You Never Know

When I was in college, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recruited grad students, including from the University of Michigan, to create a secure communications network for military leaders. 

What they got was the Internet.

According to the story that reached me, the students and their supervisors couldn't crack the technical obstacles in their way until one night, they got stoned and came up with the TCP/IP networking solution that represented a breakthrough.

I don't know if that story is precisely true or if my sources simply got stoned and made it up, but as a '60s guy, it makes a lot of sense to me. After all, "everybody must get stoned," and you never know what will happen when you do.

Of course, the irony is that what DARPA ended up with was/is the ultimate information sharing tool, no more secure than the old party line telephone system we used to know.

It's so leaky, in fact, that in recent years, journalists I know have been using end-to-end encryption services like Signal's app to communicate with sensitive sources, in the hope of thwarting law enforcement agencies from intercepting their communications.

Whistleblowers use these methods but nothing is foolproof, so it continues to be an extremely dangerous time to be a whistleblower. Nothing remains secret for long in our world -- nothing.

The police shootings and protests continue across the nation. Some, like the situation in Atlanta, go viral, some wait for history to catch up with them. That a black man sleeping in his car at a Wendy's drive-through was killed by police after a struggle Friday night seems almost too perfect a metaphor for our age.

After all, hasn't Wendy's been known as the high-quality junk food purveyor? It's almost as bad as in the '80s when a boy died after eating a hamburger from Jack in the Box. At least, for the company's sake, his name was not Jack. (Tragically, it was Riley.)

The momentum to change U.S. society from the current protests isn't going to dissipate even if the demonstrations die down. By this point, the pressure to address centuries of racism is too great to be stopped by those who would try.

Since I've already referenced Bob Dylan once in this column I might as well go back to the main warning poem of the era when the Internet was created; it resonates down through the decades now that people once again fill our streets with cries for change:

"Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your wall
For the times they are a-changin'"

No one else before or since could have put it any better or plainer. But the people who needed to act then didn't get the message.

Once again, it is time to right these wrongs. Who might be listening now?

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