The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to look at the impact Stewart Brand had on computing. Brand was one of the greatest muses of the interactive computing and then the internet revolutions. This isn’t to take anything away from his capacity to create, but the inspiration he provided gave him far more reach than nearly anyone in computing. There’s a decent chance you might not know who he his. There’s even a chance that you’ve never heard of any of his creations. But you live and breath some of his ideas on a daily basis. So who was this guy and what did he do? Well, Stewart Brand was born in 1938, in Rockford, Illinois. He would go on to study biology at Stanford, enter the military and then study design and photography at other schools in the San Francisco area. This was a special time in San Francisco. Revolution was in the air. And one of the earliest scientific studies had him legitimately dosing on LSD. One of my all-time favorite books was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. In the book, Wolfe follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters along a journey of LSD and Benzedrine riddled hippy goodness, riding a converted school bus across the country and delivering a new kind of culture straight out of Haight-Ashbury and to the heart of middle America. All while steering clear of the shoes FBI agents of the day wore. Here he would have met members of the Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady, members of the Hells Angels, Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner, and maybe even Kerouac and Ginsberg. This was a transition from the Beat Generation to the Hippies of the 60s. Then he started the Whole Earth Catalog. Here, he showed the first satallite imagery of the planet Earth, which he’d begun campaigning NASA to release two years earlier. In the 5 years he made the magazine, he spread ideals like ecology, a do it yourself mentality, self-sufficiency, and what the next wave of progress would look like. People like Craig Newmark of Craig’s List would see the magazine and it would help to form a new world view. In fact, the Whole Earth Catalog was a direct influence on Craig’s List. Steve Jobs compared the Whole Earth Catalog to a 60s era Google. It inspired Wired Magazine. Earth Day would be created two years later. Brand would loan equipment and inspire spinoffs of dozens of magazines and books. And even an inspiration for many early websites. The catalog put him in touch with so, so many influential people. One of the first was Doug Engelbart and The Mother Of All Demos involves him in the invention of the mouse and the first video conferencing. In fact, Brand helped produce the Mother Of All Demos! As we moved into the 70s he chronicled the oncoming hacker culture, and the connection to the 60s-era counterculture. He inspired and worked with Larry Brilliant, Lee Felsenstein, and Ted Nelson. He basically invented being a “futurist” founding CoEvolution Quarterly and spreading the word of digital utopianism. The Whole Earth Software Review would come along with the advent of personal computers. The end of the 70s would also see him become a special advisor to former California governor Jerry Brown. In the 70s and 80s, he saw the Internet form and went on to found one of the earliest Internet communities, called The WELL, or Whole Earth Lectronic Link. Collaborations in the WELL gave us Barlow’s The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a safe haunt for Kevin Mitnick while on the run, Grateful Dead tape trading, and many other Digerati. There would be other virtual communities and innovations to the concept like social networks, eventually giving us online forums, 4chan, Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, and corporate virtual communities. But it started with The Well. He would go on to become a visiting scientist in the MIT Media Lab, organize conferences, found the Global Business Network with Peter Schwarts, Jay Ogilvy and other great thinkers to help with promoting values and various planning like scenario planning, a corporate strategy that involves thinking from the outside in. This is now a practice inside Deloitte. The decades proceeded on and Brand inspired whole new generations to leverage humor to push the buttons of authority. Much as the pranksters inspired him on the bus. But it wasn’t just anti-authority. It was a new and innovative approach in an upcoming era of maximizing short-term profits at the expense of the future. Brand founded The Long Now Foundation with an outlook that looked 10,000 years in the future. They started a clock on Jeff Bezos’ land in Texas, they started archiving languages approaching extinction, Brian Eno led seminars about long-term thinking, and inspired Anathem, a novel from one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson. Peter Norton, Pierre Omidyar, Bruce Sterling, Chris Anderson of the Economist and many others are also involved. But Brand inspired other counter-cultures as well. In the era of e-zines, he inspired Jesse Dresden, who