Dreaming, Seeing, Feeling, Thinking, Saying, Doing

Kim H. Veltman

Unpublished

Ever since the advent of computers, human-computer-interfaces have been an important theme not least because of great differences between the two. Machines traditionally have an either/or logic: a machine is on or off. A program is running or not running. Human beings are more complex. An essential difference is that humans distinguish between dream, seeing, feeling, thinking and doing. As the tale from 1001 Nights told so eloquently long ago, a person may occasionally have terrible dreams that do not reflect the wonderful things that will happen in reality. A person may feel miserable, and still go to work. A person may think something quite impolite or even worse about their boss or someone and wisely say nothing. In a burst of anger or excitement a person may say something they do not mean. Fortunately, what the person does visibly is usually something much more polite, balanced with a sometimes excellent façade.

The person’s actions, their facades, their masks, are significant dimensions of a human but are hardly the whole person. Even so, our legal systems were constructed on the assumption that only actions count. A child may say; I’m going to kill him/her; a grown person may think: I’d like to kill him/her, but only someone who plans to do so and does so is a murderer. People see Hollywood films about killers, murderers, terrorists and criminals daily and go back home with no plans, let alone attempts, to be anything other than peaceful citizens, loving parents and gentle spouses. Traditionally owning a copy of Playboy was no proof of illicit or criminal behaviour. It was often simply a sign of healthy puberty. Seeing the equivalent online is often nothing more. Traditionally, sublimation was not a crime. Justice is about redressing actual crimes where illegal actions have been done.

In the past fifteen years, social networks have been undermining this model, by shifting attention from acts to intentions, comments, thoughts and even dreams. In the United States, the three main bodies concerned with security, intelligence and investigation are deeply involved in this process. Three sample articles will illustrate the point. In 2006, there was a report about the NSA:

The agency is apparently using "data mining" techniques to scour these records for connections between terrorists. According to an intelligence official interviewed by USA Today,the NSA is analyzing this data using "social network analysis." … The basic concept of the social network is familiar to anyone who has used Friendster or played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Social network analysis formalizes this parlor game, using details about the network to interpret the role of each ….Network analyst Valdis Krebs set out to prove after 9/11 that networks could help uncover terrorist cells. Working from publicly available information, Krebs showed that all 19 hijackers were within two connections of the al-Qaida members the CIA knew about in early 2000.... (There is also controversy surrounding reports that a U.S. military unit called Able Danger used network analysis to identify Mohamed Atta before 9/11.)…

Social network analysis has been used in many areas besides terrorist surveillance. Google's PageRank system is based on network theory and the concept of "centrality." Doctors use network analysis to track the spread of HIV. And some academics have applied network theory to Enron's e-mail records in an attempt to understand relationships within the company.[1]

The CIA is involved in meme-tracking and:

maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of an nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency's Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as "vengeful librarians," are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad. According to the Associated Press, these librarians are tracking up to five million tweets a day from places like China, Pakistan and Egypt[2]

Meanwhile, “The FBI is looking to develop a web application that can monitor social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to gain better real-time intelligence about current or potential future security threats or situations.”[3] Official government bodies are involved. For instance, the US Department of State is organizing:

TAG Challenge is a social gaming competition in which participants are invited to find volunteer suspects in a simulated law enforcement search in five different cities on March 31, 2012. In order to win, a participant or team must be the first to successfully locate and photograph all volunteer suspects—the nefarious and elusive “Panther Five”—and submit verifiable photographs to the contest.[4]

Some have suggested that social gaming is emerging as a new spying technique.[5] There has, in any case, been increased interest in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs):

the CIA expressed great worries about the use of MMORPGs as a secret communications channel for terrorists. On February 15, 2008, the office of the Director of National Intelligence provided Congress with the Data Mining Report…. Reynard Project….: "Reynard is a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particular terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community. The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments.[6]

At the level of everyday practice there are games such as Bomb Threat[7] or America’s Army financed by the U.S. Government, “ranked among the top ten online PC action games with almost 9.5 million registered players who have completed over 380 million missions from basic training to operations in the War on Terrorism.”[8] The names of the games speak for themselves in MMOs tagged military: Blacklight Retribution, Warface, Project Blackout, Dead Six, War Inc Battle Zone, End of Nations, Counter-Strike Online, Tactical Intervention, BlackShot.[9] Sponsoring and even making available for free, games where children are playing at fighting and terrorism may not be the ideal way to fight terrorism.

