Not Getting Caught In A Lie

Is not the same thing as telling the truth...

The retort is paraphrased from Three Days of the Condor, one of the best spy thrillers of all time.  These days it seems that no one working inside The Beltway ever watched the 1975 classic.  [Apparently no one there watched The Battle of Algiers (1966) before invading Iraq either.  What, you movers, shakers, and influence peddlers never heard of Netflix?]

All sorts of people, some of them usually pretty smart, others not so much, are going on and on about determining who in the Obama administration leaked the details of which used the Stuxnet virus (and others) to set back the Iranian nuclear program by a couple years.

Joel Harding, author of the To Inform Is To Influence blog, last week posted a piece titled The Atomic Bomb of Cyberspace, in which he laments

It’s official.  The United States of America was the first to use an atomic bomb against an enemy and now the United States is the first to have acknowledged using a cyber weapon against another country.  We are now certified bad guys to the rest of the world.

We are the first nation-state to admit to having used a cyberweapon on another nation-state.

To whoever leaked the information from the Obama administration, for whatever purpose, you have now doomed the United States to a terrible legacy forever.  Now the United States will forever lose the war of ideas when it comes to innocence.

To which I reply, if this is a “terrible legacy” then responsibility for it resides with those who unleashed Duqu, Stuxnet, and Flame, not those who leaked the truth about it.  We will “forever lose the war of ideas about when it comes to innocence” because we are guilty of the act, not because our lying about being innocent didn’t hold up.  We will be credited with first use of cyber weapons because we used cyber weapons first, not because we failed to maintain (as with our drone attacks in Pakistan, a rather transparent) deniability.

Do I care that we wrecked Iranian centrifuges?  No, not at all, and all the better we used USB drives instead of MOPS or nukes.  Should the leaker stretch a rope for committing treason?  Maybe, but let's not pretend the responsibility for our Stuxnet legacy lies with anyone other than the paymaster behind Project "Olympic Games."

Image credit: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/flame-tied-to-stuxnet/

Julian Jaynes and Our Bicameral Past

Traipsing along the fringe between science and pseudoscience...

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes is an interesting if dated perspective on the emergence of human consciousness. Fascinating idea, but not one I find compelling at first read.  Was Jaynes an intellect ages ahead of his time or a nutty professor with a quirky theory?  There's something to his idea, but I can't quite make sense of it.  Another book on my reading list, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, may help me flesh this out.

Twelve Hours To Go

Until the US premiere of the film event of the summer, if not the year...

Ridley Scott's Prometheus is opening Friday morning at 12:01 AM, and we'll be there!  The prequel to Alien (apparently, sort of, mostly) features Noomi Rapace (the original Lisbeth Salander from the superior Swedish film production of the Millenium "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" Trilogy, rowrrr!) and will give us some back story on The Space Jockey.   Yee Haa, Waa Hoo!

UPDATE: Prometheus is sumptuous to the eye, but key details don't line up with those experienced in Alien.  Of course no one told us they would (actually , we were told they probably wouldn't), but the discontinuities are unnecessary and create more questions than the movie purports to answer.  The screenplay was penned by the co-creators of Lost, which is not automatically a good thing.  The story features many traditional Science Fiction and Horror tropes and a ship load of "redshirts," about half of whom meet their end in single inexplicable scene.  Still, Michael Fassbender's David is awesome, and Noomi Rapace is captivating of course.  There are times when Ridley Scott's vision shines through and others when he manages to channel the best of Stanley Kubrick in his 2001: A Space Odyssey phase.  I'll be going back. 

REUPDATE: Saw it again and liked it better the second time. And it was great fun watching the audience squirming like worms during "that scene."

LinkedIn Hacked?

So says the LA Times...

LinkedIn and Goodreads are my favorite social media hangouts.  I have no time for Facebook, having been Zucked one too many times, and Google's offerings are many and confusing.  I should play with Twitter, but I haven't gotten around to it.  Anyway, a member of my team sent me the breaking news that a Russian hacking site has allegedly posted 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords.  Apparently they're hashed, but that is not the same thing as unbreakable.  I'm not usually an alarmist about such things, but inasmuch I'm unfamiliar with LinkedIn's ability to restore my account if someone should mess it up, I took 30 seconds to change my password, which I was behind on anyway.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."

Ray Bradbury, the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Fahrenheit 451, passed away today at the ripe, old age of 91.  He's being remembered eloquently in thousands of papers, zines, websites, and blogs today, but I would be remiss not to comment on his passing.  Reading Fahrenheit 451 was a formative experience for me.  Francois Truffaut's grim movie adaptation was uncanny and wondrous as well.  Yes, Bradbury wrote many other novels and hundreds of short stories, but his apt realization of a dystopian future which resembles our current reality all too well was his greatest gift to me.  Thank you, sir, well done!