NRO: The "Other" Intelligence Agency

Now that every member of Congress and the White House staff is avoiding learning anything about the National Security Agency, in favor of calling for the head of Edward Snowden (with the exception of admirable efforts by Mark Udall and Ron Wyden), it is time to remind everyone that NSA is not the largest U.S. technical intelligence agency by budget.  That honor goes to the even lesser-known National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO.  The NRO, which spends in the neighborhood of between $15 and $16 billion per year, is the largest of any U.S. intelligence agency, at least in budget authority.  Its staff is small, because its business is flying spy satellites, using partial budget authority of the Air Force.

For the first 15 or 20 years following establishment of the NRO in 1960, the agency had an even more benign reputation among arms-control liberals than did the NSA, and for a very concrete reason.  The early imaging satellites launched by NRO disproved Soviet bomber gaps and missile gaps, thereby making the case for smaller strategic nuclear budgets (admittedly, they did not seem very small in the height of the Cold War, but could have been even larger).  This tendency to rely on "national technical means of verification" led to a knee-jerk assumption by many liberals that the NRO was benign-by-design.  How could a spy-satellite agency be a subject of Constitutional debate?

Those that ask this question do not realize how profoundly the NRO changed during the 1980s, and particularly in the aftermath of the Cold War.  The NSA was on a mission during the Reagan years to limit the exposure of ground-based listening posts in sensitive locations like Iran and Turkey.  The NRO could claim new frontiers in chip integration and RF antenna design that would allow the fielding of massive geosynchronous satellites with unfurlable antennas as large as two football fields, and "close-listen" satellites in low-Earth and Molniya orbits that would allow particular conversations (voice or email) to be picked up in specific regions of the planet.  During the 1980s and 1990s, a vast array of NSA capabilities moved to space, courtesy of the NRO.

In my earlier post on NSA, I pointed out that this move made it easy for NSA to expand to full broadband intercept of all communications.  It is much harder to make a satellite turn itself off for one specific region, than for the same satellite to pick up everything globally, but make much of its intercepted content deniable except when other agencies of government specifically needed that information.  Thanks to NRO, the NSA was scooping up everything from the Clinton era on - not just from the post-9/11 era.  Bush's FISA Bypass flap was about making collected NSA information usable and only partially deniable - prior to 2002, the information was collected but was denied to exist.  The constellation of NRO satellites also made it easier for signals intelligence to update itself for the TCP/IP packet-switching era of the Internet.  Many ground-based NSA resources of the past were designed for circuit-switched, nailed-up connections between sender and receiver.  NRO satellites could function just as well in the packet-switched anything-to-anything world, as in the circuit-switched telco world of the past.

During the 1980s, huge new ground stations were built at locations such as Menwith Hill in England and Buckley Field in Colorado, specifically to download, analyze, and store this massive treasure-trove of data.  The rationale for these satellite-downlink stations is similar to that for the NSA's new Utah Data Center opening this summer in Bluffdale, Utah -- the stations wouldn't be built if the agencies didn't have the data to fill them up.

In the 1990s, organizations like Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, submitted testimony to Congress on the potential problems of new classes of spy satellites.  We were privately told by Air Force officials that the protests were appreciated, because no member of Congress ever raised these issues.  Most members wouldn't know the difference between imaging and signals satellites in the first place, and virtually all members of Congress did not want to learn more about the NRO or NSA - rubber-stamping any new project was preferred.  This led to huge scandals in the mid-1990s -- at one point, NRO Director Jeff Harris was removed from the agency because he could not account for $2.5 billion of the agency's annual budget.

The NRO influence and budget continued to grow following Sept. 11, and continues to grow today.  Its classified budget is believed to exceed $15 billion.  The NRO launched six satellites in the course of 2012, of which citizens were allowed to learn virtually nothing, and the agency expanded staff at its Chantilly, VA headquarters and at Buckley AFB in Aurora, CO.  What happens if a contractor is upset about satellite capabilities and decides to reveal information a la Edward Snowden?  Do American citizens need to know each orbital plane and each frequency band of all of NRO's spy satellites?  Perhaps not.  But does the public deserve to know about the general class of advanced spy satellites like Advanced Orion and Advanced Jumpseat, and their possible role in violating civil liberties?  Of course they do.  But the attitude of the Obama administration, and 90 percent of the members of Congress, is that the public has no right to be asking about technical intelligence agencies in the first place, let alone the right to deserve honest answers.

