Wired State

Hey, Alex Madrigal, You Have Double Standards About Vigilantism

Alex Madrigal, one of the "progressive" geeks who has taken over the former intellectual magazine The Atlantic, wins the net-nanny race following the horror of the Boston terrorist attack with this piece, Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism.

Of course, there's the spectacle of the Global Village scolds trying to achieve by browbeating what they can no longer achieve in the age of social media, through institutions which they destroyed (like the newspaper editorial or op-ed piece, which is now drowned out in a zillion reader comments).

The shushing of the 'progressives" on Twitter has been thunderous -- anything to get people to stop trying to figure out who a terrorist is, eh? Because this might offend someone's tender sensibilities.

What's most awful about Madrigal's finger-wagging here is the double standard -- he was unavailable to condemn Anonymous' vigilantism around Steubenville or Aaron Swartz's case, although their acts were far, far worse and actually violated civil rights through hacking, heckling and exposure, whereas the group effort of Redditt is based on publicly-available media.

My comment:

This entire scold would be a thousand times more persuasive if you had fired it up and delivered it when Anonymous was hacking and heckling and harassing everyone around the Steubenville rape case. But you were nowhere to be found then, and other Atlantic authors were only thrilled. Anonymous vigilantes hacked into the football team's website and the coach's phone and invaded their privacy and began making all kinds of suppositions -- claiming the coach had picture of young girls on his phone and was guilty of child pornography when in fact he had pictures of his adult girlfriend. People who weren't related to the crime there were savaged -- you had nothing to say.

Leftist journalists and feminists everywhere praised these thugs as if they were a new crowdsourced force of "justice" that would replace what they viewed as discredited institutions infected by sports culture and patriarchy. But the prosecutors said in the end that Anonymous only hampered justice -- they had to promise some witnesses immunity to get them to testify in this horrible climate. Anonymous with its operations JusticeSec and KnightSec ended up outing the victim's name, in fact, when they carelessly grabbed documents and they ended up humiliating this victim far more than she would have been without them, which was bad enough, by spewing the video of her tormentors virally over the Internet.

If anyone criticized Anonymous and their tactics, they would be doxed and have their private information exposed online, or aggregated in such a way as to bully them. Journalists and bloggers like me were savaged and bullied because we called out this vigilantism. You were missing in action then.

Now you spring to action over this collective action and call it vigilantism, and while elements of it may be, you're completely omitting the fact that there are two factors that make it different:

1. The police *asked the public to get involve* in looking through social media knowing of the thousands of pictures and videos taken -- some people may have taken pictures they didn't upload yet and they should examine them.

2. Redditt is looking at open and public sources, not hacking like Anonymous did, and yet you wag your finger.

Why? The fact is, you can't stop them. There is nothing that can stop people from using the Internet to look at publicly uploaded material and commenting on it, alone or in groups. Nothing at all; in fact, interfering with that would fly against the First Amendment.

But I'm most troubled by the implications of your double standard here. It was okay for Anonymous to really use vilgante tactics to go after the entire football team and everyone surrounding them as well as law-enforcement -- and you were silent because it was cool. Maybe you take the side of nerds against football jocks or you dislike the police?

When Anonymous hacked US government servers in protest against Aaron Swartz's case, you had nothing to say either. Anonymous vigilantes went and stalked prosecutors they didn't like such as Carmen Ortiz even at their homes. Where was your "hey, knock it off!" then?

Instead, you bring out the heavy moral cannons over terrorists. Do you feel ambivalent about terrorism itself, that maybe they are chickens coming home to roost? That maybe fighting terrorism can't be a war, a war the public supports, but can only be "police work" in keeping with the "progressive" view of such things? Are you worried that the crowd would go after targets that the left feels protective of, far more than they do of football teams? Well, Alex?

The Redditt process is unstoppable in any event, and in any event, there are correctives to those who jump up and say "hey, that man is running while black" -- they will face a challenge even from that crowd.

I'm less worried about Redditt than I am of the horrid net-nannying the "progressives" have engaged in all through this tragedy -- constantly scolding and telling everyone to shut up, not speculate, not express an opinion, and wait for the pre-cleared approved "thought leaders" to tell us what to think. No thank you. People lost their family members or their limbs. If some clue in one of the numerous images online could help bring the perpetrators of this horror to justice, it should be accessed. After all, it will still have to go through the scrutiny and due process of our justice system -- the justice system that Anonymous severely undermined without any protest from you.

 

The Creepy Controlling Cultism of Wikipedia

As we know from the official website, Wikimania, the annual conference of Wikipedia editors, has 720 participants from 56 countries. But most of them do look like the guys in this photo by Wikimedia Israel.

I've been a long-time critic of Wikipedia -- this article goes back to 2008 before there was even an entry for me.

What you learn from Wales himself and some former Wikipedian editors is that while there is a claim of 150,000 volunteers producing the millions of entries; while of these, 615 do 50% of the edits (!), in reality, only 15 people -- like a little Politburo -- are the arbitors for controversial pages. That's just horrible.

I complained about the original troll of my Wikipedia entry back in 2010, but then just ignored it. I don't think that many people really care about what is said about you on Wikipedia.

Then, as I saw more and more repeated vandalism and libelous claims being made on my ever-more elaborate Wikipedia entry, and then a swarm of Anonymous began to harass me and dox me in February when I criticized their vigilantism in Steubenville, I began to put objections on the "Talk" page.

Mind you, the vandalism done to me (and other individuals and organizations I know of) is only one reason for my major critique of Wikipedia -- as I've noted in my 21 Theses Against Wikipedia -- and in continued responses to Wikinistas trying to rebut my critique and why I've even suggested, despite my dislike of Google on many of the same grounds, that the best thing to fix the awfulness of Wikipedia might be for Google to take it over. We have to ask, indeed: where is the smartness going to come from for all the smart gadgets?

As you can see from the pulling back and forth of my entry by a large number of anonymous people, it's a field-day for Anonymous.

I decided to write and complain about this -- I thought, you never know, perhaps some grown-up could be found who would put an end to this nonsense.

Instead, I just got another kid, one of them, a former Googler and software developer. I publicized all this correspondence, as I think it's part of the large and necessary social task that many, many more people than me need to bring to Wikipedianism, especially as Wikipedia will increasingly be used as the "knowledge base" for all kinds of "smart" gadgets.

So here's the response I got to my latest complaint:

Dear Catherine Fitzpatrick,

Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team is committed to providing assistance with sensitive issues related to the biographical articles on Wikipedia. However, since you have decided that attacking the volunteer who has genuinely tried to help you is an appropriate reaction to the effort he has put into cleaning up the article about you, we no longer find ourselves in position to assist you any further. Since your concerns do not require privacy, as you have voluntarily published the
entire correspondence, you may bring up them publicly on Wikipedia, as described
in <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons>.

Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization which employs people
with extremely diverse backgrounds. We have about 35 chapters around the world, all ran by local volunteers. Our projects exist in 350 languages and we have a language engineering department with resident linguist. We also have a dedicated program of the development of Wikimedia projects in Global South and a lot of events aimed at involving more women and improving Wikipedia coverage on topics related to feminism and women's history. I do not know how have you verified your assumptions about "white nerdy males" and "narrow-minded little coders", but they
certainly do not add you credibility when compared to reality.

Yours sincerely,
Victor Vasiliev.

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/
---
Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://www.wikimediafoundation.org/

 

Well, Victor, Global South program or no, we can't check your claims because you don't have transparency about yourselves at all!

And while you claim that these answers from volunteers "are not to be considered an official statement" from the Wikimedia Foundation, in fact, it seems as it is, as your answer has essentially conceded that tacitly.

You imagine that people to whom we are forced to appeal about grossly vandalized entries are somehow "helping" when they don't help, but take the side of their tribe, the geek vandals.

And you imagine that publicizing the lame answers of this volunteer -- in a much-needed transparency and accountability for your secret society -- is an "attack". It's not an attack, it's a mere publication of his geeky response -- obviously this material is tendentious and he can't grasp it. Without any "science," he linked to the completely biased piece on Woodbury banned from Second Life, as if this was the case for "many" educational projects, which he pluralized, and as if they weren't banned for cause.

And isn't it hilarious that on my say-so, he can decide that I don't have the largest artificially-intelligent chicken experiment in Second Life (I surely don't, but he has no way of knowing that), but on my say-so, he can't remove the entire ridiculous insanity of even tying my biography to Woodbury University, merely because I abuse-reported these griefers and documented their abusiveness against me in a virtual world.

And look, Victor, I'm come to this assumption about your white nerdy boy prevalency by reading about it on the Internet, looking around the room at Wikimania; by looking at the pictures of Wikipedia nerds when they are published, and just using plain common sense: most projects of this sort are run by nerdy little white guys -- and you're another one! A very good example is this article about how 13 percent of the articles about Egypt don't come from Egypt! (Remember Aaron Swartz's discussion about Wikipedia editing?)

What a creepy bunch, these Wikitarians! If you refuse to make an account and join their system -- I refuse -- then they expose your IP address -- even though the zillions of people who make edits are largely anonymous. On my entry, you can see there are those who make accounts, then vandalize my entry, then evidently delete their accounts -- which accounts for notices that there is "no such name" when you click on it. The person who started this digital form of harassment of me named "Jason OBrian" doesn't exist. Hah!

Then, if you publicize their tendentious correspondence, they decide then that they can "no longer help you". Of course, one doesn't need such "help" but indeed, I will continue filing complaints.

I'm looking around now to see if there is any group that has a concerted effort to try to gain accountability from the murky and cultic Wikipedia gang.

This site doesn't seem to be active anymore.

This website Wikipediocracy and forum appears to be active now for a year.

