Emm Oh's Blog: Do Monkeys Lie?
December 10, 2014
Director No
The Guardian reports that Agent 007 was subject to an FBI background check in 1964. He flunked, as far as getting any G-Man Cross-branding Love.
When the feds received a request for FBI equipment cameos from Goldfinger producer Harry Saltzman, the movie script was passed to the FBI for closer scrutiny. Background checks were run on Saltzman, author Ian Fleming, and the script writer, Richard Malbaum, because ... Hoover Era. J. Edgar himself found the womanizing Bond character to be Not Agency Material. The famous federal alleged cross-dresser also found the spy novel series trashy, and suggested that Bureau go-betweens should prominently mention federal laws prohibiting the use of "Federal Bureau of Investigation" or its acronym without the Bureau chief's written permission.
Hard to tell how U.S. laws might have been enforced on British rogues like Bond and his handlers. But J. Bond 007 vs. J. Edgar 38DD does sound like enticing reality crossover fan fiction.
When the feds received a request for FBI equipment cameos from Goldfinger producer Harry Saltzman, the movie script was passed to the FBI for closer scrutiny. Background checks were run on Saltzman, author Ian Fleming, and the script writer, Richard Malbaum, because ... Hoover Era. J. Edgar himself found the womanizing Bond character to be Not Agency Material. The famous federal alleged cross-dresser also found the spy novel series trashy, and suggested that Bureau go-betweens should prominently mention federal laws prohibiting the use of "Federal Bureau of Investigation" or its acronym without the Bureau chief's written permission.
Hard to tell how U.S. laws might have been enforced on British rogues like Bond and his handlers. But J. Bond 007 vs. J. Edgar 38DD does sound like enticing reality crossover fan fiction.
September 29, 2014
The Space Shuttle We Don't Talk Much About
The U.S. Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, right?
Well, televised launches, news updates, and Welcome Home parties for the NASA program shuttle did, anyway.
Yet we still have a shuttle up there, sponsored by the Pentagon ... which is ... um ... experimenting with new technologies.
Just FYI :).
Well, televised launches, news updates, and Welcome Home parties for the NASA program shuttle did, anyway.
Yet we still have a shuttle up there, sponsored by the Pentagon ... which is ... um ... experimenting with new technologies.
Just FYI :).
September 26, 2014
The Battle for Your Smartphone: When "No" Means "Maybe" ...
Apple and Google, two privateers who know more about you than any government agency, continue to boast about their new law-enforcement-snooping-proof phone operating systems this week.
See, your phone used to be an open book in the event the authorities needed to browse your text messages and file content. Anyone with dark sunglasses and a badge could make a surveillance request, and with a subpoena, a pretty-please, or a really good "This is an Emergency" story, your data was their data.
But with the advent of Apple's iOS 8 and Google's forthcoming Android update, no one -- not even the ghost of Steve Jobs -- is supposed to be able to bypass your password to get a look at the collection of adorable kitten snaps on your phone.
Which really only means that anyone wanting into your phone just needs your password ... or an app that has permission to integrate itself with your phone via password permissions.
So be on the lookout for the new, free Fruit Bird Ikaruga game at an app store near you soon.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
See, your phone used to be an open book in the event the authorities needed to browse your text messages and file content. Anyone with dark sunglasses and a badge could make a surveillance request, and with a subpoena, a pretty-please, or a really good "This is an Emergency" story, your data was their data.
But with the advent of Apple's iOS 8 and Google's forthcoming Android update, no one -- not even the ghost of Steve Jobs -- is supposed to be able to bypass your password to get a look at the collection of adorable kitten snaps on your phone.
Which really only means that anyone wanting into your phone just needs your password ... or an app that has permission to integrate itself with your phone via password permissions.
So be on the lookout for the new, free Fruit Bird Ikaruga game at an app store near you soon.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
September 19, 2014
Apple's Canary Keels Over
Is Apple bragging about iOS 8's ability to block police searches of devices just misdirect cheering to divert users from noticing a much larger wholesale user data handoff?
A report by gigaom-dot-com speculates that the the disappearance of "warrant canary" language in Apple's most recent government Transparency Report might mean that Big Bro has come knocking.
