The Rise of the Computer State: The Threat to Our Freedoms, Our Ethics and our Democratic Process
273
The Rise of the Computer State: The Threat to Our Freedoms, Our Ethics and our Democratic Process
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497696846 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 01/13/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 273 |
| File size: | 534 KB |
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The Rise of the Computer State
The Threat to Our Freedoms, Our Ethics and Our Democratic Process
By David Burnham
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1983 David BurnhamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9684-6
CHAPTER 1
The Beginning
My story begins more than a century and a half ago; Napoleon had been dead for one year. James Monroe was the president of the United States. Baby Victoria was fifteen years from assuming her splendid throne. Charles Darwin would not publish his revolutionary thesis On the Origin of Species for another three and a half decades.
The year was 1822. In England a brilliant, cantankerous mathematician named Charles Babbage completed the construction of a model of a technically advanced adding machine that he called the difference engine. The British government, correctly assuming that the special power of this machine could greatly enhance the navigating skills of the world's leading maritime nation, decided to subsidize the difficult task of building a full-scale version of Babbage's device.
This nineteenth-century example of a government-supported research and development program went forward in a laboratory partially built by public funds. Babbage's craftsmen, however, found the challenge of building the necessary system of gears and cogs extraordinarily difficult.
Year after year Babbage continued the frustrating task of trying to transform the model of his difference engine into a full-scale reality. But he also began thinking about a far more ambitious invention. The mathematician first wrote about this new device in 1833. Historians now say that this second conception, which Babbage called the analytical engine, was the world's first universal digital computer.
From the high-technology perspective of the late twentieth century, Babbage's two devices look a good deal like each other. A replica of the experimental model of the difference engine at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington looks like the brass innards of a carefully crafted and very sturdy antique clock. Hundreds of brass spools, geared to each other and stacked on a series of metal shafts, rest on a thick oak frame. The drawings of the analytical engine suggest a similar but far more intricate machine.
The apparent similarity, however, is misleading. The model of the difference engine could do nothing but add numbers with complete accuracy. The analytical engine, as conceived by Babbage, was far more ambitious. With it, the operator could place instructions in the machine to later undertake a lengthy series of different mathematical functions. In today's language, the operator could program it. The analytical engine had a memory or "store" unit, as well as input, arithmetic, control and output units.
Unlike virtually all inventions of the first part of the Industrial Revolution, Babbage's second machine was not intended to increase the physical strength and mechanical ability of mankind. Instead, implicit in its plans lay a revolutionary method to examine and organize the universe, to increase the power of the mind. Now, fifteen decades after Babbage's fertile brain conceived the analytical engine, both the device itself and the thought processes that emerged from it have come to play a major, perhaps even dominant, role in how people earn their livings, teach their children, elect their leaders, play their games and wage their wars.
The significance of Babbage's conceptual achievement was understood by neither the British government nor most of his peers. But it was recognized and celebrated by one of his disciples. Her name was Ada Augusta, the Countess of Lovelace, and she was the brilliant daughter from the brief stormy marriage of Lord and Lady Byron.
Contemporary portraits show Ada to be a slight, beautiful woman with dark romantic eyes, a slim nose and a small, determined mouth. She was known as an excellent horsewoman, and in her later years was a compulsive gambler. There were even rumors, apparently unfounded, that she and her mentor, the brilliant Babbage, once worked together to develop the elusive dream of all gamblers, a sure-fire system to confound the bookies.
Mathematics was the second curious passion of Lady Lovelace, and with expert tutoring from Babbage, she had become a first-rank practitioner, unusually well trained for her time and sex. Partly because of this expertise, she came to understand Babbage's invention and believe that the analytical engine was a powerful instrument that ultimately would have an enormous impact on the world, its inhabitants and how they thought.
"If we compare together the powers and purposes of the Difference and of the Analytical Engines, we shall perceive that the capabilities of the latter are immeasurably more extensive than those of the former, and that they in fact hold to each other the same relationship as that of analysis to arithmetic," she wrote in an English scientific journal of 1842.