 

Related articles

Where Will the Smartness Come From?

How Many Blacks Work at Wikipedia, Google, Humbug or Any Other Silicon Valley Company, Luke Faraone?

A Driving Force Behind Wikipedia Will Step Down

Sue Gardner To Depart Wikimedia Foundation, 'Uncomfortable' With Where Internet Is Heading

Announcing the first Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grantees

Google Fiberhoods Divide Up the Broadband Haves and Have-nots

Googlefiber in Kansas City. Photo by Rodney T.

I mentioned this article about the "Slaves to Google" in the latest Harper's deep in my post about Beth Noveck and the Wired State folks but it deserves its own post -- Google, which is supposedly bringing to Kansas City a broadband experiment that will save us all, is actually rationing the broadband, according to an article that was unfortunately not put up free online, although other articles critical of Google's project in Kanas have been. This important article by Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson is in stark constrast to all the breathless tech press coverage of this "magnanimity," and the accounts of "more broadband than we knew what to do with". (It also represents a concretization of my hope that more people in the humanities will come forward with good critiques of Google.)

Look at this appalling concept of "fiberhoods" brought to us in Kansas City creating broadband haves and have-nots in a system that was supposed to increase broadband -- as the Harper's piece explains, critiquing the much-ballyhooded Google "socialism in one city" project:

Utility-owned networks guarantee access to every citizen in a municipality. Google, by contrast, divided up Kansas City into 202 "fiberhoods" -- and decreed that between 5 and 25 percent of the residents in each fiberhood had to preregister for its service by paying a ten-dollar fee and opening a Google account. Fiberhoods that didn't qualify would be left out of the network. Worse, Google's fiberhood map bisected the city at Troost Avenue, a historical racial divide. It soon became clear that most lower-income black areas would fail to meet the preregistration quotas. Local teachers and librarians began canvassing door-to-door with Google employees, urging residents to sign up, and charitable groups raised money for registration fees. A majority of these fiberhoods ultimately qualified for service. But the frenzied volunteer push revealed an uncomfortable truth behind the city's "real partnership" with Google: Kanasas City had left itself powerless to guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents. And it could not compel Google to redraw its maps in a less discriminatory way. (Of course, the vegan bakery, Pilates studio, and Italian deli next door to Google's subsidized offices received their fiber service for free.)

The authors also talk about the real reason this experiment was done in Kansas, and not California -- a town willing to drop all its regulatory functions over this corporation.

But another explanation might be the treasure trove of user-behaviour information that such a network represents. Data of this kind is so prized that a company like Google can afford to give away other services for free, as long as this beneficence opens up new markets. In Kansas City, low-income subscribers to the company's slower, "free" Internet option will be giving Google details about each URl they visit, even if their accounts remain anonymous. And customers who plunk down $120 a month for the "Full Google Experience" will have their television-viewing habits individually tracked by Google's data-mining elves. Is this a reasonable bargain? For Kasnas City, it's too late to ask. But history -- and the success of municipally owned fiber-optic projects throughout the country--strongly suggest that we should look this gift horse in the mouth.

Pick up the hard-copy of this issue of Harpers from your news stand -- this article is a must-read. Plus, it has a good story from John LeCarre (although some of his whiney lefty pontificating to go with it) and another useful article about Ron Paul.

 

Happy, shiny people bringing Googlefiber to Kansas City. Photo by UFCFool.

How the Googlers live. Photo by UFCFool.

 

 

Apple "Bans Journalism"? Really, Anil Dash?

Anil Dash is ranting nonsense again.

It's the typical geeky hysterical edge-casing trying to make a larger political point, but it's pretty suspect.

He's claiming that Apple "bans journalism" critical of religions:

“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that shows where drone strikes have been.

Really, Anil? "A lot" of software? What on earth are you talking about?

Probably this, the intifada app. That's all. There likely isn't any other use case of Apple "forbidding journalism".

As for the drone strike app, they may have decided that if the US government declares them secret, there is no sense in facing a possible lawsuit over it, I don't know the specifics. Plenty of people report on drone strikes. Again, probably some of the news apps that *are* allowed on the phone contain this reporting.

My comment:

re really blocking “journalism”.

That sounds like an overheated exaggeration that is basically trying to exonerate anti-Israel hate speech (or perhaps some other crude hate war game against Muslims or something) that really wouldn’t qualify as “journalism”.

They’re right that if you want to express your hatred for religion, a book is a better format because you can capture more nuances and make your arguments.

What is the “journalism” of any sort — about religions or any topic — that would fit into an app? Obviously, they don’t mean news apps, as there are articles in the New York Times or on the BBC which will contain critical comments about Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, for example. The apps carrying these op-ed pages or news articles are not blocked for their content, obviously — which is journalism critical of religion.

What Apple means specifically is the intifada app, that crudely propagandized the violent Palestinian movement against Israel, and denigrated Israel and Jews.

There may be others that involved such crude hate speech in the form of the externals of the app itself, not the content it might bring.

Apple, as a private company, is going to create some standards of taste and against hate speech that aren’t going to fit your own extremist politics. Good! If you want a different mobile company, go to CREDO. Maybe they have an independent app store where you can still get the intifada app.

The key is having a market with pluralism, so that those who feel they absolutely can’t live without hate apps can get them. The opposite — where “progressives” could force private corporations to include extreme political content they endorse — would not be freedom.

 

How Many Blacks Work at Wikipedia, Google, Humbug or Any Other Silicon Valley Company, Luke Faraone?

Luke Faraone is one of the legion of myrmidons volunteering at Wikipedia. With his coloured hair and impish geeky Justin Biebery looks, he's the face of most Wikipedia editors -- believe me, when I went to some of Wikimania as part of Tech@State last year, I saw that the overwhelming majority of the Wikipedia editors were white nerdy males, with some females, and very few blacks or Hispanics.

Maybe by straining and folding in their worldwide population of editors, the Wikinistas can claim to be more diverse, but let's face it, we can't know because many of them hide their identities. They are unaccountable -- and it's only because the complaints system apparently requires a real person to answer that I found the face of this particular little nerd who is controlling how my Wikipedia entry is edited -- and hence, as for many people who meet this fate on Wikipedia, maintaining the vandalism and tendentiousness of my entry, which of course is not only libelous but a detriment to my livelihood.

I'm a big critic of Wikipedia and open source software and all things geek -- and kid working now at Humbug -- and formerly at Google -- may know that and it could well inform his tendentious ripostes here.

I decided after seeing a huge slew of vandal attacks (obscenities were removed but other things stayed) and another warring over my much-wrenched Wikipedia entry, to go and complain to their complaints desk -- for what it's worth.

Below, you can see the correspondence that tells you all you need to know about the soul of Wikipedia -- narrow-minded little coders who believe what they read in Ars Technica bringing to the job of "all knowledge on the network" their atrocious set of beliefs and hobbling notions that fly in the face of reality. They are always trying to radically wish into being new norms and to wish away anything that doesn't fit -- and with Wikipedia, they have the power in their hands to shape most Google searches for information, as Wikipedia is the result that comes up first (and this creates a vicious circle of self-prophesying algorithim primacy).

In my persistence in refusing to be bullied and refusing to submit to any characterization of "racism," I really fly in the face of three of the most cherished beliefs of geekdom which grow out of their own precious sense of themselves, and their having contorted themselves to machines with binary thinking. Here they are:

1. That geeks are infallible and that they always do an unbiased and fair job of coding software untained by personal beliefs.
2. That we cannot make judgements about truths based on something being true most of the time, even by a high percent, because small percentages would "taint" it and mean we cannot make any coherent statement of fact about it.
3. That we cannot make obvious judgements based on the science of demographic drilling (a la Nate Silver) but must maintain a fiction around aspects of polls that are politically correct.

Hence, when I made these three claims, I went to the heart of the fallacy of geekdom, and their most jealously cherished beliefs about themselves and their coded world:

1. I said that if coders/developers are liberals/progressives/libertarians voting for or supporting Obama, they cannot do a good job for Romney. Their heart will not be in it.
2. A marker for voting for Obama is indeed race, whether we like it or ot: 96.4% of blacks voted for Obama. Therefore a judgement that a black developer will likely vote for Obama -- and his heart may not be a job coding for Romney or other Republicans is not racism, but merely a report of our times.
3. Maintaining the fiction that any black person anywhere still has a .6% chance of not being a Romney voter, and therefore we must pretend never to notice obvious demographic markers or face charges of racism is an appalling politically-correct fantasy, and means that we lose all sense and meaning about what is racism -- it turns out to mean whatever some geeks says it is in a quest for power.

In fact, in our new world of "red states" and "blue states" and Nate Silver math, we can't expect the Republicans ever to overcome their problem with having few minorities. It will be an impossibility, given the true math and the actual numbers. No matter what they do, the Republican Party, in this scheme, will be perforce racist because blacks are now perceived not as voting for a president merely because he is black, but because he is progressive. Thus even conservative blacks who might have voted for Proposition 8, let's say, in California, are converted into a "progressive" block of "the 98.6%".

Someday, fifty years from now, perhaps these solid demographic politicized blocks will erode. In time, people will become disappointed with socialist-style politics that produce nothing but debt and slow the economy; eventually there will be more black candidates of all political persuasions so that black people who vote for a conservative black or conservative white candidate will not be seen as "race traitors".

Right now, they are seen that way as we saw in Congress recently, and it will be awhile before this stark situation changes. But it didn't change yet, and my judgement, based on demographic science, that black developers are going to vote for Obama is not racist, but merely the report of the reality of our times. It's a system not of my chosing, as I never thought it was a good strategy -- deliberately pursued by Democratic strategists -- to try to paint all opposition to the Democratic Party as "racism" because there was a black candidate.

