Flash Gordon Left Me The Keys

Hope For What Might Be
Most of the political arguments going forward in the world at the present moment are the same ones that enlivened the scaffolds of Renaissance Italy annals of Imperial Rome -- the old and bitter quarrel between time past and time future, between the inertia of things as they are and the energy inherent in the hope of things as they might become.

The former and more portly faction invariably commands the popular majority. It is the party of military parades and Late Night with David Letterman, of Time magazine, Steven Spielberg movies, and the oil company lobbyists working the halls of Congress.

All of you belong, by definition if not by choice, to the party of things-as-they-might-become. Don't underestimate the guile of your enemies. The servants of the status quo like to say that nothing is seriously amiss, that this is the best of all possible worlds, that the wisdom in office, whether at the White House or on the set of Nightline, brooks neither impertinence nor contradiction.

The authorities rest the case for their assurance on two lines of false reasoning. First, that the future is so dangerous that only football captains need apply, that everything is very difficult, very complicated and very far beyond the grasp of mere mortals who never have sailed up the Nile with Henry Kissinger. Second, that because this is the best of all possible worlds, nothing important remains to be said or discovered. The media have a hand in both of these deceptions, and I speak from some experience when I say that the fear of the future sells newspapers and bids up the market for cheap miracles and expensive cosmetics.

The enormous acquisitions and disseminations of knowledge over the past 20 years (about nuclear physics, cancer cells, the history of Germany, terrorism and the chemistry of bats) have brought forth corresponding gains in the levels of anxiety. Hardly a day passes without somebody naming yet another substance (previously thought to be harmless) that can kill or maim everybody in downtown Los Angeles. The evil omens decorate the seven-o'clock news, and every self-respecting newsletter announces the depletion of the reserves of deutschemarks, sunlight and conscience. The seers who look into the abyss of the millennium predict catastrophes appropriate to the fears of the audiences they have been paid to alarm. During the span of a single week at Harper's Magazine I once received the galley-proofs of three new books entitled, in order of their arrival, The End of Nature, The End of Science and The End of History.

The rumors are as exaggerated as the ones about Saddam Hussein's inventory of nuclear weapons. It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and most of the people who magnify its risks do so for reasons of their own. Jealous of a future apt to render them ridiculous or irrelevant, they bear comparison to the French noblewoman, a duchess in her 80s, who, on seeing the first ascent of Montgolfier's balloon from the palace of the Tuilleries in 1783, fell back upon the cushions of her carriage and wept. "Oh yes," she said, "Now it's certain. One day they'll learn how to keep people alive forever, but I shall already be dead."

To disprove the second proposition, you have only to consult the listings in any newspaper -- any week, any edition -- to know that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are still at large on five continents and seven oceans. The headlines give the lie to the assertion that the servants of the status quo know why the word wags, and who or what wags it. Quite clearly, almost everything remains to be done, said or discovered; also quite clearly, the world stands in need of as much help as it can get, and if it doesn't get that help from people like yourselves, then in whom does it place the hope of a new answer, or even better, a new question.

As a student at Yale in the 1950s I was taught to think of the 20th Century as the miraculous and happy ending of the story of human progress; I now think of it as a still primitive beginning. From the perspective of the 30th Century, I expect the historians to look back upon the works of our modern world as if upon sand castles built by surprisingly gifted children.
When I was your age I made the mistake of imagining the future as a destination -- like Paris or Baltimore or the Gobi Desert, and I thought that in the so-called real world the people who ran the place were made of Greek marble or Gothic stone. As I grew older I began to notice, first to my surprise, and then to my alarm, that the more loudly the Wizards of Oz claimed to know all the answers the less likely that they knew even a few of the questions. The walls of the establishment are made of paper, as often as not the fortress manned by soldiers already dead, propped like sandbags on the parapets of office. The party of things-as-they-are stages a great show of its magnificence in order to conceal its weakness and fear, and it makes small complaint if all the voters in California, New York and Michigan wander through their lives in a passive stupor. As a nation we now spend upwards of $500 billion a year on liquor, pornography and drugs, and the Cold War against the American intellect constitutes a more profitable business than the old arrangement with the Russians or the new arrangement with the viceroys of terrorist Jihad....

Democracy allies itself with change and proceeds under the assumption that nobody knows enough, that nothing is final, that the old order (whether of men and women or institutions) will be carried off-stage every 20 years. The plurality of democratic voices and forms assumes a ceaseless making and re-making -- of laws and customs as well as of fortunes and matinee idols. Democratic government is a purpose held in common, and if it can be understood as a set of temporary coalitions among people of different interests, skills and generations, then everybody has need of everybody else. To the extent that a democratic society gives its citizens the chance to chase its own dreams, it gives itself the chance not only of discovering its multiple glories and triumphs, but also of surviving its multiple follies and crimes.

