When my sister-in-law Katje gets a bug in her ear concerning a certain subject, she’s pretty much implacable. So when she called me on Wednesday to make arrangements for dinner at my place in Great Falls, Virginia Saturday night, and insisted on doing all the necessary shopping and making everything herself so my brother Rob Roy and my nephew Jason could “play games and drink while I’m slaving away in the kitchen,” I knew something was afoot. It turned out to be her extremely liberal upbringing on the Upper East Side of New York City, which figures.
As regular readers of this Web log know, Rob and I are also from New York – we grew up in Little Italy, however, albeit in a penthouse. Dad was bartender to the stars of Broadway, publishing and finance and we were quite well off, no doubt about it. But when it came to politics, our parents were nothing like Katje’s – ours were real middle-of-the-road types, while hers, to paraphrase Will Rogers, never met a left-wing cause they didn’t like.
So Rob, Jason and I hung out in the basement Saturday afternoon while Katje slaved away in my kitchen. We started out playing pool, table tennis and poker, then moved to cavorting with my collection of vintage pinball machines. Then we dominated various on-line video game adversaries with my high definition screen, 64 gigabyte custom video card, 500 mbps fiber optic Internet connection and my extensive arsenal of exquisitely hacked and aggressively overlocked game controllers, all while raiding a liquor cabinet stocked with top shelf potables and exploring my ninety-five brand international beer collection, each bottle exactly chilled to precisely forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Finally, around six, Katje called us upstairs to the dining room.
The meal was exclusively vegan, not that I have any problem with vegan cuisine; I appreciate it, provided it’s well prepared and I don’t have to eat it every day (unfortunately, however, that’s a choice Rob and Jason don’t have). No doubt about it though, Katje’s very good at vegan cooking. The appetizer was mixed seared brassica in a garlic and Sriracha aioli, followed by an entree of lemongrass, scallion and turmeric coconut curry made with glazed abalone fungi, roasted shiitake mushrooms, miso tempura, seared yuba, snow pea pods, gai lan, cardamom-cured chiles and rosewater seasoned peanut oil sautéed pistachios, served on a fluffy pilaf of red quinoa and wild rice with finely julienned ramps and toasted pine nuts. For dessert, there was espresso ganache almond milk sponge cake with a sauce of cinnamon burnt caramel and nutmeg rum soaked black currants, all topped with a lovingly made white chocolate mousse. I had offered to supply the wine, of course, but Katje insisted on a Chilean Malpo Valley Sauvignon Blanc, which proved quite remarkable in context, despite not being particularly expensive. Katje kept her powder dry until after the entree – she didn’t unload until about halfway through that scrumptious sponge cake, actually.
“I don’t suppose, Tom,” went her opening volley, “that Rob has told you about his latest special assignment at work.”
“Not a word,” I jocularly confessed. “We’ve been been doing nothing but drinking and playing games all afternoon while you slaved away in the kitchen. And my compliments, by the way; excellent food, Katje, thanks so much for going to all the trouble – this spread would have run about seventy or eighty bucks a person at a vegan restaurant downtown, including the wine, and before tips and gratuity, naturally.”
“I’ll bet,” Katje challenged, “that Rob here hasn’t told you anything about it because he’s ashamed!”
“Ashamed?” I wondered, turning to look at Rob. “Ashamed of what?”
“I’m not ashamed of anything!” Rob indignantly declared. “Anyway, they have me working on a new proposal, that’s all.”
“Go on,” Katje scolded, “tell Tom what the proposal is for!”
“Aw, hell,” Rob grumbled, “It’s not that big a deal.”
“Tell him!” Katje insisted.
“It’s… um… well,” Rob stammered, “they want to bid on this solicitation that the Secret Service posted on FedBizOps for uh… social media analytics.”
“He’s talking,” Katje explained, “about Solicitation HSSS01-14-Q-0182, posted June 2, 2014 which advertises for a federal contractor to provide software which will allow the United States Secret Service to spy on Facebook, Twitter and other social media and conduct automated analysis of message contents to identify prospective targets for government persecution!”
“She’s extrapolating that last part on her own,” Rob rebutted.
“I can read between the lines on a RFP,” Katje snorted, “as well as anyone else who’s been in federal government contracting for more than ten years! The Secret Service says it wants the software to have the ‘ability to detect sarcasm and false positives,’ which means they want it to finger people so the feds can come after them.”
“Finger them?” Rob shrugged. “Finger them for what?”
“To arrest them, to put them in jail, to… water board them!” Katje shot back. “How should I know, exactly, what they’re going to do if somebody tweets something that the software heuristics raise a red flag about? Consider the implications, Tom – one minute you’re making a witty remark on Twitter or Facebook, and the next minute, you’re ‘an item of interest’ to the Secret Service!”
“Actually,” I pointed out, “I don’t have Facebook, Twitter or any other social media accounts, not even LinkedIn.”
“Okay, okay,” she replied with a dismissive wave of her hand, “I forgot – you think social media’s just a stupid fad and refuse to lower yourself to participate. Well, fine, goody for you, Tom, but there are millions and millions of innocent people…”
“Some of whom,” Rob interrupted, “are, in fact, not so innocent!”
“That doesn’t justify,” Katje persisted, “trampling on the rights of all the ones who are, in fact, so innocent, now does it? Look, Tom, those bastards at Whizzonator-YoYoDyne not only have my husband working on a proposal to provide the Secret Service with this Orwellian computer application, they’ve also named him in the Corporate Capabilities section as key personnel, and you know what that means.”
