Category: Random

I am Dutch and being Dutch I have been given Dutch names. A first name, a middle name and a last name, to be more precise. Now the last time I went to the USA, I frequented Starbucks establishments—a well known ‘java’ dispensing chain of cafes that appears to be ubiquitous, or at least so it seemed in the state of California. Now the funny thing is that with every order they ask for your name and then write that on the cup that will get filled with your coffee. So when your order comes up, they’ll be able to call out your name so you know your coffee is ready. Very convenient… in theory. But my names being Dutch, they kept misspelling it and mispronouncing it. Annoying, but what to do?

Initially I just made up names. It’s not like they’re going to ask for an identification card, right? I think at one point I may have called myself ‘Bob’ or ‘Jack’ because I reasoned those would likely be rather popular names and therefore less likely to invite spelling errors. On the other hand, very common names increase the risk of confusion: there might be another ‘Bob’ or ‘Jack’ waiting for his order. Now I could use more obscure names, like ‘Ferdinand Ignatius the 3rd Count Von Schtockhausen zu Lieberwurst’, but that might blow my cover as it sort-of sounds like I made that up (which would not be an unfair assessment). Also I fear it would be a bit of challenge to fit all that on a coffee cup, even the humongous specimens found in the US. So I recently decided to search the internet for a source of information that might tell me the etymology of my Dutch surnames, and whether I might be able to find a decent English version for either of them. That would be the best solution, I think.

After a bit of searching I came across the site “Behind the Name” where I was able to look up my first name. Apparently, the English equivalent would be ‘Maynard’. Cool. So then I continued with my second name. That was a bit trickier. As it turns out it’s Laurence, but in the US the more common spelling is ‘Lawrence’. Hence my comment on it being trickier. However, as both versions sound the same when called out it won’t make any difference which one I use. As a matter of fact, I’ve used ‘Lawrence’ in a Starbucks on Melrose Ave in Los Angeles at one time. Although they misspelled the name, I still got my coffee just fine as you can see in the picture. So I’ll go with Laurence here.

The way ‘Lawrence’ is spelled at Starbucks.

As for my last name (‘Voogt’), well that really is a bit trickier as there is no English version for that one. There is however an English way of pronouncing ‘Vogt’, a name related to mine. Thus I imagine the correct way to say my name would be to pronounce it just as ‘Vogt’ but instead with the ‘oo’ sound as in ‘root’. With a silent ‘g’ it would therefore sound something like ‘voote’ instead of ‘vote’. One snag though: that would make my name sound like ‘voet’ which is Dutch for ‘foot’. And I can’t accept that because I support the metric system, so I guess I’ll just have to go with ‘Vogt’. The extra ‘o’ in ‘Voogt’ is probably a typo anyway.

Ok, nearly there, but ‘Maynard Laurence’ doesn’t sound quite right. To my ear ‘Laurence Maynard’ sounds better and that’s what I’ll use. So here is my full name in English: Laurence Maynard Vogt. Starbucks, here I come!

I’m feeling a bit like playing the role of Devil’s advocate today, my apologies for ranting on about this PRISM thing by the by. In a recent blog article on The Economist (Foiled plots and bathtub falls) a case is made that the loss of life in the USA due to terrorist attacks (around 3,000 in 2001) is so small compared to other causes—such as 29,573 gun related deaths—that the measures taken by the government to prevent terrorism are currently to extreme and ought to be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis. In the end the main question put forward is this: If the same number of people died in slippery bathtub incidents, would we want to give the NSA this much snooping power to prevent those deaths? I’m going to argue that this point is non-sensical.

An important source for the arguments in The Economist were taken from another article in The Atlantic (The irrationality of giving up this much liberty to fight terror). In this article the author gives an idiosyncratic and consequently rather introspective account of why the threat of terrorism hasn’t affected the lives of Americans in general. But his account stands in stark contrast with the facts of the repercussions of the September 11 attacks. The stockmarkets dropped sharply all over the world and trading was even halted for a time, tourism in New York plummeted, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, the New York economy suffered losses in the order of magnitude of tens of billions of dollars and the attacks started two wars that in total have cost five trillion dollars to date. That’s a five followed by twelve zeroes, or roughly twenty times the number of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. Psychologists also noted an increase in fear of flying and feelings of distress immediately after the attacks. And then to think that the death-toll from the attacks on the World Trade Center could have been far higher—some 50,000 people used to work in the twin towers on an average weekday, not including the visitors who numbered 200,000 per day.