No matter what the season's top billings in the American political circus, the argument between the past and future tense falls along the division between the people who would continue the democratic experiment and those who think that the experiment has gone far enough. The freedom of thought and expression presents society with the unwelcome news that it is in trouble, but because all societies, like most individuals, are always in some kind of trouble, the news doesn't cause them to perish. They die instead from the fear of thought and the paralysis that accompanies the wish to make time stand still. Liberty has ambitious enemies, but the survival of the American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to think for themselves.

Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement, but a democracy stands in need of as many questions as it can ask of its own stupidity and fear. Idealism rescues cynicism, and the continued comfort of the party of things-as-they-are depends on the doubts placed under their pillows by the party of things-as-they-might-become. The future turns out to be something that you make instead of find. It isn't waiting for your arrival, either with an arrest warrant or a band, nor is it any further away than the next sentence, the next best guess, the next sketch for the painting of a life portrait that might become a masterpiece. The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will.

A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams... "Snake you are alve!"
It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!

The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.

What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?

The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

All of this -- and more -- would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health.

This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to "trace the 'threads' of an individual's life," to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog's sponsor.

Someone with access to the database could "retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier ... by using a search-engine interface."

On the surface, the project seems like the latest in a long line of DARPA's "blue sky" research efforts, most of which never make it out of the lab. But DARPA is currently asking businesses and universities for research proposals to begin moving LifeLog forward. And some people, such as Steven Aftergood, a defense analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, are worried.

With its controversial Total Information Awareness database project, DARPA already is planning to track all of an individual's "transactional data" -- like what we buy and who gets our e-mail.

While the parameters of the project have not yet been determined, Aftergood said he believes LifeLog could go far beyond TIA's scope, adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.

"LifeLog has the potential to become something like 'TIA cubed,'" he said.

In the private sector, a number of LifeLog-like efforts already are underway to digitally archive one's life -- to create a "surrogate memory," as minicomputer pioneer Gordon Bell calls it.

Bell, now with Microsoft, scans all his letters and memos, records his conversations, saves all the Web pages he's visited and e-mails he's received and puts them into an electronic storehouse dubbed MyLifeBits.

DARPA's LifeLog would take this concept several steps further by tracking where people go and what they see.

That makes the project similar to the work of University of Toronto professor Steve Mann. Since his teen years in the 1970s, Mann, a self-styled "cyborg," has worn a camera and an array of sensors to record his existence. He claims he's convinced 20 to 30 of his current and former students to do the same. It's all part of an experiment into "existential technology" and "the metaphysics of free will."

DARPA isn't quite so philosophical about LifeLog. But the agency does see some potential battlefield uses for the program.

"The technology could allow the military to develop computerized assistants for war fighters and commanders that can be more effective because they can easily access the user's past experiences," DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker speculated in an e-mail.

It also could allow the military to develop more efficient computerized training systems, she said: Computers could remember how each student learns and interacts with the training system, then tailor the lessons accordingly.

John Pike, director of defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said he finds the explanations "hard to believe."

"It looks like an outgrowth of Total Information Awareness and other DARPA homeland security surveillance programs," he added in an e-mail.

Sure, LifeLog could be used to train robotic assistants. But it also could become a way to profile suspected terrorists, said Cory Doctorow, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In other words, Osama bin Laden's agent takes a walk around the block at 10 each morning, buys a bagel and a newspaper at the corner store and then calls his mother. You do the same things -- so maybe you're an al Qaeda member, too!

"The more that an individual's characteristic behavior patterns -- 'routines, relationships and habits' -- can be represented in digital form, the easier it would become to distinguish among different individuals, or to monitor one," Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists analyst, wrote in an e-mail.

In its LifeLog report, DARPA makes some nods to privacy protection, like when it suggests that "properly anonymized access to LifeLog data might support medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic."

But before these grand plans get underway, LifeLog will start small. Right now, DARPA is asking industry and academics to submit proposals for 18-month research efforts, with a possible 24-month extension. (DARPA is not sure yet how much money it will sink into the program.)

The researchers will be the centerpiece of their own study.

Like a game show, winning this DARPA prize eventually will earn the lucky scientists a trip for three to Washington, D.C. Except on this excursion, every participating scientist's e-mail to the travel agent, every padded bar bill and every mad lunge for a cab will be monitored, categorized and later dissected.

Michigan might ban high-tech weapon
Michigan lawmakers took a tentative first step Wednesday to criminalize a bizarre high-tech weapon called the e-bomb, which sounds really scary but might not exist at all.

