Rob van Kranenburg on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:08:58 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Spook Schools



That is explained by Edgar Allen Poe in 'The Purloined Letter':

 "At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a
trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty
blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the
mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were
five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much
soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle --as if
a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had
been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal,
bearing the D-- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a
diminutive female hand, to D--, the minister, himself. It was thrust
carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the upper
divisions of the rack.

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of
which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically
different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a
description. Here the seal was large and black, with the D-- cipher; there
it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S-- family. Here, the
address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the
superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold and
decided; the size alone formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the
radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the
soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true
methodical habits of D--, and so suggestive of a design to delude the
beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these things,
together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the
view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions
to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly
corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to
suspect."

In the days of the network the best way to hide is to be hyperobtrusive,

Greetings, Rob

> They are not exactly hiding this program:
>
> http://dni.gov/cae/press.htm
>
> # # #







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