Wired State

Why Wikileaks is Wrong

Pandora's Box by Waterhouse

Most people judging Wikileaks as morally wrong focus on the issue of the burning of sources mentioned in cables and documents  -- they could face not only embarrassment but persecution and death. Soldiers and dissidents and diplomats could all be harmed.

And all that's true, although we haven't seen it work that way -- yet. And would we know if it did? Wikileaks leaks other people's secrets -- mainly America's! -- but doesn't go on leaking to follow up to see if it did harm. We wouldn't learn about the adverse consequences from them. And if the U.S. is trying to minimize the seeming harm, would it be in the government's best interests to say if Wikileaks scored in this way? I would hope, in fact, that we could get this information -- because it would help in the long-term effort to quell the anarchic thuggery of Wikileaks.

Yet there's also the issue of democracy, transparency and accountability -- of Wikileaks itself, as an operation or loose organization or movement. It has none of those things. People involved are mainly anonymous. They ask for donations by banking accounts -- but we don't know how much they raise or how much they spent, or on what.  They don't say what their aspirational goals are, or whether they have any creed or ideology -- there's only the taunting slogan "We open governments."

Except they don't. They only open *one* government, pretty much, the U.S.  The others only become displayed to the extent the U.S. engages with them, and much of the time, it's unflattering and damaging to the U.S., not anyone else. Timothy Garton-Ash makes a strange effort to make lemonade out of lemons by describing, for example, William Burns' literary talents in describing a Dagestani wedding where Kadyrov is present and concluding that U.S. diplomatic efforts make the diplomatic corps look good. Maybe so. But they'd look even better if their secrets weren't dumped.

The nature of Wikileaks itself and the contrary, secretive, unaccountable essence of its own operation are, of course, a problem, and one not commented on often. As is the one-sided nature of their "opening" -- it's never the Kremlin, the Taliban, the Iranian ayatollahs and *their* plans and *their* assessments that we ever get from this bunch.

In that sense, Micah Sifry's tweet that Wikileaks represents an "open society" is a disgraceful perversity -- and I told him so. You can hardly compare a society that is open *by consent* and by voluntary disclosure of the governed and the governing to vandals who forcibly pry open what is rightly closed. How strange that Micah answers that I "of all people" should be interested in this openness?! Like all the opensource thugs, Wikileaks violates the principle of opt-in; and indeed there is not even an opt-out.

Yes, most of all, what's wrong with Wikileaks is that it is achieved by force, without consent and without knowledge. It's Bolshevist, in that a group of people arrogantly usurp to themselves power, without democratic legitimacy, in the name of revolutionary expediency (and here, it's not even clear what the revolution is for, except to undermine the leader of the Western world for the sake of hackerish info-anarchy).

So it's not the American people, through their elected representatives, and their president who appoints various officials to preside over diplomacy and classification of documents. That democratic, institutionalized process is loathed and hated by Wikileaks. Here, we have the most liberal president in history, right? With the most open government, with Gov 2.0 prying open government to view all over town, right? And that's not enough? And it's *now* that we get these dumps, not under Bush? Something wrong with this picture.

While it's customary on the hard left and among the "progressives" to imagine that the U.S. is some evil bulwark and oppressive force, in fact, there are few governments in the world more open. Few have the kind of levers to uncover information that the U.S. has with its free press and the Freedom of Information Act.

This is how we have to think of the moral problem of Wikileaks: If most people were able to have a chance to vote on the issue of whether or not to expose all the diplomatic cables of the United States and all the classified secrets about, say, diplomacy with Iran, they would likely vote *no*. I think most would prefer to have Congress deliberate these issues, and to have the elected executive, President Obama, and his chosen Secretary of State Clinton, decide what should be said and not said. These institutions, after all, are democratically and openly created. If you *didn't* like them, you could vote to change them -- and in fact, that's what people did -- and could do again!

By contrast, the thugs at Wikileaks simply crowbarred the door open and dumped everything out merely because...they can. Because they got a lucky break due to a combination of sullen malice from the perpetrator Sgt. Manning and the negligence of security arrangements.

I don't know why information isn't more compartmentalized -- in fact in compartments like a ship, where if one is compromised, it is localized and not every section is flooded. At least, not like it was on the Titanic...But in part, it was due to the modern fashion for silo-breaking, so that information isn't in vertical silos and unavailable for collaboration. Wikitarianism in the minds of the U.S. government's internal network architects is as much to blame for this outrageous diplomatic compromise  as the wikitarianism of Wikileaks itself. As I've always said, it's usually only a few who benefit from the false collectives of wikis...

I bet some people doubt that a democratic and fair vote as to whether this sort of leakage should be approved would lead to people voting *against* Wikileaks. I don't. And the problem is, like people living in a totalitarian society, we didn't *get* to vote. It's our country and our diplomats and our documents -- and we *didn't get to chose*. It was unaccountably leaked in spite of us.

I was interested to see a blog called The Acorn where the author pondered the consequences, post-Wikileaks, and the return to information silos.

There are very few voices raised in condemnation of Wikileaks -- the left and right both are gloating at Obama's discomfort, for their reasons. This writer had no qualms about condemning the act morally, and also practically -- the government cannot function in a Pantopticon:

If everything a government official says and writes is liable to become public the next moment, you will only have self-censorship, political correctness and worse, a greater tendency to avoid putting debates and decisions on record.

The Acorn believes that the net effect is going to be a worsening secrecy and lack of disclosure from a government that had, in fact, been quite open -- I would say more than any in history -- and a change in the way data are handled:

What might happen is that brakes will be applied in the trend towards sharing of information within government and across departmental silos. A process that began as a result of the US intelligence community’s failure to piece together data that could have led to the uncovering of the 9/11 plot—and was adopted by governments across the world, including in India—might come to an end with abuse of technological power by Wikileaks. ‘Information fusion’ within governments is likely to be the first casualty of Mr Assange’s war on responsibility.

Meanwhile, a disgraceful Guardian blog adds insult to injury banging on State Department legal advisor Harold Koh for condemning the leaks and urging Wikileaks to cease and desist. It's bad enough the secret documents of the U.S. are forcibly leaked against the will of the people; but Pratap Chatterjee wants the U.S. government then to somehow roll over, and for guardians of human rights like Koh to acquiesce in the Wikileaks criminality.

Why? I would challenge Chatterjee to find anything illegal in the actions of the diplomats that have been exposed by this wikidump. No doubt analysts will focus on the instructions to diplomats at the UN to gather humint about the Secretary General. Perhaps. Or maybe it is due diligence in preventing another scandal like the "oil for food" being launched from our shores? In any event: show me the violations, I'm not seeing it, just because somebody provides a frank characterization of the Persian character or tries to gather Arab allies in the job of containing Iran's nuclear mischief.

Chatterjee goes off on a tangent to fuss that the U.S. doesn't have the right to assassinate terrorists. I think likely more context is needed here. Are these just any enemies of the U.S., or terrorists for whom there is "probable cause"? Who have attacked the U.S.? War is not illegal, more's the pity for the human rights purist. In any event, even if Koh turns out to have committed a human rights sin here by endorsing targeted assassinations, that doesn't mean Wikileaks is entitled to expose people to danger and undermine *a democratic, freely-elected government*. Once again: how come it's never the tyrants who are undermined?!

After the last disgraceful round of Wikileaks, the leakers must have felt *some* moral pressure because they talked about how the next round would involve "kompromat" (compromising material) on Russia and other countries, finally exposing authortiarians instead of democrats.

I'm not seeing it. I saw *one* cable on Russia in the Guardian data base, and the Dagestani wedding doesn't really tell us anything that undermines the Kremlin; if anything, it's yet another advertisement for why it should be feared.

Is it any accident, comrades, that Evgeny Morozov was out in front cheering the Wikileakers, chortling that now the entire USG gets to go through a Rapiscan like the TSA, earning himself a fete at the NYT Lede? Where's the leaks that undermine the Kremlin, Zhenya?

Self-acknowledged red diaper-baby and RT regular Fred Weir, who always craftily appears to be critical of Russia, yet is always morally equivocating it with the West, wrote only a month ago that we were going to be getting some mother lode of kompromat on Russia, citing Izvestia. Nu? Where is it, Fred? I'm not seeing anything remotely like what you described. His article October 26 in the Christian Science Monitor achieved a spinning of the growing questioning of Wikileaks as anti-American and always in one direction -- and yet it never delivered. Will Fred, let along Kommersant or Moscow News or Izvestia, return to note that their speculative spin didn't pan out? Or will they claim there is still a kompromat dump to come?

 

 

Reaching the Shut-Ins

I met a blogger at the Typepad meet-up the other night who told me that he was working on helping clients get local ads on Twitter. He thought the real money from Twitter to be made was not on national campaigns but on local advertising. With geolocation turned on, he said, you can suck out of Twitter all the people in, say, a 6-mile radius of your restaurant who are typing things like "where should we eat"or "food" or "hungry". It's not even about spamming them; you just follow them and they see you.

Of course, we suffer that all the time. I block many of the people doing that to me, sending me translation service because they see I write about a foreign country, or people pushing other junk at me based on what they think a key word tells them. I'm not interested in sales pitches on Twitter.  But maybe other people are. A lot of people pack their followers' list with stuff like that merely to boost it in one direction so that they can then go and follow past 2,000, the ceiling.

