Wisdom

Of course with a research task of this magnitude there are many profound voices discovered, transcribed, cherished and filed away to be later deployed amidst one’s own thoughts.  However, this does not always work out as intended and all too often these pearls of wisdom – or barbs of reality – get left behind.  I began this collection of quotes on the 25th January 2010 as I took the first tentative steps towards writing my thesis; here are the ones that got away …

[... Dotted amidst these quotes are some of the music I have been so thrilled to find during my cybernaut travels over the course of building this site.  Many thanks to Rollo & Grady, Dangerous Minds, TwentyFourBit, Drowned In Sound for their news, views and impeccable taste.  Not to mention the ever expanding universe of Bandcamp and SoundCloud for bringing distant musical constellations into such startling relief...]

“No man should try even to allude to the greater part of what he sees in his subject, and there is hardly a limit to what he may omit.  What is required is that he shall say what he elects to say discreetly; that he shall be quick to see the gist of a matter, and give it pithily without either prolixity or stint of words.”

-    Samuel Butler in On the Making of Music, Pictures and Books from The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (Transcribed from the 1912 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price)

“I’ve suggested elsewhere that we are also witnessing a shift from the collection of ‘things’ to the collection of ‘experiences’. We are moving toward what I call ‘experiential’ art. If that is correct, it implies other big changes. If we are going to buy experience, we can use technology to do it.”

-    Alvin Toffler, The Future and the Functions of Art: A Conversation between Alvin Toffler and John McHale (1972)

“… I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -  mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”

-    JG Ballard, Introduction to Crash (1995)

“Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.  Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.  If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.”

-    Samuel Butler in Darwin among the Machines letter to the Editor of the Press (Christchurch, New Zealand – 13 June, 1863)

“
I think that the most important aspect is that I am an artist whose theme is the impact of technology on society. So I am a novelist, but also a journalist, and a futurist, but also an antiquarian. I really want to understand how technology works on some deeper level; I want to know not just how it functions technically, but what it means and how it feels, which are basically literary questions. I’ve found that I do well if I just pursue that basic understanding and don’t worry too much about whether it is called “design studies” or “technohistory” or “corporate forecasting” or “computer journalism” or “science fiction.” These are taxonomical distinctions, they don’t have much to do with my central problem as an artist. Any field of study that can give me fresh and relevant insights will be welcome. I spend most of my working life doing research.”

-     Bruce Sterling, Dead Media Project, interview by Arpad Bak for the Hungarian net magazine,  Internet Kalauz.  (This extract is from a version which appeared at CTheory on 3/16/1999.)

“Our final aim is, not to “recuperate” the net.art in the art museum, but to make this project “open” to everyone. There will be no distinction between the artist and the audience, anyone can communicate with each other inter-actively.  And we expect that an utterly new form or definition of Art would emerge from our virtual museum — it might be a far-reaching dream, but we are ready to transform ourselves to attain the aim.”

-    Netarts.org, Manifesto, (http://www.netarts.org/about.html, 2008)

“Artists’ increasing use of technology is bringing to light a far-reaching and on-going discrepancy between artistic perception, art theory, and aesthetics, which are seen to be notably diverging instead of developing synchronously and congruently. This gulf between theoretical «corpus» and artistic practice culminates in a paradox that without doubt leads to the often proclaimed end of art.”

-    Claudia Giannetti, in Digital Aesthetics: Introduction, 2004

“Today the speed of logistics is also largely computational, but this is not to say virtual, immaterial or distant.  Quite the contrary.  Supermarket shelves, for example, are a human interface to a vast internet of things: a network of supply-chain, demand-chain and customer-relationship management softwares, steel containers, offshore factories, inter-modal exchange protocols – all forming an unimaginably complex, robust and nimble assembly of everyday purchase commands and vast economies of production and distribution.”