"The former engine is in its nature strictly mathematical, and the results it can arrive at lie within a very clearly defined and restricted range, while there is no finite demarcation which limits the power of the Analytical Engine. A new, a vast and a powerful language is developed," she said, a language "through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationships which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst."
A little more than a hundred and twenty-five years after her death, the U.S. Defense Department paid tribute to the unique insights of this intelligent and passionate woman in a way both unusual and appropriate. The Pentagon named a computer language after her. With the help of Ada, a new language designed to replace eight separate languages being used by the three services in 1980, the experts said they hoped to increase the flexibility of the military while at the same time save the taxpayers about $1 billion a year.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, partly because of the failure to make the full- scale version of his earlier machine function, the inventor never tried to transform the intricate plans for his analytical engine into a working model. In fact it was not until the application of the vacuum tube to the concept of the computer at about the time of the beginning of World War II that the significance of the analytical engine began to match the promise claimed for it by the Countess of Lovelace. But during the century and a quarter that separated the conception of the computer from the first steps to make it a mechanical reality, the way of thinking inherent in Babbage's plans came to permeate many of the institutions of the industrial nations.
One of the most provocative critics to identify this process is Jacques Ellul, a French lawyer and World War II Resistance leader. Ellul coined the word technique to describe an approach to life that he feels has come to dominate the method of thought of the people, corporations and government agencies of much of the world.
Technique, Ellul has written, is the rational and unblinking search for increased efficiency and greater productivity. When technique is applied to machines, as it was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it made sense. But as machines have come to play a larger and larger role in almost every aspect of our lives, technique has come to dominate the minds of corporate executives, government officials and just plain people as they go about planning their organizational and personal lives.
Streamlining a high-speed locomotive or airplane, Ellul suggests, is totally rational. But streamlining the management procedures of a hospital, the guidelines that determine when a policeman can make an arrest, or the way a law-school graduate takes a bar exam or an unemployed mother applies for public assistance for her child may have painful and unforeseen consequences.
Furthermore, some of the procedures adopted in the sacred name of efficiency directly conflict with the ethical standards and human values that have been developed by the great religious and philosophical movements of the world.
Ellul thus contends that the way of thinking implicit in Babbage's invention had become a potent force in many nations long before the middle of the twentieth century when the computer finally became an essential recruit in every army, every government agency, every police force, every corporation and every largish institution.
With the full blossoming of the computer in the decades since World War II, however, the velocity of the search for greater efficiency and productivity has accelerated at an incredible speed and the analytical engine has now become the central force of our civilization, the unique metaphor of our time.
In the rushed clutter of our daily lives, it is easy to lose sight of the combined power that the computer, the related telecommunication links and the computer's system of thinking have come to exert over almost every aspect of our lives. For the fish swimming in the ocean, the comprehension of wetness is impossible. Wet requires the contrast of dry. In the same way, it is hard for most Americans to appreciate the intricate layering of computerized networks that have been built up around each of our lives during the last twenty-five years. Abrupt violent changes, like the revolution in Iran, are easy to see. Incremental changes, stretching over decades, are harder to perceive.
The enormous benefits provided by this technology offer another kind of camouflage. The comforts and conveniences of the computer make thinking about its potentially negative effects something of an exercise in self-denial. Computers, after all, give the United States the largest and most sophisticated telephone system in the world. Computers allow firemen in some cities to receive reports on the number of tenants who live in the apartment house as they are rushing to put out the fire. Computers scan the records of millions of drivers in a few seconds and permit a state in the East to deny a license to an applicant from the West who has been convicted of drunken driving. Computers, built into the engines of our cars, increase fuel efficiency by precisely regulating the flow of gas into the carburetor. Lives saved. Time saved. Money saved.
The overwhelming influence of computers is hard to exaggerate. Linked computers have become as essential to the life of our society as the central nervous system is to the human body. Industries engaged in the processing of information by computers now generate about half of the gross national product of the United States. The Social Security Administration, AT&T, the Internal Revenue Service, the insurance industry, the Pentagon, the bankers and the federal intelligence agencies could not function without the computer. Access to a computer is one way to define class, with those who cannot or will not plug themselves into a terminal standing on the bottom rung of the social ladder.
