Michael Brooks: Alleged hacker is my biggest fan

Jake Davis, the teenager accused of hacking into News International and the Serious Organised Crime Squad networks, carried my new book, Free Radicals: The secret anarchy of science into court. Today, I woke up to find myself hot property, with news articles examining why Davis would be so interested in a science book. The thing everyone wants to know is, how does it make me feel? Well, it's nice to see a reader. And it's nice to appeal to teenagers in particular.
So many of his generation think science is dull, beyond them and something that has no need of their input. That's because every generation before them has colluded in creating the myth that science is boring, that scientists are dull, passionless, cold and logical.
Science is far too important to our futures to let that situation just roll on through another generation. After all, these are the people who will have to make decisions about climate change, genetic engineering, medical technologies and energy production.
The book is about what scientists really do - the lengths they go to to make discoveries. They fight and brawl, they sometimes cheat and take drugs. They perform reckless experiments on themselves. They lie when they have to. There are no rules - or at least they act as if there are no rules. So, yes I'm very happy that more people - especially teenagers - are now going to see scientists as they really are: adventurers and risk-takers.
We're all living twice as long as people 200 years ago because of pioneering scientists who have created extraordinary medical advances - sometimes through life-threatening experiments on themselves. We have mobile phones and the internet because of risk-taking, adventurous scientists (we have iPods because of Steve Jobs of Apple, who says that taking LSD was one of the most important things he ever did in his life). Even just being a scientist often involves defending your work from the rabid attacks of colleagues. It's not for wimps.
I can imagine Davis sees himself as someone who lives outside the law, who isn't afraid of authority, who is smart and driven to do bigger, more audacious things than anyone around him. In that sense, he's very like some of the characters in Free Radicals. I'm not endorsing drug use, hacking or reckless self-experimentation, but If there's one thing I'd like to see come out of this strange moment in my life, it is having more of the risk-taking, adventurous teens view science as something they would like to get involved with.
Michael Brooks @'New Scientist'
Read Michael Brooks's exclusive New Scientist feature based on his book, Free Radicals.

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Carrying a copy of 'Free Radicals: the Secret Anarchy of Science by Michael Brooks'
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Getting Bin Laden

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft. Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because of this obsession, Pakistan’s “principal air defenses are all pointing east,” Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. “No one leaves their borders unattended,” he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan’s radars—“It’s not where the radars are or aren’t”—he said that the American infiltration was the result of “technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S.” The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening “skin.”
The SEALs’ destination was a house in the small city of Abbottabad, which is about a hundred and twenty miles across the Pakistan border. Situated north of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, Abbottabad is in the foothills of the Pir Panjal Range, and is popular in the summertime with families seeking relief from the blistering heat farther south. Founded in 1853 by a British major named James Abbott, the city became the home of a prestigious military academy after the creation of Pakistan, in 1947. According to information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency, bin Laden was holed up on the third floor of a house in a one-acre compound just off Kakul Road in Bilal Town, a middle-class neighborhood less than a mile from the entrance to the academy. If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

 

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