A Simple Primer on Global Listening

When the UK Guardian published direct orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to Verizon on June 5, many readers did not have the slightest idea what they were looking at.  The methodology used by the National Security Agency to conduct domestic surveillance is not new - what was new in the story was the direct proof that presidents from Reagan to Obama have consistently lied about what the NSA does, domestically and internationally.  Authors such as James Bamford, Duncan Campbell, Desmond Ball, Nicky Hager, and Matthew Aid have been disclosing the details about this global system for years.  It seems as though it's time for another refresher tutorial so that people understand what their government does on a daily basis, so they don't use ridiculous terms like "warrantless wiretap.":

   The United States exited World War 2 with plenty of new global bases, acquired in some cases from the UK, or established as U.S. forces drove the Japanese west across the Pacific.  British authorities were worried about having signals intelligence fall out of the hands of Anglo-Saxon nations, so they talked the U.S. into signing the UKUSA Treaty in 1946, which apportions signals intelligence duties across U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- and no one else.  UKUSA remains highly classified today, 67 years later.

   The miserable status of signals intelligence collection during the Korean War spurred Harry Truman into creating the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, MD in 1952.  The mere existence of NSA was not disclosed until 1956.  It has since become the second biggest intelligence agency by budget, spending roughly $12 billion annually.

   When the U.S. was going through its base-building frenzy in the 1950s to establish a nuclear weapons infrastructure, it also built secret bases around the world to gather critical military intelligence everywhere on the planet.  Many bases were in global hotspots like Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan.  The most common form of ground-based SIGINT base at the time was a massive series of concentric dipole antenna rings, variously referred to as Elephant Cages, Flare-9's, Classic Bullseye, or Wullenweber arrays.  Although the main focus was offshore, plenty of SIGINT bases were opened on domestic U.S. soil, in locations such as Winter Harbor, ME; Fort Gordon, GA; Medina Annex, TX; Two Rock Ranch, CA; and Skaggs Island, CA.

   In 1960, the Air Force established the National Reconnaissance Office to manage spy satellite programs.  NRO subsequently became a DoD intelligence agency in its own right, and the largest intelligence agency by budget, currently spending around $16 billion annually.  Throughout the 1960s, NRO concentrated on primitive imaging satellites aimed at missile fields in the Soviet Union, though that was to change as electronic integration improved.

   NSA got caught up in the mid-1970s probes of intelligence agencies, and was forced to reveal domestically-aimed programs like SHAMROCK, though few in Congress asked if its international programs really aimed at the Cold War targets that were supposed to be NSA's bread and butter.  The so-called reforms Congress put in place created a new top-secret court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  All the judicial members of FISC and all its rulings are top secret.  The court is supposed to monitor the activity of the NSA.  The public learned for the first time in 2005 that there is also a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Appeals Court, but it did not convene until the 21st century, because the FISC never rejected an NSA request until the post-9/11 period.

   When FISC began rejecting some Bush administration requests, forcing the convening of FISAC, George Bush issued executive orders that allowed NSA to bypass FISA requirements and conduct domestic surveillance as it saw fit.  Congress codified this procedure in its 2008 FISA "reforms."

   Bobby Ray Inman, director of the NSA in the Carter years, believed in faster deployment of advanced integrated circuits into spy satellites.  As a result, new satellites were fielded in the 1980s that allowed real-time digital delivery of images and electronic intelligence from phone calls and computer messages, directly from geosynchronous orbit to ground stations.  NSA and NRO worked together to define new satellites such as Jumpseat, Ranger, and Advanced Orion, some of which sported unfurlable antennas as large as two football fields!  As a result, NSA shut down many of its ground stations in the 1980s, and opened new satellite downlink stations in Menwith Hill, UK; Buckley Field, CO; Bad Aibling, Germany; and other locations.  NSA also opened special ground stations at Yakima, WA and Sugar Grove, VA that intercepted communications from commercial satellites in orbit.

