Well, good afternoon and welcome to another one of our security seminars.
Our speaker today is difficult to introduce.
I've known him for years, I've read many of the things he's done.
And he's actually written and spoken about so many different topics.
Sort of the state of computing and human consciousness, religion, the changing impact of technology on society and a number of other areas that are absolutely fascinating.
And he also brings this to bear on how security and privacy are being changed by the things we do.
So we have a title for the talk, Security, Soft Boundaries, and Oh-So-Subtle Strategies, which may or may not have bearing on the content of the talk.
Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my friend Richard Thieme.
Thank you, Richard.
Thank you very much.
I'm going to move out from here just because that feels like a huge barrier.
I'll go back to it to pick up some things from time to time.
So forgive me for carrying notes.
It's great to be here.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit of my story too in the course of this conversation because it's relevant to what we're talking about.
I started life in English literature.
I taught literature at the University of Illinois in my 20s.
I went back to school.
Some people can't help it.
And keep going back and did a Masters of Divinity.
Became an Episcopal priest.
I did that for 16 years.
And I bought my son an apple too when he was 12 years old.
And we started playing with the apple.
And because I knew how literature worked, and I knew how text worked, in a book, in the technology of book, and I knew how people interacted with the book, and then how in the ministry you use the technology of the word as mediated through the printing press to create community and create structures of social and cultural and emotional feeling for people in which they lived unconsciously,
not noticing that they were in them.
So that when I interacted with that apple too, playing a text adventure game, I mean, you guys are all into graphic games, right?
But in the golden day, Infocom created text adventure games of which probably the greatest is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Any of you played that?
Thank you.
And it's wonderful, especially played in all green caps, blocky letters on a small dark screen.
And while I was playing that game with him, I had a little epiphany.
I realized that not only was I being changed in how I thought, I was being changed in how I was.
That the psychic structure that I thought of as me was being subtly altered by interacting with text through the mediating symbol manipulating machine called a computer.
And I suddenly flashed on the fact that if everybody sat in front of one of these or began to embed them in all the structures of our lives, it would be a transformation as big as speech, writing, and the printing press.
And indeed it was.
So I began writing about the transformation of religious experiences and the transformation of spirituality, the transformation of religion per se.
And I'll talk about that a little bit because it's relevant to evolving ethical norms for working on computers because you're talking about trying to think about ethics at the same time that the framework or foundation of your ethical systems which are embedded in or rooted in those religious systems are also in the process of fundamental transformation on their way to becoming something else for which we really do not yet have names.
So as a result of that, I wrote a piece called Computer Applications for Spirituality, the Transformation of Religious Experience.
I sent it to the foremost Episcopalian Anglican Theological Review.
Predictably, I got it back with notes in the margin that said, he must be crazy.
God forbid!
And who does he think he is?
So you know you're on the right track, right, when you get that kind of response.
Put the thing away.
There was nowhere else to publish it.
No one would publish it.
Five years later, seven years later, I don't remember exactly, a new editor went to that same journal.
I didn't change a word.
I just sent it back.
And I have a second letter from them saying, this is so cutting edge.
This is so far-seeing.
And they published it to no comment whatsoever.
Now, the simple truth is, I was working in church structures, all churches.
Excuse me.
Hi, Victor.
How are you?
Would you like to say a few words to the television land?
No.
No problem.
This is what happens when you're middle-aged.
You pause, you go off on a cul-de-sac, and then you return, ah, I was talking about my essay and how it was no longer timely because my references to Moos and Mushes and the kinds of AI I referenced were no longer relevant.
And I was about to say that all religious structures, it doesn't matter what they are or what religion, are a little slow on the uptake because their structures require fixity and persistence in order to make the claims that they make.
I believe the Catholic Church recently apologized to Galileo.
That's 400-plus years after the fact.
I'm not going to be able to wait that long.
So, in a nutshell, I left the ministry to speak and write full-time about these issues and found my insights into how religion was transforming.
Luckily, the timing being right, the early 90s, people were just beginning to interact with computers in a way that made the social, economic, political implications of this interaction relevant to them in their lives.
So I could get jobs, and I could help people understand that if they didn't get with this new program, they were going to be in deep trouble.
What I was fundamentally really hammering at was, to me, axiomatic.
It was about the cultural and the social and the psychological framework in which we habitually live without thinking about it.
The unconscious presuppositions that our cultures and our frameworks give to us.
But you have to become conscious, during times of radical transformation, of what the context is.
You have to turn the context into content.
That's a theme that I'll probably repeat a few times.
You have to turn the context into content in order to see it, because then it can become an object of manipulation, thought, and leverage.
Whereas if you don't, it affects you, but you don't affect it in the same way.
And this is why Marshall McLuhan said one of the things he meant, I think, by there is absolutely no inevitability to anything, as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
In other words, if you're willing to step back and see the big picture, and take a really clear look at what is going on, nothing is inevitable, because it renders it all plastic and even liquid in your hands.
And you can master it in significant ways.
So, all of our systems, our human systems, are means, one way or another, built on, I believe, means of exchanging knowledge, information, and energy.
And I think information and energy are essentially the same things.
Information is energy that has become conscious of itself in a form that we call matter.