Brand knew as Jefferson Airplane Spencer Drydens kid. The kid turned out to be dFx, who would found HoHo Con an inspiration for DefCon. Stewart Brand wrote 5 books in addition to the countless hours he spent editing books, magazines, web sites, and papers. Today, you’ll find him pimping blockchain and cryptocurrency, in an attempt to continue decentralization and innovation. He inherited a playful counter-culture. He watched the rise and fall and has since both watched and inspired the innovative iterations of countless technologies, extending of course into bio-hacking. He’s hobnobbed with the hippies, the minicomputer timeshares, the PC hackers, the founders of the internet, the tycoons of the web, and then helped set strategy for industry, NGOs, and governments. He left something with each. Urania was the muse of astronomy, some of the top science in ancient Greece. And he would probably giggle if anyone compared him to the muse. Both on the bus in the 60s, and in his 80s today. He’s one of the greats and we’re lucky he graced us with his presence on this rock - that he helped us see from above for the first time. Just as I’m lucky you elected to listen to this episode. So next time you’re arguing about silly little things at work, think about what really matters and listen to one of his Ted Talks. Context. 10,000 years. Have a great week and thanks for listening to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast.

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate of the future! Todays episode is is on the microphone. Now you might say “wait, that’s not a computer-thing. But given that every computer made in the past decade has one, including your phone, I would beg to differ. Also, every time I record one of these episodes, I seem to get a little better with wielding the instruments, which has led me to spend way more time than is probably appropriate learning about them. So what exactly is a microphone? Well, it’s a simple device that converts mechanical waves of energy into electrical waves of energy. Microphones have a diaphragm, much as we humans do and that diaphragm mirrors the sound waves it picks up. So where did these microphones come from? Well, Robert Hooke got the credit for hooking a string to a cup in 1665 and suddenly humans could push sound over distances. Then in 1827 Charles Wheatstone, who invented the telegraph put the word microphone into our vernacular. 1861 rolls around and Johan Philipp Reis build the Reis telephone, which electrified the microphone using a metallic strip that was attached to a vibrating membrane. When a little current was passed through it, it reproduced sound far away. Think of this as more of using electricity to amplify the effects of the string on the cup. But critically, sound had been turned into signal. In 1876, Emile Berliner built a modern microphone while working on the gramophone. He was working with Thomas Edison at the time and would go on to sell the patent for the Microphone to The Bell Telephone Company. Now, Alexander Graham Bell had designed a telephone transmitter in 1876 but ended up in a patent dispute with David Edward Hughes. And as he did with many a great idea, Thomas Edison made the first practical microphone in 1886. This was a carbon microphone that would go on to be used for almost a hundred years. It could produce sound but it kinda’ sucked for music. It was used in the first radio broadcast in New York in 1910. The name comes from the cranes of carbon that are packed between two metal plates. Edison would end up introducing the diaphragm and the carbon button microphone would become the standard. That microphone though, often still had a built0-in amp, strengthening the voltage that was the signal sound had been converted to. 1915 rolls around and we get the vacuum tube amplifier. And in 1916, E.C. Wente of Bell Laboratories designed the condenser microphone. This still used two plates, but each had an electrical charge and when the sound vibrations moved the plates, the signal was electronically amplified. Georg Neumann then had the idea to use gold plated PVC and design the mic such that as sound reached the back of the microphone it would be cancelled, resulting in a cardioid pattern, making it the first cardioid microphone and an ancestor to the microphone I’m using right now. In the meantime, other advancements were coming. Electromagnets made it possible to add moving coils and ribbons and Wente and A.C. Thuras would then invent the dynamic, or moving-coil microphone in 1931. This was much more of an omnidirectional pattern and It wasn’t until 1959 that the Unidyne III became the first mic to pull in sound from the top of the mic, which would change the shape and look of the microphone forever. Then in 1964 Bell Labs brought us the electrostatic transducer mic and the microphone exploded with over a billion of these built every year. Then Sennheiser gave us clip-on microphones in the 80s, calling their system the Mikroport and releasing it through Telefunken. No, Bootsie Collins was not a member of Telefunken. He’d