by Maureen Webb ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
Coders seeking to do good in the world will find much inspiration here.
Facebook and Amazon may be in the business of selling us to the highest bidder, but not without good guys fighting to keep the internet free and safe.
Webb, a Vancouver-based labor attorney and activist, once hoped that democratic constitutions around the world would roll back the wave of governmental and corporate intrusions on privacy. Unfortunately, “when you take stock of the pervasive illegality states and corporations are engaged in with their uses of digital tech, it is manifest that the law is collapsing.” Leave it, then, to the white-hat hackers of the world to deliver us from technological evil. The author traces the hacker ethic to MIT programmers in the late 1950s who stole mainframe time when the authorities weren’t looking, then to the Bay Area libertarians who would launch the computing revolution. Valuably, Webb ranges far beyond that American-centric story—even as, she notes, most internet traffic passes through and most of the internet’s backbone resides in the U.S.—to examine the long history of hacking in Europe, courtesy especially of the Berlin-born Chaos Computer Club and a tech culture “aligned more with the advent of personal computing than with the development of early mainframe computing.” The CCC gave rise to other hacking movements, such as the Spanish ensemble of coders who linked the financial collapse of 2008 as it played out in their country with misdoings on the parts of bankers and government officials, and the Five Star Movement in Italy, with its hearty mistrust of the status quo. While making allowances for black-hatters such as Julian Assange, Webb asserts that the goal of hackers and “hacktivists” is profoundly on the side of ordinary people. “The goal they share,” she writes, “is to distribute power to the people, to put the people’s hands on matters as local, national, and global citizens.” And the overarching task, she concludes, is no less daunting—namely, to “build a new condition of freedom.”
Coders seeking to do good in the world will find much inspiration here.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-262-04355-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Bari Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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