Juvenescence for the Brain

I recently came across talk of PROMIS software in some of my readings on the CIA and military black ops. Being unfamiliar with it, I decided to do some research.

This story has several interesting components. First and foremost, the software itself has stunning capabilities that go far beyond its “stated purpose”. There’s also the extremely shady way in which the government handled the software. And, of course, this wouldn’t be a juicy conspiracy story unless there were allegations of corruption and misappropriation, to boot!

The software’s creator, Inslaw, was founded in the mid 1970’s by a former NSA/CIA agent. From the very beginning, almost all funding for Inslaw came directly from the government. If you visit their website, it seems pretty obvious that Inslaw isn’t terribly concerned about winning over new business – in other words, they’re hardly a “business” at all. Their purpose was to create “a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts.” This mission yielded the first versions of Promis, delivered to the government that same decade (1970’s).

Promis can take information from any number of databases and integrate it together in a meaningful way. It can parse any data system (regardless of how old or defunct), essentially turning any kind of raw information from any source into useable material.

The implications are endless, and extremely unnerving.

From a WIRED article on the software: “Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There’s a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney’s General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task (…) Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases.”

As you might imagine, other uses for Promis were soon discovered.

Imagine you’re the U.S. government, and have access to telephone and bank records for people. Promis makes child’s play out of running highly specific, goal-oriented searches. You want to know when and where I’ve ever purchased a book? Done. You want to know how many cumulative minutes I’ve ever spent on the phone with Bank of America? Done. You want to keep tabs on the horribly disorganized airline databases to notify you if I buy a plane ticket to Pakistan? Done.

The implications are endless, and extremely unnerving.

From this article… “Through the use of such a system it would be possible to determine that if a suspected terrorist entered the country and was going to hide out, that by monitoring the water and electrical consumption of all possible suspects in a given cell, it would be possible to determine where the terrorist was hiding out by seeing whose utility use increased. Conversely, it would be possible to determine if a terrorist was on the move if his utility consumption declined or his local shopping patterns were interrupted. Aren’t those “club” cards from your supermarket handy?”

You know in Enemy of the State, when Will Smith is being followed by the government? Turns out that kind of stuff is not as fictional as we might hope. As long as the user has access to information (as our government had and continues to have), they have complete control. Make no mistake about it, knowledge is power.

Our government most certainly uses Promis to integrate data about world politics. Everything from the economic situation in China to ongoing investigations at Interpol – it’s all fair game. That means that we probably have better means for parsing criminal records of people in Japan than even the Japanese themselves.

Here’s where it gets even stickier.

Among the secrets that convicted FBI double-agent, Robert Hanssen, allegedly furnished to the KGB was our government’s working version of Promis. Yes, the infinitely scary program that our government uses to keep tabs on both its own citizens as well as foreign governments, had fallen into the hands of the Russians. Adding insult to injury, the Russians sold that software to many other third-parties, including Al-Qaeda.

Yes, many of our greatest enemies in the world now have, in their possession, one of our greatest strategic assets.

Some have speculated that Bin Laden’s possession of Promis is one of the reasons we’ve never caught the damn guy. If he’s aware of how much we know, it’s much easier to stay under the radar. We think that Bin Laden still has access to most of his money, even amidst an international effort to freeze them, and Promis is probably making this possible for him.

There’s one huge caveat. The user must have access (obviously) to huge stores of contemporary information in order for Promis to be effective. We don’t know how capable groups like Al-Qaeda are at obtaining this type of raw material – which essentially must be hacked from various government/private databases. The danger that Promis poses, in unsavory hands, is entirely dependent on their ability to hack.

What do you think about all of this?

After watching the State of the Union address tonight, I have to admit I was left with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. President Obama’s speech, as always, was written and delivered superbly. It wasn’t the things that he said, so much as it was the behavior of everyone else around him, which really ticked me off.

He began his oration by pointing out various uncertain times in our country’s history – the Civil War, D-Day, the civil rights movement, and so on – and reminded us of how, even though victory was not guaranteed, we overcame and maintained as Americans. Of course, he addressed these issues in parallel to our current situation – mired in two dreadfully expensive wars, crawling out of a recession, etc. He spoke of the things that Americans are tired of, and can no longer tolerate. Principal among these was… wait for it, “partisanship“.

