We are in the information age, will we adapt and change or fail and decline?
The rise of anonymity
Anyone who was brought up in a small village will know that it is close to impossible to keep any secrets. People will get to know everything about you and try to help you, whether you want them to or not. Participation is somewhat compulsory.
Rewind 300 years, and the vast majority of people lived in villages. The elite did possess privileged access to information, but this was due to the prohibitive cost of higher education for the majority, and a lack of free time and mobility in a predominantly agricultural society. There was no police state or legal protection of state secrets.
In the medieval times, a stranger entering a village would be watched very carefully, if not questioned and perhaps run out of the village or worse. With the rise of the modern world, people became anonymous for the first time. People who you have never met before can walk down your road unescorted and without suspicion.
A medieval villager would have kept several yards distance from an unfamiliar person. Modern man can enter a theatre or cinema and sit next to a complete stranger without introducing himself to his neighbour barely a few inches from his own body.
The rise of urban anonymity had both good and bad consequences. Anonymity allows our natural innate conscious to be overridden and ignored. How many people had their rights overridden to bring you the computer that you are reading this post on? How many people suffered to bring you the clothes you are wearing. How much damage was done to the environment by the things around you in the home or office you are reading this post in? It is very hard to know, and researching it all thoroughly would take months. I went into this further in my post Archimedes - Why Godwin was wrong.
The rise of anonymity was accompanied by a massive rise of state bureaucracy - institutional anonymity. Many aspects of our lives are now controlled by people we do not know, people who we have never heard of and probably will never bother to find out about. However formidable this bureaucracy may seem, it is as fragile and brittle as any other man made system. What rose up suddenly can fall just as fast, although things that grow quietly often fall loudly and messily.
As I said above, the medieval and early modern age had no police state enforcing state secrets. Great Britain managed to become the world's dominant military power with an empire spanning the globe with territory in every continent, all with no concept of state secret.
Britain started to have state secrets after it was already in steady decline. How did the modern concept of state secret come about?
Yes Minister!
For a long time, Britain has had a large standing army, but it is no match for Britain's civil service, which has always been several times larger than the military. In Britain, civil servants are not politically appointed. Politicians can try to influence long term policy through laws, but they do not have direct executive authority over the civil service in the way some other countries' politicians do.
The first Official Secrets Act in 1889 was primarily motivated to avoid civil servants giving information directly to the press and embarrassing the government. Obviously this was a failure because governments are still routinely shown up by the civil service leaking information.
In the hysteria in the run-up to the First World War, the 1911 Official Secrets Act was enacted without discussion. It aimed to prevent sensitive civil service information being leaked to foreign states. Several other versions of the Official Secrets Act have been passed over the years. None of them have stopped the civil service from leaking politically embarrassing information when it has chosen to.
The Official Secrets Acts cover civil servants, they are not aimed at the general public. The government can deny or ignore information presented to the press by a member of the general public, but they cannot do much about it. In the UK, a 'gag order', a legal injunction restricting information to the public, can only be made by a court, this can then be appealed through various levels, all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. The idea of the state keeping secrets from the public did not even really work in the pre-information age, no matter how many Official Secrets acts they passed - if you are carrying a water in a sieve, it does not matter if you try to run faster, the water will still come out.
The information age makes us all a global village
As we are already far along the path of moving from the modernistic bureaucratic age to the post-modern information age, it is even harder to keep information secret. In particular, technological change has overwhelmed any prospect of profiting from information hoarding (just look at the legal trolls formerly known as the record industry), in short: code trumps law. With a World-Wide-Web, it does not matter if a British court says that a piece of information must not be published in the British press, it will be online anyway, and there is nothing the British court can do - code trumps law. As John Gilmore said 17 years ago "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".
The British laws have slowly started to recognise the Information age with the Freedom of Information Act which came into force in 2005, giving us access to any public information we ask for, unless it falls into a small and reducing set of exceptions. This however is just the beginning. It is not only the government that will have to adapt to the free information age, we all will have to adapt, not least to live with or filter out much of the noise to find the real signal, as Michael Arrington's article highlights. We will all have to learn to stop blaming the messenger and get started with the hard work of building a better social and economic system.