And of course there are plenty of people willing to sign up for things to be pushed to them on their phone.

The other day I was standing at the ATM, feeding in a check, when I overhead a bank manager helping a woman who appeared to be new in town, who had been sent to New York by her firm. The manager was telling her about some kind of texting thing you could set up on your smart phone with the bank account. The newcomer to New York was then rhapsodizing about her apps.

"If it weren't for these apps, I would be a shut-in," she said. "It tells me where to eat, where to shop."

I blinked, and wondered why this young, healthy woman couldn't step out of her apartment and...explore. Experience the thrill of wandering around a city and stumbling on things serendipitously. And instead, would peer at a tiny screen and let some geek tell her what to eat. I found it really scary. Somehow, when I left the bank, I saw the woman was walking up the street in front of me. She didn't look at anything to the right or left, none of the little restaurants up and down the lanes. She was first talking on her phone, then staring at her screen...

I have given my Android to my daughter because I got tired of maintaining it, and even when I had it, I didn't take it out on walks because I figured if I stared at a screen most of the day for work, wouldn't it be nice to look at trees and birds and people and such while outside, and not the little screen?

Even so, this fellow Typepad blogger is a localvore for ads.

It was so funny the next day to open up my email and find this rant from tech guru Shelly Palmer exposing the myth of the local advertising revenue: "The Complete Myth of Local Advertising," he says.

Shelly described this friend of his, Harry, who had a small business and had a free blog made for him, and who asked Shelly if he could "put him on the front page of Google" now using SEO -- although he was just a little carpet place. And Shelly became exasperated with him and basically concluded an interesting thing: that this guy is not worth chasing. That he will never get it. That he will never spend money on making the website or spend money on advertising. That he will never understand "21st century business". And therefore he is not worth chasing as a client.

Of course, instead of going to all that expense of having geeks make a website, Shelly, the carpet guy could just go on Twitter. Given the geolocation thing, if he just advertised around, maybe he'd get some nibbles. Of course, I'm not sure that people go on Twitter and type, "I need to buy a carpet today. ne1 know where there's a carpet store in my neighborhood to buy a carpet?" etc. That's probably not how it works very often. In fact, little carpet stores in your neighborhood get passed by a lot of times by shoppers who go to bigger stores or even order by phone or online from big warehouses.

I happened to follow a few favourite restaurants on Facebook and Twitter. But if they were having specials or coupons or were just trying to remind me of their existence, they just got lost in the huge stream of friend-news. They would probably get my attention better by snail-mailing me a brochure or even using the Chinese-menu-under-the-door invasion method than Tweeting me.

The *connection* just isn't there. I do better literally going out and looking up and down streets to find something interesting. What happens when there are just *too many* little local things chasing each other and us for ad clicks?!

Shelly may be wrong about the potential for Twitter or even some cheap blog -- and even Typepad! -- for a carpet business trying to get a few more customers. Instead of telling the friend to go on Typepad or Wordpress or Twitter, he started asking him geeky-guru questions like "how many people walk through the door?"

I went into my standard explanation about business goals like, selling more carpet and floor covering. I spoke about conversion metrics and how he might measure the success of his web marketing efforts. Driving foot traffic over the doors of his two retail locations, etc

That's important to know, but what this guy needs is *more* people than *already* walk through and needs to hear *HOW* to do that on the Internet without being fed a lot of SEO junk. He doesn't really need to know -- at first, especially -- about conversion metrics or be asked bigger thinky questions about his "goals" (obviously they would involve selling more carpet). He just needs to be told that no, he can't get on the *front* page of Google, but he can get *some* hits if he improves his website, adds a few things, and goes on Twitter. Why not? That will cost him nothing.

Yes, we get it that he cannot get to the first page of Google in "carpets". But maybe if somebody types "E. 23rd Street carpets" he *would* get noticed -- if they lived on that street.

Still, Shelly knows his business, and his verdict on his friend his pretty harsh:

There is no version of the world where Harry's business is worth going after, or taking. He will require three times the amount of customer handholding that a customer three times his size would require. He will never spend enough to justify speaking to him. He will torture you for every dollar he is asked to spend, because of how hard he has to personally work to make the dollar in the first place. Harry is a real person with a real business ... but he is not a growth opportunity for a technology-driven hyper-local advertising business. Harry is not a growth opportunity for anyone -- not even for himself.

I have to say this tracks for me with my little SL business. I wish the Lindens would also come to realize that they shouldn't track every customer but should just try to reduce the hemorrhage. There are a lot of Harrys in SL. They waste your time, given what they will give you. I have to use rudeness as an actual business tool to weed out the people who are trying to make me spend an hour holding their hand to give me only...one dollar a month, or maybe $2.50. I won't be doing that. I give them self-service, cards, a greeting, some live chat, and that's the end of it. If they begin to take up lots more time I tell them to read the cards and move on. They often spend a great deal of time lecturing me about how unprofessional this is, how terrible it is that I won't endlessly listen to them complain that they don't like my theory of not allowing security orbs and only using ban powers. I don't care. They aren't paying me enough to care or even to have a motivation to keep them as a customer. This isn't just because it's a business with micropayments, or because there's always another one popping up right behind them.

It's because no amount of time spent on them will work. Ever. Time worth explaining how prims work or helping lay out a house *might* be worth it; other things aren't. I *could* be polite and spend the hour endlessly repeating why security orbs are a bad bargain. They will never get it; it isn't worth wasting each other's time.

That's Shelly's realization, and I accept that it's a valid one. But just as someone might lecture me that I should try to keep the 10th newbie the day who puts out 1,000 prims on a 512 and won't use an online translation system but insists on live face-to-face meetings for inworld translation -- and then still doesn't understand -- I will say, maybe, if I want to spend my life doing this -- but I point them to a) online translation systems b) my cards c) my self-service cheap rentals and log off.

In the same way, I think Harry might still be saved by Twitter -- and my fellow Typepad blogger thought so, too. Maybe not. Unfortunately, the Internet enables more stores like that to be put out of business than to be kept in business.

Show Me on the Doll Where the TSA Man Touched You

If I could, I'd point to the doll's head, because most of it is in people's heads.

Yes, I'm aware of some awful stories like the sufferer of bladder cancer who wet himself and was humiliated -- but by and large, this is a story about hysteria concocted by a certain set of geeks, libertarians and leftists -- and it got legs because of their access to social media and ability to "go viral" -- and that's about the size of it. Forums-dwellers are raging with their references to "security expert" Schneier and referencing his nasty platitude about how 3,000 people die in car accidents every month, so why sweat 3,000 people killed in a terrorist attack.

Yes, some nerd in my Facebook connections (a non-friend I've never met in real life) has actually calculated the chance of dying of cancer from a scanner, by contrast with the chances of dying from a terrorist attack, and found that you have a greater chance of dying by the former... Most of the quirks arguing about this are trying to convince you that because the system hasn't caught a terrorist yet, then it's pointless. What can you say to people like that?! "Say, let's have a terrorist go through, kill lots of people, and then, depending on how they did that, let's figure out what security system to have, mkay?"

Oh, except, that's what they did with *this one* -- made it so that people with box-cutters, bombs in their shoes, liquid explosives, and explosives in their underwear will have a tougher time getting through to a plane. They don't accept these arguments -- they get even more hysterical and begin to publish fake stories about TSA men found masterbating, TSA men traumatized at what they have to do and breaking down, even Hillary is cited as someone who "doesn't want to go through with this". (When the left and the libertarians resort to citing their hated Hillary about anything, you realize how desperate they are!)

But...courage! I've started to conclude that this madness is starting to ebb.

First, I realized that the usual massive influencers, the high-traffic tech and geek blogs and the "thought leaders" weren't all getting into harness on this. Interesting! There was this sense that "everybody on the Internet" was raging against the TSA machine, but...they weren't, really.

Scoble didn't blog about it. I didn't see that he had any tweets about this. I caught up with him on Twitter last night and he protested that in fact he had had *retweets* and that he was afraid and was wondering how he was going to do on an upcoming trip to Paris. But see, that took *prodding*.

Gawker.com didn't have *anything* on this highly snarkable topic -- nothing for days on end. Finally they fetched up a post, but they allowed as how it really all came from the libertarians -- or actually that it was all Matt Drudge's fault. I see now that just as I am concluding the same thing, John Cook is writing:

But no matter how you cut it, the alleged "furor" and "tumult" surrounding them are not actual phenomena in the observable world. They're a bunch of rich people whining into an echo chamber and passing it off as an uprising.

(I need to see if these elites at Gawker were the only ones telling us the story about how "it's all the elites" and whether Valley Wag in SFO was saying the same -- probably.)

Fred Wilson had nothing. He picks up some fashionable causes but not others; this didn't grab him because he's a fairly solid guy despite his revolutionary excesses.

Wait a minute. So...where was TechCrunch? Shouldn't they be four-square for a no-touch-my-junk geek in their own Valley? Apparently not. Earlier this year, they had a very different perspective -- merely a report without any agida. Even their first story about the backlash was very, very mild. Then I didn't see a single TSA article on TechCrunch as the rage spread elsewhere (like in their comments). Could that be? I have to look again. I keep looking! Nothing! Oh wait, there was this funny one by Alexa about the poor TSA worker who had to run the Twitter account "a lone guy against 'everybody on the Internet'". (Many people don't like her, but since she's one of the very few girls writing at TC, I appreciate her.)