Americans are tired of partisanship! And in lieu of this fact, everyone in the audience acted like mature, America-minded professionals – ones who are not at all influenced by petty, hypocritical differences of allegiance and opinion. Oh wait……

After every point made by Obama, the Democrats stood up and applauded wildly, as though they’d just saved 15% on their car insurance.

On the other side of the hall, Republicans seemed to be expending even more energy – except this energy was directed towards seeming as ill-entertained as possible. In fact, some of them seemed downright depressed! I half-expected to see Joe Wilson hunched over his iPod, listening to The Cure while slicing his wrists open… “Alas, cruel world!”

Anyone can become a politician – so long as they’re below a fourth-grade maturity level.

In any case, hardly anybody seemed to be focused on the big issues. They were more concerned with poking subtle (and not so subtle) jibes at the other half of the room. Though my confidence in our government has already been weakened greatly by the past few years, tonight’s State of the Union left me convinced that anyone can become a politician – so long as they’re below a fourth-grade maturity level.

Say what you will, but I’m increasingly of the mind that a democracy – at least insofar as we perceive it – is not the correct way to administer a country of 300 million people. It leaves too much bloat, too many people masquerading as intelligent, representative entities. I’d rather have a small handful of intelligent people run the country then a plethora of idiots.

Edit: although, perhaps this is already the case?

A friend of mine posted an article today poking fun at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. As with most criticisms against Gore, it relies on two specific points: that <insert particular city or region> received a lot of snow this winter, thereby irrevocably and scientifically refuting the notion of climate change… and that Gore is a money-grubbing, self-aggrandizing preacher who’s pursuing this issue more for personal reasons than for any greater sense of public service.

As for the first one, I rarely know how to even begin countering such a statement. Typically, a person using this argument is committing a number of logical fallacies. For starters, they imply that weather in a given (tiny) area is somehow reflective of the planetary climate as a whole. This is like generating a U.S. Census by surveying only families living on the Jersey Shore.

Secondly, they confuse the message about climate change with that of global warming. Yes, the two are related, yet completely distinct. Climate change has no significant detractors. The climate is changing, and it’s changing faster and in more peculiar ways than we can possibly predict. Humans are at the root of much of this change. That much is agreed upon by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.

global warming may or may not be a legitimate, long-term trend, but climate change is.

Global warming is a different story. Even with thousands of scientists working to understand the climatological processes we face, its not entirely clear how today’s climate will differ from that of ten, twenty, or a hundred years in the future. If you’ve ever learned much about Earth and how its climate works, you will have realized how overwhelmingly complex it is, and how difficult it can be to predict anything. So far, the temperature on our planet has increased noticeably (to scientists) over the past half-century. We think that the trend will continue, but the main point here is this: whether or not global warming is a legitimate, long-term trend, climate change most definitely is.

True, Gore doesn’t make this distinction very clear. However, perhaps it’s better that he shouldn’t. His film is neither directed toward scientists nor politicians, but rather the average viewer — a viewer whose attention span narrows with each passing year. With his main goal being to hammer home the importance of climate issues, it may actually be more effective to dumb down the message.

Many people also deride Gore’s lifestyle, insinuating that someone who cares so much about the environment shouldn’t fly around in a private jet, have such a big house, etc etc. He’s suuucch a huge hypocrite for putting out a supposedly “environmentalist” film and then guzzling jet fuel to bounce around the country. To such a person, I would ask this: what have you done recently to inform the public about climate change?

No, really! You think you’ve got Gore all figured out, huh? He’s just doing this whole “environment” routine so he can assuage himself for having never become President. To collect royalties on his movie, and his book. To get an ego-massaging Nobel Peace Prize. Right?

Come on, people. If you created an equation that related the tangible and intangible results of his ongoing efforts to raise awareness about climate change with his carbon footprint, I think you would find that he still comes out as overwhelmingly “green”. Let’s (I believe, safely) assume that few or none of his critics have actually spent any of their own time or energy in support of the climate issue. In that case, their mere existence on the planet represents a far more negative influence on the environment, even without private jets…

Long story short: it’s going to take enough energy and thought, as is, to repair our environment and ensure its stability for future generations. Why in the hell does it seem productive to nitpick, misdirect, and misinform? At the end of the day, I must acquiesce to you Gore critics — yes, you have proven that Al Gore is a human. What now? Take that energy and pour it into something that will help the situation, not alienate and anger people.

While waiting on a smog check for my Volkswagen today, I read an extremely well-written article in Newsweek entitled “The Death of Theocracy: Tehran’s Thugs Cannot Last”. I paused to take special note, as I’d been seriously underwhelmed by the other pieces in this most recent issue. I’ve always enjoyed Christopher Hitchens’ writing, with this example being no exception!

