From: Thomas Pynchon <octogenarihexation@gmail.com>
Date: 7/27/12, 03:56
To: barriticus@gmail.com
Thanks again for your time. A few more questions/thoughts, whenever you have a chance:
- Project PM's funding: where does it come from? Who pays for server space? If you can say, that is. Just curious.
- Is Project PM looking at US anti-union, anti-EPA corporate lobbying and PR firms that do astroturfing and sockpuppeting? Berman and Company, for example. It'd be interesting to know if these firms overlap with certain defense contractors in terms of technical capabilities and practices -- and possibly some of their clients -- for monitoring and manipulating internet use and users.
- If you or someone sympathetic to your aims can throw several thousand dollars at this kind of research, you (or someone who shares your aims and is better positioned to do this) might consider attending one or two upcoming defense industry conferences, like the Cyber Defense Forum that Gamma and others are sponsoring in Prague at the end of October, as a participant or as a journalist. The agendas of these events are on their websites, and look interesting, to put it mildly. For that particular conference, registration is open but an institutional affiliation of some kind seems to be required. (Also, there seem to be a ton of online resources for the compleat Web2.0 defense industry professional careerist douche -- see DefenseIQ.com. Might help to trace networking that way, too.)
- In thinking about ethics, security, and transparency, a useful book might be Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Sissela Bok, 1983).
- I don't think that the crucial public conversation in the US about ethics that needed to happen in the late 1960s/early 1970s (in the wake of LBJ/Nixon, COINTELPRO, Watergate and so forth) has ever actually occurred; if it had, perhaps we would not have witnessed the severe depredations of the Bush administration (and furthered by the current one) against civilians' privacy and freedom. This dominant militarized, ethically vacuous culture must be seen as itself aberrational, a neocon insurgency against commonly held and understood foundational values, and the efforts to dismantle it must be seen as a rational and just counterinsurgency. This is my understanding, anyway.
Again, will let you know if I run across anything useful, and if and when something I've written about this is published. (I may start blogging too, for whatever that's worth.)