Yet this race-baiting continues, and it continues with my entry in Wikipedia and the harassment of me in different fora.

Real racism, as I explained, would be saying that black developers shouldn't be hired; that they don't do a good job because of their race; that Republicans should avoid black employees. I didn't say anything remotely like that, of course. I said that *Democratic voters* do not make good coders for Republicans and *for the job of campaigning for Republicans* you need those supporting that party. The Republicans should try harder to reach out to minorities, not just to capture that tiny percentage that might be available to them, but to try to end these harsh and rigid race-painted demographics.

On Wikipedia, the vandals tried -- and failed -- to get me put in a category called "American racists" -- and failed, because I'm not a racist. This blog post of mine is all the "evidence" they have -- and it's tendentiously portrayed first by Ars Technica, then in the editing of my Wikipedia entry.

Some people like the conservative/extreme libertarian/whatever she is La Russophobe have demanded that I "apologize" for this entry. The idea is that I can be browbeaten into saying I'm sorry and somehow "restore my good reputation". She has been this lately to others as well.

But that's insane. I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't said -- as the Wikipedia falsely claims -- that Mitt Romney shouldn't  have hired black developers (!).  All I've said is that Democrats don't make good coders for Republicans, and that in this much-discussed firm, the few coders there seemed like obvious Democratic voters, and therefore were not likely enthusiastic producers for Romney. Targeted Victory continues to be criticized by blogs such as Red State for their failure to win and their failure to come up with fresh stuff.

So what is the solution? The solution is not for them to fire minorities, of course, but everyone on the team should ask themselves: are we really into this? Are we going to give it our all? What benchmarks should we give ourselves to prove this? We had two apps we oversaw mess up. How can this be prevented for the next customers?

As for the Republicans, I think two apps messed up, the arrogance of Zac Moffat and his refusal to concede his mistakes, and their lack of performance all around regardless of who their staff are or aren't is a good reason to find another agency -- or really, to do what Obama's campaign did, which was to keep all the digital work inhouse.

Meanwhile, this Wikipedia entry and Faraone's tendentious ruling on it of course disguise the larger problem. How many minorities are there at Wikipedia, Google or any of these Silicon Valley firms? We all know that SV has a problem in going outside its white nerd-boy networks to hire women and minorities. That's why it's easier to savage me and take a twirl pretending you are beating back "racism" than really look at your own real hiring practices.

It's also interesting to note that in making this latest round of edits, Faraone deliberately removed the lines about me being a prominent WikiLeaks critic. Why? Because in his view, the citations for this weren't somehow credible or reputable enough. Most likely what he's really doing here is getting rid of the evidence that there *are* WikiLeaks critics!

Below is the correspondence so far:

• Catherine Fitzpatrick

To

• info-en-v@wikimedia.org  

Dear Wikipedia,

RE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_A._Fitzpatrick

From its inception, my entire Wikipedia entry itself is an act of vandalism and "griefing," i.e. harassment by 4chan and Anonymous hackers active in the online community of Second Life.

Prior to this attack by hackers, I was merely mentioned in other people's biographies as their translator.

Although I am a minor translator and minor blogger and known only in the specific field of Eurasia studies and human rights, as a result of vandalism and repeated attacks and distortions, my Wikipedia is longer than many, many prominent people with commercial or academic publications -- which I do not have. I have only nonprofit books and news articles as publications.

From the numerous arguments and vandal attacks and rewrites of my entry, you can see that a small and concerted group of people continue to harass and heckle me with this page to do harm to my privacy and my livelihood.

I am not the author of my entry and do not know how to edit Wikipedia and have no interest in editing Wikipedia, nor forming an editor's account, or having anything to do with the editing of my entry.

I am filing this abuse report for the record as I am being constantly harassed via your service with this libelous and false material.

I have repeatedly cited corrections in the Talk section, and noted the tendentious and false information, but that has only caused various Anonymous hacker hecklers to claim I'm editing my own material, which is ridiculous. Ask yourself if someone who has translated from Russian 30 books, many of them members of the Politburo, who has a blog that is only known in limited circles, would have in their biography copious amounts of material related to a mediocre commuter college in Woodbury, California, where I've never been. Answer; because a group of hackers in Second Life who have been repeatedly (four times) banned by Linden Lab from this virtual world and have their rental servers seized have decided to speciously insert this into my biography merely because I abuse-reported them for crashing my servers. That's all there is to it.

They've also tried to portray me as someone who hates gays or blacks, although I am a human rights activist with many years fighting for LGBT rights and against racism. This is merely an attempt to discredit me in my field.

The entry claims falsely that I condemned Mitt Romney for hiring African Americans. This is preposterous, as Romney, if anything, should have reached out more to minorities. I made a separate point that he should not have farmed out his digital analytics and app work to Democrats, and firms with Democrat voters in them -- which is not a racist point but a point about how you get people caring passionately about you. Obviously Obama didn't hire Republicans or Republican voters as his tech team.

I am not the daughter of a poultry farmer and have no AI poultry experiments of any significance. And much else -- read the Talk.

My entry should be considerably shortened, if it were to meet the standards of Wikipedia entries for people of my stature, and incorrect and tendentious material removed. The anonymous and unaccountable people who have repeatedly made entries to this page are in Second Life, they are anonymous, they have no Wikipedia accounts.

Finally, I should not have my IP address exposed on your site merely because I refuse to participate in your account and editing system. My identity is easily verified through email or phone calls and there is no need to expose me to further harassment through IP address exposure.

Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

From: Wikimedia Support Team (Quality items) <info-en-q@wikimedia.org>
To: Catherine Fitzpatrick <catfitzny@yahoo.com>
Sent: Monday, April 1, 2013 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: [Ticket#2013032110004408] Libelous Entry and Repeated Vandalism

Dear Catherine Fitzpatrick,

Thank you for your email.  Our response follows your message.

03/21/2013 09:35 - Catherine Fitzpatrick wrote:

> The entry claims falsely that I condemned Mitt Romney for hiring African Americans. This is preposterous, as Romney, if anything, should have reached out more to minorities. I made a separate point that he should not have farmed out his digital analytics and app work to Democrats, and firms with Democrat voters in them -- which is not a racist point but a point about how you get people caring passionately about you. Obviously Obama didn't hire Republicans or Republican
voters as his tech team.

What you said is that because they were African American they wouldn't be "dedicated", and assumed their political affiliation because of their race.

From http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/orca-was-no-fail-whale-
says-romneys-digital-director/

| "Truly, how can they expect dedication?" She also singled out another developer who is African-American and "who has a 96 percent chance of being an Obama voter…

> I am not the daughter of a poultry farmer and have no AI poultry experiments of any significance. And much else -- read the Talk.

I removed that information, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Catherine_A._Fitzpatrick&diff=548154688&oldid=545744972>.

> My entry should be considerably shortened, if it were to meet the standards of Wikipedia entries for people of my stature, and incorrect and tendentious material removed. The anonymous and unaccountable people who have repeatedly made entries to this page are in Second Life, they are anonymous, they have no Wikipedia accounts.

If there are specific cases of vandalism, they can be brought up and the relevant users blocked. If your article has persistent problems with IP editors, edit access can be restricted to autoconfirmed users.

> Finally, I should not have my IP address exposed on your site merely because I refuse to participate in your account and editing system. My identity is easily verified through email or phone calls and there is no need to expose me to further harassment through IP address exposure.

IP addresses for all editors who are not logged in are recorded for accountability. The only way to not have such information exposed is to create an account.

Yours sincerely,
Luke Faraone

--
Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/
---
Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://www.wikimediafoundation.org/


Dear Luke,

You're a good example of the outrageous sectarianism of Wikipedia and why it's not fit to have to control it does over knowledge on the Internet.

Rather than use the tendentious portrayal of my statements by Ars Technica, or your own tendentious ideas of what I said, you should look at my original blog here:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/was-al-gores-dev-in-charge-of-romneys-aps.html

I didn't say " because they were African American they wouldn't be "dedicated", and assumed their political affiliation because of their race."

I said *because they were Obama voters they wouldn't be dedicated* and I reported *accurately* that blacks have an extremely high chance of voting for Obama -- both of which are true statements, and not "racist" statements.

I said the following about Mitt Romney's digital consultants:

"Sure enough, what I found were two guys who looked like very likely Obama voters. And that's ok to say. That is our reality. That isn't racism. That's a report on how the world runs now -- Obama won 50% of the vote because he was able to count on minorities who voted in far larger numbers, and count on the fact that the older conservatives are mainly white -- and didn't even turn out for Romney (and not only because the software broke down).

But if that was all there was, you could still hope that they were loyal to their job assignment. 

Now HOW DID IT HAPPEN that the Romney campaign would hire Al Gore's dev to do a critical job like that?!

It happened because Romney hired a firm and didn't look at the project worker list. Well, to be more precise: Zac Moffat just didn't think that his former firm was something that might contain weak links in it. And that firm stakes its reputation, no doubt, on "science," and bi-partisan civic pride, right?

The other dev is Will Boykin, who has a 96% chance of being an Obama voter.

And there is nothing wrong with that, and that is the norm. But it does mean you have to ask, if you are the Romney campaign, whether someone who is going to go in the morning and vote for your rival is really going to stay up all night with the Monsters and the Red Bulls and do for you everything possible to fix your clusterfrack.

This is just due dilligence. But it's the kind that nobody wants to talk about, nobody will mention, and I will be accused of "racism" for even flagging. But it's the truth. And would you rather have me say the answer is "incompetence" -- as Ekdahl is saying -- because they are minorities? Or hear that they may  not have done their utmost to pre-test and re-test and trouble-shoot precisely because it wasn't a vocation, it was just a gig, and they were voting for somebody else anyway?

