Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Monday, July 16, 2007

The first paragraph says it all 

From Wired comes this article about wiretapping.

"It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.

You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it."

Or even better: "Even the lawyers who filed the document with the court are no longer allowed to see it; instead, they've been permitted to file declarations, under seal, based on their memory of its contents."

You can't make this stuff up.

Well, you can, but why bother, when reality writes your PARANOIA hooks for you?
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 6:56 AM (0) comments

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Smells Like... Treason 

This is a great one from BoingBoing. It's the tale of the Stasi (East German secret police)'s secret museum of smells. "One of the more bizarre activities the Stasi was found to have engaged in was the collection of Geruchsproben — smell samples — for the benefit of the East German smell hounds. The odors, collected during interrogations using a perforated metal “smell sample chair” or by breaking into people’s homes and stealing their dirty underwear, were stored in small glass jars."

As the article says "the thing about the Stasi is that they illustrate just how daffy any totalitarian authority structure necessarily becomes. Tyrants all have their Rasputins, mystic goonybirds whose theories about human biology, governance, magic, and life end up steering the state into ever-tighter circles of rabid tail-biting."

The application to PARANOIA is obvious. Track down that Commie, Troubleshooter - your only clue is this scent. Off you go!

(Allen reminds me to plug the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, another source of great weird links.)
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 10:20 AM (2) comments

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