erroneous thoughts

One of the covers of this book (the one reproduced below), has the following quote on the top of the page:

I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year

While I don’t know if that quote’s author meant either this year (2009) or the last one (when the book was published), in my case, it applies to both.

Drawing some elements from what’s arguably its predecessor, the novel is first and foremost, actual. It depicts, although in an exaggeratedly fast pace, changes that we are already starting to see happening throughout the world. In a bigger or smaller scale, the trend is always the same: increased surveillance, dwindling privacy and in some cases, free speech as well. The reason? Security and fighting against global terrorism.

This should be cause to widespread public discussions on topics such as privacy (both off and online), surveillance (idem), security, and the role of the internet in modern societies. But that has yet to happen (the “widespread” part at least) — probably because despite these changes being rolled out fast, they’re not fast enough:

If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser.

By fast-forwarding reality, the Little Brother will hopefully produce the same effect as reducing the time span during which the refrigerator has to go from a low hum to full blown soprano: the change will get noticed. Noticed in a way that prompts to action. And that action starts with realising that forfeiting your freedom to get security is useless (if not downright counter-productive). It starts with daring to be free, even when it’s the opposite passive subservience that becomes social norm (as it increasingly is). Here technology, while far from being enough on its own, does play a key role. And this is the other big plus of the book: despite being small (<400 pages), it's full of practical examples on to use technology to attain that goal. Now if on the one hand, tech-savvy readers will point out that some things have been (very) oversimplified, on the other hand the author does a great a job of explaining non-trivial technical ideas to a lay audience, mainly through the use of very good analogies.

The book is available for free here. Find some time and go read it. The fast-paced style will glue to the screen. When the soreness in your eyes gets you, order the dead tree version, and then read the rest. It’ll be a worthwhile read, because besides an engaging story, the whole book is a call to daring to be free. For while freedom is a right today, it is not (and never has been) a right without a price. And a part of that price is not being indifferent to it — i.e. daring to use it.

So things have been quiet for a while. A big while. I was involved in a pretty big project, that ended in the meantime, and in that meantime off I went in vacations.

But far from me the thought of minds being left idle, here’s something to churn those surplus neurons: If only gay sex caused global warming.

Yup, you read that correctly. It’s a small article, that I first heard of while reading a not so small book, that revolves around the reasons of why we (as a species, but I’m guessing the author meant US americans in particular) care so much about terrorism, and so little about global warming:

The odds of this [global warming] happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

Now, if indeed gay sex (or anything else that goes against established moral rules) caused global warming, we would mobilize and demand action be taken, for “Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action.” This is indeed one of the problems with global warming: “It doesn’t cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively)“, and that’s also the reason for the article’s name.

The author deals with three more problems that threaten to render global warming into oblivion — at least while it doesn’t come back for revenge. First, “global warming lacks a mustache” — seriously. We tend to overestimate big time threats that come from other humans, while systematically underestimating those not related to human intent, viz. natural disasters. Indeed “If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.” Secondly, environmentalists’ discourse to the contrary, global warming is not happening fast enough — fast enough for us to actually realize it, in a “oh my God we need to DO SOMETHING about this” kind of way.

The third reason, which is the one besides this post’s title, has to do our good old brains. If they originally evolved to allow better and quicker responses to a changing environment, we now have within our grasp the ability of not only responding to environmental changes, but also predict them before they actually happen. But there’s the rub:

But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

I guess it remains to be seen if we can drop off the beta before falling victim of what might well prove to be the ultimate software bug.

… to go unnoticed. And the following comment, posted in this Slashdot thread, is surely one of them:

The Bush administration has shit all over the Constitution and this country. They have committed treason.

That’s not what scares me (or any other onlooker from Europe or the rest of the world).

What scares us is that you shitheads let them get away with it. You almost impeached a president for lying about a blowjob, but you don’t take down an administration that is actively dismantling everything your ancestors fought and died for.

The thread deals about an article where this idiot says he wants 1984 in the good old US of A.

Personally, what scares me the most is that when I read this, I though of a lecture given by Stallman, where he says something like this: “Americans have the bad habit of instead of solving their problems, they focus more on imposing the same problems onto the rest of the world”. He said this referring to copyright laws, but it’d be naive (to put it mildly) to think they’ll stop there…

Cory Doctorow has written a piece on what would happen if Google… well, stopped not being evil. The short essay describes a hypothetical association between Google and Department of Homeland Security, a recent security US security agency. Although I’ve not finished reading it, the think the most amazed me was, how plausible the described scenario is. I’m not saying it is (or it is not) true. I’m saying that unlike some other dystopian scenarios, this one, despite being an extreme one, looks surprisingly plausible.