One sign of just how deeply the computer has penetrated the psyche of America is a stanza from one of Dr. Seuss's books for children, a high-spirited examination of sleep in America that is calculated to entertain the four-year-olds, if not their parents.
Counting up sleepers ...? Just how do we do it ...?
Really quite simply. There's nothing much to it.
We found how many, we learn the amount
By an Audio-Te-ly-O-Tally-O Count.
On a mountain, halfway between Reno and Rome,
We have a machine in a plexiglass dome,
Which listens and looks into everyone's home.
And whenever it sees a new sleeper go flop,
It jiggles and lets a new Biggel-Ball drop.
Our chap counts these balls as they plup in a cup.
And that's how we know who is down and who's up.
A jolly Big Brother alive in the blithely cute world of Dr. Seuss.
With incredible speed, after a gestation period of more than a hundred years, the offspring of Babbage's analytical machines are now changing the way we live: how we pay our bills, get our news and entertainment, earn our living, obtain a government handout, pay our taxes, obtain credit, make our plane and hotel reservations, inform the government of our views and even receive our love letters.
Most U.S. commentary on computers has tended to be laudatory, in part because of the widely shared perception that the machines are essential to the continued growth of the American economy. A few critics, nevertheless, have sought to examine the dark side of computers, often aiming their fire at the somewhat narrow question of personal privacy.
In response to these criticisms and the increased public awareness of government surveillance that grew out of the Watergate scandals of President Richard Nixon, Congress enacted a handful of narrowly drawn laws. One statute imposed restrictions on the use of personal information by federal agencies. Another permitted Americans to see and challenge the information collected about them by credit reporting firms. A third established a secret court that authorizes the FBI to install bugs and taps against espionage suspects.
Despite this flurry of legislative activity, Americans frequently discount the importance, in the phrase of one Supreme Court decision, of being left alone. "I have nothing to hide," many respectable citizens reply when asked whether they fear the increased intensity of all kinds of surveillance made possible by the computer. And they often seem unaware that personal privacy has been considered a valuable asset for many centuries and is not just a faintly hysterical fad of the age of technology.
"A wonderful fact to reflect upon that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to the other," Charles Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities. "A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it."
Privacy, however, is far more than the aesthetic pleasure of Charles Dickens. And the gradual erosion of privacy is not just the unimportant imaginings of fastidious liberals. Rather, the loss of privacy is a key symptom of one of the fundamental social problems of our age: the growing power of large public and private institutions in relation to the individual citizen.
This book examines how the widely acknowledged and heavily advertised ability of the computer to collect, organize and distribute information tends to enhance the power of the bureaucratic structures who harness the computer to achieve their separate and often worthy goals. This book also examines how the computer, as utilized by the institutions of our society, is affecting our values. Thus the book is not just about computers and data bases and computerized communication networks. It is about how large organizations use such systems and how these systems influence what we think is important.
One of the most brilliant and knowledgeable men to ponder these questions was Norbert Wiener, a child prodigy who earned his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University when he was eighteen and was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for most of his life. Wiener, a mathematician, was a unique and enthusiastic pioneer in the development of computers and computer languages. At the same time, however, he feared that computers ultimately would pose a serious threat to the independent spirit of mankind.
"We are the slaves of our technical improvements, and we can no more return a New Hampshire farm to the self-contained state it was maintained in 1800 than we can, by taking thought, add a cubit to our stature or, what is more to the point, diminish it," he wrote in 1954.
Asking us to open our eyes, Wiener argued that "progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future, but new restrictions. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness."
Five years later, he turned his attention more directly to the computer. The occasion was a 1959 lecture to the Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "It is my thesis that machines do and can transcend some of the limitations of their designers, and that in doing so they may be both effective and dangerous."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rise of the Computer State by David Burnham. Copyright © 1983 David Burnham. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
The Beginning,Surveillance,
Data Bases,
Power,
The National Security Agency—The Ultimate Computer Bureaucracy,
Values,
The Rule of Law,
Can Anything Be Done?,
A Future,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Acknowledgments,