Wired State

Copyleftist Law-farer Opposes SOPA

As I looked around trying to find what other First Amendment experts were saying about SOPA, I wasn't surprised to find Brian Rowe, via Chris Pirillo. In this video, Chris, who is notorious to the Second Life community as an SL hater (and for being technically unable to log on to Second Life and function in the virtual world despite his supposed vast geeky credentials), acts goofier than ever and even appears to be stupid about law in general and the workings of Congress. This has to be a pose, right? Except geeks often *are* ignorant about how organic law works in the real world, as they live in the code-as-law embryonic Wired State, running everything via the Internet and computer code and thinking that this trumps many things in real life.

Because he claims to know nothing, he invites in The Experts -- in the form of activist and agitator Brian Rowe, a lawyer and law professor, and his law student. Brian Rowe is a type I've run across several times before in these debates (Benjamin Duranske AKA Benjamin Noble immediately comes to mind) -- a geek whose first academic degree was in science, i.e. computer science/engineering, who actively agitated against copyright for years working with various leftist causes including EFF, and then who got a law degree to assist him in his zealous struggle. I find these kind of zealots to be the most deeply convinced and persistent in their opposition to intellectual property rights and content as a commodity online -- even as they swear up and down that they are for IP because they themselves are content creators. (I guess Rowe has written books or something; Pirillo of course has his whole goofy website and videos and geek social network empire where I guess he mainly makes money off the ad clicks.) But of course, these IP-holders can afford to furiously advocate their give-away open-source stone-soup stuff because they don't actually earn their living from content sales, but from consulting fees, ad revenue, lecture fees, or teaching positions. Nice work if you can get it!

Here are my notes on Pirillo's video interview of Rowe and the law student.

Brian Rowe holds a B.S. in Informatics and B.A. in Political Science, both from University of Washington, and a J.D. from Seattle University. (see what I mean!)

On his website, under his "philosophy" section, Rowe lets us know about his conflicts of interest, and his siding with the cause rather than the client when he has to (a disconcerting choice all its own, given what should be lawyers' ethics -- of course he believes he answers a Higher Law). Rowe starts arguing with these kinds of usual ethical norms:

"These rules do not take into account individuals that are using the law to further a cause and fight for all stake holders instead of just one stake holder,"

This is really devious stuff -- and a good indication of why informatics and polysci geeks make for poor attorneys -- they want to *use the law* -- not apply the law or defend the law -- they have an instrumental view of it which in fact undermines the rule of law. They also believe themselves annointed to fight class action suits everywhere -- and lose sight of the rights of just that one individual -- who, of course, is the foundation of all human rights. There's a kind of legal hubris here -- "I'm going to dump this one client because I'm for fighting for a hypothetical class of stakeholders."  I find this philosophy troubling -- it's not really a philosophy of defense of people, but defense of ideology.

Immediately in the video, Rowe then sets the stage for evasion and even cunning obfuscation about the actual law and the actual First Amendment by mendaciously referring to hypothetical cases of implementation of SOPA that will act against "a link to content somewhere".

Er, no, Brian. The anti-piracy law will act against not just "a link to content somewhere" but to *links to sites with pirated content* -- infringers of copyright. It's not just somebody's political speech or some teenager Tumblr blog. It's Pirate Bay. He knows that and we know that -- but he's keeping it deliberately vague so he can get a geek influencer like Pirillo -- already pre-disposed toward hating SOPA without even knowing why just because Cory Doctorow told him to think that.

Anti-SOPA geeks avoid talking about the realities of how SOPA would really be implemented, because if they did so, their scarifying about "links to somewhere" would evaporate. A basic notion of "probable cause" will have to operate as it does anywhere in valid law enforcement. There are restraints within the law, and defenses. Read them!

Rowe claims as anti-SOPA lobbyists always do that someone implementing the law "takes those links and monitors it" and "the government can put together a blacklist." "If you link to them you can end up with copyright infringement problems," he says -- vaguely, and of course mendaciously, because nowhere has he actually said that the target of SOPA is *pirate sites* -- and as I explained -- those with commercial intent to sell pirated content, who possess a certain threshold of it and commit this act within a certain period of frequency.

It's not really hard to figure out what a pirate site is. This isn't a "I'll know it when I see it" matter of taste. Either you have infringing content or you don't -- lots of it, or you don't.

So he's already completely faked up a scary future in which "the government" or platform providers will be monitoring your every email and blog post to see if you're linking to some bad site -- even though that's not what they will be doing. Neither Youtube or the US Government will have the capacity or the will (especially Youtube) to mount a massive trawling and filtering operation that will survey every appearance of a link and pounce on it. That's not how you find pirate sites; it's not how you *have* to find pirate sites -- and of course Chris Pirillo knows that perfectly well as he knows how SEO and traffic to sites work.