However, one of them, Vincent Gallegos, was Al Gore's former dev"

In sum:

o if they voted for Obama, they would not be dedicated in their work for Romney
o if 96.4% of blacks have voted for Obama, a black developer would have an extremely high likelihood of voting for Obama.

Again, both of these are true statements, and are not racist statements. To characterize them as racist is to reveal your own sectarianism. To pretend that a highly accurate estimate that a black developer in a digital consulting firm has at least a 96.4% chance of voting for Obama is a report, not racism. That you think it is racism is why Wikipedia is evil.

BTW, your friend Obama hired lily-white Harper Reed with earings and a Mohawk cut, not any black developers -- indeed, all of Silicon Valley, like all of Wikipedia, suffers from the problem of failure to hire and promote African Americans. That's why you play this game with trying to vilify people like me.

Once again, my entry -- which would likely not even exist if it weren't for the determination of Anonymous to dox and harass me -- is way too long, longer even than figures like Evgeny Morozov with far more fame and publications. And it is filled with tendentious dreck, like pretending that Woodbury University is anything significant in my biography -- they are the vandals.

My entry has already been persistently vandalized numerous times and already should be limited to confirmed accounts for that reason.

Catherine A. Fitzpatrick


Dear Catherine Fitzpatrick,

Thank you for your email.  Our response follows your message.

04/01/2013 21:42 - Catherine Fitzpatrick wrote:


> That you think it is racism is why Wikipedia is evil.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

> BTW, your friend Obama hired lily-white Harper Reed with earings and a Mohawk cut, not any black developers -- indeed, all of Silicon Valley, like all of Wikipedia, suffers from the problem of
failure to hire and promote African Americans. That's why you play this game with trying to vilify
people like me.

There is no such plot, and that rationale does not follow.

> Once again, my entry -- which would likely not even exist if it weren't for the determination of
Anonymous to dox and harass me -- is way too long, longer even than figures like Evgeny Morozov with far more fame and publications. And it is filled with tendentious dreck, like pretending that Woodbury University is anything significant in my biography -- they are the vandals.

I removed some references to opinions you hold that were not covered in reliable sources, which trims the article down a bit.

> My entry has already been persistently vandalized numerous times and already should be limited to confirmed accounts for that reason.

Your page is not *currently* the subject of such issues, and therefore such a request would be likely
denied. If you want, you can request it at

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_page_protection>.


Yours sincerely,
Luke Faraone

--
Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/
---
Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://www.wikimediafoundation.org/

The Killer Robot Logic of Orin Kerr

Killer Robot in 1951.

When I saw this 2010 Jaron Lanier video the other day, I had an epiphany. Well, it wasn't something that I didn't "already know," but things fell better into focus for me. Lanier said what he says in You Are Not a Gadget, but even more so -- he really pronounced the web 2.0 phase of the Internet (but not the Internet itself) as really producing no good at all. And one of the things he denounced was the way in which computers and by extension the Internet and social media, were making people adjust themselves to machines, and make themselves more stupid than machines.

I think of this each time a Facebook friend from the Caucasus or writing about Syria posts something about some horrible masscre; or about some raid of human rights groups in Moscow; or about the re-sentencing of an Uzbek writer -- and all I'm left to do is click "like". Many people do. What they mean is "thanks for letting me know" or "I appreciate the petition you are doing on this".

But inevitably, we are all Shanghaied into sometimes -- maybe always -- clicking "like" on things that in fact are atrocities -- because the meaning is stripped away by the machine. I don't "like" the massacres of children or the jailing of writers but I click "like" on these horrible stories from friends and colleagues to say "I saw that" or even the opposite "I don't like that, it's awful".

This isn't just about machines, of course, it's about the inherent geek default in the geek religion (yes, it is all those things) to not allow votes of "no" in the belief they will be "gamed" -- in the belief, they mean to say, that they will be used against them to vote them out of office. That's really what it's about. The script underneath that interface allows for a "dislike," did you know? But it is not implemented. Hence "like". Likelikelike -- there is even a program that assembles your likes now and makes a collage of you based on that.

Everyone knows how these machines think stupidly, right? But Lanier gets us to think about how we are dumbing ourselves down to meet them half-way, then becoming beholden to them. I accept the erosion of meaning around the "likes" and lose touch with the idea that you can't really "like" a tragedy. If McLukan talked about television as the "great reducer", reducing the five-o'clock news about Vietnam and the napalming of a village into a consumable chunk along with the Chesterfield commercials and the Mousketeers, then now, you are not just reducing everything into the box, but "liking" it, too -- beyond consumption to being subsumed.

And I realized as I thought about Lanier and about Weev and all the other characters I've been writing about -- like Matthew Keys, who is pleading innocent and denying the evidence of the chat logs (not sure what he'll come up with there) -- or Aaron Swartz -- I realized that this nasty, trollish, deviant and devious thinking that they are always engaging in -- denying that anything is wrong, denying that things are what they seem, denying that it matters, claiming that some literalism is all there is to the truth -- that is the robot thinking. That is it, in spades.

I used to think that people who did this Eddie Haskell act online knew the truth, but dissembled. They knew what they'd really done -- theft, server crashing, intrusion, etc. -- but that they just developed a patter about it, a gabble, a line.

Now, as I look at how this has spread to forums everywhere and there are always literally hundreds of kids who come on and angrily tell you that what Weev did was "just like what Google does when it scrapes any web site"  and I realize -- hey, they may no longer be in touch with the truth of theft and the truth of coercion. They may really no longer feel it. It could be their conscience is gone -- or never formed.

Not that it's poisoned, but worse, never formed. So Adam Lanza, or any number of other shooters, including the shooters of an infant in his baby carriage this week, are people who are in a game, shooting for the pleasure of it, and simply don't feel that it's wrong. It's not that they know, and suppress that knowledge, or know, and dissemble -- the conscience is never formed.

That this only happens to some people out on the edges of the young male population and not to everybody who plays games or reads 4chan or surfs the net or whatever doesn't mean we shouldn't think about what it is, what causes it, and how to stop spreading it.

The Weev problem is first and foremost a problem of bad faith. It's not that he's Puck, a jester and a prankster but fairly benign, but that he's Pan, turning women into objects or the Pied Piper of Hamlin, leading children away to their deaths. Someone like Biella Coleman whitewashes Weev into a jester or an emblem of carnival and not a criminal harming other people, as if the problem of the Internet is merely to find the right literary or social metaphor and everything will be all right.

But it's also about people being unwilling to accept that Internet crimes are exactly like real-life crimes, that tampering with mailboxes in real life and on the Internet are exactly the same, and that the latter is not exonerated and eroded merely for being digitalized.

Orin Kerr really disappoints me here by taking up the defense of Weev. This is not about an obnoxious asshole online "needing" a public defender because everyone is entitled to defense -- he already had one. This is about Kerr taking a political action to defend him as part of his cause of reforming the CFAA. I have to say, upon reflection of Reverend Magdalene, that lawyers who take up clients merely to further their own political cause might turn out to be the same thing that you become when you defend yourself -- and have a fool for a client.

In any event, Kerr is a lawyer with vast credentials and real-life experience and I can't possibly hope to out-argue him on legal grounds. But I can say just a few simple things that are part legal, part moral, to challenge this law-faring for the Internet Autonomous Zone, which I don't think exists or should exist.

Leave aside the defenses like "why is this in New Jersey" -- which might get it thrown out on technicalities. I hope the simple answer to that is, "because the Internet is in New Jersey, too."

Much of what Kerr hopes to do here is prove that hacking at servers if you have not cracked passwords or used log-on credentials is not a crime, and not unauthorized access -- and the correlary to that contrived fiction, which is saying that the computers therefore attacked in this way aren't protected. In other words, he wants to show not only that CFAA doesn't apply, but if it does apply, then it is overbroad and should be reformed.

First, why isn't there a basic matter of property here? Weev did not own any of the serial numbers of the devices he guessed at using algorithms and a "brute force" script. The deal was that you accessed AT&T's website with your Apple i-Pad if you bought the device and then read the number and typed it in. Your property accessed their property in a customer-business relationship.

This doesn't seem to count, however as scores of machine thinkers are claiming that if the site was open to such machinations, the context doesn't matter. The fact that the numbers plugged in were not those of the actual customer, but an malevolent algorithmist anarchist, trying to make a name for himself, "doesn't matter". Character doesn't matter. Past deeds of course don't matter. Intent doesn't matter. All that matters in this machine-world Orin Kerr is vigorously defending -- erroneously, in the name of free speech -- is that the server was accessed "legitimately," i.e. by a string of numbers forming the URL that got those open pages that popped up the customer's email and name. Therefore it's "public," you see. The prosecutor, judge and jury didn't buy this contrived logic -- the logic of bad-faith hackers and the machines they emulate -- but now Orin Kerr is going to defend Weev and get their common sense and human dimension excised. You know, like Pan cutting the reed -- a woman turned into a reed --  to make a flute.

Legions of script-kiddies accept the argumentation. While none of them have said this yet, surely someone will say, but what if you bought 250 i-Pads for an elementary school to help children, and then you as the IT person had to use all of their numbers to access the web. The machine can't tell the difference between you as an educator and helper and Weev, a cynical hacker.

No, it can't. But we all can. That educator bought all those numbers; Weev did not.

The avid desire to protect machines in their neutrality -- "net neutrality" is a lot like this -- is justified, so they say, on speech grounds, oh and "innovation". Otherwise, people poking around, doing data mining "for a better world," testing security -- won't be able to do their "good work" because it might trigger a hacking indictment.

But hey, if they can demonstrate their good faith and good intentions, how could it? After all, does anybody really believe that if Weev had sent an email to the information security officer or network administrator at AT&T that there was this security hole, that they would have pressed charges? Why would they? His claim that they would -- as an argument for why he didn't engage in this responsible disclosure -- is pretty threadbare.

Yet Orin Kerr tosses all that out -- for the libertarian goal of free speech untrammelled by government.

The First Amendment, however, does admit restriction as to "time, place, and manner". Isn't the manner of this -- and its rapid timing -- at issue? It's with malevolence, to do a big hack, embarrass the company -- and create a feeling of terrible vulnerability for everyone. Those people whose emails were exposed would feel not only they had to change their password, but would have to get new e-mail addresses now because they couldn't be sure that some idiot in the IRC channel wouldn't be writing them hate mail now or spamming them. It doesn't matter that we have Weev's word (*cough*) that he didn't distribute this list. That's not the point. The point is that Weev wanted to make a huge propaganda of the deed in revolutionary armed struggle -- where the arms are brute-force scripts -- and not really help corporate America.

At what point will Orin Kerr realize he's sawing off the branch of civilization, even just academe,where he sits with this sort of celebration of anarchic coercion that takes away rights from us all in the end?

I hope Orin Kerr fails in this gambit. I hope common sense and the law -- not contrived lawfaring, but the rule of law -- prevails. I hope that the decision helps establish in fact that unauthorized access means just that -- use of coercive scripts regardless of the putative "openness" of the target.

If you don't want killer robots to take over some day, as Human Rights Watch is now fashionably saying, you can't adapt your thinking to machine thinking and strip away acts of moral contexts and intent shadings. They matter. You can't say that automatic scripts malevolently designed by anarchists don't matter because you can't make value judgements or "subjective human judgements" but have to look at every access of a machine neutrally. You don't have to. You are human. They are robots.

The oldest picture of the Pied Piper copied from the glass window of the Market Church in Hameln/Hamelin Germany (c.1300-1633).

The Creative Commons Shill

Larry Lessig 50th Birthday Lip Sync Tribute from Daniel Jones on Vimeo. This video illustrates many famous goofs and and lesser-knowns who have endorsed Lessig's loopy technocommunist ideals starting with Joi Ito, venture communist. Only the children can be forgiven. Featuring Ethan Zuckerman telling us there is water at the bottom of the ocea. See Aaron Swartz at 2:38. This video has a CC license. I am using it because I can as an illustration to a critical post.

 

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Ever since I started this blog 2.5 years ago, I've been waiting for three things that might happen because of my persistent and strong critique of Creative Commons (which I call Creative Communism) and the copyleftist movement. I've called either to ignore and not apply the phony licenses to your work if you are creative, or to pressure CC to add a "pay me to copy" license.

Accordingly, given my strong and persistent stance -- many people criticize CC once or twice but never come back again because they are browbeaten to death by its supporters -- I have expected the following:

1) Someone who resents my critique and who is their supporter will call me out for "hypocrisy" on the fact that despite being a strong critique of CC, I use photos of people who have indicated they want a CC license. To be sure, I attribute the photos to those persons -- although I refuse to put any CC insignia or marks or notifications on my site -- but they may feel that if I use them *and criticize the idea of CC* I may be "hypocritical and "to be stopped".

2) Someone who resents my critique and is a CC booster will claim that if use attribution-only photos, not for commercial use, but have Google Ads on my blog for Adsense, that I am supposedly "exploiting" their non-commercial pictures "for commercial use".

3) And finally, someone who resnts my critique and supports Lessig and others will invoke the vague wording in the license for attribution  -- "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) -- and say that the mere appearance of their photo on my site implies "endorsement" and therefore they will ask me to remove their photo as they don't endorse me or my views.

And what's interesting is that despite the high potential for "trolling" and heckling and harassment and claw-backs and hatred on the Internet, and despite the near-cult-like fanatacism that some people bring to the whole Creative Commons shill, I've never encountered any of these issues ever on this blog.

Until now, regarding the first one.

And it's not surprising that it's from a persistent sniper and heckler, Pieter Hulshoff, and avid copyleftist and excuser of piracy who endlessly Energizer-Bunnies in the comments here against me, such as in the comments to my article about copyleftist law-faring where he says:

You know, for someone who bashes Creative Commons as much as you do, you use a remarkable amount of images released under that license. :) Since when is "there isn't an easy payment system" an acceptable excuse in your mind?

So...Why do I use Creative Commons "licensed" pictures?

The answer is simple.

Because I can.

Because they are there for the taking, for attribution, and in keeping with other terms they might use, i.e. no mixing, or mixing etc.

I simply given them the attribution they require under their fake "license" as a consideration I'd give anybody who released their work on the Internet for attribution -- and I link back to their page so that someone can go see more of their work and decide if they want to get involved in the CC thing themselves or not. I never put any CC on my own works -- they all say "copyright" and they all mean "pay me to use them".

The CC "licenses" and people who use them do not say, "You can use our system, only if you like our ideas and support us and are one of us". They don't say, "You can't criticize our system or you can't use it." They don't even say, "You must put the CC license jpeg/insignia on your site along with the attribution or you can't use it". But of course, they will likely come to that point some day precisely because they aren't what they seem and pretend.

Pieter is a good example of that duplicity, and a very good example of a shyster who uses fake morality to try to play gotcha in the eternal pirate's undermining of legitimacy for copyright.

He thinks that a critic who says to pirates "lack of ease for payment isn't an excuse to copy" can't therefore justify using a CC license by reverse logic. Basically, he's saying, "You can't use CC unless you support its philosophy, and you can't use CC if you criticize piracy or prosecution of copyleftists -- or else I will call you out as a hypocrite."

That's stupid -- and hey, I saw what you did there.

Like I said: the condition for use of CC isn't "you must refrain from criticism of our lack of a paid option". Or "you must refrain from being a hypocrite". It just says, essentially, "if you copy this, give me credit".

I think the lack of a payment option on CC "licenses" is cunning, conniving, and deliberate. It's not about the difficult of coding payment systems and coupling them to content distribution pages -- that's trivial and done everywhere now. It's not about pretending that payment and distribution are apples and oranges and they don't do those windows. No, it's about a concerted, central, ideological belief that people should not be seeking to commercialize digital items on the Internet. They want to deliberately smash the commodiofication of the digital, and remove any inherent commodification properties it has. That's why they endlessly cite this fake pirate fallacy that you "haven't really stolen anything" when you lift a copy of something that is copyrighted. Of course you have. You've stolen the ability to monetarize by the IP owner.

If people who want attribution also had an easy way to pay them, I'd pay them. But they don't. So I don't. Because I can. They didn't ask for payment. Flickr doesn't add payment options; other sites don't either. They send you to Getty Images sometimes for commercial use, but I'm not a commercial user, and it's too may steps for a casual user to try to convert as a moral action.

No, the Silicon Valley tilt away for payment for the user-generated content is deliberate, ideological, and methodically thwarted. It is no accident, comrade. So I won't be playing that game.

I take those images *because I can* and that's how it's going to be. I don't take them because they haven't made payment easy -- that's the pirate's logic. I take them because they've released them for attribution only, not pay. Full stop.

Trying to gin more out of it is just obvious "trolling" -- a word that I usually reject for usage because it's so overbroad and always used to hamper free speech. But it has a specific connotation for many in this: deliberately heckling and harassing someone over a perceived hypocrisy in the effort to try to get them to somehow concede their hypocrisy or give up. I won't be doing that because I'm not hypocrital, I just take people seriously when they put free content on the Internet for me to take -- with attribution. I do. Because I can. The minute somebody smartens up and bucks the Silicon Valley mandate on this and puts in easy payment options with microcurrency to make small reasonable payments, I'll be all over it.

As for these other two concerns that haven't come up -- they will, inevitably, some day. As my blog gets more traffic, as those people I criticize get more nasty and oh, decide they have "second thoughts" about themselves in pictures at parties with each other with wine glasses or whatever it is that they feel should have only been used by their little friends. And I expect that at some point, they will restort to gambits 2) and 3). They will feel, "Hey, that movie for Larry's 50th birthday should only be used by his friends and admirers to support him, not to criticize him or imply they're goofs". And the moment they do that, they will have proved that they aren't what they seem. They're not a global village; they're just a village.

No. 3 is easy to reject. The ads for my little blog produce minimal income, the blog is not high traffic, and it is impossible to characterize it as a "commercial" blog when nothing is sold on it. The intention of such an edict should be to ensure that, say, newspapers that are commercial entities and that normally have to pay for photos because they sell their newspapers and sell advertising, don't just lift CC photos casually. There is even a successful lawsuit in this regard in Holland by Adam Curry -- where else and by who else, eh?!

But in order to succeed with that notion, CC couldn't just arbitrarily harass little blogs with no income to speak of who aren't selling anything with these pictures -- they're just there to illustrate the blog post and help bring attention to the work of good photographers.

No. 2 I expect to see here some day because I've seen it in the Second Life context.

And the language is indeed overbroad, and those freaks who boost the CC system as a political action will be the first to try to claim an interpretation of that vague language to suit them.

I don't think that they should get to do that, and that if they do that, they will be merely revealing the true nature of Creative Commons as not really about what it claims -- a means for photographers and designers to get their work "out there" and recognized and attributed properly -- but rather a means in fact to actually create that digital commons that is the collectivist vision of the future these technocommunists have.

That's why I don't think they'll hesitate at all to use methods 1) or 2) or 3) to discredit their critics, even though in fact we're all supposed to be able to copy and use these images for distribution on our blogs if we give the people credit -- and they should not claw that back regardless of the free speech used around their freely-given images.

