Comments on Cables

All Quotes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak

on or about 12/9/2010

I hand picked these from the source above to prove my points. If you want to counter-argue, find your own quotes. My points are:

• The U.S. government breaks the law too much, and people should know about it.
• The U.S. government is hypocritical, and we should practice what we preach.
• The diplomats and leaders of the political world are a bunch of immature little boys, and maybe it's time we tried something else.

I think America is too important to let these things go on in our name and with our tax dollars. I love my country. It's the government I don't trust.

If Wikileaks is willing to step up to the plate and get this information out there, we should applaud them for doing the job the mainstream media should be doing.

The U.S. is hypocritical, form 1 (preach rule of law, practice all's fair in love and war):

In July 2009, a confidential originating from the State Department ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on the leader of the United Nations, Secretary general Ban Ki-moon, and other top U.N. Officials. The intelligence info the diplomats were ordered to gather included biometric information, passwords, and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications. the UN had previously declared that spying on the Secretary general was illegal, as a breach of the 1946 UN convention. Former UN diplomats commented that UN officials already work under the assumption that they are spied on and are used to getting around it, but the surprise in this case was that it was done by other diplomats rather than intelligence agencies. This scenario therefore blurs the line between diplomats and spies.

Why is this a secret? Wouldn't the Russians knowing about this plan act as a deterrent? Do you really think it would surprise or offend them?

NATO created plans to defend the Baltic states and Poland against a Russian attack. Nine British, German, US, Polish divisions have been designated for combat operations in the event of a Russian attack. In 2011 NATO wants to conduct exercises for this new plan.

Why is this a secret? Shouldn't all citizens of the world know this?

A Chinese official revealed that both public opinion in China and the government are "increasingly critical" of North Korea, stating that "China's influence with the North was frequently overestimated". The Chinese mentioned that they do not "like" North Korea, but "they are a neighbor".

Why is this a secret? Making contingency plans is a good thing. Telling Kim Jong-il that he's going to be irrelevant someday is a good thing.

U.S. and South Korea officials have discussed reunification of the two Koreas should the North ultimately collapse, according to the American ambassador to Seoul.

People have a right to know when their government is involved in fucked up shit like this:

According to a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul, Vice President of Afghanistan, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was found carrying $52 million in cash that he “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination”.

WTF?

The U.S. military took 15 percent of the €50 million the German government gave to a trust fund to build up the Afghan National Army.

Other countries are two-faced also. And exposing this is a problem how? Outing international leaders as, basically, liars, seems likely to only improve the level of honesty in diplomacy. And no, I don't think diplomacy requires keeping secrets. Secretiveness is only one approach to diplomacy. One which gave us the war-torn, despot-filled, terrorized world we have now. How about we try something else, like behaving as adults and working out our differences, instead of bluffing and boasting our way to personal glory for our leaders?

The cables reveal some Arab distrust for Iran, and encouragement from pro-US Arab leaders for a military strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran. Saudi King Abdullah has repeatedly urged the U.S. to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. In one diplomatic cable, King Abdullah said it was necessary to "cut the head of the snake", in reference to Iran's nuclear program. This remains problematic, as many Arab leaders have refrained from publicly criticizing Iran, due to popular support for the country.

In Saudi Arabia,

Diplomats claim that Saudi donors remain chief financiers of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, Taliban and LeT.

Shouldn't the public have a right to know who our enemies are?

Sounds reasonable. Why secret?

Muhammad bin Zayed (Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi) described a nuclear armed Iran as absolutely untenable. He suggested that the key to containing Iran revolves around progress on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He argued that it will be essential to bring Arab public opinion in line with the leadership in any conflict with Iran and that roughly 80% of the public is amenable to persuasion. To win them over, the U.S. would have to quickly bring about a two state solution over the objections of the Netanyahu government. He suggested working with moderate Palestinians that support the road map, and forget about the others as there is no time to waste.

The U.S. government thinks it rules the world, and can do so without transparency and without regard to law. This is not how I want my government to behave, and I think Sweden betrayed its own citizens here.