   Two policy changes took place during this time without input from the public or Congress: Because satellites in geosynchronous orbit cover the planet in an RF footprint by their very nature, interception within the domestic U.S. became the rule, not the exception.  FISA rules or no, NSA was collecting everything globally - it simply could never acknowledge doing so.  Also, the agency established to intercept military communications of adversaries slowly was tasked with intercepting all commercial and consumer/civilian communications on the planet.  This was a massive expansion, requiring many more employees and facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

   In the latter years of the Clinton administration, a significant furor was raised over the code name Echelon, which referred to a specific Compaq Computer client-server architecture for tracking communications through the use of key words.  Echelon was not the global network - this had been built over the previous four decades as a basic infrastructure of NSA and NRO missions.

   Following Sept. 11 and passage of the Patriot Act, George Bush used the FISA Bypass as a cover for allowing the NSA to implement Stellar Wind, a program to put packet-sniffing equipment inside telephone switching centers inside the U.S.  This equipment, manufactured by Narus, Cisco, Blue Coat, and other companies, allows IP packets used in Internet communications to be probed deeply for both traffic analysis and content analysis.  Meanwhile, NSA was trying to shift from the circuit-switched telephony world of the past to the IP-based world of the future by implementing global programs that also allowed automated filtering and data mining of massive amounts of traffic.  Programs such as Trailblazer and ThinThread did not always work so well, though they cost a bundle.

   U.S. wireline phone companies were not too crazy about being lured into this, but agreed to have interception equipment placed in the heart of their networks.  When Joe Nacchio was ousted from Qwest Communications, he claimed in a court hearing that NSA had forced him out when he refused to have such equipment added to packet switching networks.

   The latest kerfuffle involving NSA, FISC, and Verizon illustrates the fact that NSA needs to work a lot harder with wireless cellular networks.  Some communications can be picked up using wireless methods, some phone calls and texts transferred to the wireline network at base stations can be intercepted at central switching centers, but NSA also needs the call records maintained by wireless operators to perform detailed traffic analysis.

   Of course, there is far too much traffic collected for the NSA to be able to analyze using human agents.  That's why automated data mining and filtering tools like ThinThread are so important.  And this is why the NSA was running out of storage space in the Baltimore-Washington corridor to store all that global communication it had intercepted.  NSA asked Congress for the money four years ago to create a new Storage Station Freedom in Bluffdale, Utah to store the massive amount of voice and IP traffic it collects abroad, and here at home.  The Bluffdale facility is slated to open in late July of 2013.  But of course, you're unlikely to hear about its grand opening, as it's merely one more element of NSA's daily business you are not allowed to know.



  

That Damnable Revolving Door

So Gasland II premiered in Colorado Springs tonight, with an appearance by director Josh Fox, and sure, there were plenty of updates about the people of Dimock, PA, Pavilion, WY and many other places that were just as grim.  It is obvious the U.S. is declaring shale areas to be "National Sacrifice Zones" in which it is deemed cheaper to buy out the homes of all who live near fracking sites, making them sign nondisclosure agreements in the process, than to adopt regulations to insure that fracking is either conducted safely, or not at all.

What is more disturbing are the number of ethical sacrifices people are willing to make on a regular basis.  We see this most explicitly when energy companies and developers of LNG port sites talk in public about how wonderful it will be when the North Pole ice cap melts, so energy barges can travel unhindered among northern ports in Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia.  We see it when energy companies hire Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who worked for PSYOPS and military intelligence divisions, who reorganize PR departments so they are managed like a counterinsurgency campaign against the "terrorists" who would oppose fracking.  This kind of activity makes me lean to generalizations to insist that anyone who works for the extractive energy business is morally suspect.

And then we have the problem of the revolving doors.  Leading Pennsylvania and New York state government officials, as well as federal government officials, quit their posts to work for the companies they regulate.  Of course, you say.  That's as prevalent in the military industrial and resource management sector as it is in energy.  That still does not make it right.

Yes, yes, all business is prostitution to a certain extent, and one can't fault everyone who leaves a nonprofit or government post to go into for-profit industry.  But any move to greater prostitution along the "misrepresenting for profit" line should be taken with due consideration for what kind of ethical lapses might be made.  I've seen many in my field of journalism go into corporate PR as traditional journalism disappears.  Obviously, working for Cisco or Dell can't be seen as being as damaging as working for Lockheed-Martin or Halliburton, but one would hope that people draw firm lines in the sand as they start sliding down the slippery slope of moral rationalization.

