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From: sblack03@cdc.gov (Stephen Black, National Center for Infectious Diseases)
To: rmathis@dhs.gov (Robert Mathis, Federal Computer Incident Response Center)
Subject: Ball is in your court
Date: Tues, 18 Sep 01:04:54 -0400
Mr. Mathis,
I do not appreciate the manner in which you have handled the incident. Frankly, I don’t care if the outbreak falls under the jurisdiction of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, as long as it lands somewhere firmly enough for the investigation to be completed and the issue resolved. Heck, give it to the CIA. But I think you will find from the attached case studies that the outbreak now lies in the hands of the Dept. of Homeland Security, more specifically, FedCIRC.
Obviously, there is still much left uncovered concerning the events of the past eight months, but two cases proved to be invaluable in shedding light on the mess. Two men, Philip B. Burnsted, a computer engineer from Syndico Systems in Austin, and Russell T. Iverson, a defense attorney of Cincinnati, were interviewed at length concerning their involvement. I’ve attached select transcripts from these interviews.
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I realize my use of "incident" is obnoxiously vague. I plan to replace that as soon as I come up with a descriptive name for the incident (such as September 11th, Bay of Pigs, Day of Infamy, etc.)
The email goes on for another half page, then I plan on each chapter of the book being a first person account of events, each chapter alternating POV between these two interviewees. Probably conclude the book with another brief email.
EDIT: would it be a problem that those two email addresses are very likely real addresses of an s. black and an r. mathis?
[This message has been edited by TheoPhileo (edited July 05, 2004).]
I wouldn't use the e-mails. Perhaps putting just their names and titles in the header would be better. Alternatively you could go to the CDC and find the format they use for e-mails and deliberately use an alternate format (i.e. instead of first initial and last name it becomes initials followed by a number)
[This message has been edited by RFLong (edited July 05, 2004).]
quote:
Alternatively you could go to the CDC and find the format they use for e-mails and deliberately use an alternate format (i.e. instead of first initial and last name it becomes initials followed by a number)
Heh. I actually used to have a CDC email address. Both forms will get to the person. But I know what you're getting at.
Go with incident for now. It is the media that assigns those catchy and ultimately meaningless names to events. I like the feel that we are getting behind the scenes information about things that the media hasn't yet uncovered and trumpeted to every corner of the world.
Asside from that, I like the air of trying to keep things from getting leaked. And incident is fine, considering we can assume it is the "outbreak" mentioned in the next sentence.
I don't like the email format. It just doesn't draw me in. I'm learning information here and not much more. I would rather learn this information AND something about a character by having him/her read the email and react to it.
I know that "computer virus mutates into real virus" is one of those where-the-#$%^-did-you-go-to-school plot devices, but the chosen format here semi-convinces me that this will actually be an SF story rather than a what-did-you-sleep-through-science-class story. So I think that is a big argument in favor of keeping something like this opening.