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Education Reading

Latest Read: The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. Michelle is an Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, writer and civil rights activist. She earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Previously, Michelle was a member of the faculty of Stanford Law School. Then as Director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California. Today she is an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

This is in fact a stunningly 10th Anniversary Edition including a new preface. Michelle is again addressing black men, violence, and a new way forward. Across these initial sixty pages arises a new, strong message. While the book’s message may appear simple, the research data delivers a complex analysis. Since the end of World War II the government has established laws targeting the incarceration of black men.

Yet, gains during the civil rights movement became in fact, the target of a ‘law and order’ mindset. The crack cocaine wars of the 1980s were certainly not even in place when President Reagan’s War on Drugs was launching nation wide. This was a build up from the Nixon Administration, even accelerated by President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. In addition, the book asserts prisons are creating cages to hold and punish young black men as a control method.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: Hackers

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. The former chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, today Steven is an editor at Wired and author of eight books including Crypto, which won the Frankfurt ebook award for best non-fiction book of 2001.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

So, the best way to introduce this release from 1984 is to simply define the term Hacker as ‘a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.’

How times have certainly changed. Today popular culture has certainly morphed this term into someone who is able to subvert computer security for malicious purposes. This person should be more accurate defined as a cyber criminal. Needless to say there is a big difference since it will surprise many to discover the first computer game was written in 1961.

In fact, Steve provides a historical view of hackers dating back to 1946. At MIT, an on-camps model railroad club, the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) was the first hacker club in America.

Indeed, a model railroad club on campus allowed talented introverts access to a locked room to construct HO scale railroad layouts. This makes the model railroading of my childhood seem like Dorthy in the Wizard of Oz.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: No Place to Hide

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald. Glenn is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer with a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

Glenn initially founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He later began writing for Salon and then for The Guardian. He contributed to their 2014 Pulitzer Prize. Glenn was also one of three reporters who won the 2013 George Polk Award.

In 2014, he cofounded The Intercept until his resignation in October 2020. He has since began self-publishing on Substack. Glenn’s book is a focus to the request made by Edward Snowden to contact Glenn in 2013 regarding US surveillance.

So Glenn documents how was initially contacted and actually did not respond thinking the outreach was a fake attempt. Edward only allowed himself to be an anonymous source with evidence of US government spying.

In fact, after Snowden reached out repeatedly through encrypted channels, Glenn did agree to travel to Hong Kong. This turned out to be the digital version of The Pentagon Papers leak by Daniel Ellsberg.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: Dark Territory

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan. Fred is an American author and journalist currently writing at Slate and previously at The Boston Globe and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Scientific American.

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

He received a 1982 Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to the Boston Globe Magazine’s “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” regarding he Soviet arms race. He holds both a Master of Science and Ph.D. in political science from MIT. His weekly “War Stories” column for Slate magazine covers international relations and U.S. foreign policy.

Fred shares that in June 1983, then President Reagan watched the movie War Games. A kid (actor Matthew Broderick) unknowingly playing with his home computer dialed into the Pentagon and controlled military computers. Reagan, a former actor requested from his military Joint Chiefs if this could actually happened. The generals confirmed it was indeed possible. And this may have started the first White House action to protect Hilary computers.

Yet it would be President George H.W. Bush who first leveraged American cyber attacks during the 1991 Gulf War invasion to shut down all military communications used by Saddam Hussein. This is the foundation Fred establishes for all future cyber wars fought by America.

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Education Reading Vietnam War

Latest Read: Fire in the Lake

Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald. Published in 1972, Fire in the Lake was the first history of Vietnam written by an American. A journalist and historian Frances won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award as result of her reporting in Vietnam in 1966.

Fire In The Lake by Frances Fitzgerald

This is certainly a very worthy book to continue my education of the American war that lasted a generation. Approaching this book, 50 years after initial publication may appear ‘ancient’ by today’s internet-connected world. I can even recall assigned chapter readings of this book in college along with Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and Michael Herr’s Dispatches among other powerful writers.

Frances has simply written her outstanding analysis in two parts. First, addressing Vietnam, the Vietnamese people, and their long history of foreign oppression. This includes a Chinese occupation which lasted over 1,000 years and concludes with the era of French colonization of Indochina.

The second part of this book is addressing the American War effort which began during World War II and expanded under French rule until the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. At the time of publication, President Nixon was ramping up strategic bombing while withdrawing American troops. The American effort would end three years after publication in 1975 with the fall of Saigon.