Almanacs again.
Dec. 31st, 2003 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoAs a follow-up to the almanac story, we have these thoughts from Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
"(T)his is just a phenomenally dumb move. The old hardcover family almanacs might or might not have gotten annotated, but your modern year-by-year trade paperback almanacs certainly do. If someone’s carrying an almanac around with them, there’s a good chance they’ll have jotted down notes in it. Who’s this going to catch? Schoolteachers. People with children. The more earnest sort of traveler. The last person I saw annotating an almanac in public was a nice woman who turned out to be a professional tour guide. One of her routes covers various sites and sights in my Brooklyn neighborhood. She was annotating her book because she’d just been out checking her route for changes.
What scares me, though, is how specifically the FBI has targeted almanacs, and how they haven’t mentioned travel guidebooks, high-resolution terrain maps, architectural guides, government directories, maps of underground water, power, and transit systems, lists of major industrial sites, the Yellow Pages for pete’s sake, or any of the other references that might reasonably be used at that stage.
I’m not just alarmed because this lets hypothetical terrorists escape scrutiny by taking their notes in a travel guide instead of an almanac. If you want to see how someone does research, look at how they imagine someone else doing it. If the almanac is the only documentation that comes to the FBI’s collective mind when they visualize potential terrorists engaged in “target selection and pre-operational planning,” what that suggests is that almanacs are pretty much what they’re working from when they’re doing their own target selection and pre-operational planning.
That’s unsettling. Almanacs are a great resource, a good place to start your research, but they’re the very definition of “general information.” Somehow, I feel as though I’d just found out that FBI agents were all recruited from the kids who did their class reports by copying stuff out of the encyclopedia."
"(T)his is just a phenomenally dumb move. The old hardcover family almanacs might or might not have gotten annotated, but your modern year-by-year trade paperback almanacs certainly do. If someone’s carrying an almanac around with them, there’s a good chance they’ll have jotted down notes in it. Who’s this going to catch? Schoolteachers. People with children. The more earnest sort of traveler. The last person I saw annotating an almanac in public was a nice woman who turned out to be a professional tour guide. One of her routes covers various sites and sights in my Brooklyn neighborhood. She was annotating her book because she’d just been out checking her route for changes.
What scares me, though, is how specifically the FBI has targeted almanacs, and how they haven’t mentioned travel guidebooks, high-resolution terrain maps, architectural guides, government directories, maps of underground water, power, and transit systems, lists of major industrial sites, the Yellow Pages for pete’s sake, or any of the other references that might reasonably be used at that stage.
I’m not just alarmed because this lets hypothetical terrorists escape scrutiny by taking their notes in a travel guide instead of an almanac. If you want to see how someone does research, look at how they imagine someone else doing it. If the almanac is the only documentation that comes to the FBI’s collective mind when they visualize potential terrorists engaged in “target selection and pre-operational planning,” what that suggests is that almanacs are pretty much what they’re working from when they’re doing their own target selection and pre-operational planning.
That’s unsettling. Almanacs are a great resource, a good place to start your research, but they’re the very definition of “general information.” Somehow, I feel as though I’d just found out that FBI agents were all recruited from the kids who did their class reports by copying stuff out of the encyclopedia."
