First it was a nimble and versatile typewriter, then a hefty number cruncher, and now it is becoming the ultimate communications device, connected by modem and telephone lines to an amorphous global network called the Internet. I eagerly invested in one of the earliest personal computers, a quaint little machine that I now realize was the research equivalent of training wheels. I also bought a modem when such devices were little more than clumsy novelties and dutifully plugged into a telephone jack, only to discover there was nothing of any significance on the other end of the line. Many things have changed. My three computers are now swifter and more capacious than I could have imagined in 1982.
Modems are smaller, faster and far more cunning than their predecessors.
But still there is not as much really useful information at the other end of the line as I would like. Two years ago, I sat down to lunch with an officer of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, a small and respected institution located in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was concerned that public information about developments in Iran and the Persian Gulf was so meager and distorted that the United States was at risk of stumbling into a new crisis in that volatile region out of sheer ignorance. I was thoroughly sympathetic. I had been a member of the National Security Council staff in the White House during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, and I had written two books about US crisis decision-making in circumstances of uncertain or deliberately false information.