“think beyond google”
AC Thompson

Wednesday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, there was a cozy lecture/seminar between an artist and journalist about the complex-creepy-elusive-dark vaults of our government’s special intelligence information and actions and how we as individuals, artists and writers can crack the code. Trevor Paglen is an writer, artist, and geographer at UCB working on experimental geography art and information projects that range from displaying a full list of the mysterious and strangely poetic world of code names of military project to leading trips in to the desert to test the limits of legal boundaries around military test zones such as area 51. His art is in a current exhibit at the YBC. AC Thompson is a locally renowned investigative journalist who raked deep muck for SF weekly and the Guardian on everything from gang violence to telemarketing fraud over the last decade until landing at Oakland’s Center for Investigative Reporting, “a nonprofit organization that reveals injustice and strengthens democracy through the tools of journalism.”

Thompson and Paglen are masters of information, conjuring impressive paper and people trails. In the lecture they broke down the kinds of information you can gather in spy terms, human intelligence (human interviews and information) and signal intelligence (paper, email, electronic communication). AC discussed his tactics on classic journalistic sleuthing- using the example of looking in to the environmental footprint of so called clean energy technology corporations by going to the sewage plant to get info on their gross water use and tracking the history of 911 calls for injuries related to the sulfuric acid used in production.

Paglen employed these same tactics when he first began looking at the geography of secret military test sites. The beginning of the talk was a how to of investigative techniques, everything from knowing how to excursive your rights to government collected information through This duo recently released a book titled “Torture Taxi, on the trail of the CIA’s rendition Flights”, tracing the tangled web of covert military operations taking prisoners to torture facilities world wide for ‘interrogation’ and torture. Though the YBC lecture veered away from discussion of this book, the investigative work these two did is inspiring, they literally tracked the flight patterns and deeds to so called civilian crafts executing these kidnapping missions worldwide to prove their nebulous existence for the public. You may be asking yourself, well why didn’t I hear more about this? The best kept media secrets are not locked inside some vault but buried under other coverage, this is by no means to diminish the profound contribution of these two authors but rather to highlight the difficulty of really reaching people, really exposing the activities of our government. ABC 7 news did cover the opening and Paglen’s website has list of relevant clips from when the book was first released!

art by jana flynn

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 \ 4:01 pm \ Uncategorized
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