Don't know what a "warrant canary" is? It's sort of a notification-by-omission legalese way of flashing one's headlights to warn the citizenry of cops up the road. Read up.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
A report by gigaom-dot-com speculates that the the disappearance of "warrant canary" language in Apple's most recent government Transparency Report might mean that Big Bro has come knocking.
Don't know what a "warrant canary" is? It's sort of a notification-by-omission legalese way of flashing one's headlights to warn the citizenry of cops up the road. Read up.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
September 16, 2014
About Some Guy who says he's a Spy
Tonight, CNN will air a story about al Qaeda double agent Morten Storm, who in a new book claims to have hopped languages, ideologies, and customs between Islamic extremists and Western spy agencies, ultimately to put al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki in the crosshairs of a U.S. drone strike.
That's what this Storm fellow says, anyway. Neither al Qaeda nor any spy agency has even heard of the guy. The book jacket is dressed up with some important-sounding CNN terrorism analyst co-writers, though.
Alas, I suppose you just have to trust self-proclaimed masters of deception who nobody but the media claims to know if you want the truth about secret worlds.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
That's what this Storm fellow says, anyway. Neither al Qaeda nor any spy agency has even heard of the guy. The book jacket is dressed up with some important-sounding CNN terrorism analyst co-writers, though.
Alas, I suppose you just have to trust self-proclaimed masters of deception who nobody but the media claims to know if you want the truth about secret worlds.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
September 10, 2014
Party Like it's 1983 ...
Here's some really expensive tinfoil: a new clothing line with removable pockets designed to prevent cell towers, the government, and random hackers from feeling up your mobile phone.
See, it used to be you could drive across the country on cash and get away with a crime -- at least for a few years. But nowadays your iThing pretty much reports your every move, even if you've removed the GPS transmitter with a hammer. There are still cell tower pings, and that latest fruit-bird-farm game you downloaded is always reporting your position via some mysterious transmitting technology you agreed to install after missing the detail somewhere in the million-word User Agreement.
This new clothing line from The Affair features a removable metal-fiber-lined "UnPocket" designed to keep your electronic signature more private than Jennifer Lawrence's privates.
And in case you don't want to spring for new 1984 clothing that, according to MailOnline, looks just like the clothing from Orwell's book (you're not going crazy ... there was no "clothing" in the book ... but there was clothing depicted in the 1984 movie 1984, which was just clothing from the actual year 1984 ... but whenever you read MailOnline, movies and books and news and facts get so confusing) the UnPocket is sold separately.
Just remember: You can suit-up in stealth 80s retro and plan the perfect crime, but if you so much as pull out your phone to check Facebook at that gas station in Kansas City, you're busted.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
See, it used to be you could drive across the country on cash and get away with a crime -- at least for a few years. But nowadays your iThing pretty much reports your every move, even if you've removed the GPS transmitter with a hammer. There are still cell tower pings, and that latest fruit-bird-farm game you downloaded is always reporting your position via some mysterious transmitting technology you agreed to install after missing the detail somewhere in the million-word User Agreement.
This new clothing line from The Affair features a removable metal-fiber-lined "UnPocket" designed to keep your electronic signature more private than Jennifer Lawrence's privates.
And in case you don't want to spring for new 1984 clothing that, according to MailOnline, looks just like the clothing from Orwell's book (you're not going crazy ... there was no "clothing" in the book ... but there was clothing depicted in the 1984 movie 1984, which was just clothing from the actual year 1984 ... but whenever you read MailOnline, movies and books and news and facts get so confusing) the UnPocket is sold separately.
Just remember: You can suit-up in stealth 80s retro and plan the perfect crime, but if you so much as pull out your phone to check Facebook at that gas station in Kansas City, you're busted.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
September 8, 2014
Getting the Truth out of Spy Agencies
Here's a good one: The U.S. Congress wants the CIA to come clean on the "enhanced interrogation methods" it used on al-Qaeda suspects after the 2001 terrorist attacks ... which the Telegraph reports often amounted to near-drownings.
Who knows? Maybe there were some actual drownings. Maybe there were a bunch of actual drownings. Maybe the kittens of al-Qaeda members were harmed.
But I wonder if our politicians know that they are wasting their time trying to get the truth out of organizations that operate on stealth and deception?
Because I would just hate to see politicians wasting time, wouldn't you?
