Friday, February 28, 2014
The Unselected
From Guardian:
Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.The Unselected. Perfect modern version of the proles. Not worth full focus until some algorithm finds some distant semantic connection to a Selected. At that point the laser focuses on the Unselected and one binary digit switches from 0 to 1 in a boolean flag variable. Now you're a Selected, and there's no way to flip your digit back to 0. ¶ 7:23 AM