-     Bratton, Benjamin H.  “Logistics of Habitable Circulation.” Introduction to Speed and Politics, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2006

“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness.  Film, radio and magazines form a system.  Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together.  Even the aesthetic manifestations of political opposites proclaim the same inflexible rhythm.  The decorative administrative and exhibition buildings of industry differ little between authoritarian and other countries.  The bright monumental structures shooting up on all sides show off the systematic ingenuity of the tate-spanning combines, towards the unfettered entrepreneurial system, whose monuments are the dismal  residential and commercial blocks in the surrounding areas of desolate cities, was already swiftly advancing.”

-    Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1944)

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.

-    Walter Benjamin in Illuminations, (1936)

“We have met the enemy and he is us”, (Pogo).  The enemy is no longer outside. Increasingly, the enemy is no longer even clearly identifiable as such. Ever- present dangers blend together, barely distinguishable in their sheer numbers. Or, in their proximity to pleasure and intertwining with the necessary functions of body, self, family, economy, they blur into the friendly side of life. The Cold War in foreign policy has mutated into a state of generalized deterrence against an enemy without qualities. An unspecified enemy threatens to rise up at any time at any point in social or geographical space. From the welfare state to the warfare state: a permanent state of emergency against a multifarious threat as much in us as outside.

-    Brian Massumi, in Everywhere You Want To Be: An Introduction to Fear  (Makeworlds, 07/04/2004)

“…  the Lord has protected us so wonderfully these 225 years. And since 1812, this is the first time that we’ve been attacked on our soil and by far the worst results. And I fear, as Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said yesterday, that this is only the beginning. And with biological warfare available to these monsters – the Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Arafats – what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact – if, in fact – God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.

And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

-    Jerry Falwell on The 700 Club (September 13, 2001)
(Quote from Henry Jenkins, The 700 Club : http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions/interpretations/700club.html)

IT WUZ TEH BEST OV TIEMS, IT WUZ TEH WURST OV TIEMS, IT WUZ TEH AGE OV WISDOM, IT WUZ TEH AGE OV FOOLISHNES, IT WUZ TEH EPOCH OV BELIEF, IT WUZ TEH EPOCH OV INCREDULITY, IT WUZ TEH SEASON OV LIGHT, IT WUZ TEH SEASON OV DARKNES, IT WUZ TEH SPRIN OV HOPE, IT WUZ TEH WINTR OV DESPAIR, WE HAD EVRYTHIN BEFORE US, WE HAD NOTHIN BEFORE US, WE WUZ ALL GOIN DIRECT 2 CYBER HEAVEN, WE WUZ ALL GOIN DIRECT 2 CYBER HELL- IN SHORT, TEH PERIOD… WUZ SO FAR LIEK TEH PRESENT PERIOD, DAT SUM OV ITZ NOISIEST AUTHORITIEZ INSISTD ON ITZ BEAN RECEIVD, 4 GUD OR 4 EVIL, IN DA SUPERLATIV DEGREE OV COMPARISON ONLY.

-    Anonymous (2005) Posted on  4CHAN 
(This version sourced from jstchillin.org on 17-03-2011)

“Graphs, it seems, are the only mathematical tool that can provide a picture, a legible image, of the day-to-day and year-to-year movements of modern economies, which are so abstract. The man in this picture, sitting by his screens with his little American flag, spends all day moving vast sums of money that only exist as numbers, ideas, credit. The financial sector deals in notional money and speculates these notional sums against national economies, as rating agencies denounce or threaten one national economy after another. What does it all mean, this floating world of imaginary wealth and imaginary poverty? “

-    Jonathon Jones in Despair of a Downward Graph writing in the Guardian on Friday 29 July 2011 (see image : Richard Drew (2011-07-29) NY Stock Exchange Trader)

“A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc. – and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge.”

-    Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

-    Paul Valéry, Aesthetics, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” (1931) (translated by Ralph Manheim, p. 225. Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, New York, 1964)

“Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.
Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. At their core, all models of ubiquitous computing share a vision of small, inexpensive, robust networked processing devices, distributed at all scales throughout everyday life and generally turned to distinctly common-place ends.”

