Subversion
December 10, 2002 7:29 PM   Subscribe

"Every day, I will endeavor to say, email, or otherwise express over an electronic media something at least suspicious, if not actually subversive," states Ezrael.

"Let me at least explain to you why I feel this is necessary. You see, I reread this post, and I felt a real fear. A clambering, slithering, nauseated fear that someday, I will end up imprisoned or even dead because I suggested this. The fact that I can feel that fear, a fear that threatens to make me silent, to shut me up in the face of what I think is wrong in America is the greatest reason I can think of to suggest this. "
posted by Unxmaal (18 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason:



 
That boy's our last hope.
posted by Xkot at 7:31 PM on December 10, 2002


That boy's our last hope.

Uhhh, no. You are. Get the picture?
posted by Wulfgar! at 7:37 PM on December 10, 2002


Oh and uuuhhh...Merry Christmas.
posted by Wulfgar! at 7:39 PM on December 10, 2002


Wow.....Maybe Ezrael is on operative working to ferret out the subversives. Maybe not. In any case, a life lived in fear is a life unlived and so: time for my 'Bush family-funding of Nazi party' post. (hee hee)
posted by troutfishing at 7:56 PM on December 10, 2002


And, yes, here's a quote for one who saw it firsthand in '33:

 
".........But Then It Was Too Late.

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933,between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote.  All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.

What happened here [Germany in the 30's] was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.  And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter." .........Sound familiar?

posted by troutfishing at 8:06 PM on December 10, 2002


I have a friend who's doing something similar. Years ago we heard some (hopefully) urban myth that states all phones are tapped and computers go through all the conversations looking for keywords. When the computer finds a keyword it red-flags the conversation for so a human can come along and decide if a crime is being discussed. So, he named his cat "kilo." Recently he got a puppy whom he named "Osama." There have been some amusing conversations on my phone line lately. "So Osama's hiding under the sofa. He's afraid I'm going to punish him for peeing in the corner again. Oh and I lost kilo somewhere."
posted by elwoodwiles at 8:11 PM on December 10, 2002


I sent out an email awhile ago containing words likely to trigger Echelon as a joke - maybe it's time to step it up to a chain letter.
posted by iamck at 8:16 PM on December 10, 2002


In what way is this different from all the young bloggers out there who imagine that their blog is going to change the world by its subversiveness"? The majority of his site seems to comprise cute little notes about his girlfriend, video games, and what he ate for lunch.

A TIA, CIA, FBI, or any other three-letter agency would spend about exactly three seconds on that site before realizing it's another idealistic young suburban kid trying to stir up crap because he had the misfortune not be present for the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, the American Revolution, or any other particularly thrilling bit of history.
posted by oissubke at 8:19 PM on December 10, 2002


Um.... I understand being wary of the state, and I am, but frankly, I think this sort of crosses some lines. There's a difference between the "we will track every citizen's travel, habits, purchases, and anything else we're interested in through our super-amalgamated-Poindexter-database" and "we'll monitor communications channels for suspicious statements." If there _IS_ someone who's going to "leave the plutonium in the warehouse at midnight," or "has the DNA and is prepareing the application", I want the state to know about it, even if I want them to stay the hell away from my cross-referencing my credit, MIB, IRS, and direct marketing personal data.

The fact that our current administration makes a BS job of half the things they talk about doesn't change the fact there's real security work to be done. No, most effective terrorists aren't going to send clear messages like the above, but that doesn't change the fact that what our friend Ezrael is doing can't possibly help the situation.
posted by namespan at 8:21 PM on December 10, 2002


I sent out an email awhile ago containing words likely to trigger Echelon as a joke - maybe it's time to step it up to a chain letter.

I think that the programmers who developed Echelon would have enough common sense to code a few simple lines in there that weed out messages containing unrelated combinations of buzzwords, especially since you can be dang sure they know all about "Echelon jamming".