One thing that Fox showed in his sequel to Gasland is that few in the Obama administration, including the president himself, have made admirable ethical choices.  Those mid-level EPA officials, as well as former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, finally had to leave the agency when the desire to cover up blatant fact on fracking-fluid contamination got in the way of good science.  And we won't even get into the cesspool that is Congress.  I left the movie feeling that there really is no one, at local, state, or federal level, that can stay in government without compromising basic values.  And so many of them choose the revolving door.  Where are the people who will stand up and say, "I will state facts based on the research conducted, make regulatory decisions as they need to be made, quit my job if money gets in the way of my ethics, and refuse to join the companies I formerly regulated."  The ranks of such people are dwindling by the day.  And what we are left with is independent people working in retail, the arts, non-profits, etc. who look at government and transnational corporations and say "I want nothing to do with any of you."

Wes Wilson (formerly of EPA) and Josh Fox

That's the kind of line I'll draw.  I simply won't have any track with people who will sacrifice their morals for the sake of making what they call a living wage.  The revolving door is a death wage.

Proceed At Own Risk

Benghazi, IRS vs. Tea Party, Ryan Fogle, Justice Dept. vs. Associated Press.... is the Obama White House facing the same cascade of scandal that ensnared the Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton administrations in turn?  Perhaps, though one must subtract the Republican reality distortion field that surrounds at least two of the scandals.  It might also speak to a Justice Department that has always seemed incapable of serving the needs of justice (not just under the deplorable Eric Holder, but perpetually, harking back to the days of John Mitchell).

But the biggest source for scandal is the proverbial living-room elephant that neither major party dare name: the fundamental incompatibility between global imperial national-security state and bottom-up democracy, which has served as a drag on a constitutional republic since 1947.  A nation that runs according to the parameters of the National Security Act of 1947, NSC 68, Patriot Act, FISA Bypass, and various cryptography and atomic energy statutes, is simply not one that can be managed according to the rules of a democracy.

Since so many Americans enjoy specific perks from the U.S. maintaining its top-dog role in this game of King On the Mountain, I'm not too optimistic about taking this discrepancy to a direct vote.  A majority may well favor ditching the Bill of Rights in order to keep their toys,  But here's what I would demand: If the nation is going to accede to the existence of covert divisions of acknowledged agencies, or entirely covert agencies and operations, then those agencies must operate from the principle that the risk they take through plausible deniability remains with the agency itself.  Journalists cannot and must not be prosecuted by learning what they can of agencies' missions.

Frankly, I was a little surprised when the Obama administration did not attempt some form of prior restraint when pictures of sloppy Moscow CIA agent Ryan Fogle (above) appeared worldwide on May 14.  Of course such an effort would be futile in a Web and social network age, but it doesn't mean that the White House (particularly Attorney General Eric Holder) wouldn't try.  After all, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the mid-1980s that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which made it a crime to publish the names of CIA agents, was perfectly constitutional.  Later that same decade, the USSC said that covert agents with CIA, DIA, or Special Ops Command need not behave with any constitutional constraint when operating in other countries.  And all indications are that the USSC will approve the warrantless monitoring, operated globally by NSA and NRO on a 24/7/365 basis, and approved by Bush in 2002 and given ex post facto validation by Congress in 2008, under something called "FISA Bypass."

This impunity and arrogance to protect government from the eyes of probing media may have gotten a thumbs-up from all three branches of government, but it is still unconstitutional and wrong.  Eric Holder has prosecuted nine journalists under the Espionage Act.  The only time such prosecution is warranted is when a journalist is handing over information to a foreign power.  Publishing something the government wants to keep secret is not a crime - it merely means that the covert agency is not doing its job.  Whether the media source is WikiLeaks or a small Baltimore newspaper covering the headquarters of NSA, it is not legitimate to prosecute that source for leaking secrets.

Our laws actually are worse than that.  IIPA and FISA would criminalize the dissemination of secrets that originate with the government.  But under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, all information on fusion energy and H-bomb technology is "born secret."  That means that if you figure out in your head the architecture of the H-bomb, the government can classify your brain.  Many people think that this law was tossed out after The Progressive won its H-bomb case in 1980, but all that happened was that the Justice Department dropped its prosecution when it became untenable.  The Atomic Energy Act still stands.  And sections of various cryptography acts passed over the last century make it a crime to publish information about electronic monitoring -- even if such information is informed speculation coming from a reporter, and is not based on government information.

