Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Who are we afraid of?

"I could just imagine it: hundreds of spies in trench coats, sulking around hallways."(p312) Clieff Stoll said these words preliminary to a meeting with the CIA as he pondered what it really looked like on the inside. These seemingly negative and often abrasive feelings against different government organizations were strewn throughout the non-fiction novel. I thought, can I try to explain this saturation of bad ideology from within the evidence of the book, "The Cuckoo's Egg".

First to make a few clarifications in the form of questions. Is this rhetoric against the government societies caused by fear, anger, or something else entirely? I decided that maybe the distaste might be a result of many things and that specifically fear and anger might both play a role. Working in tandem or not, they should be explored separately.

Ask yourself if you are afraid of the dark. If you're a macho man you might have instantly decided it was a silly question since nothing scares you. For the rest of us, the dark poses an imminent threat. Or does it? Ironically, it's not the monotone black wasteland our eyes see that increases our pulse and wets our palms, but the lack of a familiar palette of bright colors. What we can see will never be as scary as what we cannot see.

So, if our eyes see the CIA people wearing trench coats, our logic should indicate we have nothing to fear. Well not quite, but its a start. Clieff Stoll, like us, has little understanding of the inner workings of the CIA or say FBI. Then in a sense, he has a limited understanding or vision of what they do and how they do it. Connecting the ignorance of the agency or bureo to the lack of light in the dark bears some fruit of an explanation. He and we, are afraid of these organizations not because of anything we have seen them do, only our false perception of what they could do.

Then our imagination plays games like the hacker Clieff chased across the Atlantic. Even the agencies themselves cared little about the facts he presented them. Only when the facts led to more questions were the telephone calls keeping Clieff away from his latest object oriented graphical design of a telescope. People fear questions in which they don't have an answer and groups that won't give the answer. Finally, if you're a government entity with the name NTISSIC, a acronym never even decoded, don't be shocked when everyone fears your work and why you do it.

In the novel the anger of a potential small village is illustrated by Chieff's comparison to a hacking an poorly defended network. "In a small town, where people never locked their doors, would we praise the first burglar for showing the townspeople how foolish it was to leave their houses open?" In a similar way, a company or entity that in the past had withheld information, released false information, or worse failed to accomplish an expected purpose will face angry people.

When Chieff's plan to record the hacker's first few connections required near 50 workstations and printers commandeered from the office, not many of the employees were happy to find their equipment missing without an explanation. And in truth, even if they were given one, would that quell their frustration. After all, the whole novel emanated from the anger of a stolen seventy five cents of computing time.

Living in San Fransisco, marinated in far left wing political rhetoric of anarchy and its glory, Clieff Stoll was angry with the mainstream institutions and afraid of their secrecy. Ignorance and skepticism were replaced by facts and people. Slowly, throughout the novel Clieff Stoll finds himself both understanding the governments problems and eventually even feeling responsible to help. This vision of their workings coupled with an appreciation, howbeit streaky at times, of their work shifts the fear and anger away from these entities. At the end of the book Clieff Stoll finds himself neither afraid or angry with the government and even feels a duty to help, as did I, with their fight against anarchy on the nets.

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