‘The Government Took my Email’

If the National Security Agency was reading emails between my wife and I this week, this is what they got to see:

Although, as I read further about Yahoo cooperating with the NSA on this spooky email reading, chances that they saw this photo, or really anything of mine, appear beyond slim.

The Reuters story kinda fails to put the fear in me.

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events. 

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

And, yes, I’ve seen the movie:

So clearly, this is the time for all of us Yahoo email users to make the following demands:

1.      Winnebago. Burgundy interior.

2.      Phone number of the girl with the Uzi.

3.      Europe. And Tahiti.

4.      Peace on Earth. Good Will Toward Men.

5.      Clear up my record. Get out of my life.

6.      Declaration that “I’m fine.”

And I get it. I should be completely freaked out that the sinister NSA is reading my email. Looking for an undisclosed string of characters either in an email or an attachment. Believe me, I’ve seen that movie too.

I know the civil libertarian in me should be outraged. But when I open up the Vault O’ Outrage, all I get is the comically scurrying spider, running away from an empty room.

Facebook and Google and other tech companies are standing ready at their fainting couches, beating their breasts that if it had been THEM, THEY would not have complied with the NSA’s order for surveillance. They’re too busy of course, mining our every breath and syllable online in order to make money off of us to even bother giving the government a chance to listen in as well. That’s the American Way.

And I know the big argument: Where do we draw the line? If we lay back and let the government Snoops get into our email now when they won’t even tell us what they’re looking for, what’s to stop them from digging deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into what we’re doing and saying and thinking and buying and eating and defecating?

Who says they ain’t doing that stuff right now?

BOOGA BOOGA!

Hope I didn’t scare you.

I’m not even all that worried about the recent Yahoo data breach.

I’ve changed my passwords. And hackers can just as easily download the mammoth/glasses photo from this post as they can from my email.

And maybe I’ll be a little more worried about the NSA surveillance when I have to scurry out of the sewers like a rat. But if we ever get to the point I’m being arrested and stuffed into a smelly sewer for sending (or receiving) a photo of a stuffed wooly mammoth wearing owl glasses, I guarantee you the world will have slipped so far into absurdity no amount of outrage then or now will matter.

Ah, but the slippery slope, the slippery slope! I’ll slip and fall on the slippery soap, you say.

Maybe.

In a movie.

We Were Gonna Change the World, Marty . . .

A follow-up to my previous post mentioning the sneaky prescience of the film “Sneakers.”

Today, someone hijacked the main Associated Press Twitter account, tweeted that two explosions had occurred at the White House, injuring President Barack Obama – sending the US stock markets into a precipitous if brief free-fall. 

Here’s the graph, and more information on the incident, from Ars Technica:

Per Ars, the markets dropped 150 points in the minutes following this single tweet, recovering when the AP – through other Twitter accounts – announced the hack. 

This isn’t a prank, folks. 

Imagine if all of the AP’s Twitter feeds had been hacked, with confirmatory – or at least a lack of denials – coming out of other AP feeds. This seven-minute market blip could have lasted a lot longer, even before other news outlets had determined that the tweet was incorrect. 

Now imagine some social aspect of two or more news organizations were simultaneously hacked, with confirmatory messages coming from multiple news sources. That causes the market blip to last longer. Possibly a lot longer. 

What’s wrong with this country, Marty? Money. You taught me that. Evil defense contractors had it; noble causes did not. Politicians are bought and sold like so much chattel. Our problems multiply. Pollution, crime, drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, despair. We throw gobs of money at them. The problems always get worse. Why is that? Because money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it. 

I agree. Who did you say you were working for? 

Oh, that’s just my day job. Listen, when I was in prison, I learned that everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality –

– But the perception of reality.

Posit: People think a bank might be financially shaky. 

Consequence: People start to withdraw their money. 

Result: Pretty soon, it is financially shaky. 

Conclusion: You can make banks fail. 

Bzzt. Done that. Maybe you’ve read about a few? Thing bigger. 

Stock markets? 

Yes. 

Currency markets? 

Yes. 

Commodities markets? 

Yes. 

Small countries?

I might be able to crash the whole damn system. 

And if you think this kind of power is going to end up giving money to Greenpeace, the United Negro College Fund, Amnesty International and the Democratic Party so those organizations can do good, well, you have rocks in your head, son and daughter, you have rocks in your head, and Crease is going to come along and bust you head.

It's A Journey, Not A Prank

Back in 1992, a smart little film called “Sneakers” hit the theaters. It was a moderate hit, but has, over the years, evolved into a classic cult film. 

For good reason. The film was prescient in its focus on the power of data: 

The world isn’t run by weapons any more. Or energy, or money. It’s run by little ones and zeroes. Little bits of data. It’s all just electrons. 

I don’t care. 

I don’t expect other people to understand this, but I do expect you to understand this. We started this journey together. 

It wasn’t a journey, Cos. It was a prank. 

There’s a war out there, old friend.  A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information.

Unfortunately, this clip leaves out the least prescient part of what the film had to say about data. Here’s the rest: 

[Cosmo] Don’t you know the places we can go with this?

[Bishop] Yeah, I do. There’s nobody there.

If you think nobody’s there, well, you’re a naïve little soul, aren’t you? 

Google, for one, is there. Read this. 

It’s a little spooky, to tell the truth. 

Even I, a non-traveler, know the Frommer’s name. Frommer means travel. To Google, it meant something simpler. Data. 

[I]t appears that Google, despite selling the Frommer's name, has retained the brand's social data and is integrating it with what is now called Zagat Travel. “Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest.” PaidContent writes. “These thousands—or more likely millions—of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.” 

There’s a war out there, old friend.  A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information. 

This is much, much more than just a prank.

And Google isn't alone. Just two weeks ago, Amazon.com announced it was purchasing Goodreads (an internet book review website that woefully fails to recognize the value of retaining a space between its words).

We put lots of data on the web. Tons of it, per experts like Clay Shirky and others. The vast, vast majority of it, we put there voluntarily. 

But companies and governments and who knows who else is watching. And collecting it all. Some so they can sell stuff to us – old hat, absolutely. Some, so they can steal stuff from us, also old hat. And some, because, well, there’s that thrill of knowing. And of lording it over the rest of us that they know. 

I’m not necessarily saying this is all sinister stuff; there’s good that comes from data collection, obviously. But it’s clear that those who don’t have our best intentions at heart are just as eager to gather our data as those whose intentions are pure as the driven snow. 

Cos’ work for his quaint “family men,” in the light of the people eavesdropping on the massive amounts of data we’re shoveling into the waiting maw that is the web, well, in the words of another fictional character, in this case, Former Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfuss of the Surete, “makes the Cosa Nostra look like the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”