He defines theocracy as “a system where mortals claim the right to dominate other mortals in the name of God”. This is a definition with which I heartily agree, and also one in perfect alignment with his book. Iran, of course, is a theocracy – one whose problems are currently boiling to the top of international media. Its fundamental issue is a lack of human accountability (and competence), as its leaders claim to be merely enacting Allah’s will. In the West, the average citizen views Iran with suspicion and fear, in no small part due to its position amongst the so-called “Axis of Evil” (thanks, Bush!). In reality, the truth is far more complicated.

Allow me to generalize. Here, I use “we” in reference to the typical American – an individual who composes his/her worldview primarily from stories reported by large media outlets, and perceives the general distribution (types of stories, nature of the “big issues”) of those stories to somehow accurately reflect the state of things as they really are. For example, “we” believe terrorism to be a huge, pressing threat toward our daily lives, when in fact we’d be better off paying more attention on the road – since we’re hundreds of times more likely to perish there than at the hands of an extremist. “We” view Iran as a nation full of pin-headed, reactionary fundamentalists, when in fact the vast majority of Iranians are more liberal and easy-going than that, and would likely be content with a chilled-out leader and a functioning electoral process.

Yes, I understand the economics behind reporting big stories. People are more interested in reading about bomb threats than things like their own city’s impoverished areas, and henceforth those are the things that we read about. Unfortunately, rather than pushing the real, rational perspective of things toward us (as responsible media should), the misguided masses are pulling all kinds of crap toward themselves. Used to being entertained, we are demanding entertainment from the media. And that’s what they’re giving us in order to keep the lights on.

I see myself beginning to ramble (again). I suppose what I originally set out to tackle was our misunderstanding of terrorism, and of the Middle East in general.

If I leave you with any main points, they are these:

• Media outlets mean well, but they are businesses. If they’re feeding us bullshit, it’s because we (the customers) asked for it.
• Muslims don’t want to blow us up (at least not very many of them) because they’re mean people, they want to blow us up because their governments are making their own lives suck, and they have no viable outlet for that anger (such as free speech).
• Make an outline before you begin writing, or – like me – you’ll have a brain fart and forget what you were even getting at.
• That is all.

Ahh, so this is the moment – the one I’ve known would appear sooner or later ever since I arrived in the Deep South. My room is packed up, the car is ready to go… tomorrow morning I will be saying my last goodbyes to the city I’ve called home for over four years. Atlanta will remain on my list of “maybe’s” as I seek a job. However, I find it more likely that I’ll remain in Los Angeles, or continue elsewhere if it becomes a possibility. I’m eager to find myself back in China (having studied there this past summer), though that may be a few months away, at the earliest.

Of course, as I coast through this first week of my non-university life, I find myself reflecting on my experience here in Atlanta.

I arrived here in August of 2005, a starry-eyed, barely-seventeen-year-old California boy. I didn’t have a very solid idea of what I was getting into at the time… I knew that Atlanta sounded like an interesting place to be, and that the South was the dominion of rednecks, old money, and Bush supporters. Beyond that, I had hardly any clue about Southern history (which, in retrospect, is largely similar to my preconceptions thereof) or how people, in general, go about things down here.

As a freshman at Georgia Tech, I pledged at Sigma Nu fraternity. This decision, not very carefully made, has largely defined my experience in the past four years! I’ve had a complete blast with all of my brothers, seeing all kinds of crazy things that my (potential) children will probably never believe. I learned how to drink more alcohol than is typically advisable, how to cook shrimp like a Southerner, and how to stay up partying on the least appropriate nights possible. I also learned much about brotherhood, honor, and trust. It’s safe to say that Sigma Nu has overseen my transition from boyhood to manhood, though it’s not singularly responsible for that shift. I will certainly miss everyone from Sigma Nu (well, and the rest of Tech as well!) after leaving here tomorrow.

I will also sorely miss my peers in Science, Technology & Culture, as well as IAC at large (the Ivan Allen College is Tech’s college of liberal arts). I found such a nice home in STAC, and I wish the best to all my fellows who’ve just graduated, wherever you end up. The Student Advisory Board was also a defining experience for me, grooming me as a leader and planner. I hope that they continue in our worthy quest to better the IAC for future students!

