The Shorts 300 was an ungainly looking airplane. Passengers could see into the cockpit and when the captain announced his name as Dick and the first officer's as Tom, you wondered just how old these children were who were flying the plane.

At least that was my wife's reaction when we flew one years ago from Rockford to Chicago. Note they were built like trucks and there was never a fatality from a crash with one of these planes in spite of the fuel tank being over the top of the passenger compartment. They were also notoriously uncomfortable for the pilots, cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

They also engendered numerous jokes. "Sorry, Tower, we lost sight of the Shorts when it flew over the trailer park." Or the pilots being asked by the controller, "Will you be able to make an intersection takeoff or do you have a full load in your Shorts." Not to mention, it was the only aircraft that could suffer a bird strike from behind.

Review: Dark Territory by Fred Kaplan

This is an excellent book, a very readable, veritable page-turner that details in clear, understandable terms, the technology, bureaucratic in-fighting, and events that have led us to where we are today, on the cusp of a revolution in surveillance, intelligence, and warfare.

It's almost a truism that generals fight the last war instead of the present one. That is certainly obvious from reading Kaplan's very disturbing history of cyber vulnerabilities in the United States. In spite of the efforts of numerous people in the CIA and NSA to alert the Defense establishment to their vulnerabilities, top ranking officers, for whatever reason, ignored the warnings or even misused the information they were given by the intelligence people or failed to take advantage of that information.

For example, during the first Iraq war, General Shwarzkopf was provided with the locations of the fiber optic switching locations that carried all the traffic between Saddam's headquarters and his army in Kuwait. Schwarzkopf was happy to bomb those installations, but when the transmission were replaced with microwave towers he bombed those, too, against the advice of the intelligence types who knew that microwave transmission were easily monitored via satellite and available for information harvesting.

Generally, the military establishment was very skeptical of charges their networks were insecure. Ironically, it was a movie, War Games, that motivated not just hundreds of hackers but also Ronald Reagan, who, after bringing in experts who assured him all that was possible, began a campaign to analyze networks. Repeatedly, the military had to be shown just how insecure the networks were. There was the inevitable overreaction by the NSA who wanted to install a chip (the Clipper chip) in every computer in the country that would monitor transmissions and provide a backdoor for the intelligence community to monitor everything. That failed, but thanks to Snowden, we know that it wasn't needed and the NSA is basically collecting every phone and message transmission in the U.S. close to 2 billion per day.

There was always tension between the NSA and technologists side and civilians. The NSA wanted "zero days" (holes open for exploitation in software) left open so they could exploit them, while those holes could be used by foreign governments and malicious hackers to wreck havoc on the civilian population: good for national security, bad for individuals. When Bush was elected in 2000, all the work of Richard Clarke and George Tenet was thrown out the window. Bush wanted nothing to do with Clinton initiatives or people so their warnings about Al Qaida were dismissed. Cheney and Bush were more interested in threats from Russia and Iran so they could build their missile defense system.

In the panic following 9/11, bureaucratic in-fighting for control of the money that was being thrown at terrorism went into overdrive. Verisign (the company that controls domain and registration web names) had analyzed web traffic and discovered that 80% of all the internet traffic in the world flowed through one of two major distribution points in the United States. The NSA realized that was a goldmine for information gathering and with the help of Mitch McConnell pushed through features of the Patriot Act that eventually permitted the NSA to "store" (collecting information on U.S. citizens without a warrant was illegal) virtually all the internet traffic in the world. The ramifications were enormous. If for example, an American citizen were to have phoned a number anywhere in the world that "might" have had terrorist connections, the NSA could go to a FISA court (all in secret) to get a warrant to track other calls plus calls made by others this person might have called and calls those people made, looking for "connections". Before you know it, that one call, which might even have been accidental, would result in collecting relationships of millions of Americans, thus completely subverting the prohibition against surveilling Americans.

One can only wonder at the immense power granted numerous federal agencies by the Patriot Act, which permits so much to be done in secret. When I was director of a college library, we were very concerned by one feature that pertained to libraries. The FBI could walk into the library, demand to see the patron records of anyone, and it was a federal crime not just to refuse, but also even to mention to anyone that they had asked for it. Fortunately, the library community designed its software to delete any trace of books that had been checked out. Having read Kaplan's book, I suspect now they wouldn't bother to ask as they have the capability to examine all the metadata of all the internet and phone traffic anywhere in the world.

