An Algorithm is Watching You

 Annamaria on Monday

This past week I googled this question: "Can a crocodile smell blood?"

As you may have surmised from seeing my recent posts about the air war in East Africa in 1915, I am working on the fifth book in my Africa series, to be called The Sharpest Tooth.  Yes!  My story involves, in addition to the regular series characters, a young sailor aboard one of the combat vessels.  When I asked the crocodile question, I already knew that a pilot who crash-landed in the Rufiji River in 1915 and disappeared was assumed to have been eaten by a croc.  I wanted to know if such an event would  bring more crocs near my young hero floating on a river monitor barely a two feet above the water.  Google gave me this answer:

Then I began to wonder what the spying bots would make of the kinds of things that I and my fellow MIE authors type into their search engines.

I had been aware for some time that the things crime writers talk about can be misleading to eavesdroppers.  I had, for instance, participated in such a conversation.  Years ago, when I was the president of the NY Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, I had to co-sign the chapter's checks with treasurer.  She worked in Times Square, and I researched at the New York Public Library a couple of blocks away from her office. Once a month, we met for a coffee so we could sign together.  And it gave us a delightful opportunity to chat.  On one such day, she was telling me about a problem she was having with a plot:

She: Do you know an expert in poisons?

Me: I have a book about them at home. I'll be glad to lend it to you.

She: Great.  I want it to look like suicide, so I need to find a poison that is not at all easy to detect.

With that, the people sitting near us moved to another table. 

When she and I laughed, it probably only cemented their suspicions.

But what would an eavesdropping algorithm make of such an exchange.  We all know that bots belonging to search engines are spying on our every move on the Internet.  

(It occurred to me as I typed the above sentence, that the letter "I" in AI does not refer to intelligence, as in the capacity of big-brained humans to solve problems, make decisions, etc. etc.  It is really much more like the "I" in CIA and MI5.)

I began fretting over this issue years ago when I was researching Idol of Mombasa.  Each book in my Africa series has a plot that involves one of the Ten Commandments, and it also has another sin, not forbidden by Biblical law, but one that I have the audacity to think should have a Commandment.  In Idol of Mombasa that other sin is slavery, and a lot of the story's tension stems from the conflict between British law and Sharia law.  By 1912, the Brits had outlawed slavery, but Sharia, the law embraced by the Muslim population, did not.  And Mombasa, newly taken over by the Brits, had been an Arabic city for a couple of millennia. To write that book I needed to learn a lot about Islam in East Africa

I was beginning that research in 2014, when the US was deeply involved in a war in Afghanistan, and there was a lot on the news about home-grown young men being recruited for terrorism. And there I was googling question after question after question about what Sharia law said about x or Y.

Do you think it wrong of me to imagine that there might have been a bot watching?

More to the point of MIE, what do you suppose the spying bots think of the questions you ask? 

The Air War: East Africa 1915, Part 2

 Annamaria on Monday

A few weeks back, I gave you the Indiana Jones-like story of Herbert Dennis Cutler, the first pilot ever to attack a battleship.

That story, about a relative failure, told of Admiral King-Hall (above), whom one historian called "the ugliest man in the Royal Navy."  He may not have been handsome, but he was not a quitter either. He persisted in his effort to use aeroplanes against the Royal Navy's nemesis: the Konigsberg. 

  

By early 1915, Britain had established The Royal Naval Air Service.  The fight against the Konigsberg had the British navy's highest priority.  King-Hall, in charge of that goal, requisitioned a squadron to carry on with his plan.  Enter Lieutenant John Tullock Cull, who arrived in British East Africa with two Sopwith hydroplanes and accompanying officers and a crew of mechanics.  They took up residence at a newly built airstrip on Mafia Island, in Indian Ocean, just off the African east coast, which had easy access to the Rufiji Delta, where the Konigsberg was hiding out.  Oh, and did I say that RNAS men also brought with them racks of sixteen and fifty pound bombs.

Problem was that the Sopwith planes literally fell apart in the humid, equatorial climate.  Their laminated, hardwood propellers became literally unglued, spinning in the muggy air.  The engines seized up.  One had an exhaust valve failure that cut the engine in midair, and the plane dropped into the drink.  Cull survived.  The Sopwith did not.

Try though they may, the mechanics could not overcome the problems and make the planes strong enough to carry more than a pilot, much less a copilot and heavy bombs.  In fact, when they did fly with just the pilot, they ascended barely high enough to avoid the tree tops.

But like their Admiral, King-Hall's men were not quitters! They brought in two Caudron and two Henry Farnum seaplanes.  Though older models than the Sopwiths, they were, one hoped, more likely to stand up to the climate.  They did.  Well, sort of.  In April of 1915, Sublieutenant Arnold joined Cull on one of the flimsy Farnums.  They got the thing up to about 800 feet and made for the delta. Traveling at a pokey 60 mph, they were subject to Germans firing on them from the ground.  Suddenly a huge explosion behind them caused a shock wave that hit the plane.  It sputtered.  Nevertheless less, Cull descended to 700 feet and banked the plane for a better look, with the full knowledge that he was making it easier for the German riflemen to hit them.  He saw where the big shell had come from.

There is was!  The Konigsberg, anchored at a bend in the river, facing downstream, ready to break out of its hiding place.  Cull circled twice, and just for fun he and Arnold took a few potshots at the battleship with their pistols.  Cull grabbed his Brownie camera and took several  photographs of 

the Konigsberg before he hightailed it off into the clouds and made for open water.  This time the enemy on the ground hit the Farnum with small arms fire.  The engine quit.

Culll managed to land the seaplane within a mile or so of the Mafia airstrip.  Steam launches came to tow the plane to safety.  A German bullet was later found in engines' oil-feed.

But Cull has had made history!  The photographs he took that day were the first ever taken from the air of a battleship under siege.