Jay Rosen was crowing that nothing like the TSA had brought together the left, the libertarians and the right. Well, not exactly. It only brought together *some* people -- and it's not even a case of "the elites" as gawker is saying. I see it as a bringing together *some* people in the strain of radicalism on the left, the libertarian loon edge, and the wacky right -- not really bringing together everybody in those tendencies, but just enabling some of the more easily rioted ones to squawk. Ultimately, however, the Opt-Out Day just didn't get any mass participation.

Oh, this just in. The Tribal Leader Has Spoken, Here's @jeffjarvis via Twitter:

I'm now officially more frightened of the TSA hysterics than I am of the TSA.

Oh, it gets better! Again, from @jeffjarvis

@vaspersthegrate Put some ice on it, fella. Rape. Gestapo. Perverts. Sex crime. You and your rhetoric are overheated.

So I guess we're done, eh? The Google man has spoken.

The TSA is not going to change what they're doing fundamentally; newspapers like the Baltimore Sun have editorialized in favour of the scanners and the pat-down -- so now it's left for the extremely wacky to try to keep this alive, but mainly people are likely to adjust.

I guess I can't help feeling a bit smug that I was out in front of @jeffjarvis and gawker.com on this one -- as much as Lum Lumley likes to portray me as the hysteric and the freak *chuckles*.

Eric Rice, who often has just the right mot for an occasion like this, said:

We know full well that all it takes is one major terrorist thing at an airport to make this scanning drama stop cold. Then we can grouse about Bristol Palin on Dancing with the Stars.

And speaking of Facebook frenemies, Scott Jennings (Lum Lumley) blocked and defriended me over this debate. I simply don't take geeks sitting down and fight back when I see them get all crazy and Bolshevik. He quoted Schneier (sigh) and I argued down every single point.

Getting the Internet to Pay *Us*, Instead of the Technocommunist Oligarchs or Moving from Khalyava to Hawala

Diagram by Wutzofant

The snapping up of Cory Ondrejka, former CTO of Linden Lab (makers of Second Life) by Facebook, along with his start-up formed with game-god Bruce Rogers, called "Walletin" (which we will likely never hear from again) got me to yearning once again for a Better Internet -- an Internet that can enable more people than just a few new media tycoons and click adsters and app engineers to make money.

Tim Wu, the inventor of the term "net neutrality" (which I vigorously dispute as an ideology) has an article that at least more or less accurately diagnoses the results of the technocommunism that he won't concede -- information monopolists, or what I would call "oligarchs". These are the new monopolists like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Skype, Apple, and eBay that are the leaders or nearly sole providers of certain things we "can't live without," whether search, mobile, socializing, etc. Oh, sure, there are competitors -- Microsoft's Bing -- but we all know that there are category leaders that we all rely on. Oh, and sure, there are the legions of engineers with their "apps" who somehow help disguise the fact with their engaging baubles that they merely enable the giants to become more enormous and to eat more of us for lunch.  But basically, the giant information monopolists of today are no different than the rail, steel, electricity, telephone, etc. monopolists of yesteryear. The difference is that in the old days, we got roads and rail cars; today, we get time suck and exposure of our privacy.

The one point I don't see Wu making is that given how we're stuck with these monopolies, and given that the government is not likely to break them up any time soon  (and that's why some of them make sure not only to have lobbyists in Washington but a revolving door of their executives into government), what we *can* hope for is for the monopolists to fight *each other*. That clash of the titans, sometimes resulting in a compromise (as with Google and Verizon) can help create levers of freedom for us -- sometimes they lower prices to become more appealing to us, or they increase protections of privacy at our demand -- but generally, they offer their goods for free -- and we don't know how long they can keep doing this.

No media in the history of the universe has ever been able to survive by either subscriptions or ads alone  -- it usually needs both. So slowly but surely, as Google continues to lose money from Youtube, as Facebook begins to feel the need to pay back the VCs, as Twitter has to get the many server bills paid, we will start to see these mammoth Bolshies convert to capitalism not only for themselves (state capitalism, or oligarchy) but democratic and liberal capitalism based on free enterprise -- where we will get more of a piece of the pie.

How will this happen? With a wallet (like "Walletin" -- but without Cory's collectivist ideals of "free"). With commerce getting re-connected against to content, via the web, the connector that was instrumental in decoupling it mainly for ideological, and not technological reasons.

We finally see this sort of ideology in favour of paid content being taken seriously now even in the hallowed halls of "free" such as TechCrunch (now that it has been taken over by AOL). Devin Coldeway maps out an entire intriguing plan for how to start getting micropayments of $1 or $5 paid to content online, and how to get the concept more wired and widespread. All good -- but my concept differs from his -- because of my experience of Second Life.

While it's fine if he gets various big media giants, or even aspiring medium-sized media companies, to start charging small amounts of 50 cents or a dollar for articles or songs through a reliable payment system, it still ties the payment pipe to the media entity -- perhaps it's their sole, proprietary pipe (and that's ok, if there are lots to chose from).

But what we know from Second Life is that having the payments system tied to a platform, enables lots and lots of businesses to exist and make money from that platform. That means payment is not separately tied to each individual merchant directly, or via some third-party payment platform like Paypal (as on the Open Sims) . To be sure, Linden Lab itself is a publisher in this respect, but it has created something more than just a subscription and ad system like any other publisher; it has created, in addition to those old revenue streams, the platform that enables other people to get paid by a simple DRM system and a simple currency and exchange system. It's payment -- plus socializing, exploring, learning and advertising.

Yes, DRM, which is always disdained by the big boys in this Bolshevik business like the two Corys, but which works very well for virtual goods precisely because you can enable people to make copies that they can't transfer -- something you can't do with music on the Internet (that's a really, really important feature of virtual worlds and it can be leveraged).

Actually, Linden Lab could extend out its platform to say, blogs or SL musician CDs. They could have people sign up for a widget linked to their servers that enabled people to easily buy advertising and tip bloggers and purchase CDs -- it could be tied to SL Marketplace. Yes, that means leaving the security of their own domain on their own servers, but eventually, they or somebody else will figure out how to wrap their pipes sufficiently securely so as to serve as a community and commerce building platform.

If they don't, somebody else like Zynga will figure out how to go beyond games to go to other kinds of content. Or maybe Sony. Or maybe Facebook. Facebook is a good bet simply because they've already sucked in so many people, and sucked in parts of the old Internet functions (like blogs, which are now Facebook pages to "like"), that they have their own servers and their own trusted pipes and they may invent a microcurrency that people exchange just within their universe -- which is so large, that despite all the sneering regarding "walled gardens", people will suddenly come to see what they're for: guardians of value, enabling PAYMENT. PAYMENT!!!.

Software Thinking Undermines our National Security

  Wikipedia Marti Raudsepp

Oh. It gets worse! And I see what this is really about now. The same kind of appalling destructive thinking that goes into open source software thinking and indeed, the security thinking of a certain brand of geeks about software and the Internet in general, is now being overlaid on to our real-life *national security* with all the uproar about the TSA's scanners.

It didn't occur to me immediately that the same sort of arguments I'd have in Second Life with script kiddies who claimed the best sort of security was "the thousands eyes on the bugs" in open source, or that it was "futile" to try to block rogue viewers, would be the exact same arguments I would have about *national security*. It boggles the mind.

Actually -- No, it doesn't, because it's part of the entire software cult induced by the Internet, where a sector of people have come to think that the methods they use to make software should somehow be applied to every aspect of life -- whether or not such binary thinking makes any sense.

They are rapidly, aggressively, and arrogantly trying to overlay this into real life everywhere -- and this area of airport security is no different than anything else -- music, books, telecoms, whatever their disruption can disrupt -- and why not this, too? (And do they have help?)

Hence the sort of arguments we're getting from the geeks on the "don't touch my junk" incident. They all run the same course, like this, from really goofy, to simply myopic and narrow-minded, to very sophisticated -- but ultimately still destructive:

o "If we were nicer to other countries/stopped defending Israel/changed some other aspect of our foreign policy, we wouldn't have terrorists"

Um, ok. Well, would you like to try that and see if it works? I wouldn't. Because I realize that much of the world's evils aren't caused by the U.S. -- and therefore -- guess what! -- not fixable by the U.S., either. Have you ever heard of the Uighurs or the Chechens? Look at the maps of the Russian and Chinese empires and see if it makes sense to surrender. Talk to the Georgians or Estonians about history. Ask yourself if those people in Iraq who regularly blow away 50 civilians at a marketplace, 50 civilians in a church, 50 civilians in a school, 50 civilians in a police recruitment line, would...stop. Magically. Doing that sort of thing. If we didn't fight them, and they could have their way.

This is a variation on the Second Life griefer's mentality that tells me that if I didn't abuse-report or expose people deluging my parcels with obscenities, and asked them to stop nicely, why, I would never suffer these attacks.

o "We've never caught a terrorist with all this scanning, so it's redundant and stupid"

Soooooo...let's not have any border controls then, because there haven't been any terrorists, so let's just assume there won't be any ever again!

I can't imagine how people come to think this stupidly. Oh, yes I can. They come to think of this because they've accepted the "softare mentality" that seizes on some factoid like the "analog hole" theory of the Internet -- "if you can see it you can copy it" -- and then tries to make policy with it. They think that just because "nothing" works to prevent copying and DRM can be broken by hackers, then -- by analogy -- terrorism cannot be caught by the DRM of scanners, or by the obfuscation of pat-downs, or by the captchas of taking your toothpaste out in a plastic bag.