WHAT IF GOOGLE WERE EVIL? Cory Doctorow imagines the worst

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” —Google CEO Eric Schmidt

I might further edit this post after I finish reading the essay…

EDIT: I am now writing a couple of days after the initial post. I’ve finished reading it, and while I did not actually enjoyed the end (seemed a little far fetched, reminded me of the ending of Brave New World…) the essay itself is a joy to read. I wonder what Google guys must have thought of this… I mean, I’ve never worked at Google (though I did apply once…), but from I’ve read, it appears that most of the guys of work there, enjoys their work very much. For instance, quoting Peter Norvig, here’s what he says about his own job (he is currently Director of Reseach at Google):

Note to recruiters: Please don’t offer me a job. I already have the best job in the world at the best company in the world. Note to engineers and researchers: see why you should apply to help.

And this “working enthusiasm”, lacking a better description, appears to be pervasive at Google. So how can an IT company with such devoted workers come so close to ending privacy worldwide? This is not an easy question, but I think that this may be similar to judging the nature of scientific developments: it depends not only on the developments per se, but also on the use that they are given.The scientific development in discussion here is a great search engine, one whose greatness is only surpassed by the enormous abuse possibilities (as so many science and technological wonders before it). I think they new this for a while back, and that may have been one of the reasons for their world famous motto: “Don’t be evil”. But they already caved to Chinese censorship laws, and with the US becoming a more police state as each day goes by, one can only become wary of possibilities… Reminds me of a quote by Reagan that I previously posted:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free

A final note to say that subcontracting intelligence gathering to the private sector, something referred to in the essay, is not fiction; it is a proposed measure by the US government (will post link to it when I find it).

This is one of the articles in Slashdot today:

The BBC has a nice high-level overview of some technologies for surveillance developed in the US and the UK. ‘The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game …

And this is one of the comments:

 

 

This reminds me of my youth in Poland.

(Score:5, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16, @09:19PM (#20630867)

I grew up in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the sort of shit we dealt with each day.

The Communists claimed to have devices that could read minds to determine one’s intentions. Now, we didn’t know if this was true or not. But seeing as many of us wanted to live another day, or at the very least not get tortured, we assumed they did.

It seems that the citizenry of the UK and the US are now in a very similar position….

Funny how the tables can turn in such little time… makes one wary of what freedoms can you really take for granted these days…

The million dollars (or euros, pounds, or what have you) question. And the answer:

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And the sad reality (from the same article):

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

That link goes to an excellent post by Bruce Schneier, one that more people should be aware of. It explains why taking away people’s freedom is not a proper response to terrorism (nor an effective one, at that). This last ideia is further developed here:

One problem with securing the nation is the scope of the threat. Terrorists can attack airplanes, sports stadiums, water reservoirs, power plants, chemical storage facilities – the possibilities are endless. Securing the air transportation system isn’t much of a solution, because countermeasures that aren’t comprehensive are of limited value: If you want to defend targets, you have to defend them all. Protect half the reservoirs and the others will still be at risk. Protect all of them, and the sports stadiums are still vulnerable.

From the same post, comes the following:

The only effective way to deal with terrorists is through old-fashioned police and intelligence work – discovering plans before they’re implemented and then going after the plotters themselves. Every arrest of an al Qaeda member weakens the organization. Every country that’s unwilling to harbor such individuals interferes with its operation. Of course, we still need some perimeter defenses around airports and government buildings. But more damage was done to al Qaeda by disrupting its funding and communications than by all the guards and ID checks in the US combined.

Both posts are strongly recommended reading. As a final note, the last post starts by putting some proportion around the WTC bombings:

Terrorist attacks are very rare. So rare, in fact, that the odds of being the victim of one in an industrialized country are almost nonexistent. And most attacks affect only a few people. The events of September 11 were a statistical anomaly. Even counting the toll they took, 2,978 people in the US died from terrorism in 2001. That same year, 157,400 Americans died of lung cancer, 42,116 in road accidents, and 3,454 from malnutrition.

Makes one wonder, does it not? But then again, proportions mean what they mean. Joseph Stalin put it best:

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic