One of East Germany's top spies was actually an American soldier. Jeff Carney defected to the Communist state in 1983 and fed the notorious Stasi with reams of valuable information. He has now written a book about his experiences.
Click on Image to Enlarge – The US surveillance post at Berlin-Marienfelde where Carney worked as a US soldier and East German spy.
EXTRACT
Later, after defecting to East Germany, Carney received the gold “Brotherhood in Arms Medal” from Stasi head Erich Mielke. Even later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a US court sentenced Carney to 20 years in Fort Leavenworth, a military prison in Kansas. Carney, code-named “Kid,” was one of a pair of top agents the Stasi had used to infiltrate the US military in West Berlin. The Americans estimated the damage that the “Kid” had caused by betraying secrets over a period of more than two years at $14.5 billion (€10.9 billion).
A recent piece in Uzbekistan's state-sanctioned media has advocated joining NATO and taking over the territory of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and most of the rest of Eurasia. The piece, published on 12news.uz, was taken down shortly after being published, but was preserved on inoSMI.ru. [PBI: English translation below the line.]
The piece, at nearly 9,000 words, offers a number of controversial (to put it kindly) claims: that Tajiks are merely Persian-speaking Uzbeks, that Uzbekistan is the successor state to the Mongol Golden Horde, that the agreement between Russia and Kyrgyzstan to develop hydropower plants is invalid because it misspells “Kyrgyzstan,” among many others. Its main thesis, however, is that the “threats of a natural-technical character” — namely proposed hydropower plants in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — are the gravest security threats facing Uzbekistan, comparable to a nuclear bomb. And the solution is that Uzbekistan should join NATO.
The piece is a bit out there, but Uzbek analysts point out that it must have been officially sanctioned. “This site [12news.uz] is not just semi-official, it’s official,” dissident political analyst Tashpulat Yuldashev told uznews.net. “It's curated by Dilshod Nurullaev, former Security Commission chairman and advisor to the President,” he said. “There is total censorship in Uzbekistan, and such a politically charged article would not have been allowed to be published without permission from the very top.” That assertion was backed up by another Uzbek analyst to The Bug Pit.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower initiated the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the Soviet launch of Sputnik I in 1957. Eisenhower believed in the great value of science, and formed ARPA in 1958 in a quest for “the scientific improvement” of U.S. defense. This project employed, at one time or another, some of the finest engineers and scientists of the late 20th century. The early emphasis was on missile-defense systems and the detection of nuclear bomb tests. It wasn't until 1962, when J.C.R. Licklider arrived on the management team, that ARPA began investigating the idea of networked computers.
In the early 1960s, Licklider, Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, Lawrence Roberts and other research scientists came up with the ideas that allowed them to individually dream of and eventually come together to create a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly and easily access data and programs from any site. Licklider jokingly called it an “Intergalactic Computer Network,” but he and his team began to seriously build the ideas and the technology that turned out to be the Internet. By 1964, some researchers had begun using their enormous mainframe computers to occasionally trade information by an early, informal form of e-mail – but the purpose wasn't to formulate a research network; they were just trying to get their work done efficiently. In the early 1960s, Baran and British scientist Donald Davies both proposed the idea of sending blocks of data – packets – through a digital network. Roberts and many others got down to the serious business of taking this concept, combining it with other researchers' proposals and building a real network in 1967, 1968 and 1969.
1969– Critical work on the first real network was being completed, and information had to be shared between far-flung research groups. Steve Crocker, a young computer scientist, wrote a long memo – the first of what came to be called a Request for Comments (RFCs). These are, to this day, the accepted way in which computer networking engineers and scientists suggest, review and adopt new technical standards. Since the day Crocker wrote the first Request for Comments, thousands more have followed. RFCs are a rich source of history about the development of the internet. The researchers also established a name for themselves at this time – the Network Working Group. The democratic way in which decisions were made by these pioneers became a basis for the free-speech, free-exchange format of the internet. ARPANET went online in an extremely basic format in late 1969, connecting four major universities: the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI at Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. This rough system gave computer scientists and engineers the opportunity to begin refining ideas for a more efficient, reliable communications network. They had a lot of work to do in the years to come to get the “bugs” out, brainstorming, trying and failing, exchanging RFCs and improving the system.
Amazing read and historical perspective about transmission. Knowledge and information are actually very different concept :
“This book doesn’t actually focus on the term information but it talks about the institutions that made knowledge possible. Its first volume runs “From Gutenberg to Diderot” – in other words, mid-15th to mid-18th century. A second volume stretches “From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia”, from the mid-18th century to the 21st century.
Peter Burke is a great cultural historian who has worked on many different aspects of the transmission of knowledge – including, for example, how historians worked, or how ideas about good behaviour at court were transmitted. In this synthetic pair of books he explores the question: What were the institutions that were collecting, classifying, sorting and disseminating information?”
In our world now where information is everywhere, how you make sure that knowledge is still accessible ? Curation is now not only a great means to express yourself but also an obvious path to become a gatekeeper and a qualitative filter. This article gives an awesome perspective on an universal and eternal inspiring mission : transmission.
