Cryptogams and the NSA (fiction)
warscapes.com
warscapes.com
I should write a blog post about this, but the short version:
When I was about 19, I was interrogated by the Secret Service for threatening the US president. I hadn't (ever) done this, and I didn't even know what they were talking about. It turns out that I was on an AT&T alliance (conference call, back then) with a bunch of phreakers (which I was). Sometime during the lifetime of the call (which could have been 24 hours or more), someone called the whitehouse and apparently did make some kind of threat.
I, being 19 and stupid, figured "I have no idea what they're talking about, and I have nothing to hide, so I'll just go in for their interview. It'll be fun." After about 5 hours of being grilled, polygraphed, good-cop-bad-cop'ed, I just wanted to get out of that room. Sweat was dripping off me. I wanted to tell them whatever they wanted to hear to get out of there. And they kept saying "look, we know you made the threat, why don't you just tell us?". Somehow I stayed strong enough to not give a false confession. They let me go, and eventually they charged some kid (a minor, it turns out) in Ohio for it.
If you have ever wondered about people recanting confessions, this is how it happens. The police are trained on how to break you down, make you confess, whether you are guilty or not. There are textbooks (for cops) on how to do it. In the US, they are allowed to lie to you. They can threaten to arrest your wife, etc.
If I'm ever questioned for anything again, no matter how innocent I may be, I'll always request an attorney be present.
Anyway, watch The Lives of Others (or just the beginning, available here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu-NJA4Y1RI) to see it from the other side. It is a very good movie.
Do you have any proof it's fictional writing?
In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.
Instead, the protagonist, with his lawyer's encouragement, study secondary texts on the interpretation of the text and work with the FBI to help them understand a poem someone else wrote?
It is very Kafkaesque, but also plainly obvious that it is fiction (I also started reading it with the expectation of a true story rather than fiction).
> In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.
Except a pre-agreed set of excerpts in a particular order forms a codebook, and the order in which they are delivered easily becomes a code. The code's symbols need not just be excepts, but some combobulation involving the position of the excerpt in the source text, length of quotation, etc. etc
Picking a random book from Project Gutenberg, War and Peace has almost 12,000 paragraphs going by the HTML version. That's enough to encode one and a half words from any of the 235k entries in OS X /usr/share/dict words with just 2 quoted paragraphs
A green flare is shot into the air at 11pm. Or, two green flares are shot. That's a pre-agreed signal that something did happen, something will happen or something should happen.
A paragraph is sent on August 2nd. Or, two paragraphs ...
And that scares the shit out of me.
Certainly his twitter seemed to say the opposite.
What didn't add up to me is A. Prism could track these emails. B. It would trip it off
Finnegans Wake is sort of the literary equivalent of The Art Of Computer Programming, widely admired, seldom read, rarely understood.
-- Lines from Wake that actually make sense:
It was folded by cunning, sealed by crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art?
Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?
Shake eternity and lick creation.
Erning his breadth to the swelt of his proud.
To be even more clear it appears to draw inspiration from various works of political fiction. Notably the "love" for authority figures towards the end smacks of Winston's transformation in '1984'.
Now, if you read that in 2015, you might have a case.
It's also Bloomsday today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
See: http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/john-sifton-guanta...
Summarized: http://sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net/?p=14164
The scenario illustrated here is a little absurd. Our nation would be bankrupt well before it had the finances to fund such rabid pursuit of false positives.
ETA--
Have to call that out as inaccurate, though, as GR is very comprehensible, if sprawling. Compare:
GR: A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
vs
FW: riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
Ulysses (sort of) rewards the patient reader. FW abuses her.
A page from the Claybook, for the Abcedminded among us: https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/333859568796958721/photo/...
You have not experienced Finnegan's Wake until you have read it in the original Mandarin.
I mean, FBI agents seeking clarification about emails you wrote? Pssht...they'd just read the emails, build their case and send you to a military tribunal.
Clever, utterly insane and timely.
Dubliners, though? Or Portrait of an Artist? Those are readily accessible to anybody and obviously very, very good.
Ulysses I like, but agree it may be too dense to merit the accolades it's given. But "trash" goes way, way over into the opposite direction.
Anyway, Ayn Rand had a clearly-articulated theory of art (she wrote a whole book about it), so there's really nothing to "confirm" here. But if there were, you couldn't rationally do it from one data point anyway.