Book Review: Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity and Democracy (2023). Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.

This brand new non-fiction book combines the true story of a recent masterpiece of complex investigative journalism with revelations that are disturbing and important for all who value privacy, individual rights and democratic norms.

The authors are two noted French journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.  They are both leaders in a French non-profit journalism organization called Forbidden Stories, which seeks to continue the investigative work of assassinated reporters from many dangerous authoritarian countries around the world. To accomplish this mission, they make use of the skills of a team of their own organization's staff, who work in collaboration with top reporters and technical experts from major news media companies and human rights groups from many nations.

The target of the special investigation described in this book was an Israeli company called NSO. NSO was a high-tech security company that developed and sold surveillance tools to governments. Among their most valuable tools was a secret product known as Pegasus, a combination of spy software and hosted I.T. services which allowed their customers to hack into smartphones, and to use the compromised phones and their data in a variety of nefarious ways.

Pegasus enabled not only access to all the existing content (email, text, video, audio) on any  phone it compromised, but also the ability to plant data on it (such as child porn, or other fake evidence used to besmirch the phone owner’s reputation, and justify arrest and prosecution). It also allowed the cracker to activate the microphone and cameras on the phone remotely, to serve as an unintended bugging device against the phone's owner, as well as being able to use the phone's GPS information to track the phone's owner's location. And it enabled the cracker to interact with the phone in other ways too, to control it, and download a vast array of personal private information from it on demand.

The product was quietly sold to select governmental agencies in allied countries with the permission of the Israeli government. In the beginning, it was marketed and defended by NSO as a tool for democratic governments, primarily in the west, to defend themselves and their populations from terrorists and criminals, in response to the many new apps and tools for data encryption on Apple and Android phones. The ability to hack into suspects' phones appealed to worried law enforcement agencies and officials in many countries, who feared that new phone encryption apps would prevent them from being able to monitor and investigate lawbreakers effectively.

However, this positive spin on the purpose and uses of NSO's tools took a dark turn when Forbidden Stories obtained a list of over 10,000 phone numbers from a secret source (probably within the NSO company), from nations around the world, which had been hacked using Pegasus. 

It quickly became obvious from the journalists' initial review of the phone numbers on the list that NSO must also be selling the product to repressive regimes and unsavory leaders in many places, to allow those dangerous customers to surveil, monitor and track individuals who were considered a threat to them or to their regime(s).  Pegasus suddenly looked to be a terrifyingly powerful new weapon for authoritarian dictatorships hunting dissidents, and seeking to silence or punish political opponents and inquisitive reporters.

Once Forbidden Stories realized the threat posed by the existence and sale of this tool, to them as journalists as well as to anyone who might fear the sort of all-knowing governmental surveillance and targeting made possible by Pegasus, they set to work on trying to find out more about it. To do that, they had to slowly and carefully build a wide network of respected journalists and media outlets in many countries, who would contribute to a large group investigative journalism project, but under very strict security restrictions.

One of the greatest risks to the project, and to the journalists working on it, was that each of their own smartphones might become a potential source of leaks that could blow the story wide open, before they were able to complete the deep and wide research needed to document it. Indeed, just by tracing the owners of many of the phone numbers on the list, the journalists working on the project quickly discovered that some of their own phones had already been hacked by Pegasus customers from repressive regimes.  

The reporters, computer experts and Forbidden Stories project organizers thus had to find ways to do their work, coordinate all their efforts and handle communications among participants on different continents, over a period of many months, without relying on the most common tools of their trade, the ones we all take for granted now – their phones and the internet.  This made their achievements all the more difficult, and their success that much more astonishing.

This is a truly disturbing, but impressive and thoroughly researched story on how a voluntary network of idealistic journalists around the globe pieced together the truth about a set of repressive surveillance tools, aimed directly at our smartphones, that could destroy the ability of anyone to trust in their own personal safety or security from malevolent governments and criminals anywhere in the world.  Having managed to uncover and document the story in astonishing detail, they then made it public, with a highly synchronized barrage of stories from many reporters in different places, with each report addressing the local instances and effects of the Pegasus spyware and operations in their many respective countries.  