At a more political level, this has led to “Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy. It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.”[10] In February 2012, this new consultancy offered scenarios for: How will it end in Syria?[11], appearing as a sidebar in the CNN Global Public Square (GPS).[12] A frightening detail is that scenarios about Syria opening discussed in 2012 were scenarios being discussed by think tanks in 1993.[13]

On the surface, Wikistart is an online consultancy using scenarios and simulations for news. They also have a grand strategy competition which includes college think-tank teams[14] and in week one had “44,097 actions within the wiki with new information being added at an average rate of once every 10 minutes”[15] with respect to five topics: “Global energy security; Global Economic “Rebalancing” Process; Salafi Jihadist Terrorism; "Chimerica"-China-US Relationship; and Southwest Asia Nuclear Proliferation.”[16] Their geo-political analysis includes the Arab Spring. Members cite views of conservative organizations such as Council on Foreign Relations, PNAC[17] and Bilderberg.[18] Parallel international consulting firms providing strategic analysis of world events, with less visible online presence include Oxford Analytica (founded 1975 by a special assistant to Henry Kissinger), where Senior Global Advisors include David Milliband and Philip Mudd (formerly of the CIA),[19] and where former heads of the CIA come to dinner as does the Secretary of Defense.[20]

Wikistrat Chief Analyst Thomas P. M. Barnett has described the concept as "Facebook meets Wikipedia," to describe the combination of a community of strategist and the environment of an editable and dynamic encyclopaedia that is known as the Global Model (GLOMOD).”[21] At least that is the surface. Their actual views of Facebook are less flattering:

All Facebook does is facilitate a universe of useless knowledge transfer, whose primary business function is snooping into “the lives of others” – Big Brother with a cherubic face. Instead of passively collecting business and personal intelligence on your every Internet move, like a transparency-hoarding Google, Zuckerberg cons you into providing all your intimate details willingly. His reward? A $50 billion company valuation and investment from Goldman Sachs….

Despite our natural fears of Wikistrat being confused with Wikileaks (remember please: we’re the people who allow you to strategize scenarios privately), we’d suggest that 2010 be remembered as the Year of the Transparency Mongers.[22]

In any case, in the Wikistrat version of Facebook meets Wikipedia, the comments are more than simple opinions of casual users. They are planned strategical comments involving major political events in real politics and the strategy game has disturbing overtones of the Great Game. In the 19th century this involved adventurous explorers such as Francis Younghusband and Sven Hedin, frequently with spies dressed as explorers and handfuls of eminences grises in major cities.

The modern version is online. In the new version, simulation, scenarios, think-tanks and op-eds are the surface words, which undermine distinctions with real events, covert operations, wars and regime changes. What poses as a possibility, views, opinions, opinion polls, sharing ideas freeely, is aligned with agendas and strategic plans to make it a reality, while posing merely as a discussion, and a game. The vision of wikipedia as an encyclopedia for making facts accessible is being challenged, some would say hijacked, by a pseudo-encyclopedia of strategies posing as opinions and views which will change the factual order: not what is, but what some persons believe should be; not a record of the world order, but a program for a new world order.

These trends of mixing game and reality are reflected also in films. Originally planned as a sequel to Total Recall (1992), the movie Minority Report (2002)[23] began filming in March 2001, five months before 9/11. The film is about stopping crimes when they were still mere thoughts. A decade later, pre-crime[24] is linked with practical projects being developed in the United States. The film, Inception (2010), broached the topic of shared or collaborative dreaming and alluded to its being linked with military developments. Since then there is an emerging field of power dreaming,[25] where individuals use collaborative worlds such as second life in order to improve their dreams. Darker dimensions are found in the remake of the Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004), and the Killing Room (2009).