Who knows? Maybe there were some actual drownings. Maybe there were a bunch of actual drownings. Maybe the kittens of al-Qaeda members were harmed.
But I wonder if our politicians know that they are wasting their time trying to get the truth out of organizations that operate on stealth and deception?
Because I would just hate to see politicians wasting time, wouldn't you?
September 1, 2014
On Naked Stars in the iCloud
The Daily Mail says the internet is talking smack about Ricky Gervais criticizing celebrities who store nude photos of themselves on their iPhones. Jennifer Lawrence and possibly 99 other celebs who take naked pictures of themselves with their iPhones had their iCloud picture stash hacked recently.
Ricky blamed "the victims," according to the internet ... and the internet made him remove his tweets.
Really?
and
Doubtful.
I am not a celebrity, but I know what I look like naked just from looking in the bathroom mirror. I feel no need to document the look, let alone store the photos on my telephone.
You guys are celebrities, right? It's not like you need nekked selfie snaps to get a one night stand. And you do know what a "cloud" is, right?
Going back to the Orwell riffing I've been doing lately ... maybe it's time to revisit 1984 with a tale called 2014 ... where spies become passé thanks to dumb people with smart phones.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
Ricky blamed "the victims," according to the internet ... and the internet made him remove his tweets.
Really?
and
Doubtful.
I am not a celebrity, but I know what I look like naked just from looking in the bathroom mirror. I feel no need to document the look, let alone store the photos on my telephone.
You guys are celebrities, right? It's not like you need nekked selfie snaps to get a one night stand. And you do know what a "cloud" is, right?
Going back to the Orwell riffing I've been doing lately ... maybe it's time to revisit 1984 with a tale called 2014 ... where spies become passé thanks to dumb people with smart phones.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
August 29, 2014
On Lies and Spies
I know ... nobody asked ... but it took me all of 30 seconds to name this blog.
Because this is a blog about The Spies of Thurber Hall series, I thought about going with Spies and Lies. It rhymes, yes, and spy stories are always about lies. There are lies told to uncover lies and more lies told to re-hide some of those lies. The truths revealed by spying are sometimes useful, but often useless. Sometimes the “useless” truths in the context of intelligence gathering are very useful to someone ... just not the party that commissioned the spying.
There went 21 seconds of my life (and 17 seconds of yours to read about it. Remember, this blog is all about spying, so please don't be alarmed that I know exactly how long it takes you to read these sentences). The next nine or so seconds of the above-30 found me refining the concept of truth and human propensity to manipulate it. The ideas lit-up and fizzed-out like a Fourth of July sparkler, which would account for me having many more superficial thoughts in half the time it took me to ponder the initial blog title. All of those sparkly, fleeting thoughts were driven by this self-serving question:
What’s the punchiest way to say that of all the creatures on Planet Earth, only humans lie? And that only humans are compelled to spy to uncover certain lies?
It’s tough for someone like me who doesn’t speak “Squirrel” to confirm that squirrels don’t lie to other squirrels, or to groundhogs, an animal species which seems ripe to be lied to all week long and Sunday too.
The best way to put the issue to rest, of course, is to simply Google, “do animals lie?”
If you do, you will find hundreds of pages of research that confirm that non-human animals lie to each other all the time. The most preeminent Google search result asserts that stomatopod crustaceans have, over the course of decades of academic study, been plainly observed bluffing other stomatopod crustaceans at-will.
But what a load of bull, these bluffing stomatopod crustaceans. Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing they too have their own spy agencies.
(They don’t. I saved you four seconds of your life by Googling it, even if I took back two of those seconds to brag about it).
So in the end, I found this blog title the punchiest:
Do Monkeys Lie?
For unlike stomatopod crustaceans, monkeys enjoy a certain Darwinian closeness with us humans. And unlike the bluffing crayfish, monkeys can be observed in their natural habitat at any zoo (please don’t nitpick here) ... not lying ... not spying ... only swinging from vine to vine, howling, and flinging poo.
So that's more than you wanted to know about the title of this blog.
Onto The Spies of Thurber Hall.
While I had fun with the idea of college kids being college kids ... and being government trained, funded, and supplied spies ... I also thought a good deal about Orwell’s 1984 while writing this series.
