[HN Gopher] Hollywood and hyper-surveillance: the story of Gorgo...
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Hollywood and hyper-surveillance: the story of Gorgon Stare (2019)
Author : areoform
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-01-20 11:29 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| mtgx wrote:
| Same for Minority Report ("predictive policing" idea) and the
| 1984 book in general. Just wait until they discover the Black
| Mirror show, too.
|
| These sociopath politicians and intelligence officials watch and
| read these things and really do take them as _instruction
| manuals_ , not as the warnings they were meant to be.
|
| So please stop giving them ideas everyone, I guess.
| mc32 wrote:
| There also was the Total Information Awareness project that was
| seemingly shelved in the early aughts.
|
| How they didn't see parallels to the stasi I don't know.
| adolph wrote:
| Clifford Stoll's book _The Cuckoo 's Egg_ has an interesting
| and nuanced take on TIA advocate Adm. John Poindexter's
| ideas. Late in the book Stoll comes to agree at least partly
| with what he describes as Poindexter's idea that any
| particular piece of data the hackers acquired was not
| critical, but when enough information was gathered and
| organized the new insights available to an adversary were
| critical. On the other side, Stoll takes extraordinary steps
| to coordinate government response to the hackers, much of
| which was ensuring information flow.
|
| Is any sufficiently information sensitive government
| different from the Stasi? I think the difference may be what
| is done with the information. Is the information used
| arbitrarily, unequally or as blackmail, or are laws and rules
| enforced without favor? Do people have incentives to report
| the transgressions of others? Does the system increase or
| decrease trust within a society?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter
| mc32 wrote:
| The thing is we can't rely on good governance over the
| data, even if we accept the premise that the government
| could govern better (uphold laws) with that information.
|
| Unfortunately we know from history that the propensity to
| misuse or go beyond original intent is too great and
| alluring, if not to the designers, to people who follow
| them in office.
| adolph wrote:
| Agreed and since information volume will not decrease,
| how can incentives be aligned to overcome untrusted
| governance?
| mc32 wrote:
| The only iron clad option is to not let the genie out of
| the bottle. Look at how we got around the idea of
| torture, for example. (Maybe it was useful, maybe it
| wasn't, but despite having restrictions against it, we
| found a way to skate the periphery, now imagine something
| less controversial like improving lives through reduction
| of violence enabled by TIA or the Chinese alternative
| "Social Credit Score".
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >How they didn't see parallels to the stasi I don't know.
|
| Probably some mental gymnastics along the lines of "it's
| different because we're using it for good."
|
| What I don't get is why these boondoggles keep popping up
| despite them failing to actually improve the crime stats that
| the people at the top who approve these things tie their
| careers to.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| History has vindicated the sociopaths at least once, early and
| importantly with the Manhattan Project. A letter from Einstein
| and others to FDR made the case for developing the weapon ahead
| of others.
|
| We need more examples of the sociopaths being wrong; of
| projects that no other nation-state found useful but were
| pursued anyway. This book is good for that: a project that
| never rises to nation-state importance, so it's shopped around
| the private sector.
| areoform wrote:
| Hi mtgx, I believe that you may have been shadow banned. It may
| be a good idea to contact dang and self-correct or fix whatever
| happened :)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I live in Baltimore, and recognized this as the controversial
| "spy plane" here. But I don't recall this story; anyone have or
| can find the details (like name of organizer)? I suppose I could
| get the book and look for it!
|
| > In one understated episode, he reveals that -- after the
| Baltimore project was exposed -- the owner of the company that
| built and deployed the WAMI system there had "personally"
| provided gifts to a community organizer. The organizer was
| working to convince Baltimore residents that a sky-borne Big
| Brother might be in their interests.
| adolph wrote:
| Here is a Radiolab episode about an early version of it
| deployed to Dayton, Ohio.
|
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/eye-s...
|
| Additional coverage:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...
|
| https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-1022-kee...
