This afternoon I got an email to set up an interview for next week. That was the good part. A few minutes after receiving an email about my interview next week, I received another email that requested some additional information in order to keep my application on track. I guess I was still thinking about the email I got minutes earlier, so I thought the two were connected. I briefly looked over the email and quickly skipped down to the additional information that was being requested. It asked a lot of questions about where I lived over the last ten years, if people could verify my exact location, even questions about my father’s past business involvements. I knew that some of the folks I was looking to work for were sensitive about security, but damn! The depth of the questions made me go back and re-read the entire email in-detail from start to finish.
After reading the message a few more times, I found that the message had nothing to do with the email I previously received, but was something entirely different. When I found out who was actually requesting this information, my heart started beating rapidly. I wandered around my apartment frantically trying to get a grip on myself. After about an hour, I returned to my computer to contemplate why I was getting the third degree via email from a major U.S. intelligence agency for a job that for which I was certain that I never applied. The specific agency will remain nameless, but it’s one of the one’s that conspiracy theorists and civil libertarians frequently mention as being the cause of their problems. Being both a conspiracy theorist and a civil libertarian, I was more than irked as an overwhelming sense of paranoia came over me.
After regaining control and checking into it further, I figured out that they were looking to send this inquiry to someone else at the university that I attend. I won’t go into how I figured this out, but I’m 100% sure that this message was not meant to go to me.
There are a number of possible takeaways from this incident. Maybe I should be on guard about folks I go to class with since their biggest aspirations may to become super spies and code breakers. Moreover though, I have realized that there’s no reason to even be afraid. People make mistakes, some more than others. Systems, even those that are part of the surveillance-industrial complex, are built of people and their ability to make mistakes. While I’m not perfect, this is as screwed up as I’ll ever get. I even have the potential to be much less error-prone by making a concerted effort to gain better concentration, motivation and perceptual capabilities. The spy agencies have a cumulative effect of gaining more possible error with every new recruit they get (no matter how leet). This is great if I ever wanted to drop out of society, fake my death, hide from the law, etc. Luckily I suspect terrorist organizations have such problems as well and are sending emails to everybody except the people they intend to recruit. Putting it that way, I wonder why I was ever afraid.
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