been touring with James Brown for awhile ad by then was with the Parliament Funkadelic. Funk made a lot of use of all these innovations in sound though. So I see why you might be confused. Other than the fact that all of this was leading us up to a point of being able to use microphones in computers, where’s the connection? Well, remember Bell Labs? In 1962 they invented the electret microphone. Here the electrically biased diaphragms have a capacitor that changes with the vibrations of sound waves. Robert Noyce had given us the integrated circuit in 1959 and of microphones couldn’t escape the upcoming Moore’s law, as every electronics industry started looking for applications. Honeywell came along with silicon pressure sensors, and by 65 Harvey Nathanson gave us a resonant-gated transistors. That would be put on a Monolithic chip by 66 and through the 70s micro sensors were developed to isolate every imaginable environmental parameter, including sound. At this point, computers were still big hulking things. But computers and sound had been working their way into the world for a couple of decades. The technologies would evolve into one another at some point obviously. In 1951, Geoff Hill pushed pules to a speaker using the Australian CSIRAC and Max Mathews at Bell Labs had been doing sound generation on an IBM 704 using the MUSIC program, which went a step further and actually created digital audio using PCM, or Pulse-Code Modulation. The concept of sending multiplexed signals over a wire had started with the telegraph back in the 1870s but the facsimile, or fax machine, used it as far back as 1920. But the science and the math wasn’t explaining it all to allow for the computer to handle the rules required. It was Bernard Oliver and Claude Shannon that really put PCM on the map. We’ve mentioned Claude Shannon on the podcast before. He met Alan Turing in 43 and went on to write crazy papers like A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, and A Mathematical Theory of Communications. And he helped birth the field of information theory. When the math nerds showed up, microphones got way cooler. By the way, he liked to juggle on a unicycle. I would too if I could. They documented that you could convert audio to digital by sampling audio and modulation would be mapping the audio on a sine wave at regular intervals. This analog-to-digital converter could then be printed on a chip that would output encoded digital data that would live on storage. Demodulate that with a digital to analog converter, apply an amplification, and you have the paradigm for computer sound. There’s way more, like anti-aliasing and reconstruction filters, but someone will always think you’re over-simplifying. So the evolutions came, giving us multi-track stereo casettes, the fax machines and eventually getting to the point that this recording will get exported into a 16-bit PCM wave file. PCM would end up evolving to LPCM, or Linear pulse-control modulation and be used in CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray’s. Oh and lossleslly compressed to mp3, mpeg4, etc. By the 50s, MIT hackers would start producing sound and even use the computer to emit the same sounds Captain Crunch discovered the tone for, so they could make free phone calls. They used a lot of paper tape then, but with magnetic tape and then hard drives, computers would become more and more active in audio. By 61 John Kelly Jr and Carol Lockbaum made an IBM 7094 mainframe sing Daisy Bell. Arthur C. Clarke happened to see it and that made it into 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember hearing it sing that when it was getting taken apart? But the digital era of sound recording is marked as starting with the explosion of Sony in the 1970s. Moore’s Law, they got smaller, faster, and cheaper and by the 2000s microelectromechanical microphones web mainstream, which are what are built into laptops, cell phones, and headsets. You see, by then it was all on a single chip. Or even shared a chip. These are still mostly omnidirectional. But in modern headphones, like Apple AirPods then you’re using dual beam forming microphones. Beamforming uses multiple sensor arrays to extract sounds based on a whole lot of math; the confluence of machine learning and the microphone. You see, humans have known to do many of these things for centuries. We hooked a cup to a wire and sound came out the other side. We electrified it. We then started going from engineering to pure science. We then analyzed it with all the math so we better understood the rules. And that last step is when it’s time to start writing software. Or sometimes it’s controlling things with software that gives us the necessary understanding to make the next innovative leap. The invention of the microphone doesn’t really belong to one person. Hook, Wheatstone, Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Wente, Thuras, Shannon, Hill, Matthews, and many, many more had a hand in putting that crappy mic in your laptop, the really good mic in your cell phone, and the stupidly good mic in your headphones. Some are even starting to move over to Piezoelectric. But I think I’ll save that for another episode. The microphone is a great example of that slow, methodical rise, and iterative innovation that makes technologies truly lasting. It’s not always shockingly abrupt or disruptive. But those innovations are permanently world-changing. Just think, because of the microphone and computer getting together for a blind date in the 40s you can now record your hit album in Garage Band. For free. Or you call your parents any time you want. Now pretty much for free. So thank you for sticking with me through all of this. It’s been a blast. You should probably call your parents now. