The Black Forest Fire is now 75% contained, they say, with slightly over 500 homes destroyed.

If one of those were mine, the “slightly over” rounding error would piss me off, just as are some of the property owners who have been prohibited from re-entering the area to see what they have lost.

There are accusations of favoritism being lodged against the cops, and some low-level class warfare about who has the juice to get the justice they can afford.

I don’t know. I don’t have that level of information. Now that the immediate danger to the people, pets, horses, livestock and wildlife is diminished, I guess things will sort themselves out and we can go back to arguing about more esoteric things, like what the government knows about us and what it might be capable of doing.

A couple inquisitive readers asked me what I thought about the whole thing, as if it mattered. I have attempted to marshal my thoughts on that a couple times, since it does not appear that what the NSA and other folks have done is much different than business as usual.

The media is breathlessly reporting on snooping activity at some global summits, like that is a surprise. Of course we are snooping. Jesus, if we weren’t we would be up in arms.

I keep my head down when someone blows a particularly neat bit of tradecraft in the press. Like the one that feartured giving away infected USB thumb drives at conferences where the operators of stand-alone computer firewalled computer systems of interest. That was a neat secret no one needed to know, but oh well. For every door that closes another one opens.

Or so I have been hearing- a lot- lately. But the problem with the press- well, one of them, anyway- is that they don’t know what they are talking about. They the significant all bolloxed up with the stuff that doesn’t matter and report the chaos as if it was all the same thing.

You don’t have to go too far back to see the genesis of the NSA meta-data collection program. There was a time when we worried about the capability to capture the Internet on a daily basis. We were not quite sure what we might do with a beast that enormous (it was much smaller then) but it seemed like it might be useful if we could do it.

Of course they are going to do nodal analysis on the connections, and if you happen to be talking to a pal in Yemen, I would certainly hope someone is looking at it. I never had any expectation of privacy when I called home from Pyongyang or Port au Prince, you know?

The thing about the data collection was that it can- with the proper safeguards- do all sorts of good things.

Do you remember Admiral John Poindexter? He was the national security advisor who saved President Reagan from taking the knife for the Iran-Contra scam, which looks a lot like what the current administration was doing with Libyan weapons to Syria last year.

(Then VADM, now RADM, John Poindexter in 1985. Photo USN)

He was a smart guy, and generally an honorable one. He came back on the scene a few years later in the Post 9/11 Age with a concept called Total Information Awareness, or TIA, for short.
It was originally a DARPA project, and Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about it recently in the digital pages of the New Yorker like this:
“The goal of the Information Awareness Office was… an ecstatic state of intelligence-gathering nirvana:
The Office’s main assignment is, basically, to turn everything in cyberspace about everybody—tax records, driver’s-license applications, travel records, bank records, raw F.B.I. files, telephone records, credit-card records, shopping-mall security-camera videotapes, medical records, every e-mail anybody ever sent—into a single, humongous, multi-googolplexibyte database that electronic robots will mine for patterns of information suggestive of terrorist activity. Dr. Strangelove’s vision—“a chikentic gomplex of gumbyuders”—is at last coming into its own.”

Congress got all agitated about it and defunded the activity at the time, but no good or bad idea with really cool/frightening implications ever dies.

At the time, I was concerned with the spread of public health emergencies like Ebola and SARS and monkey pox and anthrax-laden letters. We had a scheme by which we proposed to tap into the orders of your local Walgreens or CVS- with appropriate HIPPA sanitization- to see if there were spikes in antihistamines or other over-the-counter drugs to determined if people were self-medicating prior to the inevitable visit of the horror to the emergency room, and maybe get enough time to deploy the National Emergency Pharmaceutical Stockpile to an area of outbreak before the contagion was formally identified.

It was not much different than the indications-and-warning game we used to play with the Soviets, but there naturally some complications about confusing the Spooks and the Health people.

I don’t know if anyone is still working on the concept, but I do know this: we are on the brink of Total Information, that is for sure. Whether there is any “awareness” associated with it is an altogether different question.

I think it is sort of sad that the best defense to liberty is keeping your mouth shut and head down, but that is TIA for you. Try not to come to anyone’s attention and things will be just fine.

Right?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com