|
| https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/surveill...
| Animats wrote:
| Looking down on everything from orbit isn't all that useful for
| surveillance. You can follow cars, mostly. Systems with large
| numbers of cameras at ground level are more useful.
|
| Surveillance cameras look about the same to most people. But they
| have improved from blurry black and white analog recorded on
| super low speed VHS to 4K and higher full speed, networked
| together, with face recognition and following. That's far more
| useful than aerials.
|
| Here's another video from Hikvision.[1] They're quietly selling
| the vision of a kinder, gentler Big Brother. They have really
| good promotional videos.[2]
|
| [1]
| https://www.facebook.com/PhilteqHikvision/videos/35218484261...
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/otAuH6FDhgw
| areoform wrote:
| > Here, the story takes an even more dystopian turn. John Arnold,
| "a media-shy billionaire", uses his own money to help secretly
| deploy a WAMI system to assist the police in tracking suspects in
| crime-ridden Baltimore, Maryland. Arnold, who has funded other
| "new crime-fighting technologies", first learnt about WAMI's use
| overseas from a podcast, and decided to debut it stateside. "Even
| the mayor was kept in the dark," Holland Michel writes.
|
| US history is filled with bizarre moments where rich, well-
| connected individuals have charted the ship towards dangerous
| shores (or away from them, once in a blue moon). I am currently
| reading "Charlie Wilson's War" by the reporter George Crile III -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Crile_III - on how the US
| ended up getting entangled in Afghanistan, and how it eventually
| led to the formation of Al Qaeda and 9/11. (here's The
| Economist's review, https://www.economist.com/books-and-
| arts/2003/04/24/horseman... and their obituary for Charlie
| Wilson, https://www.economist.com/obituary/2010/02/18/charlie-
| wilson )
|
| There is a movie on the topic, but I do not recommend it as the
| tale is far too bizarre to be told in any other way.
|
| The chain of events that ended with the most horrific terror
| attack in American history started out with a wealthy socialite
| and debutante, Joanne Herring, who conducted her own shadow
| foreign policy and convinced Representative Charlie Wilson to
| intervene by casting aspersions on his manhood. Yes, you read
| that right. It keeps getting "better,"
|
| > To the uninitiated, Joanne and the baroness appeared to be
| typical social butterflies, but they actually shared a
| conspiratorial past. As young debutantes, both had been inducted
| into the Minutewomen, an offshoot of the ultraright, paramilitary
| Minutemen. While other debutantes across the country were
| tittering and talking about boys, Joanne and Buckets were sitting
| at high tea listening to "patriotic women who cared about their
| country. They opened my eyes to the conspiracy that threatened
| our way of life," remembers Joanne. By the time the two girls
| were eighteen they had become part of a semisecret national
| organization of right-wing patriots so convinced of the
| possibility of a Communist takeover that they were organizing for
| guerrilla warfare. And like all good Texas girls, Joanne and
| Buckets had learned to ride and shoot from the earliest age.
|
| I couldn't believe this detail so I fact checked it, and
| apparently this was all true,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minute_Women_of_the_U.S.A.?x The
| Minute Women of the USA were a McCarthy supporting quasi-
| paramilitary group of women convinced that a communist takeover
| of America was imminent. They naturally planned for a guerrilla
| war.
|
| > "It is difficult talking about this now," says Herring. "You
| can easily be thought of as a nut or a nutty hawk." Nevertheless,
| she remains deeply proud of her involvement in the arch-
| conservative organization. That's where she acquired a "sense of
| obligation to act like a lady," which included a commitment to
| fight Communism. "I decided back then that I would dedicate my
| life to making the free-enterprise society survive for my
| children."
