Read moreBurglary is about getting something that you want that’s guarded by architecture. I realized over the years that while that architects thinks they are the only ones thinking about…built space. But the burglar rethinks the architectural environment in an interesting way, unpuzzling how you get from A to B. If you start pulling on the string of the sweater there and start seeing the burglar as an urban expert, it takes you some pretty interesting places…
You start getting into this almost interdimensional weave of surfaces that are being argued between lawyers and cops. Burglary is turning into this insane mathematical exercise for generations to come. Burglary is now encompassing the movement of human beings through space in a really fascinating way. The idea is that we have to define what burglary might be. Pursuing where these arguments might go, you get into this sphere of breaking and entering, of finding buildings that have outer perimeters, if I go under a roof, am I burglarizing or simply trespassing in your yard? Burglary is this really undefined thing.
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One of my favorite heist movies is actually Die Hard. I think it’s an amazing movie. And, in fact, every aspect of the movie is a misuse of a skyscraper in a really amazing way. They go down elevator shafts, they go through air ducts instead of hallways. They shoot their way through other construction. And on top of that he jumps off the roof and comes back in through a window. It’s as if you assembled a whole bunch of people who had no idea how to use a building. And turned that into an action film.
technomad inspirations
Read moreIf Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector.
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But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.
At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.
Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.
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Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.
There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department.
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Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.
More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.
Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.
You’ve just spent five weeks in limbo, stateless, living in the interzone of an airport terminal.
Your rival for Technomad Citizen#1 was under “house arrest” in the country estate of a sympathetic aristocrat.
Fleeing the might of the Empire, he’s now residing in the diplomatic safe zone of a South American embassy, from which he conspired to break you out of Hong Kong with the power of the network and the voodoo magic of temporary papers he conjured up with his host, hacking Authority.
You’ve been granted a solar year of asylum in the bounds of the Russian Federation, formerly trading as the Evil Empire ™. Anna Chapman has already proposed to you. You can regroup at an undisclosed location of your choice. You literally left paradise when you began this journey. You are a massive geek, and are well aware that it would be an easier and less perilous to take a rocket to the ISS, than travel anywhere else on Earth.
Maybe you make this your temporary base of Bond Villain operations.
(You definitely aren’t still part of the Company. This isn’t a massive psyops action.)
Read moreRead moreNot only had the Soviet Union—the chief object of the NSA’s spying, and its raison d’etre—disappeared from the map, but now the agency also realized that the main threat was going to be “super-empowered” individuals—terrorists—who might be talking on cell phones or computers anywhere on earth. Above all, these new bad guys were using private technology, rather than the sort of intra-government communications systems that the NSA used to monitor in the Soviet Union or China.
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In a period of a decade or so, Hayden said, the agency went “from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well—to chasing a communications structure in which an al-Qaida member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting-edge.”
Read moreIn 1953, he founded the World Government of World Citizens. The demand for its documents proved so brisk that he established the service authority the next year.
More than half a million world passports have been issued, though there are no statistics on the number of people who have successfully crossed borders with them. A half-dozen countries — Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mauritania, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia — have formally recognized the passport. More than 150 others have honored it on occasion, according to the service authority.
Fees for the passport range from $45 (valid for three years) to $400 (for 15 years). The passport has text in seven languages, including Esperanto, the artificial international language.
Carrying world passport No. 1, Mr. Davis spent decades spreading his message, slipping across borders, stowing away on ships, sweet-talking officials, or wearing them down, until they let him in. The newspapers charted his comings and goings:
1949: “Garry Davis Arrested in Paris”; 1953: “Garry Davis Held Again: Arrested When He Camps Out Near Buckingham Palace”; 1957: “France Expels Garry Davis”; 1979: U.S. Court Rules ‘World Citizen’ Davis Is an Alien and Rejects His Passport; 1984: “Japan Expels American ‘World Citizen’ ”; 1987: “ ‘World Citizen’ Announces Presidential Bid.” (It was the United States presidency this time.)
In 1986, Mr. Davis ran for mayor of Washington, receiving 585 votes.
Mr. Davis was arrested dozens of times, usually for attempting to enter a country without official papers. He had canny ways of circumventing authority.
In the 1950s, when France was trying to deport him, he conspicuously shoplifted items from a Paris department store. (His haul, United Press reported, was “$47 worth of peach-colored lace panties, black-silk brassieres, black garter belts, lace petticoats and pink slips.”) He made certain he was arrested.
As a result of his arrest, Mr. Davis was legally enjoined from leaving the country.
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In old age, Mr. Davis was far from idle. Last year, he had a world passport delivered to Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
Just weeks before he died, Mr. Davis had a world passport sent, via Russian authorities, to Mr. Snowden, the fugitive former national security contractor accused of violating espionage laws, whose United States passport was revoked in June.
