A licence to abuse: Max Bowden on Abu Ghraib

“The scenes depicted in the photographs are a graphic example of what often takes place in a prison environment where controls and supervision are inadequate. Prison guards have been abusing inmates for as long as there have been prisons. In a now infamous 1971 psychological experiment at Stanford University, in which one randomly selected group of students was permitted to play the role of “guards” over another group of “inmates,” abuses began almost immediately, and at one point involved forcing inmates into sexually humiliating role-playing. People don’t like to admit it, but the propensity for cruelty is in all of us, and it rises to the surface for many when they are given complete authority over other human beings. Add the unique environment of war, in which culture, religion, race, ethnicity, and ideology often separate guards from prisoners, and abuses are sadly and extremely likely.

The fact that the pictures were taken at all, and the cheerful expressions on the faces of the American bullies, suggest an atmosphere in which these soldiers had no reason to fear being punished for their behavior. It seems doubtful that the photos were meant to be used later to intimidate other prisoners, as has been suggested. If that had been so, the guards would probably have tried to look threatening. These photos have the appearance of grotesque souvenirs. The smiling faces of the tormentors suggest that apart from lacking moral judgment, these soldiers felt licensed to abuse.” [From The Atlantic.]

In Camera

At the head of Alan Hollinghurst’s interesting review of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood is this picture of Isherwood and W.H. Auden setting off for China.

Note the Smoking carriage sign behind them — sign of a vanished age. Being a photographic buff, my eye fell immediately on the camera hanging languidly from Auden’s neck. It’s a Leica. Shows impeccable taste. And then I was reminded of the famous Dorothy Parker joke. She reviewed Isherwood’s book, I Am a Camera, in one line. “Me no Leica”.

Unearthed images

A friend of Dervala’s was clearing out an old hard drive and came on some evocative photographs of the World Trade Center towers, including this lovely one.

She writes:”These are accidental portraits of the buildings that were the city compass (and camera hogs, too). We looked for them whenever we surfaced from the subway or climbed onto a roof deck. We triangulated from them on bridges and in strange conference rooms, and steered by them in tug boats and canoes. The towers were Downtown. More useful than True North, in the self-appointed center of the word.”

Those photographs — again

There’s a fascinating article in The Chronicle by Susan Brison, who teaches philosophy at Dartmouth, on the significance of the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison. She puts them usefully into a wider context. For example:

“The rape of women by invading armies is a well-known tactic of war – so well known that it has typically been taken for granted – but what are we to make of peacekeepers who rape? Do they consider it torture? Apparently not. Michael A. Sells reported, in The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, that ‘in the summer of 1992, U.N. peacekeepers under the command of Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie frequented the rape camp known as Sonja’s Kon-Tiki, in the town of Vogosca near Sarajevo. Even after they learned that the women at the Kon-Tiki were Muslim captives held against their will, abused, and sometimes killed, U.N. peacekeepers continued to take advantage of the women there and to fraternize with their nationalist Serb captors.’

In an interview on National Public Radio, Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, noted that civilian contractors working for DynCorp, a U.S. company hired to train police in the Balkans in the early ’90s, were involved in serious sex crimes, including “owning” young women as sex slaves. The site supervisor was so confident that sexual abuse of women would not be considered torture that he even had himself videotaped raping two young women. (Sound familiar?) Not only were the contractors never charged with criminal activity, but the company was later hired by the United States – to train the police force in post-Saddam Iraq.”

In this connection, guess how many of these private ‘contractors’ there are in Iraq? Answer: 15,000. That’s ten per cent of the total US ‘peacekeeping’ effort.

The way we live now – II

There’s a fatuous example of “lifestyle journalism” in today’s New York Times. Headed “A BlackBerry Throbs, and a Wonk Has a Date”, it’s about how the Blackberry [a portable email device] has become an essential accessory for Washington’s thirtysomething elite. Just listen to the breathless gush of the prose:

“A YEAR ago, Tripp Donnelly saw his BlackBerry as a social liability — an accessory with all the sex appeal of a pocket protector. But now the gadget makes the rounds with Mr. Donnelly, 31, even when he sheds his jacket and tie for a night of barhopping or clubbing. He started keeping it with him when he realized he was missing social e-mail from the growing population of Washington women who were carrying BlackBerries themselves.

