When you wanted to warn the world media that all phones, all holos, all netfriends were being monitored by WorldCom, it was really quite difficult to use an untapped communications device to tell them. Leaking 101: Don't use your work email or work phone to say something bad about your work. When your work happened to own all the communication devices around, and you're leaking to warn them that they're monitoring everything, for financial gain (they never picked the wrong stock), for the news channel, for the political donations--so they always, but always, bet on the right horse to win, even when there was another clear favorite--well, then it gets complicated.


Inspiration: BoingBoing article on how to blow the whistle: http://boingboing.net/2012/04/16/how-to-blow-the-whistle.html
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Setting. Not personal enough. Could do a Grisham with it, though.

My cold informer came to me in the center of a graveyard. She looked around, then back at me. "Is this your idea of humor?" "I thought it was fitting." "You do realize that I'm not actually dead. I am, after all, talking to you." "A technicality." I didn't like interacting with the cold ones. Sure, their body temps might not be below 97.3 (exactly and precisely, with no variance, ever), but we all had visited the slab where they were made. We saw the bodies, saw the hoarfrost on their eyelashes and the stiff blueness of their limbs, the wounds that had killed them. I was never sure if that was a kindness or just a "this is part of the job, so we should show them." In everything else, the Apparatus might obfuscate and conceal, but--


Inspiration: "Cold Reformer" - Jean-Paul Bondy
Story Potential: High-ish?
Notes: I like the setting, the spy/cold war/panopticon feel of it, but there's no idea of story beyond the setting here.