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you. But before you do, thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Alibaba Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past prepares us to innovate the future! Today we’re going to look at a company called Alibaba. 1964. This was the year that BASIC was written, the year Kleinrock wrote history first paper on package flow and design, the year the iconic IBM System/360 shipped, the year Ken Olson got a patent for the first magnetic core memory, the GPS (then called TRANSIT) went live. But some of the most brilliant minds of the future of computing were born that very same year. Eric Benioff the founder of Salesforce was born then. As was tech writer and editor of Fast Company and PC World Harry McCracken. Obama CTO Megan Smith, a former VP of Google, Alan Emtage of Archie, and Eric Bina an early contributor and coauthor of Netscape and Mosaic. But the Internet stork brought us two notable and ironically distinct people as well. Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Jack Ma of Alibaba. You would need to have been living under a rock for a decade or two in order to not know who Amazon is. But just how much do you know about Alibaba? But Alibaba makes nearly 400 billion dollars per year with assets of nearly a trillion dollars. Amazon has revenues of $230 billion with assets just north of $160 billion. For those of us who do most of our shopping on Amazon and tend to think of them as a behemoth, just think about that. 7 times the assets and way more sales. Alibaba is so big that when Yahoo! got into serious financial trouble, their most valuable asset was shares in Alibaba. If Alibaba is so big why is it that out of 5 Americans I asked, only 1 knew who they were? Because China. Alibaba is the Amazon of China. They have also own most of Lazada, which runs eCommerce operates sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Like Amazon they have supermarkets, streaming services, they lease cloud services, their own online payment platform, instant messaging, a pharmaceutical commerce company, sponsor FIFA, and a couple of years after Bezos bought the Washington Post, Alibaba bought the South China Morning post for a little more than a quarter billion dollars. Oh and you can get almost anything on there, especially if you want counterfeit brands or uranium. OK, so the uranium was a one time thing… Or was it? Oh, and I’m merging a lot of the assets here that are under the Alibaba name. But keep in mind that if you combined Google, eBay, Amazon, and a few others you still wouldn’t have an Alibaba in terms of product coverage, dominance or pure revenue. All while Alibaba maintains less employees than Alphabet (the parent of Google) or Amazon. So how does a company get to the point that they’re just this stupid crazy big? I really don’t know. Ma heard about this weird thing called the internet after he got turned down for more than 30 jobs. One of those was frickin’ KFC. He flew to the US in 1995 and some friends took him on a tour of this weird web thing. There he launched chinapages.com and made just shy of a million bucks in the first few years, building sites for companies based in china. He then went to work for the Chinese government for a couple of years. He started Alibaba with a dozen and a half people in 1999, raising a crapton of money, saying no to sell assets but yes to investments. Especially Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who gave them a billion bucks. And they grew, and they got more and more money, and sales, and really they just all out pwned the Chinese market, slowly becoming the Chinese eBay, the Chinese Amazon, the Chinese google, the Chinese, well, you get the picture. They even have their own Linux distro called AliOS. They own part of Lyft, part of the Chinese soccer team, and are a sponsor of the Olympic Games. Maybe he buys companies using AliGenie, the Alibaba home automation solution that resembles personal assistants built into Amazon Echo and Apple’s Siri. Ma supposedly has ties to Chinese President Xi Jinping that go way back. Apple makes less money than Alibaba but their CEO gets to go hang at the White House whenever he wants. Not that he wants to do so very often… Bezos might be richer, but he doesn’t get to hang at the White House often. Makes you wonder if there’s more