UPDATE
Two days after the post, and seeing that other posts have gone up, I have to conclude DDOS Apologist and Internet "freedom fighter" Deanna "Share" Zandt is not willing to share my thoughts with her readers and has censored my post (see text below the fold).
Now that I go to the page and no longer get the message that I'm in the mod queue, I know she's decided it is "too hot" to publish.
The other silly thing is that after I posted this blog yesterday about her holding me up "in moderation," she silently followed me on Twitter ROFL.
***
Well, it's waited all day, so I have to conclude that Internet freedom-fighter and DDOS-attack-justifier Deanna Zandt (why am I not surprised she's written a book with "Share This!" in the title) will not post my message on the "Civil Disobedience" debate. It's in the moderation queue.
So this being the Internet, and not the Darknet run by Doug and Dave, at least not yet, I will publish it below.
It's not because it's too long -- there are other long posts and if you don't want "long," put in a character limit.
It's not because it has "ad hominem" attacks -- saying "I'm as serious as a heart attack" -- not a phrase I use lightly -- about calling NY State Senate IT worker Noel Hidalgo to account for advocating the DDOS and openly soliciting financial contributions to WikiLeaks -- isn't "name-calling," but the same kind of politics Deanna practices. They just don't like to be on the receiving end of it. P.S. I believe strongly in using ad hominem attacks, and in fact, so does she and her friends when it's people they don't like.
No, it's probably for calling out the radicalism of people like Hidalgo who have worked for the liberal Dems like John Kerry, and for pointing out how Ethan Zuckerman once again wriggled out of a moral dilemma involving the incitement of violence.
Oh! And because I called that web hippie goof Stowe Boyd "a technocommunist". Again, that's a report, not a label lol. I don't view that sort of description "an adhominem attack".
I'd love for these perlustrators to get into the habit of imagining how they would justify their censorship to the public -- let them highlight and comment on objectionable phrases.
And herr -- I get it that a private blog can't "censor" in the literal meaning of the word, because only a state can "censor -- derr. However, given that these people aspire to *becoming* the state and making some kind of...utopian Internet thingie...I think it's useful to point out how they behave now, when they are influential, but not yet in power.
There is nothing legitimate about coercion of other people. Everything about WikiLeaks #cablegate is about coercion — there were no sources voluntarily handing files over, out of a sense of civic duty. There was just a big hack, so that it is mixture of nihilist destructiveness and the robotic artififacts of machines that could yield a big dump of files. This isn’t journalism; it’s vandalism. And WikiLeaks’ dog-whistling to 4chan is barely covert, and there is never a condemnation and disassociation of the chan thuggery by them, only sullen apologies for it, claiming it is “public opinion”.
It’s not. Most people prefer Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard and even Gawker.com — which was hacked because they criticized the hacks of the others (!) to a bunch of thugs.
I utterly reject this geeky knowier-than-thou crap where you tell us all that “this is not a hack”. Of course it is a hack. You don’t get to define “hack” in self-serving ways that minimize your tribe’s amorality and even criminality. Hack is already defined by the public at large that already gets it about you: you are willing to lie and dodge to get your way. We need to stop defining “hack” by perpetrators motivated to minimize them, geeks motivated to downplay them, and *define them by their victims* — who will explain the loss of time and money and the other reality of these “minimal incidents” — that they repeat and repeat because these nihilists are merciless and don’t give up. All this specious whitewashing of the DDOS as “not a hack, everybody”? And meanwhile Gawker then *is* hacked, and none of *you* were around to condemn that, now, were you.
@noneck (Noel Hidalgo) is to be refuted in the strongest possible terms, and people in New York State should write to their senators and demand an inquiry into his “open government programs” and obtain assurances that our data in NYS such as concerns our health, education and welfare will not be hacked, and that he and his comrades will not use WikiLeak coercion or DDOS attacks to silence people they don’t like. I am as serious as a heart attack. This kind of criminality has to be stopped dead in its tracks if we hope to avoid the kind of totalitarian systems that other countries have suffered, even as “progressives” claimed they were going to “better mankind”.
Let’s be clear about politics — indeed. It should not involve coercion or violence, or it is Bolshevism. Indeed, my calling of noneck “a Bolshevik” isn’t an ad hominem attack or some fit of hysteria of red-baiting hysteria but a report on the methods he is willing to use — *force, and thuggery* for the sake of an extremist leftist agenda. No thank you, I didn’t vote for him, but he can hobble my legislature of representatives merely because he’s the garage mechanic.
The notion of any “Bill of Rights online” is not only legally ignorant — private corporations or gangs of geeks making darknets cannot legislate unless they are juntas — they refuse to acknowledge in fact what *is already* the rule of law in the Constitution of the United States, which in fact guarantees freedom of speech just fine, including for Amazon or Paypal, which doesn’t wish to host material in violation of their rules — which they get to do, as they have freedom of association under the Constitution as well.
