The NSA Is Reading My Email

This isn't paranoia on my part.

As some of my readers here know, I am a sculptor. I carve stone. In addition I repair sculptures in some cases. I don't work on really expensive stuff, or anything by noted artists, or anything valuable by virtue of age - I don't have formal, conservator training - but that doesn't stop people from emailing me and asking for those kinds of repairs, or asking questions about how to get such repairs made by someone else.

And I've had questions from a fair number of places... much of the US, Australia, and England, at least.

But two days ago I got one from Pakistan. A very nicely spoken (well... written) gentleman there has a couple of very old, broken, Buddha sculptures, and he was looking for some advice on how to fix them. I replied and told him what I could, as I do with everyone who asks such questions of me. (The gist of my advice, of course, was to find a conservator. 2000+ year old sculptures need to be repaired by an expert.)

This morning he sent me a picture of one from his collection that is unbroken. I don't feel like I should publish it here - I haven't asked for permission - but it is lovely. He also asked for advice on how to safely display his sculptures with less risk of additional breakage.

And once again I replied, discussing the issues around displaying them, and telling him about museum putty.

This is all completely innocent, of course. Or is it?

I've now exchanged multiple emails with someone in Pakistan, and that someone has also sent me a picture.

Wanna bet I am on the NSA's radar now? And probably their equivalents in at least the 5 eyes countries? You know I am.

If my emails weren't being monitored and saved before, they definitely are now.

And I had to think about whether I would reply to these emails or not. I actually sat at my desk for a couple of minutes wondering if it was worth the risk - of getting tagged by the NSA as communicating with someone in Pakistan, someone I don't even know personally - to discuss sculpture repair. That's appalling.

Imagine what this could have looked like. What if we'd talked about something more delicate, like the state of politics in his home city, or religion.  Ponder that for a bit.

The direction the US has taken is a dangerous one. Each day we look more and more like the dictatorships we claim to oppose, and it happens one tiny little step at a time. One little freedom given away in the name of "security". One little act of self censorship because someone might be watching.

I'm sure this blog post will only cause the NSA to watch me that much more closely. And possibly other agencies as well... FBI, CIA, who knows. And apparently various presidential directives and secret interpretations of certain laws make that all completely legal.

It makes me sick to my stomach.

And I Respond to Senator Feinstein's Response... Not That She Cares In The Least

Back on July 4th, I posted the contents of the letters I sent to some of my elected representatives, discussing the NSA spying situation and various related things.

Then, on July 11th, I shared the response I received from Senator Feinstein's office.  Sadly, thanks to limited formatting options in Blogger, I had to post her response on my personal website to make it legible.

Today I post my response to what I got from Senator Feinstein.  Again, though, the format doesn't work well, so you'll have to visit the page on my website to read it.  Apologies, but with limited column width and no real way to indent text effectively, it's better this way.

I invite you to comment.  Even more, though, I invite you to send your thoughts to your elected representatives.  Even if you disagree with me, they need to hear what the people think.  But - and this is important - we need to be educated.  We need to read the news reports about what the NSA has admitted doing (or been forced to admit), along with what governments in other countries are doing as well.  And we need to think deeply about what this country stands for, and is (or should be) afraid of.

If you've done those things and still disagree with me, that's fine.  Rational disagreement is possible on these topics, and I accept that.  If, however, you're just taking it on blind faith that our government can do no wrong and that terrorism is the ultimate threat, I suggest you need to do a lot more reading about these things.

Anyway, feel free to read any or all of the above links.  I hope they are interesting and possibly useful.

And Senator Feinstein (actually, her staff, I'm sure) Responds to my email:

In an earlier post I shared copies of emails I recently sent to my state senators and the president.  Today I got a response from Senator Feinstein's office.

I tried several times to include the text of the email in this post, but it turns out that Blogger's editor really doesn't have an easy way to make it look nice, or even readable. Kind of a problem.  And since I couldn't manage to do that I didn't even bother trying to include the contents of the PDF file here either.

Instead, I've posted both the email and the attachment on my personal website.  You can read them over there:

http://www.bangtherockstogether.com/nsa_flap/

As you'll see, I didn't write up my response just yet.  For now, suffice it to say that I think her email and the PDF embody the same, tired reply the government has been giving the press for weeks.  "These programs really do work." "There really is effective oversight." You know the drill.

In short, in my opinion, it's a crappy canned response that some harried senate staffer decided was the most appropriate given what little s/he read of my email and the choices they had available.  If I am lucky they added one to some total of complaint letters they got about the NSA issue as well.  If I am unlucky, they forwarded my email to both the FBI and the CIA, and I am now undergoing "additional scrutiny", since I am such a threat to the security of our homeland.

That said, something funny happened when I tried to reply directly to the message I got.

The senator's email came from senator@feinstein.senate.gov, so that is where my reply was going to.  Amusingly, it bounced with the following error message:

550 5.1.1 <senator@feinstein.senate.gov>... User unknown

If only it was the case that Senator Feinstein was unknown, and that someone who cared about civil liberties was in her place.  And I love the fact that my own senator is sending email with forged headers.  Cool, eh?  I wonder if the CAN-SPAM act makes that a crime?  I may have to look that up.

I will mark up Senator Feinstein's response and share it here in a few days, when I can make the time.  It will wind up on my website as well, no doubt, but I'll publish a link here when it's ready to go.