The United States Government was very concerned about file-sharing related issues in Sweden. The US Embassy actively worked with the Swedish authorities to reduce file-sharing related threats, including The Pirate Bay, which was raided in 2006 following US pressure. The diplomatic cables reveal how the United States pressured Sweden, despite the Swedish prosecutors' claim that there had been no political interference. According to the Swedish Left Party the secret cooperation was unconstitutional

US diplomats lobbied Russian politicians for US credit card companies Mastercard and Visa. A law proposal currently undergoing discussion in the Russian State Duma proposes a National Payment Card System (NPCS) to collect all credit card fees for domestic transactions. This would result in a revenue loss for Visa and Mastercard.

Is this the responsibility of the U.S. Government? My tax dollars were spent on this? Where's my share of the profits?

Kim Jong-il, leader of North Korea, has a reputation among Chinese diplomats as being "quite a good drinker".

Awesome. Now I know what to get him for Christmas.

Traveling Back in Time

This post is not about time travel, per se, but it is about seeing the distant past, as we would if we actually travelled back in time.  Most of us have had the experience of reading about some scientific theory of ancient events: evolution of life, evolution of the universe, medical conditions of centuries-dead people, human migration patterns in prehistory.  How many times have you said to yourself, how do they know that?  The answer is that they observe today's world and deduce how it must have come to be the way it is by virtue of past events.

This deduction is possible because our physical world obeys strict laws of cause and effect.  Theoretically, if we knew the position and velocity of every object in the universe, we could play the laws of physics backward to see where all of those objects came from.  Of course this is a massive simplification, given problems like quantum uncertainty, but the argument holds for all classical objects in the universe.  If you agree that in theory we can do this, then it's a simple matter of engineering to obtain the data and do the computations needed to make an observation of the past.

Large-scale computation of atomic motion on the earth is clearly far beyond our current capabilities of observation and computation.  Therefore, researchers have had to come up with clever ways to find traces of the object or process of interest.  Several examples you are probably already familiar with:

• Counting the rings in a tree can tell you when the tree was born and what kinds of weather it has lived through.
• Fossils can tell us what life forms lived on the earth long before any humans existed
• Observations of today's stars and galaxies allows us to determine the life cycle of these objects and the universe as a whole.

That last point deserves some elaboration.  The life cycle of celestial bodies was not observed by looking at evidence in single objects.  Instead, reasoning alone was able to determine that many of the bodies that appeared fundamentally different from each other were actually just different life stages of very similar objects.  An analogy clarifies this.  Adult may flies live for only one day.  So if may flies had an intellectual culture, how would they learn about the life cycle of the trees in the forests they inhabit?  No single individual is alive long enough to observe growth in any individual tree.  Even cultural transmission of information would be ineffective, since it would require thousands of generations to observe the life cycle of individual trees.  Only by reasoning could the may flies realize that saplings are just young trees.

New methods of reasoning about the past and observing its evidence have appeared in the last decade or two.  One notable example of this is population genetics.  Researchers can use observations made today (markers in people's DNA) to determine where and when human migrations occurred, and where certain traits first developed.  This new tool allows historians to piece together huge migration patterns that occurred tens of thousands of years ago.  See http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Human_migration for an article and map of human migration.  This is an amazing example of going far back in time, all over the earth.

Even when not using a may fly strategy, astronomy is a field where looking back in time is quite commonplace.  This is possible (mandatory, in fact) because light has a finite speed and the universe is very large.  So when we look at a galaxy that's 20 million light years away, we must be seeing it as it appeared 20 million years ago, when the light our telescopes detect first left its source on its long journey to us.  Many of the objects we look at are probably no longer existing, but we can't see this directly until the light from the object's later life stages reach us, many years hence.

