Consent of the Networked

Consent of the Networked; The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
© 2012 Rebeca MacKinnon
352 pages

A couple of weeks ago I read Who Controls the Internet, which covered in part nation-states’ role in reasserting national boundaries in cyberspace. Consent of the Networked  examines threats to the open internet, both from states and corporations.  The threats are not always overt, like the Chinese state apparatus that keeps the Chinese internet connected to the global net only through a half-dozen filtered gateways, or the common suppression of social networks in times of social unrest, as we witnessed in Tunisia and Egypt during their respective revolutions, and in Iran during the controversial reelection of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.   The author also examines more indirect threats to an open internet; the  irresponsible privacy policies at Facebook, for instance, which  issue updates that change privacy settings without giving appropriate forewarning. In some countries, a policy update that exposes bloggers, tweeters, etc’s real identities can lead to imprisonment or worse.  Other threats include the end of Net Neutrality,  an end which might channel people into using particular social networks. If those networks are as cavalier about user info as places like Yahoo and Facebook have been,  activists and others could be compromised all too easily. MacKinnon also sees overly-aggressive attempts by companies to protect their intellectual property as a threat to free expression.

Intriguingly, MacKannon does not demonize solely the private sector or the public; both have compromised people, and the free democracies have few bragging rights: just recently, the United States and United Kingdom were both named as ‘enemies of the Internet’ for their intensive surveillance.   (Sometimes public and private work together, as when Cisco became a partner to China in its firewall enterprise, and Yahoo thoughtlessly handed over user info when requested…again, by China.) MacKinnon isn’t particularly enthusiastic about the United Nations, either, but  holds that international agreements are a necessary road forward given the internet’s global nature.  While the only surprise here for me was the degree of European governments' internet surveillance and strictures. Given their constant run-ins with Google over privacy, I'd had the impression they were better about safeguarding private internet security than the U.S.

CYBERPUNK

CYBERPUNK: Hackers and Outlaws on the Computer Frontier
© 1991 Katie Hafner
400 pages

Cyberpunk takes readers back to the early days of hacking, when it was so old-school that computers weren’t involved. Using three case  in the United States and western Germany,  Katie Hafner’s history introduced readers in 1991 to the general idea of hacking, and her history sheds some light on what hackers were, what they did, and what they might want. It’s a fun look at early internet history, with the net as we know it developing slowly  throughout the course: ARPAnet, the internet’s predecessor, only appears halfway in.

The story begins with telephone lines, which -- in the mid-20th century -- bored teenagers began to examine with great interest.  Kevin Mitnick and Susan “Thunder” met over their mutual interest in learning to detect the patterns used by telephone switching systems and reproducing the sounds to manipulate their way through the boards, arranging free phone calls for themselves. (This was a bit of a cultural education for me -- evidently there were conference call lines advertised where people called in and just chatted with whoever was also on the circuit, a telephone chatroom!)  When the systems became controlled via computers,  Kevin, Susan, and a few more of their friends began tinkering with them.  (For readers born in the eighties, whose first computers came with web browsers, it takes a bit of chewing to realize that Mitnick and Thunder were literally dialing other computers;  telephone and computer network access systems were much more closely related)  Their explorations would eventually led to purloined and privileged accounts on sensitive systems across the United States; Susan had a particular interest in looking at military hardware.  The group weren’t plundering records for profit.

Although this group acquired an enormous amount of access via its steady experimentation, little was involved in the way of programming. They weren’t creating bugs to invade systems;  at most they rooted through the dumpsters of phone and computer-access companies looking for manuals, notes, and other juicy bits of detritus. The manuals not only allowed them to understand the systems they were ‘phreaking’, but often included passwords from people who hadn’t yet developed any sense of security.  They also engaged in what Hafner calls ‘social engineering’ -- lying, essentially, and obtaining information by talking to telecommunications and networking personnel under different guises -- almost exactly like phishing, but they did it in person. Eventually an interpersonal feud led to one of the crew being turned in, and the tip was used to great effect by a security specialist who had been doggedly tracking their excursions.

From here, Hafner moves to a group in Germany whose hacking begins to resemble what we in the 21st understand it to be. Initially, they too were interested only in the thrill of entering computer systems.  Unlike the American group, “Chaos” did experiment with programs to do their work for them -- and unlike the Americans, some of the Germans became interested in converting their skills into currency. Specifically, they approached East German border guards (who connected them to KGB personnel), offering to sell them information obtained through the networks.   The Soviets’ real interest was in the actual software -- compilers, especially -- but they were willing to engage in occasional business.  (Chaos also claimed to be working on behalf of world peace, since if a balance of power was maintained, war was less likely.)