‘It’s made it much more efficient, much more direct,’ Mr. Donnelly said of the effect on his love life. ‘A 15-minute phone conversation can be abbreviated into a 10-second, one-sentence e-mail.’ Mr. Donnelly, a Clinton White House staff member who is now a managing director of the wireless communication company InPhonic (which once distributed BlackBerries, but no longer does), said he uses his BlackBerry to correspond with “a handful” of women in Washington and beyond. In one recent exchange, he asked a Bush campaign worker out on a first date.

He: ‘You and me — tomorrow night — dinner.’ She: ‘Sure.’ And that was that.”

There’s lots more in this vein. The piece even has the mandatory 9/11 reference.

“The BlackBerry gained a foothold in Washington two and a half years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks left many in the city incommunicado when cellphone services were overwhelmed. BlackBerries worked fine that day (the proprietary network that carries their signals, for a monthly fee, has far less traffic than the networks used by cellphones), and shortly afterward the House allocated more than $500,000 to outfit its members with them.

Since then, lawmakers have started using their office budgets to provide BlackBerries to even junior staff members. With them, business can be conducted at any hour of the day or night; it is not uncommon, for example, for the staff of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, to receive to-do lists sent from his BlackBerry after midnight. In 2001, perhaps a few dozen BlackBerries were in use on the Hill; there are now more than 5,000.”

The interesting thing about this is why Washington’s policymaking elite clearly hadn’t realised that there was a technology for doing this without resorting to the expense of buying Blackberries. It’s called SMS.

The way we live now

Once upon a time, people went to the office to work. Now…

Persistent inactivity

Last Friday, Cambridge railway station’s display server was again displaying an inactive ‘Active Desktop’. Yesterday, it was still inactive. And here’s how it was this morning:

Wonder how long this will go on. Maybe we should offer them a Linux server?

Parliamentary Selection

Yesterday I went to London to give evidence to the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport — which is considering the future of the BBC and the renewal of its Royal Charter (matters the government must shortly decide). Never having done this before, I prepared carefully, read a lot and pondered as deeply as I could. I also submitted a written statement.

I went expecting to be thoroughly grilled by a group of suspicious and well-informed legislators. Instead there was a genial conversation between the five ‘witnesses’ and members of the Select Committee, few of whom appeared to have given much prior thought to the issues under discussion. It was the opposite of forensic examination. Most of the MPs’ ‘questions’ were combinations of statement, thinking aloud and query. They were unexpectedly courteous and deferential. The Chairman, Gerald Kaufman (who in an earlier life had been Harold Wilson’s Press Secretary — the 1960s equivalent of Alastair Campbell), beamed at us like a benevolent gnome. And proceedings wound up at noon — 30 minutes before we had expected to be released.

As I got up to leave, who should hove into view but Cory Doctorow, now resident in London (a cause for celebration IMHO). He was, like me, dressed in a suit and tie, something I never thought I would see. And he had been forbidden by officials to use his laptop, so had been obliged to sit through the proceedings without touching a keyboard. It was great to see him. We walked up Whitehall together (past police officers armed with Heckler & Koch hardware) while he related the saga of his attempts to get Orange to sell him a mobile phone. Then I took two of my sons to lunch in the Garrick, most of whose members are as genially ignorant of digital technology as were the members of the Select Committee. It seemed a fitting way to end a puzzling day.

Homework

Nonsense on stilts — forthcoming

A clown called Ken Brown, who is president of an outfit called the Alexis de Toqueville Institution, a care-home for right-wing flakes which is funded by Microsoft (among others), has apparently written a book claiming that Linus Torvalds didn’t write Linux and implying that Linux is the beneficiary of IP theft and plagiarism. As someone who researched the history in some depth for my own little history of the Net, I suspected that Brown knew very little about the subject, but until I read Andy Tanenbaum’s riveting account of Brown’s attempt to interview him, I hadn’t realised that he was, as they say, out to lunch.

