As I watched the Twin Towers collapse on September 11, 2001 I wrote this in my diary: “We can kiss goodbye to civil liberties from this day onwards. There’s nothing that democracies won’t do to prevent this ever happening again”. As ever, John Perry Barlow was both more articulate, and more perspicacious. This is what he wrote that day to those on his BarlowFriendz list. (Courtesy of SpiekerBlog.)

This morning’s events are roughly equiv­a­lent to the Reich­stag fire that pro­vided the social oppor­tu­nity for the Nazi take-over of Ger­many.

I am not sug­gest­ing that, like the Nazis, the author­i­tar­ian forces in Amer­ica actu­ally had a direct role in per­pe­trat­ing this mind-blistering tragedy. (Though their indi­rect role deserves a much longer dis­cus­sion.)

Nev­er­the­less, noth­ing could serve those who believe that Amer­i­can “safety” is more impor­tant than Amer­i­can lib­erty bet­ter than some­thing like this. Con­trol freaks will dine on this day for the rest of our lives.

Within a few hours, we will see begin­ning the most vig­or­ous efforts to end what remains of free­dom in Amer­ica. Those of who are will­ing to sac­ri­fice a lit­tle — largely illu­sory — safety in order to main­tain our faith in the orig­i­nal ideals of Amer­ica will have to fight for those ideals just as vig­or­ously.

I beg you to begin NOW to do what­ever you can — whether writ­ing your pub­lic offi­cials, join­ing the ACLU or EFF, tak­ing to the streets, or liv­ing vis­i­bly free and fear­less lives — to pre­vent the spasm of con­trol mania from destroy­ing the dreams that far more have died for over the last two hun­dred twenty five years than died this morn­ing.

Don’t let the ter­ror­ists or (their nat­ural allies) the fas­cists win.

Remem­ber that the goal of ter­ror­ism is to cre­ate increas­ingly par­a­lytic total­i­tar­i­an­ism in the gov­ern­ment it attacks. Don’t give them the sat­is­fac­tion.

Fear noth­ing. Live free.

And, please, let us try to for­give those who have com­mit­ted these appalling crimes. If we hate them, we will become them.

May God — or What­ever you want to call It — bless us all. We’ll need it.

Courage,

John Perry

And here’s what he wrote the other day:

The answer to ter­ror­ism is not fear. Nor is it vio­lence. Nor is it trans­form­ing our coun­try in the very ways Al Queda wished, thus betray­ing every­thing Amer­ica stood for and becom­ing an arbi­trar­ily vio­lent and sur­veil­lant nation that rou­tinely tor­tures per­ceived ene­mies and incar­cer­ates them indef­i­nitely with­out due process.

If only we’d had the courage and self-assurance to say, “Nice shoot­ing, Ass­holes, but we have lots of tall build­ings.” And left it at that. If only we’d had the courage to respond to ter­ror­ism with a stead­fast unwill­ing­ness to be ter­ror­ized. If only we’d rec­og­nized the trap we were being led into. But we didn’t.
Now Amer­ica is a par­ody of what it was that day 10 years ago. We have bank­rupted our­selves and slaugh­tered tens of thou­sands with point­less wars of reac­tion. We have gut­ted our enlight­ened guar­an­tees of civil lib­erty and gov­ern­men­tal restraint. We have lost our way. And we have become the very mon­ster Osama bin Laden per­ceived us to be.

This is a sad day indeed. Not merely because it refreshes the tragedies of that ter­ri­ble day, but because it also reminds us of all the tragedies — most of them far worse and more per­ma­nent in effect — that we sub­se­quently inflicted upon our­selves and on count­less inno­cents here and abroad in reac­tion to those events.

Fox-Amphoux roofscape, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Today we went to one of my favourite places in the Var — the tiny hilltop village of Fox-Amphoux. It’s an old Roman village at the intersection of two Roman roads, 540m above sea level with a lovely panoramic view of the surrounding countryside and it’s one of the quietest and most peaceful places I know. It has no shops, one tiny hotel and an artist’s studio. We sat on the steps of the church, in the shade of a nettle tree that is believed to be several hundred years old, and had a delicious picnic.

