Morning at the Office of Information

08.16.2010

Agent Robinson walked casually to his desk. It was 8:17 in the morning and though he was early for work, he felt as if the bureau chief would mock him for another tardy morning. By the time he strolled into the office downtown, plenty of agents were already at work. The building always buzzed with activity, night or day. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of agency employees were endlessly busy monitoring targets, evaluating threats and executing investigations, interrogations and covert missions. Robinson sat down at his desk, set his coffee mug to the right of his mouse and flipped on a computer monitor. His long slender fingers rested on the keyboard. He typed “arobinson,” followed by “duke819757,” an amalgam of his dog’s name and wife’s birthdate. He opened his email, sighed and muttered under his breath “47 messages already. A patriot’s work never ends. He remains vigilant.” Robinson glanced at the bumper sticker on the cabinet above his monitor reading the same mantra.

The agent casually scrolled through his morning messages. Department briefings, special meeting announcements, an office party on the 23^rd floor for some IT guy’s birthday – he thought his name might be Matt. The work of government appears sexy in a press release but it’s pretty tedious day to day, he thought. Finally he found something interesting – a few activity alerts on some of his targets.

The office Agent Robinson worked out of was just one of many huge information hubs scattered across the continental United States. Each Infohub looked like a standard glass high rise office building and was typically placed on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area. The only difference between an Infohub and any other skyscraper was the amount of satellite dishes and antennae on the roof, which thanks to the information age, no one ever noticed.

Located within the walls of Infohubs were non-descript offices, plenty of conventional surveillance systems, thousands of computers, several lock up areas, enhanced interrogation rooms, lethal and non-lethal tactical equipment rooms (armories), and even temporary living quarters. The real excitement though, lay in the analytics department. Each Infohub contained several NaurusInsight systems, supercomputers pioneered in the early 1990’s by the Defense Department for mass electronic surveillance, ECHELON interceptors, a communications monitoring system built during the height of the cold war and subsequently networked into every phone line across the world and the Genisys system. All data mined globally fed through Genisys, an almost sentient software program developed to handle large repositories of information. Data was pulled via Naurus and ECHELON along with information handed over by credit card companies, banks, retail outlets, plus local and regional law enforcement. Even the postal service fed intercepted mail scans into Genisys. The program would route information through about a dozen subroutines in order to determine what individuals or groups could be potential threats and predict their movements and actions, down to what day of the week an individual went grocery shopping.

Essentially, Genisys took care of the bulk of Agent Robinson’s work for him.

Michael, one of his targets, would apparently be out of toilet paper sometime tomorrow.

Geni, as most agents jokingly referred to the system, picked up on Michael years ago after it noticed an email list he maintained during the early 2000’s. Mike would forward out suspect or seditious news articles to a small group of friends. Since then, he started writing and blogging about any number of supposedly hot button political issues, attended various radical left wing meetings, even engaged in street protests. Mike would never be a physical threat to any political administration, federal government, local government, police, or even a partisan opposition group – but Geni knew Mike had something wrong in his head and labeled him an ideological threat.

Agent Robinson slurped his coffee with excitement and read the alert.

Subject number 614: Michael Wilson, aged 35. Ideological threat. Watch level status: Yellow.

Begin sitrep: Subject M. Wilson authored 17 articles, all published on the internet on the following subjects: war, terrorism, Lollapalooza, civil liberties, the constitution, beer, Milton Bradley, Islam, World of Warcraft, Christianity, class war, dubstep music. Facebook activity: 150 links shared, 39 status updates, 10 new friends, 3 friend deletions, joined groups “Americans against war in Iran” “Cryogenically Freeze Eric Estrada’s Head” and “Don’t you hate it when your ass gets sweaty after sitting in your office chair for too long.”

Robinson let out a little laugh and took another swill from his coffee – it was sweet, two sugar packets and two creamers. Never Nutrasweet – like Flouride in drinking water, Nutrasweet was bad for one’s health. He remembered joining the very same Facebook group two nights prior, under the fake account he kept in order to maintain pseudo friendships with some of his more interesting targets. Even though he knew Mike worked as a temp for a firm contracted to sell advertisements in the Tribune, he somehow always thought his personality type seemed more akin to shipping and receiving.

The report continued and Agent Robinson’s soft brown eyes glazed slightly: spending reports for two weeks, travel logs, some minor surveillance footage from various ATM’s across the city, internet browsing history containing pie charts of most viewed themes – the two majors of which were labeled politics (37%) and p (32%) – a ratio the majority of his targets, usually opinionated but otherwise innocuous middle aged males, held. At the bottom, a window popped up – it read “Agent arobinson, what option would you like to execute?” The options read “immediate arrest, detain for questioning, upgrade alert status, continue monitoring.” There was never an option to downgrade alert status. After briefly thinking about the data, Agent Robinson clicked “continue monitoring” and opened the next alert.

He did this a few more times, desperately hoping for something interesting. He read an update on Jack, a 17 year old male from a more rural area, highlighted by Geni because of a questionable flyer Jack printed featuring a caricature of a president drawn with a pencil in his head. Agent Robinson read about Darius, a 47 year old teacher from the city, on Geni’s list because of a paper he authored in college questioning the legitimacy of attacking Afghanistan. He even saw an alert for Jessica, a pseudo hippy college liberal type who often got arrested at one demonstration or another for “civil disobedience.” Though she was orange flagged as a legitimate threat, the only thing close to a crime she had committed in the past two weeks was posting a picture featuring her in a “fuck you” trucker hat on Facebook.

Robinson needed a break. He opened up a news website and read an article on China’s human rights violations and its pervasive surveillance systems. Apparently, the Chinese government installed and networked cameras in two provinces in nearly every public space. Livid with outrage, he nearly spilt his coffee. Why would people stand for that, the elimination of their privacy and freedom? Sure, America had to make a few sacrifices – networked some cameras in more urban “trouble spots” together and yes, he had to monitor people – but those people were deemed threats. His job was different though, it was science. Science and technology figured out the threats and targets – not some arbitrary people, be they part of a governing class or not. For a government to monitor every inch of the public square, especially without scientific proof? That was going too far.

Agent Robinson looked at the clock in the corner of his computer monitor. 11:15, time for Matt in IT’s birthday party. The work of a patriot may never be complete, but at least sometimes there’s cake.