See how that works?

Of course, in software, as in, um, *life*, security filters actually do work. The DRM does stop a lot of people from copying. The bans and blocks do deter a fair number of people. The casual hackster isn't admitted, and has to try harder and maybe gives up.

Stopping terrorism is an art and a science, and needs redundancy and "catching the stupid terrorist" as much as the smart one.

o "Only 3,000 people were killed on 9/11, and that's nothing like the number of people killed in car accidents every month, so it's not worth all this excess security

Of course, demeaning human life this way is pretty grotesque. Yes, geeks actually argued for many rounds trying to see if more car accidents than 3,000 occurred every month. Classic. Can't tell deliberate mayhem and murder from an accident. Ho-kay.

But it's also letting us know how dense the geek is, for not realizing the difference between a deliberate crime against humanity intended to kill massive numbers of people -- that an entire city has to worry about -- and individual one-on-one murders that only, say, a woman with a freaky jealous ex-boyfriend has to worry about. It's apples and oranges. Actually, it's *people*. I shouldn't have to explain this. That I do is part and parcel of the Geek Religion that has infected a lot of thinking on the Internet.

Here's a particularly cynical and stupid version of this argument by Tim Carney of washingtonexaminer.com:

But there's a deeper question to ask: how far are we willing to go to prevent weapons or bombs from getting on airplanes? In the past decade, terrorists on airplanes have killed just about 3,000 people -- all on one day. Even if the Christmas Day bomber had succeeded, the number would be under 3,500.

Those are horrible deaths. But in that same period, more than 150,000 people have been murdered in the United States. We haven't put the entire U.S. on lockdown -- or even murder capitals like Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore.

People murdering their wives aren't a threat to anyone else; people robbing stores are also a threat limited in scope, but mass murderers, terrorists trying to do as much damage as possible are a different order of magnitude and a different threat.

And these insular American bloggers fail to grasp terrorism as a worldwife phenomenon -- look at Baghdad and Kabul first of all, then in recent years, look at Madrid, London, Moscow, Mumbai -- I mean, what does it take for you people? Thousands and thousands of people have been massacred by terrorists.

Schneier also has a particularly bad case of this myopia -- looking at only the relatively few incidents in the U.S. and failing to see the operations of terrorist gangs and movements all over the world. He also unjustifiably equates murder victims with terror victims in an effort to minimize and relativize the seriousness of the terrorist's intent.

o "Security theater doesn't work, it's all an empty show"

Whenever I hear the term "security theater" -- a term that is suppose to evoke John-Wayne sort of swagger with guns or missiles bristling -- I immediately see the invoker of the term swaggering just as much with his oh-so-special insight. Ugh.

A good example is The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who should know better (he is usually critical of terrorists). He's decided merely to let his desire to impress us with all his many trips around the world with odd artifacts (even a blow-up Yasar Arafat doll!) trump normal, routine logic. No, he didn't happen to get caught each time when he deliberately tried to foil the system, carrying knives. He got caught 4 times. OK, great! The system works. Oh, it didn't the other 16 times? So? Hardly a reason to dismantle something that worked...4 times.  The most stupid thing Jeffrey sneers at is the TSA official who passed him through when he unfolded a Hezbollah flag. Um, Jeffrey? Can you point to any terrorist act by this group or any similar group where first, they stopped and unfurled a flag, and then dropped a bomb? Ok, then. Knock it off.

One senses that this entire episode of "don't touch my junk" run wild is really designed to assist with male bonding rituals, now that baseball season is over.

Security theater works to deter *some people*. A wannabee terrorist who maybe read about jihad on the Internet, or some copycat trouble-maker, may be discouraged from blowing up a bridge or tunnel if he sees a surge of 30 police cars around it periodically.  No, it may not deter the terrorist who is more organized and thinks up some clever hack to this theater, or goes to some other place entirely.

But security is predicated on the notion that there are layers of people attacking the defenses -- random people trying anything, deliberate people trying something, really organized and methodical people trying multiple somethings, etc. etc.

Says Schneier, " No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards."

Um, it verifies that a person has valid ID with a picture that looks like the bearer of that ID. Hello! Fake or stolen ID might be detected. Most terrorists have to fake their ID. Again -- it's one more check. By itself, it might seem redundant; taken as a whole complex of measures, it does not.

o "This little girl in a pink dress or this old lady in a wheelchair or this nun in a habit couldn't possibly be a terrorist so why are they checking them"

This is the sort of argument cropping up quite a bit on blogs like this one. But look, let me break it down to you because you appear not to be able to conceptualize.

If you have a security system, it has to be for everybody. If you start making discretionary judgement, like "oh, that lady looks ok," error and negligence start to creep in. You need a protocol and you have to go through it. And hey, haven't you ever seen those movies where the bank robbers are dressed up as nuns? And didn't you ever study how drug dealers work, even using children and pregnant women as their runners? So a security system can't afford to say that "Gee, those people look unlikely, let's give them a pass" because it's precisely that psychology that a terrorist will prey on to get through.

BTW, the solution that a country like China or Russia would use on this problem -- racial and ethnic profiling -- isn't one that America, with its values of tolerance and non-discrimination, wants to install. By objecting to the uniform use of security on everyone, regardless of their demographics, the geeks are driving us to a racial profile. And of course, there are some who openly say this on some forums. Of course, now that we have homegrown American jihadists who are blond and blue-eyed, this method, even if it could politically survive, wouldn't work.

o "These security systems are developed, lobbied and sold by evil corrupt businessmen who made these businesses for their own gain -- they invented and hyped this threat and found the solution to it to make a buck"

This story has a number of variations, usually singling out Chertoff   -- the worst version is an antisemitic slur (I even saw a picture of Chertoff, the seller of one of these scanners, with the word "Israeli" across his forehead, appearing as a red devil with horns -- his name comes from the Russian word for "devil").  George Soros and Deepak Chopra are said to profit; there are other businesses with similar devices that have relationships to Congressional commitees and lobbies. The horror!

Sigh. This is just the usual rampant hatred of capitalism you find on the left. And that "no business but my business" Randianism of those tekkies willing to accept capitalism -- but only of their own tribe. Let's imagine some opensource software solution that involved, oh, retinal scans or something more high tech and groovy and less intrusive. Do you think if there were one high-tech mogul in Silicon Valley beloved by these geeks who sold and lobbied that device that they'd object to his lobbying and selling this device? Of course not.

Oh, I'm quite prepared to believe that there are back-room deals and even corruption. But...wait a second. What was that *other* way you wanted this whole thing to work? You didn't want to have businesses innovate and make a product to serve a need? You didn't want them to promote that product with elected representatives because they believed it to be a solution for national security? (Of course, those uncovering these "smoking guns" never impugn good will to such entrepreneurs).

So...you wanted what, then? You want the executive branch just to assign a contract to their friends -- or friends you like? Or how are you willing to do this?

I can't find this to be the grave evil indicated when I don't have evidence of graft. What there is, is a lot of innuendo of the bloggy sort that makes it seem that being in government office, then leaving and making an invention for security, then getting government funs to sell it, is somehow some great horror. But what if it is a good invention?

Sure, examine it, scrutinize it in congressional committee and if there isn't sufficiently competitive bids, or no bids, why, put them in. Happy now? But what's your REAL problem?

o "Scanners don't work to find weapons which can be hidden in orifices."

Well, first of all, I'm thinking that metal detection is still a function these scanners provide. And while sure, people can put weapons up their ass, with this many layers of security -- scanners, dogs, pat-downs -- there is greater chance of catching someone.

But...our primary problem here with the geek mindset is that they don't believe filters or bans or bars work -- period. They think everything can be hacked, and therefore -- and here's where the immorality and futility and nihilism comes rushing in -- therefore, we should *do nothing*.

And that's as ridiculous an ideology to hold when running a virtual world or social media platform as it is a country in real life. Deterrences, bars, filters, scans -- these work.

o "Even the pilots object to this and it's really unfair to them."

Like I said, any security system has to be for everyone. When suicide bombers or terrorists in Afghanistan have succeeded in killing our soldiers, they have done so by posing as a soldier or by gaining trust in various ways. If you make the system work on the idea that "trusted persons," i.e. "that pilot that comes here every week who knows the scanner guy personally" can come through, that's the breache through which a terrorist can try to break through. Nobody objected to pilots walking through metal detectors, so these new scanners aren't really that different.

Notice that the geeks for the most part are NOT making the health argument. That's interesting. That might be the one they could get many ordinary people worked up about. But...people don't buy it. It's not just that the government has already stated it is not harmful -- they might not believe them. It's that other experts have, too.

o "Rape by Rapiscan -- People are being molested."

