Section 215 to Room 101

Chances are, someone at the NSA read this blog post before I even published it.

That’s not hyperbole. Because I sent it to my personal Yahoo! email account, it’s quite likely it got routed overseas before it hit my inbox at home. And since I have a poor record of cleaning my email out at home, even if it didn’t go overseas when it got sent, Yahoo! has the right and the means to send it overseas to be stored until such time that I delete it. And even then . . .

Yes, I work as a government subcontractor. In documents. But I have never come across anything worth sharing -- aside from the desire, before this project closes out, to insert the phrase “monkey nostrils” into a significant portion of one of our working documents.

But what the National Security Agency and associated agencies and programs can do – with full sanction by our own government – is a bit scary. Even if I have nothing to be scared about.

If you have not watched John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden, you should. Even if you don’t approve of salty language.

OLIVER: Would a good takeaway from this be, ‘Until such time as we’ve sorted all this out, don’t take pictures of your d***. Just don’t do it any more’?

SNOWDEN: No, if we do that, if we. . .  You shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much.

What is our greatest fear? To read even a summary of Section215 of the Patriot Act, it’s clear the fear isn’t clear at all.

But with the help of Oliver and Snowden, it’s clear the fear isn’t in Section 215, but in Room 101.

“You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world,” the sinister O’Brien tells the dupe Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel 1984 (and this is in contrast to my theory that we’re descending not into 1984, but Brave New World – though Oliver’s report certainly has a certain BNW vibe to it as well). We’re witnessing Room 104 as the government uses the Patriot Act to overreach.

So what do we do? Oliver is a little scant on the details. Contact our congressmen, I suppose.

Uh-huh.

And uh-huh.

I’ve emailed Simpson, as he tends to be the more rational of the two. I merely asked him what his intentions are on renewing the act on June 1, 2015. We’ll see what kind of response I get.

Review: A Small Town in Germany

I’ll warn you, it starts slow. But then it takes you screaming down odd twisted paths and leaves you dumped at the end of the line, wholly unsatisfied, but ready to read another book by John le Carre.


There, my one-paragraph review of “A Small Town in Germany,” the first of le Carre’s books I’ve read, following my long-standing policy of reading books that typically come to me through thrift store purchases, outright donations or are discovered being smuggled into the house baked inside loaves of bread.

The one sympathetic character in the book is the one you don’t get to meet. The rest of them are anti-heroes at best, schemers at worst – which is probably an accurate reflection of the seedier side of mankind – the decent guy is the one you never meet. But then he’s not decent, then, is he? I won’t spoil any plots, but be ready to discover there are no white hats in this roundup.

I’ll ding it one star for crude sexual references that add nothing to the plot nor to the overall contemptible anti-hero’s persona. The book, and its characters, are brutal, brutish, ugly and inhuman, as inhuman as the Nazis who inevitably become the book’s shadow villains. Nazis, of course, are perfect villains, because that’s their shtick. “Nazis. I hate these guys,” is an apt line to steal from Indiana Jones when reading this book.

Le Carre has an interesting style. No one is omniscient in this book. We learn along with the characters, and as little as possible, to boot. Nor are we left with a clear-cut understanding as to how the plot is sewn together. There is much left unsaid that le Carre leaves to the reader to fill in. That’s admirable in a spy novel, because the true impulse is to wrap up everything in a neat package at the end like an Agatha Christie novel. The flaw with that premise is that life rarely comes in such neatly-wrapped packages. Le Carre captures that frustration well, and plays it to great narrative advantage.