And really, there's almost nothing else in the universe, once you look at it that way.
So, with our systems of information, we're in a symbiotic relationship.
I love the way Marvin Minsky looked at that.
He looked at the fact that we are so interactively embedded in the systems that we use, that we build them, and then they build us.
And then we inflect them again, and then they inflect us.
But, he said, with prescience, I believe, that looking ahead at what computing was going to do to the world, that if you did not interact with a computer, you were essentially going to be incapable of thinking.
He asked the question, what do we mean by thinking?
And he said, thinking is the capacity to hold simultaneously in your mind a multiplicity of representations of reality, while you sift and sort them, and apply them here and there, now and again, to the various experiences your senses and state of your life brings to you,
so you can say which of these is a good enough map for now.
That's what we mean.
You can't be fundamentalist or literalist about any of those representations of reality.
You must hold them lightly in your mind.
Where, then, he asked, is thinking taking place now, and where is it going to be taking place?
It is going to be taking place on the web.
It is going to be taking place in the net.
It is going to be taking place in the matrix.
Whatever you want to call the metaphorical attributes that we've come to accept.
Now, you think nothing of doing what you're doing in front of laptops and with cell phones, and broadcasting this conversation.
But only 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, it was a radical confrontation with people who had been contextualized by other technologies and didn't know it.
And, therefore, their learning curve, unlike that of younger people for whom it is given, was very, very steep.
And so Minsky concluded, anyone who is not connected to the network is literally going to be like a desktop computer on a corner table pushed into the corner of the room.
They're going to be like a brain in a bottle.
And, obviously, that was a pejorative way of saying that you better be linked up.
You better be networked.
Now, these were radical thoughts then.
And some of the implications that I predicted, which is the great thing about being old enough to outlive your predictions, is they've come true.
There is now, for this generation, even younger than you, the younger people who are being brought up without even given a thought to the ubiquity of their electronic communications.
There is a change of identity that is, I believe, fundamental.
There is a communal way of approaching work and thinking and the academic process that is different from the kind of independent thinking, bounded, that I was taught as a young person.
And this is just my intuition.
But the first time I went to a school to try to assist a group of teachers in a high school, to try to understand what was going on, they said they were getting good marks from the industries they were sending students to.
Motorola, Baxter Labs, Abbott Labs were in the neighborhood, northern Illinois.
They said the one thing we're not doing very well is training people for work teams, for learning how to function effectively on work teams.
And when I asked them what they meant by functioning effectively on work teams, I realized that in my day, when I was in school, we called it cheating.
Literally, if you looked at someone else's paper, you were doing something dishonest.
Now, I'm a radical pioneer.
I was a pioneer in collective work at exam time.
And I would always engage Bruce Rockwell, who used to sit right there, where Spaff is sitting, in my exam taking.
And I was usually caught and sent to room 127, because they didn't see that I was a pioneer and a far-seeing person.
They called it cheating.
But quite literally, what is taught today by example and precept, is that you must learn to function effectively as part of a group.
And the social structures in which young people are brought up now, are fundamentally different in that they are all group activities which are heavily scheduled.
It's an oversimplification, but there's something to it.
So that the boundedness of the individual, I don't think it's an accident, is no longer as clear.
And a boundary is where we get our identity.
A boundary is what determines our identity.
And boundaries around everything, from the individual self, all the way up to the geopolitical structures, are exactly what are morphing, or being transformed.
And that is what's causing us to kind of stretch, to find new concepts, new names, new words, to give these emergent realities a palpable feel, so we can get a hold of them.
Now, giving new names to things, Nietzsche said, originality, creativity, is nothing but seeing ten seconds earlier than everybody else.
The emergent realities that are coming over the horizon, and giving it a name.
And the names you choose make a big difference.
It's branding, it's marketing, from one point of view, but it's the human project from another.
A quick example, in the 1920s, mail was being carried on airplanes for the first time, after World War I.
And periodically, people would hop on the airplane as well.
And they were bold, and courageous, and adventuresome souls, and they had a name appropriate to that.
They were called aeronauts.
Aeronauts.
Well, the government was subsidizing the mail planes, and wanted to reduce the subsidies, and increase fares that people would pay to ride on airplanes.
It was a novel thing.
But they knew if they called them aeronauts, like we call them astronauts, people would not be able to insert themselves into that category, see themselves in it, because an astronaut is a bold space walker, not us.
So they needed a new name for aeronaut in the 1920s.
What do you think they came up with that enabled people to get a hold of it?
What was the creative genius that...
What's the word?
Passenger.
Thank you.
Yeah, they said, we'll call it airplane passengers.
Now, ten years ago, I said, what you're going to watch for are space tourists, and that's exactly what we got.
But you have to go next, beyond space tourists, because what we need is a category that will enable all of us to see ourselves becoming part of a transplanetary civilization, so that when we go where our telerobotic exploration has gone, which right now is limited to the solar system and a little beyond,
we will be able to see ourselves doing that venturing.
I was one of the first people, I was told, to apply for a survivor-type program.
I was so excited.
I heard about it, and I used the net to track down the NBC producers who were putting on the program.
