Never Lose Your Glasses

April 30, 2017 9:57 AM

How I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography then got into more trouble An entertaining yarn by the author of Can computers cope with human races?
posted by nevercalm (15 comments total)

If you enjoy this style of writing, Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" is a fun read.
posted by jferg at 10:09 AM on April 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Seconding Feynman's books, and enjoying the pokes the OP takes at the concept of being pigeonholed, by whatever means.
posted by infini at 10:39 AM on April 30, 2017

I managed to stay relaxed, partly because I was not yet fully awake.
posted by infini at 10:49 AM on April 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Once upon a time, I spent a couple of days reading Bureau of Investigation (the precursor of the FBI) reports by agents who had infiltrated various supposedly-suspicious groups during and right after World War I. I thought it would be a good way to find out what was happening in meetings of these organizations, but it turned out not to be, because the agents were both really clueless and interested in different things than I was. (They were also interested in different things than the organizations were. They kept trying to find pro-German sentiment, getting frustrated when it wasn't there, and desperately trying to twist various things to be pro-German sentiment when they were actually something else. Also, their spelling was atrocious, and they couldn't get anyone's name right. I thought I would at least be able to tell who spoke at meetings, but it was kind of a lost cause.) Mostly, I started to feel a little bad for the agents, who kept complaining about how very, very long and tedious the meetings were and begging not to be sent back. "Then they recited poems for several hours. The poems might have been subversive: they talked about nature a lot, and everyone knows that Germans are also interested in nature. After the poems, there was a long discussion of an upcoming party. They will be purchasing refreshments from someone named Schmidt, who could be a German spy. They are having another planning meeting next week. I do not think it is necessary to go to that. Please do not make me investigate their party planning meeting."

So yeah, I'm not totally surprised that twenty-something years later, they were investigating secret decoder rings and the flag-disrespecting behavior of four-year-olds.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:04 AM on April 30, 2017 [14 favorites]

From the authors move to DC: The first time that I did a Boston-style bluff at a traffic circle, the other cars yielded! This took all the fun out of it and I was embarrassed into driving more conservatively.

lol, went back to Seattle after a few years in Boston, driving a friend and approaching what would be a time consuming congestion I just did what was natural and was past, to the amazed consternation of native friend.
posted by sammyo at 12:06 PM on April 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Arbitrary and Capricious, you immediately reminded me of this passage from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday:

“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.”
posted by McCoy Pauley at 12:07 PM on April 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

I'm sure the FBI's got at least some kind of file on me, because back when my grandparents kidnapped me, at least according to what my grandmother told me once, the two of them consulted with the agency about my case to get help monitoring my mom's entry to the U.S. to keep her from snatching me back to Germany. I can't really worry about it now, but it is fascinating how ordinary, relatively powerless people's lives can sometimes become so much more the focus of concern for authorities than those of the more powerful and politically well connected despite their having the obvious potential to do deeper, longer term harm than even the most ambitious and determined small time seditionists. I get the realities of the need, to a point, but the nature of these institutions in such a politically polarized reality as the contemporary American scene makes the consequences of that kind of scrutiny and suspicion much harder for less powerful people to survive intact.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:10 PM on April 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

But their lack of integrated databases and the political infighting/jostling for funds&power among collection agencies implies that the powerless yet suspect - often for reasons as innocuous as being a mongrel - will happen over and over and over until the experiences offer up a kind of ju-jitsu training of their own uniquely customized kind.
posted by infini at 12:27 PM on April 30, 2017

I'm sorry @SaulGoodman, but would you mind expanding on that story a little bit?
posted by endotoxin at 3:27 PM on April 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

I got an FBI record when I was about 12. I locked myself to the gates of a factory that made the triggers for nukes. As you do.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:30 PM on April 30, 2017 [9 favorites]

[this is good]
posted by Busithoth at 6:04 AM on May 1, 2017

I'm sure the FBI's got at least some kind of file on me

I've probably got one from the guy who crashed on my couch in the 90's, who used to be a Russian language analyst working for the NSA, calling the NSA on my phone, drunk, while I was at work, and demanding to speak to various people he had grievances against.
posted by thelonius at 6:27 AM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

a) what is the boston style bluff ? (I'm guessing the "time consuming congestion" avoidance maneuver was to go down the land that's closed/ending all the way to the end ? )

b) I don't think the FBI's much better now than it was then.
posted by k5.user at 6:59 AM on May 1, 2017

The "Can computers cope with human races" article is. . . complicated. I was constantly torn between wanting to criticize it for stark obliviousness and then a paragraph later praising it for being far more self aware and thoughtful than one might expect in context.

Still, I'm pretty sure that encouraging contemporary Americans who enjoy all the social privileges of being perceived as white to refuse to list a race on government forms is unlikely to make the world a better place in our lifetimes. Once he got to "I invite others to join in self-declassification," my patience and goodwill more or less bottomed out.
posted by eotvos at 7:22 AM on May 1, 2017

Mostly, I started to feel a little bad for the agents, who kept complaining about how very, very long and tedious the meetings were and begging not to be sent back.

That may explain one of the anecdotes I've heard that claims that the agent who was sent to infiltrate the Society for Creative Anachronism wound up filing a report that boiled down to "These people are harmless, but I'm having the time of my life!"

I'm pretty sure I have at least a cross-reference in the files, as the FBI keeps membership lists for organizations like the SCA and Starfleet International just because they're large and pass a lot of weird looking information around.
posted by Karmakaze at 11:04 AM on May 3, 2017