In Orwell’s 1984, the citizens live with omnipresent telescreens that push propaganda and act as a monitoring camera and microphone. The screens hung on walls; today we carry them in our pockets and pay for the privilege of doing so.
Back when I worked in security, I regularly encountered things that just left me shaking my head, “why would anyone want to do this?” It made me feel increasingly distanced and out of touch with the industry/community, as the decision-making herd went thundering off over the horizon, ignoring the sign that said “cliff.”
The US has tried to assert its colonial dominance over the internet, and has acted as though it is its domain since the beginning. That has had a lot of policy implications, and has created a “karma debt” that I think we are only starting to confront.
The first time I saw this, I mis-read it as “Lemmy”, which – as you will see – would be double plus epic. But it’s still pretty good.
King Arthur was mortally wounded as a result of a military accident; allegedly his forces and Mordred’s were facing eachother in a state of high tension and one of the soldiers saw an adder, drew his sword to kill it, and everyone mis-read the waving steel and the battle began.
There is a huge battle between Microsoft and Amazon over who gets to control the future of government computing. To me, the whole thing looks utterly surreal.
Military technology has a short life-span; anyone who has an advantage immediately becomes a target for spies and scientists trying to figure out what makes it tick. And archeology shows us that military technology breakthroughs spread extremely rapidly, because they are a matter of literal life and death.
A few months ago, I got a request from an old friend in the security world, to come teach a class for a group of young women that are being jump-started with an “information security boot camp” that is being run under the aegis of NASA.
A lawyer I was working for once described the doctrine of estoppel as “Seriously, now, who are you trying to kid?”
You probably recall the NSA’s lie about that they were only monitoring citizen’s “metadata” during their illegal data-collection program.