Squid Fry 06.20.13 - Street Art…

STREET ART… Even though Squid knows it’s an unfair advantage to play hop-scotch against two-legged players, Squid’s always taken delight in easy wins and summertime sidewalk games. Innocent fun – exactly the kind of activity the city of Monterey should be promoting.

But it seems that the city, already battling a growing problem with the homeless and fighting to balance a barely there budget, is now poised to take on innocent fun, too. A gaggle of 7-to-17-year-old girls was hanging out at Del Monte Beach earlier this month as part of The Wahine Project’s surf camp. After a morning of lessons, they grabbed chalk and drew waves and hearts on the Surf Way sidewalk.

Wahine Project Director Dionne Ybarra says someone rolled up in a city truck and told instructors to wash it off because chalk art could promote graffiti, plus it would wind up in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. (Note: It did anyway.Ybarra erased the Wahine girls’ work with buckets of seawater.) “They were disappointed,” she says.

So is Squid, who thinks everyone should remember this: When chalk art is outlawed, only outlaws will do chalk art.

SALINAS SECRETS… Squid is angry, but not surprised, that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting and storing domestic data from phone calls and online communication with little-to-no public oversight. (Good luck intercepting underwater communications, you shark bastards.) But Squid takes a delicious bit of pleasure in finding out Salinas is linked to that burgeoning industry of spying and data analysis.

Since January, Salinas has been using an online tool that breaks down the city’s budget in easy-to-read, colorful graphs. Delphi, maker of the online tool, is chaired by Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of a murky Silicon Valley company called Palantir Technologies.

Palantir, according to a report by Salon.com, sells powerful data-mining and analysis software that maps outhuman social networks for use in counterintelligence. Customers include the CIA, the FBI and the military. Writer Tim Shorrock suggests on his own website that Palantir could even be connected to PRISM, the controversial Internet-mining program recently unveiled by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Speaking of collecting information, Salinas Councilman Steve McShane has unveiled (re-unveiled? Squid seems to remember this happening last year too) a graffiti-fighting app meant to make it easier for the public to report vandalism. Squid suspects McShane’s real goal is to mine the app for nuggets of constituent data… and maybe track users via GPS. The NSA would be proud.