Let’s also not forget terrorist are unfortunately not all stupid and sometimes have quite ambitious plans. There have been signals that terrorist have tried and are still trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons, such as from Russia for example. Maybe I’m just a bit suspicous by nature, but in this context I think it’s interesting that Obama is suddenly urging Poetin to cut back on the nuclear arsenal, in particular since the PRISM system has now been exposed and come under scrutiny. If a terrorist group ever get their hands on a loose nuke, an attack might cost the lives of 500,000 citizens in a major US city. Slippery bathtub, my foot!

And then there is the fact that the PRISM program is there to thwart plots. So I cannot help but ask what degree of plotting is involved in the thousands of diabetics who die each year. Or what about the thousands of drunk driving accidents? Where are the inebriated drivers gathering to plot the next fatal freeway pile-up? What deadly bathtub conspiracies are currently being scemed? And are they twittering about it? The point is of course that the NSA only works with communications, thus making all these analogies ridiculous. The slippery bathtub analogy—which I am almost certain was selected for half-humorous reasons—back-fires on itself. Another, better example should have been used such as the 12,664 murders commited in the USA during 2011. But suppose we could use a PRISM system to help uncover plots of US citizens to commit murder. Does that analogy still fall short of convincing people that the PRISM project might be an acceptable compromize after all? I wonder…

I must first say that when I first heard about the leak of NSA’s PRISM project I was entirely unsurprised. I really thought it was little more than a ‘public secret’ that digital communications were being monitored and stored by secret services. It’s a Spy vs. Spy world we live in, fueled by political, economic and military interests. And the technology for it is apparently available, so if you’re in the business of covertly scanning for nutcases who want to blow up stuff then why not use it? I would think it very unlikely that the NSA is the only intelligence organization with a PRISM program and intelligence gathering via the PRISM programs is probably widely shared with allies of the USA anyway.

But of course no-one will ever actually read your emails—no human anyway. I believe that globally nearly 300 billion emails are sent every day, which is a lot to go through. But most of it is spam though, so let’s assume the NSA has a decent spam filter. Then they only have to wade through around two billion emails every day. Now let me illustrate just how mind-bogglingly large this torrent of communication is. If it would take just a a minute on average to read an email, then one secret agent would have to read non-stop for nearly four thousand years to process them all. Perhaps a blessing in disguise, since it would would probably take him centuries to learn all the languages emails are sent in anyway. And when further taking into account that many emails tend be written less like a Shakespearean sonnet and more like what a monkey produces when left alone with a typewriter for five minutes, I think we should first and foremost pity the NSA people who would have to suffer reading them all. That’s probably why they would just write clever software to filter out ‘interesting’ emails anyway, just like Gmail does to target their ads. You would probably first have to try and get their attention with your behavior, such as ordering “Terrorism for dummies” on Amazon.com or whatever to show up on their scanners. So unless you’re a terrorist attending a discussion in the Al-Qaeda whatsapp group about a diabolical plan to attack the next world curling games, I daresay not a single spy is going to be very interested in reading any of your digital communications.

Furthermore, you only have to look at recent hacking affairs such as the Climatic Research Unit email controversy or the recent leaking of 6.5 million LinkedIn user passwords to realize that digital communications should never be considered to be private or secure. A wise user of email services, social networks and chat clients should act accordingly, such as not forgetting to log out when leaving the computer unattended (frape anyone?). Many GNU/Linux operating systems will offer you the option of encrypting your personal files upon installation, by using filesystem-level encryption or even disk encryption. And software such as GNU Privacy Guard and PGP have been around for many years now. I started toying around with these programs ten years ago and nowadays they are just so trivial to set up—a child of five can do it.

Yet in all these years I have not once signed someone else’s PGP key or received any email communication from my friends and family in which encryption was used to keep the contents of the email private. Part of me sometimes thinks some people secretly want to be spied on, and that everyone else simply doesn’t care. But maybe that will all change now. Perhaps we will also see a revival of the mail industry? I doubt the NSA will have the resources to photocopy two billion handwritten letters every day.