Acting on the better-safe-than-sorry model of legislating, the House Criminal Justice Committee voted unanimously to add e-bombs -- also called electromagnetic bombs -- to Michigan's criminal code along with dynamite and other explosives.

Using one, or possessing one with the intent to do harm, would be punishable by up to life in prison if someone died in the detonation.

Supporters of the measures, while acknowledging limited understanding of the technical details, said that is unlikely; e-bombs are theoretically aimed at disabling infrastructure like computer systems and electric grids, not harming people.

But Rep. William Van Regenmorter, R-Hudsonville, one of the bills' chief sponsors and chairman of the committee, said no one knows for sure what harm is likely because so little information is available about the weapons' capabilities.

At Wednesday's committee meeting, one witness used the movie "Ocean's 11," in which thieves use an e-bomb to disable electronics for a casino heist, as an example of its use.

The U.S. military is widely believed to have done extensive work on various kinds of e-bombs, and some experts are convinced a form of e-bomb was used in the war in Iraq.

John Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, said a lot of research has been conducted but most of it is classified. Pike said he thinks a cruise missile-launched e-bomb may have been used on the first night of the war to disable Iraqi military communications systems. But the Pentagon has not confirmed it, he said.

Little is known about the potential for a devastating e-bomb attack by terrorists.

A form of the technology could be used to build one for as little as $400 that would be powerful enough to disable an entire city, according to one widely circulated estimate. Crashing computers, every electronic gadget and even automobiles within range, a terrorist e-bomb could "throw civilization back 200 years," a 2001 report in Popular Mechanics suggested.

Pike said he is somewhat skeptical of that scenario. If e-bombs were that devastating and that easy to construct, terrorists probably would have used them by now, he said.

Of course, they might have without anyone realizing it since computer and electrical systems failures aren't rare events.

Van Regenmorter and his fellow lawmakers said they don't know how to measure the threat. But if an attack occurred or wasplanned, law enforcement officials need specific tools to prosecute the offenders.

US slaps sanctions on Chinese, Iranian companies over missile trade

The United States has slapped sanctions on two major arms companies from China and Iran, accusing them of working in concert to help the Islamic government in Tehran modernize and expand its missile arsenal.

The penalties, which took effect May 9 but were announced by the State Department Thursday, call for termination of all existing contracts between the US government and the North China Industries Corporation, or NORINCO, and Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, a leading Iranian missile manufacturer.

The order also bans all US assistance to the concerns and calls for the revocation of all export-import licenses they may have held to conduct business in the United States, according to State Department spokeswoman Jo-Anne Prokopowicz.

The two arms giants and their subsidiaries are also barred from selling goods and services in the United States.

"These penalties were imposed because the US government determined that these entities contributed materially to the efforts of a foreign country -- in this specific case Iran - to use, acquire, design, develop, produce or stockpile missiles capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction," Prokopowicz told AFP.

The measures will remain in effect for two years.

A key supplier of the People's Liberation Army of China, NORINCO also has a visible presence in the US market as an exporter of hunting rifles and other firearms.

It has a registered capital of about 30 billion dollars, is involved in more than 100 joint ventures around the world and, in addition to weapons, sells high technology products, chemicals and construction machinery, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a local research organization.

Iran's Shahid Hemmat has already been targeted by the United States for alleged missile technology exchanges with North Korea.

In April 2000, the administration of president Bill Clinton imposed sanctions against it -- along with three other Iranian companies -- for "knowingly engaging in the export of military technology."

The company, which is known as a close partner of Russian defense firms, is believed to have played a crucial role in designing the Shahab-3, an intermediate-rage Iranian missile, which experts say is an improved version of North Korea's Nodong.

The US Central Intelligence Agency believes the Shahab-3 is now "in the late stages" of development.

The State Department refused to disclose what specific transgressions the two firms had committed against the Missile Technology Control Regime.

But Prokopowicz noted that while China's non-proliferation performance has improved, "problems remain in the People's Republic of China's enforcement and implementation" of export controls adopted last year.

In a report sent to Congress last April, the CIA said Chinese companies had provided dual-use missile-related items and raw materials to countries such as Iran, Libya, "and to a lesser extent, North Korea" in the first half of last year.

A General Changes Course

Army General Tommy Franks, who helped realign the military to wage war against terrorists and led US forces to decisive victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq, has decided to retire, US defense officials said yesterday.

The 57-year-old Franks, who has served more than three decades in the Army, will be remembered not only for his military success, analysts said, but for honing a new military strategy that emphasizes speed, agility, and information superiority over conventional strength.