-    Marc Weiser in Ubiquitous Computing (March 17, 1996 8:00:04 PM)

“The cyberspace. A consensual hallucination, experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in all nations, by children who are being taught mathematical concepts. A graphic representation of data disregarding the banks of all the computers of the human system. An unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light not aligned in the space of mind, and nebulae constellations of data. As the city lights …”

-    William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984)

“In September 1999, the GNU/Linux operating system was awarded a prize by the jury of the art and technology festival Ars Electronica. This award – for the ‘.net’ category – converted a computer operating system, developed through open collaboration, into an artwork. Setting aside the question of the jury’s Duchampian gesture of nominating a tool of production as a work of art, the event could be said to signal the popularisation of the analogy, now frequently drawn, between avant-garde art practice and free software production. This analogy insists upon the recognition that the activities of making art and software are both defined by the necessarily collective nature of creative and intellectual production.”

-    Josephine Berry Slater, in Bare Code: Net Art & the Free Software Movement, (2005)

“A scientific world-view which does not profoundly come to terms with the problem of conscious minds does not have serious pretensions of completeness.
”

-    Sir Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, (1994)

“Art’s affair with technology has led to more than a marriage of materiality, and more than the augmentation of intelligence that high-speed computing power and ubiquitous networks bring to the human condition. The significant outcomes are as much spiritual as biological or social. In this reconfiguration of ourselves and our culture, the process of transformation lies between what I call cyberception, technologically extended cognition and perception, and the technoetic aesthetic, art allied to the technology of consciousness.”

-    Roy Ascott in Turning on Technology (1997)

“Virtual worlds are equivalent to a Copernican revolution. Before, we turn over the images, and now we turn inside them. Now we are not content with fondling them with the eyes. We mix with them and they drag us into their vertigo.

To produce in us the illusion that we can enter the pictures, like Alice in Wonderland, virtual worlds invade our cerebral cortex, with their laws and games. From there it came abysses experiences, but also hopes and thoughts of other places.”

-    Philippe Quéau in The Virtual, Paidós Editions, Barcelona, (1995)

“Architects of the twenty-first century will shape, arrange, and connect spaces (both real and virtual) to satisfy human needs. They will still care about the qualities of visual and ambient environment. They will still seek commodity, firmness, and delight. But commodity will be as much a matter of software functions and interface design as it is of floor plans and construction materials. Firmness will entail not only the physical integrity of structural systems, but also the logical integrity of computer systems. And delight? Delight will have unimagined new dimensions.”

-    William J Mitchell in  City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, (1995)

“The dimension is cyberspace as a world inhabited by bodies consisting of intangible digital ‘cells’ with the matrix form of hypertext, can work with the body of a smart system that constantly readjust according to the information supplied to it. The liquidity associated with the solvency of the architectural presence materials of the building projects in these webs of platforms for digital networks that mimic the architecture of human neural networks through nodes and links, storing these nodules’ digital cities’, with the mapping linking the speed of light gigabytes of information. These ‘fragments’ may contain bytes in the form of cathedrals, cities never seen, records topographic surface of distant planets, revisitações of sacred spaces disappeared and visited by surfers planning journeys in the form of authentic ocean shipments of complexity …
”

-    Hugo Ferrão in Architecture in Cyberspace (and the ‘non places’ inhabited by “men without qualities”). See http://www.uavm.net/english/exhibits/bytescrapers/bytescrapers.html.  (Date Unknown)

“A-Life describes a specific area of research investigating the principles that constitute a living system “without making reference to the materials that constitute it” (Adami 1998) as well as the ‘study of the general properties of “cognitive and intelligent abilities”’ (Risan 1997). For many researchers the capacity for the computational system to “evolve” is paramount to A-Life; this view is best summed up by A-Life researcher Thomas Ray who states “I would consider a system to be living if it is self-replicating, and capable of open-ended evolution” (Ray 1991).  It has also been observed that the present challenges of A-Life include “the transition to life, the evolutionary potential of life, and the relation between life and mind and culture” (Bedau, McCaskill, Packard et al. 2000).”

