WASHINGTON – Whatever you may think of the U.S. Dept. of State’s “Think Again, Turn Away” campaign to counter the social media-based recruitment efforts of Islamist groups like ISIS (or “ISIL” or “The Islamic State” or “Enron” or whatever they’re calling themselves at this point), one thing is clear: Someone involved has a pretty impressive knowledge of Hungarian pornography.
How else are we to explain the ability of @ThinkAgain_DOS to so quickly identify the middle frame of a triptych image tweeted by an ISIS-associated account as coming from “Hungarian porn?”
[Side note: is it just me, or does “@ThinkAgain_DOS” sound like the Twitter handle of a campaign to get extreme computing luddites to rethink their choice of operating system?]
The original tweet appeared late Monday afternoon. By Tuesday morning, @ThinkAgain_DOS had determined not only that the image was from porn, but from Hungarian porn, specifically.
There’s no way the conclusion stemmed from manual searching. There’s simply way too much Hungarian gangbang porn in existence for that to be possible. So, we’re either talking about an in-house State Dept. porn expert, or some manner of automated image-recognition search.
Personally, I find it way more fun to believe the State Dept. has an Undersecretary of Pornography than to assume it sniffed out the source of the image using some manner of technology. I’m on the fence about which possibility is creepier, but the porn expert theory is decidedly more entertaining.
The quick (especially by bureaucratic standards) recognition of the porn image didn’t elude the attention of the Twittersphere. The comment directly following the @ThinkAgain_DOS tweet reads “dude, @ThinkAgain_DOS it’s really weird that you know so much about Hungarian porn.”
Naturally, it wouldn’t be the internet without at least one Bobby Buzzkill joining the conversation and flexing his rationality-muscles, so the image recognition software possibility received mention, as well.
Here’s the thing about image recognition software, though: It only works if the image targeted for comparison exists in the database the software is matching against. In other words, it wouldn’t do the State Dept. any good to download the image and use image recognition software to analyze it unless they already had access to a database containing such images.
Hm. Thinking about all of this a bit more, the image recognition software theory is pretty damn entertaining, too.
What this means is the State Dept. is either collecting porn directly on its own behalf, or Foggy Bottom is Facebook friends with some spook agency like the National Security Agenc, and that organization is doing the porn collecting.
Either way, it sure sounds like somewhere out there in the ether of governmental-server-land there’s a RAIS which is chock full o’ porn—at least some percentage of which is Hungarian in origin.
It doesn’t appear the mainstream media has much interest in this story (unless you consider The Washington Free Beacon to be part of the mainstream media), which is a shame, because it has all sorts of potential to be an embarrassing, disconcerting, scandalous and freaking hilarious saga.
Just imagine Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf standing at the podium trying to deflect pointed questions about the source of the State Dept.’s apparent in-depth knowledge of Hungarian porn. Could a press conference get any better than that?
If we were really lucky, maybe we’d even get Secretary John Kerry on CNN trying to maintain his serious, Botox-bolstered patrician façade while fielding a fusillade of porn-related queries from Wolf Blitzer: “Mr. Secretary, I want to ask this again, because this is a very serious matter. In your opinion, which is the superior facial cumshot series: ‘Praise the Load’ or ‘Sperm Splattered?’”
Sadly, the ISIS/State Dept./Hungarian porn story appears to be dying on the vine, so we’ll probably never get to witness those moments. On the bright side, if we ever hear of a strategic national security alliance between the Obama Administration and DDF Productions, we already know what’s up.
