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Friday, July 5, 2013

Social Media Updates on Clashes in Cairo

Chaotic clashes broke out on Friday night between supporters and opponents of the ousted Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, in a riverside neighborhood of downtown Cairo near Tahrir Square, drawing thousands of people into the streets and shutting down a major bridge spanning the Nile.

The violence appeared to have started shortly after sunset, when a large Islamist march moved across downtown Cairo’s Sixth of October Bridge in the direction of Tahrir Square, where Mr. Morsi’s opponents held a large rally on Friday, according to a report by The Associated Press. The report said that 10 people were killed and 210 were injured in protests and clashes nationwide on Friday, but the actual toll of the clashes was not clear.

Ayman Mohyeldin, a correspondent for NBC News, posted a picture on Twitter of what he described as “thousands” of pro-Morsi protesters crossing Cairo’s Sixth of October Bridge at sunset, shortly before violence erupted in the area.

Sherine Tadros, a correspondent for Al Jazeera English, watched the street battle unfold after nightfall from a nearby office building in a corner of the neighborhood known as Maspero, and posted regular updates on Twitter.

For almost two hours, neither police nor military forces intervened as the two sides battled each other with rocks, fireworks and guns, leading some on social media to bitterly mock the security forces, including an activist, Ahmed Aggour.

Tarek Shalaby, a prominent activist who was among the crowd of Mr. Morsi’s opponents, shared pictures and observations about the clashes in a series of updates posted to Twitter. The most pitched battles appeared to be on Sixth of October Bridge, he said, and near the Ramses Hilton, a towering luxury hotel.

Mr. Shalaby, an activist against human rights abuses under Egypt’s previous military government, also expressed dismay that many anti-Morsi protesters were chanting slogans in support of the defense minister, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who announced Mr. Morsi’s ouster in a nationally televised address on Wednesday.

Adham Abdel Salam, a presenter on Nile FM, an Egyptian radio station, was also present among the anti-Morsi protesters and documented his experience of the clashes through a series of updates posted to Twitter.

Mr. Abdel Salam said that he believed he had seen a protester killed, and also accused Mr. Morsi’s supporters of firing live ammunition at their opponents, but neither claim could be independently verified.



Using E-Mail Data to Connect the Dots of Your Life

The Obama administration for over two years allowed the National Security Agency to collect enormous amounts of metadata on e-mail usage by Americans, according to one of the latest leaks of government documents by the now-famous whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden.

But what is e-mail metadata anyway? It’s information about the people you’re sending e-mails to and receiving e-mails from, and the times that the messages were sent â€" as opposed to the contents of the messages. It’s the digital equivalent of a postal service worker looking at your mail envelope instead of opening it up and reading what’s inside.

That sounds harmless, but it turns out your e-mail metadata can be used to connect the dots of your life story. I learned this from participating in Immersion, a project by M.I.T.’s Media Laboratory, earlier reported by my colleague Juliet Lapidos. Immersion is a tool that mines your e-mail metadata and automatically stitches it all together into an interactive graphic. The result is a creepy spider web showing all the people you’ve corresponded with, how they know each other, and who your closest friends and professional partners are.

After entering my Google mail credentials, Immersion took five minutes to stitch together metadata from e-mails going back eight years. A quick glimpse at my results gives an accurate description of my life.

In an Immersion chart, each person is represented by dots. The more you’ve e-mailed with the person, the bigger the dot gets. In my results, the biggest dot was my boss at my last job; the second biggest was my long-term former girlfriend. The medium-size ones were some of my closest friends. Lines that connected some dots showed friends of mine who knew each other.

One can imagine that mining the metadata of a person suspected of a crime is an effective tool to track down his accomplices. But considering how easily and quickly this can be done, it’s not hard to assume that the government collects these records on just about everyone. That seems to be the point that Immersion is trying to make.

After being thoroughly disturbed, I removed Immersion’s permission to access my account and asked the project to delete my metadata. But it left me with the feeling that more about me is already known than I’d like, and it’s already too late.



