I remember the times when people used to say "This is not for the telephone". We tried to analyze the clicks and background noises to identify when our conversations were monitored. Under communism people disappeared for saying things on the phone or writing something in a letter that the regime considered dangerous. Solzhenytsin, for example, was sent to the Gulag for a jovial observation about Stalin in a private letter to a friend. What we dont realize is that today all of our communications on the phone and the internet are open and easily monitored by hundreds if not thousands of organizations, using keywords or other statistical methods, building complex profiles of what we are and with whom we communicate and what are the probabilities that they could sell us something or that we vote for somebody. No one is disappearing in our democracies, but I'm sure careers and opportunities are deflected by our image built by the computers.
My uncle never wrote a letter, probably because he was thinking that anything could be used against him in some unknown future. I have almost no pictures of him. He is dead and his fears (if he had them, I dont really know) resulted unfounded. Today, the computer profiling is so developed that no harm can fall on a decent, moderate, well-intentioned person like me. There are
people out there who think differently.
2 comments:
Reminds me of a prof i had, he would repeatedly warn us never touch any thing to do with defense due to big brothers scrutiny his most popular refrain was "You stay in the loo too long and they peep in just in case"
Oddly nowadays in the free west commercial and government surveillance is so pervasive your communication is more likely to be tapped in than in a 3rd world country
My aunt has a brother who got left behind in Tashkent at the end of the war (he finally got out in the '70s). When there was no meat in the shops, he would write "Mrs. Fleishman has not visited in several months." And so on.
Once my mother in law visited Tashkent as part of a tour and had a package of clothes, etc. to deliver to this man's sister in law who was still there. They arranged an exchange that would have been the envy of any spy. They met in a park. My mother in law left the package on a park bench and then walked away. A few minutes later the pickup was made.
I always thought citizens of totalitarian countries were naturally adept at such matters, but this summer when a Chinese graduate student was supposed to intern at my son's office, she fell completely apart when mildly questioned by the customs and immigration officer at the airport and ended up being sent back (she had a tourist visa but admitted she was coming to work - all she had to do was insist she was here to visit the national parks.)
K
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