Surveillance state links of the day
2013-06-17 15:51:01.183408+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
Guy sets up proxy server in Pakistan to send him snippets from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, emails back excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems. Visits from the FBI and attempts to explain Joyce to federal prosecutors ensue.
Even if the emails were to be flagged, I figured any analyst’s scan of the text, a simple Google search, would reveal the passages to be from a work of literature.
But no one has ever kept out of trouble relying on the competence of the United States government. I suspect it was the following passage that did me in, from page 261 of Finnegans Wake:
Terror of the noonstruck by day,
cryptogam of each nightly bridable. But, to
speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he?
Laurie Penny in the New Statesman: If you live in a surveillance state for long enough, you create a censor in your head. Yes. This. One of the things I didn't realize until I moved to California was how much, even though I hung out with the cool people, the conservative culture of Chattanooga impacted my thinking. If we live in a society where emailing Joyce around can lead to Federal charges, there will be cultural consequences.
Flying Magazine: Feds Say: 'Pilots Have No Rights'.
Our source told us that the ramp check was just a ploy to search the airplane and that the real target of the search was drugs, though even that, he said, could be used as a pretense for apprehending other potential criminals. The federal agents teaching the class he attended did not specify what other kind of “target” they might find, he said.
James Clapper Throws a Concentrated Nugget of Orwellian Turd-Splat