The Tyranny of E-mail (16 page)

Increasingly, governments are getting into the act. And it’s hard not to understand why. “In this new kind of war,” James Bamford has written about the importance of Internet communications for stateless agents, “in which motels are used as barracks and commercial jets become powerful weapons, public libraries and Internet cafes are quickly transformed into communication centers.” But surveillance of e-mail predates the so-called war on terror. Indeed, long before it was revealed that Mohamed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers had communicated by e-mail, logging in at public libraries, no less, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was keeping tabs on “chatter” by monitoring e-mails. The scope of its listening capacities is truly awesome. As James Bamford describes in
A Pretext for War
, “dozens of listening posts around the world each sweep in as many as two million phone calls, faxes, e-mail messages, and other types of communications
per hour
.”

In December 2005, though,
New York Times
reporter James Risen and Eric Lichtblau broke the story that President Bush had
told the NSA, whose mandate is to spy on foreign and foreign agent communications, to spy without warrants on the phone calls and e-mails of people
inside
the United States. President Bush assured the American people that one end of the conversation had to be outside the United States, but in fact the NSA was “trolling through vast troves of Americans’ telephone and e-mail conversations with artificial intelligence,” writes Maureen Webb, a human rights lawyer and activist, “looking for key words and patterns.”

Most alarming for many Americans is the fact that the communications companies were helping them. To a certain degree, this is not new. According to a federal statute called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, communications companies must design their facilities so that their network can be easily monitored. As Bamford explains in
The Shadow Factory
, “it even requires the company to install the eavesdropping devices themselves if necessary and then never reveal their existence.”

As Webb describes in her book
Illusions of Security
, this is just the tip of the iceberg in a vast data-mining program that will draw from multiple databases to create a “black box,” a giant trove of data vastly more sophisticated than the black boxes that Internet service providers have to monitor user traffic.

Little is publicly known about the workings of these, except that they are like the “packet sniffers” typically employed by computer network operators for security and maintenance programs running in a computer that is hooked into the network at a location where it can monitor traffic flowing in and out of systems.

The Internet, which used to be a law enforcement nightmare, has become a useful tool now that
technology has developed to monitor it. Sniffers can monitor the entire data stream, searching for keywords, phrases, or strings such as net addresses or e-mail accounts. They can then record or retransmit for further review anything that fits their search criteria. Black boxes are apparently connected directly to government agencies by high-speed links in some countries.

In other words, they’re vacuuming up e-mails at broadband speed as you read this. In 2002, the NSA was gobbling up 650 million intercepts a day, the same number of pieces of mail the U.S. Postal Service then delivered in America every day.

We believe at this point, we need people to change their behavior…. We need to make sure when people are getting on the highway, they are prepared to travel safely.

—
J
OHN
N
JORD, DIRECTOR OF THE UTAH DEPARTMENT OF
T
RANSPORTATION

One of the deadliest places you can be in the United States is on a roadway. In 2006, 42,642 people were killed in traffic accidents; it was a banner year since it represented a drop of roughly 2 percent from 2005. Yet the Interstate Highway System and the smaller roadways have become essential to living in the United States. People get in their car, buckle up or don’t, and drive off without a flicker of a thought that they might be on their way to becoming one of the 116 fatalities about to happen that day. The urban planning that developed as a result of roadway use often doesn’t give them much choice; they have to drive.

It didn’t have to be this way. The U.S. Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in the history of the world, was born out of the same military background as ARPANET. President Dwight Eisenhower signed it into law on June 29, 1956, having been heavily influenced by traveling around Germany on the Autobahn after World War I and realizing that America didn’t have a similar system for mobilizing and transporting troops. It also happened to help people travel around the country and was a great boon to automakers, who lobbied heartily for it.

For every benefit of the interstates—and there have been many, from faster shipment of goods to greater ease of travel and an enormous number of jobs for Americans—there have been many side effects. Interstates have torn up the landscape, destroyed the frontier, made Americans dependent on automobiles that pump tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and created a system of suburban living that siphoned tax wealth out of cities, causing slums to develop and flourish—one of the most potent examples of which is the ring around Los Angeles. “Nothing has been learned from the dismal California experience,” Mike Davis once wrote, “not even the elementary lesson that freeways increase sprawl and consequently the demand for additional freeways.”

In 2009, when the Pennsylvania Turnpike/Interstate 95 Interchange Project is finished, the last project of the original interstate plan will be completed, but we are nowhere near the end of the infinite highway system coconceived in Eisenhower’s era by the good folks at ARPA and now known as the Internet. Each month, new traffic circles, abutments, and auxiliary lanes are thrown up and quickly exploited as new host computers go online, new devices are invented, more and more people use wireless. The speed limit gets higher and higher.

Entire virtual cities are thrown up and torn down, and the speed of our ability to travel between them virtually means that
we actually don’t have to physically leave the house anymore. For this reason, a Stanford professor, Norman Nie, has commented, “The internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than did automobiles and television before it.”

And what of this highway? There is so much to see by the roadside, so much of enormous use, be it the endless library of Google books, the streaming sports scores on ESPN, or the river of talk bisecting the screen after an episode of
America’s Next Top Model
. But as we just learned, if we think of our e-mail accounts as the middle lane on this interstate, what kind of road is this? Would anybody in real life get onto a freeway where nine out of ten cars had a penile enlargement ad on the side, let alone the occasional thief looking to siphon off your financial information or breach your home, where the identity of drivers could be concealed, where the government or your employer or your lover was constantly monitoring you, where people veered into your lane to impose their needs on you two hundred times a day? What sort of ballistic defensive driving course could prepare us for this kind of travel?