What they were going to do was send 12 people to Baikonur, Star City in Russia, and you were going to go through cosmonaut training.
And every week, the Russians were going to eliminate one person, and the one who was still standing at the end could go to Mir for two weeks.
Well, I did track them down, got my beautiful three-page Why I Should Go sent to them, called my congressman, Sensenbrenner, who I happen to know, and he was the head of the space committee, and I said, can you help me with this?
He said, not you, not anybody's going on to Mir again.
We're bringing that damn thing down.
It's a fire trap.
I said, well, the Russians are cool with that, right?
They kludge stuff together with duct tape and bailing wire.
They don't care if there's a fire, collision.
You know, the thing is flying.
No, but he had his way, and a couple months later, Mir came down, and my dream of going into space, I think, probably forever.
And I say this seriously, because I've always wanted to go.
Well, most people I find in conversation don't want to go, but you will go.
You will go to Mars.
Your children will go.
Using propulsion systems, material science, things that are now being experimented with through black and white budget research, you are going to go.
And the three major things that are going to impact identity going forward, not only religious but human in its fundamental forms, are information and communication technologies, biotechnologies of all kinds as we reinvent ourselves, and the attributes that fundamentally mean what it is to be a human being,
and the advent of a transplanetary culture.
Okay, but that's getting far afield.
I'm still on page one, and we've got a lot to cover.
Anybody have any questions at this point?
This is just kind of trying to introduce the space into which I want us to walk as we deal with what all this is doing to security, to information security, to intelligence, and ultimately to the structures in which you are going to have to build some sanity.
Yes.
Yeah.
One comment about what you term the emergence of a collectivist society.
Do you think that's something new, or do you think that's actually a reversion to social models that have existed in the past?
It can't be a reversion because it's something that hasn't existed before in this way or in this form.
But what I think happens, and I admit that when you're doing a speech you sound like you know, it's just part of being glib, and it comes with the territory.
But what I really think happens is that the content of every new technology is an old technology at first.
In other words, it doesn't eliminate anything, it recontextualizes it.
And at first people say, oh, it's just the same.
The Duke Durbin, for example, hated the printing press because he thought a book printed by such a monster was cold and inhuman.
And he only wanted to read books that were handwritten by monks because that was a real book.
And yet periodically he would hear of a printed book that he wanted to read, and he would ask that it be delivered to the monastery in the area he controlled so they would recopy it by hand so that he could read it.
Now, he felt like he was reading something that would have been, I believe, as you alluded, a reversion, but in fact he was reading something new because the printed text itself enabled new things to be said.
It enabled new ways of expression.
It enabled fixity.
It enabled a fixity of thought as well as vocabulary and spelling and words.
It enabled all sorts of things, including the explosion of the language because an oral culture prior to writing would have 25,000 to 50,000 words max.
It couldn't have that many.
But with the printing press you had an explosion in English, for example, to over a million words.
And so with a million words you have a palette of a million colors instead of 25,000 colors.
So even though it looks like you're painting the same landscape, in fact you are seeing differently, you are constructing a different reality, and then by agreement you're doing something different.
So of course human society has been collective since tribal days and then the days of agriculture and husbandry 10,000, 12,000 years ago.
That part is not new.
What is new is the enabling technologies reduce boundaries between people in a way that has fundamentally not taken place before because the symbiotic relationship to which I alluded between us and our networks is so absolute that we don't see, subsequently we will not see another way of being.
On the downside of the political scale it means that fascism is set in motion as a much more real possibility because people who cannot live without constant feedback from text messengers or IMers or other people in whom they live as a node in a network who literally cannot live without feedback and reinforcement from others who literally cannot run out and play and be alone without feeling lonely and at odds with the universe are ripe for a collectivization of their political will which to me is dangerous.
Now when you combine that with what a friend of mine at the National Security Agency says, and he says it with anxiety in his voice he says, you know we have invented everything necessary for a police state and since 9-11 a lot of it has been implemented but we do not have the precipitating event e.g.
Pakistan last week real or imaginary?
Operation Northwoods, you know about Operation Northwoods?
You should well know I'll tell you later Google Operation Northwoods as a possibility, a way some people in our political structures think about what should be done and you'll see why there are real dangers I think, one more quick thing to add to that I think that if you look at say the conceptions of shame in Roman and Greek society,
you'll see people viewing themselves as a function of their perception in others' eyes much more than you would in a modern society in a sort of guilt structured society and so we might be reverting to that with new technology the existence though of a society in which its members view themselves as a function of others' perception of them is something that's very ancient Right,
I won't argue with that but it is a new iteration and it is at a level of a different kind of complexity and if I am correct that whether it's speech or writing or printing press or electronic communication beginning with the telegraph around 1820 if each one of these is a true formative event because our technologies frame and shape our very way of perceiving being,
behaving, thinking then while it will reiterate fundamental human nature at a new level, it will be at a new level so I think I am not an expert on all of the varieties of cultural expression of the dynamics we're talking about and so it could look like a reversion to that but I'm still trying to make the case that it's not a reversion to the way a Roman citizen conceived of him or herself that you can find antecedents for all these things in other cultures but that what is emerging is fundamentally different because of all the other inputs into human identity
Hopefully a brief comment.