It's only a matter of time before some Marxist-Leninist Occupier who put his work for CC on Flickr demands that it be taken down from my blog because I criticize OWS and he does not want to appear as an endorser of my views. Not to put ideas into their addled little brains, but it's the sort of thing that is coming as the Internet becomes more and more of a contested space.

 

 

The Hysteria About Bullying is a Chill on Free Speech -- and a Whitewash of Anonymous

Oh, dear. A big piece by Emily Bazelon on that pet topic du jour, bullying, advocating more and more encroachment by social media networks and more and more empowerment for net-nannies -- and worse, the vigilantes in Anonymous.

My response:

Everything you're saying here is all wrong, Emily, and it will empower unaccountable corporations who don't use due process in their "governance," and worse, will enable and abet vigilante groups like Anonymous.

My God, how could you justify doxing people and having unaccountable, anonymous hackers bully and harass people suspected of bullying? Aren't you getting how this form of anonymous bullying ends up worse for society than the original crime? Use the abuse report button. And don't follow people who are nasty and block them and don't look them up. Do that instead of justifying wild-west posses!

It's truly awful. Can't you see that by advocating an endless chase after millions and millions of pieces of context-free speech with only 30 seconds of adjudication, not only are you not going to stop bullying -- as you effectively showed by tracking the one complaint that got two rejections from Facebook personnel -- you will create an over-controlled chilled atmosphere on these platforms that are increasingly taking the place of the town hall and the town square? They simply can't be contorted into net-nanny statelets imposing political correctness because of the problems of some teenagers. FB is ducking its corporate responsibility by deflecting people back to "real life," but there often are only distracted parents parking kids on the Internet to babysit them in real life, no "there there". So we have to develop other strategies. And that means ranges of services -- some that have First-Amendment strength full services with 18 and only and license, credit card or passport required to join, or some with kids that have live, hands-on monitors like MMORPGs do.

And hey, a little more perspective on the need to get kids to get off the Internet and solve problems in person is also in order.

No twelve-year-old should be on Twitter or any service tracking 17-year-old boys. Where are her parents? As my children were growing up, I kept their computers in the living room and supervised their time spent and their social networking. There were many rocky times when I helped them both avoid bullying when they were in tears and when I prompted them to stop joining in with bully parties easily started. Every parent should be right in the face of these services with their kids when they are in formative years. Their retreat to separate rooms or the gifting of laptops and cell phones should be privileges they earn after they can be trusted to behave and not get into trouble or cause trouble for others -- and then still monitored until they are 18.

You are putting too much reliance on these services to fix things. Good Lord, Facebook got its start as Mark Zuckerberg's lecherous "Hot or Not" app that he and his college buddies leered at as they eventually made "The Facebook". And you're expecting with founders like that, that users will be any different? It's also human nature. So supervise your children. Parents need to get behind LGBT children in real life and insist that the high school have inclusive prom polices, and if their parents won't do it, teachers must step up -- don't lead it to some ridiculous social network that is merely graphing bullying like the flu.

What you're failing to see is how the 60-second warnings and hobbles get in the way of adult political speech among peers when they are part of a vast net-nannying system, like this:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/w...

We can't have that. It's not good for us. It's not good for kids, either.

What we might debate is whether or not people should have the right to remove pictures of themselves, regardless of whether they took them, in which they are tagged, or whether they can remove references to themselves by other people they aren't comfortable with. In my sixth grade in the 1960s, nasty girls passed around "slam books" with anonymous gossip about each other, often cruel. Teachers confiscated them when they found them because fights broke out and feelings were hurt. So why can't we confiscate the slambooks on Facebook?

Have your kids defriend the haters like this, too, rather than gawk at them -- that will help to get them less attraction.

As for Anonymous, you've been seriously misled here. Anonymous is engaged in a fake reputational laundering effort right now to distract from their horrid roots in 4chan, where they spent a decade harassing and bullying other people, particularly young girls, with some of the most violent and misogynous porn on the Internet. And they are still bullies, as you can see if you try to call out their vigilante tactics around Steubenville, as I have personally discovered ---- and merely for questioning their own bullying tactics posing as anti-bullying activists, I've been severely harassed with "doxing", hacking attempts of all my accounts, spam attacks of my website, etc.:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/w...

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/w...

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/w...

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/w...

Anonymous is engaged now in a sinister massive recruiting effort to criminal hacking operations by bringing in flocks of teens under the guise of "helping them" with bullying, LGBT, rape, suicide, etc. They are the worst possible people to be doing this, as in fact they create a climate of incitement and hysteria and deliberately inflame a victim mentality and a rage that there are bullies everywhere, when in fact there is sometimes merely criticism and legitimate speech, even within the TOS, let alone the First Amendment.

Take a big breath and ask yourself: who is really served by all this flocking to social media and hysteria about controlling speech on it?

Related articles

Anonymous is a Rigidly-Disciplined Cadre Organization Not a Loose-Knit Movement

Sad Little Life of #Anonymous #JusticeSec Operative

Otherwise, There Might Be A Case...

How Anonymous JustSec Vigilantes Talk to Women Online - 3

The Anti-Bullying Movement: Fools and...Bullies?

"Does it ever feel like you’re playing at being a superhero?"

The guys (ok, maybe one or two gals) get together to write CryptoParty Handbook. Photo by Daniil Vasiliev

I saw a breathless, gushing reference to Gabriella Coleman's Coding Freedom here, then actually found a critical review here even from an opensourcenik, and Tom Slee (Whimsley) didn't disappoint by wondering succintly in 140 characters whether Biella'd ever resolve the, um, tension between the FOSS gang and corporate web 2.0. I think the answer is "no," but I'm still reading myself.

Do download it for free since she postures and cavorts and insists that she has to both offer it for $24 at Princeton (!) *and* offer it for free -- but you can't instantly find it on Google, you have to click endlessly. Please download it at Coding Freedom for free here. Princeton has enough money, comrades. And in the interests of true transparency, let us know the figures. How many downloads of the free PDFs? And how many copies bought right at Princeton, and how many on Amazon or elsewhere? Well? It's so easy for the copyleftist professors to offer their goods for free because they are already paid at their universities, duh, and can often pick up extra lecture and consulting fees. Meanwhile, they undermine choice and openness for everybody else who needs to make a livelihood.

I don't expect Biella as she likes to be called to get into the misogynist culture of Anonymous and hackers in general. I do my poor best here, but of course, it's a "voice crying in the wilderness" as a prominent hipster journo just snarked at me in email as he labours to try to discredit my take on Anon, i.e. I'm the only one saying all this about Anon, so it just must be my problem, right?

Well, what's interesting in that regard is to look at the terrible meltdown at CryptoParty. Yeah, I get it that Anonymous and CryptoParty are all different, um, right.

The first glimpse of CryptoParty I got some months ago left me utterly unimpressed. I argued with some kid on Twitter about it, I don't recall his name. We went many rounds where he laboured to prove this CryptoParty wasn't just yet another elite hacking collective with Leninist ideology. I pointed to the same-old, same-old about it -- men making wikis with the same old names shown domineering anything -- wikis with wackies, wikis with inactivity as one or two people did everything then quit -- then people jetting off to conferences about themselves, not really helping people, NGOs with grants doing piss-poor shoddy websites that barely provided any information you couldn't get off the back of a cereal box, etc. etc. The usual.

He just went on and on justifying himself, there was a hiatus where I took notes and was going to blog about how awful it was, but then I just got busy with more important things, jobs, family, etc. Then along came Asher_Wolf, that Melbourne single mum with the tot taking on the Evil Security State, with whom I'd tangled before over Anonymous and WikiLeaks, and now surprise-surprise, she was touting CryptoParty. I had quite a few go-rounds with her, where I confronted her for her seeming endorsement of the awful Occupy Wall Street gang in Occupy Boston, who outed policemen's home addresses and incited harassment of them for doing their jobs. Occupy Boston was among the nastier Occupies, and I watched for days how a bunch of OWS office wives and Occupy mommy bloggers (and she may have been among them!) ruthlessly controlled the livestream and locked out any dissent, criticism, even mild questioning of how people were comporting themselves in that discredited occupy that even occupier and various stalwart lefties were crying and wringing their hands over.

Asher claimed to me on Twitter that she couldn't possibly be Leninist or Marxist because...her grandma had fled from Russia after the Bolsheviks cut off her fingers. This was a story that I had questions about which she deflected, but it wouldn't rescue her from the clutches of technocommunism as we've seen it many a time before, the apples fall so far from the trees...

But again, I just didn't have the time to blog about Asher_Wolf and her antics. I questioned whether the pictures of the flame-haired biddy we kept seeing everywhere were in fact even her, because some of them seemed quite different from each other -- the entire thing could be a persona -- so often Anons make fake female personas. Who knows?

Then she seemed to take an Internet holiday or something.

So I was just looking for reviews of Coleman and I saw Anonyops again, a rather garrulous and self-promoting fellow as they go, and noticed there was an interview about how he was forced to leave America because his revolutionary activities were going to get him arrested. Um, okay. *Snort*.

So I clicked and saw the interview was done by Asher_Wolf, that self-same Pirate Party patch-wearing aggressive pro-OWS, pro-Anonymous and Wikileaks activist. She enables Anonyops to do did a star turn as a Tragically Misunderstood Artist forced to Go Into Exile like Solzhenitsyn or something. It was ridiculous. As some people pointed out in the comments, other than pasting some links about some ops, it wasn't clear what he was going to go to jail *for* if caught -- unless he hacked into Stratfor or USSS or something...

