Thread by @doctorow

This week marks the publication of @bartongellman's "Dark Mirror," an important addition to the canon of books about the @Snowden revelations. Earlier this week, @TheAtlantic ran a fascinating excerpt about how spy agencies targeted Gellman.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/pro…

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Today in @Wired, we get another taste - a long excerpt about the "Database of ruin" - the @NSAGov's system for mapping the "social graphs" of every person in America using phone billing record.

wired.com/story/inside-t…

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This system was handwaved by GW Bush, who said, "if somebody is talking to al Qaeda, we want to know why" - but as Gellman discovered, that's not what the "Stellarwind" program did. This wasn't about getting terrorists' call records to see who they talked to.

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It was about "six degrees of separation," finding everyone who talked to someone that a terrorist talked to, then everyone THEY talked to, and so on and so on. Exponential growth (a subject we've become much more familiar with) means that soon, you're looking at everyone.

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The computational intensity of this task meant that the trillions of records the NSA ingested weren't inert on a hard-drive, waiting to be pulled after an attack so that cops could find confederates of the attacker. Rather, they were constantly, continuously recomputed.

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For decades, the NSA was created these algorithmic webs of suspicion, seemingly in ignorance of Cardinal Richilieu's Law: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

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This is what made it a "database of ruin." Because just as predictive policing doesn't predict crime (it predicts whom the police will suspect of crime), so did Mainway/Stellarwind perfectly predict whom the NSA would suspect - but it did not predict who was a terrorist.

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And it's what made the system a "dark mirror" - the NSA knew who we talked to and when, but we never knew who they talked to and when. It was one-way glass.

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Gellman: "If the power implications do not seem convincing, try inverting the relationship in your mind: What if a small group of citizens had secret access to the telephone logs and social networks of government officials?"

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"How might that privileged knowledge affect their power to shape events? How might their interactions change if they possessed the means to humiliate and destroy the careers of the persons in power?"

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In 2008 - a few years after the Mark Klein revelations (the events that precipitated Snowden's own whistleblower journey), I was so struck by this concern that I wrote a short story about it.

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In "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away," I imagine a system of automated, universal suspicion, abetted by a cadre of willfully blind, technically excellent and brilliant prodigies in monasteries.

tor.com/2008/08/06/wea…

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Rather than raising honeybees or making wine, their monastic order processes data for the security agencies. "Weak and Strange" follows one of these monks as he confronts who he is and what he does.

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Living in our present moment requires enormous compartmentalization skills - there is no "ethical consumption," so either you don a hairshirt of material privation, or you try not to dwell on the oceans of blood just below the surface.

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It's why I'm so interested in whistleblowers like Snowden, and anyone who confronts the reality of their own complicity in the indefensible. Even if you don't have to go into exile as a result of your actions, you still pay a giant psychic price for it.

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I re-read Weak and Strange the other day, after reading @genmon's post about neurodiversity (I wrote the story after a car-ride in which @pnh proposed that monasteries were the medieval way of managing neurodiversity).

interconnected.org/home/2020/05/1…

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It reminded me that I've been thinking about the subject of confronting complicity for a LONG time.

Which was something of a revelation, because my next novel, ATTACK SURFACE (AKA Little Brother 3) is all about this.

read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksu…

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Somehow, I'd forgotten about Weak and Strange for the years I spent on that book (!). But again, that is the satisfying and sometimes frightening thing about writing: it tells you stuff about yourself you've forgotten or never noticed.

eof/