One can only wonder how Trump, were he smart enough, might use such incredible power. Then again, if I were he, I would be very afraid of what those same agencies might have on him. J. Edgar Hoover is salivating in his grave

Review: The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Singh, author of Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem, has even included a code to practice one's deciphering skills on. The successful crypt-analyst will win $15,000. In the appendix, he discusses other famous attempts at breaking codes, including the The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin. This work caused quite a stir a couple of decades ago when Drosnin, building really on the work of several Hebrew scholars, claimed to have discovered several prophecies hidden in the text of the Bible, a forecast of the assassination of the Kennedys and of Anwar Sadat. The Biblical code was an EDLS (equidistant letter sequence) code, where you take any text, pick a particular starting letter and jump ahead a given number of letters to spell out a sentence.

As critics have pointed out, any large text will produce all sorts of things. Brendan McKay at the Australian National University used Drosnin's technique to search Moby Dick and discovered similar predictions of assassinations that have occurred. Hebrew texts, Singh notes, are particularly rich in EDLSs because Hebrew has no vowels, which means interpreters can insert vowels as they see fit. Codes are constantly evolving; as code breakers break them, new ones must be developed. The supposed one-time pads, as in the Cryptonomicon, even had weaknesses — for example, if used more than once or from patterns inadvertently created by typists, patterns being the entry into most ciphers. Cryptanalysis, or the process of code breaking, was really invented by Islamic scholars in the 19th century. Substitution ciphers, where another alphabet is substituted for the original, were believed to be unbreakable; there were so many possible combinations of 26 letters that it would take billions of years to test all of them.

The Islamic scholars, while analyzing the Koran, discovered that the frequency of letters was not the same. In English, for example, the letter 'e' appears much more frequently than 'z' By analysis of letter frequency and knowing the language of the cipher, deciphering became quite simple. Blaise de Vigeniere solved this weakness by inventing the Vigeniere square, which provided multiple cipher alphabets using keywords to link letters with particular alphabets, a polyalphabetic cipher. The beauty of his scheme was that the letter “e” might be represented by several other letters, so frequency became irrelevant C or so everyone thought. To decipher the code, all one needed was the keyword, easy to remember, and not necessary to write down anywhere. Deciphering was a tedious process, however, and his impregnable ciphering system was not widely used. The Great Cipher was created by a father and son team working for Louis XIV. Their system was to use a combination of various types of ciphers. Unfortunately, they died without recording how their cipher worked, and many documents in French archives remained completely unreadable until the late 19th century when a French cryptanalyst spent several years painstakingly applying his knowledge of ciphers to the problem. Several of the documents thus finally deciphered revealed the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask.

Charles Babbage, inventor of the modern calculator and computer, was the one who broke Vigeniere's polyalphabetic system, by using statistics to create an algorithm that helped reveal the keyword. The problem in the twentieth century has not been the development of undecipherable ciphers. The computer makes encoding very easy and quite unbreakable. But each ciphered message can only be deciphered using a key. The recipient has to know the key. Banks would hire messengers to deliver keys to encrypted messages that needed to be sent from one bank to another. That proved to be a bureaucratic nightmare, and as the Internet created a need for encrypted messages between individuals and online stores or other persons, the deliverer of the key became very important. Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, and Whitfield Diffie decided the problem was not insoluble. As Hellman said, “God rewards fools.”

Only a fool would be willing to work on a problem for which the experts had said there was no solution, and to be willing to keep getting excited by an idea only to have it flop, then try another. Their solution was unique. They eliminated the need for key exchange. Just how they did this is marvelous in its simplicity, but if I told you you wouldn't need to read the book, which is what I heartily recommend. PQP, the cipher made public so that anyone could use it, made the government nervous and civil libertarians and others in favor of privacy leap for joy. Now anyone could encrypt a message with total security. We hear constantly about the worry that the NSA, CIA, and others in government have about the easy ability of ordinary people to have a level of encryption that is indecipherable. But, of course, it=s in their interest to make everyone think they have an indecipherable message, so my guess is that those agencies already know how to break the unbreakable codes but just don't want anyone to know they can.