Her skilfully written piece -- that keeps its analytical and self-aware eye above the level of a pity-party  -- lets you know what's wrong with these Anon people -- they live in some kind of mirror world where they think they are oppressed like prisoners in the GULAG because...somebody once tracked them after they massively hacked and disabled numerous systems and failed to catch them, or tried to make a law to clip their wings slightly and failed and their feelings are hurt. When they recite all their "martyrs" like Manning or Hammond or Barrett Brown who did get caught, they forget to say that these people committed fraud, theft, and massive damages and therefore are rightly liable under the law.

You can also see c3's theories in action -- Ashera aptly asks them if they all want to be superheros, and he says yes... The good thing about these Anonymous "namefags" or "famefags" or whatever it is the kids call them is that they yap and that may help them to get caught. It takes somebody in the comments about five minutes to apply social engineering and figure out that probably the guy went to Iceland, since he talks about a country with a banking crisis and a problematic president -- and he seems to eliminate Canada -- and I can't think of very many countries that would allow an American to stay very long beyond 90 days or something with no job or relatives or long-term visa or whatever.

Now, poor Asher does have some talent. But when you see what came earlier on her blog, you'll see how she easily slipped back into her hero-worship of these losers when in fact she could have been just a little harder-nosed with her journalism, given everything. She's young, and she may get there.

Because then there's an eye-popper that I missed, from December:

Dear Hacker Community, We Need to Talk

In it, she describes the total meltdown of the CryptoParty and it's conversion into misguided but seemingly egalitarian "just folks" people who "are here to help" into insular creeps refusing to let others even in their own group look over their shoulder as they decided everything.

I didn't have to study and labour and blog thousands of words to take down this silly self-absorbed fake outfit -- she does all that work from the inside. Good!

That is, she herself seems to think of herself as pretty much the CryptoParty, and the others chide her for being too much of a micro-manager who can't let things go. Maybe the CryptoParty will go on without her -- so much the worse.

But for my money, this gal has called it all pretty right:

o the awful sexism, cruelty, crudeness, hatred of mothers with young children, disparagement, and of course even the groping at conferences, imagine. Squick.

o the fabulous types jetting off to conferences about their fabulous wunderkind movement sponsored by aging salivating copyleftists at Google or the EU or the Australian government or whatever who want "youth" and"innovation" and will accept "theft" and "unaccountability" as a substitute.

o the hackster hipster who took her $700 to make a website but never did the website and never returned the money

o the people taking credit for her work as a bridge-builder but also disparaging it as "women's work".

o the snottiness from uber-geeks about people who can never know enough tech, even if they master it as power users

o oh, and Jacob Appelbaum, figuring in as an Evil Quantity. Now is that news?! Not to us here! I have to say that the article that gets the most hits on my blog every day is The Unaccountable Jacob Appelbaum. He has pissed a LOT of people off.

So there you have it. CryptoParty turns out to be the same old Leninist lameness, avante-gards masquerading as "the people" and then reduced to a sectarian shambles (and frankly, that started with her own faux-Tupperware shtick and a refusal to question why everybody had to crypto in the first place!). There it all is, in all its shabby maudlin glory in her piece. People shoving aside others and muting and then expelling critics for the sake of themselves and their power in a revolution that seems to be an awful lot like the ancien regime with expense-paid trips and wining and dining and conferences and having control over other people. Ugh!

None of this surprises me about the left, the "progressives," the hacker movement -- that's why I'm not in any of these movements.

It's a great piece worthy of Rolling Stone, really, if that pub weren't run by aging hippie men who don't let women do anything, or perhaps the Village Voice if that wasn't so slight now. It's a really good expose of what happens to movements, why they get coopted, lose their way, etc. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand from the inside what these awful Internet-bred movements are really like and really about.

But...I would argue that this isn't fixable. These totalitarian hacker assholes that Ashera gave her life and heart and soul to, trying to make a people's movement around their insular enclave, are not going to change. She's banging her head against the wall here.

Even so. perhaps there is hope for her to regroup with a few like-minded people and make a different kind of movement that exposes the creeps like Jacob Appelbaum continuously and renounces the worst features of hacker culture. It probably would make too many excuses for Bolshevism for my taste, but it might be more viable.

Oh, and the cherry on top is Aaron Swartz's ex-girlfriend Quinn Norton, who seems to tell Asher that she had better postpone her concerns about women's rights in the hacker movement for later, after the revolution, because the people they all need to encrypt themselves from are so, so much worse.

Boy, have we heard that one before. I'll never forget the two women's rights leaders who came lunging after me when I stood up at a meeting before Obama's election in 2008, that was about getting the women's rights treaty CEDAW ratified by the US, and called for a petition to Obama to support it. I was first tackled by an Obama campaign operative who told me to shut up and wait until not only was he elected but maybe the second term; then knocked to the ground by a UN official who warned me in fright that I would incite the religious right's opposition if I even breathed any of this now and this could harm Obama's chances. So, hey, shut up about women's rights, once again. At that meeting, it took a black female lawyer to get up and say yeah, we've heard that one, first get the liberals in, then sequence work on racism after that, or first get the black males into power, then work on women's rights -- but hey, why can't we work on all of them at once?

Well, it's a great read -- and the comments are even more indicative of what's wrong with the entire thing. It won't likely change. Perhaps Asher_Wolf will come to her own personal understanding and enlightenment, however. Meanwhile, she should respect herself and her child and raise him right, and that means finishing her degree and knocking off the booze. Alcohol and childhoods don't mix...

Googlization of Obama for America, Organizing for Action

Yes, soon, I may be able to retire from blogging about the Wired State, which I'm not particularly good at, because there are better bloggers with more resources and more attention on this subject now, for example at Red State.

I didn't use to read Red State much at all, but after the elections, when they repudiated the crazies in the GOP like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman, etc. there was hope. After all, I had just voted Republican for the first time in my life as a protest. I don't think I could become a Republican party member, but I'd like the party to get better than it is.

I only care for about half of what I read on Red State -- so much of it leaves me cold because it's either about gun stuff, which I don't support, or it's about that day-to-day political scrum of domestic issues on the Hill about who said what or who fought with whom or wasn't righteous enough -- and I can't get hugely interested in that.

But I like Tech at Night (I wish the guy would just write and stop clearing his throat all the time and apologizing) and there have been some great pieces on the whole Google problem and politics which have been very well done.

Obama, Google and the Democratic Party

Today, there is a great expose on Google and the intimate connections with the Democratic Party.

Of course, I noticed the picture of Eric Schdmit and Harper Reed on Google+ back in November on election day, and it's taken them all this time to notice it, even though I put links in the comments a few times to my piece, Harper Reed and the Soulessness of the New Machine. It is almost impossible for any new voices to get attention there -- though they promise you a blog page (like Daily Kos) and they promise to elevate some of the blogs, I simply never got the blog page because evidently they are either overwhelmed or don't like me. Oh, well.

Neil Stevens has a great piece, Whose Side is Google On? which really gives the lie to the constant refrain from techies that there are a mixture of political views in these big companies. Of course there aren't. Geez, look at the campaign chart above! Says Stevens:

A few years ago, Google was deeply in bed with the left wing activists like Moveon.org and Free Press pushing for Internet regulation. When Obama was elected, Google got even more deeply embedded with both the left and the government.  At this point, Republicans began paying more attention to Google and Google realized it had a political problem.

So, after years of lining up with the left to demand more government regulation of the internet, Google changed course. (“Google cozies up to the GOP“)  Google promoted their Republican lobbyists, hired Republican consultants, sucked up to conservative organizations and even hired a squishy Republican, Susan Molinari (R-MSNBC) to run their DC office.

Stevens asks whether Google will jump back into the arms of Moveon.org and CAP etc. on "net neutrality". Oh, of course they will. They never left. They feel they can move in for the kill now with Obama II.

Ben Howe talked about Google as the Democrat's Private Intelligence Agency.

Remember that enormous, sophisticated data operation the Obama campaign had? The one that gave them massive daily data on public opinion trends in almost every segment of potential voters.

It’s almost as if Democrats had access to some sort of huge database of real time information about what the public was reading or writing online. The kind of breathtakingly large, real-time data that could be used for real-time trend analysis, predictive modeling and even behavioral manipulation.

Well, I've been trying to find the smoking guns on that, and of course, in this discussion here over Katherine Maher's article on Westphalia, they all vigorously deny it.

My hunch is actually that Eric Schmidt is not going to stay with Google. I don't know why I feel that. I just do. Maybe because he sold his stock, and because his title is demoted, and because his trip to North Korea to snuggle with the Dictator and bond over connectivity cults wasn't so well-received and even got sort of upstaged by his own daughter's blogging.

But Google may be calving off other nonprofits to permeate society better and maybe they'll have him run one.

Google Running Intel for Dems?

Ben Howe says:

The real threat is that Google, or perhaps just a few people within the leadership of Google, may be quietly operating as a private intelligence agency for the left.

And every time you use Google or Gmail you could be contributing just a little bit more of your behavioral data to the left.

Well, they probably are doing that. But he has no proof. You can be sure that Google would work very hard to keep traces of anything like that out of the public eye. If you notice, the top Googlers really are very well hidden, and aren't even in Google -- McLaughlin doesn't have a Wikipedia entry -- neither to others in the top echelons, current and former. Do they have a deal with Jimmy Wales? Or are they just good at working their own non-secret-for-them algorithms?

Ben Howe is on stronger ground when he simply researches the connections of all the leadership and the engineers to Obama's campaign and OFA:

Obama’s impressive data team also boasts a large number of high-profile connections to Google, starting at the top with Rayid Ghani, OFA Chief Scientist. Not only has Ghani keynoted an address at Google Research Labs, according to his online CV (PDF), but he also spoke this month at his grad school alma mater Carnegie Mellon University in a lecture series sponsored by – you guessed it – Google. Ghani’s former department at Carnegie Mellon boasts seven alumni on Google’s payroll on their website.

