Miss William Gibson?

++We're living in the tyranny of algorithms. Your credit rating,your health insurance prior to Obamacare, and on-line shopping are all controlled by algorithms applied to give your access or deny you  services. This may be the last triumph of the Western mind. A total control system based on mathematics and completely invisible.

++This is the world pioneered in literature by William Gibson and his forerunner Philip Dick. This brave new world has many positive but eerie sides. For instance, Amazon knows with close to 100% certainty I will buy  Henning Mankell's next book. So they have a program to ship the book to a warehouse nearest me for the moment I order it. Sort of cool except that a computer program has figured out my reading tastes. Any order out of my routine usually triggers a wave of bizarre Amazon recommendations that indicates I have introduced chaos into their system. Another innovative approach of this applied technology is surgery performed cross boundaries through computer generated image and instructions from on-line doctors many time-zones away from the patient.

++But the flip side appears in the revelations of the NSA's data-mining. If you have been waiting for the latest William Gibson cyber-punk novel,turn to the non-fiction offering by Luke Harding called The Snowden Files. Vintage Press,$14.95, February, 2014. The book is about Edward Snowden, the 29-year old computer geek who managed to download all the key NSA files onto pen-drives and distribute them to the world. It is a very peculiar read and is perhaps the first book in awhile that makes me feel old.

++The "triggers" for Edward Snowden's actions are varied, eccentric and downright quirky. He is a supporter on Ron Paul,gets alienated by Barack Obama's desire to outlaw assault weapons,finally makes a commitment to expose NSA's operation after Clapper lied before the Senate about not collecting data on Americans. As laudable as his idealism may be, there is an underlying naiveté about the various institutions he chose to affiliate with. After 9/11 fueled by his patriotism,he attempts to enlist in the Special Forces. Physically he couldn't make the grade and got turned off by the recruits who just wanted to kill Muslims. He then takes his computer prowess to the CIA and has a cushy job, ending up in Geneva, Switzerland. There he got turned off by the CIA's entrapment of a Swiss banker, which he thought was amoral. Fast forward to being the web manager of Anime cartoons in Japan and then to his final destination as a Booz-Allen contractor in Hawaii. During this time, he became intimately aware of the US' cyberwarfare against Chinese targets. The private saga of his growing consciousness of the implications and scope of the NSA's activities is fascinating and worth the read.

++Raised by a father who was an officer in the Coast Guard and living as a teenager near the NSA headquarters in Meade, Maryland,it strike me as bizarre that Edward Snowden would go into his line of work and not understand what both the CIA and NSA do. As someone who has been under periodic surveillance by our government since the 1970s,I have been conditioned to think that our government monitors both the activities of foreigners and politically involved Americans. The history of this fills whole libraries. Freedom of Information requests have yielded the constant surveillance of civil rights heroes such as Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr. and anti-Vietnam war dissidents. The scale and technology today may be different but none of this is secret anymore. 

++A day after 9/11, Michael Hayden got the demand from George Tenet and Dick Cheney to unleash the NSA and pull out all the stops in fighting terrorism. The initial hours after 9/11 set the table for what followed and the rapid advances in computer technology afterwards accelerated the NSA's reach and capability.

++Harding's book is really about the NSA's invisible empire and Edward Snowden trying to expose its global reach.

++You know you are in another country with the description of Glenn Greenwald traveling to Hong Kong to finally meet his new source, Snowden. Greenwald thought he was going to meet a grey-haired intelligence chief but instead met a slight, pale young man holding a Rubrik cube as a sign of identification. You know you are in a new bizarre world that even John Le Carre couldn't describe adequately.

++The Guardian, which played a pivotal role in printing the NSA documents,also demonstrates a certain naiveté in the spy game. Fueled by a groundbreaking story,initially they appear as if the cooperation between the NSA and our allies is somehow unique or unusual. The story leads to the bizarre episode of editors watching as the British authorities destroyed their hard drives. 

++I got the sense that Edward Snowden, despite wanting to serve in the CIA and NSA,believed the old adage "Gentlemen don't read others' mail." I still not convinced that Snowden knows the consequences of his actions. He is keenly sensitive to the risks to his own self but to no one else.

++Like millions of Americans,I enjoyed Wikileaks exposure of the State Department's cables. First, I appreciated how well our diplomats could write. But then I read cables that exposed people by name in an African country who briefed our diplomats on the crisis in their country.A day later I received calls that their lives were endangered by these revelations and they had to go into hiding. It was their perspective we needed to make accurate policy judgments, not the communications intercepts.

++For your further reading pleasure, Glenn Greenwald has initiated his new blog Intercept. William Gibson's reality is now here. I'm not sure I like it.