It's not that hard to program something to filter out messages that contain "Osama" and "Steak knife", or "William Gates" and "rail gun", while keeping useful combinations such as "Osama" and "Palestine".

I mean come on, give the guys some credit. :-)
posted by oissubke at 8:29 PM on December 10, 2002


Maybe he should spend the effort rallying people to be more politically conscious and to vote instead.
posted by Stan Chin at 8:29 PM on December 10, 2002


iamck: I started to send that list to a paranoid friend of mine but I just couldn't do it. I guess I'm getting paranoid too.
namespan: Exrael himself cannot change the world but perhaps someone will see his site and think of something better. No matter how cynical I feel about politics today, I still feel like I need to vote and express my views.
*laughs like madman and imagines the look on his paranoid friend's face when he checks his inbox - pushes send*
posted by elwoodwiles at 8:32 PM on December 10, 2002


The fact that our current administration makes a BS job of half the things they talk about doesn't change the fact there's real security work to be done.

That's the most intelligent thing I've heard said about the issue in a long, long time.
posted by oissubke at 8:43 PM on December 10, 2002


elwood: the question I would ask is -- if everyone did this, would it make the world better?

I think I understand the thinking -- the various Three Letter Agencies would get the idea that they can stop treating citizens as naive babies to protect from bad, bad men, and realize that many of us really want our civil liberties, and that monitoring would become so ineffective they'd have to stop. But what if monitoring for suspicious phrases does have some utility? Say, much more than creating an SS network of the population, or almalgamating all data ever collected about you?

I'm bothered by surveillance and potential abuses. There's some serious thorny questions afoot. But they're not going to be resolved by this guy or even if everyone did what he did. It'd make the problems harder.

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933,between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany.

I think this points us in a different direction. Without transparency, this gap grows. Accountability goes out the window, because those in power believe those who put them there can't possibly understand reality. Then without accountability, it becomes "ends justifies means" and before long, there's a kernel of a few who are nearly encouraged by the system to become sociopaths and abuse their power.

The key concepts when it comes to giving the state power are oversight and checks and balances. That's where rational discussion begins and stunts like this stop.
posted by namespan at 8:45 PM on December 10, 2002


troutfishing, Could you cite your source on that?
If it's real, it has something very telling in it.

There's a difference between the "we will track every citizen's travel, habits, purchases, and anything else we're interested in through our super-amalgamated-Poindexter-database" and "we'll monitor communications channels for suspicious statements."

The system will be in place, it won't just go away when/if this "war" ends. Even if for now it is only used for the latter, it will be capable of doing the former. A tempting capability considering corporation's desire to catalogue our shopping habits, the FBI tracking activists, and on and on...
posted by a_green_man at 8:53 PM on December 10, 2002


The key concepts when it comes to giving the state power are oversight and checks and balances.

That's why this country was designed from the get go to work that way. And why those who currently are working to dismantle those systems should never have been allowed to seize power in the first place, because any system is much harder to defend once the Huns are inside the gate.
posted by rushmc at 8:59 PM on December 10, 2002


I've been waging my own artistic jihad in this vein for quite some time. My homepage shows some of my current efforts in this regard.
Those of us who are already in the 'highly suspicious' category based on race and other factors appreciate the solidarity.

In A.D. 2003
War was beginning.
Bush: What happen?
Cheney: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Osama: All your base are belong to us.
Bush: All your oil are belong to U.S.
Osama: You are on the way to destruction.
Bush: For great justice spy on every 'citizig'
Osama: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Bush: We know what you doing...we watching
posted by nasim at 9:00 PM on December 10, 2002


I think a client could easily be written, that would run in the windows system tray etc, much like SETI@Home. It would harvest all the text in one's daily webbrowsing routine and then recombine it with some algorithm into an outbox that would occasionally fire off "suspect" emails to other users running the client. It would all be automatically destined for dev/null of course. Or would it? And that of course would be the point. Meaningless data coming from us obviously meaningless citizens.
posted by crasspastor at 9:08 PM on December 10, 2002


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