-    Mark Guglielmetti, in A-Life: the creation and development of new modes of realism, (Re:Live 09 Conference Paper, 2009)

“Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today—all so long as the RCAs of our day don’t use the law to protect themselves against this competition.”

-    Lawrence Lessig, in the Introduction to Free Culture (2004, p9)

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

-    Walter Benjamin  in Theses on the Philosophy of History, (1940)

“(Ernst) Cassirer’s definition of man as an animal symbolicum that lives in a symbolic universe is inherent in any discussion about human thinking, understanding, culture, and communication, including telecommunication and hypertext. In the age of computer interfaces, tele-working and global hypertexts, man truly lives no longer in a merely physical universe, but in a symbolic universe.”

-    Moritz Neumuller in  Hypertext Semiotics in the Commercialised Internet (ist.psu.edu, 2001)

“The future historian of the origins of molecular biology will, I hope, examine critically the purported role of information (or communication) theory. . . . Although the mathematics of information theory . . . appear to have had little application in biological research, the language they introduced was eagerly adopted by those engaged in the study of the genetics and metabolism of bacteria and viruses.”

-    Joseph Fruton in Skeptical Biochemist, (1992)

“The screen is not a simple rectangle but rather the homothetic surface of the viewfinder of his camera. It is the very opposite of a frame. The screen is a mask whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves hidden. “

-    Andr Bazin, in Jean Renoir (1973)

“… between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”

-    M.Foucault, Heterotopias,  (1967)

“We have met the enemy and he is us”, (Pogo).  The enemy is no longer outside. Increasingly, the enemy is no longer even clearly identifiable as such. Ever- present dangers blend together, barely distinguishable in their sheer numbers. Or, in their proximity to pleasure and intertwining with the necessary functions of body, self, family, economy, they blur into the friendly side of life. The Cold War in foreign policy has mutated into a state of generalized deterrence against an enemy without qualities. An unspecified enemy threatens to rise up at any time at any point in social or geographical space. From the welfare state to the warfare state: a permanent state of emergency against a multifarious threat as much in us as outside.”

-    Brian Massumi, in Everywhere You Want To Be.  An Introduction to Fear (Makeworlds, 07/04/2004)

“I don’t know where my expertise is; my expertise is no disciplines. I would recommend to drop disciplinarity wherever one can. Disciplines are an outgrowth of academia. In academia you appoint somebody and then in order to give him a name he must be a historian, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a biophysicist; he has to have a name.

Here is a human being: Joe Smith — he suddenly has a label around the neck: biophysicist. Now he has to live up to that label and push away everything that is not biophysics; otherwise people will doubt that he is a biophysicist. If he’s talking to somebody about astronomy, they will say “I don’t know, you are not talking about your area of competence, you’re talking about astronomy, and there is the department of astronomy, those are the people over there,” and things of that sort. Disciplines are an aftereffect of the institutional situation.”

-    Heinz von Foerster, SEHR, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind, (June 1995)

“In his seminal novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) about life in Paris and London, the English novelist Charles Dickens wrote  ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.’ aptly capturing the mood of the time.  Almost a hundred and fifty years later the feeling of disillusionment, the failure of politics to handle the ‘big’ problems, the recent financial collapse, the assault on the environment and a general sense of individual and collective alienation which a global society has not been able to rectify all seem palpable.  Might we be the observers of a universal depreciation of the system of thought, of an irreversible collapse of ideologies?  

In the field of cultural production the dominance of the art market, the ineffectiveness of cultural theory and the over-theorisation of culture seem to have dissociated art from real life.  In his provocatively titled book After Theory, the English theorist Terry Eagleton claims not the death of theory, but the redefinition of its goals and fields of research. Perhaps this time of uncertainty could be the moment for the reconsideration of the intrinsic worth of artistic practice. The moment to explore art as a privileged space for relatively free expression of ideas and for an alternative view of the world and the social environment. An art that goes back to life, back to Praxis, to the creative activity that contributes to the formation of a political view and to a new way of thinking and being. According to ancient Chinese philosophy, revolution is realignment with the order of the world. Could this be the time to seek a true revolution? Can art provide a window of opportunity in these uncertain times?”