there, like… Nevermind. Back to the story. When Ma bought the South China Morning Post the term “firmly discouraged” was used in multiple outlets to describe other potential bidders. Financial reports have described the same from other acquisitions. Through innovation, copy-catting, and a sprinkle of intimidation, Alibaba became a powerhouse, going public in 2014, in an IPO the raised over $25 billion dollars and made Alibaba the most valuable tech firm in the universe. Oh, Ma acts and sings. He rocked a little kung fu in 2017’s Gong Shou Dao. It was super-weird. He was really powerful in that movie. Strong arming goes a lot of different ways though. Ma was reportedly pressured to step down in late 2018, hading the company to Daniel Zhang. I guess he got a little too powerful, supposedly bribing officials in a one-party state and engaging in wonktastic account practices. He owns some vineyards, is only in his mid-50s and has plenty of time on his hands now to enjoy the grapefruits of his labor. This story is pretty fantastic. He was an English teacher in 1999. And he rose to become the richest man in China. That doesn’t happen by luck. Capitalism at its best. And this modern industrialist rose to become the 21st richest person in the world in one of the most unlikely of places. Or was it? He doesn’t write code. He didn’t have a computer until his 30s. He’s never actually sold anything to customers. Communism is beautiful. And so are you. Thank you dear listeners, for your contributions to the world in whatever way they may be. They probably haven’t put you on the Forbes list. But I hope that tuning in helps you find ways to get there. We’re so lucky to have you, have a great day!

BASIC Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past prepares us to innovate the future! Today we’re going to look at the computer that was the history of the BASIC programming language. We say BASIC but really BASIC is more than just a programming language. It’s a family of languages and stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. As the name implies it was written to help students that weren’t math nerds learn how to use computers. When I was selling a house one time, someone was roaming around in my back yard and apparently they’d been to an open house and they asked if I’m a computer scientist after they saw a dozen books I’d written on my bookshelf. I really didn’t know how to answer that question We’ll start this story with Hungarian John George Kemeny. This guy was pretty smart. He was born in Budapest and moved to the US with his family in 1940 when his family fled anti-Jewish sentiment and laws in Hungary. Some of his family would go on to die in the Holocaust, including his grandfather. But safely nestled in New York City, he would graduate high school at the top of his class and go on to Princeton. Check this out, he took a year off to head out to Los Alamos and work on the Manhattan Project under Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That’s where he met fellow Hungarian immigrant Jon Von Neumann - two of a group George Marx wrote about in his book on great Hungarian Emmigrant Scientists and thinkers called The Martians. When he got back to Princeton he would get his Doctorate and act as an assistant to Albert Einstein. Seriously, THE Einstein. Within a few years he was a full professor at Dartmouth and go on to publish great works in mathematics. But we’re not here to talk about those contributions to the world as an all around awesome place. You see, by the 60s math was evolving to the point that you needed computers. And Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz would do something special. Now Kurtz was another Dartmoth professor who got his PhD from Princeton. He and Kemeny got thick as thieves and wrote the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (keep in mind that Time Sharing was all the rage in the 60s, as it gave more and more budding computer scientists access to those computer-things that prior to the advent of Unix and the PC revolution had mostly been reserved for the high priests of places like IBM. So Time Sharing was cool, but the two of them would go on to do something far more important. In 1956, they would write DARSIMCO, or Dartmouth Simplified Code. As with Pascal, you can blame Algol. Wait, no one has ever heard of DARSIMCO? Oh… I guess they wrote that other language you’re here to hear the story of as well. So in 59 they got a half million dollar grant from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation to build a new department building. That’s when Kurtz actually joined the department full time. Computers were just going from big batch processed behemoths to interactive systems. They tried teaching with DARSIMCO, FORTRAN, and the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, a classic acronym for 1960s era DOPE. But they didn’t love the command structure nor the fact that the languages didn’t produce feedback immediately. What was it called? Oh, so in 1964, Kemeny wrote the first iteration of the BASIC programming language and Kurtz