The fact that Forbidden Stories' investigation, and its revelations, ultimately drove NSO out of its very lucrative phone spyware business is encouraging, but only somewhat. Unfortunately, as the authors point out, we still have to recognize how relatively easy it is to create spyware systems like Pegasus, tools that can use all the wonderful technological capabilities of our smartphones against us. The authors suggest we need to try to prepare for the next time in advance, by passing laws to try to limit or prevent development of these kinds of Orwellian surveillance technologies in the future.

This is an exciting real-world thriller of investigative journalism, combined with a vital cautionary tale about the threats to freedom and privacy posed by our ubiquitous smartphone technology. It includes a powerful and enlightening introduction by Rachel Maddow. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat (2021). On Netflix.

This interesting recent movie on Netflix is a good docudrama about one of the more audacious Allied intelligence operations and victories of World War II.  It's about Operation Mincemeat, a real plan created by the British Naval Intelligence Division (NID), to confuse the Nazis with false information about the location of the planned 1943 Allied invasion of southern Europe (which ultimately was launched against Sicily).

The story begins with the development of proposals for the British military on how to create confusion and doubt among the German military authorities about the impending invasion. Ewen Montagu (played well by Colin Firth), a commanding officer within the NID, and his team members, are considering different ways they might feed credible-sounding fake intelligence to the Germans. They ultimately make the controversial decision to try to float a dead body ashore off the coast of Spain, disguised as a British military courier, with false plans for the invasion.

The group realizes they needed to create a completely fictional backstory for the body. But first, they need to find a fresh dead man’s body of the right age, sufficiently anonymous that it can be “repurposed” with a different identity, and well preserved enough to appear to have died recently. Once they overcome that challenge, they have to create a convincing history for this person who didn’t really exist, by forging public documentation and a discoverable history, and also figuring out how to put convincing corroborating evidence on the body itself.

Finally, they need to find a way to deliver the body, in the guise of a courier who apparently had been shot down over the ocean, so that it would float ashore and be found and accepted as real by the Spanish authorities, then passed along to a German agent, who they hope will send the information on to the always suspicious and sophisticated German intelligence apparatus, and ultimately to Hitler himself.

It's a far-fetched but well-crafted cinematic tale of this unlikely plan that not only happened, but even more amazingly appears to have succeeded in fooling the Germans about the location of the invasion. It also nicely depicts the lives and interactions of the team of seemingly ordinary men and women in an obscure London NID office, who worked together to assemble all the elements of this elaborate deception scheme, and see the whole fraud through to the end.

One of the movie’s noteworthy characters is Lt. Commander Ian Fleming (played by Johnny Flynn), Montagu’s personal assistant, who later became famous (in real life) as the creator and writer of the original James Bond spy novels. Fleming is believed to have played an important role in this secret operation.

It’s worth noting that this story has been told several times before in books and films, including in the book The Man Who Never Was (1953) by Ewen Montagu himself (which I remember reading and enjoying long ago); a popular movie of the same name, based on Montagu's book, from 1956; and the more recent book Operation Mincemeat (2010) by Ben McIntyre, which was the basis for this recent film.

However factually accurate and complete it may or may not be, it’s an enjoyable and dramatic portrayal of one of the high points of British spying and information warfare against the Germans in World War II. Recommended.

Personal Note: Phasing Out Rock and Roll Friday

From early on here at The Memory Cache, I’ve used the fourth Friday of each month as my day for posting reviews and writing about pop music, musicians, music films, music books and even a music podcast. I called this regular feature "Rock and Roll Friday". 

However, as part of the ongoing evolution of the blog, I’ve decided to discontinue this tradition effective today, and simply move to writing about music whenever something good turns up, as I do with all other topics covered here.

I currently have U2’s lead singer Bono’s recent autobiography Surrender high on my reading list for the near future, so no worries – there will be more music-related posts to come, whenever I discover anything of the kind that I really enjoy and find noteworthy. It just won’t necessarily show up in the blog on any particular day of the month.

