A rather breathless and uninformed piece appeared in today's online Washingon Post tech section which makes the patently absurd claim that the PhD dissertation of one Mr. - soon to be Dr., I suppose - Sean Gorman is a 'terrorist treasure map'. The apparently unintentional self-parody continues:
Invariably, he said, they suggest his work be classified. "Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?" he said. "They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree." For academics, there always has been the imperative to publish or perish. In Gorman's case, there's a new concern: publish and perish.
"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade -- and then they both should burn it," said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. "The fiber-optic network is our country's nervous system." Every fiber, thin as a hair, carries the impulses responsible for Internet traffic, telephones, cell phones, military communications, bank transfers, air traffic control, signals to the power grids and water systems, among other things.
"You don't want to give terrorists a road map to blow that up," he said.
While unequivocally demonstrating that Mr. Clarke has rendered his nation a great service by the simple act of leaving government, the article is embarrassing on several levels, not the least of which is its hagiographic portrayal of Mr. Gorman. Indeed, I'm sure that the Post has done him no favors; it must now be difficult, if not impossible, for him to travel in knowledgable circles without receiving a merciless ribbing:
"I'm this grad student," said Gorman, 29, amazed by his transformation from geek to cybercommando. "Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined I'd be briefing government officials and private-sector CEOs."
Nor would I, Mr. Gorman.
Were it not for the still-resouding echoes of l'affaire Blair (which must still haunt the dreams of newspaper editors everywhere, inspiring if anything overly zealous fact-checking requirements), I would strongly suspect that most, if not all, of the article in question had simply been made up out of the whole cloth. Perhaps I'm just naive, but it's hard to credit that everyone from the faculty of GMU . . . through the unnamed financial-services 'executives' who, we're asked to believe, suggested that Mr. Gorman's laptop ought to be confiscated before he left the building where they were meeting . . . to his academic advisor, 'Uncle' John McCarthy (who really ought to know better) should be simultaneously dumbfounded by and terrified of Mr. Gorman's collation and correlation of information which is publicly available to anyone with a personal computer and a dial-up Internet account.
Irrespective of the inexplicable credulousness displayed by supposed industry professionals & researchers alike - none of whom really have an excuse for making such foolish utterances in public - the greater improbability in my mind is the notion that one can apparently obtain a PhD from George Mason University in exchange for nothing more than amassing output from the iterative use of traceroute, whois, MapQuest, NetGeo, and GnuPlot and passing it off as actual research.
Now that the postmodernists have been granted tenure, one supposes that any old nonsense will pass muster as learned discourse in this failed age we inhabit. Still, one feels that Mr. Gorman rather let the side down by going along with it all - perhaps in future he will have second thoughts before making himself party to the relentless journalistic overhyping of the merely commonplace as 'news'.
Then again, maybe not.