joined him very shortly thereafter. They did it to teach students how to use computers. It’s that simple. And as most software was free at the time, they released it to the public. We might think of this as open source-is by todays standards. I say ish as Dartmouth actually choose to copyright BASIC. Kurtz has said that the name BASIC was chosen because “We wanted a word that was simple but not simple-minded, and BASIC was that one.” The first program I wrote was in BASIC. BASIC used line numbers and read kinda’ like the English language. The first line of my program said 10 print “Charles was here” And the computer responded that “Charles was here” - the second program I wrote just added a second line that said: 20 goto 10 Suddenly “Charles was here” took up the whole screen and I had to ask the teacher how to terminate the signal. She rolled her eyes and handed me a book. And that my friend, was the end of me for months. That was on an Apple IIc. But a lot happened with BASIC between 1964 and then. As with many technologies, it took some time to float around and evolve. The syntax was kinda’ like a simplified FORTRAN, making my FORTRAN classes in college a breeze. That initial distribution evolved into Dartmouth BASIC, and they received a $300k grant and used student slave labor to write the initial BASIC compiler. Mary Kenneth Keller was one of those students and went on to finish her Doctorate in 65 along with Irving Tang, becoming the first two PhDs in computer science. After that she went off to Clarke College to found their computer science department. The language is pretty easy. I mean, like PASCAL, it was made for teaching. It spread through universities like wildfire during the rise of minicomputers like the PDP from Digital Equipment and the resultant Data General Nova. This lead to the first text-based games in BASIC, like Star Trek. And then came the Altair and one of the most pivotal moments in the history of computing, the porting of BASIC to the platform by Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. But Tiny BASIC had appeared a year before and suddenly everyone needed “a basic.” You had Commodore BASIC, BBC Basic, Basic for the trash 80, the Apple II, Sinclair and more. Programmers from all over the country had learned BASIC in college on minicomputers and when the PC revolution came, a huge part of that was the explosion of applications, most of which were written in… you got it, BASIC! I typically think of the end of BASIC coming in 1991 when Microsoft bought Visual Basic off of Alan Cooper and object-oriented programming became the standard. But the things I could do with a simple if, then else statement. Or a for to statement or a while or repeat or do loop. Absolute values, exponential functions, cosines, tangents, even super-simple random number generation. And input and output was just INPUT and PRINT or LIST for source. Of course, functional programming was always simpler and more approachable. So there, you now have Kemeny as a direct connection between Einstein and the modern era of computing. Two immigrants that helped change the world. One famous, the other with a slightly more nuanced but probably no less important impact in a lot of ways. Those early BASIC programs opened our eyes. Games, spreadsheets, word processors, accounting, Human Resources, databases. Kemeny would go on to chair the commission investigating Three Mile Island, a partial nuclear meltdown that was a turning point in nuclear proliferation. I wonder what Kemeny thought when he read the following on the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Perhaps, like many before and after, he thought that he would breathe free and with that breath, do something great, helping bring the world into the nuclear era and preparing thousands of programmers to write software that would change the world. When you wake up in the morning, you have crusty bits in your eyes and things seem blurry at first. You have to struggle just a bit to get out of bed and see the sunrise. BASIC got us to that point. And for that, we owe them our sincerest thanks. And thank you dear listeners, for your contributions to the world in whatever way they may be. You’re beautiful. And of course thank you for giving me some meaning on this planet by tuning in. We’re so lucky to have you, have a great day!