The only way to move to a just society is to demand that covert agencies take their own responsibilities for maintaining secrets, and not get the Justice Department involved in prosecuting those that would expose government behavior.  The second and necessary step is to de-link all government branches and agencies from the strictures of the national security acts passed in the Cold War years of the 1940s and 1950s.  Oh, so you thought Obama was leading us in that direction?  Haven't seen much sign of Gitmo closing, have we?  Haven't seen any Espionage Act cases against journalists dropped, have we?

The global imperial infrastructure is not going to end tomorrow.   There are hundreds of U.S. military bases, intelligence bases, and embassies the size of military compounds, flung worldwide across every continent, which are not going to close tomorrow.  But the time to begin the process is now.  Ending the Republican and Democrat reliance on the national security state would help ease the budget crisis, and make our nation more genuine in its supposed interest in democracy.  But it sure is hard to see any interest in moving in this direction from either major party in mid-2013.

Noise Annoys

OK, kids, it's Deep Kafka time - or maybe the John Cage/Pauline Oliveros hour of deep listening.
 
When scientists pondering the likelihood of extraterrestrial life talk about the conditions for carbon-based life forms, some sci-fi buff in the crowd usually will pipe up, "Why assume carbon?  Why not silicon-based life forms?  Why life based on matter made up of known elements?  Why not replicating energy fields?"

I often feel this way in discussions of music and audio creative arts.  Why assume any baseline rules at all for what constitutes music?  Is the solving of a mathematical equation a type of music? (Remember that in pre-Copernican days, the ratio of orbits assumed in an Earth-centered universe created an orbital-resonance inaudible hum that was called "music of the spheres.")  Even if we grant that music is based on the mathematical manipulation of sound waves, what about waves of too high or low a frequency for human hearing?  Is melody required?  Is a scale with a specific number of steps?  Must there be a recognizable rhythm, or harmonics with a certain predictable ordering?

It's a good time to ask these questions, as the noise artists of the 1990s are beginning to gain new mainstream respect, in the same way the wildest of free-jazz pioneers of the 1950s gained new respect in the 1970s.  Jeff Fuccillo has digitized the back catalog of the legendary Union Pole Tapes and offered MP3s for sale.  Several collections of Harry Pussy 1990s recordings have come to light.  The No Neck Blues Band has put its entire catalog on iTunes.  And many will probably despise these offerings, or find them terrifying.  That is precisely the point.  When Pauline Oliveros discussed her Deep Listening concept with Bill Forman of Colorado Springs Independent prior to a recent UCCS concert, she suggested people should find pieces of music that disturbed them, and listen to those pieces over and over and over.

This self-description of No Neck at the time of the iTunes release indicates the creative sparks being released through the mainstreaming of noise: 
 2013 marks 20 years of activity for the No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK), New York City’s premier altruistic free-music cabal. During this time, NNCK have released 40 plus LPs, CDs, singles, and cassettes, documenting a Fin de vingtième siècle sound that incorporates the contradiction of spirit and self, the risk of fear, and the gestalt of ritual combination. They have been compared to Sun Ra, AMM, The Godz, Amon Düül, Yahowa 13, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and The Quicksilver Messenger Service, and have toured and/or collaborated with John Fahey, Träd Gräs Och Stenar, Embryo, Circle X, Royal Trux, Harry Pussy, and the Sun City Girls. Yet despite all of this, the group remains enigmatic, contested, and largely unknown. Their “hiding in plain sight” anonymity and emphasis on encryption and obfuscation has rendered their place in history unclear, no doubt quite deliberately; though now exclusively for DESTIJL we see something of a change in strategy. In a move at once antithetical to their perceived “stance” and seemingly faux-nostalgic, NNCK has released their entire back catalog digitally, along with detailed descriptions of each release as well as an oral history of sorts comprised of quotes from co-conspirators, allies, and friends of the band, with stories of rooftops, ritual objects, fascist bombings, and more. This mother lode of sound and lore also comes peppered with links to previously unseen NNCK videos + related links.)

Now, I fully expect (and would encourage) fans of different types of visual or audio arts to bluntly state that they found a certain work remarkable, or to pass by with a wave of the hand, saying "Not my cup of tea." But the person who claps hands decisively over ears and leaves the room yelling, "That's not music, that's noise!" is only displaying gross stupidity.  And they should be roundly denounced for being so stupid.  On a more mainstream level, the music fan who might love classical or bluegrass or classic rock, but allows as how they can't stand country or hip-hop, should be exposed as being no fan of music at all.  The way to engage in Pauline Oliveros's form of Deep Listening is to throw all assumptions away.  Let your appreciation of audio arts proceed without any rules or guideposts.  Let it flow, whether its audio, extra-audio, or orbital hum.  And particularly if it seems at first listen to be excruciating noise.  You just might learn something.