Andy is a key figure in the story (he wrote MINIX) and knew everyone involved, so when he talks about this stuff, everyone listens. Here’s part of what he says:

“I quickly determined that he [Brown] didn’t know a thing about the history of UNIX, had never heard of the Salus book [on the history of UNIX], and knew nothing about BSD and the AT&T lawsuit. I started to tell him the history, but he stopped me and said he was more interested in the legal aspects. I said: “Oh you mean about Dennis Ritchie’s patent number 4135240 on the setuid bit?” Then I added:”That’s not a problem. Bell Labs dedicated the patent.” That’s when I discovered that (1) he had never heard of the patent, (2) did not know what it meant to dedicate a patent (i.e., put it in the public domain), and (3) really did not know a thing about intellectual property law. He was confused about patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Gratuitously, I asked if he was a lawyer, but it was obvious he was not and he admitted it. At this point I was still thinking he might be a spy from SCO, but if he was, SCO was not getting its money’s worth.

He wanted to go on about the ownership issue, but he was also trying to avoid telling me what his real purpose was, so he didn’t phrase his questions very well. Finally he asked me if I thought Linus wrote Linux. I said that to the best of my knowledge, Linus wrote the whole kernel himself, but after it was released, other people began improving the kernel, which was very primitive initially, and adding new software to the system — essentially the same development model as MINIX. Then he began to focus on this, with questions like: “Didn’t he steal pieces of MINIX without permission.” I told him that MINIX had clearly had a huge influence on Linux in many ways, from the layout of the file system to the names in the source tree, but I didn’t think Linus had used any of my code. Linus also used MINIX as his development platform initially, but there was nothing wrong with that. He asked if I objected to that and I said no, I didn’t, people were free to use it as they wished for noncommercial purposes. Later MINIX was released under the Berkeley license, which freed it up for all purposes. It is still in surprisingly wide use, both for education and in the Third World, where millions of people are happy as a clam to have an old castoff 1-MB 386, on which MINIX runs just fine. The MINIX home page cited above still gets more than 1000 hits a week.

Finally, Brown began to focus sharply. He kept asking, in different forms, how one person could write an operating system all by himself. He simply didn’t believe that was possible. So I had to give him more history, sigh. To start with, Ken Thompson wrote UNICS for the PDP-7 all by himself. When it was later moved to the PDP-11 and rewritten in C, Dennis Ritchie joined the team, but primarily focused on designing the C language, writing the C compiler, and writing the I/O system and device drivers. Ken wrote nearly all of the kernel himself.

In 1983, a now-defunct company named the Mark Williams company produced and sold a very good UNIX clone called Coherent. Most of the work was done by three ex-students from the University of Waterloo: Dave Conroy, Randall Howard, and Johann George. It took them two years. But they produced not only the kernel, but the C compiler, shell, and ALL the UNIX utilities. This is far more work than just making a kernel. It is likely that the kernel took less than a man-year.

In 1983, Ric Holt published a book, now out of print, on the TUNIS system, a UNIX-like system. This was certainly a rewrite since TUNIS was written in a completely new language, concurrent Euclid.

Then Doug Comer wrote XINU. While also not a UNIX clone, it was a comparable system.

In addition, Gary Kildall wrote CP/M by himself and Tim Paterson wrote MS-DOS. While these systems from the early 1980s were not even close to being UNIX-clones, they were substantial and popular operating systems written by individuals.

By the time Linus started, five people or small teams had independently implemented the UNIX kernel or something approximating it, namely, Thompson, Coherent, Holt, Comer, and me. All of this was perfectly legal and nobody stole anything. Given this history, it is pretty hard to make a case that one person can’t implement a system of the complexity of Linux, whose original size was about the same as V1.0 of MINIX.”

In view of this, I’d be surprised if the Brown ‘study’ turned out to be anything other than nonsense on stilts. But given our clueless media, I bet it gets treated seriously. I’m reminded of something Paul Krugman said in a talk about media feebleness he gave at Harvard. If Rush Limbaugh claimed the world was flat, said Krugman, the US media would interview a scientist and then write a story under the headline “Some say world is flat, others disagree”. Just wait and see this happen with the Brown book.