Well, no. Only if they won't go through the scanner. It's a pat-down. Nobody likes that kind of personal intrusion, but on the scale of things, this isn't Ben Franklin material, the kind of yielding of an actual important personal freedom for the sake of security that renders you with neither, as the famous inventor told us. Let's get a grip here. It's not like the Internet is being shut down; you are being asked to walk through a device that makes an outline of your body so that planes are not blown up. I think it's a fair trade. Why don't you?

o "Terrorism is not stopped by these methods, when terrorists are caught, it's not by these methods"

A more sophisticated version than the argument that says since none have been caught, let's not have any security. Yes, it's true that the underwear and the shoe bombers were caught by humans, not by machines. So? It's good humans are on the ball. But they are imperfect. And they need back up by machines with X-ray vision. A combination of types of security has to be used in this system.

o "Bomb-sniffing dogs can do the job"

There's a curious reliance on something completely organic and dependent on many variables and factors -- by people who normally rely on code and software. Dogs are not machines. The scent can go cold. They may be trained to find drugs or gunpowder but don't always find it. Dogs are used to find the scent of people killed and even with a trail of blood and clothing can't always find them. So again -- it's one of the layers, and can't be the only layer.

Ultimately, what are the "lessons learned" from real terrorist attacks?

Whenever I think about these issues, I think about the UN hero, Sergio de Mello and the Canal House in Baghdad which was blown up by terrorists using a Soviet-era bomb, killing him and many others in the UN staff using the building as a compound. Sergio didn't want to put in "security theater". He wanted to appear friendly to the local population -- not threatening, not like the Americans. He didn't want to accept American security protection -- that would be to ally the neutral UN with a belligerent. He didn't want to put in heavy walls and reinforcements like the Green Zone where the Americans hid from the realities of the war.

So a truck with bombs was easily able to ride into the compound and blow it up. Now he's dead, along with his theories. Those who do protection and security work in the UN don't make the geek arguments -- and if any did, they sure make them less after August 19 in Baghdad. At the entrance of the UN you find metal detectors and guards who randomly pat you down and occasional checks by dogs. No doubt they will add these scanners, too.

Schneier -- widely copied and retweeted among geeks as a security expert with a blog on security, has this awful concept to share:

Any terrorist attack is a series of events: something like planning, recruiting, funding, practising, executing, aftermath. Our most effective defenses are at the beginning and end of that process -- intelligence, investigation, and emergency response -- and least effective when they require us to guess the plot correctly. By intelligence and investigation, I don't mean the broad data-mining or eavesdropping systems that have been proposed and in some cases implemented -- those are also movie-plot stories without much basis in actual effectiveness -- but instead the traditional "follow the evidence" type of investigation that has worked for decades.

Gosh, what that would involve is *waiting for the crime to happen, then investigating it with any evidence left behind*.

No thanks!

And oh -- you don't like police, heavy weapons scanners -- and you want to nip the crimes in the bud -- but gosh, you don't like eavesdropping -- even with probable cause -- or perusing the Internet to watch groups that talk jihad and violence online (even with the obvious correlation between the online groups and some actual terrorist bombings.)

Fortunately, our national security is not in the hands of these geeks -- yet.

When it was, they carelessly lost the laptop with the blueprint of the president's helicopter and it wound up in the hands of Iranian intelligence, remember?

Maybe they should have crowdsourced the solution and put a thousand Tweeps on the job, that would work...

Says Schneir, "Stop telling people to report all suspicious activity; it does little but make us suspicious of each other, increasing both fear and helplessness."

Well, no. I'm not ever going to do that, and I hope New York authorities continue their "If you see something, say something." Far from making people feel helpless, it makes them feel involved. It's a good thing that the Vietnam vet selling caps on the street in Times Square did call the police when he saw some strange wires in the back of a car. If he had read Schnier and thought like a software geek, we might have seen that story turn out very differently.

 

 

Don't Touch My Homeland Security, Geek

 

 
Transportation Security Administration Scanner

Californian -- check. Male -- check. 30-something -- check. Software programmer -- check.

So, not surprising that an individual with these characteristics yelps "Don't touch my junk!" at the TSA man at the airport who wants to frisk him. Frisk him for a valid reason -- for the sake of preventive checks to deter terrorism.

Why is he being frisked? Is he a Muslim or a randomly-selected passenger? No, he looks to be white and has a European-sounding name -- John Tyner.

He's being frisked because he refused to go through the body-scanning machine. He said it was because he doesn't like being seen naked -- the machine renders an image of your naked body to the personnel scanning for dangerous items. Apparently these are being used more than the old walk-through scanners that only seemed to check for metal.

I suspect he had fear of being in enclosed spaces and didn't want to admit it. But he may really have had fear of having an image of his unclothed body appear for a second on a screen, and may really have felt it distasteful to be "groped," as everyone is describing this normal inspection.

So he records the encounter on his cell phone and posts it on his blog and uses his position as a California 30-something software-programmer to get his beef viral.

The guy carried on and wouldn't cooperate and raised a fuss, and then got warned of a $10,000 fine. This is a story about a self-referential, entitlement-happy, prima-donna who cannot see above himself and his fastidiousness and two-bit rebellious instincts to a higher cause, that of safety for the whole community.

So given the California-male-30-something-software-programmer factors that went into this precious hunk telling the guy not to "touch his junk," we got the viral videos, the AOL news, the Youtubes, the geek blogs, the tech press absolutely going batshit crazy over this one.

It takes one of the mommy-bloggers to start to ask the right questions -- gee, an awful lot of preparation went into this "victim" experience. Everything is researched. Then everything is taped.

There was also a case recently of a pilot in Tennessee who wouldn't comply with these regulations, so that helped set the stage for this story.

So what is this REAAALY about?

After the "divisive" elections that got Paul Krugman fretting so, this sure is a a neat cause to bring together conservatives, libertarians and Ron Paul nerds promoting personal freedom with the anti-government hard left.

There's even a Fox News show that has the host talking over the guest lawyers he invited, even the one sharing his point of view, making it seem as if this is some sort of freedom-fighting cause.

The lawyer opposing this self-indulgence calmly explains that purchasing a ticket and going on an airplane is a transaction in a free economy that you don't *have* to make. And if you do, you are subject to the rules and regulations that company places on the transaction. And yes, the federal government -- gasp -- gets to make rules about scanning people before board airplanes because of actual terrorists making actual attempts to bomb planes.

I marvel that Fox News, in their quest to push for personal freedom, I guess, can sound just like the most Leninist of the open source freaks in exclaiming that the government here is engaging in "unreasonable search and seizure," and huffing and puffing that not a single terrorist has been found *this way*.

So...you're saying not to bother looking for them anymore?

Um, well, it only takes one, you know? And there has been one Nigerian terrorist caught before they managed to set off bombs with explosives in his underwear. There's the shoe-bomber of course. And there are packages that were sent recently. It's certainly reasonable to check more thoroughly.

Those objecting to these normal rules are calling the frisking "a sexual molestation". Huh? With your clothes on? By trained personnel who are looking for weapons as a job description? Please.

And we've also got a look on Facebook from our "friends" at the "security theater" video promoted by Reason -- say, do you think the reason this guy is the *former* El Al security chief is because he doesn't see any reason for ethnic profiling or denying people to go to the bathroom or "play with their Kindles" during the last hour of a flight?

Every time I hear the term "security theater," I know I'm going to be dealing with an arrogant geek who doesn't have a basic respect for security in any event. It's like the term "moral panic," which always lets me know I'll be dealing with someone who accepts no moral imperative of any kind.

Why am I posting this on Wired State? Because in our wired state, we can't learn any other points of view about this. We're getting the wired elite's take -- and their ranks are swollen from both right and left extremes today -- and they are drowning out any reason, and not only on Fox (if Fox were drowning out reason on any other topic, we'd be hearing about how it is "alternative TV" etc. lol).

Newscasters who should know better are planting ideas in the head of the guy with the pat-phobic shriveling junk -- could there be health issues in going through the scanner? Well, one would expect, if you have a basic faith in government, i.e. other people you elected and the people whom they appointed -- you would surmise that effects on human beings would be tested and limited before 2 million people a day would pass through them.

But -- let's just say that sure, nobody wants excess X-rays on them. So...how much do you actually absorb from this?

I imagine this story will continue to fester and new "rebels" will be found here and there to "make a point".

Sorry, but I for one will not be bludgeoned into reducing airport security because of the libertarian excesses of the California geeks.

Oh! We've already got a blogger finding an Evil Bush Plot here with an Evil Official who is Profiting From Security Scares -- but of course gawker.com already snarked about this in 2009. Sigh. (For some reason it has been slow at getting on the story again today.)

Government official identifies threat. Has a business with the scanners. Has them implemented, and makes a fortune. And -- OMG George Soros is profiting off them! And OMG the company CEO is Deepak Chopra and he has accompanied Obama to India!

I hope Janet Neapolitano will stand firm and look at this issue from the perspective not of self-indulgent grand-standers in Silicon Valley, not from the perspective of ending the graft of the Bush administration (other departments can do that) but from the perspective of what her job is supposed to be about: homeland security.

Of course, we have had normal journalism performed on this subject by a reputable media organization to check all this and see what the amounts of money are involved.But despite that article *back in January*, it doesn't seem that anything actually wrong has been discovered. So some crony got a stimulus grant? You don't think this doesn't repeat itself 100 times a day with Obama's friends?

Frankly, if there are businessmen who make machines that increase public safety, and they are able to continue making and improving them from the profit motive? So what? What happened to the libertarian ethos that usually roots for this sort of thing lol?

And while it should definitely be an area with competition and multiple bids examined by each airport before only one company benefits, if there is a company that makes the best option, why can't that be used? After all, this is our national safety we are talking about. Could we focus on that for a minute? Monopolies, when they are Internet companies, never bother geeks anyway -- they are selective in caring about this.

