It was the year Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, was, after four days of interrogation over the 1972 murder of a single mother of ten, released without charge. It was the year STX developed a meditation tracker that uploaded stress indicators to cloud storage. It was the year the right to be forgotten was recognized in Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González. It was not a case that Genevieve Bailey worked.
It was the year judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals denied a twenty year-old American citizen in Chicago named Adel Daoud access to classified FISA court records part of his warrant application. In the concurring opinion, it was acknowledged that a FISA-related warrant could only be challenged if errors were caught, and errors would only be caught if access to the documents had been obtained. But the decision had been made for reasons of national security.
There were new symbols then. Rejection was a direction of the finger. But perhaps that was old too, a gladiator legacy, or rather, a legacy of the wisdom of the audience. Populist. Young people volunteered themselves to be shown on screens to strangers, hoping for love or sex or just some minutes in communion.
To the south, Fernando Sepúlveda, a member of the social media team for an opposition party and supposed leader of an obscure intelligence unit, was arrested in Colombia for intercepting communications between the president and the Revolutionary Armed Forces.
Vape was the word of the year, according to a dictionary website.
It was the year a documentary, released on a streaming service provided by the world’s largest online store, traced an industrial espionage suit against Bayer. In memory, the credits declared, of the late Lyle Michaels.
Records were broken, exempli gratia, a Russian player, Хируко, comprehensively beat World of Warcraft.
Meanwhile, the United States ended operations of the Human Terrain System, the counterinsurgency program in which social scientists trained military commanders in the customs of invaded territories. The program had been rejected by the American Anthropological Association, holding that it conflicted with the Code of Ethics, particularly the clause “to do no harm” to those studied. One of HTS’s founders, Montgomery McFate, under the name Montgomery Cybele Carlough, had written her doctoral dissertation on Irish republican paramilitaries. In response to Professor Roberto Gonzalez’s critique of the program’s misappropriation of scholarship, McFate, then a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, wrote that charges of misappropriated knowledge constituted epistemological censorship. It is in the nature of knowledge to escape the bounds of its creator; to believe otherwise is to persist in a supreme naïveté about the nature of knowledge production and distribution.” It was suspected that she was the woman behind the blog I Luv a Man in Uniform.
That same year, an American whistleblower granted asylum in Russia denied that his leak had been orchestrated with Russian intelligence, which was the stated position of some members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. They disseminated these speculations on the television show Meet the Press.
A biopic about the Irish-American mobster Whitey Bulger, a man who had once smuggled guns in coffins to the IRA, was pilloried as an uncritical reproduction of mob lies.
Around the time of the release of the film, shortly after the publication of an article criticizing Turkey’s bombing of PKK-affiliated forces, Professor Bri Freeman received a package of anthrax in a cardboard shipping box. In the article, she had noted that the separatist group repelled ISIS in Iraq.
It was the year a coroner reported that the fatal gunshot wounds of a black man named Avery James might have been self-inflicted in the back of a police cruiser, as his hands were handcuffed behind him. For her coverage, a Noze writer received a United States Journalism Award in the area of commentary.
It was the year Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared.
It was the year a boy named Tyrell Owens studied for his GED.
It was the year LeBron James went home to Cleveland, and Republicans took control of the House and Senate again. Diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba were reestablished. It was the year two hundred Nigerian schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram. It was the year Scotland voted against leaving the United Kingdom. It was the year the American president expressed disappointment over failed peace talks in Northern Ireland. It was the year a hedge fund mogul named Lawrence Coffers tripled profits off new financial instruments, packaging what he referred to as “nonprime” mortgages. His daughter, Winnie, announced that she would be buying a newspaper. Barry Cain was assigned to a net neutrality task force.
It was a year of many stories. It was a year it was difficult to remember them all, even when they were buzzing in your pocket. There were acronyms for news missed. There were acronyms for the fear of what would be missed. And there were many dead.
What happens to the dead man’s email account was something very few people knew. Historians were considering the legalities of entering these emails into archives for future historians. It was a question that might once have bothered Shel Chen.
In this year, it was estimated that there were more than 4 billion email accounts. Nevertheless, the New IRA, a paramilitary organization formed of Provisional IRA dissidents, conducted a letter bomb campaign, which included explosives sent to British Army recruitment offices and prison staff. In a failed RPG attack in North Belfast, the weapon bounced off a Land Rover. The officers inside the vehicle were said to have suffered shock. Over a decade after it was reported that the IRA had been supplied with Russian rifles, investigations into international gunrunning continued, just as classified operations continued even while the Belfast hotels and convention centers were built. But that was not quite a news story. Surveillance, investigation, the collating of facts and figures, the contacts—these were part of the regular ecology.
There are no headlines “Today there is air” or “Today, still, so many people are dead.”
It was something Frank Michaels, once a Micelli, thought of when he thought of the child he’d loved. But sometimes, he listened to the voices of angry men on the radio as he drove to fix the broken part of a home someone thought was in emergency, and he felt less alone. They spoke about how there used to be promise, and people around the country called in to send their heavy hearts over waves. Anger was the only honest thing Frank Michaels heard anymore.