The third act in Hafner’s book concerns the “Morris worm”, the invention of a son of the NSA who invented a self-spreading program to explore the size of the internet. An error in judgement allowed the program to collect several instances of itself on one machine, consuming their memory, and causing system after system to grind to a halt.  The worm infected ten percent of all machines then connected to the internet. Needless to say, this unexpected attack caused a panic, and in the resulting trial some members of the cyber-communications industry were out for blood despite it being fairly obvious that the culprit hadn’t intended any harm and had in fact sent off anonymous warnings within a couple of hours of noticing that his creation had gone berserk.  Although a zealous prosecutor -- and an equally zealous witness, the man who had led the hunt for the Mitnick intrusion -- did their best to incarcerate Morris, in the end the judge erred on the side of mercy and concluded with a sentence of community service, probation, and a large fine.

Cyberpunk was quite the education for me.  My interest in the early days of the internet, and in particular the quasi-libertarian ethos of some of the personalities attracted to it, first interested me in the volume.  Most of the people cataloged here are quirky individuals, all uncomfortable in school but obsessive about learning the ins and outs of different systems.  They were driven to explore a new world, to prove themselves masters of it -- but they were also inspired by the literature they were reading. From time to time books like Shockwave Rider,  Neuromancer, and the Illumantus Trilogy show up. (Interestingly, the latter was used as a staple of one of the hacker characters in David Ignatius' The Director..)   Although Hafner was recounting these cases to an early 1990s audience just starting to explore the consumer-oriented internet,  the cases as arranged offer a look at the internet and its cultured as they evolved.  I enjoyed it enormously.

As a side note: the case of Kevin Mitnick continues provoking controversy, with numerous books authored by him and others arguing with one another over the "truth".  According to this book's epilogue, Hafner's own account is "80%" true.

The Digital Divide

The Digital Divide
ed. © 2011 Mark Bauerlein
 368 pages

For those who often think about the way the internet has transformed every aspect of our society -- our daily social interactions, the ways we shop and work, etc -- The Digital Divide presents an anthology of writing on that very subject ranging from the 1990s until 2011. These pieces include excerpts from books (Digital Natives or The Cult of the Amateur, for instance) as well as previously published articles. Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" appears in that category. The material curated here is chosen to represent different aspects of the argument about digital technology and society. A piece on how our immersion in the world of digital device multitasking rewires our brain to make us more efficient is followed by an article commenting on the negative aspects of a brain in perpetual overdrive: chronic, low-grade stress and general inefficiency from the constant breaks in attention. Many parts of the book are dated, but remain valuable nonetheless. For instance, articles penned in the 1990s lamenting how the invasion of the Internet by the common market had made it much more sterile and boring are interesting in the picture they paint of the young network, then a plaything of researchers and techies. (The author of that piece, Douglas Rushkoff, remains a "It's popular and now it sucks" kind of fellow, snarling about the growth of e-commerce while simultaneously praising Yahoo and Blogger for allowing people to produce content and communicate with one another. This is especially amusing when he maintains -- in the same article - -that the internet can't be institutionalized...it has its own mind and people, like, do what they want with it, man. (Things like...buying and selling?) Other points are more enduring, like the the plasticity of the brain. By far the most interesting article in the book for me was a piece on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, originally published in Reason magazine; in that interview, Wales reveals how inspired he was by the writings of F.A. Hayek, particularly on emergent order.

Related:
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brain, Nicholas Carr

10 Don'ts On Your Digital Devices

10 Don'ts On Your Digital Devices
© 2015 Eric Rzesut, Daniel Bachrach
180 pages

Networked computers are no longer the hulking monsters of the 1970s,  only found in  industrial and military installations. In the second decade of the 21st century, they are as common as phones -- in fact, for many of us, they are our phones.  Their ubiquity allows us to connect all the various aspects of our lives to an infinite degree; we can do taxes or engage in research while traveling,  stream lectures during exercise,  and lose ourselves in TriviaCrack while on dates that aren't going so well.  But the pervasive natures of web-connected devices doesn't  just create space  for leisure, education, and personal work, however:  it's also an opportunity for parties interested in accessing and exploiting our personal data -- businesses,  criminals, and the government. In Ten Don'ts On Your Digital Devices, Eric Rzesut and Daniel Bachrach offer a crash course in basic digitial security, one which fairly well covers the basics for people who never realized that the same smartphones which allow  them access to a world of information also expose them to a world of quicksand, disasters, and predators.

