{"id":10838,"date":"2012-07-31T02:54:18","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T09:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=10838"},"modified":"2012-07-31T02:54:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T09:54:18","slug":"and-speaking-of-helpful-hackers-of-arab-extraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/31\/and-speaking-of-helpful-hackers-of-arab-extraction\/","title":{"rendered":"And speaking of helpful hackers of Arab extraction …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I began a post about the novel Alif the Unseen<\/em><\/a> with this quote:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re living in a city run by an emir from one of the most inbred families on earth, where a few censors can throw someone in jail for writing things on the Internet and falling in love with the wrong person.\u201d Dina reached out to be helped to her feet. \u201cIt went out of control a long time ago.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book is about a young hacker of East-Indian and Arab extraction doing his best to foil the security state — and paying a price for it.<\/p>\n

At the very moment I was typing up my review, old friend JG sent a link. About a young hacker<\/a> of Arab (actually Lebanese, which is pretty much a melting pot of ethnicities, though Arabic is the national language) extraction doing his best to foil the security state — and paying a price for it.<\/p>\n

The site Nadim Kobeissi has created, Cryptocat,<\/a> is very much worth a look. After investigating I may use it with friends who haven’t set up email encryption, though it’s a live chat site and live chat drives me screaming bonkers.<\/p>\n

But speaking of the paranoid security state trying to quash freedom of speech, I had to laugh (in a bitter, nasty way) at this:<\/p>\n

When he flies through the US, [Kobeissi has] generally had the notorious \u201cSSSS\u201d printed on his boarding pass, marking him for searches and interrogations \u2014 which Kobeissi says have focused on his development of the chat client. …<\/p>\n

His SSSS\u2019s can mean hours of waiting, and Kobeissi says he has been searched, questioned, had his bags and even his passport taken away and returned later. But he\u2019s kept his sense of humor about the experience, even joking from the airport on his Twitter account.<\/p>\n

WHAT AN SSSS FOR THE FIFTH TIME IN A ROW HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN I AM SO SURPRISED THIS IS SO SURPRISING twitter.com\/kaepora\/status\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora) June 17, 2012<\/p>\n

The young and cheerfully sarcastic Kobeissi is somewhat baffled by the border attention. Kobeissi said that in one of his last U.S. trips through Charlotte, NC, \u201cIn total I was searched either three or four times,\u201d \u2014 in a single visit. \u201cWhy? Do bombs materialize? I don\u2019t understand,\u201d he continued. If the searches, delays, and interrogations about Cryptocat are an intimidation tactic, they haven\u2019t worked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I began a post about the novel Alif the Unseen with this quote: \u201cWe\u2019re living in a city run by an emir from one of the most inbred families on earth, where a few censors can throw someone in jail for writing things on the Internet and falling in love with the wrong person.\u201d Dina reached out to be helped to her feet. \u201cIt went out of control a long time ago.\u201d The book is about a young hacker of East-Indian and Arab extraction doing his best to foil the security state — and paying a price for it.…<\/p>\n

Continue readingAnd speaking of helpful hackers of Arab extraction …<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23,28,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-and-technology","category-thuggery-and-bad-law","category-privacy-and-self-ownership","category-resistance","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}