the_unlettered_tellurian

Just finished watching The Bourne Ultimatum for the nth time…man do I need to get some better movies or what!

Anyways, coming back to the post… the more I watch the movie, the more I know what’s coming in the next frame, so the more I have started focusing on other things…and here’s what struck me suddenly.

Everything else about the CIA’s “firepower” seems ok, except for the amount of data that the agency is shown to have access to in the movie. I mean, look at it. the movie shows them as having not just good old physical access using ground support…they have been shown to have almost real-time access to almost any kind of electronic data… phone calls, emails, everything!

Is it really possible to have such high levels of electronic eavesdropping currently? Do agencies really have the computing power to compare all sorts of electronic transmission against a set of keyword-based alerts on a real-time basis? Also, do they currently have the authority to do such things? Across international boundaries?

Now that’s a whole bunch of nasty questions cropping up in my head…and i don’t think I can stop thinking about them till I find at least some answers…so…I guess I should start with some existing reference books.

It’s been a long time since I read that good old book lying on my bookshelf – Database Nation – think it should be a good starting point!

I have no recollection of the contents of this book I claim to have read. while mindlessly browsing through some backups, I found this document I had written…well…I don’t know how many years back…am just putting it up below…

The Jagged Orbit

Reading this book was a bit of a task. It reads like a really old sci-fi book. Actually it is a really old one, it was written way back in 1969 by John Brunner. I had never heard of the book, let alone read any reader recommendations / reviews about it anywhere. I picked it up merely because I was curious. Having read a few pages of the first chapter, I realized that one of the main characters was a spoolpigeon. Now that’s a term I had never heard before, but the nature of the job as described in the book made it sound like a spoolpigeon was a TV journalist of some kind. It was also mentioned that this guy was the last of the spoolpigeons, so I was just curious to figure out how his miserable life comes to an end. 100 bucks didn’t sound a great deal for that kind of entertainment.

I was in for some real surprise though, the book turned out to be quite interesting. As I mentioned before, reading through the book gives the feeling of watching a really old startrek episode. Back then they all thought that computers would very easily understand voice-based commands. They all thought that vehicles would fly way above the surface of the earth.

Some of the topics dealt with in this book are astonishingly relevant to our times. While there is the standard bit about humans becoming excessively dependent on computers, the author is not entirely wrong in talking about the now prevalent human tendency of searching thorough a somewhat common repository of data before taking any decision.

The “comweb”envisioned in the novel can be looked upon as the Internet. But what was more surprising was the similarity that any modern day reader can draw between the term “commed” and “googled” as used in today’s context.

But the similarities between comweb and the Internet don’t stop at that, the comweb is an omnipresent network that is fed all kinds of data (text, images, voice, video) with the intention of later retrieval. Now, most of these data can be uploaded to the Internet, and, in fact, the new web 2.0 sites allow these things to be seamlessly interlinked.

So what is the point that we are arriving at here? I have no clue. Just that I felt like most of the things in the book were technically possible today, albeit in slightly different ways.

And this is causing all the discomfort. Because the scenario depicted in there is quite bleak.

For all those in dire need of some quick reference in English. a direct PDF link to William Strunk’s 1918 classic ‘The Elements of Style’.

It’s a very handy reference, and a quick read at 50 pages.

You can also use the free online version at Bartleby.