From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, August 13
NYT — read the full story
A memo memo stamped "authorized" lands on the desk of the first corporation willing to swing back. The New York Times reports the Trump administration has cleared American companies to mount offensive cyberattacks against criminals — ... not defend against them... but attack first. This flips forty years of policy that kept private hacking illegal and mirrors the playbook China has run on us. The inversion is complete: we spent decades lecturing Beijing on restraint, and now we've licensed the thing we condemned. Franklin takes the opening, then Thoreau.
I read the account this morning over my chocolate, and laughed until the cup trembled in my hand. A government that spent decades preaching the virtue of the shield now hands out swords to every merchant who can afford a forge, and calls it policy. You know the feeling , the one where the preacher climbs down from the pulpit to pick the pocket of the collection plate. We have seen this before. In '56 the Crown issued letters of marque to any captain willing to harry French shipping in the Atlantic. Privateers they called them, patriotism with a profit motive.
By '63 the same captains were seizing neutral Dutch vessels off the Guinea coast, and the Admiralty courts spent years untangling the mess. The law of unintended consequences keeps a better ledger than any comptroller. A tradesman in this coffeehouse asked me yesterday whether a man may strike back when his warehouse is broken into. I told him the law permits defense of property, not vengeance disguised as justice. The distinction is thin as a shilling's edge, and dulls fast in angry hands. Now a great republic — ours, if the papers speak true — has declared that distinction optional for those who carry the right commission.
The irony is not lost on me. For twenty years in Paris I listened to the ministers of Louis the sixteenth complain that English privateers were the scourge of civilization, while their own ports fitted out corsairs by the dozen. Nations condemn in others what they practice in secret. The only novelty here is the secrecy abandoned. A letter of marque does not make a pirate a patriot. It only gives the Crown a share of the plunder.
war, put us to the immense expence of defending that long extended frontier; we shall then, as it were, have our backs against a wall in America, the sea-coast will be easily protected by our superior naval power; and here “our own watchfulness and our own strength” will be prope…
Sir H Clinton to treat in America. Has anything of this kind happened? and what terms? I mean to ask, if it be public & proper to give Information.— I see likewise a very extraordinary assertion in the Spanish Manifesto of Motives &c, published last Summer; viz that while the Bri…
<Nantes, November 7, 1778: Repeated captures of American vessels off this coast induce us to seek more effective protection. The intelligence our enemies obtain about the departure of our ships allows their capture as soon as the French frigates part from their convoy. Not only a…
molestation or hindrance; And all Fishermen, all Cultivators of the Earth and all Artizans or Manufacturers unarmed and inhabiting unfortified towns, Villages or Places, who labour for the common subsistence and benefit of Mankind, and peaceably following their respective employm…
of happiness. And agree after the words “in their own” to insert “or any other”. But we still propose it for consideration whether it will be expedient to either party to disarm itself entirely of the power of retaliating on any particular nation which may restrain the loading of…
I walked the bean-field this morning before the dew lifted. A red-tailed hawk circled above the woodchuck's hole , waited, stooped, missed, circled again. The woodchuck knew the hawk's shadow before the hawk knew the woodchuck's burrow. This is the law the newspaper calls new: the strong authorize the strong to strike the named enemy, and call it defense. The merchant concerns of Boston have long paid constables to guard their wharves. Now Washington writes them letters of marque for a warfare without ships or powder , invisible projectiles along copper threads.
They will strike at those called thieves in a realm no jury can see. The magistrate who cannot keep his own ledger straight grants license to private vengeance. I have seen this before: the militia called out against Shays's men, the volunteers marching for Mexico, the posse comitatus hunting fugitives who owed nothing... but their labor. The weapon changes. The warrant does not.
A boy on the Common throws stones at a wasp nest. The wasps sting the boy. The boy cries for his father's cane. The nest is broken, the wasps scattered, and the boy calls it victory. He does not ask who built the nest in the eaves of his father's house. The ice goes out on Walden with a sound like thunder.
The hawk returns to the same pine. The woodchuck feeds at dusk, unconcerned.
with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say, “that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cann…
the State, that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union, which have prevented them from resisting the State? How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy _it?_ Is there any enjoyment in it, if…
a secondary at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.” He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist…
of his own when he demands it; “Render therefore to Cæsar that which is Cæsar’s and to God those things which are God’s,”—leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know. When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, what…
a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. Wh…
The story ran in the New York Times. We just handed private companies a license to hack back — something the U.S. spent decades telling everyone else not to do. That's Old News for today.