Mr. Snowden could not be reached for comment.
Read moreFor a large portion of the American/Western/advanced-industrial film audience, travel might be the activity in which geopolitics most noticeably intrudes on their lives — in the inconvenience of borders, passports, languages, currencies, customs. But none of that fazes the spy. He either circumvents restrictions entirely or he comes equipped with the tools he needs to pass through them. He doesn’t wait in line unless he’s in disguise.
What’s the first thing the spy does after arriving in a new city? You and I haul our bags to the hotel and stand shifting our weight while a bored clerk pecks at a keyboard; the spy is led briskly to an all-white room where he’s left alone with a safety deposit box. Inside the box: multiple passports, a wad of cash in different currencies, a gun with a silencer, an envelope with the name of a contact — everything he needs to navigate his new surroundings. If we see his hotel, it’s luxurious. If we see him on a plane, he’s either flying it himself or it’s a private jet. We are repeatedly shown — more often, or at least more indelibly, than in the books some of these stories are based on — that the elements of travel we ourselves find exhausting and stressful have been magically made easy for the spy.3 The spy never worries about not understanding a language; whatever it is, he already speaks it, and fluently, with no trace of an accent. Instead of sitting around in train stations and dealing with subway platforms, something he’ll do only if it’s part of a chase, the spy procures a car (who knows how) or a helicopter, or a speedboat, or whatever vehicle he needs, which he always knows how to operate expertly, even if it’s a Soviet tank. And you’d better believe he knows his way around at 100 miles an hour — he’ll take shortcuts the locals haven’t discovered yet. None of your panicked on-the-fly deciphering of Parisian road signs in your rented Renault Twingo.
When you and I pack for a trip, we’re so preemptively defeated by the thought of weather and strange places that we take crushable hats and wicking layers and comfort-fit pants with legs that zip off at the knee. The spy, whether he’s stylish like Bond or casual like Jason Bourne, never looks like he’s traveling. But rain or shine, he always has just the right outfit. That may be why, whereas we stick to tourist areas and look in a guidebook to figure out where to have dinner, the spy can go anywhere he wants. He strolls into the classiest and most dangerous bars, the finest and grimiest restaurants, the ritziest and seediest casinos.
Read moreWhat Warner meant when he called the Taj a “Burner bar” was that it operated, in part, according to a barter system. One of the standing rules at the guesthouse was that any expat could exchange information for booze. In a war zone where so many different agencies, companies, and contractors passed like wary ships in the night, one of the biggest problems was that no one could coordinate knowledge. No one, that is, except maybe a bartender. Under the banner of “Beer for Data,” Warner had turned the Taj into a major clearinghouse for information in Jalalabad. It accumulated by the terabyte on his hard drives: construction plans, hydrology surveys, health-clinic locations, election polling sites, names of farmers, number of trees on their farms, number of acres. What Warner collected he then passed on to the United Nations, the Pentagon, and anyone else who asked for it.
Warner let on that there was a lot more to tell, and that he was making a trip into the field a couple days later. But he offered no invitation, and I went to bed, leaving him at his laptop.
And that was how I met Dr. Dave: a former U.S. Army drill instructor, self-avowed “hippie doctor,” PhD neuroscientist, technotopian idealist, dedicated Burner, dabbler in psychedelics, insatiable meddler, and (weirdest of all) defense contractor. Unlike the guys who had come to the war mainly for the hazard pay, Warner seemed genuinely bent on something far grander—redeeming the debacle of Afghanistan through the gospel of open information.
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Using various pots of money, Warner had built dozens of these solar-powered computer labs around the province. Some, like this one, didn’t have an Internet connection—at least not yet—and were, in Warner’s mind, just stepping stones to the computer literacy that would one day make these kids potential sources of crowdsourced information. Other computer labs, closer to town, had Internet pumped in from the antennae and satellite dishes on the roof of the Taj. In those labs, Warner and his team were teaching Afghans how to use OpenStreetMap, a Web-based platform that allows users to add fine-grained local information to existing satellite maps. (As a result, the OpenStreetMap page for Jalalabad is exquisite.)
Warner was doing it on the cheap—no security details, no armored vehicles—stretching his DARPA funding and his own bank account fairly far. “For the price of two expat security contractors,” he boasted, “I can put Internet to 50,000 students.”…
I was just beginning to get used to his way of talking, which alternated between turgid military jargon and gonzo flights of fancy. (“I’m dismantling the Death Star,” he told me later, “to build solar ovens for the Ewoks.”) Ultimately, what he wanted to do was help the Department of Defense and all its scattered parts—a hulking war apparatus he derisively called “The Machine”—help itself. “I’ve foolishly created my own counterinsurgency,” he said.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 