In the meantime, happy fourth Friday!

Movie Review: She Said (2022). In Theaters and on Peacock.

Last year I wrote a review of Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow’s excellent non-fiction autobiographical thriller about his attempts to research and expose the stories of institutionalized sexual abuse by powerful men in major corporations, centered on NBC’s host Matt Lauer and the Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein. It’s a remarkable story, and an inspiring addition to the history of investigative journalism as an essential and difficult tool in the struggle for democracy and against abuses of power.

Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor were the two New York Times reporters also working the story of Harvey Weinstein, and his serial abuse of women employees and young actresses throughout his career as one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, at the same time Farrow was trying to uncover the story for The New Yorker. 

After their sensational revelations in the pages of the New York Times, which ultimately led to Weinstein’s disgrace, his departure from Miramax and successful criminal prosecutions for rape, Twohey and Kantor also wrote a bestselling account of their work on the Weinstein story, She Said, which I haven’t read yet (but will).

In the meantime, though, I have seen the dramatic movie made from their book, which is an outstanding creative work in its own right, and a worthy entry on anyone’s “best investigative reporting stories” list of great films. 

As the story begins, we see how Weinstein first appeared on Kantor's radar, as a possible illustrative case of sexism in the workplace for an article she was researching on that topic. As she begins to follow leads, she hears harrowing accounts from several of Weinstein’s victims, but also runs into barriers, including the fact that most of the victims had received settlements, and had signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), which barred them from disclosing what had happened or talking to the media about their experiences.

We then see how Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) recruits Twohey (Carey Mulligan) to work with her on the story, and how the two – with the careful and tough oversight of their editors and executives, and the everyday love and support of their husbands and young children, despite long hours at work and midnight phone calls – compile an exhaustive body of notes, anecdotes, sources, witnesses and documents, in order to write the story.

Much of the drama builds from watching the two of them arranging for and then conducting interviews with scared, reluctant sources in a variety of settings, as they try to understand the magnitude of Weinstein’s crimes, and the nature of the cover-up operations by the Miramax board of directors and Weinstein’s lawyers. It's also obvious that the fact that they are both career women and mothers of young daughters adds to the empathy and bond they are able to establish with many of the victims, as they try to gain their trust, learn their stories, and then ultimately try to get one or more of them to go on the record.

One of the most impressive features of the story (as in most investigative journalism tales) is the team’s high standards for the types of evidence they need in order to publish their findings. After all the recent years of constant attacks on the press for “fake news”, it is a revelation to watch what it takes to be able to publish a credible investigative report in the mainstream news media.

In the movie, it’s clear that the editors and writers automatically agree on the need for a high level of verifiability, because that’s their understanding of their jobs and the nature of their profession. There’s a reason that the New York Times is considered one of the most authoritative news sources in the world. But it’s also made clear that a story of this sort – about the crimes and misbehavior of a famous and powerful man – must be unimpeachable to withstand the sorts of attacks an influential man like Weinstein, and a wealthy company like Miramax, can unleash to protect themselves.

With all the social tumult of the last decade, it’s easy to see certain currents like the #METOO movement, which has had such an important role in uncovering institutionalized sexism and abuse in the workplace – as having arisen spontaneously. But it didn’t. The #METOO movement exploded as a direct result of the truths told by these few talented and dedicated writers and their editors, who were determined to get to the bottom of this ugly story, in order to shed light on institutional abuses of power, and by the brave women, some of them famous, who were ultimately convinced to make their own pain and victimization public in the hope of improving the lives of other women.

She Said is a gripping and intensely moving drama of two women investigative journalists working together on one of the most notorious and difficult real-life news stories of recent times. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth (2019). Gordon L. Dillow.

I stumbled on this intriguing book over the holidays, in a pile of remaindered science books in one of our local bookstores. It turned out to be one of the better impulse book buys I’ve made lately.

The title itself is suggestive of the contents, but doesn’t nearly capture the richness of the author's presentation. The general topic is asteroids colliding with earth, and the threat they pose to life on earth and modern civilization, but Dillow approaches the subject with a measure of humor, a longtime journalist’s talent for research and storytelling, and a truly cosmic problem to consider.