I like very much what you said about the necessity to turn context into content.
That is to realize the premises you bring into a situation.
And in the same serious tone, I want to go to your deep-seated guilt complex about having cheated when you talked to Bruce or whoever.
My view of the situation is that the examiners, the people who were running those quizzes or whatever, were cheating on you because they violated what we call the sincerity condition of a speech act.
They asked you to answer a question to which they didn't need you to answer because they knew the answer.
And you did the best you could.
They cheated on you and you responded as if they were not cheating.
You're right .
You're right.
What a fool I have been.
I remember reading in the mid-1950s a mediocre novel by a mediocre American nuclear physicist turned mediocre novelist by the name of Mitchell Wilson, who wrote novels about physicists, which is a kind of a self-defeating idea to start with.
But they had no emotional life.
But there was something there that was a formative experience for me, and I have used it again and again.
I have been subjected to it and used it again and again as an instructor.
There were two talented brothers in physics at Princeton, and they needed to submit a senior bachelor thesis or something like that.
And the instructor told them, take half a year, go and invent something.
That is an exam.
And the whole point was that they invented TV or something which led to the TV.
So if you go back from the exam situation and rethink it, you see who the real cheater was.
You are a mensch.
You are a real mensch.
Thank you.
That alleviates my guilt, although it is embedded in such other behaviors of adolescence that I don't think we have the time or appropriately the opportunity here to explore that in depth.
But you are pointing me towards some necessary therapy, and I appreciate that very much.
I guess I am trying to make the point that the structure, all software, all hardware, all human beings are embedded in a single complex system.
So that when we define security, which is kind of what we are talking about, where in that complex system is the point of departure for defining the entire system?
How can you see the system from within itself?
Human-machine symbiosis creates a unique set of interesting conundrums.
The environment, said a friend, in which the logic is running is an unknown from a security standpoint.
This means the environment needs to be audited too.
It is not a good idea to use new environments for security-critical code.
For example, when PHP came out, people rushed to it because it was easy to use, but look at all the problems that came down the road.
In other words, the context, as Victor brought me back to center, must become content statement, is a necessity, not merely a good idea.
Because during radical change, the newly emergent realities that are coming into the center of our consciousness from the edges are redefining management and human identity and everything.
And it may sound crazy, and I want to introduce you to the thought that a lot of what I think sounds crazy.
When I first sent that essay on the transformation of religious structures into that journal, it literally sounded crazy to them.
And I understand that.
I am now writing about new things that sound equally crazy.
And I have to go back to other people to stabilize myself sometimes.
One of them is Robert Galvin, who was the great man at Motorola, who built Motorola through its great formative years into the entity that it became.
And he was there for real critical breakthroughs.
And people sometimes asked him, breakthrough ideas, these incredible ideas you had there for the kind of chip you developed or handheld this or whatever, where do they come from?
And he thought seriously about it.
And this is a man who had remarkable success for 40 or more years.
And he said, every idea that turned out to be a breakthrough idea began its life as an opinion of one.
If someone said it aloud, first you think it, and then our own filter internally screens out anomalies.
And because of appropriateness and social niceties, we don't allow ourselves, except I do, to say the unthinkable.
We don't even say it.
But if we say it, no one hears it.
In other words, it just doesn't compute.
It literally does not attach to any of the grabbers in our cognitive structure.
But if someone says it again and again and people finally hear it, they laugh.
Because it sounds funny.
It sounds crazy.
Wisdom and insanity are contextual.
And when the context changes, what was insane under one set of conditions becomes eminently sane and creative and original and breakthrough under another.
And so if the people keep saying it and endure the derision and the laughter and the hooting and the water fountain conversation about what an idiot they are that they hear coming around, if you can endure all that, then you finally live long enough to emerge where people not only say they thought it was a good idea,
but they always thought so all along.
Everybody agrees that it was a wonderful idea.
And Galvin said the corollary was also true.
This is important in an academic setting.
He said that every time we had a problem that we confronted that was really challenging and we surfaced it in a very explicit way, if someone suggested a solution and everybody immediately agreed that that's what we should do, it was always wrong.
Now he said always.
He didn't say often.
He said it was always wrong.
Now if you think about what I'm saying, our ideation, our way of thinking about things, is in part a function of our technologies which frame and shape them and make available new possibilities, literally, for ourselves and for our world.
Therefore, in the world of agreement of social structures in which human beings live, there is a constant flux, as I said, from the edge to the center.
The truth begins at the edge, can't be heard, can't be seen, moves to the center and becomes the core of a new consensus.
By the time it arrives at the center and a new consensus is building, a new truth is already emerging at the edge.
Therefore, if everyone is in agreement immediately, it means of necessity, think of it temporally, that they are living in the past.
Because they are allowing the frame or shape of the thoughts that prior technologies helped to create to determine what they think they see going forward and they are missing what is right in front of their eyes.
You can get them from the internet.
All those funny, funny quotes everybody tosses around.
Like, space travel is utter bilge.
1956, Royal Astronomer of England, a year before Sputnik.
Heavier than air flight is impossible.
I foresee a market for five computers.
