Both “no security through obscurity” and “loose lips sink ships” cannot simultaneously be true. Instead, it is a key research task, including for transparency advocates such as Roberts, to determine the conditions under which disclosure is likely to help or hurt security. In other writings, I have tried to contribute to that research project, especially by identifying the costs and benefits of disclosure to attackers and defenders in various settings. One key theme is that secrets work well against a first attack, when the attackers might fall for a trap. Secrets work much less well against repeated attacks, such as when a hacker can try repeatedly to find a flaw in a software program or system firewall.

Better understanding of the relationship between secrecy and security will be crucial in coming years as the nation seeks to build a society that is both open and secure. By so ably documenting the current trends toward both openness and secrecy, Roberts has provided a crucial underpinning for that debate.

Transparency in jeopardy

"Look, this is a democracy," said one woman there who refused to be identified.

"... there would be more male members of Congress in that category than people would think."

"Oh, my God. It looks like a haystack," he said.

The swag in the bag was just the beginning.

"In a silent way, the people have spoken and said, ‘This cannot continue. This one-man show cannot continue.’"

"If it’s this bad at Microsoft, it has to be bad at other companies, too."

Should we really be expending so much emotion crying over one spilled secret?

Some 17,000 people died in fires last year, according the Emergency Ministry -- a rate several times higher than seen in Western countries.

It would be wrong to stereotype, to say that Russians are fatalistic or heartless. They are, however, not only resigned to tragedy but inured to it in a way that to many raises alarms about the country’s future. They’re not just helpless in the face of disaster; they could be called complicit, ever beckoning the next one by their actions or lack of. Disasters, natural and man-made, occur everywhere, but unnatural death occurs in Russia with unnatural frequency and in unnatural quantity.

An Italian journalist who was held hostage for 15 days by the Taliban in lawless southern Afghanistan was ransomed for five Taliban prisoners. It appears to be the first time prisoners have been openly exchanged for a hostage in the wars that the United States and its allies are fighting there and in Iraq, and the move drew immediate criticism from Washington and London, and from other European capitals. ... [ Read More (1.2k in body) ]

It may seem a bit eccentric to cross the Atlantic by plane merely to take a walk. At least it would have seemed odd to me before and even during a recent excursion to England. But afterward, it also made sense, in a quirky way. On my transoceanic return flight, with plenty of time to reflect on what the previous week meant, I had something of a revelation. It came to me that I had gone to London because I wanted to breathe by stretching my legs; I had wanted to think on foot.

...

“The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” [audio by Robert Pinsky, or the Bo Diddley / Sid Vicious version] one of Wallace Stevens’s faux–nursery rhyme poems, begins with the sound of a round:

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

What sounds like sheer tedium, in rhythm, rhymes, and repeated words, Stevens calls “pleasures.” As I remarked at the start of this essay, pedestrian life gives access to greater-than-pedestrian experiences. The ordinariness of the daily round opens us to discoveries of self and of world. The garden moves with the angel, the angel with the clouds, and finally the clouds dissolve into one another. Stevens has begun what looks like a list, something linear, which then turns in upon itself, undoing our expectation of something greater. From garden to angels to clouds: we are waiting for something else to follow “clouds,” but it’s clouds all the way in a gentle, nebulous intensity. They are like us. Always on the move, always flying “round” like the clouds, we are never lost because we are going nowhere.

I'm reminded of Louis Kahn:

In his plan for midtown Philadelphia he attempted to press the forms of Piranesi's Rome of 1762 into the service of the modern city. In this, expressways were thought as "rivers" and the traffic-light controlled streets as "canals." Kahn was conscious of the profound antipathy between the automobile and the city and of the fatal link between consumerism, the suburban shopping center and the decline of the urban core. He proposed a "dock" solution (1956) comprising a 6-story cylindrical silo housing 1,500 cars and surrounded on its perimeter by 18-story blocks that was deprived of elements at a human scale.

Toward A Plan for Midtown Philadelphia

Architecture is also the street. There is no order to the movement on streets. Streets look alike, reflecting little of the activities they serve -- Carcasson... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Pleasures of Circulating

In popular culture, Goa has long embodied qualities hard to find in India — it is quaint, laid-back, libertine — and its real estate boom may be more about mythology than location. It is the kind of place, you repeatedly hear, where a woman can go out of the house in shorts, or where people are reasonably tolerant of a situation like Patrao’s living with Kaur, who, at 34, is much younger, and not even his wife. An acquaintance of mine in Delhi who owns a house in Goa put it bluntly: If you want to get out of India, come to Goa.

Paradise, in Contract

Once having committed stupidity, it seemed preferable to remain consistently stupid until the bitter end. I would stick to my guns, even if they were pointed at my own head.

$100

Nothing like a little historical context to go beside your latest updates.

However the Toynbee or the Gibbon of the future adjudges what happened to American society, he will need to reckon large with the impact of radio and television. By the 1950s, TV had become the greatest new instrument of political and social influence in the nation. How that happened, how TV became both a shaper and a creature of politics, both a maker and a prisoner of public tastes, is most simply told as the story of one broadcasting network, of its founder and indomitable chairman, William S. Paley, and the men who helped make CBS into Paley's golden candy store.

David Halberstam has written that story as part of a larger work in progress about centers of power in America and the ways they have been affected by science, technology, and modern communications.

Don't forget part 2:

The advent of the half hour news program made television the major source of news for many Americans and the only source for a dismayingly large number of them. This vested in broadcasters awesome responsibilities and a sense that they had ventured into a political minefield. In the first installment of his two part examination of the growth of broadcasting, television journalism, and the CBS network in particular, David Halberstam showed how the medium became both a shaper and a creature of politics, both a maker and a prisoner of public tastes.

In this installment he tells how three Presidents influenced and were influenced by TV, how TV made Vietnam into an electronic war, and how, reluctantly, it dealt with the Watergate tragedy.

Then go watch Network, or at least read this original NYT review, published the same year this Halberstam piece was published. (There are plenty more to choose from, if that one doesn't suit you.)

CBS: The Power and the Profits, by David Halberstam

I launched this site in anticipation of the release of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

What's it all about? Here are some key passages from the book's introduction:

Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence ...

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted ...

Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms ...

I will argue here against the idea that convergence can be understood primarily as a technological process - the bringing together of multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices. Instead, I want to argue that convergence represents a shift in cultural logic ...

In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time ...

Henry Jenkins: Welcome to Convergence Culture

Following the thread from WSJ Op-Eds on Education last month.

The price of college long ago outstripped the value of these goods.

In 1979, according to the economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, a 30-year-old college graduate earned 17 percent more than a 30-year-old high-school grad. Now the gap is over 50 percent.

About their book, the New York Post wrote:

Remember that barely one-third of New York City's eighth-graders can read and do basic math. Then, read this book.

Back to the linked article:

In recent decades, the biggest rewards have gone to those whose intelligence is deployable in new directions on short notice, not to those who are locked into a single marketable skill, however thoroughly learned and accredited.

This is not the same thing as being a generalist, mind you.

The future belongs to the quick study.

What a College Education Buys

As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy

The main objective of posters, as with other communications media, is to influence attitudes, to sell a product or service, or to change behavior patterns. Public health posters are clearly in the third category, their purpose being to alter the consciousness of the public to bring about an improvement in health practices.

See, for example, Arabian Nights: "Night was beautiful, the sky was starry, and Sheherazade took out a condom."

Related posts from the past:

American Social Hygiene Posters, ca. 1910-1970

Public Health Posters at the National Library of Medicine

And these:
American Propaganda Posters from World War II (now here)

AIDS Posters - UCLA Digital Library