Rather, they will seek to cut off the main heavy trafficked sites that link to pirating sites to stop pirating. If a kid comes into a cafe waving a slip of paper with the address of a house where the parents aren't home and tells everyone they should copy down the information and go steal stuff in that house, or -- to be more modern -- Facebooks and IMs on his Blackberry or Android the address of where you can loot that store -- you're not going to be able to claim First Amendment or protected speech. And the law isn't intended to go after every Starbucks squatter with a laptop -- it's about pirate sites and the big businesses that profit from them.

Google was already forced to pay a $500 million fine because it ran ads linked to illegal drug sites. That's the real world even without SOPA. Good! Google couldn't mount the First Amendment defense on that one -- it can't with the intent of SOPA, either.

Rowe continues to say that the states' attorneys general will be given power to step in and ask ISPs or search engines "not to list particular content."

Again, he cunningly elides over the specifics of that content, painting a lurid picture that isn't based in the text of law or legal reference but just his vague agenda-driven conjecture.

But what the AGs will do is come in and tell ISPs and search engines *not to list known pirate sites*. Big difference. That's ok. And it's not hard to detect them. And they won't be failing to distinguish a teenager's Tumblr or Facebook or somebody Etsy craft page from a known high-volume pirate site.

Even without this law, the AGs stepped in and talked to Craigslist, that fought them with lawyers until finally negative public opinion forced them to change their business model, that basically consisted of looking the other way while all sorts of sordid prostitution ads were run -- paying Craig money -- and people browsed for used furniture and read the lurid free sex personals and paid escort offers. Some of those prostitutes got killed, and some of those hooking up on free ads got hurt or robbed. So the AGs acted. Properly. And Craig had to change. This was before SOPA.

Next, Rowe commits his greatest cunning feat -- invoking the notion of all these Fox-TV Wal-Mart shopping Bible-thumping people somehow using this law against "something somebody doesn't like" -- as he mendaciously puts it.

Um, something somebody doesn't like, Brian? No. Again, it's *pirate web pages*. Pages that offer infringing content deliberately, in the manner in which the law defines. Not your blog.

Brian is off and running with the classic ACLU argumentation known since the days of Skokie:
"If you don't like something, the answer is more speech."

Well, sure, if the issue is hate speech -- let's say racist, anti-gay, conservative, etc. speech you don't like. The answer isn't to restrict speech you don't like, but have more speech denouncing it, educating people, arguing, etc.

Er, the answer to *pirate sites* is to have *more pirate sites*, Brian? Or just a blog denouncing them? Really?

Now there's Chris' cue to pipe in with a denuncation of SOPA, based on this totally contrived and manipulative lobbying devoid of actual legal analysis, with airy expressions of "somethings" and "a link" -- and say, "Sounds assanine!"

Now Rowe leaves that line of argumentation that isn't very persuasive because it never touches down and actually explains how the First amendment is violated (as Floyd explains: it isn't), and goes off to a political lobbyist position and a cry for "fairness".

In this mantra -- tried and true from EFF for years -- we are told that "diverse stakeholders" weren't really involved in the law, and that they should have been consulted, and that's why it is "flawed" and even "technically impossible."

"Bring those of us who are experts to the table,"  he says in a bid to persuade the gullible, the innocent, who might be swayed only on grounds of "inclusivity" or "democracy".

But there's a good reason that the USTR reps don't bring these types of copyleftists to the table. They are not really for protecting copyright. They don't really want to protect it by law or by law enforcement. At best, they want a technocommunist regime -- truly -- that relies on communal peer pressure to force content creators to have a "license" from Creative Commons to assure them of proper crediting -- but which coerces them into then sharing their content for free to everyone who wants to use it -- except those who want to use it commercially.

The problem is that CC doesn't have any license that says "click and use this commercially and pay me". CC decouples itself from commerce -- and that's deliberate. It decouples itself from any kind of payment system which it could have developed by now *because it really doesn't want content to be paid*. They believe it should all be liberated and shared and that magically, like the few espousing this communist ideal, people will be paid. Of course they aren't.

There's another reason why the government doesn't bring in the California Business Model people to the table to help write copyright law -- they are massive infringers of it, deliberately, with their model. It's like having the fox come into the chicken coop.

Oh, sure, you could put together some government task force that had EFF, Google and whomever on it representing this copyleftist perspective. They will pretend, hand on heart, that they are all for protecting IP (perhaps they'll chloroform JP Barlow and put him in a closet so he won't give away the truth about their real position.) But I'm convinced they will endlessly delay and obstruct and dilute and prevaricate and in fact prevent any effective law from being passed. I've seen the prototype of how this works in Second Life politics with the same actors (Mitch Kapor, founder of EFF and Mozilla, chairman of the Linden Lab, which are the creators of Second Life.)