 This is a technological briefing that doesn't get too technical, allowing even the most tech-oblivious to get a handle on the new territory they're covering.  Some lessons are utterly basic, like remembering that phones, tablets, and laptops can now contain information just as sensitive as that found in a wallet of credit cards and government identities, and should be guarded with the same ferocity.  Others pass along information gained only by experience, like learning to detect phishing attacks -- emails disguised as legitimate correspondence containing innocent-looking links that lead one's digitial information to being plundered.  Even the paranoid, myself included, may find updated threat information here: I wasn't aware that some phones are enabled by the manufacturer to automatically connect to whatever wireless networks are in the area, exposing unwitting users who check their bank statements on the phone without realizing it's switched to Johnny Ne'er-do-Well's network instead of their service provider's. Ever section includes a basic review of the issue, followed by suggestions. Some are behavior-related (as in, "Don't pay your credit card bill on a McDonalds wifi connection",  but some list alternatives and relevant tools.   Short but full of useful information, Ten Don't's is a good review of basic personal digital security that offers a lot of suggestions for people who want to tread more carefully.

Related:
Internet Police: How Crime Went Online (and the Police Followed), Nate Anderson
@ war: the military-internet complex, Shane Harris

@ War

@ War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex

© 2014 Shane Harris

288 pages

In the 21^st century, intelligence and war are no longer the domain of pipe-smoking spooks hiding behind newspapers, and uniformed soldiers on the march. When so much of a nation’s livelihood rides on computer networks – both internal ones, allowing massive systems to be controlled from a central office , or an external connection to the internet at large – protecting those systems from harm is as important today as protecting factories and bridges was for the powers of World War 2.  @ war is a quick review of  new vulnerabilities and opportunities exposed by the digital age, an unsettling account  of power on the rise. Attacking networks offers new means to conventional ends (stealing plans for military technology remotely, for instance), as well as new ends altogether, like using viruses to shut down energy networks or cause financial market crashes.Additionally,  cyber warfare has changed the nature of the powers involved: while few powers would take the risk of sending a strike team into a foreign country to engage in widespread sabotage during times of peace, the ethereal domain of the internet allows for powers within China to continually engage in skullduggery against US companies. The same are also engaging in skullduggery right back, which is another interesting facet. Mention the privatization of war, and paid mercenaries like Blackwater come to mind – but this is warfare of another kind.  Private digital security firms, in fact, are sometimes more feisty than the state’s own, biting back with next-gen tools. Not that the two are necessarily competing; as Edward Snowden revealed, connections between private companies like Google and AT&T and the government are commonplace now. Google works with the NSA to help increase its own security, and telecommunications companies build in backdoors to their machines and software that give the government easy access for listening in. Cyberwar may be a less bloody domain of martial conflict, but the power accretion in the hands of both governments and corporations is no less dreadful. 

Related:

• The Internet Police, Nate Anderson
• Economist article on cyberspace as “the Fifth Domain”

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
© 2012 Peggy Orenstein
260 pages

When did every little girl become a princess to be bedecked in pink and fawned over? Such is the question posed by Peggy Orenstein, author of numerous books on issues of motherhood and raising women. The answer is at least twofold. First, advertising toward girls in general has emphasized coy, yet overt sexuality, even to the very young: and secondly, in the early 1990s, the Disney Corporation realized there was a lot of money to be had in developing a line of princess goods.  But this isn't really a book on advertising: Orenstein is more concerned about what the princess culture is doing to the minds of girls. The substance of the book is an examination of  how girls view themselves and each other in society.

 What makes a princess special? There's no answer. A princess is special just because. She exists solely to be an object of attention: her specialness is not the result of her accomplishments, her skills, her talents, her character, or anything substantial.Therein lies the problem with the princess culture, for it influences girls to aspire to be objects of appreciation. Their sense of self-worth is an external fair, subject not to what girls feel themselves capable of, but how girls feel others respond to them. If they are not regarded as Special, they feel worthless. Distracted by the quest for attention, they don't bother with the kind of self-growth that would merit attention, or  be fulfilling on its own. Substance is placed by superficiality. This is particularly troublesome in the case of sexuality: in Orenstein's words, girls learn to aspire to be desired before they have desire (of that kind) on their own. Orenstein sees this as a problem for girlhood in general, because the princess culture has utterly hijacked what it means to be a girl. If a helmet isn't pink, it isn't a girl's helmet. If a mother scorns all the fluff, her inadvertent lesson to her daughter is that it's not okay to be a girl.  This being the problem, her solution -- in addition to reversing Reagan's deregulation of children's advertising -- is for parents to focus on teaching girls how to live for themselves, and not for the approval of others; to define themselves and not try to fit Disney's definition of a girl.

