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:
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.:
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?
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.
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?
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.
I saw a few references to The New Westphalian Web by Katherine Maher on Twitter, and I read the article. It was fairly mediocre, as it was basically just a compilation of the utopian ideal of the Internet as a borderless "autonomous realm" and a knock on the evil states that try to control it -- like the US, which is placed on par with Pakistan or Saudia Arabia or Russia as always happens in these sorts of pieces.
There didn't seem to be anything significantly new in it, except the fact that the person writing it represented Access, a relatively new organization headed by former Google lobbyist and former White House staffer Andrew McLaughlin. Maher used to be at NDI, but I don't think I ever heard her speak, she is one of the people who has been going around working the Arab Spring with the idea that mobile access will increase freedom. It's too bad the authoritarian state under Morsi and the Islamists get in the way of these ideals.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW LOST IN CYBERSPACE
The article might not have gotten a second look, but I decided to leave just a short comment when I saw her invoking uncritically John Perry Barlow's silly "Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace" which I countered years ago (my latest revision was done last year with a refutation of much of his collectivist and utopian ideologies that are antithetical to human rights and the rule of law).
My comment was this:
The problem is that nobody elected or even appointed John Perry Barlow, and people in fact like their nations and like and defend their states and the defense of liberties they bring. This borderless woo-woo pretends that authoritarian states and terrorism won't take over instead of their pastoral utopianists bringing us back in fact to the village, not the urban life.
The next thing I know, Ethan Zuckerman, who has never gotten over my critique of his dissing of Twitter in Moldova to fight the communists back in the day, is telling Maher to follow @GrumpyCatFitz which is the parody made about me -- I'm fairly certain by either Joshua Foust or Nathan Hamm or both or someone in that circle around Registan. GrumpyCatFitz is a hilarious grumpy meme cat who takes my tweets and makes them sound like "get offa my lawn!" sort of harumphs by dividing them into two parts, one at the top of the meme poster, and one at the bottom in capital letters, a method which can make just about anybody's tweet sound like a cantankerous old curmudgeon, but my tweets can lend themselves especially to this method : )
The anonymous GrumptyCatFitz also created @opcatzhunt and began to harass me together with the Anonymous newbies from Ohio who decided to make the heckling of me on Twitter an "op" to earn their Anon spurs -- but failed. GrumpyCatFitz began her life in December telling all the Registan regulars and their little extended circle of lefty Internet freedom fighters like Zuckerman to follow her -- and they did. Grumpy had an active life for a few weeks but then got bored until she could join the Anonymous assault on me. This may be due to the fact that bout Foust and Hamm became unemployed recently. I guess the Sequester is already starting to bite hard in the defense analysis industry...
In any event, Maher, whom I don't know, but who seems youth and thin-skinned as youth often are these days, rushed to Twitter with in minutes of my comment (perhaps she was refreshing her article's page waiting for more comments!) and typed:
My FP article just got trolled by a legend. This may mean I've said something good.
When Zuckerman urged her to follow @GrumpyCatFitz, I realized she meant me. Imagine, my little paragraph questioning her utopianism and JP Barlow, and I'm a legendary troll!
Well, I reject the entire notion of "troll," which geeky boys have been trying to impose on us since the days of the Well to mean "anything we don't like", and I fail to see why calling out the obvious utopianism of this piece was somehow "trolling". But that lets you know just how much they believe they are the new normal -- although it's hard to believe anybody would conceive of themselves as the new normal with JP Barlow in their midst. There it is, however.
THE WORLDWIDE TREND TOWARD...COUNTRIES
I first heard the term "Westphalia" years ago as a young person at the UN. There, people often look into the middle distance and talk about the realities of "Westphalia" to mean "sovereignty" which they find gets in their way of their more idealistic ventures like international human rights. The reality is that human rights, although about such universalism that tends toward the ideal and "world government," has evolved now to be about "the responsibility to protect" -- which was a clever device thought up by the Canadians and Francis Deng, the UN special rapporteur to sort of use ju jitsui on states -- con them into thinking they wouldn't have to part with their sovereignty but in fact would be called upon to exercise it -- but in the cause of treating refugees or internally displaced peoples better. I've written a fair amount on why RTP is so fundamentally misplaced as an idea, as it assumes good will of states like Sudan that it doesn't have, and pretends that 8,000 Sudanese policemen who were busy displacing IDPs five minutes ago are now going to protect them.
Speaking of Sudan -- well, that's just it. While people like Maher are pursuing the utopian notion that states are withering away and borders are disappearing, real people in the real world are doing things like trying to carve South Sudan as a new country out of greater Sudan, to get away from oppressive Bashir in Khartoum. And on and on around the world -- there are all kinds of states that either came into being recently (Kosovo or Tajikistan) or which want to come into being and are oppressed (Kashmir or Chechnya) and movements of peoples that want their own states, like the Tibetans or Uighurs. They're not content with the hipster borderless Internet, you know.
I've spent years and years at the UN, OSCE, and other international bodies. And it's very clear to me from observing reality instead of ideology that most of the people of the world want countries, identities, languages of their own, and don't really want to be part of some internationalized, homogenized conveyor belt of jet-set intellectuals. That is, sure, there are some international civil servants, NGO staffers, various carpetbaggers particularly of the left who make up this jet-set that go around to all the conferences -- as one suffering Internet freedom fighter from an oppressive country was heard to say to another sufferer in Vienna at the OSCE conference I just attended, "See you in Amsterdam next month" -- where the next occasion for per diems and nice hotels and good food would be had by all sufferers for freedom!
INTERNATIONAL JET-SET AND THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
And it's very easy when you live among these jet-setters with i-phones and i-pads especially now to enhance their international elite status to believe they are "taking over" and they are "all as one" and the Internet is uber alles. But the reality is, well, countries. They still do what they want. And that's because most people either want them to do what they want, or they are oppressed. And if they want to get out of their oppression, the path of international pop fronts organized by elite collectivists isn't always the appetizing one for them.
Well, there's more about the borderless Internet I don't like -- the Global Village, I've come to find out, is pretty oppressive and reactionary all its own. (McCluhan never meant it to be that). You know how you left your small town to come to the big city? To get away from the place where everybody knew your business and got in your face? Well, now you're back there again, where you have no privacy when you are doxed by Anonymous or scraped by corporations or eyeballed by a potential employer who doesn't like your Facebook party photos. You're back there again -- you might as well be in the grade school play yard -- being bullied and heckled and told to conform -- or else.
Or else people like Jillian York will get you fired from your job! Or Anonymous will harass your relatives, even though they are not relevant to their beef with you. Or Katherine Maher will call you a "troll" -- the greatest of Internet curses! -- and whistle to her friends to come protect the Motherland.
Like Dan LaTorre who calls himself a "change agent". And then calls me a "known stinker":
@krmaher
ha & a known stinker at that. sigh. was about to dive into the
comment thread then just noticed that flury. ignoring steadfastly.
Are these people like...twelve years old?
And you would ignore a robust discussion because a "troll" has commented in it? Oh, my.
LOBBYING FOR GOOGLE'S LAST MILE
Well, if you can get past all these childish antics, here's what seems to be going on:
Access is flexing its muscles hard, getting ready for more serious lobbying and the March Through the Institutions. Andrew McLaughlin may be "ex" to about most of the powerful things of our time -- Google, the White House, ICANN, the Berkman Center, etc. -- and is now at Betaworks -- but obviously he retains ties to all these things and is a powerful networker and influencer -- recall how he said to The Wall Street Journal's Crovitz that he believed the ITU should "have its kneecaps broken". (!)
Access will take on a menu of various things like the anti-CISPA crusade -- it will be interesting to see how much they load up their advocacy agenda and keep to c-3 versus c-4 status or how that will work. Certainly they oppose SOPA and advocate for net neutrality. Basically, they are about ensuring somebody else pays for Google's last mile and that Google never has to see a law it doesn't like. But they will likely steadfastly, hand on heart, declare they have nothing to do with Google. Maher already wrote to me:
"katherine maher
@krmaher@catfitz I missed the part where we have Google staffers on our executive team. Or, you know, are sectarian.
Now, does it have to literally have Google staffers to be "Google-run"? No. It's my belief that it's enough to have McLaughlin there, who can be trusted to run the Google line, and communicate with whomever he needs to communicate with at Google -- exactly as he did at the White House, an act for which he was reprimanded -- about which you can read either the left or right version of the story.
GOOGLE'S REVOLVING DOOR TO THE WHITE HOUSE
What's interesting to me about that first link under "left" for TechPresident is that Darrell Issa began by launching that probe alleging that McLaughlin talked to two dozens Googlers -- TechPresident says it was not such a big deal -- but today, you see Issa eating out of Google's hand, taking donations from Google, and advocating vigorously against SOPA/PIPA and demanding investigations of the prosecutors in the Swartz case. How did this happen? Did he get knee-capped?
Everyone has long forgotten this story now as it was back in Obama I. But eventually McLaughlin resided as Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Google spends more money lobbying than ever. In a way, they don't even need some ex-Googler who is under something of a cloud to lobby their issues, but Access is something that has a lot of Silicon Valley backing with every single aggressive cadre fighting for the copyleftist/Google vision on their board -- and was involved in what I consider was aptly called RightsCon (more later on that).