The village has one claim to fame, though. The clue is in this crude plaque:

It’s the birthplace of Paul de Barras, who was one of the leading figures in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, and was for four years one of the most powerful men in France. (He was the lead member of the five-man French Directory between 1795 and 1799.)

Given the difficulties of communication at the time, one wonders how much the inhabitants of this place ever knew about their famous son. And whether he ever visited it after he’d gone on to greater things.

Interesting post by George Dyson on The Edge site. Excerpt:

This is much bigger than the relative merits of national security vs. the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or any of the other debates by which the Snowden revelations have been framed. We are facing a fundamental decision (as Turing anticipated) between whether human intelligence or machine intelligence is given the upper hand. The NSA has defended wholesale data capture and analysis with the argument that the data (and metadata) are not being viewed by people, but by machines, and are therefore, legally, not being read. This alone should be cause for alarm.

And what of the current obsession with cyberterrorism and cyberwar? We should deliberately (and unilaterally if need be) abandon the weaponization of codes and the development of autonomous weapons—two different approaches to the same result. They both lead us into battles that can never be won. A good example to follow is the use of chemical and biological weapons—yes, they remain freely available, but we have achieved an almost universal consensus not to return to the horrors of poison gas in World War I. Do we have to repeat the mistake? We are currently taking precisely the wrong approach: fast-tracking the development of secret (and expensive) offensive weapons instead of an open system of inexpensive civilian-based defense.

Fourteen years ago, I spent an afternoon in La Jolla, California with Herbert York, the American physicist of Mohawk ancestry who became Eisenhower’s trusted advisor and one of the wisest and most effective administrators of the Cold War. York was appointed founding scientific director of ARPA and was instrumental both in the development of the hydrogen bomb and its deployment, in a few short years, by a working fleet of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. He was sober enough to be trusted with the thermonuclear arsenal, yet relaxed enough about it that he had to be roused out of bed in the early morning of July 6, 1961, because he had driven someone else’s car home by mistake.

York understood the workings of what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex better than anyone I ever met. “The Eisenhower farewell address is quite famous,” he explained to me over lunch. “Everyone remembers half of it, the half that says beware of the military-industrial complex. But they only remember a quarter of it. What he actually said was that we need a military-industrial complex, but precisely because we need it, beware of it. Now I,ve given you half of it. The other half: we need a scientific-technological elite. But precisely because we need a scientific-technological elite, beware of it. That’s the whole thing, all four parts: military-industrial complex; scientific-technological elite; we need it, but beware; we need it but beware. It’s a matrix of four.”

We are much, much deeper in a far more complicated matrix now. And now, more than ever, we should heed Eisenhower’s parting advice. Yes, we need big data, and big algorithms—but beware.

… in 1947, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

From SiliconBeat.

“I’m a very responsible guy. I would pay the national debt down first. Then I would buy the Phillies, if I could get a great price.”

— Chris Reynolds, of Media, Pa., on seeing in an email statement that his PayPal balance was $92,233,720,368,547,800 . He was not a quadrillionaire — nor the richest man in the world — for long, however. When he logged on to his PayPal account, his balance read $0. Was someone at PayPal a bit spacey? Perhaps PayPal just has astronomical on the mind: As the Merc’s Heather Somerville wrote last month, the company is working on a payments system for use in outer space. But  back to the big oops. ”This is obviously an error and we appreciate that Mr. Reynolds understood this was the case,” the San Jose company said in a statement, according to CNN. The company, owned by eBay (market capitalization: about $73.8 billion), said it offered to donate money to a cause chosen by Reynolds.

Wonderful series of videos in the French style.

Story from a friend whose daughter recently graduated from a major UK university.

