The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.
To make that possible, engineeers hived off part of the Libyana cellphone network—owned and operated by the Tripoli-based Libyan General Telecommunications Authority, which is run by Col. Gadhafi’s eldest son—and rewired it to run independently of the regime’s control. Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim, asked about the rebel cellphone network, said he hadn’t heard of it.
Brazillian Goggles Auto-Detect Criminals
“…A special camera installed on [a police officer's] glasses captures an image of people and then forwards them to a real-time database Data from the police. If the person in the picture is in some sort of trouble with the law, a small red square appears on the camera lens and the police officer can take appropriate measures…”
“It’s quiet because you do not questions the person does not ask for documents. The computer does it,” The man explains.”
Communication is Power
In less time than it took the Beatles to make it big, WikiLeaks has dropped us all, willing or unwilling, into a Bruce Sterling wet dream. The only question now is who gets to be Jonathan Gresham: Assange, or moot?
The media’s focus on the contents of specific leaked cables (and then, as attention waned, on Assange’s sex life) is understandable: specific revelations and the controversies they trigger are the bread and butter of pop journalism. To be fair, news that US mercenaries sold children as sex slaves and billed taxpayers for the time… well, that’s worth a little chatter. Everything was by the leaked-news numbers, though, until the bottom dropped out from under WikiLeaks. After a couple days of “Meh, nothing new here,” Switzerland froze bank accounts, Interpol issued a Red Notice, PayPal and VISA locked donations, columnists called for Assange’s execution, Senators twisted Amazon’s arm until they kicked WikiLeaks from their cloud servers, and 4chan launched a retaliatory assault on the Swiss banking infrastructure.
Yes, it’s a fine time to be a shit-thrower.
It’s no wonder, though: behind the embarrassing bits there’s a real war going on. Assange and the WikiLeaks posse don’t care about changing policy, about targeting corrupt officials, or even revealing specific abuses. Unlike traditionally motivated leakers, they’re taking the long view:
Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial….
Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction….
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Simply put? The details don’t matter, and the ripple effects of any specific revelation are unimportant. The current actions of a given state aren’t the problem to fight: it’s the future success of a potential conspiracy that must be stopped, by crippling its ability to communicate efficiently.
[This campaign] represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.
In that light, the speed and the ferocity of the government crackdown is no shock. Like all asymmetrical conflicts, though, the dangers of disproportionate response are significant. Can the powers that be put the genie back in the bottle before they annoy everyone else?
http://www.youtube.com/v/FgTq-AgYlTE
Creepy enthusiasm for double-edged swords is par for the technofetishist course, and a willingness to say, “Wait a minute, what if someone were to use this for…” is what separates us from the aspies. The latest Diminished Reality tech demo, though, takes the cake. If you can’t trust realtime streaming video, what’s left?
Google vs. China: the first public stare-down between Nation-States and Knowledge Extractors? Discuss.
Update: An interview in The Atlantic with Google’s David Drummond about the issue. Looks like the stare-down theory holds water.
In the future, there are no cliches
Ever since The Turk went live, it’s been one Craphound story after another about the crazy, Gen-Z future of crowdsourced intelligence work. Why hire expensive corporate spies to monitor your competition, or convince unstable radicals to propagandize for you? Just use the distributed job-o-verse to outsource tasks and wait for hungry gold farmers to clock in from China!
Buzz be damned, there hasn’t been much to show for the idea outside of World of Warcraft and the pages of Metatropolis. Why no love? Sadly, there’s a big gap between microcontent grunt work and running dead drops for the CIA; it’ll be a cold day in hell before honest-to-God TLAs entrust security-sensitive tasks to the project management equivalent of BitTorrent. More importantly, though, the Turk and its various workalikes are still focused on brute-forcing past AI challenges. Summarize this paragraph, reads one job. Post a one-hundred word comment on a site, reads another. To push past the novelty stage, someone needs to broker tasks that require real, physical access: the stuff Google-style algorithms will never be able to automate.
Whoops! Looks like someone did. FieldAgent is a Turk-like brokerage wrapped in an iPhone app, and all of the jobs are tied to real, physical places. Combine that with the iPlatform’s GPS niceties, and you’ve got yourself a distributed job board. Pop it open, tap ‘find me a task,’ and it serves up a proximity-sorted menu of Competitive Intelligence grunt work. “Drive to the Walmart on the corner of 52nd and Washington,” reads one task. “Locate the Taster’s Choice 16oz decaf, take a picture of its tag, and record the sale price.” FieldAgent whips the pic off to its anonymous client, you get a cool $2, and a retail conglomerate’s pricing models just got craftier.
Funny thing is, anyone who didn’t see it coming wasn’t paying attention. Nation-states move slow, but the business sharks are slaves to selection pressure. If FaceBook is the new Big Brother, price-checks are the new spycraft.
Steve Jobs: first against the wall when the singularity comes.