THE RUCASS RUCKUS
But to get back to Westphalia, something Alec Ross also discussed as if it were now history.
It isn't history, and it isn't as if Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or Sudan any of the others in the aptly-named RUCASS caucaus at the ITU making trouble for the free Internet just started controlling the Internet today. They have been at it for years, and I catalogued some of the latest round here.
Despite whatever international regimes get going, there are always states that simply don't play. In the OSCE context, out of the 57 members, only 48 have signed the Fundamental Freedoms document affirming that "offline rights apply online" -- something that John Perry Barlow and Katherine Maher actually would do well to learn, because there are many rights they'd like to dispense with in cyberspace in the quest for their collectivist utopia.
A NEW HELSINKI ACCORD FOR CYBERSPACE?
I've been mulling over whether there should be some kind of new "Helsinki Accord" for cyberspace to prevent militarization -- just as the Helsinki process did -- but I think it's likely premature when the very same bad actors like Russia can't even sign the document affirming the "offline=online" stuff.
Naturally, for Maher, the militarization of the US looms huge and scary in her eyes although with her experience abroad, she should know better that the US is the least of our problems.
She incorrectly refers to SOPA as "breaking" the DNS system, when in fact it was *alleged* to *hypothetically* break a *future* regime of DNSSEC, not in place yet, which in fact big companies haven't adopted because its expensive and complicated. We've had that long discussion on my other post about the "breaking" of the Internet and how fake it is. As for "warrantless searches" under CISPA because information might be exchanged that could affect privacy, again, I don't believe this particular bunch ever met an Internet law they liked, and they are never serious. When CISPA isn't a law, we get an executive order, which is worse.
It's not fair to book to the US some horrid edge in "militarization of cyberspace" because of Stuxnet, either. Russia and China militarized and weaponized cyberspace long before the US did, and made the US their constant targets as we know full well. What is the problem that Russian or Chinese hacking is supposed to solve in the world? American capitalism? That's not a problem, that's a solution; they're the problem. And what was the problem Stuxnet was to solve? The intractable problem of a nuclear Iran. It's not like the US dreamed up Stuxnet to be mean to a nice country and throw their digital weight around. They dreamed it up as a means of dealing with the meat-world challenge of Iran in real life, where it's authoritarianism is a misery to its own people and its neighbours and the world. Stuxnet is a response, not sui generis; fastening on this effort to digitalize the Cold War with Iran instead of bombing Iran outright and calling that "militarization of cyberspace" is fairly lame. Why?
FAILED TWITTER REVOLUTION OF 2009
Because it doesn't address the problem of the failed Twitter revolution of 2009. Cyberspace could not save Iranian democrats. And the leftists and "progressives" of the world, even those who did pay attention, couldn't save them either, especially not by tweeting. It was good to tweet, but the Internet cannot save you. So it's really reprehensible to forget the blood in the streets of 2009, and people not saved by Twitter, and then suddenly get indignant about Stuxnet and the militarized cyberspace. Who militarized real life -- and Twitter, for that matter -- first?! Oh, and please don't whine to me about Israel having the bomb -- they are a democratic state under the rule of law, unlike Iran. And that's where we Internet freedom fighters differ with Katherine and Jillian and all the rest of them -- they think the US and Israel are the problem; Iran is only a dim memory by now.
DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN CYBERSPACE
What was interesting amidst this discussion was a reference to a new pushback against that wily old Grateful Dead nerd Barlow. This is a Declaration of Interdependence in Cyberspace put out by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, something I am just learning about but which is described in the comments as a corporate shill or a Republican shill with Darrell Issa and Orrin Hatch. Well, good! We need diversity in this space, and with the Mitch Kapor run groups and things like Access, we haven't had much of that.
Given that I haven't been able to win the lottery yet and open my Institute for the Study of Internet Ideologies (plural), it's good that there is something like this new "Interdependence" manifesto that could be seriously lobbied in Washington. The Institute itself has existed since 2006, but it seems to have lobbied on specific technology issues and not gotten into the overarching ideological battles (such as I've been involved in for years). I've never seen them in this space. I mean, somebody more informed than I am about Washington lobbyists can tell me if I missed the memo on this, but the op-eds of this group have been things like "ARPA-E’s RANGE Program Will Boost Battery Innovation" or "The Tesla-Broder Debate and What It Says About Decarbonizing Transportation" more than they've had larger, overarching ideological texts like "The Declaration of Interdependence".
I do wonder if Darrell Issa, who is stumping against the prosecutors of Aaron Swartz, who was no doubt inspired by Barlow's manifesto, realizes that Daniel Castro's "Interdependence" manifesto would tend to mitigate the radical anarchism of Swartz. Do they talk about these things at board meetings?
The Declaration isn't quite something I can endorse because I think it has some incorrect referencing to international law in it (i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't support property rights and capitalism to the extent implied) and needs more input from international human rights lawyers -- and not of the sort captured by the Googlers like Susan Crawford But by and large, it calls out some of the real fatuousness of Barlow's stuff and I can only welcome this initiative.
Perhaps soon I can retire from blogging. It is now shaping up that the West Coast Mitch Kapor or John Perry Barlow organizations and all their permutations have some resistance on the East Coast -- from Berin Szoka's organization, which mounted the alternative manifesto to the Free Press' socialist cadre group's collectivist manifesto -- the alternative also stressed private property and capitalism as legitimate; and also from the Tech Liberation Front bloggers, some of whom are at George Mason, even from Red State's Tech at Night.
I won't retire just yet, however, as these are two extremes of the left and right that tend to meet each other behind the barn and come together around things like opposition to SOPA or glorification of Swartz's anarchic "propaganda of the deed". There has to be a better balance that is not antithetical to real human rights.
Annual Wikimania conference, held in Haifa, Israel in 2011. No one knows who most of the editors are, but they are generally found to be white males. Photo by Sebastian Wallroth.
So here's one of those PandoDaily posts that help sell the gadgets better. So Nathaniel Mott is using that "iconoclastic" trick of bloggers purporting to go against the status quo (the hatred of fanboyz of something stupid tech companies are doing) to in fact support the establishment.
I can't help thinking of that deliciously awful put-down by Nick Danton, the Valleywag entrepreneur:
Oh @sarahcuda, you matter. As scraping courtier to the tech princes, flatterer-in-chief at Pander Daily, you are a gift of a subject.
Somebody aptly calls the overpriced $1300 new Google-manufactured Chromebook a glorified browser with a keyboard attached to it, that oh, yeah, you can swipe on, and Mott turns it into an epiphany about Luddites Who Stop Progress.
I remember it was one of the pioneers in virtual reality in Second Life at Stanford who bragged on Facebook that his little two-year-old daughter automatically tried to swipe the TV set because she was used to swiping the i-pad, and found that it was "b'oken" because it didn't behave as she, an obviously evolved creature, expected it to.
I remember my father, an engineer, coming home from work at Xerox Corporation one day some 45 years ago and telling me that "the boys in the string ties" as he used to call the people in California making up different wild gadgets were making them try screens with "light pens" as he called them. In other words, if you held this "light pen," a pen made to be able to interact with the pixels on a TV screen, you could make the screen "do things". It was among those early tests with interactive screens -- the pen would make the screen "do stuff". But this was an annoyance because you'd have to take your hands off the keyboard, then pick up that pen, which would get lost, so they had it corded to the computer like a phone. This was before the mouse.
In any event, here we all are, and we're supposed to swipe stuff. All well and good, soon everything -- bathroom mirrors, kitchen tables, bedside stands, etc. will have screens or be screen-enabled and be swipable.
But here's the problem with ubiqituous computing or the semantic web or the Internet of Things or whatever they will call it, and it's not that awkward gap between keyboard and hand-swipe: the knowledge base.
You're supposed to be able to touch anything or call to anything and get answers from those "smart" things -- smart phones, smart tablets, even smart bathroom mirrors or tables in the future.
And where will this smartness come from?
Well, it will only come from Wikipedia, which is highly flawed and written by a bunch of anonymous and unaccountable geeks nearly impervious to the rest of the Internet because there really aren't valid votes on their work or even the ability to share the pages for discussion (and recently I was told by a well-informed Wiki-geek that this was due to fears of privacy concerns, that they'd have to hook their pages up to Facebook's servers to process the "likes". Sigh.)
To be sure, there are a few competitors, like the drama-ridden and sectarian-hobbled Quora, which I don't play, because nobody pays me to write smart essays on my areas of expertise there -- they don't even pay me in Quorabux to enable me to buy a t-shirt or a free Coke or something. There's also Qwiki, that was an attempt to make an encyclopedia pulling in your social web and Wikipedia both, with sometimes hilarious results, which is now morphing into yet another "innovation" of the tired three elements of social/video/pictures only this time as video/pictures/social.
So that does leave Wikipedia far out ahead.
As you know, I have at least 21 theses against Wikipedia -- and more. I could add "and this awfulness is used as the tainted basis now for the 'smartness' of all smart-phones etc."
