Tea at Trianon: The Weapon of Choice

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

The Weapon of Choice

From MIT Technology Review:

Although it may seem as if cyberattacks target mainly networks and computers, conflict on the internet can affect every human being both directly—when, for example, medical equipment is compromised—and indirectly, by forcefully reshaping the geopolitical reality we’re all living in.

“Today, the full scale of the threat Sandworm and its ilk present loom over the future,” Greenberg writes. “If cyberwar escalation continues unchecked, the victims of state-sponsored hacking could be on a trajectory for even more virulent and destructive works. The digital attacks first demonstrated in Ukraine hint at a dystopia on the horizon, one where hackers induce blackouts that last days, weeks, or even longer—intentionally inflicted deprivations of electricity that could mirror the American tragedy of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, causing vast economic harm or even loss of life.”

As we start a new decade, the most immediate threat in the minds of many Americans is—once again—election interference. The 2020 election threatens to move forward the pattern of escalation that began when Barack Obama’s campaign was hacked in 2008, and spiked when Donald Trump became the first to directly benefit from hacking by a foreign power. Hacker States, an upcoming book by the British academics Luca Follis and Adam Fish, distinguishes between the different dimensions of destruction. Whether or not a hack achieves a specific technical goal—malware installed, account taken over, data breached—it can undermine public confidence and democracy.

“It is not just about tampering, information warfare, or influence campaigns, but it is also about the very physical infrastructures and complex systems responsible for everything from healthcare to tallying votes,” Follis and Fish write. (Read more.)