The Price of Amazon

The Amazon.com story is remarkable. Within living memory, bookselling was a local activity. A major city would have two or three large independent stores selling new books and other large, scruffier stores selling secondhand books. Paperbacks would receive wide if uneven circulation on bus station and drugstore racks. It was not a perfect system, but it had the advantage of being diffuse and thus hard to control. The hippie, black and women’s movements of the 1960s would not have been so successful in challenging authority without the bookstores, which made their ideas widely available and sympathetic in a way that television, for instance, did not.

That transmission system has now been largely dismantled, killed by high rents and new technology. With little discussion, Amazon has skillfully absorbed a large part of the book trade. It sells about one in four new books, and the vast number of independent sellers on its site increases its market share even more. It owns as a separate entity the largest secondhand book network, Abebooks. And of course it has a majority of the e-book market.

The company is a marvel in many ways. You can get almost any print book you want, by the end of the week! And Amazon will pay the postage! For book lovers, it was a dream come true. Amazon presents itself as less a company and more a public utility. One of its greatest accomplishments is the way it has made the future of bookselling seem as if it will inevitably be owned by Amazon.

One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book’s “real” price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim. The first seeds of this can be seen in the Justice Department’s suit against the leading publishers, who felt that Amazon was pricing their e-books so low that it threatened their viability. The government accused the publishers of colluding to raise prices in an anti-consumer move. Amazon was not a party to the case,  but it emerged the big winner.

Perhaps as a result, the question of how Amazon prices books is now a radioactive topic with some publishers. While reporting my article in Friday’s New York Times, I tried to ask the University of Chicago Press why Amazon seemed to be cutting discounts on its books, effectively making them more expensive and thus possibly less salable. Laura Avey, promotions manager, replied: “This just isn’t something that anyone here is going to be able to comment on. Pricing questions involve proprietary information, and we just aren’t able to share that.”

One of the few publishers willing to speak his mind about Amazon is Dennis Loy Johnson, proprietor of the Melville House, one of the most interesting new presses since its founding in 2001. Melville had an immediate hit last month with a rediscovered article by James Agee, “Cotton Tenants.” But as sales slow in the days since publication, Amazon is charging more for it.

The price-tracking site camelcamelcamel shows “Cotton Tenants,” which lists for $24.95, moving from $16 on Amazon shortly after publication to $19.79 last week before falling back slightly to the current $19.23. If you were a few weeks late getting the news about “Cotton Tenants,” you paid 20 percent more.

But it is still cheaper than the neighborhood bookstore, assuming of course there is one left. Right?

“I don’t like the fact that there’s one retailer able to so massively underprice other retailers, especially in a business that so desperately needs more retailers,” Mr. Johnson said. “And I don’t like the inconsistency of the pricing, either â€" the raising, the lowering â€" because it sends a confusing message that good books are worth less, and because it encourages buying based on something other than the quality of the book. It’s just an unhealthy business if people are buying a thing mostly because of its price, not its quality. That’s how you sell widgets, not books.”

“Discounting, and especially inconsistent or shifting discounting, really messes with a publisher’s ability to price a book fairly and accurately to its cost,” he added. “You have to consider the fact that whatever price you put on the cover, Amazon is going to reduce it by as much as half â€" unless they don’t â€" or they may, but only for a while. But in short they’re going to make your book look like a thing with a cost lower than the one you placed on it.

“So do you raise the price, knowing they’re going to lower it, so that the price will then appear closer to what you need it to be? But if you do that then you’re screwing the more honest retailers who can’t discount. And we’ve gotten a long way from recognition of the fact that publishers have costs in making books, and that should have something to do with the price.”



The Death of Photography Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

The Fourth of July celebration this year was very different for Americans who use social media. Last year, as the fireworks burst in the air, people pulled out their smartphones and snapped still pictures. This year, they had a new tool in their life-documenting arsenal: video.

Over the last several months, a number of short video services have moved into the mainstream, including Vine, which allows people to record six-second videos, and Instagram, which introduced 15-second videos last month.

People are clearly using these services. Anyone who visited a social network stream on Thursday night would have seen endless videos of pops and sparkles in the air.

For years, photographers have been bracing for this moment, warned that the last rites will be read for photography when video technology becomes good enough for anyone to record. But as this Fourth of July showed me, I think the reports of the death of photography have been greatly exaggerated.