Imagine I'm at a party and everyone whispers into their Apple Watch or their Google Glass, "Who is Catherine A. Fitzpatrick?" And they get my vandalized and ridiculous Wikipedia entry partly taken from Enclopedia Dramatica. So while they are all whispering to each other that my entire career seems to have been obsessed with taking down a Soviet-themed commuter college digital arts department named Woodbury in suburban California, or fattening up my children adopted in Soviet Russia in order to eat them, or that I am "the biggest asshole of the Internet" (if the vandalism happens to not yet have been removed at that particular hour), what am I to do?
Well, fortunately by that time, someone will have created the Right of Reply ap or some other kind of Propaganda Layar (which is how it will be seen) to counteract that, um, "voice of the people," Wikipedia. So Wicked Impediment would have harmed yet another social transaction, but who cares? The nerd in New Jersey who lives to spite middle-aged WikiLeaks critics he loathes lives to fight another day in anonymity.
That's just a tiny thing -- what if the Olympics managers asks the smartthing for the national anthem of Kazakhstan, and gets not the real national anthem, but Borat's Song? (That actually happened in real life).
Or what if the President of the United States summons on his aging Blackberry or Google Glass, if he wears one, the facts about some country he is about to order invaded, and the Wikipedia entry is skewed with over-hype from that country's defense ministry about its defense capacity that in fact is wildly exaggerated?
And so on.
I used to think the only solution to fix the awfulness of Wikipedia that would actually happen (because disbanding it or making all the editors unmask themselves and be accountable) would be having Google buy it out. They might fix up some of its obvious stupidities and make it work better. After all, it's Wikipedia that provides the fig leaf to Google, the Ad Agency, by turning up search results with actually non-commercial "knowledge" or the appearance of same, on every search, before you see the SEO-skewed results or the paid ads. Google Glass needs Wikipedia even more voraciously than regular online search sitting at your computer or i-phone.
Will the new scrutiny and burden on Wikipedia finally make this open-source cult bastion crack and crumble like the old Soviet Union and finally be forced to reform? Will that reform perpetuate it and/or make it worse?
That same well-informed geek told me that no one in Wikipedia would ever countenance the idea that Google would buy out Wikipedia because a) it's not for sale and is nonprofit and b) they knew that Google had failed at this task only a few years ago with its Knoll thing. Nolls. Whatever they were called. "Units of knowledge". Yes, it failed and closed. So what? Google is better, maybe, at buying out start-ups that already had some user testing.
And yes, there's a price that likely Jimmy Wales could be bought at. Well, as I said to the Wiki-geek, get rid of that creepy leader of yours with the creepy eyes and then maybe they'll talk.
It was bad enough when it was "The Internet of Things" -- wiring up
things like your home or car to run them via your smartphone on the
Internet. I've written about the horrors awaiting underneath the upbeat claims of tekkies of this Brave New World.
But now they are trying to make it even more palatable and saleable
by calling it "The Internet of My Things" the way everything
collectivized online is called "My" to make the user have the illusion
he is in some actually personal private space. So some media that is
drilling you and making you sign up for their forced social media scrape merely to share stuff creates things called "My Slate" which
aren't really so much "my" anymore -- but theirs. And on some of these
services, every time your friends go read an article, they see you
"liked it," and they might even wonder why, and you might even wish you
could get rid of some of that. In fact some of the services showed you
when you merely read an article, and started posting it to all your
social media automatically -- people hated this and those services began
to die out. They'll be back. The drive to make "what is yours mine" is
big.
I saw the Internet of Things prototyped in Second Life about 7-8 years ago by Babbage Linden (Jim Purbrick, a very creative fellow who probably doesn't think of himself as an IOT founder). I wrote about it enthusiastically initially as well as did Mark Wallace, thinking only in the context of the community of that little virtual world, not the wider Internet, and focusing more on the rating than the tagging functions. (Purbrick went on to conceive and prototype IOT as helping, for example, people use Second Life as a 3d data base to keep track of their real-life carbon-emitting objects to assess their carbon footprint; today he is doing things like making 3D printing from personal web information.)
But even then I had some misgivings about all this tagging and the inflation of the reputational system instantly welded into it back then, and watched as Grid Shepherd, as the scraper avatar was known, by the development company Electric Sheep, scraped the entire grid and took everyone's objects and put them into search -- and abuse-reported it back in 2007. This scrape including things accidently left for sale, sometimes merely to be moved from one person to another, which then became vulnerable to theft. People did not like having their property advertised in this way -- and it was all devised basically as a prototype of how to make an Internet of Things to increase shopping on the oneline marketplace. I called it "Greed Shepherd's Big Fleece." The geeks then -- as they always do now -- snarked that people's items were in search "anyway" and were fare game and that the dbase "needed to be populated" to be "useful" and therefore they couldn't have "opt-in" or even "opt-out".
Well, but nobody thought some powerful force, funded by old media (CBS), would come in and scrape all their simulators and put everything they owned into search so, among other things, people could pry into their private lives and ridicule or even blackmail them, i.e. if they were gay online but in real life had not come out of the closet. It was awful.
For a while, there was a program that picked up everything on every sim, threw it into search, and then when you arrived on that sim, you could easily search it again to find the product or item you were searching for. This made scavenger hunts, a popular activity, immediately deprecated, and so people had to devise ways of naming things with fake names or hiding them in other things to play such a game. While it seemed convenient for a store, people hated the erosion of privacy, even in a virtual world where privacy is only a theory, really, easily defeated with cams and chat loggers and such. Eventually, this feature in the browser was removed -- probably it was too big a strain on the data base and servers anyway. It was replaced with a function you could toggle for each item -- to place it in search or not. Merchants defeated this by checking the object to be in search forever by closing the "mod" perms. And so on. Online life is filled with pernicious features with destructive social impacts as we constantly see in the prototype of Web 3.0 (or 3.D as it was known for a time) in Second Life.
Few people of influence take Second Life seriously, and don't realize it is a prototyper, consciously or not. And it doesn't matter, in a way, because real life gadgetry is soon overtaking even the fantastic prototyping functions of Second Life 7 years ago.
As usual, the way this technology is sold is not by thinking of its larger implications and negative impacts -- obviously -- but how it might be useful -- and make fortunes for people:
As usual my friend Phil Windley, whose distributed event technology I wrote about in the second installment of this series, isn’t just imagining this future. He’s helping to invent it:
“Kynetx is getting ready to introduce a product called SquareTag.
SquareTag is a simple way to use personal clouds to keep track of things
you own and imbue them with functionality they might not otherwise
have.” – Introducing SquareTag
So far these are mostly just passive tags with QR codes, but the system
is technology-agnostic and will happily embrace RFID, NFC, you name it.
What matters isn’t the tag, it’s the connection you forge between a
tagged item and your personal cloud.
And as useful, it's about how it would be useful to a nerd -- most people don't take their smartphones with them to change a filter and take elaborate notes on its date, make, place of purchase, etc. If they do have their smartphone with them, it's to text their girlfriend or watch "Waking Dead," not write about filter details. But of course, the "Internet of My Things" is rapidly developing and "the Internet of Your Things" is coming out to meet you, with the manufacturers taking the work out of note-taking by putting all this information into *their* tags. And so on.
My daughter recently asked what "the cloud" was. I had gone to TechCrunch two years ago and asked a number of the ardent evangelists for various cloud services to explain their technology to me. I went around and listened to their pitches, read some articles, and concluded:
The cloud is other people's computers, not yours.
In that sense, it is like the MMORPG game developers' fearful mantra about their games:
The client is in the hands of the enemy.
That is, their game has to be viewed through a browser that enables the user to hack them and bother other people. The cloud is merely you taking things you used to keep on your own personal hard drive under at least password protection, and under at least the theoretical obfuscation of being one of a zillion and not searchable unless you turned on filesharing programs -- and then putting them on to other people's computers. Putting them on to other people's computers so that you can "access them anywhere" and protect against data loss if your device is wrecked, but it's still about other people's computers, not yours, and your stuff becoming theirs, not yours. Really, that's all it is!
Hence, my intervention below. And I can't stress enough: it's not about the hypotheticals and edge-cases that your vacuum cleaner in the cloud is going to be hacked and start running on its own and wake you up in the middle of the night or all your doors will lock to keep you out of your own home, although we will see that happen. It's about how property becomes collectivized by coders when it becomes electronic and connected. Its inherency is broken up -- which is of course is that process Comrade Lawrence Lessig zealously began when he began to smash the inherency of copyright of digital art and induce people to "share" without paying the author.
* * *
Each
item that you put on the Internet of Things becomes partly not yours --
in fact, at any moment, it could become entirely not yours. Each thing
with its unique UUID uploaded and connected to the Internet becomes
collectivized by coders and then available to hackers.
What matters isn't the connections *you* forge among your things and
the Cloud, which only has the thin membrane of a likely poorly-devised
password.
What matters is that each connection strips away the inherency of the
property as yours, and makes it at least a little bit -- and then
maybe a lot -- someone else's.
