Thuerk says that now spam and unsolicited mass commercial e-mail are the same thing and can take different forms. “It can be messaging, but e-mail, so short messages are also the same effect, texting. . . . All direct marketing e-mail is spam.”
During his successful career he has had moments when he realizes what he unleashed. He really felt the pang when he found out about the infamous “Green Card e-mail” of 1994. “The second famous e-mail, spam, the second famous spam. Sixteen or seventeen years after mine, so we’ve moved to the nineties, here in Phoenix we had a guy who got together with the local UUNET, Usenet, UUNET, if you remember those. They weren’t really the Internet. They were local networks. Same concept, but they really hadn’t hooked in yet. And, he [the lawyer] got together with one of the administrators or the system guy, and said, Listen, I want to send this e-mail to everybody you have. They wrote it and they sent it out and it went to all the people in Phoenix that were using the system. And . . . it was real spam, and it was an announcement that, Hey, listen, I am an immigration lawyer. We offer these services. Here’s our name and number. Come see us. We can help you.”
The service was some very expensive help filling out a very simple postcard to enter in a lottery to obtain a green card. According to the cofounder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Email, the lawyers were “a husband-and-wife law firm [who] decided to join the lottery frenzy by pitching their own overpriced services to immigrant communities. But these two were not your run-of-the-mill hucksters. They were innovators with a penchant for technology.”8 They were a bit infamous within legal circles and eventually lost their licenses to practice law. “I knew from that point on that the lawyers were involved and everything was going downhill.” At this point Thuerk makes it clear that unsolicited e-mail is not homogenous. “So this shows you the difference between good marketing and bad marketing, OK?” His explanation sounds quite a bit like the nautical advice given about the good and bad rope given centuries ago. He believes his e-mail was the good kind of spam. “OK, mine, I found the target. I selected something. I went hunting with a scope and a deer rifle. This guy, he went up to the top of the tallest building in the world. He had these flyers printed out. I’m right at my target, designed, just know what I’ve got to do. Get that message sharp, to the point, do it. Versus just throw it out there and maybe someone will respond.”
Thuerk does believe that ordinary folks have to take some responsibility for the spamming they receive and that they are not just on the passive receiving end. He says it isn’t an invasion of privacy because we invite unwanted e-mail. “A lot of people get spam because of what they do on the Internet. They just do the things. They don’t think about the things they should be doing. I’ve been telling these people that back in the nineties—don’t give out your personal information. I don’t do my banking online. I don’t know anybody in the banking industry, I mean executives, that do banking online. Everything you’re doing. And the people, they just don’t think about it. They don’t understand. I try to tell people about that kind of stuff. Your privacy is, when you go in your house you want to just take off your shoes and put on bunny slippers and that. And the world has no reason to know that. You like to have a chocolate thingy, whatever, just before you go to bed at night. That’s a privacy thing, OK, getting into the bedrooms and that.” His point is your privacy ends when you start researching chocolates to eat and then order the chocolates online at night, giving out your shipping information, credit card, and e-mail address. At that point you have ventured out of the privacy zone. A funny example is when I Googled the definition of spam, I got spammed with a pop-up advertisement on how to get rid of spam.
Thuerk has a sense of humor about his place in history. He does sign his e-mail FoS, as in “Father of Spam,” but he is serious about his security. During an interview it is customary to ask someone his or her full name and birth date or age. He wouldn’t comply. He said he never gives anyone his birthday or age. Yet he was willing to talk a bit about his life as a semi-retiree. He consults with companies about Internet security. His wife is doing good in the world helping teach at-risk children. But even the man who unleashed digital clutter into the world confesses to having a common terrestrial problem. He told me, “We had to get rid of a lot of that stuff when we moved. Actually, we gave away most of the stuff in our house. . . . We’re downsizing, but we still have too much stuff.”
Too much stuff? The man partially responsible for filling up your inbox has too much junk in his real life.
Other Junk
Finally, it should be mentioned that the modern uses of junk, all by its lonesome, stray far from its origins or original definition. The slang forms range from grimy to uncouth.
If someone is looking to score some junk it means they want to partake in the euphoria-inducing and life-destroying drug heroin. In Trainspotting, the Academy Award–nominated film about heroin users, main character Mark “Rent Boy” Renton laments, “The downside of coming off junk was I knew I would need to mix with my friends again in a state of full consciousness. It was awful.” The origin of this use of the term is that addicts would search for scrap metal to sell to junkyards to get enough money to buy heroin. Those metal-grubbing addicts became known as junkies and the drug as junk.9
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, junk took on two sexually related meanings, one for women and one for men, providing some sort of bizarre gender equality.
“Junk in the trunk” became a way, generally considered positive, to describe a woman with a voluptuous derriere. The saying can be attributed to a little-known rap duo called Duice. The group hit the Billboard chart once, and only once, reaching number 12 and selling two million copies of a song called “Dazzey Duks” in 1993. The lyrics extol the virtues of women who manage to fill out or fill up very, very short shorts—those cutoff jean shorts named after Daisy Duke, who just-barely wore them on The Dukes Of Hazzard.
