A busy day in the Ministry of Information.
Our Great Leaders desire to know all about us. They love us so much they have to hear what we have to say at every moment. To this end they plan to collect all our Emails and have a look at our conversations. I imagine rows of Righteous computer operators going ‘Awww, isn’t that sweet? They sound almost human’ as they trawl through the mountain of drivel that passes down the wire each day.
My first thought was ‘So what?’ (© Ed Balls). At least 70% of what lands in my inbox is spam. If I took up all those offers I’d now have a harem of Russian wives and a six foot knob to service them with. I’d pay for them with all the money those nice Nigerian bank clerks want to give me and with my winnings from lotteries I’d never entered. If the government want to read all that crap, good luck to them. If they want to intercept it so it doesn’t even reach me, even better.
Twice, a domain I own has been hit by spammers. They use it as a return address. Those domains originally had catch-all mailboxes because I’m lazy and couldn’t be bothered figuring out individual Emails, so anything before the @ part went to that mailbox. I was getting their failed-returned mails at a rate of hundreds per hour until I wised up and shut those open boxes. They still use those addresses, so finding me in a sea of spam wouldn’t be easy.
It would be a bit of a job, in fact, to find anything worth reading in what goes in to my mailbox. The only ones I’d worry about would be the commercially sensitive ones. I’m not talking state secrets, but the companies I work for would prefer the work kept quiet until they’ve investigated patent potential. There’s nothing subversive or insulting to the government in my Emails. I put all that stuff up on the blogs, in public view, for all to see.
If I want to refer to the Brown Gorgon, the Darling Caterpillar Balancer, Jacq the Ripper, Bouncy-Bouncy Balls, Count Mandelson, Darth Campbell, the Circus Midget or any of the others, I’ll do it in plain sight. When ‘Hello Dave’ takes over, I hope he provides as amusing a bunch of misfits to play with as the Gorgon has. In fact, I really hope Ming the Meaningless gets to be Speaker. The parody potential is enormous, especially if Flush Gordon is still around.
Read my Emails if you like, Ripper. You’ll find them full of dull technical stuff and spam. That’s pretty much all I get. Well, and those revolting Powerpoint so-sweet-they-make-your-teeth-bleed collections of nauseating kittens and puppy dogs that would look better roasted (Your time is coming, puppies. Just let those food prices rise a bit more).
If the police want to find a real terrorist, they can scrutinise one or two IP addresses and quickly weed out the real from the junk mails. If they are faced with a database that is likely to be 90% spam, what the hell use is that? It’ll take them weeks to sort through it all and pick out the ones that matter. Especially since any subversive worthy of the name is going to have a few hundred email addresses and use each one once. This database serves no useful purpose.
Except one. Spammers will love it. A collection of every email address in the UK, when it was last used, updated with new ones as they register, would be an invaluable resource for such a spammer. Their activities would soar. That database would go from 90% to 95% spam in its first hour of existence. It would become less useful to the authorities and more useful to spammers and phishers with every passing hour.
Speaking of phishers, wouldn’t they just love a record of the sites you visit? Cross reference your bank site visits with your email and you have targeted phishing as never before. A lot of effort, yes, but what a return! Plus, just take a look at those logged pages and you can see who has a decent balance and is worth going after.
Ah, but the Ripper insists the data will be safeguarded. She’s going to give it to a private company to look after, so it’ll be as safe as those child-benefit records and learner driver lists. Nobody in any private company would ever have any links to spammers and phishers. It’s not as if any of them might apply for jobs there, them being computer experts and all. They’d never think of that.
Criminals are ten times smarter than our government, unfortunately, and they are prepared to put in some effort to get what they want. They don’t need to put in much effort if you collect everything they want in one place and let them have the keys.
Something the Ripper will never understand. Not even when it’s too late.