Those Damned Opposable Thumbs

When Eli Dourado of George Mason University wrote a puff piece for Wired magazine about drones being as revolutionary as the Internet, and former Wired editor Chris Anderson promoted the hell out of it, I hit the ceiling.  I'll plead guilty to naturally equating drones with surveillance and armed killing (gee, I wonder why?), but I won't say I consider them as inherently bad as Medea Benjamin of Code Pink might.  Nevertheless, this editorial seemed especially vile.  And then it hit me - and also told me why I feel nervous about the so-called Maker Revolution.

Dourado, Anderson, and all too many Maker advocates do not distinguish between the role of the scientist and the role of the engineer.  The scientist asks neutral questions about the natural world without seeking to change that world.  In fact, the scientist usually would like to minimize any external impact of an experiment, if only to avoid skewing the results.

An engineer wants to tinker with the world for the alleged "betterment" of humankind.  More often than not, an engineer requires a janitor tailing along behind, cleaning up the mess the engineer has made.  This is because neither the group engineer working for a large corporation, nor the lone engineer tinkering in the backyard, takes enough care and consideration to factor in the potential environmental harm that can be caused by a project that manipulates the environment.  This can even be true in a green energy or green geo-engineering project.  Just as we do not want to create centralized solar "power tower" facilities that might pollute in their own right, we do not want to accelerate carbon sequestration by dumping strange chemicals in the ocean or putting large umbrellas in orbit.  The Hippocratic Oath is paramount here - first, do no harm!

A single individual developing a drone in the backyard may not have evil spying or weapon intent, but the Federal Aviation Administration is worried that when thousands want to play Tom Swift, that the airspace will be cluttered with tens of thousands of drones.  And even if one individual working on a drone has no intention of turning over information to the State Police or the NSA (though many probably do), the ability of drones to practice "emergent intelligence" or "hive intelligence" means that the sum may be scarier than the individual parts.

Some might say, "So what? Dozens of small surveillance cameras, private YouTube posts, and private smartphone photos are what helped to bust the Boston Marathon bombers."  True, and there may be times we can say we're proud of being our own intelligence agents - it helps the CIA and NSA cut their budgets, I suppose.  But if we don't all work hard to limit the goals of law enforcement agencies, at least in theory, we destroy our Bill of Rights in record time.  The worst thing we can do with our democracy is to give law enforcement everything it wants.  It's not that the cops are bad actors, it's that their bureaucracy does not promote the protection of civil liberties.  Therefore, it is the duty of citizens concerned about democracy to fight expansion of surveillance and law-enforcement domains every step of the way.  Would a backyard drone-tinkerer do that?

I am not suggesting that every individual working on a drone, a Heathkit robot, or an Arduino controller project is a necessary polluter or tool of the corporate state.  But I am saying that the mere act of being an engineer moves one into the field of potentially doing harm because one is tinkering with the external environment.  Every engineer working in isolation on a project that impacts the macro-world, even in an apparently benign field like 3-D printing ("Make a gun at home!") needs to ask the questions as to how the technology might be abused.

Yes, this applies to non-engineers.  A writer, for example, must constantly weigh whether a best-seller instantiated as a printed book or an e-book is least environmentally damaging.  But a product that moves neurons or electrons, like written works or like the Internet itself, is far less intrusive than a product that has a visible physical-world impact.  The honest analysts of 3-D printing are the first to admit that its popularity may lead to a rise in more junk to fill up landfills.  With drones, the situation is much worse.  Drone proliferation means more potential death-at-a-distance, more potential spying by a wealth of corporate and government players, and an airspace so cluttered, we may see more crashes of macro-sized planes as a result.

