I know what you mean about the “voice” of the protagonist but i kinda expect it with the young activists he writes about, i like their plucky ambition and i think they would directly appeal to the age group books like pirate cinema are aimed at. Little brother seemed to be very successful at this anyway.
and I love that book (and Homeland).
What gets me with the headlines is the statement that it is a spy center. More likely than not it would just contain a spy center. As several said in the other thread, It’s overbuilt and nuke proof because it’s a major communication hub. Of course, if you’re the NSA and you want to tap cables, where else are you going to go?
It’s along the same lines of NSA going after Google. (They went where the information is concentrated. Who would have thought?) The difference possibly being the level that telcos are complicit, but that’s a remarkably old story, even if The Intercept and others are just getting caught up.
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Headline hyperbole draws eyeballs to ads
The point others and I were making in this thread and others is that it’s pretty inconsequential if the NSA actually is using this building for eavesdropping operations. This building is a well known and important piece of telecom infrastructure. If the NSA is doing anything here, it’s more of a matter of convenience rather than any sort of nefarious purpose of the building itself.
I’m of the mind that the NSA can conduct surveillance from pretty much anywhere and they certainly don’t need to take up residence in a major telco exchange to do this.
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What kind of projector did they use? A beast like that isn’t cheap, even for a one-day rental.
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It must be YUUUUUGE
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What ads? Doesn’t everyone run an adblocker here? If not, why don’t you?
I bought a few things in a store and, thus, they made more money off of me then they would ever get from the atrocious ads.
You know what else is?
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You’re right that the building likely wasn’t built for nefarious purposes, regardless of the fact that it looks imposing and straight out of a dystopian novel, those are things that come with the function of the structure.
I would argue that it’s existence and use isn’t inconsequential though. It’s a centralized direct tap for the North East that at the very least makes surveillance significantly cheaper and easier. It’s an overlap between making an efficient controllable communications network, and the will to extract information en mass. One of the fears is that the will to extract information can transform into a will to control it. A defense against both is to decentralize the network, but this runs counter to the efficiency of control that a corporation needs to extract profits and remain viable.
It’s much easier to manage the electricity from a central breaker box than individual breakers throughout the house, but if someone wants to, they can shut everything down by flicking one master breaker. Granted this analogy has a problem, the power all comes from a central line which could be cut more or less as easily as getting to the breaker box, but you get the point. Now the feasibility of such a system is even more difficult as it would be akin to each person going out and running fiber optics to their neighbors, and the various inefficiencies that would create. It would take a breakthrough in telecommunications to achieve a fully decentralized internet, so our only recourse is controlling the government that is supposed to be made ‘of us, by us, and for us’.
I guess I argued against myself a little there, so I suppose that if nothing else the building serves as a fairly good screen to project images.
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Robin Hood fantasies?
There are lots of ways of augmented markup.
Ingress has portals nearby, probably a Pokemon stop too:
And you can always upload phone snaps with GPS info to Google Maps.
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