PARANOIA

One of the seminal influences on PARANOIA, George Orwell's 1949 novel 1984, is now being adapted as a free online comic book on 1984comic.com. (Via BoingBoing.)

In my "2006 in review" post on December 31, I mentioned three upcoming 32-page Classic missions by Gareth Hanrahan, designer of The Traitor's Manual: The Sweep of Unhistory (due in March 2007), Spin Control (not yet scheduled), and one that I said hadn't yet been announced. Now the anonymous third mission has quietly crept onto the Mongoose Publishing PARANOIA page.

Announced for April 2007, Gareth's My First Treason casts your players as young Junior Citizens in a Computer-supervised creche. This is your chance to revel in the privileged status children enjoy in Alpha Complex. Though technically INFRARED Clearance, kids enjoy Computer protection that would make even a High Programmer hesitate before suggesting their termination. And for health reasons, kids are kept on very light pharmatherapy, meaning they can think clearly about many important subjects -- like how to get out of the damn creche and raise havoc among the High Programmers.

Click the cover image for a larger view of the cover by the One True PARANOIA Artist, Jim Holloway!

(Longtime fans may recall West End Games published an all-kids PARANOIA adventure circa 1990-91, late in the original line; I think it was in CTV/ParaNormal, not that anyone should care. Be assured My First Treason has nothing to do with, and in no way resembles, that earlier effort.)

The Computer outsourced its Loyalty & Well-Being Promotional Teams in the Housing Preservation & Development and Mind Control service group to produce this spastically cheery singalong video for financial megacorp Ernst & Young. Note the passive bafflement of the workers drafted as choral arm-wavers. Clearly the day's ration of HappiPills hadn't quite kicked in. (Via Blue's News.)

Shanghai Daily reports a China Southern Airlines Boeing MD-82 airplane was preparing to taxi onto the runway at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport this past Thursday night when suddenly its tail fell off:

A security inspector noticed the tail cone of the Boeing MD-82 airliner suddenly dropped to the ground at around 6:50pm just before the plane was to taxi to the runway. [...]

Inspectors later found more than a dozen screws linking the tail cone to the rest of the aircraft had fallen out.

An investigation by the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China found that an employee of a food supply company mistakenly touched a handle that dislodges the tail cone and extends an inflatable slide so that passengers can be evacuated in the event of an accident, sources said.

The handle wasn't fully moved, so the slide didn't inflate.

The handle is located in a remote part of the plane that could not be reached by passengers, according to an airline official who asked not to be named. The official said a final pre-flight check, which had not yet been performed before the problem was noticed, would include an inspection of the handle to ensure it was in the proper place.

The Shanghaiist blog offers insightful commentary: "Is it really possible that an accidental bump of a handle can cause properly inserted screws to fall out of a passenger airplane? Shouldn't it be more difficult to remove the tail of an airplane than, say, open a pack of airline peanuts? Why did it take a 'security inspector' to notice that a sizeable chunk of the plane had fallen off? Why is a food person anywhere near a handle that makes the plane fall apart?"

This incident's relevance to Troubleshooter travel in Alpha Complex transtubes is left as an exercise to the PARANOIA Gamemaster.

I have a dread presentiment "Something falls off" may become a regular feature....

Looking for new info-denial phrases beyond "That information is not available at your security clearance"? University of California history professor Jon Wiener reports in the January 6, 2007 Los Angeles Times (via Alternet) that the United States government automatically declassified 270 million pages of FBI files on December 31, 2006. Except, well, not really:

Declassification, it turns out, is not the same as release. Some documents will remain classified, and others will be declassified but still withheld. [President] Bush's executive order specifies nine grounds for exemptions, and dozens of other existing laws restrict the release of certain kinds of information.

Many restrictions are reasonable: The Privacy Act, for instance, prohibits release to a third party of any government information on a living person -- so I can't get your FBI file, and you can't get mine. The Atomic Energy Act protects information on how to build nuclear weapons.

Some of the exemptions, however, are more troublesome and can easily provide excuses to agencies that want to keep secrets. One, for instance, covers information that might "reveal the identity of a confidential human source."

Obviously, people who have been promised confidentiality should not have their names released. But the FBI has extended that principle (which is also part of the Freedom of Information Act) to cover not just the names of sources but also the information they provided. The bureau argued that release of the information might lead a knowledgeable person to figure out the source's identity. On this basis, all information provided by all confidential sources could be withheld. [...]

Thus the policy known as "automatic declassification" does not in fact mean that 25-year-old national security information will be automatically declassified. It means that the material must be, in the words of the Justice Department, "reviewed for declassification, exemption, and/or referral to other government agencies."

Read the full article for three or four more choice excuses to offer Troubleshooters standing in line at the local office of CPU's Data Disbursal Justification and Correction Bureau.

The biggest obstacle: "Documents that are deemed releasable are to be sent to the National Archives, which is then supposed to make them available to the public. But the National Archives already has a backlog of 400 million pages. Oh, and its budget for next year has been cut."

But at least these documents are declassified. That makes loyal citizens happy.