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, there is the creation side, where taking a pretty still image - especially with a fancy filter â€" is a lot easier than creating a stunning video. Ask videographers, and they will tell you that shooting beautiful videos is really, really hard.

But the real reason photos aren’t going to be eclipsed by video is because of the way the human mind works.

“One of the things we love about the still image is the way in which it can stimulate the imagination to create a fiction around an image,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard. “The fact that we can commit a single image to memory in a way that we cannot with video is a big reason photography is still used so much today.”

Video is difficult to commit to memory. We tend to remember snapshots of a moving sequence of images, rather than the entire sequence.

Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, describes the way people remember things as “flashbulb memories.” He argues that “the brain’s memory system works something like a pen and notebook.”

Think about a profound moment in history: Sept. 11, 2001. The Hindenburg disaster. Barack Obama becoming the first African-American president of the United States. If you remember these events, there is a likely chance that you will recall a photo of the point, not the moving image, or video, of the moment.

Mr. Kelsey said the perfect example of this can be seen with the photo “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” by Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for The Associated Press. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who does not remember that iconic image, even today.

“There was film taken of the same scene at Iwo Jima that doesn’t bear any consideration,” Mr. Kelsey said. “Part of what makes that photo so extraordinary is all the contingent circumstances: It was the perfect moment. When you see all the moments on one side or the other, or moving, it looks banal, it drains away the magic of the moment.”

When I sat down on the couch last night at the end of the day to see what wonders people had documented on their smartphones and then posted online, I saw a lot of ephemeral videos of fireworks that I watched once and then continued on my way. But I did see one image that was being shared repeatedly on Facebook and Twitter that wasn’t a video on Vine, Instagram or YouTube.

Instead, it was a black and white photo taken by a Daily News photographer on July 4, 1986, of fireworks illuminating the Statue of Liberty during her 100th birthday celebration.

Something tells me that 100 years from now, we’ll still be sharing that photo on the Fourth of July, or one like it, not a futuristic video of the day.



The Death of Photography Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

The Fourth of July celebration this year was very different for Americans who use social media. Last year, as the fireworks burst in the air, people pulled out their smartphones and snapped still pictures. This year, they had a new tool in their life-documenting arsenal: video.

Over the last several months, a number of short video services have moved into the mainstream, including Vine, which allows people to record six-second videos, and Instagram, which introduced 15-second videos last month.

People are clearly using these services. Anyone who visited a social network stream on Thursday night would have seen endless videos of pops and sparkles in the air.

For years, photographers have been bracing for this moment, warned that the last rites will be read for photography when video technology becomes good enough for anyone to record. But as this Fourth of July showed me, I think the reports of the death of photography have been greatly exaggerated.

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, there is the creation side, where taking a pretty still image - especially with a fancy filter â€" is a lot easier than creating a stunning video. Ask videographers, and they will tell you that shooting beautiful videos is really, really hard.

But the real reason photos aren’t going to be eclipsed by video is because of the way the human mind works.

“One of the things we love about the still image is the way in which it can stimulate the imagination to create a fiction around an image,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard. “The fact that we can commit a single image to memory in a way that we cannot with video is a big reason photography is still used so much today.”

Video is difficult to commit to memory. We tend to remember snapshots of a moving sequence of images, rather than the entire sequence.

Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, describes the way people remember things as “flashbulb memories.” He argues that “the brain’s memory system works something like a pen and notebook.”

Think about a profound moment in history: Sept. 11, 2001. The Hindenburg disaster. Barack Obama becoming the first African-American president of the United States. If you remember these events, there is a likely chance that you will recall a photo of the point, not the moving image, or video, of the moment.

Mr. Kelsey said the perfect example of this can be seen with the photo “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” by Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for The Associated Press. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who does not remember that iconic image, even today.

“There was film taken of the same scene at Iwo Jima that doesn’t bear any consideration,” Mr. Kelsey said. “Part of what makes that photo so extraordinary is all the contingent circumstances: It was the perfect moment. When you see all the moments on one side or the other, or moving, it looks banal, it drains away the magic of the moment.”

