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Stephenson:Neal:Snow Crash:Central Intelligence Corporation

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Stephensonia

It's a lot worse from when the Black Chamber* was disbanded for being ungentlemanly enough to read other people's mail:      “… Since then, he's been putting a lot more emphasis on his auxilliary emergency backup job: freelance stringer for the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation, of Langley, Virginia.

The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.

He uploads it to the CIC database--The Library, formerly known as The Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word 'congress' means. And even the word 'library' is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.

Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid. ...”

There is the offchance the building of the Crypt prevented the dystopia of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.*

Authored entries

The View from Snow Crash

What is a Big Brother to do?
What is an Orwellian spy agency
to do when its wings are clipped?
Google like everyone else... The CIC is a Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entity, formerly part of the United States of America, but spun off apparently as an economizing measure by that government to help alleviate its junked bond liabilities in the fallout after the collapse of the Federal Reserve System caused by The Great Simoleon Caper and secure, encrypted, gold-backed currency. CIC stringers are freelance entities as described above, paid on the market demand for the information they obtain. As such, it is likely a more effective intelligence agency than it is in the current day, if the economic theories of Professor Robin Hanson, author of the "Terrorism Futures Market" concept that tanked Admiral Poindexter in recent years, are correct, that markets more reliably predict future events than organized intelligence agencies.

Just the other day, this writer's boss's car was towed from an empty lot, the tower causing much damage to the vehicle. Within hours, we had googled a satellite photograph of the location of the incident, tracked down the owners of the lot, all of the people who have ever used that lot as a mailing address, among a number of other things, and investigated the towing company, its owners, agents, and its and their past criminal and business histories. All of that information was made available by people with information to sell. Our cost was less than my lunch. The federal government is currently coming down on the purveyors of these commercial databases, partly because anybody with any experience accessing them soon learns the things that keep you off of the system:

  1. Don't use your SSN for anything
  2. Always Pay Cash
  3. If possible, have all bills in the name of another person or fictitious entity, like a business. Likewise, have all packages shipped to one of those entities, not you.
  4. It is very easy to expropriate an SSN of someone else. If you use it enough, more people will believe it is yours and not the other guys, than not.
  5. Never rent in your own name, sublet from someone else, but if you must, do so with someone who isn't going to have you checked out.
  6. Always Pay Cash
  7. NEVER us your SSN
  8. Do not register any property in your name: land, vehicles, boats, planes, etc.
  9. Never be a corporate officer or director or agent
  10. ALWAYS PAY CASH
  11. NEVER use your SSN
  12. If at all possible, have AS MANY OTHER PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE use your SSN as much as possible. If your identity is thoroughly and completely stolen by many others, you are successfully a non-person. I call this stegano-identity.
  13. Did I mention never to use your SSN and always pay cash?