Echelon[26] is an existing global network of computers founded in 1947[27] that searches through intercepted messages. It was the subject of a documentary (2002)[28]. In the last decade, it has also been the topic of three action thrillers: The Listening (2006, originally: In ascolto), Eagle Eye (2008), Echelon Conspiracy (2009, formerly: The Gift)[29] and is the title of a new thriller by Andy McNab. Eagle Eye (2008), also has a “mobile game based on the film…. released for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, BREW, and Java ME devices prior to the film's launch…. also two games on the film's web site.”[30] Real projects are portrayed as science fiction and turned into games. Such fictionalizing of reality blurs the boundaries between escapist entertainment and darker realities of the physical world.

Of course, there has also been a long standing interest in game theory, war games, scenarios, simulations.[31] Henry Kissinger described Diplomacy, as his favourite game.[32] Online versions have been evolving since the 1980s. Games are an excellent hobby. Meanwhile, the secret services have long been involved in services that are secret. There is an obvious and important need for official and secret agencies to protect individuals and countries against dangerous attacks. And yet there is a curious imbalance between a rhetoric of everything being openly transparent and a system where Wiki Leaks is depicted as criminals and called terrorists[33] for being open; where Wiki and Wikimedia are undermined and where Wikistrat is on the rise.

The concern here is philosophical and ethical, not unlike the concerns that inspired Norbert Wiener to develop Cybernetics (1948).[34] In the name of protecting our security, and avoiding crime, new technologies are being combined in ways that undermine millennia old distinctions between dreaming, seeing, feeling, thinking, saying and doing. In the name of upholding the law, the very definition of the foundations of law and justice are being undermined, some would say, subverted. The Anglo-Saxon legal system is built on the premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty of committing a crime: i.e. actually doing something that is illegal. The new trend is leading persons to be charged with no evidence of doing something illegal and being held indefinitely, sometimes even years, with no recourse to defending oneself. The surface effect is that news programmes increasingly report arrests of persons not for what they did, but what they planned, intended, saw, said, thought, or potentially felt or even dreamed. Suspects, even teenagers, are threatened with extradiction to a country where they have never set foot, rather than facing a regular trial for a documented crime in their home country.

The less visible effect is that the technologies are being used to blur distinctions between what we do in public and in the workplace, what we play in virtual games, what we say in personal conversations and what we think, consider or experience as a passing or a fleeting notion. The phrase “the thought had crossed my mind” is a long way from Macbeth’s “I have done the deed.” Often persons speak with friends, psychologists, priests or counselors, precisely to get something off their mind, rather than to put it in the action tray. In Britain, there is a tradition of an upset person planning to write a letter, producing three serious drafts and then deciding not to send it after all.

Drafts are not sent letters and even sent letters are usually a long way from delivered acts and deeds. Problem-solving techniques, cases, scenarios, role–playing, are all useful techniques but to bundle them risks removing the distinctions that make us human. It introduces dangers of de-augmented humanity, where human beings are pushed in the direction of the three laws of robotics.[35]

Notes

[1] Alexander Dryer, How the NSA Does "Social Network Analysis",Slate, 15 May, 2006:

[2] Jared Keller, How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel, The Atlantic, 4 November 2011:

[3] Christina Warren, Revealed: The FBI Wants to Monitor Social Media, Mashable, 12 January 2012:

[4] Tag Challenge:

[5] Face Google: Is Google really interested in Social Gaming or rather Spy Games?, 31, 07, 2010:

Social gaming was a $700 million market in the U.S in 2009 and it generated billions of dollars in China and Japan. Is going after the multi-billion dollar social gaming market solely Google’s motivation? Evidence suggests that by its modus operandi along with its classified government intelligence contracts (for undisclosed sums) its motivation points directly at Spy Gaming