One day computers will weigh less than one and a half tons, said as a real breakthrough.
1987, Bill Gates, no computer will ever destroy programs.
That is absolutely true.
He said that.
One of them.
And the context determines the content of your thinking.
See, I'm sometimes introduced as a futurist, which is pretty funny.
Because I don't even know what we're having for dinner tonight or where we're going.
So I don't know the future.
But I'm trying to describe the present.
But so many people live in the past that I sound to them like a futurist when I describe the present.
This is a way of saying the same thing, that there is a gradation of structures of reality in which people live, but which they deeply believe to be true.
And the example from Galvin, he had strange ideas meetings at Motorola.
And some of the ideas, when you look back at them, don't sound so strange.
You remember the time someone suggested for the very first time in his memory, we could put a chip in someone's head.
And it was so unthinkable, kind of like thinking of a huge mainframe weighing one and a half tons being on a desktop.
It was so unthinkable in the categories of thinking that people had that everybody laughed.
A chip in the head.
And yet, incrementally, we are redefining what it means to be a physical human being through all sorts of new technological devices and engineering through chemicals.
So when someone has a pacemaker, you don't think anything of it.
But it was a radical introduction of a new electronic structure into the person.
And now we are working with implants.
And when it first became public that people were talking about implants in the brain, people are fearful, they don't want to hear about it.
I see it on people's faces when we're talking all the time.
A guy got up at a workshop the other day and he said, you're making me feel helpless.
And I said, terrific.
Because when you came in here, you were at minus two.
You were helpless and you didn't know it.
And now you've moved up to minus one.
You're helpless and aware of it.
Do you want to go up another notch?
He said, to what?
I said, doing something about it.
In other words, the radical change introduced by the rate of change of technologies does not allow you to see cover anywhere.
When this first started, I would talk to groups of people, and if it was white men over 50, which a lot of the groups of executives were, you could see in their eyes them calculating when they would die or retire.
And could they sprint for that line without having to deal with any of the things the 90s and the 21st century were going to bring to them.
So what Galvin is really encouraging you to do is build in an openness to heresy.
An openness to heresy.
Or as George Bernard Shaw said, all great truth begins as blasphemy.
It's another way of saying it begins on the edge and moves to the center.
Edge to the center.
250 years ago, you go to England, go to the city of London, stand on the corner at the Bank of England and say, where is the center of the world?
And they would say, right here.
The city of London, the Bank of England is the economic engine of the world.
And someone who was crazy would say, I think it's way out at the edges like the colonies where America and Australia and a sane person at the time would have said no in the consensus reality of the core.
But already the new truth was emergent at the edges and moving in.
Today, same situation.
Where is the center of the universe?
Most people would say Earth.
But already we are being recontextualized by space war and our transplanetary adventure so that if you look out a little way, you can see that Earth is merely the bridge from which the bats will flock into the twilight at night.
We are going everywhere.
Question?
A lot of what you say makes sense.
But you're also sort of generalizing that people are not willing to look out and look at things in a larger perspective.
Like you're using the galaxy and us being the center, you know.
But I think anyone that has traveled or has more an aptitude towards science and exploring things and researching actually looks out and sees that they're, they're more open to things.
And so what you're saying almost sounds like you're telling us that, no, that's not where all the tools almost define you.
I see the tools as something you can use, but it doesn't determine how you view the world.
Or the opportunities out there.
I think I fundamentally disagree with that conclusion.
I think they do.
And they do in a way and to a degree that you don't see until, as I say, it is thrown into relief.
Two things you said.
One is that there are smart people like yourself and your colleagues and friends.
And then there's other people.
I live in Milwaukee.
This is being broadcast, right?
Scratch that.
I've lived in a lot of places.
Milwaukee, Hawaii, London, Madrid, Chicago, Salt Lake City.
What I have found is that the people who grew up in those places and stayed there are much more like one another, regardless of where they grew up and what culture.
And the people who go lots of places are more like one another than they are like the people, in fact, that they grew up with.
So, yeah, there are different kinds of life experiences that bring people to different things.
Let me give you an example.
I mentioned that I wrote fiction.
I wrote literature.
Where did I conceive of the marketplace?
I bought a book called Writer's Digest, a big, thick book, when I was a kid.
I just got it off eBay.
Somebody had the magazine.
My first story was published in 1963.
And so I paid $7 to get that magazine back.
Analog Science Fiction.
It's cool.
How did I know about Analog Science Fiction?
You look up in the Director of All Magazines.
But also the whole context of your life tells you that the framework of publishing and it is unthinkable to be beyond it, literally, in the culture except for some strange person, is North America.
In other words, the brackets were the East Coast and the West Coast.
Canada and Mexico.
I wrote in English for American magazines.
It's just what you grow up thinking as the horizon of possibility discloses.
I wrote a piece for Wired when it was a new magazine on what the Internet was going to bring to the world.
5,000 words.
They published 500.
I said, I get to do what I want with the rest, right?
And they said, yes.
I sat there.
This is how slowly it can percolate.
In front of my computer, asking myself, where can I publish an article about how the Internet is going to change the world?
Duh.
The light flashed on.
Stupid.
Use the Internet.
Now, this is long before easy searching, Googling, and so on.