Awful stuff! Gosh, the other deay I was reading somewhere about this guy who identified a problem of the "need for open standards in loan applications", had a business with a solution, and advocated having the country blanketed with this solution (you would have to buy it from his company) for banking software tags -- yet this wasn't viewed in the same way as a problem as Chertoff's body scanners at all. See how it works?

Funny how the geek squad did a 180 on this. Here's what CrunchGear said in February 2010 -- with a headline "Outrage: Those airport full-body scanners violate Islamic law":

We all know that security is pretty much a joke to begin with—how many times do you hear of people who make it through security with a huge knife in their pocket by mistake?—but at the very least the TSA has provided a pretty reasonable alternative to being full-body scanned.

Keep in mind: these scans are optional. You’ll just have to let Mr. Big Security Guard pat you down. I don’t understand the hubbub—we’re all people, it’s not like there’s any surprises as to what’s going on down there—but I’ll defer to people’s own opinions here.

Nicholas Deleon, the Crunch Gear author, is saying the exact same thing I am. That if you don't like the scanners, you go through a pat-down. Big deal. That the TSA "has provided a pretty reasonable alternative to being full-body scanned". Imagine! But...he's not too sure that the Collective will approve, so he's "defering to people's own opinions".

I'm glad we have such a sensitive bunch filling up the wired waves, but I would like some reasonable options for homeland security, please. Full-body scanners, if they can be shown not to impact health, seem like an effective way to screen the population for dangerous items. So far, it seems that when DHS says it would be "irresponsible" to abandon these already-installed machines, that it makes sense.

Of course, sense is not what the geek squad and the rampageous right and loony left are known for. And now they can all get together to make common cause over this concocted issue. So they are actually planning to make Thanksgiving Day travel even more helacious by starting a "viral campaign" to get people to opt out of the scans, and force the TSA agents to do body searches.

What we are about to see is who is really in charge in this country. Is it the appointed officials of the elected administration? Who are telling us these are reasonable means to deal with a REAL threat.

Or will we see a wired state displace the organic state and get its way? Sounds like a great day to stay away from the airport...

Anonymous Gets One Year in Jail

We're not hearing an awful lot about this story from the tech media -- but it's interesting that the Anonymous b/tard hacker of Sarah Palin's email was outed and eventually tried and sentenced to one year in custody (apparently his lawyers are trying to get him into a halfway house instead of jail, but their efforts to have him released on parole failed). As we learned this summer, he is David Kernell, son of a Democrat Tennessee legislator. He seems contrite and remorseful, likely on advice of counsel, saying he realizes he will be affected by this for the rest of his life.

Maybe the tech press doesn't cover this so much because they're frightened, or reluctant to publish anything that is politically incorrect and implies that fighting Palin unlawfully will result in law-enforcement  -- but Wired covered it and the comments filled up predictably with the usual hectoring knowier-than-thou morons who tell you that it really isn't "hacking" to use Google and intuition to do a "social hack" to break into someone's email without any actual programming, that Sarah Palin is to blame for having a weak password -- and that therefore it isn't wrong.

Fortunately, there are still police and prosecutors and judges -- and juries! -- who think otherwise!

Even so, anonymous geeks persist in trying to preserve the word "hack" for only positive connotations, and keep it unsullied from the actual world of criminality that hacking really is, with its disdain for the rule of organic law and its infatuation with code-as-law.

Hacking that guesses at passwords based on Googling life details is *still a hack*. It's still *going around the rules*. It's still circumvention. Why that would have to be argued endlessly is beyond me -- but it *does* have to be argued because not only are b/tards and the larger geek milieu in which they thrive all legal nihilists, they are legal nihilists who use legalistic literalism ("Fisking") to argue their points of lawlessness -- which makes them about as eradicable as bedbugs on some forums.

Guess all that nihilism didn't work out for David Kernell. By his own admission, he uploaded a screenshot with the password to the 4chan site, always described cunningly as merely "an image board" although it is actually a forum for organizing unlawful actions against political enemies and disliked laws -- like copyright law.

We're also endlessly lectured by persistent and faux-indignant forums-dwellers that b/tards themselves changed the password again and again to "prevent abuse" (um, except by those changing it who read about the changes lol?) and that the legions of Anonymous helped to out Kernell and bring him to justice.

Baloney. Anonymous *is* David Kernell and David Kernell *is* Anonymous. He did what any other card-carrying b/tard would do and hacked into a hated political figure's email because he believed it was justice -- and more to the point, believed he was entitled to deliver it!

Just like the b/tards hack at Scientologists (certainly not a cult I would endorse) or hack into anything related to RIAA and lawyers and the struggle for copyright (again, criminal behaviour against the law). So let's not get precious here, and suddenly pretend Anonymous *isn't* about this sort of arrogant geek criminality -- and that this particular dude only takes the fall because...he didn't find anything interesting. As he himself said, he found "Nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped".

Er, that means had he found some sort of real smoking gun, like Wikileaks and that washed-out Bolshevik Julian Assuages, then he'd be a hero. Maybe even Man of the Year, eh? The left would forgive him anything if he'd uncover some kind of real corruption of some import in the Palin account. But there wasn't any to find.

What the case shows is that...if you hack into somebody's email, even if they are a figure loathed by the left, even if you use a social hack and not a technical hack, YOU GO TO JAIL. That's a good thing. We're likely to see this awareness that it is a good thing erode in time, but it holds for now.

Another feature of the trial not noticed much by the tech media but picked up by bloggers is that the infamous Moot (remember, that nickname comes from a racist anti-black meme), Christopher Poole (likely a pseudonym from the "pool's closed" meme) actually came and testified at this trial because Kernell uploaded the images to the 4chan site -- prompting the headline "4chan Not as Lawless as it Seems" -- which is all part of the plot, see?

We've seen Poole arrive, deus ex machina, before to declare his group just a lot of good, clean fun with only a few who indulge in "excesses," and really awfully helpful, Mrs. Cleaver, when it comes to real civic assistance to law-enforcement. Snort. This is all part of the giant social hack, of course. Pretty soon we'll hear b/tards are selling Christmas ornaments and chocolates to help little kids with cancer.

I Need An App for That -- Can You Lower My Heating Bill?

Here's  an idea that I wonder if those people who make apps and APIs and widgets might take up. (Say, I've been studying the difference between apps and APIs, which is usually what we would call various things in SL like the reg api or the risk api -- and I wonder if some geek might like to explain the difference -- and hold the snark -- I get that they are different, but for the user, they aren't really -- download an application to use, or go to a web page and use an interface, same thing.)

Here's a social problem that is as politically correct as they come, and you would think one of those hacktivists would have been tackling it, but they haven't yet.

I live in a building of what used to be low and middle HUD housing that lost its Mitchell-Lama status and got converted to a mixture of what they call "fair market" (still low cost) and vouchers for low-income -- it's mixed with luxury towers in one community so it's interesting. It's one of the few actually racially mixed communities in NY, because even within a 20 block radius, you can find blacks living in the projects without any whites, and whites living in luxury towers without any blacks, but you usually don't find low and middle income mixed with both.

In any event, there's a constant struggle here with the electric bills, which just aren't for light and gadgets, but for heat. We have electric heaters and air conditioners. You can have an energy-saver that automatically turns them off several times a day, so you'd have to override them with punching buttons, and many of us in fact sit in the cold during the day or night because the bills are so outrageous. It's not uncommon for me to get an electric bill of $600 for my apartment, more than I've paid for some offices I've managed that had 10 computers and heavy office equipment running in them.

Vexed with the constant tenant complaints, the management circulates bulletins with the average cost of electricity in each type of apartment. People look at these averages, and they shriek, because they are nothing like their real bills. Then the tenant association lobbies to have each and every tenant get a separate electric usage statement, not included in the rent bill, so they can see it and ostensibly, then be persuaded that it is justified. No one ever is. This stalemate continues in various forms year after year, with management patiently explaining that they have to pay to heat foyers and hallways and it costs to raise heat up especially when the weather is below freezing, and tenants complaining that their apartments are poorly insulated and their bills whopping.

The insulation is a problem -- there isn't anything inside the walls, the way it was built. To change that would be hella expensive. And fixing the rubber strip on the windows is also a huge pain -- it requires scheduling overworked men to come in and remove your window and replace the strip. People use duct tape and towels and such to try to seal all the leaks, but then they can't ever open their windows for fresh air unless they are willing to go through all that again.

Well, apps can't fix these problems. These are very deep problems of lack of resources and lack of good energy-saving construction in the first place that can't immediately be changed without huge expenditure. So often all this green stuff costs money.

But, let's say that there was some kind of way of gathering the data and seeing what's up. Seeing if in fact some tenants were overusing appliances, keeping 6 computers and gadgets on all night and burning electricity (although some geeks tell us that powering up a computer again after turning it off uses more electricity than just letting it go into sleep mode overnight).  Seeing if somebody with inefficient old-fashioned lightbulbs or broken appliances were somehow using more than they need to. Seeing if in fact there wasn't maybe one line of apartments in one area that had a crack in the wall or could be usefully sealed against the brutal winds of the East River in winter.

So you'd need a way for people to send the information about their heating bills, their location, and their set-ups -- whether they had 3 rooms or 6, 2 computers and a TV, or 6 computers and laptops, a treadmill, a plasma TV, a bread-maker etc. etc. -- or even whether the apartment was just empty (a good place to gather data, too, to see if the tenants had a point -- an empty apartment with no light or heat or appliances might be expending heat others had to pay for with its leaks.)

