Address your e-mail to
the editors to [email protected].
"The
Name's Bond. Gomer Bond."
Arrogance and ignorance
underpin Edward Luttwak's "The CIA Is Déclassé." Today the agency looks beyond Central and
Western Europe, and their "targets" hail from around the globe. While the CIA
Bubba may prefer a cold Bud and softball over a weekend of Bondian play in St.
Moritz, I defy Luttwak to demonstrate how the U.S. government can reliably use
such experiences as winter holidays on Europe's slopes as screens for future
success in gathering information on dangers such as nuclear- or
chemical-proliferation threats in the Middle East or East Asia. Leave charming
the local intelligentsia to diplomats.
Spare us laments about the
decline of Ivy League credentialism in government service. We have the world's
broadest-based system of higher education, and those state-college alumni work
at the CIA because they are smart and well educated.
Young
caffeine- and liquor-free Mormons just happen to be--because of their church's
missionary zeal--one of this country's richest veins of talent with foreign
experience and skill in languages. Odd as it may sound, the average Brigham
Young University graduate probably knows a lot more about the world than his
counterpart at Georgetown or Princeton. As for the CIA's personnel problems,
they seem to stem more from lack of accountability than from the basic nature
of the agents.
--Kevin Michael
O'Reilly
Party
Hack
"Hack Attacks," by Bill
Barnes, was uncomfortably close to the Microsoft party line.
I was particularly bothered
by a subtle attack on Java as vs. ActiveX. The article says several times that
the Java approach is "slower." It later says that Java is unsuitable for
high-performance video games because of Java's slowness. This is deceptive.
Technology has been commercially demonstrated that runs Java programs at very
high speed (e.g., Asymmetrix). It simply isn't linked up to Internet Explorer
and Netscape Navigator/Communicator yet. The Java byte-code verifier imposes
some performance cost, but there's no reason Java code cannot be byte-code
verified once, then translated to efficient machine code, and then stored on
your hard drive along with all your store-bought applications.
The security approach of Java
does restrict what an unsigned applet can do, and those criticisms are fair.
But the criticism of Java on performance grounds, as if the performance
problems were inherent in the security model, is not fair and is not
accurate.
And because the question of
Java vs. ActiveX is a very hot topic in the industry now, with lots of money
riding on it, it's impossible not to wonder whether Microsoft's influence on
Slate had something to do with this unfairness.
Of course
I don't believe Bill Gates ordered you to slander Java! But Barnes presumably
hangs around with a lot more Microsoft people than JavaSoft people, and is
likely to absorb their point of view, as I'm sure I would in the same
circumstances. The ultimate effect is that this article treads close to the
danger zone.
--Dan Weinreb
Bill Barnes
replies: You're right, of course, that I tend to understand the Microsoft
view more clearly, just as you obviously do the JavaSoft view. As with any
religious war, no one is neutral except the atheists. Java is a great and very
useful language, but all the upcoming performance-improvement technologies in
the world won't help the people using today's browsers, as you yourself admit.
Therefore I stand by the caveats I described.
Key
Points
"Hack Attacks," by Bill
Barnes, was generally excellent, but I have a few criticisms.
Secret-key cryptography
("single-key," in Barnes' terminology) is not bad for two-way interactions. In
fact, it's routinely used for that purpose. But it's difficult to get the
shared secret key to the other person (or people) in the first place.
Public-key key exchange gets the secret key to its destination safely, avoiding
the chicken-and-egg problem of having to share a secret key already in order to
share another key secretly. Afterward, secret-key cryptography is normally used
for efficiency reasons.
The reduced version of a
long document is known as a "digest," not a signature. It is a widely held but
mistaken belief that a digital signature is the public-key
decryption/private-key encryption of a document's digest. That's how RSA, the
most popular signature algorithm, works, because it happens to be both a
signature algorithm and a public-key encryption algorithm.
Barnes also might have
mentioned one solution to the problem of the corruptible system administrator:
"secret sharing." It is possible to divide up secrets (such as passwords) among
several people such that only a subset of them of a certain size (a majority,
for instance) can recover the original. That way, a single corrupt authority
can't hurt you.
