AAA-Funny Spam
I wonder if terrorists know about spam. Not in the way that they terrorize the rest of us by using spam, which is definitely what they are already doing, but in the way that they could send unbreakable code by using spam. Have you read one of these spam messages lately? Here's a recent one I found in my spam folder. The subject was, "Are you happy?" and the text went on for pages, many pages, single spaced and dense. It began:
"He grew did; saying at the knit delay same time, 'You enthusiastic see I thus"
It sounds like Yoda or Beowulf, remember Beowulf? And it went on like that for pages.
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In World War II, the French Underground broadcast poems and classical songs as code. Maybe today, it's spam. Say you are an Al Qaeda operative, a real, true terrorist living in America looking for ways to terrorize us. Say someone sends you and 10 million innocent Americans an unsolicited email seemingly full of gibberish, but with a secret code inserted. It looks like spam. So the CIA tracks you down, takes you to court and introduces this spam message as Exhibit A, is any jury going to believe that you are running an Al Qaeda cell just because you received a message from Al Qaeda, the same message as 10 million other people? And if so, Al Qaeda just succeeded in putting 10 million innocent people in an already over-taxed prison system. That's terrorism. It's genius. In a, you know, bad way.
It's encryption by volume. They could even have the "From:" line say "info@alqaeda.biz" and it wouldn't even have to be a secret code. They could just put a bulleted terrorist to-do list in there, or say "do it next Sunday at 3pm". How is the CIA or FBI going to know which of the 10 million people who got spammed is the real terrorist? Do you think the NSA is worried about this yet? I am.
On the flip side I actually have in my email program a folder named "aaa-funny spam." It starts with three 'a's because I want it to be first in the list. It's called Funny Spam because spam is the great untapped source of humor. You know, except for that terrorist angle.
You ever actually read this stuff? It's hilarious, because they try so hard to disguise that it is spam that the message ends up not making any sense at all. If you were an insurance salesman and went door to door and when someone answered you said "went hoover six darnell ishtar bulldozer" they'd surely slam the door on you. They definitely wouldn't be signing up for insurance. So, who is buying stuff in the spam that makes it still an effective marketing strategy? I doubt I've ever clicked a link in a spam message, and I definitely did not buy anything from one. Modern spam is so cryptic that there usually is no way to buy anything even if I did want to. If no one CAN be buying stuff from spam, it has to be terrorism, doesn't it?
Like this one, the subject is "Re: your VIAGRA" but the letters 'tuk' are inserted in the middle of Viagra ("Re: your VIAtukGRA"), as if I sent them a message and badly misspelled the subject and they are replying to my message ("Re:").
Has this "we're replying to you" scam ever fooled anyone? Even stranger, at the bottom of the message itself, which doesn't actually contain any info about Viagra at all, is the text "the number twelve would be on a normal clock, mortal peril. Eight of the hands were currently pointing to the home position, but Mr. Weasley's, which was the longest, was still pointing to work."
This would seem to be nonsense except I recognize it as a passage from the well-known Harry Potter books, about a clock that tells not time, but where the Weasley family members are, and if they are well. So, why put it in spam? Apparently, it throws off the spam filters. And it worked. That particular spam made it to my inbox, through the world's most impressive spam filtering algorithms. But again, there was nothing in there about Viagra or a link to go buy it from if I needed some.
Most spam never sees my inbox. If I need a laugh, I have to visit my straight-to-spam folder for spam like this one:
"Job for students, home-workers and people which have free 2-3 hours a day." What's the job? Well, they never say. But it does go on to say that if you like kids and live in Europe you can make over 3000 euro a week -- a week! -- working only 2-3 hours per day. That's a pretty brisk business. I'm not sure what they mean by "like kids," but 3000 Euro a week is making that phrase sound pretty creepy.
What's creepier is that a message could be sitting in my spam box, a message that a terrorist somewhere sent ten million people all around the world. Most of us never saw the message, it went straight to the 4th Level of Dante's Hell, which is spam. But what if it contained some spy code instructions actually meant for a terrorist? That is definitely not funny spam.