The book begins with the author describing a large meteorite exploding in the atmosphere over his home in Arizona a few years ago, a spectacular natural event which he and many others witnessed, and which started him down the road toward writing this book.

From that beginning, he moves to the story of the 50,000-year-old meteorite crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, which is a now a local tourist site. He explains how it was created, how it was “discovered” by white settlers in the nineteenth century, and how (as with other meteorite crash sites around the world) it was initially believed to be the residue of some sort of volcanic event. He then recounts the history of the clear-sighted individuals who eventually realized what it was, but then had to convince a skeptical worldwide scientific community over many decades that it really was the result of a massive meteorite impact.

Dillow then continues to weave together other aspects of the related scientific discoveries and events which inform our current understanding of the asteroid and comet threats to our planet. He explains how science had long had a consensus view that natural processes in the earth sciences were controlled by the uniformitarian doctrine, the idea that all changes were gradual, and caused by the same processes we now know about, a concept that was recently disrupted by the rise of the catastrophism doctrine. 

Catastrophism is the contrary view (to uniformitarianism) that contends that some major changes in earth’s history were the result of cataclysmic but rare events, such as asteroid strikes. Inevitably, this leads the author to a discussion of the changing scientific beliefs about what caused the end of the dinosaur era, a debate which has played out over the past half century or so in popular culture as well as the scientific community.

Some of the most fascinating parts of the book detail several major asteroid strikes in historical memory, and how scientists came to understand and prove what they really were, in contrast to earlier religious and pseudo-scientific explanations (spoiler alert: they weren't caused by UFOs). 

The 1908 Tunguska explosion in Russia, which I can recall was still considered a scientific mystery when I was young, is one of the best examples, as well as the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid event (also coincidentally in Russia). Dillow includes fascinating descriptions of both, and the means by which scientists eventually were able to confirm and explain what happened, including being able to calculate the approximate size and speed of the asteroids, and explaining why they created the particular explosive effects they did.

From there, the story moves on to the networks of governmental organizations and resourceful amateur citizen astronomers who have gradually built a database of Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and have begun to plan for the planetary defense. Needless to say, there are some wonderfully interesting and eccentric personalities involved. Dillow also looks at the growing public recognition and acceptance of the risks posed by asteroid strikes, the strategies proposed for defending against asteroids on a collision course with our planet, the politics of it all, and also includes evaluations of the Hollywood science fiction movies that have been made about it.

This book was written just a little too early to include a discussion of Don’t Look Up, the satirical 2021 disaster film about an impending asteroid strike starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence (previously reviewed here). It’s too bad, because at the time, most people (including me) thought the movie was really not about an asteroid strike, but about climate change, and our collective failure to do anything effective to stop it from destroying our planet and civilization. It was very much in keeping with a long history of popular culture and science belittling and laughing about the idea of giant asteroids striking earth, whether in the ancient past or in the future.

But in retrospect, Dillow’s presentation makes it clear that while a catastrophic asteroid strike may be a far less likely event in any of our lifetimes, it is one that is no less potentially devastating to us, our global human society and life on earth than the climate crisis. For that reason, he suggests, we should take it seriously too, and keep working on ways to try to protect our world from this low probability but very high-impact threat.

Fire in the Sky is an excellent piece of science reporting. It includes an enjoyable and educational mix of human stories of individual dedication and collective folly, along with plenty of science history. It also provides clear explanations of what we currently know and believe about asteroids, comets, and their frequent collisions with other celestial bodies, especially Earth and the moon. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Slow Horses (2010). Mick Herron.

Hello, and welcome to the new year here at The Memory Cache. Today we're talking about spies, and novels about them.  

I recently became aware of a long-running series of spy thrillers, beginning with this one, Slow Horses, and their author Mick Herron, while reading end of the year book reviews in one of my favorite magazines.