When I sat down on the couch last night at the end of the day to see what wonders people had documented on their smartphones and then posted online, I saw a lot of ephemeral videos of fireworks that I watched once and then continued on my way. But I did see one image that was being shared repeatedly on Facebook and Twitter that wasn’t a video on Vine, Instagram or YouTube.

Instead, it was a black and white photo taken by a Daily News photographer on July 4, 1986, of fireworks illuminating the Statue of Liberty during her 100th birthday celebration.

Something tells me that 100 years from now, we’ll still be sharing that photo on the Fourth of July, or one like it, not a futuristic video of the day.



Videos Show Shooting of Protester in Egypt

As my colleagues Ben Hubbard, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El-Sheikh report from Cairo, large protests in support of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi were marred by violence on Friday, when witnesses said that at least five demonstrators were killed by security forces outside the Republican Guards barracks where it is believed Mr. Morsi is being held.

Reuters reported that one of its journalists saw Egyptian security forces fire into the air, then “heard shotgun fire” and saw “at least eight demonstrators hit,” as a military helicopter flew over the crowd.

Simon Hanna, a British-Egyptian journalist in Cairo, drew attention to a video posted on YouTube on Friday that appeared to show at least one pro-Morsi protester shot in the head from close range by Egyptian troops standing behind barbed wire outside the barracks where Mr. Morsi is believed to be held. The video contains graphic content.

Video posted to YouTube on Friday shows a pro-Morsi protester shot in the head and killed by Egyptian security forces outside the barracks where the deposed president is believed to be held.

Cliff Cheney, an American photojournalist who lives and works in Egypt, drew attention to a second video that appeared to show the same dead protester from a different angle. Mr. Cheney was not in Egypt on Friday.

Video posted to YouTube on Friday appeared to show the body of the same protester shot by Egyptian security forces from a second angle.

Before the shooting began, Reuters said that its journalist observed the following interaction between pro-Morsi protesters and Egyptian soldiers guarding the barracks.

He had seen hundreds of demonstrators approach the military cordon. A handful of men walked to a barbed wire barrier and place a poster of Mursi on it. A soldier removed it and tore it up. The crowd shouted curses at the soldiers, some waved shoes in a traditional gesture of insult.

The Egyptian-British journalist and blogger Sarah Carr, who was at the scene of the shooting, said in an update posted to Twitter that a witness told her that a man was shot by Republican Guards after he tried to put a picture of Mr. Morsi on the barbed wire ringing their barracks. She later posted a picture of the man to Twitter.

Alastair Beach, a correspondent in Cairo for the British newspaper The Independent who was at the scene of the shooting, said in an update posted to Twitter that shots were fired when protesters approached the barbed-wire barricade after soldiers had warned them not to. However, he said, some witnesses told him that the shooter was not a uniformed soldier, but one of several men behind the barricade who appeared to be in civilian clothes.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, a Cairo-based correspondent for The Nation magazine and the radio show Democracy Now, was reporting from the protests when the shooting began. He posted a series of updates and pictures to Twitter that captured the tension and confusion in the crowd, and also showed at least one dead body being carried away in a makeshift funeral shroud.

Jeremy Bowen, Middle East editor for the BBC, was also reporting from the protest when the violence broke out, and said he was mildly injured when he was hit on the head by several shotgun pellets. He posted several updates to Twitter throughout the shooting and immediately afterward, describing what he witnessed, including the body of one protester that he believed had been killed by “live fire” from the security forces.

After the shooting ended, Mr. Kouddous posted a picture to Twitter of Mr. Bowen staring at the ground as two men wrapped his head injury with a white bandage. “He’s O.K.,” Mr. Kouddous said.

Robert Mackey contributed reporting.



Technology Workers Are Young (Really Young)

It’s well known that technology is a young man’s game. Still, it is surprising to see just how young (and how male).

PayScale, a company based in Seattle, has determined that the median age of workers at many of the most successful companies in the technology industry, along with information on gender and years of experience.

Just six of the 31 companies it looked at had a median age greater than 35 years old. Seven of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or younger. Women were generally less than 30 percent of the work force, and in fields like semiconductors, represented much less than that.