What started the trend of them Dazzey Duks
Ever since the summer of the ’90s
Girls had a deal with the future behind.
See many terms they use to express
We’re talking about the butt cheeks not the breasts.
Baby got back, the junk in the trunk
She got a six pack or a hell of a rump.
Yo, need some fries with that shake
See many terms they use to relate.
Yes. So many.
The use of junk associated with the male anatomy was the subject of an entire article in the venerable Gray Lady, the New York Times. Yale-educated linguist Ben Zimmer traced the euphemism back to a writer named Ethan Mordden, who he reported used it in a magazine piece called “The Hustler” in the 1980s.10
When I found Mordden, he explained he had been writing about gay life for a magazine called Christopher Street and he had used the term in a bunch of stories. Like all good writers he took information and observations from his real life and weaved them into his work. “I had a friend who was very colorful and made up language. His name was Rip and he was the kind of character you didn’t want to waste.” Mordden knew immediately what Rip meant the first time he used junk to describe a man’s genitals and that the euphemism had to be in one of his pieces. “There was logic to the sound and context and what he meant. It was like in the fifties, when hip, cool jazz guys spoke their own lingo. This was a playfully, sneaky way of expanding the language. You could tell what Rip was saying if you were a good listener.”
Often employed by radio shock jocks to avoid FCC issues, junk was mainstreamed in 2010 when a man at a TSA checkpoint recorded his opposition to a newly instituted and somewhat invasive pat down procedure. Eleven months earlier, an aspirational lone-wolf terrorist smuggled explosives in his underwear onto a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. As a result, in the name of improved security, TSA agents began to engage in extensive searches using the backs of their hands to pretty much pat down the part of a person that underwear traditionally covers. When a TS
A agent told a young man at the San Diego International Airport that he had to submit to one of these searches, the man turned on his phone’s video function and recorded the episode. It went like this.
TSA: Do you have anything in your pockets?
MAN: I don’t think so; they had me take it all out.
TSA: No belt? No nothing?
MAN: Nope. No belt. No nothing.
TSA: Do you have any external or internal implants that I need to be aware of?
MAN: No.
TSA: OK, I am going to be doing a standard pat down on you today. Using my hands going like this on your body. Also, we are going to be doing a groin check. That means I’m going to place my hand on your hip, the other hand on your inner thigh, slowly go up and down . . .
MAN: OK.
TSA: We’re going to do that two times in the front and two times in the back. And if you’d like a private screening we can make that available for you also.
MAN: We can do it out here, but if you touch my junk, I am going to have you arrested.
Considering this video went viral and the story, including the junk reference, was covered by nearly every major news outlet, maybe we need a new compound noun for the twenty-first century: junk news including squirrels on water skis, the wardrobes of celebrity children, and Twitter fights between reality stars.
6
SPACE JUNK
Q&A WITH DONALD KESSLER,
FORMER NASA SCIENTIST
* * *
IN 2013 THE BEAUTIFULLY terrifying film Gravity received myriad accolades, including seven Academy Awards. Its star, Sandra Bullock, was named best actress by multiple film critics’ associations for her role as Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical engineer stranded in space when her spacecraft is badly damaged by orbital debris, commonly referred to as space junk. She spends the short, tense film trying to get back to Earth and away from the large fragments hurtling through space.
The only truly harsh critics of the film were some very precise members of the scientific community who poked at the film’s astro-accuracy. Are the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope positioned so that someone could travel between them, as Dr. Stone did in the film? No. In space would her tears float away dramatically as they did on screen? Never. But the action that propels the movie is based on a troubling truth. There is enough orbital debris and space junk whizzing around at incredible speeds to cause serious problems and potentially disable satellites that are integral to the way we live.
NASA describes space junk as “all man-made objects in orbit about the Earth, which no longer serve a useful purpose.”1 There have been approximately forty-five hundred launches since the beginning of space exploration. According to NASA, as of mid 2015 there are roughly twenty-three thousand pieces of debris at least 10 cm (3.9 inches) in size zooming around the lowest Earth orbit at speeds close to 17,500 miles an hour. If you recently downloaded a song or movie, it is likely a satellite somewhere in this orbit was involved. It’s the same neighborhood as about twelve hundred working satellites that control things like GPS and weather monitoring systems that predict hurricanes. It is also where all the manned space flights have ventured and any future space exploration or commercialization would likely take place. That is, unless it becomes too unsafe because of space junk, and some scientists believe we are at that point right now.
The big junk is tracked by government agencies and the US Air Force, but the small stuff is rogue, often undetectable, and dangerous due to high speeds. A marble-sized piece of junk in low Earth orbit travels at such a high velocity that, were it to make contact with another object, would have the same effect as a grenade.2 If you include all the upper orbits, there are about half a million pieces of debris out there. Simply put, humans are sending too much junk into space and just leaving it there, making it more dangerous for humans and making a potentially rich resource unavailable.