This series of novels is in the process of becoming much more widely popular and better known, since it is now being produced on Apple TV+ as a TV series. I haven’t seen the TV show yet, and haven’t read the books either, except this one, the first in what have become almost annual new installments in the book series (right up to Bad Actors, 2022), but so far, it’s looking very promising.

At one point in my life, I was an enthusiastic fan of spy novels and authors, although not all of them by any means. I generally liked the stories that focused on the people, the relationships, the betrayals, the conspiracies, the lies and deceit – if it’s all just exploding gizmos and car chases, it’s not that interesting to me. I was never a big James Bond fan. But there were other spy stories and writers that I did like.

My favorite author in the genre for many years was Charles McGarry, a former career CIA agent who wrote an entire series of novels about an old American family of blue blood New Englanders, the Christophers, for whom espionage had been the family business for generations. 

There was even one historical romance in the series, The Bride of the Wilderness (1988) about the family’s origins, set in the early colonial era. The greatest of McGarry’s novels, though, was probably The Last Supper (1983), about young Paul Christopher, whose fictional brilliant career but tragic personal life spanned World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War, as well as several of McGarry’s other novels.

McGarry was one of the most literarily satisfying spy writers I’d encountered. His mastery of character, convoluted plots, believable but unforeseen betrayals and realistic spy tradecraft put him at the top of my list of spy novelists for many years. Of course, I read and enjoyed many of the other most celebrated spy novelists of our times too, including John Le Carre’, Frederick Forsyth, Alan Furst and Tom Clancy among others.

But when the Cold War ended, for a while it seemed to me that maybe there wasn’t much to write about anymore, at least with contemporary plot lines and stories, until the 9/11 era got well underway and dispelled our "end of history" illusions. Fortunately, with the writing of Mick Herron, and his Slow Horses (or Slough House) series, we now have a worthy successor to the World War II and Cold War masters of the spy thriller, creating rich new tales of people and espionage in our current moment.

It’s interesting that many of the greatest spy writers of our era, including Le Carre’, Forsyth, McGarry and Ian Fleming, had been spies themselves, which surely informed their portrayals of spy tradecraft, conspiracy and the personalities of their characters. Mick Herron, like Tom Clancy, was not a former spy. He was just a struggling British crime novelist, looking for a new angle to try to achieve some success as a writer. So, he decided to try writing spy novels, and Slow Horses was his first attempt. It was clearly successful.

The setting is modern London circa 2010, where (in the story) MI-5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence organization) maintains a seedy, depressing office called Slough House, populated with secret agents who have somehow failed or embarrassed themselves, and are therefore assigned to pass their days doing demeaning errands and pointless scut work for the “real” agents at Regent’s Park. The whole idea of the place is to put disgraced agents (mocked by their peers as “slow horses”, like the losers that compulsive gamblers always bet on) somewhere so demoralizing that they will quit their jobs and save the organization the trouble of firing them.

In his introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of Slow Horses, Herron reveals that he didn’t really know anything about spies when he set out to write the book, but he did know about organizations, and people, and modern office workplaces. And that is the genius of his premise for the book (and presumably the series).

He tells an engaging story of a group of damaged people in a recognizably dysfunctional modern office environment, at work, under the most demoralizingly bureaucratic circumstances imaginable, and then shows how an unexpected challenge brings out the individual and collective capacity for creativity and heroism in a team of hopelessly normal and flawed humans, in a workplace we can all recognize, even if we’ve never been spies ourselves.

Herron’s ability to describe situations and settings is gifted, and leans toward the dark and comical. I struggled a little to get through the first third of the book, in which he describes this bleak, dirty and depressing office, and introduces each of the seemingly pathetic agents working there. But the writing was so funny, smart and ironic that I stayed with it, until an important plot twist – the kidnapping of a young man by unknown assailants, who threaten to chop off his head – jump starts the members of this hapless group of slow horses to try to do something, and act like secret agents, even if their bosses don’t want them to.

Once we’d met all the characters, toured their shabby offices, and the plot got going, it was almost impossible to put the book down. And in the course of the rest of the story, there were some prescient and very timely observations and plot twists that spoke to genuine perils and afflictions of British society and politics today, as well as the expected dangers and adversity experienced by the characters.