|
| As she was wealthy and had political contacts, she was asked by
| the State Department to throw parties to entertain visiting
| dignitaries,
|
| > Houston was a boomtown back then, and when kings and foreign
| leaders asked to visit, the State Department found it helpful to
| enlist the ever enthusiastic Herring to entertain. Her parties
| were always magnificently overdone. For the king of Sweden, there
| was a sheikh's-tent discotheque, complete with zebra rugs,
| stuffed tigers, and belly dancers. She so charmed Ferdinand and
| Imelda Marcos that when she and her husband visited the
| Philippines, the Marcoses reciprocated by meeting them with a
| brass band and an honor guard. Herring soon added Anwar Sadat,
| King Hussein, Princess Grace, the Shah of Iran, and Adnan
| Khashoggi to her list of intimate new friends, all of whom were
| extravagantly entertained at the Herrings' twenty-two-room River
| Oaks mansion.
|
| Eventually this led her to become an envoy for Pakistan's
| democratic government, and an "honorary man" so that she could
| move freely in the islamic society,
|
| > There was no precedent for an American woman playing such a
| role on behalf of the Pakistani government, so Pakistan honored
| Herring with the official status of "honorary man"; she was
| addressed as "sir."
|
| But the good times didn't last,
|
| > It was all going very well _until the military seized power and
| hung_ President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, perhaps best known today as
| the father of Benazir Bhutto. President Jimmy Carter led the
| charge in condemning the new dictator, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq,
| accusing him of _killing democracy in Pakistan as well as of
| building an Islamic atomic bomb_. Carter cut off all military and
| economic assistance, declaring Pakistan unworthy of further U.S.
| aid.
|
| The story keeps getting murkier, as instead of turning _away_
| from the new fundamentalist islamic government, she ended up
| meeting with the dictator, Mr. Zia, and well, it 's hard to
| describe,
|
| > ... explaining that he would never move into Bhutto's palace as
| long as his people were starving. The unexpected surprise of this
| visit was the astonishing impact Herring had on Zia. He was a
| fundamentalist Muslim and she a born-again Christian. Yet by all
| accounts, their bond grew so strong that, for a time, she is said
| to have been Zia's most trusted American adviser, a development
| that Foreign Minister Yaqub Khan found alarming. "She absolutely
| had his ear, it was terrible," he said.
|
| It is hard to remove the salacious context, but it is unclear
| whether Ms. Herring and Pakistan's new dictator had an affair.
| However, their relationship became extremely unusual from almost
| every perspective,
|
| > It was all the more unusual given that Zia was in the process
| of reimposing fundamentalist restrictions on women. But he was so
| spellbound by Herring, and took her so seriously, that to the
| utter dismay of his entire foreign office, he made her Pakistan's
| roving ambassador to the world and even awarded her his country's
| highest civilian honor, the title of Quaid-e-Azam, or "Great
| Leader."
|
| And this is what Rep. Wilson said about her bond with the
| dictator,
|
| > Charlie Wilson says that Zia would leave cabinet meetings just
| to take Joanne's calls. "There was no affair with Zia," Wilson
| recalls, "but it's impossible to deal with Joanne and not deal
| with her on a sexual basis. No matter who you are, you take those
| phone calls."
|
| To appreciate how bizarre this is, I think it's helpful to zoom
| out; An American, born-again christian socialite became the
| trusted advisor to a fundamentalist islamist dictator who gave
| her honors and declared her to be a "Great Leader."
|
| This private citizen became so close with the person credited for
| proliferating nuclear weapons technology to Iran, that he would
| leave cabinet meetings to talk to her.
|
| It's fair to say that's astounding.
|
| This might not have mattered much to American history, if the
| USSr hadn't been flexing its power in Afghanistan. The US
| Government's intelligence apparatus believed, correctly, that
| intervening at too large a scale might blow back on their faces.
|
| However, Ms. Herring did not get the memo. She crossed into
| Afghanistan in private sorties organized by her friends: the
| military junta and, their version of the CIA, the ISI (they come
| up later).
