4.  "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, BAKED BEANS, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, AND SPAM!"
    by William Stone, III 
    http://www.wrstone.com>
    Exclusive to TLE    http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/>     Issue 202

There has been a hysterical cry of late for the FedGov to "do
something!!" about spam. "Spam," in this case, does not
refer to the canned ham and pork dish that is often a staple food in the
diet of those most-impacted by the endless cycles of boom-and-bust caused
by government intervention in the free market. Rather, the 21st-century
definition of "spam" is junk e-mail.

I admit it: I find spam extremely annoying. In my personal mailbox, I
receive something in excess of a 150 spam messages a day. These are
typically advertisements for sex aids, but as the FedGov continues to
blindly drive the economy into the ground, I've started to get more ads for
"easy money," hair loss remedies, and methods in increase the
size of my penis.

I've dealt with the problem of spam with a series of filter programs. None
have been entirely successful: either the filter is too conservative and
allows more spam through than I'd like or it's too restrictive and
disallows valid e-mail -- often from potential business clients.

I've finally settled on a system of having the spam filter copy the mail to
a file which I will review on a weekly basis, consigning the junk mail to
the bit-bucket a thousand or so at a time.

As I say, it's an annoyance -- probably more so to less technically-minded
individuals than myself. I've had clients repeatedly complain that they'll
open an innocent-looking message in front of a child. As so many of the
e-mails involve porn, they're left having to hastily close the e-mail
window and hope their child didn't see its content.

Recently, Congress and the President pounded the final nail into the coffin
of Constitutional America with the creation of the American KGB. This
office is sometimes called the "Homeland Security Department" by
those unfamiliar with the correct Russian translation of KGB.

Key to the KGB's plans to immorally and Unconstitutionally monitor the
activities of every human being in America from cradle to grave is the
Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. TIA is a database intended to be
the "permanent record" that your grade school principle
threatened you with, and is the nirvana of those seeking to create a police
state of the United States.

I've previously suggested that the only moral response to both the TIA and
the American KGB is non-compliance with its directives. As Gandhi noted,
there are unjust laws as there are unjust men: the American KGB is a
perfect such example.

In addition to the noncompliance offered by computer geeks everywhere,
there are many things the average individual can do to join in
non-compliance.

The first of these, strangely enough is spam.

The TIA program intends to monitor -- among a multitude of other things --
all Internet and e-mail traffic. The American KGB will collect, analyze,
and store for posterity every Web site you visit, every electronic posting
that you make, and every e-mail that you send or receive.

This must also include the spam.

Imagine for a moment that you're a paranoid KGB Agent with a dark soul and
shriveled heart. You're bent on controlling everyone you can get your dirty
little hands on. These people are communicating -- unrestricted and
unmonitored! -- via e-mail. Many of these e-mails are advertisements. What
if, hidden in the advertising, are ciphers or codes that would include
communications you might find detrimental to your dictatorial ambitions?

Therefore, when you put in place your plans to monitor every action taken
by every individual in the country, you absolutely must monitor their spam.

This turns the monitoring job into something incredibly complex, difficult,
and likely impossible. The amount of computing power required to analyze
the raw data being collected is enormous. Let's examine just the data of my
personal e-mail (wrstone{at}wrstone.com), for example:

I send approximately a hundred e-mails in any given week. These are largely
concerned with trivialities, such as the circumference of my daughters'
heads (which my mother plans to use for a Christmas gift). While on a
purely moral level, this is information that I've no wish for the KGB to
know, it does them no real good to collect it. In fact, from the
perspective of the police state, collecting it is actively harmful. In the
first place, it takes CPU power to process the data. It takes storage space
(both archival and current) to house the data. It takes CPU power to make a
first-pass automated analysis of the data, in order to determine if it
should be flagged for further study. In the event that further study is
deemed necessary, it will then take human effort to analyze it.

Many pieces of trivial data will be flagged and analyzed. If one assumes,
for example, that I'm a terrorist communicating in code, then the
measurements of my daughters' heads might have some correlation to, say,
the flight number of an aircraft I'm intending to hijack. Without human
investigation, who is to say whether or not this seemingly trivial piece of
data might not be terrorism in disguise?

Now take all of the trivial information that I communicate in any given
week and multiply it by 280,000,000.

That represents only the OUTBOUND e-mail being tracked, stored, and
analyzed. The inbound side is much more complex, largely due to the spam.

The American KGB won't have the option to be so cavalier about deleting
potentially coded information. All the spam that you and I receive will
need to be stored and analyzed for hidden ciphers and codes.

And what of all the dirty pictures we receive attached to e-mails? It's now
possible to encode data into graphic images, residing in "unused"
portions of the graphic. Where the picture that you receive looks to the
naked eye as something innocuous like a family photo or naked picture
attached to spam, when examined at the binary level there can be
information attached.

So where I have the option to auto-delete the spam from xxx.com with the
six dirty pictures attached, someone intent on analyzing terrorist
information would have to sift through those pictures.

I receive about fifty dirty pictures a day that are automatically deleted
by spam filters or virus software. Multiply that number by 280,000,000.

As you can see, from this perspective, it becomes clear that far from being
something that the FedGov should stop, spam is in fact our friend. It is
the chaff that masks our real communications from the KGB's radar. It
causes the enemy to pointlessly expend time, energy, processing power, and
money analyzing data that is utterly meaningless.

Far from demanding Federal action to stop spam, we should each be
generating as much spam as humanly possible.

You and I can afford to delete our spam with a keystroke. The KGB can't,
and this is to our advantage.

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