If a heating pad or a television or a coffee maker requires a remote
control commander or switch to operate, and you automate that via the
Internet to make it work, at any moment, whether because "technology
just doesn't work sometimes" or because its hacked or because the coders
and operators of the Internet -- oh, don't like your blog or your
political views -- those items may stop working. When they stop working,
they lose their main property -- use to you. Your property with a lot
of electronics in it that doesn't work anymore isn't much use now, is
it?
Now imagine if it is your pacemaker?
Now, technologists interested in the Bright Future skip over these
problems and call them minor or rare or fixable with encryption or
whatever. But the problem isn't just the *misuse* of the cloud and your
own personal Internet of Things.
The problem comes in your collectivization of your things. As you put
it, "I’m not the only one who can use it. I can authorize other parties
to use it as well."
That means you've stripped away some of its essence as your property
and for the sake of "smartness," collectivized it. You may find this
useful now, say, to somebody changing the car in your oil. But surely
it's not too hard even for you to imagine when this "smartness" might
get "dumb" pretty fast.
You say: "These won’t be “free” services that we get by trading away
privacy for convenience. We’ll pay for them. In return they will not
only store our data. They’ll also run code."
But everything that is coded and uploaded to the Internet related to
me and my personal property is now a coder's and "the Internet's," not
mine. Have you ever seen how the thuggish hackers' movement Anonymous
operates? Is *that* what you want done with your toaster or your car?
The privacy inherent in disconnected private property is stripped
away by the act up uploading and connection through the UUID or RFID,
and you can never get it back -- you won't be able to reset an objects
unique identifier but will be forced to buy a new one. It isn't just
that your collectivized property is vunerable; try to see it. It is
collectivized and you are now in a commune. You may never get your
private life back again. This is why I call it technocommunism, and I
warn about the way in which we will continue to get this awful system
online that was discredited on earth: the Internet of Things.
* * *
Go from "Internet of My Things" to "Internet of My Social Relations" to see the further collectivization potential for manipulation.
P.S. I'm trying to find my screenshots from back then of the parcel in the Linden sims around Derwent showing all those flowers and pots and things with taggability and rateability, and then the HUD to use to track them. Anybody else have any?
Is this old illustration from Isaac Asimov's I, Robot? I see it everywhere unattributed.
Liberationtech, the Stanford discussion list about circumvention software, encryption and other forms of "liberating" the Internet, has a little fight going now.
It used to be that while open, these discussions were not published. I started publishing a few when I'd be blocked from them, and calling on the list owners to stop coyly claiming they were an "open" list when they a) threatened people with expulsion all the time for their critical speech b) didn't publish their list. I complained about this "open source=closed society" approach in a few blogs, then I noticed someone else, I don't know who, simply started publishing all their lists outside of Stanford. Then eventually that got them to begin publishing their list archives themselves -- hoisted by their own petard, as it were, albeit with a cautionary note that now there were people "watching" their open posts and they should be careful.
I fail to see why circumventionists, encrypters, hackers, liberators, anarchists, etc. etc. get to have a special privileged position on the Internet or in society at large, which is increasingly lived through the Internet. They are unelected, self-appointed, and not even put in their positions of power by acclaim -- most people do not like hacking or hackers and despite the assiduous efforts of hackers to whitewash the very term for themselves and their acts, they've failed.
The list has been discussing the story of a purported new "supersekrit" encryption thing that will be "uncrackable". We've seen this claim so many times that it has become laughable. Everyone remembers the story of Haystack. The Cryptocat effort has been criticized by the hacker community itself. Tor is constantly critiqued. Both circumvention and encryption softwares are endlessly debated, and often the debate centers on whether these codes are "open source," i.e. available to others to scrutinize but then also the secret police or "proprietary," i.e. kept closed by companies who want to sell them -- but who also don't want to do the secret police's job for them and hand it over to them.
In the real world, it's good that there is a competition between both open and closed variants but that doesn't stop particularly the open source zealots from demanding that everything be "liberated" and open sourced -- and they will help force it open if they have to. They are never content with their technocommunism until they've forced everyone else to kneel to it. You will get me to accept the idea that supervision/scrutiny of circumvention software "has" to come from random other cultists in the "movement" and that proprietary software "has" to be peer reviewed. It actually isn't a proposition for an open society.
Phil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, is widely considered the godfather of encryption software. After making his software available for download in the 1990s, he was the subject of a criminal investigation that was eventually dropped in 1996. Today, his P.G.P. software is the most widely used e-mail encryption software in the world.
But these days, Mr. Zimmermann is busy with his new venture, Silent Circle, which provides encryption for smartphone users.
Once again we find that same connection to the military that we saw with TOR and which turns up in other settings involving circumvention and encryption:
Mr. Zimmermann’s business partners include Jon Callas, who co-founded the PGP Corporation, which now belongs to Symantec, and two former Navy SEALs, Mike Janke and Vic Hyder.
“I tell them go ahead and use Skype — I don’t even want to talk to you. This is for serious people interested in serious cryptography,” he said. “We are not Facebook. We are the opposite of Facebook.”
Silent Circle’s kind of customers, Mr Zimmermann says, ‘see the hacking that’s going on internationally, they know that a lot of services they use collect information and use it to target ads’.
‘People say I’m being watched all the time now. It’s not a Big Brother thing, it’s a little brother thing; it’s all these little things that are eroding our basic privacy.’
I was struck by the philosophy of Zimmerman that was identitcal to the philosophy of the Navy's geeks who created Tor -- they realized criminals might use it, like copybotters and child pornographers, but they figured that would be somebody else's problem to prosecute -- they only cared about populating the system with lots and lots of users so they themselves could hide better. Highly unethical -- indeed, legal nihilism. He says:
Comparing digital encryption to locks on front doors, Mr Zimmerman said Silent Circle see themselves as the locksmiths of the digital age.
'Society is better off with everybody having locks on their doors. Everybody having locks including the criminals,' he said.
That's actually not a very sound philosophy. In the era after 9/11, both Penn Station in New York City and Grand Central Station, as well as Union Station in Washington, DC and likely other train stations, ceased to provide self-service lockers. This was a huge annoyance to commuters because it meant that if you were on business for the day or overnight, you couldn't drop your luggage or laptop in the locker while you went to meetings and then pick it up later. Today, you have to go to a very expensive luggage department staffed by a live human being and spend $20 an hour or so for this privilege -- it's a deterrence to casual use. And the reason for this is that ultimately, police and municipal managers came to the conclusion that giving criminals the opportunity to have locked up bombs wasn't effective counter-terrorism.
So the list is now arguing about this software, and trashing it because it's commercial; Zimmerman's business plan is to sell it to government and business who can afford it. Business travelers in China need a way to talk without the government snooping.
Some say that "Kaepora" means "kiddie porn," i.e. using the initials of that term. But his name might well come from the owl Kaepora Gaebora from the Ocarina of Time in the Legend of Zelda, a game my son used to play years ago and whose melodies were the soundtrack of our lives for a time.
@Kaepora has bitched about Kim Dotcom in fact being crackable and not all that he's cracked up to be.
Chris Soghosian, the privacy guru who now works for the ACLU comes on to debate this, and he is hounded by others who find him hypocritical for demanding open source and transparency and accountability but being willing to endorse some proprietary encryption programs.
I have no use for Chris, as I've been critical of his arrogant and high-handed approach to this issue a number of times on this blog, after hearing him first speak at an OSI panel.
The darknet kiddies are just not going to get their way. If they themselves hack something together to hide themselves and their criminality, whether copyright violations or worse, the government will then physically infiltrate their ranks if it can't crack into them. Meanwhile, government and corporations will make their own proprietary programs to keep out hackers, and they will play cat and mouse, and many will think they deserve each other.
The same people who howl about the TSA are now yelping in horror about the news that Homeland Security now finds it fair game to examine any laptops or computers or electronic devices crossing the border. Actually, authoritiaran countries have had this sort of thing in place for years. Does this mean our country is becoming more authoritarian? Well, you're welcome to make the case to me, but I think that when the concept of "unreasonable search and seizure" and the 4th amendment and such were conceived, they had no idea that somebody might conceive of having not only a computerized device they carried as "an extension of themselves" but having those devices attached to "the cloud" which means they carry the world. Really, can't there be reasonable limits? Why should you get to carry into the country from a foreign country gadzillion numbers of files, perhaps some of them malicious that will harm our own systems? You can't bring in a sausage from Germany -- it will be confiscated because of FDA rules about not bringing in meats and fruits that could be carrying diseases. The government is going to use the same logic on laptops.
So let's think this through. The reason why hacks become possible is because of human error. People make mistakes in code. Or social hacks become possible -- they say 75% of hacks are possible because people have passwords like "1234" or "password" or in the case of the Steubenville football team "Big Red" or something like that. So human error and fallability is a big thing, unintended consequences.
Just about any code then has a flaw, a human-created opening, and there's also the spoofing problem of "if you can see it you can copy it and can't protect it" analog hole problem. So emulating certificates becomes a problem and that's what these companies or projects spend lots of time trying to get rid of.
Fast-forward to the day when robots write all the code and more and more perfection and be put into the system. You always read about robots putting people out of jobs -- this is very visible nowadays in the self-scan checkouts that first were run by clerks with wands or a scanner, and now is a separate scanning station without any clerk. But at what point will coders themselvse be put out of their jealousy-guarded jobs writing boring lines of repetitive code?
