When I was a student in history, it seemed like everything we studied was war.
Dates were “important” because they related to some military event. Technology was “interesting” because it killed people.
I even spoke about this issue a bit in the origin story for this blog.
Poems always fascinated him because they present a unique window into the thoughts and feelings of our predecessors who faced important social challenges. Much of history is taught with an emphasis solely on military events — who fought, who won and why — which Davi found to obscure much of the more fundamental day-by-day decisions and lessons distilled into poetry by people of that period.
Indeed, poetry can be essential to understanding human conflict, especially influence campaigns, as I recently wrote about Afghanistan.
Oops, see what I mean? Even poetry is about war.
Fast forward to today and a new article in War on the Rocks suggests a shift towards more systemic thinking — more cognition for placing war in context of society — is being put on the table by military historians.
This integration of battlefield events with the social, cultural, ideological, and technological forces that often trigger and perpetuate war is just what the Society for Military History has called for. In November 2014, two of the best scholars in the business, Robert Citino and Tami Davis Biddle, authored a lucid and compelling statement about the importance of teaching the history of war — in all its various dimensions. “Perhaps the best way for military historians to make their case to the broader profession,” they wrote, “is to highlight the range, diversity, and breadth of the recent scholarship in military history, as well as the dramatic evolution of the field in recent decades.” A broadly based and scholarly approach to the teaching of war, they added, “puts big strategic decisions about war and peace into context; it draws linkages and contrasts between a nation’s socio-political culture and its military culture; it helps illuminate ways in which a polity’s public and national narrative is shaped over time. All this gives the field relevance, and, indeed, urgency, inside the classroom.”
The article is great in its entirety, not least of all because it also smacks down some nonsense claims about a decline in teaching about war.
Basic analysis proves such claims wrong.
And let’s be honest, if more people realized learning history gives you an excellent grasp of analysis they probably wouldn’t have to be sold on the benefits of learning about war.
Obviously the US isn’t going to name a federal building in Oklahoma after Timothy McVeigh, nor is it going to name a sky scraper in NYC after Osama bin Laden. My how times have changed!
Not so very long ago American military bases and ships were attacked viciously using information warfare tactics and conspicuously named for those who wanted America to be destroyed.
Even more to the point, history had been systematically erased through the process of gifting honors to immoral and disgraceful enemies of the state (rather than heroes and role models who served to protect America from its enemies).
Now a Naming Commission is taking suggestions for how to remove these attacks on American identity, undo obvious damage to morale, and reverse the systemic erasure of history.
The Naming Commission has the important role of recommending names that exemplify our U.S. military and national values. We are determined to gain feedback and insight from every concerned citizen to ensure the best names are recommended. To accomplish this monumental task, we are engaging with local, city, state and federal leaders and communities. We also encourage all interested citizens to submit naming recommendations…
Here is a quick list of suggestions to help get things rolling:
In September 1864, Soule and his commanding officer, Major Edward Wynkoop, participated in the Smoky Hill peace talks with Cheyenne and Arapaho Peace Chiefs. Later, he traveled with Wynkoop and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Chiefs to Denver for a meeting at Camp Weld with Governor and ex-officio Superintendent of Indian Affairs John Evans and Chivington. Soule’s presence at both of these important peace meetings reinforced the decisions he made at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864, when he showed extraordinary courage in refusing to participate in the massacre of the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho. During the attack, Soule and his company of soldiers refused to fight and in the days following the massacre, Soule wrote the chilling and explicit letter [documenting crimes and] one of the first to testify against Chivington during the Army’s investigation in January 1865.
Graduate of Fort Benning, Commanding General United States Army having served in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Fifth African American flag officer in Army, first black intelligence general, National Intelligence Hall of Fame. Distinguished Service Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Silver Star, Legion of Merit (2 Oak Leaf Cluster), Bronze Star (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Purple Heart, Air Medal, Army Commendation Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Good Conduct Medal, and Combat Infantryman Badge (2nd Award).