Note that the author also reveals the work of Etienne Bazeries, a French crypt-analyst who discovered the identity of The Man in the Iron Mask, the prisoner of Louis XIV. It's prosaic, to say the least.

FUCT or Phuced; the Justices Must Decide.

The Supreme Court's oral arguments in Iancu v Brunetti were fascinating as the justices tried to avoid saying the name of the trademark in question, F.U.C.T. A clothing company is trying to trademark that name as an appeal to a generation that doesn't have the same reaction to the word that older folks do. (I suspect the controversy will be good for them in any case.) The question before the court is whether the prohibition on federal registration of immoral or scandalous trademarks is invalid under the First Amendment.

To many the sound of that word is offensive. To simply see the word, I would argue, requires some effort on the part of the viewer to apply an offensive meaning, as in the case of "Phuct." Neither word has any intrinsic meaning and the offense, if there is any, comes from the individuals application of verbalization. What if the company decided to trademark the name Möse? Anyone seeing the word in an English-speaking country would go ho-hum whereas a German would be scandalized as it's probably the most offensive word in German, sort of like "charogne," in French. Offense is always determined by the person being offended who must chose whether to be offended or not. One can always decide not to be bothered and get on with things in which case the word will gradually lose its singular offensiveness.

The Lanham Act prohibits trademarking "immoral or scandalous" terms, a broad definition indeed and one subject to all sorts of interpretations. The issue of viewpoint discrimination was raised. For example, one might argue that the slogan "Make America Great Again" has now become thoroughly offensive to many people because of the viewpoint it represents. The government argued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has previously defined scandalous as encompassing trademarks that are “shocking,” “offensive,” “disgraceful” and “disreputable,” but going forward they would interpret the statute more narrowly, limiting it to terms that are shocking or offensive because of their “mode of expression,” rather than the “ideas that are expressed.” Several justices thought that for the government to ask them to uphold a statute based on a "promise" of future narrow interpretation was asking a lot.

The government's position is that it wishes to "protect" people from materials they find offensive, a paternalistic attitude if there ever was one, and as a couple justices pointed out, a trademark doesn't have to be registered, and all sorts of "offensive" trademarks could be used without the government's formal registration. Not to mention that the PTO's interpretation of what is offensive changes over time making it difficult for any business to discern what might be acceptable now or later. Ironically FUCT is not a "dirty" word, but only becomes one when an illicit meaning is assigned to it.

Möse clothes, anyone?

Richard Dawkins Goes to Hell

So the famous atheist Richard Dawkins died and was greeted by Satan at the entrance to Hell. "Welcome," says the Devil. Your friends are all here, the pool is to the right, we have a great library, group discussion sessions, and be sure to let us know if there is something we can help with. Dawkins is a bit startled, but pleased. Then one of Satan's minions, announces, "Alert, alert, God will be here in about 5 minutes."

Satan quickly makes the alert announcement and all of a sudden flames shoot up in front of everything, screams are heard in the distance, and then God walks in. God asks how it's going. "Just great," replies Satan, lots of tormented souls here receiving their just punishments, pain, and suffering."

God says, "Terrific." and to St. Peter at his side, says, "OK, Pete, let's go send another hurricane to Haiti and a tornado to the Midwest and see if we can't kill a few more souls and get some more converts." He exits, the flames disappear, and the pool is again in sight. Dawkins, slightly flummoxed, asks Satan what that was all about. Satan replies, "Oh, God stops by every now and again just to make sure we are being horrible and tormenting souls, so we put on this show for him to keep him happy."

Syntactically Vertiginous; a Fustian Essay

Now I love inkhornisms as much as the next and certainly enjoy sesquipedalian narratives, but this phrase in a review of Anna Burns books in the New York Review of Books (March 21, 2019) had me scratching my cerebellum. "The novel is carried by the extraordinary dynamism of middle sister’s voice, full of syntactically vertiginous constructions and new coinages such as “numbance” (for what happens to you when you are threatened sexually) or “earbashings” (of McSomebody’s verbal onslaughts)." I mean, WTF, does "syntactically vertiginous"? I suppose literally dizzyingly grammatical, but what does that mean? Fustian, perhaps?