Robots made by humans are supposed to follow the three rules of robots devised by science fiction robot Asimov, but increasingly they are lethal in the world of drones -- that's why drones have excited such opposition. It's not just that they are sent by humans remotely -- the decisions about targeting, even if rooted in some sort of ground intelligence, can wind up being made through electronic communications and information and the targets, while precise, can have lots of collateral damage. Robots are getting more and more sophisticated and there are plenty of articles like this one, 10 More Reasons to Be Terrified of Robots.
You can just see Anonymous picking over how to interpret Asimov's laws -- what is "human"? What is "kill"? What is "an order"? Fisking and Haskelling forever. And then looping around to Turing, who creepily insisted that if a robot was successful in passing his famous Turing test, why, we should accord it the status of "human," otherwise, we were Nazis. Pretty diabolical reasoning of the sort Anonymous gives you, and then you will see how they take something Less Than Human, and use that as the arbiter to decide if they feel like it.
I'm getting off topic, but what I mean to say is that if more and more computerized systems and robots take over, you would think in theory that the human corruption would be eventually coded out. That is of course the Better Worlders vain hope.
But I suspect that the robots even built by robots will continue to be vexed by the original sin of human error. They will never get it stamped out. There will always be a glitch. There will always be something you can spoof again. There will always be man in the middle attacks. There will always be social hacks, even for robots. Won't there?
I don't believe in the possibility of perfect encryption nor do I think it is required or advisable. There should be a balance. The main thing is to try to get the existing organic institutions to decide this before it is decided for us by unaccountable and greedy technologists. Code is only a concretization of human will.
My ancestors spun looms at home or dug potatoes or peet in Ireland. In this country, they either worked their small family farms in Virginia or Kentucky or they ran a small tavern and inn on the wrong side of the tracks, where the whole family worked, serving the rail workers and traveling salesmen in Corry, Pennsylvania. One grandfather took care of horses and then cars at the Hotel Quebec.
Today, I often think that while a century or even two centuries separates us from our ancestors, we're not really substantively different. I still have to spin my Internet loom late into the night to write news copy for websites or translate articles or books; my aunt prepares book indexes; my brother fixes people's websites and servers. How different is it taking care of somebody's horse or car and taking care of somebody's web site or server? How different is working your fingers on a loom to spin thread or typing on a keyboard to spin words? My great uncle Ray died from a mule kick to the head on the family farm. When the power was knocked out for two weeks during Hurricane Sandy, I wondered what we would do if it stretched weeks -- our family farm of computers and a router burned out in the blackout were all we had to sustain us. A FEMA worker asked me if I had lost any "tools for work". "My router," I explained.
I've seen the nonprofit and news industry, where I used to readily find jobs, shrink to a fraction of its size. I don't whine about this because I've always adapted and done other kinds of consulting and of course translation. But I don't glamourize the new "work at home" online businesses and Internet-ized "sharing" businesses involving homes and cars and errands because I see they are never going to be a decent living. Only some people with already pre-existing assets are going to benefit, and the managers of them benefit most of all, with a huge discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of their Internet minions. Shouldn't all those Occupy Wall Streeters who couch-surf care more about this 1%?
Whimsley has had a very interesting discussion challenging the whole unregulated -- and unethical -- area of the Air BnB type of Internet-ized services and has even written an open letter challenging Timothy Wu who was touting them at the New York Times.
Peer-to-Peer Hucksterism is exactly the right title for this blog. Whimsley is more of a socialist or "progressive" than I am, certainly, so he approaches the problem of the Silicon Valley hustle from the perspective of the regulated social state -- what horrifies him more than the collectivization of private property involved in these entrepreneurial escapades is that the democratic state cannot properly control them so that people are not harmed. I agree regulation is needed, and I don't mind if the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which people regard as crooked because it charges huge fees for medallions, is the entity to regulate -- and therefore ban -- Uber. Uber was unconscionable during Sandy, gouging prices for rides like common Russian mafia karservisy. Disgraceful.
Paul Carr has a really great series of articles calling out these Internet thugs in Uber and the other businesses here,here and here. He calls out their Randian "Atlas Shrugs" attitude -- one blog is delightfully called "Asshole Shrugs". Myself, I call out their technocommunism. I don't favour Randianism at all, I just think the Leninist NEP that these entrepreneurs are hawking isn't an improvement over traditional free enterprise in a marketplace that in fact doesn't have to be over-regulated to still be under the rule of law and the courts. That's what bothers Whimsley as well.
Now comes Tomio Geron at Forbes touting "AirBnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy". The comments are filled with predictable snots who tell others to be disrupted and die while they make their fortunes, and Brazilian third-world sharers who sneer that those who can't accept sharing must "adapt". Ho hum, this is an old story played out in the Russian Revolution and lots of other revolutions.
So here's my intervention at Forbes:
Look, we are not glamorous, we Internet subsistence farmers, and
trying to pretend that the jobs that are going away for good are going
to be replaced by our Internet subsistence farming doesn’t impress us.
I might make my income each month by translating something online
from Russian for somebody in Vladivostok or an international agency in
another country, or copy-editing somebody’s film script within an hour
turn-around, or re-renting my Second Life servers and selling digital
furniture for avatars, or taking in revenue from Google from my blog
ads. The Future is Here! the Future is Now! Except, the future is
unevenly distributed. Whoop-de-doo. I’m poor.
I don’t have a car; I live in New York. I can’t rent out part of my
apartment — I’d lose my lease in a building where the landlord zealously
polices sublets and enforces them by video camera surveillance and
electronic card-entry to the building with cards that can only be issued
to paying tenants and approved residents. This Air bnb stuff is not a
plan for the third world; hell, it’s not even a plan for Rochester, MN
or Rochester, NY. It’s *just* a plan for sunny California where hipsters
have houses in Malibu and Prius cars that they can chop up,
collectivize and let the new oligarchs sell for them under this
technocommunist regime. The rest of us are going to be scratching in the
digital dust.
We can’t be unionized even by the freelancers’ unions — they require
letters from employers, and what, I’m supposed to get 100 letters a
month from people I did two pages of translation for or 20 minutes of
errands picking up an item they need or re-renting 1024 square meters of Second
Life server space for US $1.50 a month? Please. I’m all for
micropayments and Mechanical Turks, but you need to look at the nature
of the work and jobs on all these task rabbity sites — they are very,
very marginal and the only people who really make decent wages are
*coders*. Once again we are seeing geeks pretend that they are making a
Better World.
I’m not complaining — I chose my Internet subsistence farming after
the nonprofit I worked for failed with loss of funding after 9/11; I
chose it after my conventional media companies downsized because the
Internet killed them. I could be working at Home Depot and have health
insurance; instead, I chose this. It’s all good.
The most disturbing thing about this new collective farm where we
pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, however, are these new
oligarchs who make billions why we make 17 cents from somebody maybe
clicking on a belly fat ad.
Hey, when they’re ready to get out of the way and let their systems
be run by robots and in fact people like us, and get the tycoons and VCs
out of the way, maybe we can believe in their revolution. I don’t think
that will happen any time soon. Collectivization isn’t going to work in
the virtual world any better than it did in real life. I’m for free
enterprise. That’s not what this Brave New Internet World is. It’s
“capitalism for me, communism for thee”. It’s not just.
***
Then there's one person who thinks that the resistance to the "sharing economy" is about traditional "phobia" in America against communism and socialism and that technological advances will make this go away.
Nonsense. There’s a good reason for the ‘phobia’ about socialism and
communism in America — a lot of the people among the immigrant
populations know first hand about the horrors of mass murder under
communism and suppression of entrepreneurialism and human rights under
socialism. So they came here. They are telling the truth about communism
— she isn't.
In fact, the worst aspects of the collectivization we knew in real
life are in these digital services — the lack of accountability, the
lack of transparency, the ability of a few to exploit the labour of many
fervent collectivized believers who don’t have union benefits or
retirement plans but just get to chop up their personal property into
more and more time or space slivers.
Work on the Internet collective farm is not everything that it has cracked up to be. Write when you get work.
Some of the commenters at Forbes point out to the reputation management aspect and the "curation" or -- once again, the customer service state which would have to supervise that "curation" by the lovely commuuuuunity.
Here's the problem with having collective brow-beating to manage the collective. Group-think kicks in and fanboyz and the "community managers" -- not elected or accountable, but just corporate drones -- then become harsher and harsher trying to maintain order. We've all seen this in the virtual worlds and the game worlds -- this is going to be awful to watch as it leeches out into real life! Ugh...
Imagine if someone doesn't think the thread count on your Egyptian sheets or the view from your urban window is as wonderful as they thought seeing the picture, and they downrate you. Now you've gone from having a thrilling and fun sort of Internet hobby like that B 'n B you always dreamed of, to having some Internet dickwad threaten your livelihood because they arbitrarily leave a bad comment. You have nowhere to go for adjudication or fairness because the company will not care or have the resources to manage these things. It will be like "Rate my Professor" on steroids. Your only hope, like on Amazon or ebay, is that after enough sales, you could right the bad rep some thin-skinned nerd has given you.