“The mere act of breaking the negro’s chains was the act of Abraham Lincoln…. But the act by which the negro was made a citizen of the United States and invested with the elective franchise was pre-eminently the act of President Grant” — Frederick Douglas, 1876
The first Black law enforcement officer to serve as a Texas Ranger in the agency’s 165-year history. His great-grandfather was a Black Seminole and fought in three Seminole Indian wars (the largest slave rebellion in American history). From the small town of Del Rio as a child he decided he wanted to be a Ranger. He joined the Navy and served four years during the Vietnam War. After serving he earned a college degree from the University of Texas and began his law enforcement work, eventually working as a trooper and criminal investigator. In 1985, he took up the challenge of trying to become a Ranger. Three years later he was accepted and began investigating some of the state’s most notorious crimes. After retiring in 2003, Young opened his own private investigation agency.
Army’s most highly decorated nurse. As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, she was the third woman in Army history to be promoted to the rank of Colonel. She earned 34 medals for her service during World War II and the Korean War.
Willa became a founding member of the National Airmen’s Association of America (NAAA), the first Black aviators’ group. She served as the national secretary and president of the Chicago branch of the NAAA, whose main objective was to pursue the participation of African Americans in aviation and aeronautics, as well as bringing African Americans into the armed forces. The work of both the school and the NAAA gained traction with the onset of World War II, as a serious shortage of experienced pilots made headlines across the country. A 1939 Time Magazine article on the topic mentions Willa and the NAAA, giving a national platform for their proposed solution to the problem: train African American men to become pilots! Willa advocated tirelessly for desegregation in the military, and her school finally became part of the government-funded CPTP, the Civilian Pilot Training Program (later the WTS, War Training Service Program), established to provide the country with enough experienced aviators to improve military preparedness. It allowed for participation of African Americans on a “separate-but-equal” basis. Willa was named federal coordinator for the CPTP in Chicago and, while the Coffrey School was not allowed to train pilots for the Army, it was chosen to provide African American trainees for the pilot training program at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This program led to the creation of the famed Tuskegee Airmen and Willa was directly responsible for training over 200 future Tuskegee Airmen and instructors.
First naval flight nurse to fly evacuation mission to an active combat zone (Okinawa) she also served at Iwo Jima helping to evacuate 2,393 Marines and sailors. Of the 1,176,048 total of military patients evacuated in these dangerous flights during war, only 46 died en route.
Known as a leader who led from the front, Rogers went where the action was most intense, rallying troops and personally directing and redirecting the howitzer fire. He ran from position to position, even assuming a place on one fire team that had been diminished by casualties; engaged in close-range firefights; and was wounded multiple times during the three assaults. After being wounded so seriously that he could no longer fight himself, he continued calling encouragement and reassurance to his troops. Due in no small part to his courageous leadership, 1st Battalion prevailed and the NVA force was repelled. On May 14, 1970, President Richard Nixon bestowed the Medal of Honor on LTC Charles Rogers, making him the highest-ranking Black soldier to ever be awarded the Medal of Honor. Rogers continued his service and rose to the rank of Major General, making him the highest-ranking Black Medal of Honor recipient. He worked diligently for race and gender equality in the military before he retired from the Army in 1984, after 32 years of service
The BBC in 2019 reported that human traffickers were using Facebook’s services to sell domestic workers.
Apple threatened to remove Facebook from its App Store after a report about an online slave market.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook knew about the practice even before Apple made its threat.
There are two important and connected ethics stories in the news lately about Facebook management of user security.
The first is what I’ve been telling people about WhatsApp for several years now. The design of the product had a backdoor built-in and barely obscured.
On one recent call with a privacy expert and researcher they literally dropped off when I brought this fact up. After they went and did some digging they jumped back on that call and said “shit you’re right why aren’t people talking about this”. Often in security it’s unpleasant to be correct, and I have no idea why people choose the things to talk about instead.
