Friday
5/04/04
Everybody Say "Hi" to Mike!
Not so very long ago I was making my way down the hallway, laundry in hand and a happy little tune in my head; in short, I was minding my own business as I did the business of the day. It was then that I came around the corner and found the older lad on his hands and knees peeking into his room. My interest was piqued as he peeked, as it were, and in a moment I was kneeling beside him.
Being the closet Holmesian that I am, I formulated a brilliant line of questioning guaranteed to ferret the truth from my mark, regardless of how cagey he chose to be.
"Whatcha doing?" I asked.
"Keeping an eye on Ryan" came the reply.
So that was his game… spying on his little brother. I carefully considered my next move. "Um, why?" I knew I had him now.
"Cause he’s using my crayons and I want to make sure he doesn’t draw anything bad."
"Ah… oookay then." With that little mystery solved, I crept slowly away and went back about my business as I considered that I had just stumbled across the seeds of a junior black ops action right in my very own house. My son the spook.
More than that though, I was struck once again by how much little kids and governments have in common. Yesterday I happened across this link in the Daily Yak to a story about the fact that "U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials" may be monitoring blogs for, well, clues and such, I suppose. The story goes on to note the possible involvement of the CIA… but if the CIA is involved, it’s coming late to the party.
What the story doesn’t mention is the real 800-pound gorilla in the corner: the NSA. Since the NSA was formed during the dawn of the cold war, its mission has been the collection and distillation of a single commodity: intelligence information. It’s work as a cryptographic institution went hand in hand with its mission "To intercept the adversaries communications."
It is of course indisputable that the work of the NSA was critical in winning the cold war, but what isn’t reflected in the NSA’s rosy "Rich Heritage" page is that with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the nineties, the NSA found itself in bureaucratic limbo with a severely slashed budget.
All wasn’t lost, however; in its darkest hour the NSA was saved by the new kid on the block, a prince in shining armor called the Internet. By now it was the mid 90’s and this pet project of DARPA and a few major universities was out and growing like Audry II. It wasn’t lost on either the Bush I or Clinton administrations that the world was suddenly flooded with more communications traffic than ever before; and somebody had better be paying attention.
Now as the geeks out there know, security was never even considered when the open architecture of the Internet was developed, meaning that the so-called World Wide Web is a vast, completely open, unsecured network. When you surf the net or toss email back and forth it’s not really like leaving your house unlocked, it’s more like taking a shower in your front yard. And of course blogging is little more than sheer exhibitionism anyway.
So here we stand at the dawn of a new millennium, and the NSA has a building full of shiny new supercomputers running algorithms that look for certain bad keywords and patterns of activity across the network. Since I’ve posted several rather unkind things about members of the current administration, using keywords like "shameless," "semi-retarded," and "criminal" in the same sentence as the names "Karl Rove" "George Bush," and "Dick Cheny," … you can bet that I’m on a dark list or two somewhere at the NSA.
So hey, as long as I seem to have posted all those words yet again I may as well give a shout out to NSA director Mike Hayden. I’m pretty confident he’ll get this, because after all, I’m a guy with a fistful of crayons, and I have a habit of writing naughty things.
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Everybody Say "Hi" to Mike!
Not so very long ago I was making my way down the hallway, laundry in hand and a happy little tune in my head; in short, I was minding my own business as I did the business of the day. It was then that I came around the corner and found the older lad on his hands and knees peeking into his room. My interest was piqued as he peeked, as it were, and in a moment I was kneeling beside him.
Being the closet Holmesian that I am, I formulated a brilliant line of questioning guaranteed to ferret the truth from my mark, regardless of how cagey he chose to be.
"Whatcha doing?" I asked.
"Keeping an eye on Ryan" came the reply.
So that was his game… spying on his little brother. I carefully considered my next move. "Um, why?" I knew I had him now.
"Cause he’s using my crayons and I want to make sure he doesn’t draw anything bad."
"Ah… oookay then." With that little mystery solved, I crept slowly away and went back about my business as I considered that I had just stumbled across the seeds of a junior black ops action right in my very own house. My son the spook.
More than that though, I was struck once again by how much little kids and governments have in common. Yesterday I happened across this link in the Daily Yak to a story about the fact that "U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials" may be monitoring blogs for, well, clues and such, I suppose. The story goes on to note the possible involvement of the CIA… but if the CIA is involved, it’s coming late to the party.
What the story doesn’t mention is the real 800-pound gorilla in the corner: the NSA. Since the NSA was formed during the dawn of the cold war, its mission has been the collection and distillation of a single commodity: intelligence information. It’s work as a cryptographic institution went hand in hand with its mission "To intercept the adversaries communications."
It is of course indisputable that the work of the NSA was critical in winning the cold war, but what isn’t reflected in the NSA’s rosy "Rich Heritage" page is that with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the nineties, the NSA found itself in bureaucratic limbo with a severely slashed budget.
All wasn’t lost, however; in its darkest hour the NSA was saved by the new kid on the block, a prince in shining armor called the Internet. By now it was the mid 90’s and this pet project of DARPA and a few major universities was out and growing like Audry II. It wasn’t lost on either the Bush I or Clinton administrations that the world was suddenly flooded with more communications traffic than ever before; and somebody had better be paying attention.
Now as the geeks out there know, security was never even considered when the open architecture of the Internet was developed, meaning that the so-called World Wide Web is a vast, completely open, unsecured network. When you surf the net or toss email back and forth it’s not really like leaving your house unlocked, it’s more like taking a shower in your front yard. And of course blogging is little more than sheer exhibitionism anyway.
So here we stand at the dawn of a new millennium, and the NSA has a building full of shiny new supercomputers running algorithms that look for certain bad keywords and patterns of activity across the network. Since I’ve posted several rather unkind things about members of the current administration, using keywords like "shameless," "semi-retarded," and "criminal" in the same sentence as the names "Karl Rove" "George Bush," and "Dick Cheny," … you can bet that I’m on a dark list or two somewhere at the NSA.
So hey, as long as I seem to have posted all those words yet again I may as well give a shout out to NSA director Mike Hayden. I’m pretty confident he’ll get this, because after all, I’m a guy with a fistful of crayons, and I have a habit of writing naughty things.