Movement is metaphor, because all travel—virtual or actual—changes us. The Greek word for “carry” was
meta0phora
. What we bring and carry into the virtual world, and what we put up with there, changes us. It alters our priorities, shrinks or expands our empathic bandwidth. We know this about e-mail; keeping up with it, as useful as the message system is in so many other ways, just like that highway, is shrinking our focus. It’s one of the reasons why it causes such anxiety. None of us can change the system on our own. And then there’s a more insidious reason: we simply cannot stop ourselves.

If the medium is the message, what does that say about new survey results that found nearly 60 percent of respondents check their e-mail when they’re answering the call of nature?

—
M
ICHELLE
M
ASTERSON
, C
HANNEL
W
EB

Now that handheld devices give us 24/7, virtually worldwide access to e-mail, there is nowhere, it would seem, that people do not pause to check it. We log on during the drive to work, download a few messages on the train ride home; we look at it in the bath and in between sermons at church. Sixty-two percent of Americans check their e-mail on vacation and respond to work queries, at a time when they’re supposed to be relaxing. According to
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
,“vacation” means “a respite or a time of respite from something” or “a scheduled period during which activity (as of a court or school) is suspended.” Nothing is suspended in the wired vacation of the twenty-first century. Any time there’s a moment of silence, a break between moments, e-mail insinuates itself with stunning regularity. “You know those pregnant pauses you have on elevators? That’s a great time to pull out a BlackBerry and get some
work done,” says Raul Fernandez, the CEO of Dimension Data North America.

There is no downtime anymore, even at bedtime. Sixty-seven percent of the four thousand people age thirteen and over surveyed in AOL’s 2008 e-mail addiction poll admitted to having checked e-mail in their bed, in their pajamas. In the 1996 film
She’s the One
, Jennifer Aniston is married to a distracted financier who cares more about his job than his wife; we know this because he takes his laptop to bed. Now many of us are doing the same, even if our devices have shrunk along with our trust in financiers. Sean Young of Phoenix is one. He logs on before and after the gym, by the pool, in the car, and leaves his handheld inches from his face at night so he never misses a message. “I just realized I have a problem,” Young said, describing his daily routine of message consumption in an e-mail to a reporter.

He’s not alone.
Nearly half the people
in AOL’s survey claimed that they were addicted to e-mail. The technology that was supposed to set us free to work from anywhere, to check in and clock out on our own time, has now become the longest employee leash ever invented because we can’t seem to log off. We haven’t just tried to merge with the machine, to marry the damn thing; it has become our iron lung. “I have friends and relatives that carry BlackBerrys with them 24 hours a day, fully prepared to drop anything in their lives and work at a moment’s notice,” wrote Tim O’Leary, the CEO of a marketing firm. “I’m tethered to my laptop as if it were an oxygen machine I must cart around to keep me breathing.” The word “crackberry” was
Webster’s New World College Dictionary
’s 2006 word of the year.

The most “addicted” metropolis in America is, not surprisingly, New York, the city that never sleeps—and apparently never stops clicking: 50 percent of Gothamites feel they are
addicted to their e-mail. Lunch hour in Manhattan can sometimes feel like an outtake from a strange daylight zombie film: e-mail drones, flicking and scrolling through their handhelds, checking e-mails that they could just as easily read twenty minutes later at their desk, are given a wide berth on city streets by the not-yet-addicted.

There are several reasons for this burgeoning obsession. Mail has always traveled to us with a small but palpable comet trail of anticipation. Regular delivery of the post created a daily rhythm of expectation. We know that bills and official forms will come. But there might also be postcards from friends, Christmas cards, magazines, or maybe more. In 1967, the direct marketing firm Publishers Clearing House launched a prize giveaway. It might not just be your subscription of
Runner’s World
in your mailbox; it might also be a $1 million check with the “prize patrol” in tow.

Now that our inboxes have become both our most used mailbox and virtual doorstep, it’s hard not to have the same complicated mixture of good and bad expectations when checking e-mail. Except that we no longer have to wait. The BlackBerry was introduced in 1999 and by 2004 had 1 million users, a number that doubled ten months later. As of June 2009, that number had reached 28.5 million worldwide, and that doesn’t even count people using e-mail-enabled cellular phones. Millions upon millions of people the world over now can and do constantly access their e-mail. Psychologists have discovered that their behavior in doing so is very like that of people sitting before a slot machine.

Neurologists now understand why these standbys of casinos are addictive: they work on a principle called variable interval reinforcement schedule, which Tom Stafford, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, explained has been established as the way to train the strongest
habits. “This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there’s something wonderful—an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip—and I get a reward.”

There are chemical reasons for why this reward feels good, reasons that go beyond the quality or rarity of the gossip. The midbrain is constantly trying to make predictions about when we will and won’t be rewarded. Brain imaging is beginning to show that when we get a big reward—such as a jackpot payout—dopamine, the hormone and neurotransmitter, floods the anterior cingulate, the part of the brain that appears to control mechanical functions such as heartbeat and breathing, as well as rational functions such as decision making and reward anticipation. If we’re performing an action that doesn’t always pay out, but does
some of the time
, such as playing the slots, the lesson learned is that if we want a reward we need to keep pulling that lever.