Bin Mahmood

Detailed Unbiased Arab Account

Revisado: 06-05-24

The boos is amazing. Author has a grip over contextual historical narrative thanks to calling Yemen his Adaptive land. The details are extraordinary. Story angle could have been better if author hadn’t jumped from present to past or future. A book worth reading though.

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Worst ever narrator

Revisado: 06-10-21

The narrator should be banned from Audible for murdering narration as such. It’s a beautiful story and what narrator is doing here? Emotionless simple reading, repetition again and again. He just tortured Khashwant Singh’s soul.

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What a narration

Revisado: 04-23-21

کتاب بلاشبہ لطیف مزاح سے بھرپور تھی تاہم فواد خان صاحب نے جس طرح مکالمات کی ادائیگی کی ہے، بخدا میں حضرت کا پنکھا معتقد ہوچلا۔

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An Eye Opening account of modern digital criminology

Revisado: 12-21-19

There’s a concept of continual improvement in IT (and may be other domains as well, but being from IT I can talk about that alone). When you neglect this continual improvement phase in omnidirectional fashion, the very first consequence is starting being outdated and vulnerable.

Somehow with the advent of social media I feel like we totally ignored the legal aspects of continual improvement and hence our whole digital life got vulnerable to the threats pointed out in this book. It all started with “what’s in your mind” that later on became popular as status update. We just gave the tech giants access to our mind, emotions, experiences and personal stories. It went on and on until we started giving them access to our perceptions, understandings, opinion, and overall... our personalities. We just acted as open source platform for them tech giants without any licensing. Well, they just used it not only to teach their AI algorithms to analyze us but a step further towards influencing us. Cambridge Analytica is just one story that somehow came out. How many other such commercial organizations are messing with us we have no idea.

I live in Pakistan, where there’s a vast history of military dictatorship. Mostly it’s explicit but for last one decade it’s been covert. The military spokesperson not only regularly interferes with my political horizon but also fingers across it time and time again. They used term “fifth generation warfare” to elaborate their ideological opponents, and by ideological it simply means those who oppose their political involvement. The truth is they themselves are a whole lot of source of propaganda when it comes to social media mind engineering. They have thousands of fake profiles, pages and influencers on their payroll, busy in molding public opinion in their favor. But we are third world country, yes, better then Nigeria or Kenya being a nuclear power but since with great power comes greater responsibilities, it’s a point of astonishment where a nuclear power can reach with mind molding machines such as Cambridge Analytica achieved. Our democracies are at stake here, and the worst thing is we can’t do much for operations as that of Alex Nix’ are over complicated to be explained to an average mindset that tends to behave more radical compared to their aware counterparts.

It’s a long debate, i.e. tech giants and their monopoly to become so powerful and yet so covert that their audit and monitoring goes out of question. Their impact on states can be profound, as mentioned in few examples in this Wylie’s account. Brexit manipulation left a deep footprint over brits, Trump campaign can be taken as yet another example. The problem becomes even more serious when the initial propaganda becomes snowball rolling over a hill towards us, the people.

Hats off to Wylie to be so courageous and bold to narrate everything with that clarity. It won’t stop them hate mongers but at least it will turn some over towards sanity.

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ARTICLES Snowden’s “Permanent Record”, Rule of Law & Privacy

Revisado: 12-09-19

Someone has to blow a whistle when the maneuvers of the deep state start violating the very rule of law that infect created it. Such is the ethical power of rule of law that enables it to create the shadow actors within state acting against the very existence of it. And such is the power of rule of law that transform a gentle nerdy lad standing against the most powerful intelligence agencies on planet to righteously exposing their negative chronicles against its own people. Rule of law is supreme, let’s accept it. Those who don’t will someday but later it happens more devastating will it be for folks in denial. We all know those who don’t give a damn to the rule or law.

Snowden had to act upon his instincts by apparently “breaking the law” to stop its persistent violation. I’m no legal expert specifically in the matters of United States, however, I must acknowledge the fact that he has put his case with a justification assuming that the facts he has provided are exactly as happened.

He’s established himself being a natural choice for being an intel selection hunt as both of his parents were working for federal government in an area heavily populated by intelligence agencies. Computer was his first love and he was someone who’d love to test system’s limit by exploring the hacks and exploits it contained. An example is a directory exploit he mentioned in the book.

He has criticized the paranoia emerged in United States post 9/11 in the name of security and antiterrorism that gave rise to deep state, defeating the official trio of state pillars, i.e. Judiciary, Executive and Legislature. The intel agencies bent all three on their knees to ignore an illegitimate role they were about to play, and that all in the name of national security. Snowden has shed a light on weaknesses and flaws in US Military, the demotivation in there and the way it’s been exploited in the name of “system” and “chain of command”.

During his tenure as part of security agencies he has explained an era which was in fact a transition from legacy to modern spying system. Many weaknesses he has explained were genuine but natural. He didn’t have a conscious contradictory problem with any of the programs in there until and unless the agencies started deliberately violating the privacy. As per his justification and citing, privacy is part of the basic human rights, something federal agencies are violating with legal coverage at times and concealing at others by state pillars.

Eventually he narrates his story of evading the agency, communicating to the journalists and so on. Personally I loved the human part of his story, i.e. his relationship and the impact his actions put on it. Among the last few chapters is the one reflecting an abridged version of his girl friend’s diary pages. Regardless of any explanation from the other party, the fact is that she suffered. A happy ending though that the two are living together today.

One of the basic principles of information security is that anything can happen will happen. Knowing the fact being from Information Technology domain, plain text traffic, i.e. http can be sniffed and hence it was being as such, there’s no reason to reject the whole narration. This is the cost an individual is paying for the ease provided by technology, the disruption of one’s own privacy. We are more than ever we are encrypted from data communication point of view and yet transparent more than ever.

The case Snowden put forward was, say version one of privacy breach by government, exposed publicly. That was 2012. Same exposure of private lives abused for commercial purposes was observed recently in 2018 by Cambridge Analytica, then processing Facebook users’ private data to favor one political candidate.

Our online existence is cent percent virtual but was completely isolated from physical life till end of 90s. Starting 2000s, we’re living in an infused system where our digital identification doesn’t just compliments physical one rather supersedes sometimes to the later one. Just imagine your National Identification just evades away one fine morning. You’ll be stateless, illegal individual, just because you lack a digital existence in your country’s datacenter servers. The question of digital privacy therefore is critical today more than ever.

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A wonderful history of a wonderful city written by wonderful author and narrated by wonderful narrator

Revisado: 10-26-19

Being a Muslim I always thought why Aqsa Mosque is of importance when we have Mecca available. I had strong doubts of egoistic sense of ownership in every faith over there in Jerusalem. This very book clarified everything. The word mosque itself appeared after the advent of Islam. Church came into being when Jesus registered himself as prophet. Jews among oldest hence hold rights more than both of the other abrahamic faiths. All you need to do in order to understand this is to go through this book with secular mindset keeping your religious sentiments aside.

And yet somehow all three faiths believe this city as holy. Any mosque or church shall never be demolished but yes, Jews should be allowed to be the owners of their holiest city. This is my conclusion after reading the book. It’s not a review but in a way it is since it tells you the knowledge gained through it and convincing someone to change his views.

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