I don’t take this “truthbox” business seriously. But all this noise reminds me of a book I read recently called “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson. The plot is complicated but essentially the main character gets little breadcrumbs of information here and there on her way to finding the maker of these mysteriously attractive (anonymous) video clips. I won’t do the book justice right now, it’s 2am. But the idea is, if you have enough money you can get any information you want. So she finds this cranky old mathematically-inclined hacker who has access to some kind of system that has access to all the Internet’s data. And she pays him to find this one particular email address.

William Gibson gets lucky with some of these ideas, like when he predicted “cyberspace” just by peering into a video arcade. But it makes sense to me he’s better connected now than when he was just starting out. Does such a system exist? Probably. I seem to remember reading an article (maybe it was CNET) about an AT&T employee that claimed everything that comes down the pipe gets siphoned off to this secret room where everyone’s activities are archived. Whether that’s true or not I don’t really care, but from a fiction standpoint it’s interesting.

People come here with all kinds of wild stories about why they need the “truthbox code”. Is it really that urgent? I’m guessing it seems urgent to you. But how urgent? Fictionally speaking, how many hoops would you jump through to find out who wrote in your truthbox? Would you risk your life to find the code? What could be *so* important? In “Pattern Recognition” Cayce discovers a secret watermark code (among other things) and eventually finds the “maker” with help from friends, but not before she’s assaulted, drugged, imprisoned, etc.