So I threw on my librarian's smock and perused Google. Interestingly, that phrase was not unique. The first instance that showed up was, appropriately enough, from a paper in Dada/Surrealism, a translator's note about Dada/Surrealism ( No. 20 , 2015) "A Profession of Faith for the Alge Group" by Geo Bogza, a paper I will not read in this lifetime. The translator (from the Romanian) remarked,

The "Profession of Faith" may appear to be as grammatically and syntactically "vertiginous," to use Bogza's own description, as his theses. His vocabulary and rhetorical organization, however, are typical of learned Romanian in general and anything but the radical medium his "young wolves" ought to be feeding on. Bogza's uses strings of elegant variation (antiphrasis, litotes, antonomasia) and periphrases: "Ființe" (beings) for people, a poet's "prezență" (presence) for his role in public life, "adolescență" (adolescence) for youth or youthfulness and "apariție" (apparition, appearance) for a debut in print.1

That must have been hell to translate. No help there. (BTW, "litotes" means "understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary (as in "not a bad singer" or "not unhappy". )

Moving along, the next occurrence was from another book review, back in 1993:

The story is positively swollen with complexities, already difficult ideas expressed in syntactically vertiginous sentences.2

I'm beginning to get the picture at least. Not to belabor the point, another example was from a comment on a blog post in VQR: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion April 20, 2010).

You have an uncanny ability to render life’s little absurdities in crystalline prose, which is both supple and syntactically vertiginous at once.3

Now, aside from crystalline prose seemingly the antithesis of syntactically vertiginous being oxymoronic....

But enough, I am beginning to become a bit vertiginous, myself.

1. https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1308&context=dadasur
2. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review-dial-guatemala-for-murder-eva-salzman-on-an-ambitious-novel-about-a-poor-little-orphan-1471129.html
3. https://www.vqronline.org/awp/strangeness-awp-postmortem#comments

"No Collusion" as a Russian Sideshow

Trump's constant "no collusion" refrains, seen from a different perspective, would almost "prove" he is, perhaps unwittingly -- or not. helping the Russians in their campaign to diminish respect for American reliance and respect for democracy and government. The purpose of the Mueller investigation was to examine whether and how Russia might have interfered with the 2018 election. It has done so quite brilliantly and we now know the Russians did, in fact, utilize social media to foment discord and disrespect for our governmental institutions. That Trump encouraged that disrespect with his constant harping on "the swamp" in Washington, misogyny, hatred of any form of regulation, whipping up fear of alien invasion from the south, and general control of the news cycle though his manipulation of the media, might otherwise lead any observer to believe he was literally working for the Russians.

By focusing on the "no collusion found" refrain, not only does the Mueller report become relegated to the back-burner, the contents of that report become completely suspect. Lost in the Trump verbiage (which the GOP has swallowed hook, line, and sinker) are the indictments of 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies for meddling with the election. The Russians could not have asked for a better partner than Trump in their campaign to disrupt American Democracy and to destroy respect for its institutions.

Gods and Days

According to the Britannica, the Catholic Church has over 10,000 Saints who apparently can be prayed to and asked for special consideration or some such. Each also has a feast day, which according to my calculations means an average of 27 feast days for every day of the year. No wonder there is an obesity epidemic. Anyway, that's a lot of minor Gods (by definition a God is "a superhuman being or spirit worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes) and that number puts the Romans to shame. One sometimes wonders who's in charge.

In the U.S. we have a similar venerative days except we call them "national day of..." or "national week of..." or "national month of..." Some of these days/weeks/months are truly bizarre. Aside from today being April Fools Day, it's also National Sourdough Bread Day, and National One-Cent Day. This week is National Pooper-Scooper Week (I kid you not!) as well as National Orchid Male Cancer Awareness Week, and National Window Safety Week plus many more. As far as mponths, it's National Parkinson's Awareness Month as well as celebrating the following (to name but a few - there are many more for April): Straw Hat Month, Soft Pretzel Month, Records and Information Management Month, Safe Digging Month and Distracted Driving Awareness MOnth. It goes on and on. The shear number trivializes them all.

Personally, I think we need a national Holy Underwear Month. It would fit right in with St. Jude's festival. He's the patron saint of lost causes. Although he has some competition from St. Rita, "a saint of impossible cases. She is also the patron saint of sterility, abuse victims, loneliness, marriage difficulties, parenthood, widows, the sick, bodily ills, and wounds." Of xcourse, that makes her busier than hell.