Just to be clear, this is a fictional scenario demonstrating a potential absurd situation that could arise from dragnet surveillance.
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'.
It's also Bloomsday today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
Now, if you read that in 2015, you might have a case.
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).
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 ...
> 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
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.