I’ve been turning some things over in my mind for the last couple of months, things that I’m having trouble explaining. Key points: Bradley Manning. William Gibson’s No Map For These Territories. The CIA’s Curing Analytical Pathologies. The HBGary break in. Charles Stross’s Accelerando.
This isn’t going to be coherent. Don’t read it. Seriously.
I wrote The Fallacy Of Cyberspace and Human Endeavors In Cyberspace sequentially last fall, three weeks before the election. I have to remind people, myself included, that cyberspace is a concept William Gibson invented because he didn’t know how to write dialogue with moving characters. I have to remind people, myself included, that we evolved in hunter gatherer bands.
The CIA’s Curing Analytical Pathologies opened my eyes with one concept: the Cold War was about denied areas, while today what we face are denied minds.
Look at Bradley Manning. Seven years into a bloody adventure where there is no “win” this denied mind slipped a rewritable CD into a SIPRnet computer and hit the American diplomatic corps as hard as the recent tsunami hit Japan. The Wikileaks cables, like Fukushima, continue to simmer and spew radioactive waste into international relations.
Look at HBGary. Aaron Barr, a creature of the American military/industrial complex, sought to apply the methods of signal intelligence to social media. A denied area technique applied in a sketchy fashion to cyberspace yielded not a victory, but a deadly return stroke. His career is wasted, his company destroyed, and they are just first domino in something that must end in dramatic disarray. There is some question as to whether humans or corporate personae will carry the day, but like Wikileaks things have been set in motion which can not be stilled.
We have No Maps For These Territories.
Humans have only been able to speak to each other at a distance for about a century. Machines interacting at a distance have been around for about fifty years. Machines that can autonomously act have been around for about twenty five years. We simply haven’t had time to internalize this almost magical action at a distance that we have created.
Our military industrial complex was built to deal with a cryptic, monolithic, slow moving opponent: the former Soviet Union. They have no idea how to deal effectively with insurgency - we proved that in Vietnam. They are struggling … and failing … to deal with the world of Bradley Manning and HBGary.
It is not possible in the evolved human’s experience to speak or act at a distance. We do this every day now. It is not possible in the evolved humans’ experience for an intangible thing in an odd corner of our world to completely unmake everything at the middle, but both Bradley Manning and whomever cracked HBGary did just that.
Those who have taken up the duties of protecting us simply don’t know what to do from an operational and political position. The best hope for safe systems are diverse, distributed, compartmentalized. This isn’t how our military does things and it doesn’t fit the corporate desire to consolidate and eliminate smarts with automation. What is safe is what a criminal gang or terrorist cell would do.
We may well be facing the beginning of the end of the nation state in a role of primacy. Corporations have long whittled their power with their sheer bulk. Bradley Manning and HBGary taught the whole world one hacker with a mix of luck or skill can accomplish dramatic change in the blink of an eye. Consider how this works for someone used to defending denied areas - what good is a mechanized infrantry division surrounding something important if a single stroke of a butterfly’s wing half a world a way can wipe out the target?
This is what we face today. We can’t defend against it without giving up our civil liberties. We can’t defend against it without badly curtailing our service economy. We can’t defend against it without alerting the slumbering masses as to just how dangerous this stuff really is. Even if we did all these things we wouldn’t completely stop up the potential hazards. And we’d just be adding to the pool of disgruntled, skilled folk who might take it upon themselves to do something.
Our ancestors a millennium ago had words for those who could wield tremendous forces across a distance: sorcerer. Maybe they’ve always been with us, down through the ages, subtle and quick to anger, pursuing their own mysterious goals. Never before have they been so numerous and so aggressive.