Hidalgo imagines that he can just declare a manifesto and force it on people, as does Jeff Jarvis. They and what army? Anonymous?
The notion that there are these “evil powerful corporations” out there that are just dying to gag our mouths and exploit us is infantile. The real power is in fact Google, Twitter, Facebook, and the legions of coders like Hidalgo who can destroy privacy and cripple networks using their technical knowledge or positions of power on critical systems — like the New York State Senate! The threat to diplomats’ private cables didn’t come from the corporations who pay for the net with their profit-making businesses; it came from the coding class within their ranks who wikified knowledge without accountability, and also from a private who knew enough to hack into a network and steal files in it (although I’m among those who believe he had to have had help).
So knock it off with the victimology about the Man — the new Man is the coder who can hold everybody’s Paypal and Amazon hostage at a whim, and not just once, but any time. Indeed, corporations are weak by contrast with malicious script kiddies. If we don’t want to see this sort of power become our way of life, with mafia-like payoffs or homages to these kind of people, we have to rein them in now. And it starts with telling our senators that the “gov 2.0 program” at NYS needs a really seriously look-over. It’s been a useful exercise, however, as I always suspected Gov 2.0 was a shill and a sham for a more radical agenda pushed by Tim O’Reilly and others — and I was right — they are prepared to use violence to get their way just because they imagine a corporation like PayPal is supposed to enable the funding of their revolution on demand.
Instead of reciting like robots various Wikipedia search strings with the words “civil disobedience” in them, look at the pictures and listen to the people who lived through that era and even saw such events. The lunch-counter sit-ins had people who *paid for their lunch* or other items in the store, *sat peacefully,* and did not cause business loss and what’s most important, didn’t trample on other people’s freedom of speech or association on the way to claiming their own.
Hey, and we’re not stupid just because we’re not coders. I didn’t change my picture and criticized those who did and blogged about the cynicism it invoked in my own kids. I came to find out then that Geoff Livingston was gloating that even though people opposed this campaign, it still succeeded in “awareness raising” and showing of links to organizations for donations.
I pointed out that his approach was horribly manipulative, because it meant angering people to force them to “raise awareness” like a bot-net dragged into a DDOS attack. Indeed, it is that coder’s perspective of people as mechanical gadgets to be coded and manipulated that we have to fight. When I complained about Geoff’s triumphalism over people who didn’t even want to be in the stupid cartoon campaign, he deleted my post and net-nannied me that I should reword it without “personal attacks” (sigh) and then I could “participate in civil discouse”.
Mastercard and Paypal aren’t breaking laws; they are complying with them. The anarchist technocommunists like Stowe Boyd can’t accept that these companies operate with a free will, not in cringing fear of any “State” capital “s” — they have customers, and they care about the bottom line. It’s customers — PEOPLE — not “the State” that is the motivation here, and extremists like Boyd can’t accept that.
THAT is what we face constantly everywhere from geeks and their “progressive” hangers on–as a class they have made our Internet a place of bans, boots, deletions and even persecution — not corporations, but thin-skinned tekkies who can’t bear criticism of themselves.
Anonymous is not a community; it’s a dysfunctional compensation. What Anon is doing is actually powerfully conservative and reactionary. It is reacting in a trivial and childish and destructive way to the maturing of the Internet and its use for a huge variety of purposes besides just script kiddies making crap and copying it and screwing around. These hackers loathe the idea that the Internet becomes “srs business” as they scornfully call it and like deadly jihadists, they want to make sure nobody does anything on the Internet except what *they* want them to. This requires the most resolute pushback you can give it.
Ethan Zuckerman has as per usual turned in a less-than-credible performance. The only thing that seems to bother him about the DDOS *really* is that reactionary anti-democracy forces use it, or conservatives patriotic types like Jester, so he only sees the problem in terms of giving them PR with the glorification of a method.
But the method has to be condemned in its own right as coercive for the reasons Ethan points out in terms of true cost — and yet he can’t bring himself to condemn it generically, as that would not be politically correct with the current fashionable “thoughtful and provocative discussion” about the topic.
Ethan and others have always been absent — for years and years — as I’ve complained about the corporate TOS in Second Life and other virtual worlds that silences speech, shrugging that companies can do what they want. Now all of a sudden that Amazon is getting in the way of his “progressive cause” via WikiLeaks, he cares. And now he cares so much he wants to *force* first amendment enforcement on a non-state actor by forcing them to go down the road of pre-clearing content precisely to avoid litigation liability over copyright infringement — what they have going for themselves now is the “safe harbour” concept.
The only solution is to encourage a free and voluntary free market of services, some of which will offer First Amendment enforcement by accepting the liabilities. They’re going to likely have to charge a lot — fending of libel suits and DMCA takedowns can get to be a full-time job.
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