I wonder what Orwell would think if he were alive in this age where not only the government spies on us, but we spy on us. What would he think of all the good guys who are proved bad guys and vice-versa in a world where we can all record anything and anybody so conveniently on dash cams, baby cams, and so-called pocket telephones? At last count, the number of good guys and bad guys in 2014 is the same as in any era, but it is shocking and illuminating to find out who the real good guys and real bad guys actually are.
The patches of truth that highlight the shadows of lies fall into the laps of the young spies in this book frequently. They've got government eyes and ears on real and potential terrorists who are professors, businessmen, students ... you and me ... but sometimes the truths that turn up aren't useful to the bosses in D.C.
I don’t begrudge the idealistic young spies of SET-GO 17 a few off-the-company-books shots at making the world right. College students with government-funded omniscience and cool spy tools at their beck and call is the theme of the series, after all ... and, well ... they're only burning through wholly fictional tax dollars, see.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
Because this is a blog about The Spies of Thurber Hall series, I thought about going with Spies and Lies. It rhymes, yes, and spy stories are always about lies. There are lies told to uncover lies and more lies told to re-hide some of those lies. The truths revealed by spying are sometimes useful, but often useless. Sometimes the “useless” truths in the context of intelligence gathering are very useful to someone ... just not the party that commissioned the spying.
There went 21 seconds of my life (and 17 seconds of yours to read about it. Remember, this blog is all about spying, so please don't be alarmed that I know exactly how long it takes you to read these sentences). The next nine or so seconds of the above-30 found me refining the concept of truth and human propensity to manipulate it. The ideas lit-up and fizzed-out like a Fourth of July sparkler, which would account for me having many more superficial thoughts in half the time it took me to ponder the initial blog title. All of those sparkly, fleeting thoughts were driven by this self-serving question:
What’s the punchiest way to say that of all the creatures on Planet Earth, only humans lie? And that only humans are compelled to spy to uncover certain lies?
It’s tough for someone like me who doesn’t speak “Squirrel” to confirm that squirrels don’t lie to other squirrels, or to groundhogs, an animal species which seems ripe to be lied to all week long and Sunday too.
The best way to put the issue to rest, of course, is to simply Google, “do animals lie?”
If you do, you will find hundreds of pages of research that confirm that non-human animals lie to each other all the time. The most preeminent Google search result asserts that stomatopod crustaceans have, over the course of decades of academic study, been plainly observed bluffing other stomatopod crustaceans at-will.
But what a load of bull, these bluffing stomatopod crustaceans. Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing they too have their own spy agencies.
(They don’t. I saved you four seconds of your life by Googling it, even if I took back two of those seconds to brag about it).
So in the end, I found this blog title the punchiest:
Do Monkeys Lie?
For unlike stomatopod crustaceans, monkeys enjoy a certain Darwinian closeness with us humans. And unlike the bluffing crayfish, monkeys can be observed in their natural habitat at any zoo (please don’t nitpick here) ... not lying ... not spying ... only swinging from vine to vine, howling, and flinging poo.
So that's more than you wanted to know about the title of this blog.
Onto The Spies of Thurber Hall.
While I had fun with the idea of college kids being college kids ... and being government trained, funded, and supplied spies ... I also thought a good deal about Orwell’s 1984 while writing this series.
I wonder what Orwell would think if he were alive in this age where not only the government spies on us, but we spy on us. What would he think of all the good guys who are proved bad guys and vice-versa in a world where we can all record anything and anybody so conveniently on dash cams, baby cams, and so-called pocket telephones? At last count, the number of good guys and bad guys in 2014 is the same as in any era, but it is shocking and illuminating to find out who the real good guys and real bad guys actually are.
The patches of truth that highlight the shadows of lies fall into the laps of the young spies in this book frequently. They've got government eyes and ears on real and potential terrorists who are professors, businessmen, students ... you and me ... but sometimes the truths that turn up aren't useful to the bosses in D.C.
I don’t begrudge the idealistic young spies of SET-GO 17 a few off-the-company-books shots at making the world right. College students with government-funded omniscience and cool spy tools at their beck and call is the theme of the series, after all ... and, well ... they're only burning through wholly fictional tax dollars, see.
Emm Oh
http://www.emmoh.com