|
| A series of improbably events occur and she comes back after
| witnessing the atrocities committed by the USSR. These facts were
| checked by the author, Mr. Crile, across multiple sources,
|
| > there are times when Joanne Herring sounds quite detached from
| reality. But the stories she told about Fawcett turn out to be
| largely true, including her account of how he had recently lured
| her into Afghanistan.
|
| She funded Rep. Wilson's campaigns and had a close relationship
| with him and emphasized to him how important it was for the
| "brave fighters" to get weapons,
|
| > "I really gave Zia a story on Charlie," she recalls, "because I
| was scared someone could do an investigation of Charlie and write
| him off. I told Zia, 'This is the man who can really do it for
| you.' You see, they were very frightened of America." Joanne also
| began to use all of her wiles to pull Wilson into the Afghan war.
| "I knew that if he was serious about something, he went all out.
| I'd say to Charlie, 'You are powerful, you are wonderful, just
| think what you can do.' It had to be a sort of brainwashing," she
| explained. "But it was very easy, because Charlie thought in
| those terms too. You can raise that spirit in a Texan. It's
| there."
|
| > She emphasized how few weapons they had and described how the
| Afghans treated their guns like library books--as soon as one
| warrior crossed the border, he would turn in his gun, handing it
| over to another man going off to face death. "It was so
| humbling," she went on. "Nothing ever affected me like seeing
| those twenty thousand men raising their guns and shouting to
| fight to the last drop of their blood."
|
| And that's how we ended up with a single Congressman from Texas
| and a CIA agent waging the largest covert war in American
| history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone#Program
|
| It just happened that the people they gave the guns to, those
| brave fighters... They had always intended to turn on the US.
| Except now they'd been handed cash, weapons, trained operatives
| in paramilitary operations, and infrastructure by a tangled
| spaghetti of resources set up by Operation Cycle, the ISI, and -
| in a small, initial capacity - Ms. Herring;
|
| > However, Sir Martin Ewans noted that the Afghan Arabs
| "benefited indirectly from the CIA's funding, through the ISI and
| resistance organizations,"[69] and that "it has been reckoned
| that as many as 35,000 'Arab-Afghans' may have received military
| training in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $800 million in the
| years up to and including 1988."[70] Some of the CIA's greatest
| Afghan beneficiaries were Arabist commanders such as Haqqani and
| Hekmatyar who were key allies of bin Laden over many
| years.[71][72] Haqqani--one of bin Laden's closest associates in
| the 1980s--received direct cash payments from CIA agents, without
| the mediation of the ISI. This independent source of funding gave
| Haqqani disproportionate influence over the mujahideen.[48]
| Haqqani and his network played an important role in the formation
| and growth of al Qaeda, with Jalalhuddin Haqqani allowing bin
| Laden to train mujahideen volunteers in Haqqani territory and
| build extensive infrastructure there.[73]
|
| There were people at the CIA who protested, but it's a large
| organization. The right and left hand didn't know what the middle
| one was doing.
|
| The book is on my list for Project Karl - the modern canon I'm
| making, https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Wilsons-War-George-Crile-
| eboo... , because it's one thing to know that things are messed
| up and that no one knows what they're doing, but it's another to
| take a look behind the curtain and see how things are actually
| done. The incestuous relationships, the back scratching, and the
| brownian motion of random actors that can be altered by the most
| unlikely outsiders (provided they're well connected and rich).
|
| I am worried that something like this might have happened here.
| That decades from now, we'll identify Mr. Arnold as the new Ms.
| Herring - a singular person who unleashed a calamity on their
| fellow citizens. There needs to be a book written about precisely
| how a "media-shy" man managed get his hands on military tech and
| turned it on the civilian population.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I was reading this and became confused - why are you describing
| the plot of a fictional book in so much detail? It doesn't even
| seem like it's just one book, but rather an entire series!
| There are so many different plotlines. Then I decided to reread
| the start of the comment and Google a few things.
|
| What. The. Hell. Most _conspiracy theories_ look tame compared
| to this. Life is stranger than fiction huh?
|
| Thank you.
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