Islands In The Clickstream

David MacMichael is a former CIA Analyst, US Marine and historian. He was a senior estimates officer with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA’s National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. He resigned from the CIA rather than falsify reports for political reasons and testified at the World Court on the [...]

Steven Miles is a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His forthcoming book, which has the working title Oath Betrayed: Military Medicine and the War on Terror, stemmed from his attempt to learn why the U.S. medical staff in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay did not report or intervene to [...]

So this morning we are told they could not find a bunk for Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter jailed for keeping her sources confidential, and she had to sleep on the floor of her cell.
Meanwhile Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth Corporation returned to luxurious surroundings after being acquitted on all counts in [...]

S. Eugene Poteat, President of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) is no fool. A senior CIA official for thirty years, now retired, Poteat was a scientific intelligence officer and program manager for special reconnaissance systems for the U-2, SR-71, and other reconnaissance vehicles. He received the CIA’s Medal of Merit and the [...]

The San Jose Mercury News reports that “Gary Webb, a former Mercury News investigative reporter, author and legislative staffer who ignited a firestorm with his controversial stories, died Friday in an apparent suicide in his suburban Sacramento home. He was 49.”
I was heartsick. Just knowing that Webb was alive was enough to keep me [...]

With a million birds chirping away in the digital trees, do we really need to hear another voice?
Or is the pleasure of singing – even in an empty auditorium – sufficient reward?
Listening to our own voices can have different effects. We can think we have something to say … we can become grandiose [...]

The number isn’t important, friends have been saying when I talk about turning sixty. Some say, age is only a state of mind. Some say, you’re as young as you feel. Some say, age doesn’t matter.
And some say, why, you look great! which unfortunately confirms that there really are three stages of life: youth, [...]

Ever since I was taught in Philosophy 101 that space, time and causality, according to Immanuel Kant, are woven into our perceptual field, embedded in how we construct a virtual domain in which we live as if it is “out there,” I have felt like the proverbial gorilla that was taught to draw. Given [...]

James Jesus Angleton embodied the inevitable trajectory of a person committed to counterintelligence. Maybe he got a little crazy at the end but that might explain why we are all getting a little crazy too.
Angleton was director of counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954 until 1974. Fans of spy fiction might think of him [...]

“Is that how you experience Israel?” asked my friend when I shared what I wrote about a week in Tel Aviv and Eilat. “With all the bombs, guns, and weapons, it sounds more like Texas!”
I was in Israel to keynote the security track of an annual Microsoft Israel conference. I arrived in Tel Aviv [...]

It feels like that moment when Obi-Wan Kenobi suddenly lowered his head as if he had a bad headache and said he sensed a disturbance in the force.
In that Star Wars episode, Obi-Wan was feeling the explosion of a planet and the dying of all its inhabitants.
It’s hard to stay in denial [...]

The internet like a kaleidoscope unceasingly juxtaposes images in different patterns. Turning on the computer in the morning is almost like casting the I ching or throwing bones. Sometimes the images form a coherent picture of everyday reality, but sometimes …. sometimes they illuminate a crazy place.
Three translucent images came to the desktop [...]

“I am obsessed with the body,” Isabel Letelier said. “I turned from painting to sculpture because I needed to work with something I could feel. Bodies are so open, so vulnerable, so easy to abuse.”
Isabel Letelier had just read my column (When Should You Tell the Kids?) about proposals to use torture to elicit [...]

Bruce Schneier, the author of Applied Cryptography and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, told me that he can not walk through a department store without seeing security as a challenge. How, he asks himself, can he outwit the coded tags and markers, surveillance cameras, and guards? That’s what gets his juices flowing.
That mindset is [...]

Some things are so obvious they are invisible.
Prophets see them, prophets like Marshall McLuhan who lived between two eras and had the courage to say what he saw. Hence he was ridiculed, caricatured, and for a generation, largely forgotten. It’s all there in his breakthrough works – The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media [...]

I thought it was just me, but after speaking with a colleague, I’m not so sure.
Something has happened.
It isn’t one of the obvious things – the end of the illusion of being safe on the North American landmass, for example – but something more elusive.
Whatever it is, it’s the source of fluttering qualms [...]

In the world of computer security, it’s called the cycle of complacency.
A critical incident – the NIMDA virus disrupts networks or a worm takes advantage of unpatched systems to install a trojan horse – raises the level of urgency. Everyone works overtime. A crisis mentality governs the workspace, and for once, everybody pays [...]

Network warfare requires that we identify nodes in a net and the links between them, then systematically degrade, transform or destroy both nodes and links. Cyberwar in all of its manifestations is a metaphor for the network wars in which we are currently engaged. The Internet once again shows the dye in the arteries [...]

Be alert! the President of the United States told its citizens. Then he added, go back to your normal lives.
Between those two suggestions, however, is a great gulf, and our task now is to build the multi-dimensional stairways of an Escher etching from our “normal lives” (as we once innocently called them) to the [...]

That may not sound like an affirmation, but it is.
Sometimes No is the shortest route to Yes.
A colleague, for example, recently included this quote from a “success expert” in his newsletter:
“Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon … must inevitably come to pass!”That sounds like a lot of heavy [...]

In the last Islands in the Clickstream, On the Dark Side of the Moon, I quoted a friend who said: “Ants don’t know that dogs exist.”
To which a reader responded:
“The tasks at hand are relatively insignificant once I’ve glimpsed the shadow of the dog and my brain struggles toward the brilliant light behind the [...]

“I always thought I was a cynic,” author and journalist Gary Webb told me, “but my colleagues insisted I was an idealist.”
We were talking about the power of the national security state which has evolved since World War II and which had punished Webb for exposing the links between drug trafficking by the CIA, [...]

Games Engineers Play was one of the first Islands-in-the-Clickstream columns I wrote. In it I observed that a society socializes its young through games, teaching them through play the attitudes and skills we want them to have. Those of us who have grown to middle age through the current technological revolution have learned to [...]

The danger with taking the moral high ground is that, once you take it, you no longer have it.
Saul Alinksy, a great community organizer, was committed to delivering power into the hands of the powerless. He worked to create structures that would shift the flow toward the dispossessed. He was an engineer of the [...]