Jesus, as someone who has been interrogated by the US Secret Service, I thought this was real. It's very accurate, especially the psychological part.
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.
Were you under arrest? Because if not, you could have walked out of there any minute you wanted to.
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.
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'.
I have not read Ulysses, so the story had me thinking about Bloom filters, data structures for which the likelihood of false positives increase as the dataset grows larger. I guess there is a certain kind of poetry in the coincidence.
Ya I was thinking about the scary irony of being interviewed by a man named O'Brien. But since I assumed it was real, I thought it was just a coincidence. And in hindsight, a lot of details of the story don't make sense, but that it could be fiction just didn't cross my mind.
I think it is deliberately written to be a little too absurd to be plausible.
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).
There are at least two ways of hiding information here: how much of the text to send in one go, and the time the text is sent. You could vary both to signal information about something, even though the text doesn't lead directly to any message.
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 ...
If you send between 1 and 4 paragraphs from one of four different works, a day, it doesn't take that long to send the 2048 bytes necessary to create a public key, or the 512 necessary to give the hash of one.
You're supposed to go in with the expectation of a true story, and part of the commentary of this piece is exactly where you become certain that it's 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
He's joking. From the front page of warscapes.com: "What does the NSA make of James Joyce? The author finds out the hard way in his imagined brush with US intelligence over the PRISM data-mining program..."
I devoured AoCP in three months, Finnegans Wake took a year and a half. I have a compulsive need to finish reading what I start and it just sucked the life out of me. Ulysses is a masterpiece, but I wouldn't recommend Wake to anyone. There are still some gems but most of it is simply painful to read.
-- 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?
Oh I know. I just thought it was hilarious to see Finnegans Wake being described as so impenetrable that even cryptologists at the NSA couldn't crack it.
I guess the point of this...is...to separate the Joyce readers from the non-readers? Because doesn't the satire rely in some part on the analyzed content? I haven't read Joyce but if the OP was as unsubtle in referencing him as he was to Orwell I guess I didn't miss much.
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.
Anybody have a server in Peshawar we can use? I think a better plan is to use _Gravity's Rainbow_. It's just as hard to understand, but more things explode in it.
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.
The author included over-the-top details to make it clear that his story was fictional.
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.
Also note the subtle allusions to 1984, Brave New World, and Farenheit 451. I really enjoyed it and would like to read a longer treatment of the theme by this author.
After reading this story it to me that one way way to combat against government illegal spying would be to overload them
with useless information. Millions of citizens could install some sort of peer to peer client that sent and received gibberish emails to lots of counties.
I haven't read it, but if the excepts are anything to go buy, I was right. Books that have as many interpretations as there are readers (as opposed to a good mystery book that has four or five and gives the actual answer in the end) are as useful as the output of /dev/urandom. I freely admit that plenty of people disagree with that (or Lost wouldn't have been as popular as it was), but I still believe Joyce to be a bad writer.
Hacker News comments are a very low-bandwidth channel, and I bet I'm nothing like you think I am in person.
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.
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.