I think Gopher was around.
There were very few websites in those days.
By the way, my website was seized by USA Today as a website of the day.
That's how few there were.
They would identify five a week, and that was a big deal.
So the light bulb went on that I could use the Internet to discover markets where I could publish.
All over the world.
Now, what happened as a result, within a week, literally, I had a contract for that article.
The next month it appeared in England in a new magazine.
I start writing for South Africa Computer Magazine every month for the next three years.
I start writing in Australia.
And I start writing a column, which I sent out by e-mail, which was a new technology, which within a couple of years was going to people in 60 countries.
So I became a global presence because the technology disclosed to me, by virtue of my interaction with it, that that was a possibility.
I guess I'm trying to say that before that moment of enlightenment, I literally could not see the possibility because interacting with the new technologies discloses them to you in a way that previously is impossible.
In other words, it's impossible inside the old paradigm to think the new paradigm.
The Jews were Jews and the Greeks were Greeks.
And from neither Jewish nor Greek world could you see Christendom.
But when they encountered one another and a new transformative emergent structure emerged hierarchically from that, the structure of Christendom, you could look back and see, oh, the antecedents, like you're saying, are Greek thought.
They are Hebrew thought.
We can identify all sorts of cultural antecedents for what has emerged, but it is truly a brand new thing.
And to go back to the religious metaphor, what I saw was that the Word, the frame of the Word, is what determines your conception of God as well as self.
And I'll try to say this briefly because I do want to get to security and intelligence.
Oral cultures had gods and religions.
What were their names?
We don't know.
Because they all disappeared when writing emerged.
Or they were transformed into writing.
Now, we know from Plato's own witness that he thought writing was the end of civilization and meaningful culture.
Read the Phaedrus.
He thought this was it, because people wouldn't use memory and wouldn't think through things anymore.
And he was right, that it was the end of culture as he constituted it, but not the end of a new emerging culture.
What happened to religions?
Well, something pretty significant.
Beings who had a powerful impact on others, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, you name it, Muhammad, were transformed into textual beings.
In other words, they were flesh and blood beings, but they died and were transformed into text.
And it is the interaction with the written text that enabled people to internalize a new concept of God and relationship to it.
And I don't want to beat this to death.
We could talk about it for an hour.
But the printing press did the same thing.
Lutheranism, Protestantism, and its million and one dicings and slicings of what had been a monolithic structure, more or less, was enabled by the printing press, which transformed Luther into a textual being.
And I'm making the point that electronic communication, in all of its forms, are redefining images of God and religious structures as well.
So that it's no accident that all the religions that people habitually, without thinking about it, think of as religions, all came into being, and then have pretty much stopped coming into being in that very narrow bandwidth of historical time, which coincided with a few thousand years,
which was characterized by the emergence of writing and the transformation of human consciousness, which it occasioned.
And therefore I'm saying, absolutely.
The technology frames and shapes you in a way that you can't know until you do.
And then when you see it, it's like the Terminator on the moon.
You look at the moon through a telescope, you see light and dark, and you see the mountains where the line of light hits the line of dark.
You can't see it.
Over here it's all washed out in light, over here it's all dark.
But at the Terminator, which is what it is to be gifted with living in a transitional time, if you can stand it, is that as you are recontextualized, you are creatively reorganized yourself as a possibility for the future.
And that's what the definition of human identity is.
So when you get... yes?
Just to briefly expand on what you're saying about written word being important in religion, if you look at what Heraclitus wrote and you look at what John wrote, they're both literally calling word God.
They have a direct correlation of the word is God.
Right.
And someone who, in the 16 or 1700s, was enabled by Luther to walk into, like the churches I served, Episcopal, and take a book and read silently to oneself, was not aware that that was a transforming event.
But today, when you tell people, you don't need to have a book.
We can have it on a screen.
I remember when I first started writing that as suggestions.
To have a screen, no books, just plug it in.
I saw a monitor in every pew, like on an airline seat.
But you walk into a lot of churches these days and you just have a huge projection monitor and they just plug in the program for the Sunday.
And people are being changed by the kind of, quote, worship, unquote, that is collective experience they have in relationship to that technology.
And therefore their ideas about themselves.
And so it's ironic that fundamentalism, literalism in a Protestant context, thinks it is going back to the original text, but it was literally unthinkable until the 1900s in the form in which it has come to bedevil us.
So anyway, short answer is yeah, absolutely.
Ten minutes to go?
Oh boy.
Okay, security.
Identity is a function of boundaries.
We've talked about that.
The boundaries are morphing, the boundaries are changing.
We like to talk about the insider threat these days being one of the biggest threats, but how do you define an insider if the boundaries themselves are like a Mobius strip?
What is it you're trying to defend?
You can try to defend the perimeter, but anybody with any sense has given that up as a singular task.
We will be in a truly dangerous stance, said my friend Brian Snow.
We will think we are secure and act accordingly when in fact we are not secure.
In other words, we are okay, we have a firewall, no need to worry about internal authentication and authorization models, except for the 65 exceptions in our firewall rule set.
That's the real problem, he said, with the perimeter model.
It has potentially ugly failure modes because once you're beyond perimeter protection, you are owned.
