"By imprisoning a writer, they are playing with fire," Mabanckou writes. "How could they build walls around our imagination, when they know it has a pair of giant wings and that it sings, in every season, its hymn to freedom?"
Amid The Aftermath: You've seen the news already, no doubt: We shall have peace for our time. But now that the deal's been done, the dust has settled and the puns have all been spent — never has the phrase "bury the hatchet" seen so much use — what are we to make of it? Here's a brief roundup of reflections on the pricing agreement between Amazon and Hachette.
NPR's Lynn Neary spoke with Authors United founder Douglas Preston, who expressed cautious relief, and Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, who poured a little water on the celebrations. "There was no real victory to be had here, not even a moral one," McQuivey said. "Both of these companies damaged themselves in the meantime while they were holding out against some principle which they have now just conveniently decided to overlook."
If neither side can claim a full victory, at least several writers expressed satisfaction. "It was heartening to see so many writers rally to the defense of their colleagues," announced Authors Guild President Roxana Robinson. "We'd like to think the display of communal spirit played a part in bringing the negotiations to an end — and we hope it prevents authors from being dragged into corporate disputes in the future."
Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, explains that "agency" is the key word in the deal: Hachette's agency over setting consumer prices for its e-books marks an important concession won by the publisher. Neither company comes away unscathed, though. "The result feels like a score-draw between two sides neither of whom could quite net the winning goal, and simply grew too fatigued to keep pumping the ball up the pitch," Jones writes. "But Hachette won the penalty shoot-out."
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Shane Harris, author of the new book "@War: The Rise Of The Military-Internet Complex." And he covers cybersecurity and national intelligence for The Daily Beast. Let's talk about how cyberwar played a part in the war in Iraq - techniques that hadn't been used before. What were some of those techniques?
HARRIS: Well, in 2007, people will recall that the so-called surge began - the Iraq troop surge in which tens of thousands of more combat forces were put into Iraq. A little-noticed part of that military strategy was that the NSA developed a way to collect every electronic communication that was moving through Iraq - every cell phone call, every text message, every email that was sent. And they did this by physically tapping into, principally, the cellular phone networks in Iraq, which were really ballooning and blossoming at that time, and basically collect every piece of communication. And what they were trying to do here and what they did quite successfully was to hack into the cell phones and the computers that were used by insurgent fighters and members of al-Qaida in Iraq, which, of course, morphed later into the group ISIS that the U.S. is fighting in Iraq and Syria now.
The NSA's sort of elite hackers found ways to break into those phones, listen to the conversations. They sent fake text messages to some fighters, posing as their fellow fighters, telling them to go to a certain location to go plant a bomb. And when they got there, American troops were waiting for them. They found out ways to track people's cell phones even when they were turned off, using cell phones as sort of a tracking beacon so that it could figure out - if they knew a particular fighter or a bomb maker, they could follow him to where he was hiding out. They could round up his associates. The NSA actually infiltrated online websites - these forums that are used by jihadists - and planted malicious software in them so that when some of the people going to that site would go and would click on certain documents or read certain pages, their machines would become infected and that would allow the NSA to sort of hone in on them. And the agency gave all of this intelligence that it was generating to combat soldiers on the ground, particularly with the - what's called the Joint Special Operations Command, which are sort of the elite commandos in Iraq. And this sort of amazing, real-time cycle of intelligence began to take hold, whereby the NSA, which had basically hacked into the entire network infrastructure of Iraq, was able to gather information, send out fake information, send out malware and then physically locate where these fighters were and understand how their networks were arranged. So who was in charge? Who was the chief bomb maker? Who were people taking orders from? And feed that information to the troops on the ground, who then either went and captured those individuals or killed them. And a number of people I interviewed for the book - and even David Petraeus, who was the commander of ground forces in Iraq - has said this publicly. Credit that intelligence operation - that cyber operation - with being a deciding factor in turning around the tide of the war in favor of the American forces during the surge. It's credited with removing from the battlefield, either because they were captured or killed, at least 4,000 fighters and ultimately lead to us being able to dismantle al-Qaida in Iraq and at least for that period in time, you know, I think was arguably a U.S. military victory.
GROSS: So what happens when an enemy could do the same thing against us?
HARRIS: They would be able to find out where our forces are. And they would be able to find out how we're communicating. And that's something that the military is very concerned about. We are not the only country that has these kinds of capabilities. We have vast capabilities and they're quite extensive, but the governments of Russia, of China - Israel has really sophisticated cyber capabilities. What the military worries about now is that if we ever go into a conventional war with another country - let's pick China, which is an improbable event, but let's say we were at war with China. They would be trying to hack in our systems, too. They would be trying to manipulate our communications. They would be trying to disable our infrastructure.
And the reason that so many countries are developing these cyber capabilities, one big reason is that they know that they cannot challenge us in a conventional military setting. China is - does not have a Navy that can go head-to-head with ours. What they can do and is much easier to do is build a cyber capability that they could use if we were ever to get into a conflict.
GROSS: Are you assuming that we're using cyber capabilities against ISIS now? Because ISIS has really been relying on social media and the Internet for its propaganda, including its beheading videos. About Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University. His "Introduction to Psychology 110" class has been released to the world through the Open Yale Courses program. Bloom also presents his research through numerous books and articles in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Many of the projects he works on are student-initiated, and all of them are interdisciplinary, bringing in theory and research from many different areas of psychology.
HARRIS: Right. They've made great use of social media for recruitment and to spread their message out. ISIS is actually a fascinating case - and I've actually been looking into this and interviewing people in government in the past few days about it. ISIS has actually proven to be quite resilient to our cyber efforts. And the reason for that is that they have avoided using cell phones, radios, satellite phones. They've been very careful about when they post messages to Twitter to strip out the information that shows the geographic location where a photo was taken or a tweet was sent. They have figured out, in many ways, how we spy and how we monitor - or at least have assumed generally that we do make a great effort to spy on our adversaries' communications.
And it's worth remembering, too, that ISIS is the successor group to al-Qaida in Iraq, which is the group that we so effectively attacked using these cyber capabilities. So ISIS has really gone to school on U.S. cyberwarfare and is proving - actually, a number of officials of told me in the past two days, very difficult to track and to target with airstrikes because they're staying off the grid. They know that once they communicate with these digital and electronic technologies, they put themselves at greater risk of being discovered. So they've really taken steps to try and limit the amount - the degree to which they are communicating with each other. And it's making it harder to target them.
GROSS: But it does disable their ability to communicate? But between 1966 and 1968, long before any of those versions of the DC Comics hero, Batman came to the screen in a much lighter, and brighter, ABC series, starring Adam West. The Dark Knight it wasn't. This Batman was played for laughs, with its star's no-nonsense delivery making it all the more tongue-in-cheek.
With its pop-art sensibility, vibrant colors and rogue's gallery of playful guest stars, Batman was a brief but major hit. Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, Cesar Romero as the Joker, Burgess Meredith as the Penguin and Julie Newmar as Catwoman — these were some of the original villains who made this Batman a TV phenomenon right from the start. That first season, ABC presented two episodes per week in a serialized cliffhanger format — and both installments made that year's Top 10.
HARRIS: Exactly. And that's the flip side of it.
GROSS: Looking on the bright side. "She's playing this magical game, and characters from her paintings have all assembled and come and watched her play the game," he says. The pa