The last
part of the article might have underplayed the security threats to users. It's
true that nothing serious has really happened yet, but very little of value (to
a hacker) is in people's computers these days. That may change fast; if desktop
banking (including check writing) becomes widespread, for example, then the
incentive for hackers to use their discoveries for something other than
embarrassing Microsoft or causing general mischief increases dramatically.
-- Dan Simon
Bill Barnes
replies: Dan Simon's technical nits are well taken. However, while I agree
that security is a serious issue, I reiterate that the hysterics with which
security stories are played out in the media are generally overblown.
Breaking
the Waves
I enjoyed the Committee of
Correspondence discussion "Cycles, Waves, and Endings in History," and I agree with those who
say that the generational conflict is driving electoral politics and
policy-making. Someone should interpret moves like cutting welfare as yet
another symptom of baby boom me-firstism.
And while
I agree with Francis Fukuyama's optimism for democracy, it's important to note
that anti-democratic movements have gained new strength in recent years in the
United States and Western Europe, and in some cases have gained power through
the same systems they want to destroy. The future of democracy through
technological change is anything but assured. Postindustrial, extreme-right
movements know where to find the Web, too.
-- Mark Hunter
Is That
a D Cup You're Wearing, or Are You Just Glad to See Me?
"Bra Story,"
by Anne Hollander, was a great contribution to the recent surge in chronicling
the history of the unleashing of the female form in the 20 th
century. Her appreciation of the em-bra'd breast manages to be both appropriate
and evocative, if not titillating.
It may be some years more
before the male version of this trend plays itself out thoroughly enough to
merit similar discussion. Some future male Madonna appearing onstage in his
bullet jock will signal the pinnacle, I suppose. But the past decades have
already seen the liberation of the family jewels.
The heterosexual world has
embraced gay iconic sexuality consistently at a lag of five years or so. From
1950s fitness magazines to Batman's crotch bulge in the '60s, the International
Male catalog in the '70s, GQ in the early '80s, and Marky Mark in his
Calvins a few years ago, the penis has gone from unspeakable to unavoidable.
And just take a look at the current Jockey underwear packaging if you need to
confirm that circumcision is still being practiced in North America.
The
sociological implications are huge. Penis envy is spreading. And surely there's
a link between naked men on billboards, hard-core porn in the home video
library, and anything that can be attributed to largely male decision
makers--from corporate mergers to the end of the Cold War.
-- Robert
Rothery
The Odds
on God
Benjamin Wittes' article
"Cracking God's
Code" must have been intended for April Fool's Day. Wittes apparently
believes that the discovery of statistically unlikely "secret codes" in the
Torah proves the existence of God. Even if we accept the dubious premise that
the existence of God can be proven scientifically, it is extremely naive to say
that the occurrence of an unlikely event would do the trick.
I don't
know which is more depressing: the fact that some people's faith is so weak
they seek scientific approval of their beliefs, or the fact that they believe a
supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful God would choose to reveal himself through
some inconsequential abnormality.
-- Mike Bohan
Criminal
Procedures
Alan Dershowitz argues in a
recent book review titled "Crime and Truth" that powerful procedural safeguards for
defendants allow some guilty people to go free, but that these procedures are
justified to prevent miscarriages of justice and to deter misconduct among
police.
He misses three essential
points. First, these rules harden public attitudes toward everyone accused of a
crime. Second, they feed into the corrosive cynicism within the justice system.
Since procedural niceties seem arbitrary and irrelevant to fact-finding, there
is little motivation to enforce the rules, and people often find ways of
bending rules that they regard as arbitrary and silly. For example, as
Dershowitz himself has written, judges pretend to believe police who lie about
illegal searches.
Third,
the most glaring injustice these days is not the wrongful conviction of the
innocent. It is the remarkably cruel treatment of some people who are actually
guilty. When a troubled and illiterate 19-year-old can receive life
imprisonment for committing three muggings, it seems laughably irrelevant to
focus on courtroom procedures.
-- Harold
Pollack
Sleepers
As the
father of two adopted boys (12 and 11 months), I enjoyed reading Robert
Wright's article "Go Ahead--Sleep With Your Kids." I urge him to get back in touch
and tell us if he winds up with a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old in bed with him
(now, that's what I call birth control).
-- Brian Murphy
Address
your e-mail to the editors to [email protected].