The Vice-Chancellor (or perhaps it was the Chancellor – the distinction between the two is often lost on parents) was making a stirring speech about the importance of knowledge, etc. An example of this was the importance of the great overarching scientific theories. So the great man said, “And Darwin’s theory of…”. At which point he had a Senior Moment. There was a brief pause while he rummaged around for the word. And then out it came: “relativity”.

Could happen to any of us. Well any of us d’une certain age, anyway. I remember overhearing a woman in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin once explaining to her friend why her husband’s Volvo was superior to her companion’s husband’s Mercedes. “It’s got a cataclysmic convertor”, she said.

I love this. Especially the fact that you can’t stop it repeating itself.

Interesting, slightly elegaic piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, reflecting on the life and career of Doug Engelbart and the networked world that we have inherited.

networked computing technology has had a similar privileged spot in American life for at least 30 years. Networked computers democratized! Anyone could have a voice! They delivered information, increased the variety of human experience, allowed new capabilities, and helped the world become more open and connected. Computers and the Internet were forces for good in the world, which is why technology was so readily attached to complex, revolutionary processes like the Arab Spring, for example.

But a broad skepticism about technology has crept into (at least) American life. We find ourselves a part of a “war on terror” that is being perpetually, secretly fought across the very network that Engelbart sought to build. Every interaction we have with an Internet service generates a “business record” that can be seized by the NSA through a secretive process that does not require a warrant or an adversarial legal proceeding. 

The disclosure of the NSA’s surveillance program is not Hiroshima, but it does reveal the latent dark power of the Internet to record communication data at an unprecedented scale, data that can be used by a single nation to detriment of the rest. The narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was. 

If you’re inclined to see the trails of information Bush imagined future scholars blazing as (meta)data to be hoovered up, if you’re inclined to see PRISM as a societal Memex concentrated in the hands of the surveillance state, then perhaps, we’re seeing the end of the era Bush’s article heralded.

At the very least, those with the lofty goal of improving humanity are going to have to explain  why they’ve chosen networked computing as their augmentation platform of choice, given the costs that we now know explicitly exist. The con side of the ledger can no longer be ignored.

He’s right about one thing: the narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was.

I get lots of emails like this one, which just popped into my inbox.

Dear Mr. Naughton,

I am an intern in [name of publication] and am writing an article about
Google Glass.

Could you please be so kind and answer my following questions, so that I can
metion it in my article?

I suppose you have already watched this video

with first fight and arrest captured on Google Glass. Do you think it is a
start of new citizen journalism?

Can Google Glass affect our everyday life? In what way?

Thanking you in advance.

What always takes me aback about queries like this is the nature of the request. I’m not sure what exactly it signifies — some combination of naivete, innocence, laziness or ignorance, perhaps.

My reply is always a variant on the same theme.

Dear xxx

Thank you for your inquiry.

I’m afraid I’m not going to respond to it for two reasons: (1) your question is too broad and unfocussed, which (2) suggests to me that you haven’t done much research on the subject yourself.

What do you mean by “citizen journalism”, for example? Do you mean “citizen media” or “user-generated content”? This topic has been a major one for nearly ten years. There are lots of interesting books and publications — online and offline — about it.

(Journalism isn’t just about posting something to the Internet — it’s about fact-checking, corroborating, evaluating, doing quality-control on information before publishing etc.)

I suggest that you first do some research into Google Glass yourself (after all, that’s what the Internet is for) rather than expecting experts to do it for for you. Then, if you have identified some focussed questions for which you really do need expert answers, by all means come back to me.

Best

John

Another interesting thing about today’s inquiry is that I don’t think the inquirer had seen this blog. If s/he had, then s/he would have noticed the post immediately below this!

The least one should expect is that people who ask questions of someone should Google them first.

I’m not being deliberately snooty, by the way. When students (or interns) write to me with carefully thought-out questions, or if they provide some convincing evidence that they have tried and failed to find something, then I try to be really helpful. But I am not doing donkey-work for some rich kid whose daddy has arranged a nice cushy internship for him or her.