The NSA’s big new computer center in Utah

At Democracy Now, Amy Goodman spoke with Wired's James Bamford about the NSA's big new computer surveillance center in Utah. First of all, how big is it?

Well, it’s going to be a million square feet. That’s gigantic. There’s only one data center in the country that’s larger, and it’s only slightly larger than that. And it’s going to cost $2 billion. It’s being built in this area on a military base outside of Salt Lake City in Bluffdale. As I said, they had to actually extend the boundary of the town so it would fit into it.
Next, what is the NSA up to?
So, what I would like to do—I quote from a number of people in the article that are whistleblowers. They worked at NSA. They worked there many years. One of my key whistleblowers was the senior technical person on the largest eavesdropping operation in NSA. He was a very senior NSA official. He was in charge of basically automating the entire world eavesdropping network for NSA. So—and one of the other people is a intercept operator that was actually listening to these calls, listening to journalists calling from overseas and talking to their wives and having intimate conversations. And she tells about how these people were having these conversations, and she felt very guilty listening to them. These people came forward and said, you know, this shouldn’t be happening. Bill Binney, the senior official I interviewed, had been with NSA for 40 years almost, and he left, saying that what they’re doing is unconstitutional. What I’d like to see is, why don’t we have a panel, for the first time in history, of some of these people and have them before Congress, sitting there telling their story to Congress, instead of to me, and then have NSA respond to them? I mean, this is the American public who we’re talking about whose phone calls we’re talking about, so—and email and data searches and all that. So I think it’s about time that the Congress get involved, instead of asking questions from a newspaper or from a magazine article, and start actually questioning these people on the record in terms of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and to whom they’re doing it—you know, to whom they’re doing it.

Continue ReadingThe NSA’s big new computer center in Utah

The roots of human difference and conflict

My prejudice has long been that most human conflicts can be traced to base-level differences, minor seeming micro-differences, until they clash at macro levels.   I tried to describe this by reference to an incident in the movie "Apollo 13." Here's another way of expressing this same idea:

We proceed from the working hypothesis that inferential and judgmental errors arise primarily from nonmotivational—perceptual and cognitive—sources. Such errors, we contend, are almost inevitable products of human information-processing strategies. In ordinary social experience, people often look for the wrong data, often see the wrong data, often retain the wrong data, often weight the data improperly, often fail to ask the correct questions of the data, and often make the wrong inferences on the basis of their understanding of the data. With so many errors on the cognitive side, it is often redundant and unparsimonious to look also for motivational errors. We argue that many phenomena generally regarded as motivational (for example, self-serving perceptions and attributions, ethnocentric beliefs, and many types of human conflict), can be understood better as products of relatively passionless information-processing errors than of deep-seated motivational forces.

R. Nisbett and L. Ross Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, p. 12 (1980). The solution to most social conflict, then, is not fighting wars or even yelling at each other.  It is striving to be smart--working hard to identify those low-level differences.    That is one of the main reasons why I find Jonathan Haidt's ideas so valuable.   Rather than demonize (which we should avoid at all costs), we should work hard to determine why we disagree.  Where is it that our world-views diverge?

Continue ReadingThe roots of human difference and conflict

Status on Illinois law prohibiting citizens from recording police

Illinois Republicans voted down a bill that would have allowed people to record public police activities in Illinois. What are they afraid of? The good news:

Even without the legislation, however, the law’s days might be numbered. Two judges, one in Cook County and the other in Crawford County, have declared it unconstitutional in recent months.

Continue ReadingStatus on Illinois law prohibiting citizens from recording police

How to tell the difference between Science and Pseudoscience: A presentation by Massimo Pigluicci

Today I attended a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci at Washington University in St. Louis. The title of the talk was "A Fresh Look at the Demarcation Problem and Why it Matters." Pigliucci’s aim was to help us distinguish between real science and pseudoscience. He offered some a few examples up front to set the stage. It is fairly well accepted these days that Freudian psychoanalysis is pseudoscience whereas Einstein's theory of relativity is a prototypical example of legitimate science. Most science falls in between these endpoints. One example of a suspect science is string theory, which Pigliucci characterized as a favorite modern day "whipping boy." Karl Popper had the same objective back in the 1930s, offering his falsifiability approach: a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable. Not only did Popper believe that he had provided a method for determining what is truly scientific; he also believed that he had solved David Hume's “problem of induction.” Induction is the process of generalizing from a smaller set to a larger as-yet-unobserved set; the induction problem, according to Hume, was that we cannot rationally justify induction, because this conclusion depends upon the assumption that nature will continue to be uniform. Pigliucci argued that Popper's falsification approach is not sufficient for it distinguishing between pseudoscience and science, because it is “vulnerable to the Duhem-Quine theses.” The problem, according to Pigliucci, is that one can often save a falsifiable hypothesis by tweaking it (as nineteenth century astronomers did when they worked to save Newtonian physics in light of the perturbations of Mercury by positing that there was an as-yet-unseen planet closer to the sun, a planet they named "Vulcan." It would also seem that there is another problem with falsifiability; some nascent fields don't yet have a thick collection of observations with which to work. Imagine that Aristotle announced the theory of general relativity, far before Einstein. It might have been impossible for him to offer a way to falsify his theory back then, but not because there was any problem with the theory itself; it would thus be declared to be not-science. Pigliucci addresses this situation (see below). Throughout his lecture, Pigliucci referred to Larry Laudan's approach to the demarcation problem. Laudan has argued that the demarcation problem is "uninteresting and intractable," urging that we should completely stop using terms like "pseudoscience" and "unscientific." Laudan argues that philosophers have failed to point out necessary and sufficient criteria for distinguishing between pseudoscience and science. He therefore considers the demarcation project doomed. Pigliucci disagrees, pointing out that it is not necessary to find necessary and sufficient criteria for distinguishing between science and pseudoscience. Pigluicci draws upon Wittgenstein's work on family resemblances. Wittgenstein had challenged people to define the word "game" in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. It seems like an easy task, but it is not. Pigliucci refers to this exercise as "humbling." Just because we can't set out the necessary and sufficient conditions doesn't mean we don't know what a "game" is. With regard to many concepts, including "species," and, yes, "science," no boundaries have been drawn, yet we have workable ideas for what these concepts are. Wittgenstein’s observations have been recognized and expanded by modern linguists, including George Lakoff, who has labeled such concepts as “radial categories,” indicating that prototypes serve as the most typical instances of such categories. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to tell the difference between Science and Pseudoscience: A presentation by Massimo Pigluicci