Edward Snowden Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is about Edward Snowden, who leaked a trove of NSA documents that supposedly proved the NSA was storing and potentially weaponizing a lot of personal communications of US and foreign citizens. Now, before I tell an abridged version of his story I should say that I was conflicted about whether to do this episode. But I see the documents Edward Snowden released as a turning point in privacy. Before Snowden, there was talk of digital privacy at DefCon, in the ranks of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and of course amongst those who made hats of tin foil. But sometimes those tin foil mad hatters are right. Today, you see that word “Privacy” in sessions from developers at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies that host our data. It’s front and center in sales and marketing. Many of those organizations claim they didn’t know customer data was being captured. And we as a community have no reason not to trust them. But this is not a podcast about politics. For some, what Snowden did is an act of espionage. For others it’s considered politically motivated. But many blame the leaker as a means of not addressing the information leaked. Things I’ve heard people say about what he did include: * He was just a disgruntled contractor * He was working for the Russians all along * This is the problem with Millenials * Espionage should be punishable by death * Wikileaks rapist * He gave Democratic server data to Trump * This is why we shouldn’t allow trans people in the military * He is a hero These responses confuse a few different events. Which is understandable given the rapid rip and replace of these stories by the modern news cycle. Let’s run through a quick review of some otherwise disconnected events. Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, enlisted in 2007 and then leaked classified documents to Wikileaks in 2010. These documents included airstrike footage, diplomatic cables, documents about Guantanamo Bay detainees, and much more. Some of which possibly put lives in danger. Manning served seven years before having her sentence commuted by then US president, Barak Obama. She was not pardoned. Wikileaks.org is an active web site started in 2006 by Julian Assange. The site began as a community-driven wiki - but quickly ended up moving into more of a centralized distribution model, given some of the material that has been posted over the years. Assange has been in and out of courts throughout his adult life, first for hacking at a young age and then pushing the boundaries of freedom of speech, freedom of press, and the rights to the security of information owned by sovereign nations. I’m sure he was right in some of those actions and wrong in others. Wikileaks has been used as a tool for conservatives, liberals, various governments, and the intelligence communities of the US, Russia, and to get bosses or competitors for a promotion fired in the private sector. But hosting the truth knows no master. When those leaked documents help your cause it’s a great freedom of speech. When they hurt your cause then it must be true that Assange and his acolytes are tools of a foreign power or worse, straight up spies. Any of it could be true. But again sometimes the truth can hurt -even if there are a few altered documents in a trove of mostly unaltered documents as has been alleged to be true of the hacked emails of John Podesta, the Democratic National Committee chair during the 2016 elections. Again, these aren’t in any way political views, just facts. Because the Chelsea Manning trials were going on around the same time that Snowden went public, I do find these people and their stories can get all mixed up. Assange was all over the news as well. And I don’t want to scope creep the episode. This episode is about what Edward Snowden did. And what he did was to leak NSA documents to journalists in 2013. These documents went into great detail about an unprecendented level of foreign and domestic data capture under the auspices of what he considered overreach by the intelligence community. Just because it is an unprecedented level doesn’t make it right or wrong, just more than the previous precedent. Just because he considered it an overreach doesn’t mean I do. It also doesn’t mean that that much snooping into our personal lives, without probable cause, wasn’t an overreach. And this is a bi-partisan issue. The overreach arguably began in ernest under Bush, based on research done while Clinton was in office and was then expanded under Obama. And of course, complained about by Trump while he actively sought to expand the programs. They were all complicit. How did Snowden end up with these documents? His father had served in the intelligence community. As with many of us, he became enamored with computers at a young age and turned his hobby into a career early in life. Snowden was working as a web developer when the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 hit. A lot of us were pretty devastated by those events but he wanted to do his patriotic duty and enlisted. Only problem is that he broke his legs during basic training. According to his autobiography it happened when he landed awkwardly while trying to avoid jumping on a snake. He then began life as a contractor in the intelligence community, which was exploding in the wake of 911. As with many, he hopped around into different roles finally joining the NSA for a bit, serving in Geneva before returning home to the DC area to resume life as a contractor. Contractors usually make more than staff in the intelligence community. Snowden would go on to build backup systems that would be used for even more overreach. He then took a step down to be a Sharepoint admin in Hawaii. Because