Fetishizing an Era

   Kay DePue, the Latin teacher in my high school, was always trying to convince me to take her class.
   "Latin's not used in diplomacy or law any longer," I would tell her.  "What good is it?"
   Mrs. DePue passed away last October, still lamenting about the very trend I had warned her of decades earlier.
   Don't get me wrong, a study of Latin can help us understand Indo-European Romance roots in the same way that a study of Old or Middle English can show us how shire-reef  became sheriff.  It's just that we shouldn't expect to gain much practical knowledge from something that has passed into history.
     I feel the same way about classical studies of Greece and Rome.  We owe a lot to both cultures for injecting into the ancient world new concepts of organizing civilization, improving individual sentience, and writing about the results.  There's nothing wrong with enjoying a little Heraclitus or Pliny the Elder over a glass of wine from time to time.  But let's get real.  Natural scientists tell us that most of what Archimedes or Galen had to say was flat-ass wrong.  And even in the realm of speculative philosophy, cognitive neuroscientists tell us that Plato's notions of ideals and forms simply don't hold much water as describing the real way a conscious mind interacts with the external environment.
     Of course, all this is to be expected.  These folks lived 2000 years ago, in pre-Baconian, pre-Enlightenment times, when our knowledge of the world around us was primitive.  It's fun to study these times.  But it was a little annoying to see students of the Enlightenment Era become such fetishists over classical studies - memorizing Roman poets, taking the "Grand Tour" of ancient sites, and figuring Cicero and Tacitus had more to tell Europe about politics than any plebe of the Sun King era.  Again, this is understandable.  The scholars of the 17th and 18th century compared ancient texts to those of the 14th-century Scholasticism period, or the ignorant religious Medieval period that came before, and those Romans looked pretty smart.
     Unfortunately, historical fetishizing is still alive and well in the 21st century.  Some study Newton without the asterisks placed by Einstein and Heisenberg.  Some remain obsessed with Freud and Marx, without acknowledging how much the ideas of those two 19th-century giants were unique to conditions in that century - and are largely invalid today.
     Don't get me wrong, I am not knocking a healthy respect for all historical eras.  The worst cultures are those, like Jacobin France, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Salafist Timbuktu, who want to toss out all historical referents and say that "Year One" starts today, stripping the landscape of all cultural signposts.  But the worst sin after the Year-One nihilists is that of the people that focus only on historical high points, without recognizing that human history is supposed to be a tidal ebb and flow, is supposed to be a series of peaks and troughs, and that the study of dark corners and silent troughs and still backwaters is critically important.
     In the last couple decades, perhaps as a side effect of growing old, I have started experiencing the fourth dimension more as an omniscient landscape than as an arrow.  Some folks get confused by my experiments in essays and poems with time-space mashups, and I tell them that Clovis and Richard III and Ray Lewis and Iggy Pop seem equally alive and equally present every waking moment.  But if one is to experience time in such a way, succumbing to historical fetishism is akin to becoming obsessed with celebrities.
     It's easy to see this in history books.  Why write yet another book about the fall of the Roman Empire, if one could write a study of the Ostrogothic King Totila, attempting to re-take Rome from Byzantia in the 6th century CE?  Why write yet another study of Gettysburg, if one had the opportunity to explain how the Young America cult influenced the presidency of Franklin Pierce?  Some might say they're giving the public the kind of books they want, but I'd call that the same sort of lame-ass excuse offered by musical composers who say they're always writing for the platinum-seller, rather than aiming for the obscure and inventive music only enjoyed by the same 50 or 500 people.
     I see historical fetishes everywhere these days, and they're nearly always annoying.  There was no "greatest generation" of the 20th century, no matter what Tom Brokaw may tell us of the 1940s, or Ken Kesey may tell us of the 1960s.  There was no "golden era" of modern jazz in the 1950s or of rock music in the 1960s, where music was better than any other decade.  There is an ebb and flow of musical genres that is always with us, and the musical gems to be found at ebb tide are as beautiful and worthy as the ones that arrive with a new tsunami.
    Experiencing human history as a single flowing, undulating landscape is a wonderful experience, but it requires smashing pedestals.  It requires paying attention to the shells and driftwood left washed up on shore after high tide passes.  It requires avoiding the fetishization of particular eras, particular cultures and peoples.  Yes, we need to understand more silent cultures of indigenous people, women, workers, but we also need to savor the knowledge of dead white guys - in appropriate context.
    To hell with Greece and Rome, the Baroque Era, the Victorian Era, or the greatest generation, when taken out of context.  Immerse yourself in the flow and admit that it's all good, even those backwater portions of history that are usually overlooked.