Islands In The Clickstream

Ferg’s Law (reprised)

May 1, 2009

This is how the Internet works: Somebody in Kentucky finds one of my columns and asks to reprint it in a newsletter. Our email exchange begins a dialogue – in this case, on Buddhism, on-line spirituality, and how the world works – and in one of her exchanges, my email pal says, “I have a [...]

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Thanksgiving 2006

November 28, 2006

By Richard Thieme Thanksgiving 2006 Part One This final Islands in the Clickstream is an attempt to arrive at an expression of thanksgiving (a holiday in America last week) by a most orthogonal route. First of all, I am keenly aware of gratitude toward people who manage some online lists in which I am allowed [...]

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An Interview with David MacMichael

April 19, 2006

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 illegalities [...]

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A Quiet Betrayal

January 26, 2006

I was speaking recently with a historian at one of our intelligence agencies. I asked if there was a period of time we could discuss openly and he said he would talk about anything that happened up to the Second World War. Since I was born in 1944, he was saying, in effect, that if [...]

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The Torture-endangered Society

January 18, 2006

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 stop [...]

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High Time for Torture

December 20, 2005

Torture is all the rage these days, getting plenty of ink in the liberal press, as if it’s something new. It’s not. We have been torturing one another for centuries. Our intelligence professionals have perfected the means and the methods and have created opportunities for learning how to do it right. Torture, from beating, lacerating, [...]

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An Old Hand Reflects on More Than Judith Miller

July 14, 2005

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 his [...]

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Booting Up

April 27, 2005

Sharon Begley’s science column on Fridays in the Wall Street Journal is a constant delight. She frequently illuminates research that has profound implications for the future of human identity and behavior, often derived from biology or physics. Biology, of course, is displacing computer technology as the sexy domain for mind-boggling inquiry. Several years ago I [...]

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I Was a Victim of the KGB

March 16, 2005

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 NRO’s [...]

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The Meaning of Sacrifice

December 20, 2004

Words are used frequently today to mean exactly the opposite of what they mean. So maybe we need to remind ourselves that sacrifice means … sacrifice. To make a sacrifice means being willing to sacrifice ourselves. It means giving up our time, our energy, even our lives. It doesn’t have to be splashy. It can [...]

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Gary Webb is Dead

December 13, 2004

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 [...]

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The Battle Not to Rage or Despair

December 13, 2004

This is NOT about the election. I know it might sound like it is. Lots of people feel those feelings. They’re walking around in shellshock, unable to take in that all of their energy, all of their work resulted in even more conservatives taking over every area of government, that they live in a country [...]

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To Blog or Not to Blog

November 23, 2004

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 [...]

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Quiet American

September 6, 2004

Now that “Islands in the Clickstream” columns have been published as a book, it is time to explore tangents that illuminate the deeper implications of technology as well as write reflections. This review describes the work of Aaron Ximm and his Quiet American web site. Ximm’s award-winning “found sound” constitute exquisite islets in the clickstream, [...]

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Coming of Age

March 23, 2004

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, [...]

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Talking to Ourselves

January 14, 2004

Once upon a time in the sixties, I published a short story in Analog Science Fiction about a man who invented a virtual reality machine and let a carnival owner try it out. The carnival owner was so hypnotized by the fantasy world and its contrast with the grim realities of his life that he [...]

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Spacetime, Seen as a Digital Image, Already Fading

October 14, 2003

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 paper [...]

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A Miracle By Any Other Name

September 20, 2003

If any column is about “the human dimension of technology,” it’s this one, inasmuch as last week, my beloved youngest son Barnaby had more tubes in him, more drips dripping, more monitors flashing around him than a cyborg out of Terminator 3. When I arrived at the ICU and saw, moving among the noisy machinery, [...]

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Why We Are All Getting a Little Crazy

September 5, 2003

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 [...]

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Moral Schmoral

August 17, 2003

One way a government mobilizes support for morally dubious actions is to make those actions sound like the right thing to do. Decisions made for other reasons entirely, for reasons of strategy, say, or economic advantage, are cloaked in religious rhetoric, and when our leaders claim the moral high ground, we the people want to [...]

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The Brain Needs Time to Catch Up With the Body

May 8, 2003

“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 [...]

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Looking Through the One-way Mirror

April 22, 2003

Narcissism is endless, and deadly. When narcissists look around, like God on the seventh day of creation, they love what they see because everything looks good. But all they see is themselves. Think of relationships you have had with narcissists. After a while, it feels like we’re on the outside of a one-way mirror looking [...]

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The Problem of Empathy

March 26, 2003

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 when [...]

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A House Divided

February 13, 2003

A house divided against itself can not stand. Nor can a people, half slave, half free, long endure. Or we might say in a network-centric world: a society divided between those who manage surveillance, intrusion and data-mining on behalf of the rest of us – and the rest of us, who lack access to the [...]