You are owned indeed.
And what he says with great poignancy, as a senior guy at NSA, a very wonderful, wise guy, is that actionable intelligence saves lives.
And we had developed, he said at NSA, a definition of true and beautiful, which was based on the coherence of the algorithm, its efficiency, its pristine mathematical beauty, and that didn't save lives.
And when you hold people, as I have, in the intelligence community who are sobbing because they did not think that many people needed to die on a particular mission and it was their responsibility, then you cannot, as Brian says, do this work unless you see the face of evil.
You cannot do this work unless you have seen the face of evil in a visceral kind of way and it confronts you with, I am not that, I am opposed to that.
But, let's go back to the religious thing briefly.
The notion of who is the enemy.
When you are doing security, you are trying to protect and defend and you are trying to oppose the enemy.
But who is the enemy?
Up until the time of Christendom, the enemy was defined pretty much universally as a member of the other tribe.
The other.
Them.
And then it was redefined in Christendom as that in myself which frustrates and gets in the way.
Pogo didn't say the enemy is us.
Jesus did.
And a lot of other people, contemporaneous, like Rabbi Hillel with Jesus at the time saw that.
That the enemy was that in us which frustrates the coherence of the system.
And there is no other.
Because human consciousness, in part through writing and other emergent structures, was distributing itself in a new self-conception, a new way.
And the enemy was no longer defined as the other.
And yet, if you look at most of the models of computer security, you are trying to screen someone out and you are trying to hold someone in.
You still can't shake the notion that there is a perimeter around something.
And yet what has happened in the information state is that boundaries are now functional.
An example is ports.
We say we can't have things coming in container ships that might be explosive.
So we have to stop them at the port of origin.
What does that mean?
It means the boundaries of the United States are no longer geographically defined.
And that throws us back to where did geographical boundaries come from?
Well, you just look back historically to the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries and you see the emergence of a boundary around what we call a nation-state as that level of organizational structure appropriate to the complexity political, economic, and social of emergent civilized structures.
And therefore the boundaries of larger nation-states, the complexity and the way of organizing themselves in relationship to each other found itself so that you believe you are citizens of countries.
Because we have been trained to believe a primary function of our identity is a citizen of a country.
And yet who are we opposed to?
Who are we opposed to?
We have defined let me quote myself because I like me and periodically I say something worth saying.
If I can find it well, I've done that too, but the way I talk you know, no one knows knows that I'm doing that.
In the U.S.
intelligence community, mission and charter of the intelligence community sanctions breaking foreign laws while prohibiting similar activities in American soil.
But because of the technologies, distinctions of foreign and domestic no longer hold.
The convergence of enabling technologies of intrusion, interception, and panoptic reach combined with a sense of urgency about a counter-terror imperative and a mandate from our leaders to do everything possible to define to defeat an amorphous, non-state entity who is defined by terroristic behaviors rather than by boundaries,
borders, or even a clear ideological allegiance has created an ominous but invisible set of conditions that undermine the cornerstones of law, ethics, human identity, and even religious traditions.
In other words, there is a challenge because of the technologies themselves to our fundamental definitions of who we are and who we are defending.
And I have lots of examples which I don't have time to give, but people often wait when I'm talking to organizational structures where they adhere.
I'll give you a quick example.
This is a guy who was sent to Haiti with Army counterintelligence.
He was very gung-ho and very much believing in the mission.
And the mission was to interdict, shut down some avenues the cartels were using to move cocaine and other drugs through Haiti into the United States.
And after he arrived, shortly after he arrived, there was a regime change or some political chaos not uncommon in Haiti, and he became very anxious about whether they would be able to do what they went there to do.
And then he heard that someone was coming down, actually someone from Arkansas as it happened, who was close to someone else from Arkansas, and he felt relieved because he thought what was going to happen was that the mission was going to be shorn up.
And yet what the person did primarily was make sure the route stayed open because it was important that the stuff continued to get through because he had a stake in it.
Now, I have lots of examples of what's happening politically that makes it kind of a Mobius strip when you try to think about against whom we are defending ourselves.
New structures have emerged geopolitically for which we do not have names.
The passenger-aeronaut example would apply except we don't know who the passengers are.
We do know that clouds of power have emerged which make simple concepts of allegiance and patriotism literally obsolete when we think in a focused granular way about who we are trying to oppose and who we are trying to defend.
Because the boundaries no longer hold.
They are dissolving into clouds of power.
And when you do the work, when you do the investigative work, you can follow the money and you can see the contours and you can see the new emergent structures.
But they're not simple and they do not align in any meaningful way with the kind of political rhetoric that we are hearing and there's a great deal at stake.
So in the intelligence community, because at the moment of action you are a node in a network , but we are all nodes in the multiplicity of networks.
And we define our allegiance not by what we say or how we self-conceive, but by what we do in that moment of action.
And that is the moment in which our allegiance and therefore identity is determined.
And that is very, very difficult to circumscribe with all the checks and balances we're trying to do.
And that's why it's so much easier when you're doing information security to at least focus on the machine side of the symbiotic relationship.
Because it can be more binary sometimes, although complexity bedevils that simple statement.