The worst thing I saw at the beginning of Air BnB was that when a woman wanted to protest the horrible thing that happened to her, where lowlifes who rented her place set up a meth lab and stole and wrecked her stuff, was that Robert Scoble told her she was whining and to shut up -- the company was just getting its next round of VC cash and this was more important to nurture than responding to the complaints of one disgruntled customer. The company at first ignored her. She had to shout and shout and scream and put up with the nastiness of the Internet boys on TechCrunch and such until she finally started to get normal mainstream press attention and the company had to turn around on her case and make it good. They did, to their credit, but you got a sense of just how hard it is to challenge these Silicon Valley favourites and their horrid fanboyz with high traffic and views in the tech blogosphere. It was impossible to be heard above the noise when I tried to criticize Uber in New York -- I was hated on and drowned out on TechCrunch. It took Paul Carr from the alternative Pando Daily to get heard with these same kinds of obvious concerns anyone would have.
Meanwhile, without a car or a rentable apartment what assets do I have to rent out timeshares on? Would anyone like a dilapidated pepper plant half-eaten by a cat to grace their home temporarily and give it that lived-in look? How about a shelf of do-gooder and idealistic books that will make you seem intellectual? Say, need two well-mannered and drug-free teenagers that wash their own dishes and actually pick up their rooms? Okay just kidding.
Swartz campaigning on January 18, 2012, a year before his death, against SOPA, a bill he claimed would "break the Internet". Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski
There's endless wrangling on the comments here on this blog and of course on much bigger blogs with many more people about "what might have been" if Swartz had been forced to face a trial, if the prosecutor had been forced to try to make her case before a jury, and on and on. But, as T.S. Eliot put it, "what might have been and what have been point to one end, which is always present".
What really matters now is not the sidetrack of the hypotheticals, edge-casey and hysterical as they always are from the open sourcerers.
What matters is what happens next, what the repercussions are. After all, the Massachusetts federal courts are not going to try Swartz posthumously, like the Russians are now trying Magnitsky. The charges are dropped and the case is closed because he died. No one will ever know whether "the Internet" mob scene and media circus around a jury trial would have gotten Swartz off, as I believe.
But there are two formal investigations that are ongoing -- one conducted by Prof. Abelson at MIT (see below), and one conducted by Daryl Issa (and I'm actually not sure how formal that is, but it's serious in the sense that he is a prominent member of Congress). Issa is a Republican representing the 49th district in California, but he is four-square for the copyleftists as an extreme Libertarian on Internet issues -- he is for an "open and accessible and free Internet" by which he means he is for defending the California business model of his state. Issa was a champion of the anti-SOPA cause who has really gotten religion on this subject.
Issa pledges to probe the Department of Justice on how this case was prosecuted. This week, he got his fellow member on the House Oversight Committee, Democrat Elijah Cummings, to join him in appealing to Eric Holder in a letter.
PORTRAYAL OF SWARTZ AS A POLITICAL PRISONER
The two have REAAALY upped the ante here by turning this into a "prisoner of conscience" case. They've dropped the bombshell of an allegation that they think the DOJ trumped up this case as punishment for Swartz's anti-SOPA work, as Huffpo reports:
The letter from Issa and Cummings asks Holder about factors that led to
the decision to prosecute Swartz, along with key decisions after the
case began. The letter also asks if Swartz's political advocacy,
including his anti-SOPA work, were factors that DOJ considered relevant.
It's funny, not even the rabid fanboyz of this cause like Declan McCullough have played up that angle much. Maybe because the hack and the arrest came before the SOPA campaign in time. The arrest was January 6, 2011. He was released pending investigation. On July 19, 2011, the federal grand jury released its indictment on federal charges, but Swartz was released on a $100,000 unsecured bond.
The SOPA campaign grew prominent in 2012. Swartz was the keynote speaker at the F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012 event in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2012.
One could just as well posit that Swartz took up the SOPA campaign as avidly as he did precisely to make himself into an Internet hero and seeming "victim of the Man" to help his case along. All the while as his case was moving forward -- he was released on a bond -- he was stumping against SOPA very deliberately and vigorously and with lots of resources for his funded organization Demand Progress (basically a new shell for the very old Mitch Kapor copyleftist groups in existence already for a decade to do this campaign).
HACKERS ARE JOURNALISTS?!
But Issa lets us know just how biased he is on this probe with this sort of statement:
“I’m not condoning his hacking, but he’s certainly someone who worked
very hard,” Issa said. “Had he been a journalist and taken that same
material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it. It
would have been like the Pentagon Papers.”
Naturally, that's nonsense, because journalists don't write circumvention scripts, hack into systems, disguise their identity, break into wiring closets, cover their faces, etc. If you think they do, you haven't ever studied the Food Lion case. It's not considered ethical for journalists to pretend to be something they aren't to hack into something and gain information illegally. When they do this on the right, boy, are they savaged by the left (see Acorn). So there is no comparison and this is nothing like the Pentagon Papers because there is no war and no conscience issue over people dying needlessly -- nobody is killing somebody and napalming a rice paddy because they can't get a dusty dull old professor's paper; it was never about the content but the idea of smashing the relationship between commerce and knowledge (which is what Creative Commons was set up to do).
FAST AND FURIOUS
If you read the Huffpo piece all the way down, you'll see why Issa loves the Swartz case -- it exhibits his hobby horses and his much bigger fish to fry with holder on Fast and Furious:
“I’ll make a risky statement here: Overprosecution is a tool often used
to get people to plead guilty rather than risk sentencing,” Issa said.
“It is a tool of question. If someone is genuinely guilty of something
and you bring them up on charges, that’s fine. But throw the book at
them and find all kinds of charges and cobble them together so that
they’ll plea to a 'lesser included' is a technique that I think can
sometimes be inappropriately used.”
Funny, that; in order to get back at Obama's appointee as Attorney General over what is seen asa bungled gun-walking sting operation against smugglers to Mexico, where one gun was even found implicated in the death of a US federal agent, for which Holder ultimately was held in contempt of Congress and Obama invoked his executive privilege, Issa will use the case of alleged "overreach" in Swartz to further discredit Obama and his appointees. It's funny to think Holder reportedly once accompanied black radicals who violently occupied an ROTC office, so the Daily Caller reports. That was sort of the hacking of its day, if you will. Holder has more in common with Swartz than not, if true.
WHAT WAS MIT'S ROLE?
One of the key issues to clarify is whether or not MIT really dropped this, or really egged it on. Frankly, there is no definitive answer to that, because if MIT really, really wanted this to go away, given that Swartz's father worked for them and Abelson of MIT was a founder of Creative Commons, friend of Lessig, and Swartz, and there were many other ties, they could have made this go away. They didn't. Says Cummings:
"I'm pleased that it's a joint effort, by the way," said Cummings, whose
signature on the letter raises the pressure on the Justice Department.
"There's more than one issue here. Is the law too vague? Why was he
being charged the way he was when the university decided they were not
going to prosecute? Did that have any bearing?"
A lot of people don't understand that if an injured party doesn't wish to pursue charges in a civil suit, or cooperate with prosecution in a criminal suit, that doesn't mean that the prosecutor cannot go forward if he believes that a federal crime has nevertheless taken place. I just don't see how we can pin on these Democrats in Massachusetts any vindictiveness over Swartz's role in the anti-SOPA campaign -- none of them are associated with pushing this bill on the Hill; Ortiz may think that "stealing is stealing" -- and she's right -- but that's because she's applying the law, not because she has Chris Dodd on the speed dial. She and the other prosecutors are unrelated to the drafting of SOPA or its unfolding saga, from all appearances.
It's not clear of the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility will do any investigation beacause there isn't actually a concrete complaint of wrongdoing. There is a vague notion that the entire case is "overreach" or "intimidation" but nobody has been able to prove this systematically, it's just the rhetorical cry of the Internet mobs and copyleftist professors. Lessig may have the influence and power and money to push this -- we'll see. I suspect he will succeed; guilt will animate him. Meanwhile, Lessig calls for an investigation of Ortiz, distracting from his own complicity in both the hack and its aftermath.
ABELSON INVESTIGATION AT MIT
Professor Hal Abelson, a computer scientist from MIT has been asked by the president of MIT also to investigate this matter, because the community wants to understand why the MIT leadership backed the prosecutor on this case. Abelson is a founder of Creative Commons with Lessig and close to both him and Swartz, so it's not at all unbiased, but he was chosen precisely because MIT is dealing with an angry mob and needs a figure that mob will trust. Abelson gave a promising statement by saying that he was confident he would find that people followed procedure, setting it up so that he will not be seeing as leading a witch-hunt
Meanwhile, I suppose other agencies like the GAO could investigate the DOJ in broader terms as they have in the past, or other congressional offices.
Swartz's father could bring a lawsuit against MIT. Do wrongful deaths suits related to suicides succeed in this country the way they can in, say, Central Asia? I don't think they do, but they're welcome to try that theory. They could claim mental pain and suffering.
Now, will any of this work?
WHAT IS THE LIKELY OUTCOME?
