Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
Previously: Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
I grew up in the 1980s. I was introduced to computers at a young age. A few days ago my mother recalled and reminded me that in kindergarten I had a friend who introduced me to computing, as he had a computer at home before even very few of us had one. Remember, this was when Microsoft was a very young company, Apple stuff was very expensive, and IBM still dominated the sector.
I could not recall this friend. I was probably too young. My mother could not recall this friend's name either, she just said I used to visit his home and we used the computer. I didn't envision I'd become a programmer a decade later, nor did I envision I'd pursue a Ph.D. about 15 years later (I started my Ph.D. when I was 21) and then choose to cover technology issues for many years to come.
The university had a "Career Day" equivalent for Ph.D. students; one session that resonated with me was from a former Ph.D. gradauate who became a journalist. We became fond of each other and his presentation influenced me somewhat. At the time I was a leading programmer (and ranked #1 in some ladders), but I already felt like this wasn't what I'd like to do. I felt like programming jobs had already become less lucrative (abundant workforce, more so after the bust of the late 90s) and I was growing very uncomfortable with the direction of computing. This was more than 20 years ago; back then I heard from friends that the spying apparatus was so vast and fast-growing that locations of all mobile phones (triangulation by cell towers) were constantly shared with the state and that same state was recruiting crackers to break into people's devices.
Accurate information about this was very scarce. It was not in the mainstream media, it's the kind of thing you heard in the gym from insiders from telecom companies (yes, around the same the US had some telecom whistleblowers). This was after the 9/11 terror attacks, which understandably manufactured consent for dragnet surveillance.
By 2004 I was already blogging on a daily basis. I was very interested in suppressed topics and I adopted many RSS feeds to serve me hard-to-find information - not the sort of stuff one finds in BBC but maybe in Cryptome, a site long run by John L. Young and his wife, Deborah Natsios. John passed away some months ago at age 89 in New York City.
Thank you, John, for all the wisdom you've shared. Inspired by your principled stance, we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed. █