Orenstein is a fun author, especially as she covers beauty pageants for four-year-olds and facebook, using phrases like "Sesame street walker".She's also one who has to practice what she preaches, for her own daughter Daisy is one of the afflicted: the account conveys her desperate frustration in trying to raise Daisy to be a strong person in an environment swamped by odious messages in the advertising. It shares themes with Consuming Kids and So Sexy, So Soon and covers similar ground. What So Sexy, So Soon referred to as "age compression", Orenstein calls "KGOY", Kids Getting Older Younger. This refers to the way kids are attracted to objects advertised to older children, hence kiddie thongs and Barbie in the toddler aisle.  Of obvious interest to the parents and guardians of young women, and quite readable. 

The Shallows

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains
© 2010 Nicholas Carr
276 pages

How many tabs do you have open right now? Neil Postman thought we were undoing ourselves with a distracting and busy fusion of information and entertainment back in the mid-1980s when he penned several works on technology and society. As Nicholas Carr demonstrates in this curious blend of science and cultural criticism, Postman's fears hadn't begun to be realized  At least since the 1990s, people have referred to the Internet as an information superhighway, but the metaphor is no longer apt; it is inadequate to describe the tide of information that sweeps over us any time we visit a website, and the idea of that tide being directed in a way comparable to a highway is simply false. Websites today brim with energy; they are positively alive with interactive features and an abundance of links to other sections of the site. We do not even need to sit down in front of a desktop computer to be touched by all this activity; it reaches out and grabs at our attention through cellphones, tablets, and now sunshades. We can praise the internet for allowing access to so much information at once, but how are our brains responding to it?  Carr argues that while we view the rise of the internet as progressive, in an important way we are reverting.

He builds his argument in three stages; first, introducing readers to the ways that technology can alter our thinking. He uses the rise of print culture as his primary example, demonstrating how it allowed for the growth of a rich intellectual tradition. As we became readers, we became thinkers, spending long hour processing the dense amount of information in a given text, mulling over it in our minds -- considering implications and incorporating the ideas into our very minds. Neil Postman covered the cultural aspects of this, but Carr complements it with neurology, catching readers up to speed on neuroplasticity.Our brains never stop changing: throughout our lives, our actions inform our brains where to invest its limited resources; as we practice new skills, like music or using computers, we become better at them. The catch is that those mental resources are limited: as we grow in one area, we will tend to shrink in another. Brainspace dedicated to older skills that we no longer use shrinks. That is the essential problem Carr is concerned with: as we grow accustomed to dealing with the internet's wealth of bite-sized chunks of information, we're losing that deep-reading ability. That ability was an anomaly in human history; it allowed us to concentrate and digest fully a given set of information; now, we are regressing, losing that refined focus. In addition, we are growing ever more dependent on the internet to store information, to memorize for us. In regards to trivia, esoteric, or other information which we only need occasionally, this is a bonus; it allows our brain to concentrate on more important matters. But we stand in danger of  not being able to rely on ourselves to retain working knowledge; how many of us know our friends' phone numbers anymore?

Carr is not a pessimist with regards to the internet, but he does believe we may be losing something vital in our zeal to be ever-connected. He closes by advocating for a more moderate approach: by all means, let us use the internet's interconnectivity to our advantage, but at the same time he urges us to strive to focus on maintaining old skills of memory and reflection.

Carr definitely offers food for thought. Barring some world-changing disaster, the Internet is here to stay. I do not see the trend toward interconnectivity tapering off, let alone stopping. It will continue to change our lives, and as we use it, it will continue to shape our minds and behavior. We should be mindful of the dynamic which exists between us and our tool use, conscience that our brains are being rewired with every use. Ultimately individuals will have to determine how comfortable they are relating to that network. The Shallows is important to consider, though I would recommend Postman's works for the media-mind connection. There are numerous other works about the role of the internet in our lives which I personally intend on reading, like Sherry Turkel's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powell.


Related:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Technopoly, Neil Postman
The Shallows review at Technology Liberation Front