Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

According to The New York Times

...the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A.

Some of you have read some of my friend Tilly's eyewitness reports.
She is working in Afghanistan with an international aid organization. We correspond by email. It's a good bet that the N.S.A. has a dossier on both of us. We fit the profile perfectly--a known radical in this country communicating with a person in Afghanistan.

I don't like it. I don't like the idea of some greasy little bureaucrat (or anybody, for that matter) reading and tabulating my private mail. I'm really going to be pissed if one day some guys in suits and shiny black shoes arrive at my house in an unmarked Plymouth with a whip antennae and invite me to a rendering party in Iraq or Egypt or Texas or some other place where torture is condoned.

Oh, I could tell myself that it's OK if they read my mail because I have nothing to hide. My conversations with Afghanistan were only about work and family and daily life, but I still feel violated when I think of bespectacled little analysts in cubicles at the N.S.A. reading about my new cat or what I got for Christmas.


How do you feel about them reading your mail?

I think it is a small price to pay for feeling secure. Where the hell is a devil's advocate when you really need one? Mussolini made the trains run on time, Hitler solved the unemployment problem. You got to see the big picture. The end justifies the means. I hope they have not read my letter to Santa this year. They don't want to know what I asked him for.

jack, your presence is my present

Dear LR:

Some of the people the NSA Squinties seem most interested in are members of P.E.T.A. ( like me-- I'm also a member of the Cornell Bird Lab.)-- the story I read from CommonDreams ( linked from the Washington Post) said they had snooped the mail of 500 P.E.T.A. members . . .

I just knew the BUSHREICH baddies loved to pull kitty-kat tails . . .



--Z

besides, if they're busy reading your mail, they'll leave all my mail alone.

(me? happen to me? ha! never, not me!)...

i got this from boingboing:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/23/ex ... ee_if.html

http://www.computerbytesman.com/privacy ... ooping.htm

(how to tell if your email is being read)

do you know something about it?

"En U.S.A. algunos renombrados equipos de lingüistas trabajan conjuntamente con miembros de las fuerzas armadas y navales para:
a) el diseño de proyectos de penetración lingüístico-cultural
b) la estandarización de sistemas y códigos universalistas, cuya base lingüística no puedo obviar, a fin de alimentar los software que posteriormente se utilizan para la defensa militar.
Aunque parezca difícil de entender, el G-7 también requiere de posicionamientos científicos y comunicacionales que legalicen y defiendan sus intereses.
El hecho de que en U.S.A uno de los centros más prestigiosos de investigación y desarrollo de la Lingüística opere en y tenga como sede a las fuerzas armadas navales, es todo un ejemplo de la absoluta co-relación que tienen ambos "campos" y tareas.
Tampoco la lingüística, mejor dicho, algunos centros o institutos de lingüistas están exentos de responsabilidad directa y asumida en el diseño de:

a) cuestionarios temáticos específicos a fin de indagar: 1) las ideas de distintos grupos o instituciones, 2) los formatos discursivos y patrones ideológicos recurrentes en un grupo, institución o población, 3) la opinión "pública"
b) tipologías sintácticas o narrativas locales y universalistas, estandarizables, a fin de investigar los "guiones" (script) de la mente, así como "codificar" sintaxis universales de la especie humana;...."

it´s in "Lingüística Social y Autorías de la palabra y el pensamiento" de María Isabel Requejo, Ediciones Cinco, Buenos Aires, 2004. There are not fuente of bibliografía about it. Maybe the fuente was internet, but she didn´t write it.