I mean it was never much of a secret. Anyone could easily see (as I did, as that researcher did) the product always said if someone reported something they didn’t like when connected to another person their whole chat could be sent to Facebook for review. In other words a key held by a third party could unlock an “end-to-end” encrypted chat because of a special reporting mechanism.
That’s inherently a backdoor by definition.
A trigger was designed for a third party to enter secretly and have a look around in a private space. What if the trigger to gain entry was pulled by the third party and not the other two “ends” in the conversation?
I have seen exactly zero proof so far that Facebook couldn’t snoop without consent, meaning it’s plausible a third party could drop in whenever desired and undetected by using their trigger.
Again, the very definition of a backdoor.
Apparently this has finally become mainstream knowledge, which is refreshing to say the least. It puts to bed maybe that the Facebook PR machine for years has been spitting intentional bald-faced lies.
WhatsApp has more than 1,000 contract workers filling floors of office buildings in Austin, Texas, Dublin and Singapore, where they examine millions of pieces of users’ content. Seated at computers in pods organized by work assignments, these hourly workers use special Facebook software to sift through streams of private messages, images and videos that have been reported by WhatsApp users as improper and then screened by the company’s artificial intelligence systems. These contractors pass judgment on whatever flashes on their screen — claims of everything from fraud or spam to child porn and potential terrorist plotting — typically in less than a minute.
Policing users while assuring them that their privacy is sacrosanct makes for an awkward mission at WhatsApp. A 49-slide internal company marketing presentation from December, obtained by ProPublica, emphasizes the “fierce” promotion of WhatsApp’s “privacy narrative.” It compares its “brand character” to “the Immigrant Mother” and displays a photo of Malala Yousafzai, who survived a shooting by the Taliban and became a Nobel Peace Prize winner, in a slide titled “Brand tone parameters.”
If you think that sounds awful. Here’s a flashback to a chalkboard-screeching 2019 tweet that may as well be from the ex-head of safety of a tobacco company on an investor/politics tour to claim how the mint-flavored cigarette filter was the most health-preserving thing of all time.
Source: Twitter
That is the ex-CISO of Facebook, who was “fired” into a job at Stanford to be a lobbyist for Facebook, on stage in Silicon Valley pumping investors.
The real privacy story is more like this illustration, where Facebook and Whatsapp are clearly toxic options:
So here is how that tweet immediately appeared in my mind:
Facebook is to privacy what cigars are to health.
Also that tweet is promoting the very same person who very recently was being promoted by Facebook and Stanford into a giant op-ed in the NYT… where he hypocritically attacked Apple regarding new engineering privacy-protections to protect children from harms.
Hypocrisy? Yes, it doesn’t get much worse, as others already have pointed out: Facebook executives seem to mostly gin up bogus outrage for self gain.
I mean it’s a strange fact that an ex-Facebook executive is crossing over to pollute mainstream news like the NYT with disinformation, given the research on media he surely knows already (being the sausage factory insider who oversaw obvious failures of safety)…
Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than reputable news sites…
When I say he oversaw obvious failures, I don’t just mean all the breaches and integrity disasters, becoming a first-time CISO who within a couple years was flailing in the largest security disasters in history.
One internal Facebook presentation said that among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the issue to Instagram.
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers reportedly wrote.
This safety failure of weak and incompetent leadership at Facebook (now Stanford) has been the cause of dire consequences to our society, economy, and most importantly, national security.
The second point is thus Facebook finally is starting to face the book — it has been creating vitriol and outrage this whole time for self-gain and profit, carelessly using technology in a manner obviously counter-productive to health and safety of society.
What the AI doesn’t understand is that I feel worse after reading those posts and would much prefer to not see them in the first place… I routinely allow myself to be enraged… wasting time doing something that makes me miserable.
This is backed up by research of Twitter proving social media platforms effectively train people to interact with increasing hostility to generate attention (feeding a self-defeating social entry mechanism, like stealing money to get rich).