While the results may affirm a widely held hunch, they are nonetheless striking: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall median age of American workers is 42.3 years old. The company with the oldest workers on the PayScale list, Hewlett - Packard, came in at 41 years.

The other five companies with older workers, in descending order of median age, were I.B.M. Global Services (38 years old), Oracle (38), Nokia (36), Dell (37) and Sony (36).

The seven companies with the youngest workers, ranked from youngest to highest in median age, were Facebook (28); Zynga (28); Google (29); and AOL, Blizzard Entertainment, InfoSys, and Monster.com (all 30). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only shoe stores and restaurants have workers with a median age less than 30.

Median age means that an equal number of workers are above and below the figure. In large populations, the number is considered representative. PayScale, which surveys many industries, says it covers 3 percent of the American work force, an amount that could yield meaningful results.

Not surprisingly, the companies with older workers tend to be older companies, because some people still stay with one employer for many years, and over time a company may accumulate more of these people. Cisco Systems has a median worker age of 35, and both Samsung and Microsoft come in at 34. These companies also tend to have workers with a lot more experience.

Younger companies tend to have workers with less time at the firm, which is partly an effect of being new and hiring intensively in recent years. Facebook’s median worker has been with the company just 1.1 years, while Intel, I.B.M., Oracle and others come in around six years.

Other factors are also in play, however. “The firms that are growing or innovating around new areas tend to have younger workers,” said Katie Bardaro, the lead economist at PayScale. “Older companies that aren’t changing with the times get older workers.”

One reason for this, she said, was a function of skills. “Baby Boomers and Gen Xers tend to know C# and SQL,” she said. C# is a software language, while SQL is a database technology. She added, “Gen Y knows Python, social media, and Hadoop,” which are newer versions of those things.

Amazon.com, notably, has a median stay with the company of just one year, a figure Ms. Bardaro ascribed to the intense pace of work there. (The study did not include workers in Amazon’s warehouses, where skills and turnover are different.) “We’re based in Seattle, and know a lot of people at Amazon,” she said. “The consensus is that you are run through a gamut there, make money, burn out and leave.”

The survey was derived from information PayScale gets from individuals who come to PayScale seeking employment information, and volunteer their data to share information from others. PayScale, which works with LinkedIn, sells its data to human resources departments. Ms. Bardaro said her company had also backed up the information with third-party data, to confirm the numbers.



Rediscovering Radio Through Apps

Growing up, the radio provided the soundtrack for doing my hair in the morning and the ride to school. It kept me company during late nights while I finished my homework and entertained during long summer road trips with my family.

Fast forward a few years. I got a CD player for my car and cycled through a series of portable music devices, from hand-me-down Walkmans to MiniDisc players, iPod Nanos and finally, an iPhone with Spotify. And it was great. My music life got more efficient. I could listen to exactly what I wanted, anytime, without having to suffer through annoying D.J. interludes and commercials.

But earlier this year, work sent me to Los Angeles. Sitting in my rental car in traffic, I turned on Hot 97 and made my way across the city, singing along to the Top 40 hits and laughing at the cheesy banter of the radio jockeys. During dinner, I bonded with a friend who had listened to the same segments on the same station that morning. It was a throwback to my teen years, hauling friends around in my Volvo station wagon. It was fun and communal in a way that streaming music hasn’t been in years.

Back in New York, I gushed to a friend about my radio revelations and he suggested I check out some of the newer radio applications. I’ve been hooked ever since.

These apps let you listen to nearly any radio station around the United States. I listen to local morning shows for their reality-show recaps, ticket giveaways and celebrity gossip; then later in the day, switch over to radio stations in California or Houston to check out what the D.J.s are throwing on in those cities to hype people up for the night out.

And as it turns out, TuneIn, the app I use the most, is actually quite popular. The company said it has more than 40 million monthly users and more than 1 billion hours listened in total through the service, which is free. In May, TuneIn raised $25 million from Institutional Venture Partners (the same firm that just funded Snapchat), Sequoia, Google and General Catalyst.
 
The appeal of the radio isn’t the music selection â€" I often hear the same annoying Drake or Taylor Swift song before I get something fresh. And the commercials are just as annoying and jarring as traditional radio.

