Marines go everywhere and anywhere
Spook... Review

The neat thing about surveillance on the internet is that it's a two way street. In the old days, surveillance obsessives from all points on the sanity spectrum could only speculate about strange clicks they heard when they picked up the phone, or bicycle round mysterious antennae that dominated the countryside but didn't appear on maps. Now, thanks to the net's own obsession with recording it's traffic, they can play at being spooks themselves. One such enthusiast, Conor McGarrigle, has turned counter-surveillance into art. McGarrigle an artist based in Ireland who, runs an online magazine called Stunned. One day last June, the site's traffic logs recorded a number of visits from a military server. Curious as to why a tentacle of the US military should be interested in the Irish art scene, Mc Garrigle sent his Spook-Bot, a piece of software based on the programs used by search engines out into the web in search of other calling cards from this server, which belongs to a marine Corps base in Okinawa. Many sites publish data on their visitors, including the identification codes of servers that have contacted them. The Spook-Bot located several dozen sites containing the footprints of the server known as gate1.mcbbutler.usmc.mil
The result is Spook… -" a distributed web based artwork" or in other words a site which displays the records of it's target's contacts, and the sites themselves. There is also a section to set the context, running the gamut of sites dealing with surveillance and similar spooky stuff. At one extreme is the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell's report to the European Parliament on US intelligence-gathering; at the other is the page detailing a tortured souls conviction that sinister forces are making him ill using lasers and "resins".
Playing on the idea that surveillance is a game, Spook presents the visitor with a cryptic image of grey geometric patterns, on which black blips move like radar traces. Spook's secrets are revealed by clicking on these blips. Visitors are warned, however; that they too are being watched. In a dig at the unconvincing verbiage used by many websites to assert their respect for their visitors' privacy, Spook "assures it's guests that raw data logs are used for novelty purposes only".
Whatever else it says about the US military, Spook upholds the Marine Corp's reputation as an outfit that will go anywhere and everywhere. The server has looked in on a bunch of anarchist students at the University of California, and has checked out a group of "Guerrilla Solar" activists, who apparently go around in balaclavas, connecting solar panels to the electricity grid. It has also visited a site detailing patents for various arcane technologies, including a method for altering regions of the atmosphere by means of "electron cyclotron resonance" . Spooky or what?
Spook invites viewers to explain what the people behind the server are up to. It looks to me as though the Marines are spending part of their time winding up the counter spooks by behaving spookily, and the rest of it wasting taxpayers' dollars. Among the other sites visited are one describing a tarot pack featuring movie stars ( John Wayne as Judgement, Kevin Bacon as the Wheel of Fortune), several Christian church sites, and a very explicit message board for men keen on an activity anathema to the US Military. Ther's a site offering videos of Brazilian women on beaches, and another offering Russian women as wives. "You are looking for a beautiful, graceful, kind, tender, affectionate and loving wife and a wonderful housewife aren't you?" asks the St Petersberg site, ambiguously observing that "these traits of character are peculiar to a Russian woman".
American soldiers using high technology to search Russia for old-fashioned girls: it's the Cold War stood onits head. And now even the Marines are in touch with their feelings. " Life is too short to hide affection," a GI called Brian opines on a bulletin board devoted to Romance. Farewell leathernecks; hello New Marines.

Article by Marek Kohn originally published in his Second Site column the Independent on Sunday 5 March 2000