This is why astronomers want bigger and bigger telescopes, to look further and further back in time.   Is there a limit to how far back we can look using this approach of just looking further away?  Well, there is if we're limited to visible light, because when the universe was less than 100,000 years old, it was still so dense that light could not escape to begin its journey toward us (http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=84).  However, what about other types of astronomical investigations?  Recent developments in neutrino detectors have allowed us to use these mysterious particles as our messengers from the past.  The main benefit of this is that neutrinos have no charge and a very low mass, so they interact very seldom with ordinary matter.  Usually, they shoot right through the empty space between an atom's nucleus and its electrons.  This helps us see things we normally can't see using electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light or radio waves).  For instance, the core of a star is normally inaccessible to us because the light from the outer layers obscures what's going on inside.  But neutrinos from the core reactions in a star would have no trouble travelling unimpeded through the outer layers of the star and heading towards our detectors.  See http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/~jgl/nuastron.html for more information on neutrino astronomy.

While there are huge technical hurdles to seeing the early history of the universe or human events of past millenia, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible in principle.  This makes it a simple matter of engineering.  Given the amazing things we're able to deduce about the past now, I expect we'll continue to discover new means of traveling back in time, as long as human curiosity remains alive.

Mind Reading

Mind Reading can be done today.  Sure, it's crude and expensive.  Experimental.  Not ready for prime time.  But it does exist.  The path from the laboratory to the electronics store is a simple matter of engineering.

That's a theme I'll return to often on this blog--the difference between fundamental science and engineering.  Not to belittle engineers (I am one), engineering is much more straightforward and predictable, compared to basic science.  We have an extensive track record being able to evolve technologies to be better, cheaper, and more reliable.  TV, cell phones, and computers all started out as esoteric toys for industry and academic researchers.  Now even poor families have at least the first two, and there are over one billion personal computers worldwide.

Basic science, on the other hand, is not guaranteed (or even likely) to happen at a particular, predictable pace.  Scientific discoveries are quite often made by accident.  And without the basic discoveries, there's nothing for the engineers to work with.  If neuroscience hadn't already discovered that the brain is an electric organ whose electric fields extend beyond the skull, no type of (external, non-invasive) mind reading would be possible. 

Today's mind reading can be exemplified by two examples.  First, there's quadriplegic Matthew Nagle, who plays a mean game of pong, using only a controller that reads his brain waves.  As described by Wired Magazine, Nagle imagines carrying out the movements necessary to play the game, and the computer reads the firings of his motor cortex, which is still intact.  

Mind reading is not limited to motor instructions.  Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have run an experiment in which test subjects were shown pictures of five different household tools, and asked to think about their uses.  As reported in Newsweek, the activity pattern evoked by each object was so distinctive that the computer could tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone was thinking about a hammer and not, say, pliers.

The two examples given above rely on different technologies.  The activity of Nagle's motor cortex is read by an array of electrodes placed on his scalp. OK, it's actually in his scalp, slightly penetrating his brain.  But other researchers are working to understand the weaker, more muddled signals that can be read from outside the skull.  I think only non-invasive technologies will catch on in the long run.  The subjects in the Carnegie Mellon experiment were observed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-medical use of the familiar MRI imaging machines.  The fMRI scan gives a much more detailed, 3-D picture of brain activity, and thus is probably more suitable for reading complex, abstract thoughts.

Mind reading makes everyone uncomfortable, but the biggest impact would be felt in the courts, if mind reading data was ever allowed to serve as evidence. I'm guessing we're decades away from that (if it ever happens), but the success of fingerprints and DNA evidence suggest that many people will accept a tool which provides geniune value and is reliable. All I say is, if thought crimes are now possible, we'd better hurry up thoughts that will make the world a more tolerant and tolerable place, where freedom of thought is cherished.

Indistinguishable from Magic

Science Fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke famously said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".  When thinking of this quote, many people think of sci-fi scenarios where advanced alien civilizations wow us with their powers of teleportation or mind reading.  However, Clarke's observation can easily be applied to today's human technology.

One way to convince yourself this is true is to view today's everyday technology from the perspective of an 18th century American.  If, on your time-hopping visit to 1700's, you used your smartphone to video the citizens and showed it to them, they would recoil in shock.  If you then told them you could use the same device to talk to people all across the world, they'd lock you up in the asylum.

However, there's another level to this.  All over the world, teams of scientists are working with tomorrow's technologies today.  If you knew what they have already accomplished, you yourself would be stunned. 

This is the introduction to a series of occasional posts, whose goal is to show you the magic that science is creating daily.