This minimum can include either his email address or mobile phone number, or name, surname and geographic address (and it doesn’t have to be a full address), or just the number of his driving licence, his passport or his insurance.
BRISM will be able to find the John Smith you need using any of these criteria, sifting out thousands of other John Smiths. Then the operator enters into the program the required level of data gathering – tracking of electronic correspondence, his phone calls, his movements, his visits to internet resources, his contacts in social networks, forums and websites. All of this information is gathered, analysed by various parameters and issued in the form of reports.
BRISM and other similar programs are certainly a miraculous invention, a huge breakthrough in surveillance and espionage. Programs like this allow gathering of information about many people at the same time in all corners of the world with very little effort.
After the acts of terrorism which destroyed the towers of the World Trade Center, the creation of such system has become a necessity. Do you remember what president George Bush Jr. was saying on the evening of September 11th?
‘…America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining. Today, our nation saw evil, ‘the very worst of human nature’, and we responded with the best of America. With the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could… The search is underway for those who were behind these evil acts. I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them… Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a Power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are with me’. This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. Thank you. Good night. And God bless America!’
And so the ‘full resources of our intelligence’ created BRISM and other systems like it. It was a good thing because it allowed us to trace, find and destroy many terrorists who were preparing to kill people.
But it turns out that even in the 21st century, the path to Hell is the same as it was in the Middle Ages – paved with good intentions. To destroy the termites eating away the walls of a house, you don’t burn the whole house down. That’s just pointless.
But in our case that is exactly how it happened. The war on terror has not only turned into bloody wars, in which our brave marines didn’t fight so much against Al-Qaeda as peaceful civilians, but it also resulted in the coming of the octopus, omniscient and omnipotent.
Now the whole world knows that companies like Microsoft (Hotmail), Google (Google Mail), Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple and Paltalk, basically everything computer-related and the whole of the internet community, are working with BRISM.
At the same time, the coming of the octopus has marked a new era, in which the words of Ecclesiastes are not relevant anymore. From now own there’s a lot of power in a lot of knowledge.
I could say a lot more about programs like BRISM, about subchannel information and metadata, which contains not just information about our John Smith but also the opportunity to control him and his actions, his career and his personal life. In other words, everything I was doing to poor Herr Hagen as an agent, BRISM conducts in a moment, simply by analysing the contents of the messages, the essence of correspondence, conversations and even the likes and emoticons of the object of surveillance.
Gathering metadata about a person is not just an invasion of privacy but something much more sinister. I am not a religious man, as unreligious as a true American can be, but when I studied BRISM I realized the deep essence of the program and I must confess, I felt deeply uneasy. I recalled the words from the Revelation of St. John the Evangelist:
“Then I saw another angel coming up from the east, having the seal of the living God. He called out in a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm the land and the sea: do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.
Then I heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel.
From the tribe of Judah 12,000 were sealed, from the tribe of Reuben 12,000, from the tribe of Gad 12,000.
From the tribe of Asher 12,000, from the tribe of Naphtali 12,000, from the tribe of Manasseh 12,000.
From the tribe of Simeon 12,000, from the tribe of Levi 12,000, from the tribe of Issachar 12,000.
From the tribe of Zebulun 12,000, from the tribe of Joseph 12,000, from the tribe of Benjamin 12,000.
After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands”. (Revelation 7:2 – 7:9.)
BRISM has become that angel which ‘put a seal’ on the foreheads of the ‘pure’ and has begun to count the ‘impure’. Its creators are convinced that they are doing a good thing, but I knew for sure what will happen next:
‘When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.
Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all God’s people, on the golden altar in front of the throne.
The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of God’s people, went up before God from the angel’s hand.
Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake.
Then the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them.
The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down on the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.
The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.
The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water.
The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter”. (Revelation 8:1-8:11)
I won’t quote anymore from St John, although I do know his ‘Revelations’ well. Nobody but God and his prophets can foresee what the future will be like.
But the octopus has another hypostasis, the most vile and disgusting. He grants to a few the power over many, quite often raising most ordinary nobodies over the crowd.