Monday, February 21, 2011

spook country by William Gibson



I recently read Gibson’s 2010 Zero History and was surprised at the similarity between jacket covers across a three year patch - down economy? -- saving a few bucks? Someone got $50,000 for the artwork change, but not $500,000.
Now, the things that Gibson is famous for, is apprising us, the reader, about the trendiest cultural, marketing, and technological paths that technophiles like me are investigating.
Locative art is one of his ideas which, so far, haven’t materialized; most of his ideas have. Picture yourself walking down a Safeway aisle, Blue-Ray earpiece positioned, but idle; then “Hey there Jim, I see you’ve slowed down passing the Pet food. We’ve got a special on Kitty Litter which might be perfect for your new six-week old kitten.” Why not use your receiver, if no call is coming in, to let you know, for your convenience of course, about our local store savings available. We heard of the 6-week cat from: the SPCA, local vet, your purchasing habits at: PetCo and Safeway. That’s locative marketing. Picture you again, this time with a “heads-up” screen. You’re riding shotgun in the family car, looking for an afternoon’s entertainment. Entering San Jose, California, you watch fascinating images of Egyptian artifacts and mummies at the Rosicrucian Museum; then highlights of the Sharks ice hockey team. But it’s Water World that drags the kids into cheers of, “Yes, yes, that’s where we want to go.” As we pass the town’s center, there are virtual marble monuments to the Silicon Valley greats, Jobs, Packard, etc. with laudatory explanations of their contributions.
Listening technology – the hottest topic of the Bush (2) Administration. I am constantly, to no avail, referencing back to the movie, “Enemy of the State,”.1998 with Will Smith and Gene Hackman. It’s getting on to be fifteen years old now and yet all the techno-devices they talked about, and showed, in this movie, were what we supposedly feared were being enabled by the Patriot Act in the Bush era, 5-10 years after the movie: all calls being listened to; satellite pictures of everyone doing anything; and the Brits, they have the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, a million of them all over England, matching faces to computer profiles on every citizen.
I wrote a short story in the early 2000’s projecting what President Bush was doing at the time with “border guards.” The Patriot Act took half a dozen small quasi-police type units: immigration, border patrol, DEA, etc and amalgamated them into a single large unit under Homeland Security, nicknamed “ICE” Immigration & Customs Enforcement. The new ICE unit was unified with a: single physical uniform; enforcement teeth – armed & with powers of arrest and/or detention; loyalty to the executive branch (Seig Heil); and a common mission – homeland security. During the Bush administration, there was a scary edge to this group, which was growing year by year – estimated at 300-400,000 when I was following them in 2005/6/7. The numbers owned up to recently have been dramatically reduced – their web site says 20,000, but that doesn’t marry up with a recent 10,000 on the Mexican Border alone. These are storm troopers – a federal police force, which is unconstitutional – we’ve got State’s rights and the National Guard. When Bush’s megalomania was at its peak, he was trying to start up the Space Cadet Force, which would rule outer space (since forgotten{I hope}).
“Enemy of the State” doesn’t draw conclusions, which is why it gets an OK to go. No harm done – we’ve dumbed down the populace enough that no one draws conclusions. If only 1/10 of one percent of computer users encrypt their messages, what percentage of cell phone users encrypt their calls? Try a countable number, maybe less than ten thousand!!! Most criminal users toss them away – one time users. What does this mean !! ?? WiFi(cell) users don’t have to worry about telephone taps anymore. The furor over wire-tapping in the mid 2000s was over a dead technology. A $50 black 64-bit encryption box plugged into a $50 throw-away cell phone provides the security of WWII’s enigma machine.
WHY ?? Security Services, worldwide, have bought in to, nay, encouraged and supported 3G and 4G networks, which are convenient and ubiquitous for normal users, and completely open to computer analysis by:
--- Security people
--- Marketing people, who fun security people
--- Political people, who are funded by marketing people

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