Here's what I think will happen:
1. Issa will find, surprise, surprise that the laws were too harsh, that the sentences, even being routinely invoked, were too intimidating, and that plea bargaining and prosecutorial overreach are big subjects and should lead to...something. Review of laws. Firing of prosecutors? Passage of the ill-conceived "Aaron's law" that Zoe Lofgren is pumping -- Issa's partner in the anti-SOPA struggle. I don't know if Issa has the power to get a prosecutor in Massachusetts fired or reassigned and the mechanisms for this but it may not take this form; he may focus on the use of plea-bargaining itself as something he'd like to get rid of for various reasons -- until a case comes up that he likes when plea-bargaining is used, then he may drop it. My hunch is that he will be able to posture around this for awhile, and maybe even get congressional action to amend the CFAA or pass Aaron's law, but I suspect that it will be hard to sustain the momentum because deep down, he and others know that Swartz was a hacker, and they don't have their real constituents pushing this, they only have "the Internet mob" which is different.
2. MIT's Abelson, despite his politesse at the outset, is going to conclude that MIT officials relied on prosecutors to create a deterrent to hacking of their system. He will find that they began so harshly because they thought it was the Chinese (who just hacked the New York Times), but that they kept it up even after JSTOR reneged because they were just plain mad at the breach -- the way tekkies get. Remember how nothing would pry loose Google from China? Dissidents going to jail over the government looking at their gmail, or the government blocking search -- that wasn't enough. But the minute the Chinese hackers actually *touched Google's servers*, then they cried foul. Then it had "gone too far" and they had to leave.
No one ever names the network administrators and others in charge of MIT's computer system. Ever. In their lives. The tribe closes ranks at times like this. One of the reasons that "the Internet" is so vicious about Ortiz is that they have been sicced on her as a distraction from asking why Mr. Network Administrator or Geek-in-Chief at MIT decided this wasn't an "incovenience," as Anonymous calls it, but a hack.
The tribe didn't turn in that person or persons -- but Abelson might flag them as part of the problem, and they may be fired. Or disciplined. Or just have their names put out on Pastebin so Anonymous can savage them and call them corporate prostitutes and sell-outs.
But the buck went higher than those geeks at the actual servers, and Abelson will write something anguished and soul-searching about how the commuuuunity has to come together and understand that we must all share and work together and be as one and create commonly. Just as JSTOR threw out 4 million files for free two days before Aaron Swartz killed himself (was that part of the despair factor?), so MIT will announce some openness thingy and make available some millions of something or another.
CIVIL SUIT?
But there's still Swartz's father, who wants their heads. He thinks the prosecutors killed his son, with the help of MIT. So they will have to make it right. He may try to launch a suit against the prosecutors but I don't think he will get anywhere with that; he may try to launch a civil suit against MIT -- it won't succeed but it will get settled with perhaps a promise of funding a professorship in Aaron's name, or a center for computing, or an annual series of lectures. People like Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist, who went to MIT and give generously as alumni may throw their weight around and ask for more blood. Either the IT guy or some lower level manager who kept cooperating with the feds. As with Benghazi, the president won't resign but some officials may have to.
This is a complicated story to gain revenge on by quick impact projects. "The Internet" will try to do that by focusing on getting Ortiz gone or getting the law changed, but neither of them are guaranteed.
THE RUINATION OF ORTIZ' LIFE
I do think that Ortiz will be forced to resign or be reassigned or informally not allowed to work on computer cases -- but she faces a bigger problem. Every time somebody puts together a jury, they will have to ask the jurors if they are aware of any reputational issues with Ortiz, and some hipsters and even oldsters will say "Wasn't she the one who wanted to jail that nerd for 50 years and killed him." The Anonymous activity against her, as in Steubenville, is so vicious, and so much has been dragged out, that she may even have to assume a new identity to have a life.
ANONYMOUS ATTACKS USSC AND SUPREME COURT JUSTICES
And speaking of Anonymous, the attack on the Supreme Court is their first attack on justice as an institution. Before, they attacked the Pentagon because you're supposed to hate the war machine. They attacked the FBI over HPGary or Barrett Brown singled out an FBI agent. But they didn't try to overthrow the independent judiciary as a tactic. Now they are doing that, claiming it's because they're disappointed idealists who are saddened by corruption, but of course that's the ruse and the pose used by these forces to smash, smash, smash as anarchists must do. (And I'll never be surprised if we discover some day that foreign secret police have helped this effort along on top of supposed genuine homegrown idealists).
One of the purposes that Assange and other anarchists like him in WikiLeaks, Anonymous and OWS do what they do is to make it so that the target has to "become unlike itself" and close down or become "a security state" worse than it was, to discredit it in people's eyes. An old, old terrorist tactic. The Leninist "the worse, the better".
Because the results are going to be somewhat fuzzy from these other "civic" processes -- Issa's probe isn't going to yield some clear-cut disciplinary path; the complexity of tackling plea-bargaining will be hard; the passage of "Aaron's Law" may not work --that Anonymous will step up its game in trying to smash the justice system. Nobody loves Barret Brown, but if he comes to trial or if Hammond does or if Sabu finally goes to court, Anonymous will have fresh reason to do smashing of the justice institutions.
Civil rights activists and Glenn Greenwald and all the rest will tell the DOJ and other officials that they shouldn't crack down on these anarchists as this will make them heroes and spiral into worsening cycles of hacking and violence. They should minimize the witch-hunt so they are not treated as heroes. The same philosophy use on the "war on terrorism" to make it not a war but a police action, and a minimal one. So Anonymous will be emboldened and empowered, and will have fresh cases to be angry about.
WILL PASTEBIN JUSTICE OCCUR?
There's several factors that might intervene to put a monkey wrench into these awful scenarios. Nobody ever seemed to ask for or take an interest in any toxocology test. But if it came back that illegal drugs or powerful psychotropic drugs known to cause suicide in other cases were found, this might lesson the hackers' cause all around. Or if some hacker friend or ex-friend or skeptic or just plain spiteful bastard tired of reading about the "Reddit co-founder" who didn't really co-found Reddit decides to investigate and put up on pastebin that Swartz's suicide was really about something else, not his case, or that in fact he had more ambitious and sinister designs for his hack than was known. The script kiddies always betray their own, and this is a matter of time before revisionism starts to happen in the hagiography. But I think this could be a slow process because hundreds of people turned out for the memorial services in various cities and there is a lot of passion around this issue with many people wanting to illustrate it with a martyr.
The petition on whitehouse.gov to remove Ortiz has to reach 100,000 signatures now to get an answer, because they moved the goalposts from 25,000. And it will get it, even if somebody has to make the alt accounts and the proxies or bring in the foreign vote. Obama will look this all over, see Issa and Fast and Furious in the landscape, and punt. It's too bad that federal agent had to die from that gun Holder let walk, because then Swartz's martyrdom could have been displayed in the pristine way it needed to be displayed by Issa to get full bi-partisan support. I could be wrong about this, however, given that Elizabeth Warren already got behind the cause and it will escalate.
EFF, Google and the Berkman Center have kind of stayed away from this story somewhat, making only brief comments or calls for laws to be reviewed. EFF never declared Swartz innocent and never took up his case, as they won't take criminal hacking cases, we're told. They haven't made the struggle against a prosecutor and institutions like plea-bargaining their own -- in part they may be waiting to see if this could backfire on them, because like anybody, if the plea-bargaining helped one of their own, they might come to like it again.
But my guess is that with Anonymous banging down the gates, with the Swartz family understandably angrily grieving and wanting justice in the form of punishment for prosecutors and/or MIT, with "the Internet" baying about MIT and prosecutors, what will be sacrificed in this case is truth and justice. We will all be that much closer in the end to the Wired State.
Details at www.rhsmith.umd.edu/miniMBA2.0/courses.aspxSocial Social Media Marketing Marketing strategy has been revolutionized by the rise of social
networks, real-time tools like Twitter and Facebook, user-generated
content (e.g., blogging) and a shift in consumer attention to new
media. Old paradigms of word of mouth marketing, viral strategy,
consumer targeting, brand and reputation management are being
radically altered for this business 2.0 phenomenon. The course will
address key strategic and tactical aspects of social media marketing,
using examples and techniques from corporations, election campaigns,
and recent startups. The strategic themes focus on the business case
for using various social media approaches and examples of successes
and failures. The tactical aspects will introduce participants to the
capabilities and uses of individual technologies through case examples
and hands-on exercises.
Faculty: Dr. David Godes Panelist on the Oct 2010 Session: Panelist: Shashi Bellamkonda, Director Social Media, Network Solutions Panelist: Rohit Bhargava, SVP Ogilvy/Author Panelist: Teddy Goff, AVP, Blue State Digital Panelist: Peter LaMotte (President), GeniusRocket (cc) Shashi
Bellamkonda www.shashi.name Social Media Swami Network Solutions Please credit as above if using this picture
I put all the details of this picture from Flickr because it lets you know how social media marketers morphed to political marketers and then won the election for Obama. Above is Obama's Digital Director, Teddy Goff, formerly of Blue State Digital. We will come back to him at the end.
You know that Silicon Valley saying, "If you are not paying for it, you are the product."