I must admit, the intervening years have taught me to appreciate many things about the South. They’ve also convinced me that I would be much happier and productive elsewhere. It’s been a bittersweet time for me, for even though I’ve enjoyed myself, I can’t help but feel that I require a community of different sorts in order to remain intellectually challenged (and therefore, successful). The South, for all of its charms, is not a place for everyone.

I’m sure that I’ll have some further thoughts on things after returning to LA, so I won’t beat this into the ground – distance breeds objectivity, which might be in order lest I appear too cynical about ATL!

For the time being, I look back fondly on some of my favorite experiences down here: NASCAR races at Talladega, beaching in St. Simon’s, shooting guns and riding four-wheelers out in “the sticks”, the A3C Hip-Hop Festival, eating at Chik-fil-a and Fat Mat’s, meeting my girlfriend, etc….. you’ve truly shown me a good time, Atlanta!

Tomorrow, I’m California-bound via New Orleans (the first night), Austin, and Phoenix. Might be my last cross-country drive for a while…

After graduating from Georgia Tech on Saturday, a few friends and I got together for some liquid celebration. At one point the conversation drifted toward physics and reality.

One point of discussion involved the fundamental issue in our understanding of physics – that, of course, being the wide gap between quantum and Newtonian physics! Sure, Einstein can explain the workings of an atom (to a degree), and Newton shows us what happens when two cars smash together – but the two systems are incompatible. Physicists around the world tackle this problem everyday, with limited (or no) success.

It’s certainly exciting to think that we may someday hold a formula explaining reality in its entirety, after we’ve consolidated the multiple theories. But what then? What reassurance do we have that this miracle theory applies to anything more than our infinitesimal speck of a neighborhood? How can we know that these physical laws we observe are more than a one-off snapshot of some greater, invisible set of rules – a set of rules that manifests itself in entirely different ways for other universes?

If that were the case, it would certainly be a massive, existential blow to our egos (especially those of physicists)!

But it wouldn’t be surprising. After all, even the most rudimentary thinker has already realized that their understanding, however great, is nothing compared to the whole of reality. No amount of study and investigation can yield a body of knowledge that approaches even 0.00001% of all that there is to know! That’s certainly a very sobering realization. Yet at the same time it’s a very empowering realization, as it makes you aware of the fascinatingly unique position that we, humans, have in all of this. The fact that we’re able to comprehend our pathetic intellectual faculties means that they are not so pathetic after all!

I came upon a stunning realization during this talk, which I related to the others present. It may come as a bit of a surprise, as it too threatens our most basic notions of reality… Get ready.

You see that computer in front of you? Well, it doesn’t exist. Your bed, and your house, and your family… hell, even the city you live in! None of them exist. At least not to me.

Why? Because anything that we perceive to be real, anything that we can see, touch, feel, smell, and hear – they only exist insofar as our mental perception of them. That is to say, things only exist once they’ve been processed by our senses. Anything that we perceive to be material and solid is merely that, a perception, and nothing more.

In that sense, even though you and I might enjoy a beautiful sunset together – we are really watching two completely different scenes! That sunset (which I assume exists, because it seems like it does) has been filtered through my sensory organs to create a ’sunset’ in my brain. And that, for me, is the only real sunset. Not the actual collection of reddish-purple light on the horizon, and certainly not your understanding of the sunset.

Let that soak in for a moment.

You really have no way to prove that we are even viewing the same phenomena. This concept is related to that which schoolchildren often discuss – that we can’t really know whether I see the same “yellow” or “green” as you do. If I perceive a certain color differently, there’s no way of finding out, because even though my cognitive image of that color differs from yours, I was taught the same word for it! My yellow might very well appear, in my brain, identical to what you think is the color green!

Of course, although that example is convenient for describing this concept to children, I feel it’s flawed for a number of reasons – foremost being that color’s psychological effects on us go far beyond its visual appearance. It’s very unlikely that red would affect us in similar ways (as it does) if I were actually seeing blue instead.

But I stray from the main gist here… All I want you to take from this is the knowledge that everything you’ve ever considered to be real is merely a construct of your senses. If there are 6 billion people living on Earth, then there are also 6 billion Earths – each one a unique manifestation of what-we-assume-t0-be-reality in each of those people’s minds. This is no new concept in philosophy, but when you really start to think about it – it has all kinds of implications for everyday life. No wonder people don’t get along much of time, if we’re truly seeing completely different realities!

I’m going to go have a beer, mostly to repair my sense of existence. DC out.