I must mention to you some of you yet again! I am probably imagining things as usual. I mean it keeps you thinking. The CIA recruited one of my international team at Intel, who went to the PRC with me several times in and 85, to write down and get the business cards of everyone we met and turn them in with a debriefing.
Bill Langner is his name and we had gone to China together several times before he mentioned his role to me. Oh well — things like this always seem to be happening. I actually think I am just playing; doing recreational mental summersaults since I like to get dizzy…. Anyway this is not a story about spies.
This is a story about how impressive the internet is and about how a guy named Darrell Owens did the best job EVER explaining and impressing upon Margo and me just how amazing it is. The internet is the work of man — harnessing the most uniquely magical forces and elements we humans have yet to figure out.
There have been billions of man hours spent figuring out how to do what the internet does.. Perhaps the most unsung are Maurer, Keck, Schultz, and Kao who made fibre optic cables possible and harnessed the speed of light: Patent Darrell knows as much about the communications infrastructure of emerging countries through out the globe as any man alive. He told me once he was locked up in a tin-sheet jail far out in the boondocks of the Congo near Kinsangani or Mbuji-Myal or Kindu or someplace like that — real shitholes.
He had been mapping the infrastructure of the phone network. In any case Darrell knows how the network infrastructures around the world work. He and I met up at an conference in Livingston, Zambia back in about ; I was a keynote speaker and Darryl was leading a workshop. Margo had accompanied me which was not typical for my business trips but she was interested in schools and arts in Third World countries and had done programs in Cambodia, Southern China and Singapore and met with school children all throughout India and Vietnam.
