Islands in the Clickstream. The Face of Evil. October 6 2000

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Islands in the Clickstream:
The Face of Evil

Sometimes the streams of our lives converge in a single river and its
power is impossible to resist.

This month many of the passions which have animated much of my adult
life converged.

As the recipient of the Gamalial Chair in Peace and Justice through
the Lutheran ministry at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, I
will devote much of October and November to speaking about technology
and justice issues in a variety of venues in my home town.

At the same time, new material came into focus for a series of
articles I am writing on "Chinatown moments."  Disclosed to me over
the past year, these are moments in which different people were told
either directly or by circumstances - as Jake Gittes, the "Chinatown"
detective, was told by Noah Cross - "You may think you know what
you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't." In two instances,
people were threatened with death, in another an investigator feared
for his life when he discovered that a prominent local citizen might
have committed murder, and in a fourth, a young computer hacker broke
suddenly through a false partition in cyberspace and found himself in
freefall in a world more complex and corrupt than he had dreamed.

And at the same time ... I interviewed Dan Geer for next month's
Information Security Magazine. Dan Geer is incredibly smart. He is
currently Chief Technology Officer for @stake and newly elected
president of Usenix. He has a doctorate from Harvard and helped
develop the Athena Project and Kerberos at MIT. When you're talking to
a guy like that about computer security and he tells you that he only
hires people who are "sadder but wiser," you pay attention. By that he
meant that he wants people who know what's really at stake. The
urgency of their work must be energized by an encounter with the face
of evil so they understand what they're up against and why their work
matters.

Geer has a friend who is now a corporate attorney but who was once
assistant station chief of the CIA in Beirut. Geer asked about his
migration from intelligence to the private sector. His friend had paid
plenty of dues - he had been held hostage, for example, for two weeks
on a runway - but the defining moment was created by those who had
kidnapped his superior, the CIA station chief. Over the next days,
they took video tapes of the slow careful process by which they
tortured him to death.  Geer's friend watched those tapes, every day.
Every single day. Until the body of his colleague was at last
lifeless.

"I wish we could talk about our successes," Brian Snow, the head of
NCSC (National Computer Security Center, a division of the National
Security Agency)  told me, but sources and methods must be protected.
So I had to rely on his tone of voice when Snow spoke of what might
have happened, indicating an unimaginable scale of death and
destruction, to know that Snow too had seen the face of evil.

Reflection on "truth and justice" issues for the Gamaliel Chair, the
stakes of the game when spy meets spy, and the stories in those
articles all point in the same direction.

Technology transforms what it means to be human. Technology transforms
the future by changing how we hold ourselves here and now as
possibilities for action. Technology redefines our human enterprise at
its core.

New technologies - genetic engineering, instruments of surveillance
and social control - deliver power into our hands, and we always use
it. Then comes reflection on how to use it, after the fact. But that
reflection can impact what we choose to do in the next future, even as
the current future becomes the past.

Technology is not about anti-gravity, designer children, or new
information channels merely. It is about the entire field of human
subjectivity and how we choose to define and direct ourselves. Those
questions invoke the ultimate meaning of our lives. Technology enables
people to act powerfully but how we act is not determined exclusively
by technology.

Either the universe is all meaningless or it is all meaningful.
Meaning seems to be a function of complexity. As seemingly isolated
events or inert substances are integrated into a complex system,
meaning happens. Ultimately the entire universe and its passing shadow
which we call spacetime will be integrated into itself ... and
conscious of itself. At that instant, when the circle is closed, the
beginning and the end will be seen to have always been one thing.
Consciousness including all of its means of being.

Or put it this way.

"You tell me there's no God," said Geer," and I'll ask you to look me
in the eye and tell me there's no such thing as evil. If you can't do
the one, you lose the right to do the other."

The evil of which he speaks is no abstraction. It is the gut-level
discovery that comes when we face the worst that human beings can do
and know in that harrowing moment that there is another, a better
option.

To know the truth, however, there must be disclosure. Without
disclosure, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no
accountability. Without accountability, there is no justice.

The digital cage in which we flap our wings either hides or discloses
the truth.  The liberation of the truth and its right uses are the
flip sides of the loss of privacy and places to hide. How we build
that cage, how we live in it, is not built into digital technology but
into our souls. That is where we make decisions about making
decisions, and that is where we discover a capacity for freedom that
enables us to define our lives as heroic or debased.



A schedule of speaking venues for the Gamaliel Chair during October
and November is available to those near Milwaukee by email request.
The interview with Dan Geer will appear in Information Security
Magazine published by ICSA.

October 6 2000

**********************************************************************
Islands in the Clickstream is an intermittent column written by
Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions of computer
technology and the ultimate concerns of our lives. Comments are
welcome.

Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer
focused on the impact of computer technology on individuals and
organizations - the human dimensions of technology and work - and
"life on the edge."

Feel free to pass along columns for personal use, retaining this
signature file. If interested in publishing columns online or in print
or employing Richard as a professional speaker, retreat leader or
consultant, email for details.

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Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 2000. All rights reserved.

ThiemeWorks on the Web:  http://www.thiemeworks.com and
http://www.richardthieme.com

ThiemeWorks  P. O. Box 170737  Milwaukee WI 53217-8061  414.351.2321
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