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Just to be clear, this is a fictional scenario demonstrating a potential absurd situation that could arise from dragnet surveillance.

avsbst 13y ago
Seems like he's claiming it's fact -- https://twitter.com/johnsifton/status/345864867946827777 https://twitter.com/johnsifton/status/345864867946827777 Do you have any proof it's fictional writing?
- sses 13y ago
  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..."
- A1kmm 13y ago
  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).
  - hosay123 13y ago
    Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but.. > 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
  - a3n 13y ago
    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 ...
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      Yes but that's a very limited amount of information, maybe only a few bits. Seems like a pretty inefficient way of hiding such a small message.
      - tomjen3 13y ago
        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.
  - caf 13y ago
    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.
    - girvo 13y ago
      What tipped it off for me, was his "transformation" at the end. Until that point though, I assumed it was a true story. And that scares the shit out of me.
    - selftorture 13y ago
      "I will not acknowledge, however, that my actions were illegal." - See more at: http://warscapes.com/literature/cryptogams-nsa#sthash.9XxIjYWh.dpuf http://warscapes.com/literature/cryptogams-nsa#sthash.9XxIjY... copyright anyone?
aaron695 13y ago
I would certainly agree this would seem to be the case, but the article is not too clear on that.
- LoganCale 13y ago
  The front page of the site makes it clear, with the word "imagined".
  - aaron695 13y ago
    Got it. 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
- mtraven 13y ago
  The "Special Agents O’Brien and Bloom" kind of gave it away.
  - alexqgb 13y ago
    "What is the code? What does this say in plain English? This ‘selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless?’ – what is this shit?”
    - olefoo 13y ago
      You should spend some time with english majors. Finnegans Wake is sort of the literary equivalent of The Art Of Computer Programming, widely admired, seldom read, rarely understood.
      - thret 13y ago
        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? Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom? Shake eternity and lick creation. Erning his breadth to the swelt of his proud.
ary 13y ago
Spoilers ahead 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'.
- aasarava 13y ago
  Also, O'Brien is the agent in 1984.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    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.
    - Filligree 13y ago
      "I learned about PRISM two years ago". ;-) Now, if you read that in 2015, you might have a case.
  - auxbuss 13y ago
    And Bloom is the protagonist of Ulysses. It's also Bloomsday today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - anthuswilliams 13y ago
      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.
Oculus 13y ago
None the less, a really interesting read.

avsbst 13y ago

Seems like he's claiming it's fact -- https://twitter.com/johnsifton/status/345864867946827777 https://twitter.com/johnsifton/status/345864867946827777 Do you have any proof it's fictional writing?

sses 13y ago
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..."
A1kmm 13y ago
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).
- hosay123 13y ago
  Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but.. > 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
- a3n 13y ago
  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 ...
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Yes but that's a very limited amount of information, maybe only a few bits. Seems like a pretty inefficient way of hiding such a small message.
    - tomjen3 13y ago
      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.
- caf 13y ago
  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.
  - girvo 13y ago
    What tipped it off for me, was his "transformation" at the end. Until that point though, I assumed it was a true story. And that scares the shit out of me.
  - selftorture 13y ago
    "I will not acknowledge, however, that my actions were illegal." - See more at: http://warscapes.com/literature/cryptogams-nsa#sthash.9XxIjYWh.dpuf http://warscapes.com/literature/cryptogams-nsa#sthash.9XxIjY... copyright anyone?

aaron695 13y ago

I would certainly agree this would seem to be the case, but the article is not too clear on that.

LoganCale 13y ago
The front page of the site makes it clear, with the word "imagined".
- aaron695 13y ago
  Got it. 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
mtraven 13y ago
The "Special Agents O’Brien and Bloom" kind of gave it away.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  "What is the code? What does this say in plain English? This ‘selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless?’ – what is this shit?”
  - olefoo 13y ago
    You should spend some time with english majors. Finnegans Wake is sort of the literary equivalent of The Art Of Computer Programming, widely admired, seldom read, rarely understood.
    - thret 13y ago
      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? Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom? Shake eternity and lick creation. Erning his breadth to the swelt of his proud.

ary 13y ago

Spoilers ahead 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'.

aasarava 13y ago
Also, O'Brien is the agent in 1984.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  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.
  - Filligree 13y ago
    "I learned about PRISM two years ago". ;-) Now, if you read that in 2015, you might have a case.
- auxbuss 13y ago
  And Bloom is the protagonist of Ulysses. It's also Bloomsday today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - anthuswilliams 13y ago
    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.

Oculus 13y ago

None the less, a really interesting read.