PARANOIA

Yes, we do already know about interactive artist and designer Lauren McCarthy's Happiness Hat. (Thanks to loyal citizen Allandaros.)

One chapter of the upcoming High Programmer rulebook discusses sample NPC High Programmers. These Heroes of Our Complex (or disgraced traitors, depending on which of them was the last to edit The Computer's memory files) are for use both as non-player characters by GMs and as inspiring examples for the players.

We need a few more, though, so get writing! High Programmer biographies should be short, punchy and funny. We take no responsibilities for any terminations resulting from your involvement in this chapter.

Again, submit via comments to this post.

Slashdot: Clean smells promote ethical behavior. Check the comments for trenchant analysis. Or, at least, for dumb jokes.

Loyal citizen Zild points us to the United Kingdom government's latest ingenious cost-cutting/fundraising move, described in this September 28, 2009 Telegraph (UK) story by Transport Editor David Millward, "Innocent motorists to be asked to pay court costs":

Drivers will fall victim to reforms which will see people who are acquitted by the courts expected to foot the majority of their own defence costs. It is thought some innocent motorists will plead guilty to reduce their costs.

Currently, somebody who is cleared of a motoring offence can expect to be reimbursed most, if not all, of the money they spend clearing their name. [...]

According to the Ministry of Justice's own statistics, 24 per cent of 1.4 million motorists prosecuted in the courts in 2007 were cleared. It meant that nearly 380,000 motorists recouped about 80 per cent of their costs.

Under the new arrangements, which come into force next month, acquitted defendants will only get a fraction of their money back. The reimbursement of lawyers' fees is being limited to the legal aid rate of £60 an hour – around a quarter of the what is normally charged.

Zild comments that this is an obvious idea for PARANOIA. "IntSec could falsely accuse a citizen of a crime simply to charge them for the cost of the resulting investigation -- presumably a tactic reserved for days when they are too busy to plant sufficient evidence for a conviction."

Zild also highlights another aspect of the ever-evolving UK strategic interception landscape, "Public to monitor CCTV from home" (BBC October 6): "Members of the public could earn cash by monitoring commercial CCTV cameras in their own home, in a scheme planned to begin next month. The Internet Eyes website will offer up to £1,000 if viewers spot shoplifting or other crimes in progress."

Charles Farrier from No CCTV said: "It is a distasteful and a worrying development. This is a private company using private cameras and asking private citizens to spy on each other. It represents a privatisation of the surveillance state."

Internet Eyes has defended its plans, saying viewers will not know exactly which camera they're watching or where it is located.

Although the UK is the "world capital of CCTV" - with an estimated one camera per 14 people - viewing hours of mostly tedious and often poor quality images is a lengthy and unpopular job, said the BBC's home affairs correspondent Andy Tighe.

In August, an internal report commissioned by London's Metropolitan Police estimated that in 2008 just one crime was solved per thousand CCTV cameras in the capital. The deficit was partly blamed on officers not being able to make the best use of the many thousands of hours of video generated by CCTV.

How will they fund these rewards for civilian snoopery? Hmm -- how about from court costs paid by accused innocents?

Alison Kilkenny at True/Slant reports on the Los Angeles Police Department's re-broadcast of HPD&MC's latest ad campaign to encourage your neighbors to snitch on you.

Mongoose Publishing staff writer Gareth Hanrahan is in the final stretch of High Programmers, last of the three 25th-Anniversary PARANOIA rulebooks. This version, you'll recall, casts players as ULTRAVIOLET-Clearance supremos, the rulers of Alpha Complex. For one of the last fiddly bits of High Programmers, Gareth wants your help.

Past PARANOIA rulebooks have illuminated the entries on service groups (CPU, PLC, R&D, etc.) with bits of illustrative dialogue. You'll recall, for instance, this Armed Forces dialogue:

IntSec goon: We have a major problem here.

Army: Why, you just let my boys have a crack, and we'll settle this little contretemps in no time a-tall.

High Programmers needs an equivalent brief conversation for each service group, one that captures the group's characteristic form of subservient truckling to some UV's whim. Please write such a conversation and post it in the comments. Be terse, punchy, funny.

As always, neither Gareth, Mongoose Publishing, nor anybody at all will pay you anything or give you a free copy of anything. You grant Mongoose Publishing a dreadfully perpetual right to use your contribution in any way they see fit. Gareth will try to credit you in the rulebook, but no promises; if you post in the comments, please include your real name, or send it along separately. (See this blog's footer for the full horrifying rights-grab.)

Loyal citizen George R. Watson (@grwatson on Twitter) points us to a worthy Troubleshooter assignment at the British Festival of Science.

---

Parliament has forbidden the UK newspaper Guardian from reporting on Parliament, for reasons Parliament has forbidden the paper to reveal:

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented -- for the first time in memory -- from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

Update Oct. 17, 2009: The restriction on reporting has been lifted. Lawyers for oil trader Trafigura had tried to conceal a report on toxic waste dumping in west Africa.

---

In The New York Review of Books, James Bamford's "Who's in Big Brother's Database" reviews Matthew M. Aid's The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency:

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. [...]

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." [...]

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

As part of the newspaper's coverage of the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, Richard MacGregor in the Financial Times describes the Chinese Communist government's formidable and all-encroaching "Central Organization Department," the third component (with the army and the media) of its absolute control:

The department replicates what was known in the Soviet Union as the nomenklatura, the “list of names” of party members who formed the Communist ruling class through their eligibility to fill prized jobs in any sectors the state controlled. “The system is all from the Soviet Union, but the CCP has taken it to an extreme,” says Yuan Weishi, of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong. “China is more radical. [The party here] wants to lead everything.”

To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organization department’s job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington. The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the bosses of the television networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.

All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organization department. With a few largely symbolic exceptions, the people who fill these jobs are also party members. Not only that, the vetting process takes place behind closed doors and appointments are announced without any explanation about why they have been made. When the department knocks back candidates for promotion, it does so in secret as well.

The patronage dispensed through the department, in the form of the most powerful party and government positions in the country, has turned it into a forum for the system’s toughest internal political battles. Politburo members, factional groupings, the centre and the provinces, and individuals aligned to different ministries and industries all struggle to place their people into positions of influence in state institutions. [...]

Officials holding posts such as governor or mayor are rated according to a lengthy list of numerical indicators that look like they were drawn up by management consultants. Economic growth, investment, the quality of the air and water in their localities and public order all theoretically count in the performance metric.

Richard MacGregor's article is "The party organiser," from the September 30, 2009 FT.

On a completely unrelated note, Gareth Hanrahan continues to work on High Programmers, the third of the PARANOIA 25th-Anniversary rulebooks, this one for players of ULTRAVIOLET Clearance. The elevator pitch was "Yes, Minister with lasers and a high body count."