But...how can you take all this without risking people's privacy? You could disaggregate all the info from names, but the tell-tale location on the building graphics you would show to ultimately make the advocacy point, the information about your usage with computers or treadmills or lamps -- this would expose your privacy more than you'd like.

Most people don't want management to be able to retaliate against them for complaining about heating bills, nor have their neighbours browbeat them because they chose to have 6 gadgets and an exercise machine in their homes. It's these people realities that app engineers can't or won't look at most of the time.

I try to think whether it is possible to get people to send in the data on an app on their i-phone to some central place called www.realheatingbills.org that would start to build up the alternative narrative against the average heating bill narrative of management. But frankly, management could be enticed to collaborate by telling us the cost and usage of the halls and lobbies that tenants can't or won't appreciate, either. Maybe they'd start using the revolving door instead of the swing doors in lobbies if they could grasp how much heat it saves not to use them.

Yes, maybe somebody could use Google maps or hire some helicopter to come and make some infrared photo, that'd be pretty expensive.

But maybe if you compiled a stack of heating bills by mobile people would be willing to part with their locations, hell, they already do on Four Square and Yelp. For the sake of a lower heating bill, that might be the trade-off.

Maybe there is a way to render the information in a different visible graphics -- say, flat, like a map of a country, where apartment names and locations don't show so starkly, but just squares of energy loss. You might discover that the building facing the East River had horrendous heating bills but only in some places with wall cracks or poor sealing. You might (I suspect) discover it's much more complicated, with some people who leave computers on all night because geeks have told them to do this in fact are burning way too much juice and should shut them all down. You might discover that people with exercise machines and blenders in fact don't consume so much after all because the little old ladies who are retired and sitting home all day watching the soaps and gabbing on the land line with the heat up to 80 degrees and the lights all burning are the real "anti-green" culprits. And so on.

So, like many people who use technology and appreciate that there are apps to find me the nearest Dunkin' Donuts even if I'm in the middle of a forest, I wait to see if they might really help something more vital like saving money on energy instead of spending money on something advertised.

Beth Kanter's Networked World at tech@state

I've been reading Beth Kanter's blog for years, and often liked her no-nonsense, no-frills, hype-less approach to her craft, and her convincing connections to real people doing real things. Unlike many of the purveyors of the social media gospel, Beth has also worked in Second Life, the 3-d virtual world platform that most of the social media mavens scorn and ridicule, either because as elitists they hate the mass culture implied with shopping and cybersex or they dislike the highly intensive technical demands of the platform which they believe to be unsuitable for betterworlding, whether in the developing world or their own offices with aging equipment.

So I appreciate Beth, but even so, she's as much enthralled with the "progressive" social and educational theories of the last decades as any in the third sector, and she's merged them the open source culture memes more creatively and practically than most of the "thought leaders". I look forward to reading her new book soon, the Networked Nonprofit.

Like the theories of business and "innovation" that came first from the ecstatic TED-infused tekkies of Silicon Valley, the theories of how nonprofits should change also contain the same constructs -- we should get out of fortresses, we should stop building castles, we should break down firewalls, we should get out of silos, we should network with other people and...um...do stuff. What stuff isn't even always so important, as long as we are all in that lovely constructivist or connectivist Kumbayah of the World Wide Web where All Knowledge is on the Network. Someone's singing, Lord, let's download them from Youtube and rip them to our i-pods!

I have a funny vision of that networked nonprofit connectivist world that Beth limns in her talks that isn't at all what she's talking about (because at the end of the day, she's utopian, too) but what *I* am prompted to think about  -- everybody in fact collectivized and homogenized to mechanically do something called with a term like the Four Favours -- give money to good causes, sign a petition for a right-thinking belief, publicize an injustice, and then...maybe write a congressmen, or as they are supposed to be obsolete given the hatred of representative government, go out and demonstrate in the real world (or even subject a hated symbol of the copyright regime with a DdOS attack -- 4chan is a non-profit too, you know.)

And I see a committee of the very wired and very with-it who set up the jobs for people to do in their Four Favours to wired humanity every day, and there are just a few of them, because we are all networked, all connected, we have all data available all the time (all 1 billion of us on Facebook, let's say), we can all be reached a single drop-down blue screen, like in Second Life, and we can all do What's Right once we're told -- so to be economical and correct and logical, we really only need *just a few people* to determine this for us.

What I don't understand about Beth's vision (and I'll read the book to see if I can get some clarity) is how you preserve the ecology of the NGO world against such a future, that world which has always depended, especially in oppressive countries, on diversity, duplication, redundancy, trusted connections, "the soul of the organization." Organizations that keep up a "walled garden" or a "fortress" for a good reason -- so they are not overrun by coopting or oppressive governments; so they are not merged or diluted by corporations; so that they do not become submerged in globalizing culture of the West, etc. etc. Even in our own country, the kind of diversity of numerous organizations that P.J. O'rourke, as an elitist Republican, finds exasperating is the strength of the Tea Party movement -- they may not have a foreign policy, but they have 100 groups that provide *homes* for people.

What people want more than ANYTHING in a non-profit charitable cause or a political movement is A HOME!

The quintessential networked nonprofit without the supposed inefficiency, redundancy, illogical diversity, walls, fortresses, protective bastions of outdated managers, etc. to me -- in a negative vision -- is moveon.org, with its faceless leadership, its non-interactive site, it's push, not pull mechanisms for influencing policy. I signed up and today I got instructions of what I'm supposed to think and do: I'm supposed to reject the plan not to continue tax cuts for the rich, and I'm supposed to help think of one million reasons why this is a bad idea, with my own particular "story" of hate-on-the-rich.  I could click and write at least 5 ideas on this form here...

I didn't.

Not because I'm not interested in taxing the rich in some reasonable respect and not because I'm not interested in having some social welfare policy needed in any liberal democratic society, but because I didn't see a discussion, a debate, facts from both sides, etc. I saw about 10 links to articles that were supposed to woo me with how mainstream they looked (New York Times, etc.) but...when I read them they were cheerleading for the idea in columns without some argumentation.)

I then had another dystopian vision, thinking about Beth's network (although again, not as she does, only prompted by her writing to think myself), seen from a zoom-out above the earth looking at all those linked people and what they are doing, I couldn't help thinking of this really sad thing about Twitter.

I mean, really sad. Nobody really ever talks about it. But it's there, just under the surface, right next to your neck vein, as it were. And that is the hordes and hordes -- hundreds of thousands -- of people on Twitter who are trying to make a living as SEO consultants, social media gurus, promoters of various work-at-home schemes -- you know the kind of lame, loser, low-life stuff that's out there. And how pathetic and hopeless it is. There are LOTs and LOTs of people doing this -- many women, many blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. and then many Russians, Indians, Brazilians and others in the poor world. All those people who anonymously spam your Yahoo mail with ads for painkillers in by mailorder from Canada and viagra and phen-phen -- now, on Twitter, you can see their faces, even their names, learn about how they are dads and moms and carving pumpkins.

One of the most heart-breaking things I see every now and then on Twitter is a Russian in some blown out forsaken post-Soviet town pushing SEO and social media rhetoric in strangely-understood half-English, half-Russian jargonistic terms that they've grabbed from some other hopeless sap in some similar blown out forsaken post-9/11 town in the MidWest with the shopping strips and the pain clinics and the meth busts. Many people flick these kind of nuisance followers away instantly, or even have programs to get rid of them -- and I block them too. But not before looking at them, visiting their website to at least give them a click-through (I can do that much; we can all wash the feet of the poor so easily; there is the Christ.)

Random Hacks of...Kinda

Photo by Alain-Christian. Mobile providers like Digicel are a valueable asset to a country like Haiti

Two articles came together for me today that really summarize the whole tech@state "Civil Society 2.0" challenge.

First, was David Rieff's piece which he sent out by email with a more urgent heading: "Why We Have Abandoned Haiti. And Abandoned It We Have." There's a lot of validity to this piece, explaining not only the obvious and disgraceful shortfall in funding, but the magical thinking of "human rights mysticism" that says if there were more democracy there would be less disease, a version of Amartya Sen's comment about societies with free media tending not to have famines.

I actually find that David scolds too much about the magical thinking here, as if he doesn't realize that politics is the art of the possible, and human rights is the art of the impossible (my original slogan). There's something more than a little distasteful about the idea that authoritarian governments should be recognized as being good at controlling disease.  Yes, sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren't. Innoculated, but then...what kind of life do you have? More to the point,  the divergence between democracy and disease that the Human Rights Watch staffer becomes over-prescriptive about and David shreds is the same divergence operative between authoritarianism and disease. Why would viruses recognize authoritarian governments any more than we should?

You would think a fairly sturdy authoritarian operation like Turkmenistan, rated "medium" on the UN Human Development Index, would have been able to eradicate not just malaria in this desert-covered, swampless nation (winning WHO's praise), but cholera, too. But it hasn't, because of pipes that crack in the winter and muddy holes that people fetch water from because the pump doesn't work and the vandals took the handles.

It reminds me of the time this American military official talked very matter-of-frankly during the time of the Dayton Accords about how "we need a capable Serbia". Indeed. But I wonder how that will work out for the Kosovars.