Looking at history, we can see that all major social, economic and technical shifts have created winners and losers; the dawn of the information age is no different. To survive, state bodies, companies, charities and other institutions must be able to exist and act within a world of free information. Organisations must regenerate themselves from the ground up so that none of their actions or existence requires keeping secrets from the public. This process of regeneration will mean some institutions from the previous age will not survive, while some new institutions will be required in their place.
Military and security services are not excluded. They need to smarten up and have strategies and actions that do not require secrets to work. In short, relying on secrets to keep you alive is a really bad strategy.
The imprisonment of Private Bradley Manning
In July 2007, US helicopter pilots in Iraq opened fire on a group of civilians who are standing in a housing estate, killing a Reuters photographer among others. You can watch the video online in lots of places, including on YouTube and at the website http://www.collateralmurder.com - be warned it is quite shocking, I would not watch just after dinner.
The civilians are carrying video cameras and mobile phones. Somehow the pilots interpret these as AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The video is tragic, especially how the pilots say the civilians on the ground are shooting at them when there is nothing like that happening. We then hear the pilots gloating as a wounded man crawls around as he bleeds to death.
Then a passing van containing locals including two young children stops at the scene to help the dead and dying, picking up the wounded man to take him to hospital, and the helicopter pilots are chomping at the bit in order to get authorisation to shoot these civilians too. The permission comes through and the helicopter fires, the van disappears under bullets, smoke and dust, all just yards away from a row of houses. Then a US armoured vehicle arrives, driving over a person in the way onto the scene, the pilots laughing as this happens.
Are the US authorities prosecuting the helicopter pilots? No this presumably happens every day, instead they are prosecuting the whistleblower. US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning is being held in a Kuwait jail, alleged to have released the video, if tried and found guilty, the punishment is reported to be 52 years in prison. To maintain the old bureaucracies, the virtuous tellers of truth are prosecuted and the laughing killers of children go free. This is horrible, but it is a key indicator of institutional decline, and the end of dominance by the military-industrial elite.
Private Bradley Manning, son of an English woman and an American solider who was based in Britain, is just 22. Whatever the US military does to the young soldier, it is too late, I have already seen the video as have thousands or millions of other people. Whatever our governments are trying to achieve is undermined by the lack of care over human rights and free speech. Nothing seems to have been learned since Vietnam, however this time it is all on YouTube, this time we cannot just trust the state. They are not ever going to learn, it is we that will have to learn for them, and we will have to pray for Bradley Manning, that he can be back with his family very soon.
Birthing pains of the Information age
The development of smelting iron allowed better tools for agriculture, cooking and construction but also allowed more lethal weapons such as the sword. The invention of the printing press led to the reformation and the end of religious authority over the state. The development of powered flight allowed global co-operation and allowed mass bombing in the Blitz.
No technological revolution is ever tidy. Adapting to the information age will be costly and will even lead to loss of life. Especially when organisations like the military refuse to adapt to the inevitable changes.
Wikileaks now has hundreds of thousands of documents that the US and UK military are trying to keep secret. It is a battle that the army cannot win, the pen is mightier than the sword, the web server is mightier than the battleship. If people die, it is not because of a website, it is because the military is living in an outdated paradigm fighting war in an outdated fashion.
Code is the only weapon that matters
The future will not be won by taking up guns or helicopters, the future will be won or lost through code. The technological 'Pandora's box' has been opened and the only thing left is hope. Hope that we can build a new society based on openness and freedom. Hope that our security does not depend on giving up our human rights but on defending them. Lets inspire the peoples of the world to join us in defending human rights, rather than bombing them into submission and then trying to suppress the video.
Discuss this post - Leave a comment
Alas, it’s not so easy to knock out something that I can say with confidence will be reusable in the future. One piece of functionality I keep reimplementing is output in colors, because it’s hugely helpful to making things look more distinct. The first time I wrote this module I knew I would be using it again and I wished to make it nice and reusable, but I didn’t know what the future uses would be. So I put that off until “later”. In the meantime I copy/pasted it a couple of times into other projects. Shameful, but effective.
Furthermore I tried using lighttpd instead of gatling on my fat external drive, and it performed even better, using slightly less CPU. In the kernel I activated the deadline IO-scheduler as default (while keeping CFQ and NOOP as an option), let’s see how that plays out. I’m still not getting more than 9MB/s using Samba, while the CPU is mostly idle and lighty completely saturates the 100MBit link, really annoying.
PCEngines has an 