I think most people don't care very much about this and feel if they get a free product like Facebook or Linked-In, with maybe some premium options, they don't care. That is basically the social bargain.
I do think it's always worth peering at the business model, however, especially as the free/freemium platforms' business model always involves you working for free and often supplying free content, too.
A tweet fell into my vision from my feed from a guy named Ross Dawson, one of those typical newfangled Internet gurus who is famous for being famous and who tells you he is "sought after" and "in demand" as a speaker and consultant. It may be so.
Futurist/ Entrepreneur/ Keynote Speaker/ Author and contributor to global brain. Visualization of my neural activity: http://bit.ly/AHTGpBizModel
You know, I haven't clicked on that visualization of Dawson's neural activity -- I prefer to see if it is evidenced on Twitter for now.
So Ross was having a Twitchat and I decided to ask him a question.
He had begun breathlessly, but had few takers:
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
In 23 hours I will be doing a Twitter #crowdchat on Crowd Business Models - tune in if interested! http://bit.ly/11N5W1G
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
A "crowd business model" is a business model based on participation and value creation by many, often outside the company #crowdchat
So I asked if these companies were profitable -- I figured to start with that. Answer:
@catfitz most of the companies on our Crowd Business Models visual are profitable. Jigsaw mentioned earlier sold for $140m
So, not all of them are.
My next question was to ask what the crowd gets paid. But his talk was over before you knew it.
If you look at Jigsaw, you get the answer: of course the crowd doesn't get paid. The crowd is relied upon to upload business cards of other people -- without their permission -- to fill up the data bases and create the service. They use it and get something out of it. They pay for premium accounts/advertising/consulting whatever -- although we never learn if this company *made a profit* on its own, running its business; it is so telling that in the hustle and shill of Silicon Valley, it is described as "making a profit" merely if it is sold to another entrepreneur and its original venture capitalists take a cashout. It's never about *the company*.
Salesforce, a much more gigantic and older and successful company that does customer service and all kinds of other things for companies found it in their interests to buy out a competitor. The data is criticized as being sloppy/erroneous/not with customer's approval. The New York Times wrote enthusiastically four years ago.
Jigsaw may disappear into the mists of Salesforth's maws, another little piece of the delusional history of the dotocom and web 2.0 manias. But for Ross Dawson, it's Exhibit No. 1. Jigsaw figured out how to get all those sales people out there to input data of those they were targeting in exchange for getting their peers' data -- and they could pay to access more for $25, or as a corporation, get unlimited access (the way LinkedIn, like an old Oriental Bazaar, makes you pay bakshish into the palms of Reid Hoffman, in order to make a connection to another person who might advance you in life; sometime, if it doesn't exist already, we will see the relationships reduced to commodities as they are in Russia or China, where you pay money not just for introductions; you pay money to get the job itself, as a bribe.)
So all those middle-class sales drones input data for free into this service, paid a little to get more of it out, and put $142 million cash into the hands of Jim Fowler, the owner, when he sold it to Salesforce. Great work if you can get it -- and he did, by not doing it, because you did.
Ross Dawson has a point to make:
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
Q9) we will see a dramatic rise in crowd-based businesses. In addition many established orgs will start to tap crowds in earnest #crowdchat
I had more questions, but it was hard to find answers about those other profit-making companies and what the user really got out of it (do we ever learn what percentage of LinkedIn premium users get actual jobs?).
But suddenly, my eye was struck by another piece of news:
Jo Brothers @jobrothers
Futurist @rossdawson joins Obama’s Digital Director at Air NZ Social Media Breakfast http://www.theflyingsocialnetwork.com:8080/archives/9175 via @FlyAirNZ
And then this:
Dawson joins headliner Teddy Goff at the Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast on Wednesday 13 February. Goff is the groundbreaking Digital Director of President Obama’s data-driven 2012 re-election campaign. Teddy Goff’s team harnessed data effectively to fundraise a ground breaking US$690 million, build online followings of more than 78 million people, and register more than a million people to vote in the largest online promotion programme in political history.
So, while Kim Dotcom was rolling out his new company in New Zealand, having fled American justice to his empire in NZ, and was twitting the content industry once again by encouraging uploads of content while he looked the other way and collected fees and ad revenue, Obama's digital director, head of Obama's "data driven" win, was breaking bread at an Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast.
My mind boggles at things like that. Obama's ICE and prosecutors are trying to round up Kim Dotcom. He eludes their capture and eludes the NZ law-enforcers as well and the FBI are left bungling and fuming.
The smart thing to do then is to start to say to New Zealand, "Look, we understand you have your laws and all, and you need to respect civil rights and perhaps you haven't, but Kim Dotcom is wanted for piracy, we still have an indictment out, and we think maybe what would be appropriate because you keep refusing to cooperate in his extradition now is for us to cease to do business with you."
That's how technologists themselves do it.
Instead, Obama's Digital Director flies to New Zealand the week of Dotcom's rollout (was he in the audience for the big show? I bet he was!), and breakfasts with Air New Zealand, which is of course one of NZ's biggest businesses getting US revenue.
It's at moments like this that I realize Kim Dotcom will never be extradited during the Obama Administration.
I wish I had a big old blank page with minimal graphics visited by billions needing to search for stuff to counter this blatant propaganda the way Google purveys their own, but, I don't : )
It is not transparent because we never learn the *criteria* and the *reasoning* and the *process* for how takedown judgements are made; it's just raw Google executive revolutionary expediency, and that's it. Google is now the Global Glavlit. We get a handful of examples of "takedowns we didn't do" -- any of them could be argued on the merits but we don't have enough information and there's no appeal process; indeed, no due process as all as people cannot face their accusers, mount an adversarial process, etc. It's just what Google decides.
All these lawfaring lawyers screaming about US prosecutors overreaching need to stop kvetching about cases that didn't ever come to court, or which led to probation, and look at the huge overreach Google has acquired to adjudicate cases completely outside any national sovereignty, international treaty body, or any court of law whatsoever. Look at this:
Why do you remove some URLs but not others?
It is our policy to respond to clear and specific notices of alleged copyright infringement. Upon review, we may discover that one or more URLs specified in a copyright removal request clearly did not infringe copyrights. In those cases we will decline to remove those URLs from Search. Reasons we may decline to remove URLs include not having in enough information about why the URL is allegedly infringing; not finding the allegedly infringing content referenced in the request; deducing that the copyright removal process is being used improperly (see next FAQ for examples) or fair use.
On what basis does Google decide what does and doesn't infringe copyright? On the basis of whether they can continue to earn ad money themselves on that stolen content? That's the question to ask about this blatant conflict of interest with the search loss-leader for the world's biggest ad agency.
By publishing stark numbers on spare white pages -- like the huge increase in takedown requests related to copyright, or huge numbers of requests from the US government -- Google can ensure enormous resonance through all its tech media mouthpieces and loyal outlets to make it appear that evil Amerika is the worst in the world and evil Hollywood moguls are the worst at suppressing us all in our liberties.
But...the reason there are more copyright notices is because there is more piracy, and more piracy with impunity, and Google's help in monetarizing said piracy. Not to menion its own hijacking of content for the sale of ads and its own largesse made from this practice.
We never learn how long the content remains on Google's servers *before* it is taken down, and how much ad money Google earns on other people's content before they must reluctantly let it slip from their giant paws. Now that would be transparency; we don't get that. What we get is something else in the FAQs -- they remove content generally within six hours of getting a DMCA notice of infringement. But it can take awhile to prepare those, and the IP holders don't always realize there is infringement at first.
The reason that you don't see the real authoritarians of the world in absolute numbers of the sort that geeks with 0101 thinking can understand and the tech media can be impressed by is that countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan etc. don't submit any takedown notices or at least very few -- they just block all of Youtube. Or all of Facebook. Or all of sites they don't like, when they want. Different!
Tajikistan, which just closed off access to Facebook, Twitter, other social network sites and their own opposition sites, isn't shown to have a single takedown notice to Google. That's because "takedown" is already the gentleman's way of doing things on the Internet -- the real thugs just cut the cable or shut off the Internet or block all the sites, period.
Russia, which has huge aspirations for Internet control and achieves them in a variety of ways, from thuggish blocking to thuggish beating of journalists, as well as many more subtle ways, has only 176 requests, 174 for national security in violation of the extremism law, and two on "defamation".
The purpose of Google's report is to serve the cause of copyleftism, and try to prove that the real culprit in the world is the US government, which they fight more assiduously than China, and the real problem in Internet "innovation" is the call to remove stolen content. You can see the nakedness of their intent, with its thin global veneer, in the Faqs.
All the examples of "intentionally abusive copyright removal requests" come from the US and the motional picture industry or advertisers in the US or UK, not the authoritarian Egyptian or Russian or Chinese governments dealing with their own dissenters. That's because what Google is interested in is not free speech, but freedom for its ad agency.
They hope by publishing these skewed and misleading figures they will prevail in their own self-interested struggles for their own ideological and business interests. Their report tells us nothing about how they make money from ads with rampant piracy they encourge, and tell us little about the actual state of freedom in the world and how governments suppress it.
Recent Comments