Ghani’s role on the Obama campaign was to direct Project Dreamcatcher, which used “text analytics to gauge voter sentiment” about issues and speeches. I wonder how he came up with that idea? Could it have been in talking with Katharina Probst, Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, who, according to her own site, is “working on new features for Gmail and Gmail Ads?” (Google is currently facing some heat over how it exploits Gmail user data for advertisers – but they would never exploit user data to help the Obama campaign, right?)

 

They Have All Come Out from Under the Berkman Center's Overcoat

Ben Howe also notes Catherine Bracy, OFA Community Outreach Lead, Product Manager, Tech4Obama Program Manager, and co-director of Obama’s San Francisco technology field office and formerly of the Berkman Center "an administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which receives millions in funding from Google," says Howe. Well, no surprise there; I have spent a lot of time over the years arguing with people from the Berkman Center like Ethan Zuckerman, an avid GrumpyCatFitz follower, and Jillian York, who is no longer there but is now at EFF.

I was trying to undertand what all the neuralgia was from York over my probing on her position about "net neutrality". I put all the tweet fights here on Storify. She claimed she wasn't flogging it at the OSCE Internet 2013 meeting because it's a domestic issue and that's "not her job". I pointed out that it was a position of EFF's, where she worked, and she could hardly separate from it. She claimed it was a division of labour between foreign and domestic affairs and that EFF didn't really lobby on "net neutrality". Oh, come now. I pointed out the blog illustrating that a former intern at EFF had gone on to become the Free Press advocacy director on "net neutrality," surprise, surprise. She made it seem like this was some terrible exaggeration and mocked it by saying OMG, we cited someone's blog! Well, it's not just someone's blog, it's your former guy, now in this other group that does your agenda. She thinks that the microscopic differences between all these Mitch Kapor groups, despite the overlapping of boards and funders, are somehow significant. They aren't.

One of the things I really, really complained about all last year was the way these copyleftists were taking the "net neutrality" gambit and trying to insert it into international fora and put it on par with the problem of countries like Russia filtering the Internet or countries like Tajistan simply blocking all of Facebook or trying to -- not to mention the arrests of bloggers such as in Azerbaijan.

There was no question that Rebecca MacKinnon, on the US dime, speaking as the keynote speaker at the OSCE Dublin conference, pushed for "net neutrality" as did the UN rapporteur Frank Le Rue, somewhat indirectly, and some European states. The US activists also got various Serbs and Azeris and others to speak up from their NGOs about the issue -- and of course there is a very active Dutch group called Free Press (which claims it is not related to the US Free Press group) which is pushing it -- I got into a debate with their staffer and really challenged them doing this -- "net neutrality" in the hands of oppressive governments in fact means further granting of control of the Internet for filtration and censorship -- it's the old New Information Order gambit of yesteryear at UNICEF, or the World Information Society summits in which journalists and ISPs are pressed into service to fulfill "progressive agendas" that are "helping mankind," and then of course kill off competition, markets, freedom.

The fight is more dramatic in Europe where they have a history of distrust toward private media, more state broadcasting for TV, and a natural inclination to have the state then run the Internet, too, in the name of "freedom from capitalism" which they view as a negative -- much the way Lessig calls markets a "restraint" -- or worse.

Fake Claim that Comcast 'Censored' OWS

Free Press' rep at OSCE Internet 2013 Tim Carr openly called for "net neutrality" and gave a talk claiming falsely that Comcast censored OWS and Amazon censored WikiLeaks -- wildly tendentious stuff that no one was available to push back on from the panel, which left me just being able to question some of it from the floor, which was limited. Free Press is of course a Marxist front group (McChesney).

I'm reading an old Rand study now, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics by Philip Selznick. I swear every word reads like the "community organization" background of Obama, and the vehicle that Obama for America is now morphing into. It's refreshing to read a book where there is no apology for frank discussion of how communists infiltrate organizations because they were really doing that and it was really visible just after the war.

We shall speak of organizations and organizational practices as weapons when they are used by a power-seeking elite in a manner unrestrained by the constitutional order of the arena within which the contest takes place. Thus the partisan practices used in an election campaign -- insofar as they adhere to the written and unwritten rules of the contest -- are not weapons in this sense. On the other hand, when members who join an organization in apparent good faith arei n fact the agends of an outside elite, the routine affliation becomes "infiltration".

As this book was published in 1952, there's no Internet -- but that means there's no distraction to studying how organizations work, how people are indoctrinated into them, how recruitment and ideological zeal is cultivated and of course loyalty.

With the whole Google and Wired State sort of thing, it's not like they have to have a YPSL-style summer camp to indoctrinate cadres. There's no need for boot camp when you have bar camp. Through all the various conferences and unconferences, bar camps and TED talks and Sun Valley and Roots Camp and Wikimania and even Tech @State, people find each other and bind and develop that formulation of "the line" that is so important to cadre organizations.

What does "cadre organization" mean to me? It doesn't have to mean some literal communist cell or even special indoctrination; it means people who work with a very aggressive line that does not brook dissent, and who react to outside criticism by either trying to vilify the critics as in the wrong political opponents' group, or demean them as "trolls," or say that they are so complex and technical that the average person just can't understand them. You see all of that cadre work on this thread related to the Westphalia article I discussed.

RightsCon

I think one of the ways the ideological line was crafted and advanced was through RightsCon (aptly named, as it is a con using rights as a cover). This will be back again this fall. Here the Silicon Valley regulars leading the charge like EFF (John Perry Barlow) took advantage of the fact that the Ebay VP's wife, Elaine Donahoe, as an Obama bundler, was named as US ambasador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She still holds that post. And that office has been used to advance Internet Freedom, in part understood in the classic way, but also as a toehold to give MacKinnon a platform and slip in the "net neutrality" stuff and anti-SOPA and anti-CISPA work.

At this Rightscon, Silicon Valley was able to bring in all the top human rights officials, like the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner (whom I've known and worked closely with for  some 30 years) and all the leading human rights groups, and lobby them to their heart's content with no outside critics, trying to convert them to their vision of "Internet freedom". They didn't succeed in totalling throwing these people to adopt "net neutrality" -- but they didn't have to, as the purpose was to soften them up to the approach of moral equivalence between control of the Internet by China and Russia and "control of the Internet" through something like SOPA. The result was collaboration, many more meetings to come, and of course, the deploying of budgets.

I don't know who will fill Posner's post now that he is leaving. He and several other key human rights leaders like Harold Koh, the legal advisor, and Samantha Power, the democracy staff person at the National Security Council, are leaving. Maybe they don't feel they can justify drones. Or Bradley Manning's pre-trial detention. Or any number of things. I will be very, very interested to see who gets in that spot at DRL, whether it will be one of these very copyleftist-primed cadres or whether it will a a veteran style civil rights leader like Gay McDougall. In a way, it doesn't matter, as this office already has Dan Baer in charge of the Internet Freedom portfolio, and he may be friendly to all the copyleftist types, but he is under adult supervision at State that means he cannot go too far with this (I hope).

There's no question that these folks are battered mercilessly by the left and those far more radical than they are or can be.

US Delegation at OSCE Gets it Right

There's nothing objectional of the "net neutrality" or "anti-SOPA" stuff in this speech delivered by Baer at OSCE last week.  But it has some generic phrases that have been tooled-and-died to fight internal bureaucratic battles with those that might worry if they pass CISPA that it will enable countries like Russia to say they are doing no different (that's actually not the case, because the nature of the regime matters). Says Baer:

But just as we support individuals who are targeted every day for exercising their rights online, we are conscious of a broader threat to the future of Internet openness. Right now, in various international forums, including OSCE, some countries are working to change how the Internet is governed. They want to replace the current multi-stakeholder approach, which supports the free flow of information in a global network, and includes governments, the private sector, and citizens. In its place, they aim to impose a system that expands control over Internet resources, institutions, and content, and centralizes that control in the hands of governments. These debates will play out in international forums over the next few months and years.

Katherine Maher goes much further -- it's clear from her piece that she'd just as lief not have governments at all in her notion of multi-stakeholder approach, except as possibly cash cows to just keep supplying broadband to the masses -- she romanticizes -- and misreports -- the origins of the Internet:

And unlike almost every other global resource in history, the Internet largely escaped government regulation at first -- probably because no one could figure out how to make money from it. From the outset, it was managed not by governments, but by an ad hoc coalition of volunteer standards bodies and civil society groups composed of engineers, academics, and passionate geeks -- awkwardly dubbed the multistakeholder system.

In fact, it was managed by the US government in DARPA and ARPANET and all the rest, and the USG then handed it over to nonprofits like ICANN with the understanding that they would be good stewards. It's not clear that they are. Whenever people hear the term "standards bodies", they genuflect and grow very pious -- as if technical standards are beyond the ability of mere mortals to question.

But that's sheer nonsense, as these bodies like IEEE and IETF are not democratically run with due process like Congress -- they can be swayed by whoever shows up and behaves the most aggressively. I constantly cite from personal experience the example of the Virtual Worlds working group in IETF which was run by a loose consortium of companies and coders who argued about things like copyright, but which then got entirely taken over by the US military. Completely. And they have been unfriendly to copyright and push the open source line as a cost-cutting measure (supposedly) -- they want to be able to download and save all the OAR files and have them as freebies and not pay for virtual builders or worry about licensing fees or problems.

Problems involving people's ownership rights; their livelihoods as designers; issues of identity, geospatial location; proximity data; privacy; on and on and on -- these are not mere technical problems. They are profoundly human problems and they should not be left only to Google and its chosen Democrat or OFA apparatchiks to manage for all of us. We need to fight hard against all of this.