If you feel like you’re met with a lot of anger and vitriol every time you open up your social media apps, you’re not imagining it: A new study shows how these online networks are encouraging us to express more moral outrage over time.
What seems to be happening is that the likes, shares and interactions we get for our outpourings of indignation are reinforcing those expressions. That in turn encourages us to carry on being morally outraged more often and more visibly in the future.
What this study shows is that reinforcement learning is evident in the extremes of online political discussion, according to computational social psychologist William Brady from Yale University, who is one of the researchers behind the work.
“Social media’s incentives are changing the tone of our political conversations online,” says Brady. “This is the first evidence that some people learn to express more outrage over time because they are rewarded by the basic design of social media.”
The team used computer software to analyze 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users, collected during several controversial events, including debates over hate crimes, the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, and an altercation on an aircraft.
For a tweet to qualify as showing moral outrage, it had to meet three criteria: it had to be a response to a perceived violation of personal morals; it had to show feelings such as anger, disgust, or contempt; and it had to include some kind of blame or call for accountability.
The researchers found that getting more likes and retweets made people more likely to post more moral outrage in their later posts. Two further controlled experiments with 240 participants backed up these findings, and also showed that users tend to follow the ‘norms’ of the networks they’re part of in terms of what is expressed.”
And that’s a great explanation for the chalkboard-screeching 2019 tweet from Facebook’s ex-CISO, which could also be described as an addiction to spreading misinformation.
Amnesty International perhaps put it best, when they alleged the ex-CISO…
…created a system that gives powerful users free rein to harass others, make false claims, and incite violence. “The message from Facebook is clear – if you’re influential enough, they’ll let you get away with anything.”
Is it any wonder Facebook lied about user safety if they fundamentally side with tyranny and don’t believe in accountability? The site was founded on the theory that Zuckerberg would never face consequences for violating privacy of young women and then trying to harm them against their will.
Even the WSJ reports the company has since been building upon market corruption and unfairness rooted in privilege abuse.
Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt. A program known as XCheck has given millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse…
The question really becomes, given such a company with the worst trust record in history with endless reports of security breaches and violations of privacy, who (besides Stanford) still believes anymore in this brand or its talking heads?
In other words it should surprise exactly nobody how Facebook executives put a backdoor into their encryption while fraudulently promoting it as the safest, all for their own enrichment through the suffering of others and especially young girls.
Or as I warned on this blog literally ten years ago in a post called “why I deleted Facebook“…
…private company funded by Russians without any transparency that most likely hopes to profit from your loss (of privacy)… if Facebook is dependent on Zuckerberg their users are screwed.
There is an interesting detail buried within an article about cookie banners:
“I often hear people say how tired they are of having to engage with so many cookie pop-ups,” said Denham. “That fatigue is leading to people giving more personal data than they would like. The cookie mechanism is also far from ideal for businesses and other organisations running websites, as it is costly and it can lead to poor user experience.
“While I expect businesses to comply with current laws, my office is encouraging international collaboration to bring practical solutions in this area.”
She will raise the issue during a virtual meeting with leaders from the US, France, Germany, Canada, Japan, Italy, the OECD and WEF. Each representative will suggest a technology or innovation issue on which they believe closer international cooperation is required.
Denham has indicated that a smoother mechanism for consent is already technologically possible and compliant with data protection regulations. No further detail was given on the mechanism, which was simply described as “an idea on how to improve the current cookie consent mechanism, making web browsing smoother and more business friendly while better protecting personal data”.
Very important to note fatigue being mentioned as a reason against consent being given to the person who would be most interested in the harms.
In this context of a data owner being undermined, read the start of that last paragraph again:
Denham has indicated that a smoother mechanism for consent is already technologically possible and compliant with data protection regulations.
If you haven’t already looked at how W3C Solid brings consent to the Web, now is a great time to start.
Also, I found it delightful that this article forced me into an ugly consent mechanism before I could read about why consent fatigue is real.
