Butterflies Of The Sea

Butterflies of the Sea Their technical name is Trilobite. They lived about 600 million years ago, before the dinosaurs, before fish. They were found in shallow seas and flourished for about 350 million years before becoming extinct. They seem to be the first known creature to have vision, albeit in a strange way: some could see, some could not, and some had compound eyes with 360-degree sight. We have humans like that: some whose minds are closed, some whose insights are sharp, and some who seem to peer into every aspect of our lives. The latter group is succinctly described by Lawrence Wright in a chilling article in the January 21, 2008, issue of the New Yorker entitled "The Spymaster". When he first interviewed Mike McConnell, head of the sprawling US intelligence community, Wright told him, "I don't know much about you". McConnell replied, "That's a good thing. I'm a spy." What if you don't want the government to know much about you? It seems to be a little late for that. Secrets are embedded in the DNA of government. After a nearconfrontation with Germany over the presence of German warships in the Caribbean, Theodore Roosevelt ordered the destruction of many of the relevant documents, ostensibly to save face for the Kaiser. In the process, 51 pages of American official records were reduced to 9. The American Embassy in Berlin left 400 pages of correspondence blank. As Wright points out, one of the weaknesses in keeping secrets is that they remain untested. Another weakness, under our current system, is that potential sources of information, particularly those with fluency in other languages, have difficulty getting security clearance. McConnell claims the latter problem can be overcome by what he calls "life-cycle monitoring" (translation: permanent surveillance). For the moment, few white anglo-saxon cryptologists are fluent in Farci. In the course of doing research for his article, Wright found out that not only was he being monitored but his daughter as well. If you harbor any doubts about the power of secrets to radically affect lives, you have only to remember Hiroshima. Richard Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan Project, reputedly said afterwards, "I hate secrets". Did the trilobites keep secrets from each other? We'll probably never know, since 350 million years of existence seem to have vanished from the record (now there's a humbling thought). How much secrecy is required for survival? That's the dilemma facing us today. The risks are enormous, the dangers equally so. What you don't know can hurt you. What you know can be badly misinterpreted, or cause you to take pre-emptive action with potentially wide-ranging consequences. Scientists in the US and China have experimented with cloud-seeding to improve weather: does anyone really know what happens to the air and water, let along the genetics, of a group of people subjected to seeding? Because we can do something doesn't mean we should. Have you kicked a police officer lately? Under a plan currently being formulated, the government would have the right to examine every email, every Internet search, even every file transfer. Given the government's checkered history in the use of information, is this what we want? If not, we'd better watch our votes in the upcoming election. Information is our era's raw material of choice, just as iron ore and coal once were. Unlike those and similar commodities, data never runs dry, rusts, or spoils. Everyone owns some. Some of us own more than others. Some information is deemed more valuable than others - just ask Regis Philbin.

The United States today stands in stark contrast to the country that existed in 1901. At that time, according to Edmund Morris, we dominated the markets of the world. Morris writes, "Advertisements in British magazines gave the impression that the typical Englishman woke to the ring of an Ingersoll alarm, shaved with a Gillette razor, combed his hair with Vaseline tonic, buttoned his Arrow shirt, hurried downstairs for Quaker Oats, California figs and Maxwell House coffee, commuted in a Westinghouse tram..." Andrew Carnegie figured that we were so wealthy we could buy all of England and her colonies and have enough to pay off the British debt. It doesn't take compound eyes or a vast intelligence network to figure out which country occupies that place in today's world. How do we protect the freedoms that define us as a society without becoming the victims of our own success? Can we strengthen ourselves without self-destructing? Do we really want a military-type organization peering into every aspect of our lives? You won't have to take your shoes off at the airport: you'll already be as naked as a newborn, assuming you're even allowed to travel. Chances are that the human species won't live as long as the trilobites did. Those Butterflies of the Sea were quite lovely in their day. The issues facing us now are not. c. Corinne Whitaker 2008

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