-    Gabriela Salgado, Bisi Silva, Syrago Tsiara (http://www.thessalonikibiennale.gr, November 2008)

“How is it that we know when to say “wow”? Is there an atemporal cultural framework from which we can allow ourselves to say several kinds of “wow” at once? 

Can creative artists master this apparent confusion and then deploy it in a way that creates a frisson for others?  As critics, how would we know if artists were doing that well, or badly?”

-    Bruce Sterling, Studies in Atemporality, describing French futurist and satirist Albert Robida’s “test-tube baby” (Flickr set  June 14, 2009)

“At a recent Annenberg Research Park Colloquium session at the University of Southern California, UCLA’s Design | Media Arts professor Peter Lunenfeld said that his graduate media design students, given the task of depicting the future, could only show apocalypse. “If you’re working with students who have the ability to render worlds, and they can’t imagine that world, we’re in trouble,” he argued, adding that while students may harbor personal utopias, social visions of the future are invariably dystopian. Lunenfeld dubs this “the vision deficit,” and argued passionately for educators to find ways to help students create a new imaginary, one that isn’t driven by fear and disaster.”

-    Holly Willis, in Tactics and Haptics and a Future That’s Now  (2009)

“In any given device I find what we used to call the polemics on media convergence; today, the cell phone carries out the great convergence of Internet 2.0, and that is our raw material. All artistic praxes relying in technology meet there –in what theoreticians call social networks– and are now trying to get closer to that which concerns the users of this sort of devices: politic, social, economic, ecological issues…”

-    Humberto Jardón, (visual artist) at Transitio_MX festival, (2009)

“There are two kinds of scientific books worth reading. One is the monograph or treatise type, in which a more or less large field of science is presented in a systematic way, and in the form of a product as finished as possible at the given time. This kind of book may be considered a source of knowledge then available. The other type of book may present a collection of chapters or individual articles which do not claim to be a complete and systematic treatment of the subject; however the reader not only finds interesting ideas there, but the reading as such suggests new ideas. Such books are useful. For, although a rough and unfinished idea per se does not even remotely have the value of a well-elaborated scientific study, yet no elaborate study, no important theory, can be developed without first having a few rough ideas.”

-    Nicolas Rashevsky in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (Volume 16, Number 2 / June, 1954)

“Before September 11, a new mood of impatience was already taking hold, an insistence on putting forward social and economic alternatives that address the roots of injustice as well as its symptoms, from land reform to slavery reparations. Now seems like a good time to challenge the forces of both nihilism and nostalgia within our own ranks, while making more room for the voices– coming from Chiapas, Porto Alegre, Kerala– showing that it is indeed possible to challenge imperialism while embracing plurality, progress and deep democracy. Our task, never more pressing, is to point out that there are more than two worlds available, to expose all the invisible worlds between the economic fundamentalism of “McWorld” and the religious fundamentalism of “Jihad.” Maybe the image wars are coming to a close…
For years, we in this movement have fed off our opponents’ symbols–their brands, their office towers, their photo-opportunity summits. We have used them as rallying cries, as focal points, as popular education tools. But these symbols were never the real targets; they were the levers, the handles. They were what allowed us, as British writer Katharine Ainger recently put it, “to open a crack in history.” The symbols were only ever doorways. It’s time to walk through them.”

-    Naomi Klein in Sign of the Times (Makeworlds, 2004)

“FIFA’s refusal to use technology to help decide on close calls has left soccer isolated in major international sport, clinging to the idea that human error is somehow preferable to computer-backed truth.”

-    Reuters (2010) http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/29/2939625.htm

“We are in a place where I think the benefits of cyberspace, which are huge, have been greatly outstripped by the risks of cyberspace,”

-    “U.S. intelligence official”, from Russia and China accused of cyber-spying campaign to steal U.S. secrets by Ken Dilanian in the Los Angeles Times, (August 12, 2011)