Omega Point

I thought this was kind of interesting: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Douglas“. I don’t just mean the culture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepiness that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the RCMP Security Service and the subsequent creation of CSIS, Canada’s modern intelligence agency. (For those of you outside Canada, CSIS is known for such classy operations as helping to form the white nationalist Heritage Front and participating in the USAUK ECHELON program. Nicely done, guys.)

No, what I actually found interesting was that I’d never made the connection that Donald Sutherland was Tommy Douglas‘ son-in-law. I knew who they both were individually, and I knew Donald was father of Kiefer, but I never actually associated the two.

When I mentioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to understand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact important? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its importance in the article or in our conversation, but that got me thinking — did it actually matter which he actually meant? Why would someone consider that sort of trivia important? Moreover, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a little consideration, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Douglas was. However, several million people watch 24. By associating “Tommy Douglas”, a relatively unpopular brand, however important a figure he may have been, with a highly popular, well-known brand like “Kiefer Sutherland”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audience, seeing the man’s grandson hacksaw off terrorists’ heads every week, have formed an emotional familiarity with him. Seeing the vast number of people: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a single day — causes us to become interested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pursue popular populist — placed in pop-cultural context for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Mounties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?“

Predictably, Ze Frank already spent time thinking about this stuff… presumably so I didn’t have to.

(Original link via Rob Cottingham)

This is fascinating. Matt Haughey writes about his thoughts on the disappearance of CNet editor James Kim and his family:

If each recording is say 30 minutes long for a road, split it into 10 equal parts, 3 minutes long, and upload all of them to youtube. Ask viewers to leave comments pointing out when they see anything strange. The Kims were in a silver Saab wagon, so it’s probably something that can be seen from above. In total, there’d be 50 or 60 short clips and in a matter of hours you could have millions of people closely scan then and start pointing out the things worth looking into on the ground.

In his incredibly good (yet incomplete!) webcomic Spiders, Patrick Farley describes a world in which President Gore enacts a similar project in the aftermath of the 9/12 attacks on the World Trade Center and US Capitol Building. A million tiny robot spiders are deployed to Afghanistan in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In one chapter, an unseen figure describes how surely this is some sort of psy-ops gimmick; the Americans would need a million operators to monitor the video of every spider. A second figure agrees, and is suddenly revealed to be Osama bin Laden himself, as seen through the camera eye of a tiny robot.

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres away, a small girl is sitting at her computer. “Mommy? Daddy?” she says. “I think my spider just found that bad man.”

(Via kottke.org)

The New York Times describes how they identified a woman from Lilburn, Georgia based on her sort-of/maybe/accidentally leaked-on-purpose-but-it’s-for-researchers- and-also-those-responsible-have-been-sacked AOL search data. They imply that this was due to clever legwork and don’t actually say that she typed in her Social Security number, but there are certainly plenty of examples of searchers who did.

And finally, because you’re apparently supposed to do so in news articles and blog posts about this leak, here are some entertaining searches to amuse yourselves with while condemning AOL for having invaded these people’s privacy:

Between 9:15 and 9:40 AM, user 12276808 searches for:

• ejaculator
• ejaculator vacuum
• milk machine
• milking devices
• cow milking devices

User 2643851 searches for:

• hotmail.com
• car parts
• effect of eyewitness testimony on wrongful convictions
• the eyewitness laboratory department of psycology university of texas at el paso
• the american psychology association
• sexy girls
• google

And finally, the smug, leaked-data-referencing closing statment: That last search may have been a better option.