It’s the human element that draws me in, knowing that someone is selecting songs for you. Remember Turntable? We didn’t love it because it was cutting edge or worked perfectly â€" we loved it because the online app mimics the communal experience of listening to music together during a concert or in someone’s basement.

That’s something that often feels missing from our digital interactions and lives. Maybe that’s why the visual vernacular of images, emoji, those cartoons text characters, and GIFs are all so popular. They’re more evocative of a mood or emotion and let you feel more of the person behind the interaction. It also might be one of the reasons podcasts still find dedicated listeners in an age where talk radio often feels so outdated.

And there’s something lovely about the way radio apps let you tune in to any station you want, instead of just whatever is within range. I like listening to KCRW and KMEL when I’m nostalgic for the Bay Area, where I lived for a few years. It’s in those moments that I’m transported back to a time or a place â€" a college house party or high school trips to the mall â€" and I’m reminded that a person, not a machine, picked it. It’s the same reason I love typos in my text messages, and often don’t mind when I misspell something on Twitter.

You can feel the humanness in those imperfections. They remind you that you aren’t alone, something that can be hard to remember when you spend so much time interacting with everyone and everything through a screen.



Daily Report: Snowden Trained as Hacker While With N.S.A., Résumé Says

In 2010, while working for a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden learned to be a hacker, Christopher Drew and Scott Shane report in The New York Times.

He took a course that trains security professionals to think like hackers and understand their techniques, all with the intent of turning out “certified ethical hackers” who can better defend their employers’ networks. But the certification, listed on a résumé that Mr. Snowden later prepared, would also have given him some of the skills he needed to rummage undetected through N.S.A. computer systems and gather the highly classified surveillance documents that he leaked last month, security experts say.

Mr. Snowden’s résumé, which has not been made public and was described by people who have seen it, provides a new picture of how his skills and responsibilities expanded while he worked as an intelligence contractor. Although federal officials offered only a vague description of him as a “systems administrator,” the résumé suggests that he had transformed himself into the kind of cybersecurity expert the N.S.A. was desperate to recruit, making his decision to release the documents even more embarrassing to the agency.

“If he’s looking inside U.S. government networks for foreign intrusions, he might have very broad access,” said James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The hacker got into the storeroom.”

Mr. Snowden prepared the résumé shortly before applying for that job, while he was working in Hawaii for the N.S.A. with Dell, the computer maker, which has intelligence contracts. Little has been reported about his four years with Dell, but his résumé, as described, says that he rose from supervising computer system upgrades for the spy agency in Tokyo to working as a “cyberstrategist” and an “expert in cyber counterintelligence” at several locations in the United States.



Daily Report: Snowden Trained as Hacker While With N.S.A., Résumé Says

In 2010, while working for a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden learned to be a hacker, Christopher Drew and Scott Shane report in The New York Times.

He took a course that trains security professionals to think like hackers and understand their techniques, all with the intent of turning out “certified ethical hackers” who can better defend their employers’ networks. But the certification, listed on a résumé that Mr. Snowden later prepared, would also have given him some of the skills he needed to rummage undetected through N.S.A. computer systems and gather the highly classified surveillance documents that he leaked last month, security experts say.

Mr. Snowden’s résumé, which has not been made public and was described by people who have seen it, provides a new picture of how his skills and responsibilities expanded while he worked as an intelligence contractor. Although federal officials offered only a vague description of him as a “systems administrator,” the résumé suggests that he had transformed himself into the kind of cybersecurity expert the N.S.A. was desperate to recruit, making his decision to release the documents even more embarrassing to the agency.

“If he’s looking inside U.S. government networks for foreign intrusions, he might have very broad access,” said James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The hacker got into the storeroom.”

Mr. Snowden prepared the résumé shortly before applying for that job, while he was working in Hawaii for the N.S.A. with Dell, the computer maker, which has intelligence contracts. Little has been reported about his four years with Dell, but his résumé, as described, says that he rose from supervising computer system upgrades for the spy agency in Tokyo to working as a “cyberstrategist” and an “expert in cyber counterintelligence” at several locations in the United States.