Writing Letters

We love technology, don’t we? It is so nippy, so quick and smart, and we can do so much with it. Well, okay, maybe you can, but there are things this writer finds challenging. Simple things, like adding pictures to my posts – the results seem to look so amateurish – and linking posts so that there is a trendy bit of purple writing which takes you through to a book, an article, a piece of news. I find these things hard to do, but on the whole, I agree, that technology is a fantastic piece of kit. Pieces of kits. Love it.

I picked up a flyer at my local bookshop this weekend, a brazen black and white piece of paper with red headlines and featuring a journalist, Barrett Brown, pictured in a perfectly respectable jacket and tie. It seems he is in detention in the US for “his extensive work exposing the inner workings of the …world of private intelligence and defence contractors who work with the growing surveillance and national security state”. According to the leaflet he has been in jail for over 500 days already and faces 105 years in prison.

For investigating things? For writing articles and chasing leads? For exposing the underbelly of society and attempting to discover truths? 105 years in prison?

Conspiracy theorists, it seems, have a point about surveillance cameras and mobile phone tracking and monitoring of email traffic, but if I was somebody watching, I might conclude that the best tactic was to ignore the critics. The heavy handedness of some “enforcers” reminds me a bit of that rather implausible crime drama in which the villain tracks down the solitary witness because s/he thinks s/he saw him doing something dubious. The chances are, that even if s/he did, they forgot about it straight away and has no more chance of picking the villain out of a line-up than a five-year-old heifer with mastitis.

Still, it is sobering to reflect that the only sure-fire way of not attracting the attention of the “security forces” is to write a good old-fashioned letter. While it may be legal to hack into email traffic and listen in on telephone calls, I doubt that there is a man sitting at postal HQ in a dark room with a letter opener. Rebels! Take out your parker pens!  And we can write to Barrett Brown #45047-177 at Federal Correctional Institution, Seagoville, PO Box 9000, Seagoville, TX 75159-9000. Doubtless, his mail is opened and read.