But basically, Rieff is always a corrective for the abstract and jargonistic international justice jet-set and it's always a good thing. It's good to get a cold shower on magical thinking; now the question is what the magical doing should be. It bothered @KathrynPeters at tech@state that people were listeners, not doers. Er, one problem was, some of the more knowier-than-though tekkies were taking all the oxygen out of the room -- but that's common.

The reality is, as David Rieff often writes, it's not lack of information that explains lack of humanitarian action, it's lack of political will. You seldom find out that a genocide unfolded because nobody knew about it (remember the Rwanda fax -- all the technology you could ask for in that day, and all the information, and the international community failed to stop the genocidaires. Maybe if they'd had a Facebook page where they could express themselves better they might have become kinder and gentler -- this is Mark Zuckerberg's actual theory, you know, documented on video during SxSW a few years ago; he spouts it about potential jihadists in the Middle East who if they could "connect to someone" might not blow up stuff.)

Which brings me to Random Hacks of Kinda-Sorta.  I found the cleverly named project "Random Hacks of Kindness" on a gov 2.0 website -- NASA CoLab. I'm sure it's quite lovely. I'm sure it's quite sincere. I'm sure I'll be told I'm ignorant and haven't gotten my facts straight about these lovely projects and am uninformed about them for saying this:

Why couldn't all those mobile aps and stacks and programming and "we have/you need" stuff (now an admitted graveyard) prevent or mitigate the cholera outbreak? Well?

What, you couldn't design a FourSquare for Haiti where people could "check in" to clean water supplies and "share" with "geolocation"? Guess not! Those people could have been twittering, but I guess they were busy.

Ok, then, why doesn't this stuff work as planned? And is it possible to get all these tremendously busy and self-important geeks, and their terribly special social media consultants to NGOs actually doing good? No doubt they will defensively say yes.

There's quite a bit of room for doubt, however given the actual "facts on the ground" as "people in the cloud" in places like the UN or hackathons phrase the story.

And this amazing article on the Boston Review explains why.

It's been so long since I've read anything sane like this, I almost couldn't believe my eyes.

It's worth reading and re-reading, because he has the solid life experience and field investigation to back up what he is saying -- here are the pull quotes:

o Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute.

o The myth of scale is the religion of telecenter proponents, who believe that bringing the Internet into villages is enough to transform them.

o When a village has ready access to a PC, the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.

Not exactly what you're used to hearing at your usual wiki tikki api woo session, I realize, but...there it is.

Basically, what Kentaro Toyama is saying is that technology alone, even in large quantities, can't save people and better their lives if they don't have other ingredients in their society to help them take advantage of it -- money, education, and that term "capacity" that foundations use to gently describe a host of complex psychological and social problems from trying to get people to stop shitting into their water supply and understand the germ theory of disease and boil water to trying to get men to stop getting drunk and beating or burning their wives.

I'm recalling now this interesting special issue on water that the National Geographic had a few months ago with an article by Tina Rosenberg. She studied the difficulties of women having to walk for hours and climb mountains to fetch water and bring it back."If the millions of women who haul water long distances had a faucet by their door, whole societies could be transformed," she exclaims in the pull quote.

Just put in an Oxfam team or a Jeffrey Sachs project and fix it with technology.

To be sure, Rosenberg explains how all these factor to blame -- indifferent or corrupt government, rapacious international mining companies, etc. But in this situation, you could look over Tina's earnest and politically-correct shoulders and see something else. There was something else making the lives of these women really, really hard that wasn't the impersonal socio-political factors that the international justice set loves to highlight. In fact, it was that such scare water as there was, was made into a fermented drink like beer and served as the beverage for the males of the village who sat around getting drunk and chatting all day, while the women humped up the mountain and back with the jugs of water. Yes, they were unemployed and yes, they were divorced from their ancient patterns of subsistence farming...or whatever. So, it was complex. Even so, there was this classic case simple universal human problem of, er, "capacity" too -- a problem that teams of relief workers broke through by doing things like getting everybody in a village to donate some money to buy a pump and a pipeline and install it -- when they managed to persuade them to do so.

There weren't any apps for this.

Here's where, as with Rieff, I don't get as starkly depressive as Toyama, or Morozov.

Evgeny Morozov's problem is always that he almost seems to delight in the fact that he's found out that this or that new social media widget wonder can be used by totalitarians, too -- oops, another one bites the dust. But...so what? His role in telling us that seems merely to a) feed the potential of those cynical totalitarians to go on ruling in glee by making it appear inevitable and b) reinforce his status as the Cassandra of woeful widgets. One of Morozov's latest works speaks admiringly of Angela Davis. Angela Davis, the goddess of violent Marixst revolution...

Toyama is a lot less cynical and quietist as he recognizes that technology can play a role and that other elements have to be combined with them; his article is something people can put into training binders and try to get some dimension under the do-gooding enthusiasm.

But let's face it, it's a lot more sexy to think of women accessing health care rhizomatically via the Internet from some "all knowledge on the network" node for free from some...telecenter than to think of how a salary might be paid of a medical worker who has to circuit ride through a lot of villages without clinics. The first thing is fun for geeks and doable for philanthropic planners; the second involves expenditure of grant money in those dreaded "direct costs" that foundations find so hard to cover because they aren't "building capacity" or "sustaintable" -- except through plans like Grameen bank that involves browbeating debters and a good deal of international bureaucratic lending to keep it going.

Toyama says that you could add and add computers to a poor village and it wouldn't go anywhere. I totally agree. I have worked in countries where they were warehoused or only used for gaming and chat, too, or where they broke down or where the Internet connection page said "dialing...1 out of 99 tries". Everyone wondered why the servers were always down. It turned out Dyadya Vanya was unplugging them from the only socket where the vacuum cleaner would reach.

Even so, among the many things that you would budget for aid would indeed be laptops and even laptops for children, and the proliferation of them has a certain "emergent behaviour" that might or might not favour the goal of education and advancement.

But Toyama betrays his hand as one of the international elites of civil society so well described by Ken Anderson when he seems to chafe at people who can't select health care information over a game, who chose the purchase of cell phone minutes over clean water. This happened with victims of Katrina, too, remember? Journalists covering the do-gooders got mad along with them that some families blew money on stereos or fancy clothes instead of education or nutritious food.

I've always been interested to watch how poor people began to get cell phones faster than rich people in the circles I could observe. I might not have one, but the poorest welfare mom waiting on a bench in an office would have at least a cheap one. It's not just that it's the sort of status symbol of the rich world (like expensive sneakers) that become attractive to poor people to have for reasons of esteem, it's that poor people just have more need of phone networking and socializing than rich people -- that's my theory any way, like the Russian saying "If you don't have a hundred rubles, have a hundred friends."

Each time this discussion of tech and humanitarian work comes up, I think of Oleg Bebenin, the Belarusian journalist who was found hanged under suspicious circumstances some weeks ago, whose death was investigated by OSCE experts after his colleagues reports about discrepancies and strange aspects of the crime scene -- to the point where even the wily and wacky president of Belarus, Lukashenka, says he was murdered. As the director of charter97.org and one of the chief aides to a leading independent presidential candidate, Andrei Sannikov, Oleg was in charge of all the wires and widgets -- I worked with him on explaining and setting up Twitter accounts in English and Russian some months before he was found dead.

When a long-time colleague and friend like that is so brutally killed, you really understand where the wires hook up: to human beings. They don't really go anywhere else; connectivity isn't to other machines, but to other humans, and wires aren't the only way they connect. When all the ideas and facts and connections suddenly are eclipsed, you realize that all knowledge isn't on the network. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had the experience writing a protest letter about a killed colleague that, as you're writing it, you reach to IM or email that person because they'll know the fact about something...and realize they are gone...

So, random hacks of kindness may save the day, kinda, but the old-fashioned acts of unwired connection to people matter more. You can often add tech on to human situations when they work and improve them. You can't add humans to tech without something reduced in the process.  This isn't just a Hallmark card saying, it's a lived truth.

This is why I'm hugely dismissive of One Laptop Per Child and call it One Bad Idea Per Adult. It's fetishistic and superficial. I call it placing a tech's totemic object in third-world hands as part of globalizing first world power. It angers me to think of spending money on a laptop that a kid will play games on -- like my kids do and kids the world over -- instead of *salary for the adults*. It's part of the excision of the cute child out of the family situation that is less attractive for which relief organizations have been known for decades as a gimmick to fund-raise. The child is cute; the adult with AIDS isn't.

When I say it's a totemic artifact that doesn't connect to anything, I don't mean that these OLPC zealots haven't planned for how they can get wireless and go on a network. Duh. I mean they don't connect to the larger set of issues for that society and help them, as Toyama is saying.

When I tweeted about "not connecting" here's the usual tech thug response I got on Facebook from Chadrick Baker, a former Linden (amazingly, with his, um, arrogance and "people skills," formerly in charge of Governance (i.e. anti-griefing):

Ummm... It connects to other OLPC laptops so they can talk to each other in local intranets. The world is used to you talking about things you know nothing about, but to spout incorrect information about a non-profit that helps children is just ignorance. Typical from you. http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/connecting.shtml

Gosh, Chad-rick, do you realize that if the cell tower is knocked down, then they don't connect to anything? if there is no electricity in the village then they don't connect to anything? if they are stolen or broken then they don't connect to anything? if they are used for gaming they don't connect to anything?

You simply don't know where to start with people who can only understand "connection" in a binary and linear way as a series of Internet tubes.