Question: Other than experiencing and expressing outrage, what can you do once you know even your most private messages can be read – by your next-door neighbor, your “friendly” government or your “friendly” government’s evil twin?

The question comes up (again) because of an exclusive in today’s The Guardian. Apparently, the “back door” on WhatsApp “allows snooping on encrypted messages”. Lordie, we’ve come a long way from the community phone line where the snoop two houses down listened in while the twelve-year old you confided to her best friend the huge crush she had on the cute choirboy. (Even when no cute choirboys are involved, we  don’t necessarily care to share our every thought with everyone, do we.)

So what can we do about it? Not much.Except to live with the knowledge that everything we say or write may be deciphered, distorted, misinterpreted, used against us or someone else.  Depressing, and an outrage? Yes, absolutely. But beyond knowing this and being as clear as possible about our own words and intentions, the rest seems to be out of our hands at this point. If anything, it underscores the absolute imperative of the moral component to political and personal communications. Even more so, when shared secrets are secret no more, through no choice of your own.

In one of the “situations” we discussed at this morning’s meeting, we all reached a point where the only thing left to hope for was the existence of one or several well-intentioned fairies to come forth and help a young girl in dire trouble. Because of my own reliance on writing, I suggested the girl might try writing the letters she’s not allowed to send off, and to write them “as if” her words would find their way to those issues she needed to clarify for herself.

This brought back the memory of a Russian tale about a girl called Vassilissa-the-beautiful whose mother dies and leaves her with a small doll. “When in need”, she tells her daughter, “give the doll a bit to eat and drink, and she will help you see your way  through the deepest darkness.”

The hills. Alive with voices, messages, calls, disconnects, hacked accounts, jokes, threats, quiet words of wisdom, snatches of song and such, and such, and more. (Is the upstairs neighbor singing off-key again, you ask? As a matter of fact, all is quiet right now. I hate to even mention it, lest the ceiling come alive again soon.)

 

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The illustration to this post is one by Arthur Rackham, reproduced in Françoise Morvan’s Le grand livre des contes* and initially published in the 1909 edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales

*Françoise Morvan, Le grand livre des contes, éditions Ouest-France, Rennes 2013