The biggest offenders are the United States, Russia, and China. There have been a series of incidents in the past few years and these are just the ones we, civilians, know about. In January 2007 China successfully tested an antisatellite missile by sending it to destroy one of their weather satellites. The result was an enormous amount of debris blasted out into orbit, around three thousand traceable pieces. Two years later, there was an accidental collision between a piece of space junk—an old, nonfunctioning Russian satellite—and an active US commercial communications satellite. Experts say those two collisions alone are believed to have wiped out years worth of work that had been done to address the problem. This proves the point that it doesn’t take a lot of space junk to make a lot of trouble. That Russian collision caused problems for years. A couple of whoppers could set back the efforts to clean up space and make it safe.
In March 2012, a significant amount of debris was headed toward the International Space Station (ISS), and it was detected too late for the station to maneuver out of the way. The threat was real enough for the astronauts to be deployed to the Soyuz space capsules in case they had to escape from the base. The $150 billion investment has had to engage in debris avoidance maneuvers (DAM) four times between April 2011 and April 2012. The astronauts have had to “man the lifeboats” a least three times in the past nine years,3 including as recently as July 2015.
The international community is taking this issue seriously. The United States has its own national space policy that in part addresses space junk by calling for “strengthening measures to mitigate orbital debris.” The European Space Agency (ESA) has begun implementing a plan called e.Deorbit, which will send a “space janitor” to retrieve what it calls derelict satellites. However, there is no official governing body that is the space cop. Various recommendations have been made through the United Nations and through individual agencies about how to build spacecraft and satellites that 1) can be built with shields to absorb the impact of incoming debris, 2) not leave anything behind, or 3) find a way to do something with the debris that is there.
Japanese, Swiss, and American companies are developing all kinds of far-out solutions for the latter. The theories include building nets to catch it, lasers to shoot it, robots to sweep it up and capture it, and parachutes to drag it back to Earth. At the heart of most solutions is to use space’s self-cleaning powers and pull the junk into the lowest orbit, where it will one day burn up upon reentry—though some larger pieces won’t fully disintegrate and will fall to Earth. The chance of someone being hit by space junk is infinitesimal. Most of it falls into the ocean, though a few large pieces have made it to land. However, their real danger is out there, not down here.
In 2011 the National Research Council, part of the National Academies of Sciences, reported that we were at the space junk tipping point.4 How did it get so out of control? Wasn’t there someone who could have predicted the danger of too much junk in space?
Well, there were a few, and the best known is Donald Kessler. In 1978, while working at NASA, Kessler published a paper predicting the exponential growth of the debris as the result of collisions. The media dubbed his hypothesis the Kessler Syndrome, although he never called it that or promoted its use. But he does understand that a catchy name draws attention to the problem and that’s his main goal. He prefers to talk about the actual facts and consequences of space junk, why we can’t afford to let out of sight be out of mind, and why the space program needs to be financially supported.
In his slow, southern drawl, Kessler can make this complex, scientific problem understandable: “It was sort of like you were living in a neighborhood and you didn’t have a dump, and every time you got a new car you just stuck the old one in your backyard. Got a new refrigerator, you put the old one in your backyard. That’s essentially what is happening in space.”5 His work was taken quite seriously, so much so that NASA established an Orbital Debris Program that still exists today, and the design process of spacecraft changed to reflect the threat.
Now retired, Kessler works with several independent research groups to keep the
focus on the problem and to help find solutions. He does this and still gives interviews because he feels it is his responsibility. He has contributed to several films, like the Imax documentary Space Junk and Collision Point: The Race to Clean Up Space, and yes, he has seen Gravity.
Q: What was it about space that attracted you?
Don Kessler: Well, to me it’s the secret of the universe. It’s where we all came from. It’s our origins. I was mainly interested in the planets because that was a possibility where there was other life, and it—it just grew from that. When I went to NASA, they gave me several choices. They said, “Well, we got this meteorite group, we got this lunar sciences group,” and I just said, “Well, meteorite sounds interesting,” and that just turned out to be the key to understanding the debris environment.
Q: In your opinion, what qualifies as orbital debris, space junk?
Kessler: Well, anything that’s not serving a useful function.
Q: So, it’s like regular junk.
Kessler: Yeah. But, legally, there is no legal definition of it. Consequently, that’s probably a failing of the international law. At the time, they just didn’t envision space junk when those rules were written.
Q: Why wasn’t space junk considered an issue early on?
Kessler: Well, there were these concepts, and to me it was we were misled by our understanding of the solar system. And, you know, “space is endless,” and that was the general impression. Nobody had really begun to realize that we were concentrating so much material in low Earth orbit where there wasn’t much room, and they weren’t paying attention to not only how they were doing it, but what was going on after they left the things in orbit, and the fact that they weren’t adhering to the laws of the universe, essentially.
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