“It means,” I replied, “that if they win the proposal, Rob will be required to work on the contract.”
“As the Principal Software Engineer,” Katje fumed. “That’s like… like… like the company he works for winning a contract to run Guantanamo prison and they’re going to make Rob one of the wardens!”
“Gitmo,” Rob objected, “is closing, okay?”
“It’s an analogy!” Katje blared back at him. “Don’t think being obtuse about this is going to get you anywhere, either! Tom, the feds want to peek at everybody’s tweets and look for people who say things the feds don’t like to hear, so they can break down their bedroom door with a battering ram at three o’clock in the morning and drag them away in a huge black Chevy Suburban.”
“I think it’s a little bit more sophisticated than that,” Rob countered. “Actually, the feature you’re whining about, that a major application requirement is the ability to detect sarcasm and false positives, means that the Secret Service wants to avoid breaking down the wrong bedroom doors at three o’clock in the morning.”
“Yeah, right!” Katje huffed. “Obviously, the Secret Service only has the best interests of the American public at heart!”
“Better be careful, Mom,” Jason cautioned as he refilled her wine glass, “that was pretty darn sarcastic of you just then.”
“As long as she doesn’t tweet it or post it on her Facebook page,” I dryly observed, “there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Damn it,” Katje huffed, “this is serious! What makes the Secret Service think they have the right to sift through our tweets and Facebook posts looking for God knows what, anyway?”
“Plenty of private companies,” I pointed out, “already use software very similar to what the Secret Service is asking for to do just that. People may not be aware of it, but neither their tweets nor the Facebook material they create is protected by any serious privacy rights. On Twitter, you’re basically broadcasting your tweets to whoever wants to Follow you, correct? So, if the Secret Service – or the CIA, or the NSA or British MI-6, for that matter – wants to Follow you on Twitter, what have you got to complain about? And it’s common knowledge that Facebook sells every single bit of data it can collect about its users to the highest bidder on a regular basis – if you don’t like it, well, nobody’s holding a gun to your head and making you log on to Facebook and spill every intimate detail of your life, now are they? So, bottom line – it seems to me that people who are clueless enough to use Twitter and Facebook deserve to have spooks of every variety and nationality peering up their keisters with a carbon arc searchlight and a thirty-inch reflector telescope. And if something one of those clueless bozos says on Twitter or Facebook doesn’t please those spooks, and the clueless bozo who wrote it gets their clueless bozo life flushed down the toilet for writing it, then tough luck. Look, if people don’t want to get their on-line bank account cleaned out by some Russian teenager, then don’t do your banking on the Internet. If people don’t want to have the federal government investigating them for some idiotic thing they said on Facebook or Twitter, then don’t log on to Facebook or Twitter, and I guarantee, nobody will be coming after you about the content of your tweets and Facebook account. I mean, really, who needs Facebook and Twitter in the first place? Believe me, if there weren’t vast, vacant-eyed, moronic hordes of pathetic half-wit fools blithering their brains out all over those trashy pieces of excrement, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five and one quarter days a year, then nobody – not the scumbags who mine data for the big corporations, not the slime buckets who assemble data warehouses for amoral marketing and advertising agencies, not the slithering sewage suckers who construct online analytical processing hypercubes for the plutocratic, vote-grubbing political party bosses of American democracy, much less the pitifully benighted and Peter-principal-plagued minions of the Executive Branch, would give a single, solitary, resonating hoot in Hell about Facebook, Twitter, or anything like them!”
“Golly, gee whiz, Tom,” Jason japed with smirk, “now why don’t you tell us how you really feel?”
“That,” I noted, “was pretty darn sarcastic of you, kiddo. Caveat interlocutor!”
“In vino veritas, my dear uncle,” Jason quipped, lifting his wine glass in salute.
“You’re begging the question, Tom!” Katje protested. “Not everybody is as circumspect and clever as you are, and you can’t just dismiss all the poor idiots – myself, Rob and Jason included – who actually like Twitter, Facebook and social media in general, and use it regularly. How can I, in good conscience, condone my husband working on a proposal to develop software that will allow the Secret Service to automatically search and evaluate social media content generated by American citizens?”
“With respect to that issue,” I announced, “there is some good news, and there is some bad news.”
“What’s the bad news?” Rob asked.
“The bad news” I replied, “is that FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security already have software that performs social media analytics. General Dynamics, ICF and Booz Allen are the incumbent contractors. So whatever dire consequences Katje has been fretting about this week, if indeed there are any, have already occurred, and I would point out that so far, nothing untoward has, apparently, happened, has it?”
A pregnant pause ensued.
“Okay,” Katje sighed, “and what’s the good news?”
“The good news,” I continued, “is that it’s wired. There’s no way the Whizzonator-YoYoDyne proposal can win. Your team could bid Albert Einstein, Alan Turing and Jesus Christ as key personnel and you’d still lose, because the grapevine says, at least one of those other contractors has decent looking women with Ivy League degrees on their staff who are currently… shall we say… working with with male Secret Service employees having material influence on the contracting process for that particular RFP to ensure IT program success.”
“So,” Rob surmised as he emptied the wine bottle into his glass, “I guess no matter how low we bid, even if we win on price, the other team’s gonna win the technical proposal on the basis of their… added value and… convenience to the government, huh?”
“Rob,” I gently chided as I uncorked another bottle of wine, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say that remark was positively… sarcastic.”