Hawaii. And because he had started suffering from pretty bad epileptic seizures, an ailment he inherited from his mom. The people that do your IT have an unprecedented amount of information at their fingerprints. The backup admin can take almost everything anyone would want to know about your company home with them one day. You know, because it’s Tuesday. In fact, we often defined that as an actual business process they were supposed to follow in the days before the cloud. We called them offsite backups. Sharepoint is a Microsoft product that allows you to share files, resources from other Microsoft products, news, and most anything digital with others. Snowden was a Sharepoint admin and boy did he share. Snowden took some time off from the NSA in 2013 and flew to Hong Kong where he met with Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill. He leaked a trove of documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post. The documents kept flowing to Der Spiegel and The New York Times. He was charged on violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and after going into hiding in Hong Kong tried to escape to Ecuador. But during a layover in Moscow he discovered his passport had been cancelled and he’s been living there ever since. He has been offered asylum in a few countries but because there are no direct flights there from Moscow. Think about this: just over half of Americans had a cell phone on September 11th, 2001. And practically none had we now consider smart phones. In fact, only 35% had them in 2011. Today, nearly all Americans have a cell phone with 80 percent having a smart phone. Those devices create a lot of data. There’s the GPS coordinates, the emails sent and received, the Facebook messages to our friends, the events we say we’re going to, the recipes about the food we’re going to cook, the type of content we like to assume, our financial records. Even our photos. Once upon a time, and it was not very long ago at all, you had to break into someones house to go through all that. Not any more. During the time since 911 we also moved a lot of data to the cloud. You know how your email lives on a server hosted by Google, Apple, Microsoft, or some other company. That’s the cloud. You know how your documents live on Google, Dropbox or Box instead of on a small business server or large storage area network these days? That’s the cloud. It’s easy. It’s cheaper. And you don’t have to have a Snowden in every company in the world to host them yourself. The other thing that has changed between 2001 and 2013 was the actual law. The USA Patriot Act expanded the ability for the US to investigate the September 11th terror attacks and other incidents of terror. Suddenly people could be detained indefinitely, law enforcement could search records and homes without a court order. It was supposed to be temporary. It was renewed in 2005 under Bush and then extended in 2011 under Obama. It continued in 2015 but under Section 215 the NSA was told to stop collecting everyone’s phone data. But phone companies will keep the data and provide it to the NSA upon request, so samesies. But they still called it the Freedom act. FISC, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established in 1978 with the passing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. These hearings are ex partei given that they are about intelligence matters. The Patriot Act expanded those. The Freedom Act retained much of that language and the Trump Administration is likely to request these be made permanent. Since we all know what’s happening, I guess our values have changed. Over the centuries, technology has constantly forced us to rethink our values, consciously or not. Can you imagine how your thinking might have changed going from a society where people didn’t read to one where they did at the advent of the printing press? Just think of how email and instant messaging changed what we value. The laws, based on the ethics and the values are slow to respond to technology. Laws are meant to be deliberate and so deliberated over. When Trump, Biden, Bernie, or the next president or presidential hopefuls ask about the history of investigating them. The answer is probably that the government started when you got your first cell phone. Or your first email address. Do you value keeping that information private? I’ve never cared all that much. I guess the rest of the country doesn’t either, as we haven’t taken steps to change it. But I might care about my civil liberties some day in the future. Think about that come December 15th. We can undo anything. If we care to. Because our civil liberties are just one aspect of liberty. And no matter who is in office or what they’re trying to accomplish, you still have values and on a case by case basis, you don’t have to sacrifice or erode those due to partisan bickering, or with each transition of power and each cult of personality that rises, you will slowly see them disappear. So thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re so lucky to have you. Have a great day!