Slow Horses was a lucky first book for 2023 for me – it’s so much fun to read an exciting and entertaining story like this one, and discover there are many more of them waiting to be read. I expect I’ll be bingeing the other ones in the series over the next few months. And no doubt I’ll check out the TV show too, just to see how it compares to the book(s). Highly recommended.

Book Review: God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning (2021). Meghan O’Gieblyn.

Here as the subject for my last post and review for 2022 is one of the more unusual and challenging, yet fun books I’ve read this year. I discovered the author, Meghan O’Gieblyn, from reading her amusing advice column Cloud Support in Wired magazine, and decided she seemed somehow unusual and funny enough as a writer that I should read her latest book, God, Human, Animal, Machine.

I knew from the title that it had something to do with technology, A.I., and what it all means, but beyond that I didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, it was a strange delight, a series of chapter essays exploring the state of the world and the human condition in the midst of the advanced technologies that now shape our lives, as seen through her own life and story.

O’Gieblyn is a fascinating narrator. Born into and raised in a strict Christian fundamentalist family, and a committed believer throughout her youth, she attended a Bible college, where she dove deep into the history of Western and Christian philosophy. But somewhere along the way, she lost her religion, became an atheist and a non-believer, and later for a time a cocktail waitress with an addiction problem.

Despite this dramatic change in her beliefs and circumstances, she never lost her curiosity about the mysteries of existence. She became a writer about technology, which clearly fascinates her, but the issues which remain at the fore for her as a writer have to do with how we humans relate to and are affected by the marvelous things we invent. She also has a unique ability as a writer to probe these issues in essays by combining her own life experiences, emotional responses to people and situations she encounters, and her exhaustive knowledge of the history and ideas of philosophy.

The first chapter begins with a discussion of her experience with a small robotic dog which was provided to her temporarily by the manufacturer for research purposes. In a story that is both amusing and poignant, she talks about her first interactions with the robot dog, the uses to which she puts it, the role it takes on in her life, and the disquieting emotions she develops as she and the toy become more familiar with each other.

From this funny initial anecdote, she expands into a wider discussion of mind, consciousness, the capacity of artificial creations to have them, and what it means for us as humans to develop relationships with them. That discussion becomes quite deep and informative, as she contrasts and compares current ideas on these foundational human questions with those of many of the greatest philosophers throughout history.

I’ve never seriously studied philosophy, but this book was a crash course in the ideas of being, existence, mind, consciousness and the nature of reality, going back more than two thousand years. What made it particularly exciting was to realize the extent to which these same issues that surface with respect to artificial intelligence and robotics are the same existential questions that have been asked and pondered for millennia, before any of our current science and technology existed.

One particularly intriguing part of the book discusses the modern “trans-humanist” movement, now embraced by many Silicon Valley eminences and high-tech visionaries (or would-be visionaries), as first predicted by the futurist Ray Kurzweil. This is the notion that the ultimate end state for humanity, much to be desired, is to upload our personalities and memories to the cloud, and thereby attain immortality across the universe. A book I reviewed recently, Survival of the Richest, concerning the escape and survival fantasies of billionaires, documented the current state and wide popularity of this belief system among the very rich, the tech elites and some celebrities.

O’Gieblyn doesn’t put much stock in this movement or the likelihood of its success, but rather than simply skewering it, she brilliantly lays out her own observations of how closely the dreams, aims and objectives of the trans-humanists match the world view and goals of an earlier Christian apocalyptic movement, a thousand years ago. That one didn’t really work out either, as she gently points out.

Throughout the book, the author relates the ways that her questions about so many new technologies and areas of science – robots, artificial intelligence, quantum uncertainty, chatbots, life extension, the pandemic, and viruses – keep winding back to closely mirror the questions she struggled with in her days as a young Christian student, as she tried to understand and justify her existence, faith and beliefs. The book becomes the story of humanity’s eternal quest for meaning, in parallel with her own personal journey to find answers to the same questions, even though now surrounded by previously unimaginable and novel technologies.