''We live in a celebrity culture where celebrity is often totally disconnected from achievement. But by the standards of historians, Tommy Franks is a real celebrity,'' said Loren Thompson, a military specialist with the libertarian Lexington Institute. ''To win wars against completely different adversaries, in different countries, in rapid succession like that, is something with few precedents.''

Franks had not set a departure date, and it was not immediately clear who would succeed him, although three-star General John Abizaid, Franks' top deputy in Qatar, has been mentioned as a candidate for the post.

After two wars over the past 19 months, Franks apparently had no appetite for bureaucratic battles. He recently declined Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's offer to become the new secretary of the Army.

''The general feels that it is time to spend time with his family and look to new challenges,'' said Jim Wilkinson, spokesman at Franks' headquarters at Central Command in Tampa.

Franks' standard two-year tenure at Central Command was originally set to expire last July, but he received a one-year extension.

Franks and Rumsfeld were reported to have had an occasionally contentious relationship, with the often brusque defense secretary urging Franks to draw up more imaginative war plans involving lighter, more agile forces. But publicly, Rumsfeld has been a vocal supporter of the four-star general. In a three-sentence statement announcing Franks' retirement, Rumsfeld said the general had ''served our country with great distinction. I consider myself privileged to have worked so closely with him over these many months.''

A native of Midland, Texas, who was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the artillery in 1967, Franks seemed an unlikely candidate to debut a new strategy for warfare. Before the US attack in Afghanistan, critics painted him as too slow, cautious, and old-fashioned.

By the time his Iraq battle plan came together, the critics were saying that it was too ambitious.

''The campaign plan that they wound up with demonstrated far greater audacity than had been anticipated by many of his detractors,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. ''His detractors viewed him as being plodding and unimaginative and I would say the campaign plan he wound up with is quite the opposite. It's to his credit that he was both able and willing to do it and that the unavoidable back and forth that was occasioned in this process a year ago did not appear to have become acrimonious.''

Franks, who saw combat as an artillery officer in the Vietnam War, has received such awards as the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, three Purple Hearts, and three Bronze Stars with ''V'' for valor. He was awarded the Legion of Merit four times.

A General Changes Course

WASHINGTON - US Army General Tommy Franks, who helped realign the military to wage war against terrorists and led US forces to decisive victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq, has decided to retire, US defense officials said yesterday.

The 57-year-old Franks, who has served more than three decades in the Army, will be remembered not only for his military success, analysts said, but for honing a new military strategy that emphasizes speed, agility, and information superiority over conventional strength.

''We live in a celebrity culture where celebrity is often totally disconnected from achievement. But by the standards of historians, Tommy Franks is a real celebrity,'' said Loren Thompson, a military specialist with the libertarian Lexington Institute. ''To win wars against completely different adversaries, in different countries, in rapid succession like that, is something with few precedents.''

Franks had not set a departure date, and it was not immediately clear who would succeed him, although three-star General John Abizaid, Franks' top deputy in Qatar, has been mentioned as a candidate for the post.

After two wars over the past 19 months, Franks apparently had no appetite for bureaucratic battles. He recently declined Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's offer to become the new secretary of the Army.

''The general feels that it is time to spend time with his family and look to new challenges,'' said Jim Wilkinson, spokesman at Franks' headquarters at Central Command in Tampa.

Franks' standard two-year tenure at Central Command was originally set to expire last July, but he received a one-year extension.

Franks and Rumsfeld were reported to have had an occasionally contentious relationship, with the often brusque defense secretary urging Franks to draw up more imaginative war plans involving lighter, more agile forces. But publicly, Rumsfeld has been a vocal supporter of the four-star general. In a three-sentence statement announcing Franks' retirement, Rumsfeld said the general had ''served our country with great distinction. I consider myself privileged to have worked so closely with him over these many months.''

A native of Midland, Texas, who was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the artillery in 1967, Franks seemed an unlikely candidate to debut a new strategy for warfare. Before the US attack in Afghanistan, critics painted him as too slow, cautious, and old-fashioned.

By the time his Iraq battle plan came together, the critics were saying that it was too ambitious.

''The campaign plan that they wound up with demonstrated far greater audacity than had been anticipated by many of his detractors,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. ''His detractors viewed him as being plodding and unimaginative and I would say the campaign plan he wound up with is quite the opposite. It's to his credit that he was both able and willing to do it and that the unavoidable back and forth that was occasioned in this process a year ago did not appear to have become acrimonious.''

Franks, who saw combat as an artillery officer in the Vietnam War, has received such awards as the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, three Purple Hearts, and three Bronze Stars with ''V'' for valor. He was awarded the Legion of Merit four times.
Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com