But the human side is where it has meaning, where it has value, and where it even makes sense if you're going to do it at all.
Who are you defending?
What are you protecting?
Who is the enemy?
And if those questions aren't asked, then you're simply drinking the Kool-Aid and joining the corporation and doing what you're told to do.
And the corporation can be any corporate structure.
I mean, the world really is a film noir novel, and it doesn't have easy or happy resolutions.
Now, I have to get in just a couple of things.
I said I'd go back here, so I will now.
Bring all these out.
See, we're a couple of minutes over?
Okay.
First of all, I really have just gotten started.
Obviously, I can crank myself up.
These are cards, and they have my website on it, ThemeWorks, T-H-I-E-M-E-W-O-R-K-S.
A lot of what I write goes there, and it's all free.
If you want to access it, take a card.
Second, if you like, this is archaic.
This is a book, and this is what a publisher did to his profit and not to mine.
Believe me.
When he collected a lot of my fiction non-fiction that I was sending out, he very kindly allowed me to sell them at a cheap discounted price.
Not as cheap as you'll get on the web, which I think is down to 44 cents on Amazon.
But, if somebody wants to buy a book and have it signed, they're 20 bucks.
Or, someone can think about it and then email me and pay through PayPal.
I said I would say that with taste and discretion, and that's the end of that.
These are free.
This is entitled The Changing Context of Intelligence and Ethics, Enabling Technologies as Transformational Engines.
Lori has copies of this in the office.
All you have to do is ask for one.
She can't make it public because it was just accepted for a conference.
But I don't mind you having one, and if you want it in a computerized form, give me your email address or take mine and send me your email address and I'll send you the document.
This was written a few years ago.
Bill Moyers convened some of us to talk about technology and religion.
It takes the pieces that I've talked about here in a much more coherent way.
Entering sacred digital space, seeking to distinguish the dreamer and the dream, really is looking forward to say what kinds of religious expectations do we have in a world as a result of electronic communication, biotechnology, and a transplanetary culture?
What is likely to be some of the interaction?
What kind of human being is it going to produce?
So, that you can have.
She'll make copies of that for everybody, and I will also send you that one too, if you want it.
Any further questions?
Whether it's televised or not.
I'll turn this on and scoot back here.
As an illustration of one of the things you were talking about, in terms of boundaries changing with time, it's interesting to note the boundaries of some countries where we're having activities that are being resisted by those trying to enforce old national boundaries.
For example, the Kurdish population, which stretches across four different, or five different countries.
And one example that, as you noted in the news, Pakistan.
Pakistan never was really a country .
In fact, the name was made up from the groups, the tribes.
And I was reading an analysis where somebody was saying that the Indian Raj, actually, was set up by the British.
The boundaries were set from what they could defend.
So , they went far enough into the mountains that that was as far as they could send their troops , all the way around the northern boundary of India.
And that defined where India was.
Countries in Africa, there's a whole number of these.
But, as time has gone on, and transportation and communication have become more available to the people living in the remote regions that constitute some of the border areas, or the remote areas of these countries, they become aware of their differences from their peers within the country,
and their similarities to ancient tribal colleagues across what would otherwise be the border.
And this has led to unrest, seek for separatism, and other kinds of behavior in many of these places around the world.
And so, the communication has brought a change in that it has enabled them to understand where actually their effective alliance or kinship actually existed across what would otherwise be a geopolitical border that was established for other purposes hundreds of years ago.
Right.
And another thing that the technologies have made available is that you have options.
And I saw that in religion too.
It's become a shop till you drop kind of world in America for religions.
They're brands, they sell services, and they identify themselves through complex marketing techniques .
But what you're saying is , and think about this for yourselves , one of the things I realized the technology was doing was making things like itself modular and fluid .
Modular and fluid.
Modular means that when I grew up, and people in my era often grew up thinking they would have a job, an occupation, a vocation .
They were born to a religion and they would be in it.
It was literally unthinkable that they would not be whatever they were given as their water to fish.
They would get married and while something might happen, they would probably stay married.
In other words, there was a single linear structure to your life, and you literally didn't think you had options until the technologies enabled the economic and social realities that gave you those options, and identity is one of them.
So that I have reinvented myself three times.
I say it like it's, oh I did this, I did this, but it wasn't doing.
I was a teacher of literature.
Then I was a priest , and now I'm kind of a whatever .
Speaker, writer , I mean it doesn't really have a name.
People say, how do I define you?
What do I say about what you speak about?
Someone said, I was telling my husband, I really like your speeches.
He said, what does he talk about?
She said, I don't know.
I don't know.
What she was really saying is that making the context content, making the invisible visible, brings things into focus, but we fall back into our habitual structures of thinking.
So when you ask, what is the content of the context?
It's like the mind observing itself.
It can catch it for a minute.
Buddhists call it enlightenment.
But then it falls back into itself again.
But identity is a choice, and it's the enabling technologies that let us know.
Do we realize that Pakistan is living the American dream right now?
The lawyers are demonstrating and the police is picking them up and putting them away.
Maybe not the lawyers' dream.
Anything else?
Well, let's express our thanks, and I'm sure you'll all find some peace.
Thanks.