The book is full of smart insights, tough questions, and her personal anecdotes and admissions, all skillfully tied together into an entertaining, challenging and thought-provoking package through her unassuming but expert narration. One of the ways she particularly excels is in her ability to connect topics that we might not have considered together before, and make compelling points in doing so. Who knew philosophy could be so entertaining, as well as so important to the moral and societal choices we face with today's technologies? Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back (2022). Jacob Ward.

As we approach the end of 2022, and the beginning of a new year, I’m posting my last two book reviews of this first year of my blog, which I began in February. This time of the year is usually a time for reflection, and for looking forward to next year’s projects and challenges, so it’s fitting that I’m choosing to review two books I’ve read recently that take a similar approach to evaluating aspects of the technology-steeped world in which we live.

In The Loop, NBC News Technology Correspondent Jacob Ward coins the term “the loop” to symbolize an iterative dynamic in our society and lives whereby artificial intelligence, and the computerized algorithms that increasingly influence and control many aspects of our modern lives, are in fact shrinking our capacity for personal choice and individual decision-making.

He begins with several chapters on recent research in behavioral psychology that have demonstrated the extent to which we as humans respond unconsciously to stimuli in our environment of which we aren’t even fully aware, and process information and uncertainty in the “reality” we are experiencing on two different levels, one of which is fast and impulsive, and thus prone to being influenced and misled by past experiences and beliefs, while the other is slower, more analytical and fact-based.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this two-level thinking process worked reasonably well to allow us to survive and prosper in the primitive world in which we evolved. System 1, the more automatic and frequently used one, allows us to make fast decisions and act immediately without a lot of thought, while System 2 allows us to apply slower, more “critical thinking” evaluation to difficult information and stimuli. The combination of the two allows for quick response to threats, but also the ability to grow, learn, and change.

Unfortunately, the invention of computer algorithms, based increasingly on vast quantities of data and attempts to build artificial intelligence to help us to make choices, has created a dangerous vulnerability for us. The businesses building these systems, Ward suggests, have studied the weaknesses of our human decision-making processes, and tailored their algorithms to exploit our emotions and impulses for the benefit of their bottom line, or in support of hidden political objectives or opinions, rather than to just help us make better decisions.

This is not a startling new revelation at this point. It’s common knowledge by now that smartphones were designed to use visual and aural rewards to keep us looking at them, and that social media’s algorithms were designed to maximize our emotional engagement with their feeds, by favoring and promoting posts that engender fear and anger, but Ward does an excellent job of demonstrating how the dynamic plays out in a variety of other different contexts and real-world situations.

For example, in one chapter, he describes how the online gaming industry has created incentives in their games that are specifically designed to create addiction in their users. Along the way, he introduces us to Nir Eyal, a Stanford MBA who wrote the popular book Hooked on how to build “habit-forming” products, which became a bible for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and Robert  Cialdini's classic work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (previously reviewed here) on how to get people to do what you want.

Ward goes on to explore many problems in applying algorithms and artificial intelligence tools in areas such as education, therapy, policing and crime, and discusses troubling aspects of these attempts that surface repeatedly across the different application areas. 

He raises the fact that we often don’t know or understand how many of these algorithms arrive at their decisions. They're usually "black boxes", which we're expected (and often required) to accept as valid on face value, even though some have been challenged in court and ultimately found to be faulty or unreliable.  In many cases, these algorithms are protected by intellectual property rights, so that the individual negatively affected by them is explicitly barred from understanding the basis for the decision the algorithm rendered.

Ward also points out that organizations like courts, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies, credit agencies and banks often use computer algorithms to make life-altering decisions based on underlying big data which may reflect existing social biases and injustices. This process of using real data based on unfair conditions to make new unjust decisions simply perpetuates and reinforces the existing injustice, under the misleading appearance of the algorithm's "objectivity".

This is a wide-ranging and interesting exploration of how the alluring promise of machine intelligence and algorithms to enrich our lives has instead too often been used to limit our choices, and to manipulate us for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Recommended.