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In the Crazy Place

February 7, 2003

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 the [...]

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Whistleblowers and Team Players

January 17, 2003

It was only after whistleblowers came out of the closet during the Great Deflation that Time Magazine honored the practice of what team players call “ratting out your pals.” Conservative magazines like Time may give lip service to whistleblowing in the abstract but never champion whistle blowers until after they have sung. Instead they support [...]

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Flesh

October 11, 2002

“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 [...]

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When Should You Tell the Kids?

October 4, 2002

A newsletter for former intelligence officers (no, I am not one, I just read it) contained two requests this week from researchers. One is a Washington Post intelligence reporter who wants information about “that particular moment in a clandestine agent’s life when he/she tells the children what they really do for a living.” The other [...]

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Do Terrorists Really Have More Fun?

September 26, 2002

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 [...]

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The Crazy Lady on the Treadmill

September 19, 2002

We’ve all had the experience by now. Someone next to us – in this case, the lady on the treadmill at the fitness center – suddenly starts laughing. She didn’t snicker as if she had just thought of something funny. No. She laughed loudly for a long long time. Laughter is a social event. When [...]

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Cotton Wool as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

September 12, 2002

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 – [...]

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The Spiritual Challenge

July 24, 2002

Since the terror attack of September 11 brought to the forefront of American awareness the truth about the kind of world in which we live, which many Americans had managed to deny despite the evidence, I have watched and participated in what we might call the flexing of the American soul as it comes to [...]

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The End of Something

June 15, 2002

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 [...]

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The Horror of War

March 16, 2002

The horror of war comes in many forms. The more obvious horrors include picking up body parts as you dig through dust and rubble or trying to heal somehow the endlessness of grief or wanting to diminish the bitter rage that fuels a desire for revenge. Everybody knows those horrors. It’s the more subtle horrors [...]

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The Cycle of Complacency

December 14, 2001

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 attention. [...]

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Lest We Forget

November 23, 2001

Life is a dynamic process, not a steady state, so things are always in motion, including ourselves. Maybe that’s why Aristotle said the Golden Mean is something we see only when we look back over our shoulders as we tack past it, trying to sail closer to the wind. And maybe that’s why, when we [...]

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Doing What’s Necessary

November 23, 2001

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 of [...]

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The Power Grid

October 13, 2001

There’s an apocryphal story about an American officer who fought in the Viet Nam War. His troops, it is said, often saw him standing in the smoke of battle with his eyes closed, looking as focussed as Yoda discerning a disturbance in the Force. This is what he said he was doing.He was sorting aspects [...]

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Be Alert

September 27, 2001

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 [...]

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Battlespace

September 18, 2001

The mind of society – how it is shaped, how it is governed, how it is aimed – is both target and weapon in the new battlespace. As a consequence, spiritual warfare with all of its dimensions is fused more deeply than ever with the waging of war.I gave a speech last July for the [...]

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No No No

September 10, 2001

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 [...]

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What’s His Name

August 12, 2001

I have never had a single original idea. I recently came to this humbling truth from two directions. The first was triggered by a recent article on the evolution of modular programming. Alan Kay is a name frequently connected to that event. Kay has had a brilliant career. One biography states that he is “one [...]

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The Shadow of the Dog

June 1, 2001

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 [...]

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On the Dark Side of the Moon

May 22, 2001

I’ve been lucky. Mentors and friends have shown up at critical moments of my life to offer conversations that help me find my way. You’re never too old, I guess, to receive some balance and perspective from a wiser elder. Even when the conversation sounds a little wild. The talk at the coffee shop this [...]

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The Silence of the Lambs

May 8, 2001

“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, [...]

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Interpretation

April 13, 2001

When living systems – including people like us – spontaneously reorganize themselves, we call it hierarchical restructuring. Systems seem to be hardwired to do this when they become overwhelmed or baffled. It’s as if life itself provides a Zen koan that confronts our reasoning with a puzzle that reasoning cannot solve. Some begin the process [...]

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Child’s Play

April 3, 2001

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 partner [...]

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The Next Bend of the River

December 5, 2000

A younger friend called recently to discuss his perplexity as he moves through what we sometimes call “the age thirty transition.” This is a time of coming to terms with the growing awareness that our twenties, which we thought meant adulthood, was really a kind of post-adolescence. Around thirty, the upward call of taking our [...]

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Hactivism and Soul Power

November 21, 2000

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 [...]

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A Model for Managing Multiple Selves

September 20, 2000

Just about everybody knows by now that our interaction with networked computers has created a different sense of ourselves. Our lives are affected powerfully by what we experience online and we think and act as if we are online even when we are off. The wiring gets changed around inside. We become nodes in a [...]

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