Larry Lessig's Creative Commons is not a legal regime, and not law; it's a really deadly form of peer pressure and propaganda. It has not worked to protect actual intellectual property, but only eroded the concept. It has not worked to get people paid. It's not a model; it's not law; it's technocommunist doctrine.

Rowe invokes an argument I've heard many times from geeks on a variety of subjects but particularly this one -- the Internet makes everything before it obsolete, we need to "modernize" the law.

Um, why? The Internet is not special. It's just a big pipe with a lot of trucks hooked up to it. Yes, you can copy a lot on that pipe. So what? You can rob my house easily too. That doesn't mean we cease to prosecute robberies. Fair use is still fair use. An entire video of a game is not fair use in a game review; only screen shots or clips are.

Next -- now he's totally in political activist mode departing from any law talk, Rowe invokes the horror of "lobbying money". Oh, those evil Koch brothers! But of course, the real lobbying money and mindshare especially on social media comes from Google and EFF and all its related networks -- the anti-SOPA lobby has enormous visibility and the pro-SOPA lobby has little or none. I count...one article in Forbes and one blog on MPAA's site. Seriously.

Rowe evokes a world in which the Internet has transformed human nature and economy (not really possible, of course): "people creating stuff in old entities is no longer the norm, now it's Internet people" he says.

Oh, baloney. All those lobbying groups in the movie, book, acting, etc. industry are still creating stuff and they are still the norm. Most of the content viewed on Youtube isn't some precious indy film about social justice in America; it's entertainment music videos and movies created by mainstream corporations. A mash-up isn't "innovative" -- it's just a mash-up. It wouldn't exist without first those mainstream corporations producing the original content and investing huge amounts in it.

There's actually very little original artistry. Second Life, again, gives you the prototyping machine and the miniature window on to this phenomenon: many people simply swipe photos or textures or designs from the Internet and incorporate them into "original" Second Life houses, clothing, cars, etc. Few actually sit over a Photoshop or a Blender and actually hand draw or design completely fresh material.

Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of online "content creation" is derivative, Rowe claims falsely, "We're no longer passive automatons, we're the creators, and we don't have a stake" in the drafting of the law.

I'm the first to proclaim how we're no longer passive automatons, and I did this 12 years ago while Rowe was probably still scribbling in his Informatics class. But I recognized that underpinning our ability to "no longer be passive" were powerful content companies that created the tools *and the content building blocks* to enable us to do this, for example, with the Sims (offline and online). This is even more visible in Second Life.

Rowe proceeds -- again, completely knowingly and mendaciously -- to say that "ICE decided to take down some websites" -- without explaining that this act was legitimate, about unlawful sportscasting that was STEALING as I explain here.

He then implies that when ICE does this, they are too blunt an act (although they have acted legitimately in many cases) -- they took down what they "thought" were large infringing sites -- major rap review blogs. Rap artists send them to files.

So here you have this "ludicrous" case of "lawyers going to DOJ and asking to pull down websites that rappers themselves sent to bloggers."

Um, ok. Maybe they made a wild miss that time. Of course, I'd like to hear LOTS more about this. Do ALL rap artists send free stuff, or just wannabees and hopefuls? I see some rap artists in fact pretty heavily pursuing illegal uploads of their stuff on Youtube. Others put it up for free, but they have sales and ad clicks in high enough volume that lets them be magnanimous. Not every musician does -- and that's the Big Lie that the copyleftists tell.

There's an operative point here to be made as well: if ICE mistakenly prosecutes a site where the rappers sent in free music (if that's true), then...the truth comes out easily. The site goes back up. No harm, no foul. If they lost a few days of ad-clicking, um, terrible, terrible, but then, I dunno, they can sue for damages. This is not the norm; this is not going to be the norm, because the law is intended to go after sites that are pirates. And law-enforcement has to get a warrant for this as they do now.  Even if they won't get a warrant in some instances ultimately they will still have to defend their actions in court.

These actions all take place in a context of high media visibility, vigorous activist law-faring lawyers like Rowe, lobbyists like EFF, and of course Google. I'm really not worried about poor black rappers getting crippled and silenced by SOPA. SOPA will make it possible for poor black rappers to stop being ripped off at home and in China and Russia.

Rowe really goes off the deep-end at the end of the interview, acting as if "fair use" won't be a defense and as if there aren't other defenses in the bill (technical infeasibility; economic hardship). He claims book reviews, even your karaoke at your birthday party is going to get blacklisted and get you hammered.

"Which idiots are supporting this bill?" says Pirillo helpfully at this juncture, incited to the max.

"Content owners," comes the answer. And then ""We are all content owners and content creators" comes the mantra -- although what we really are, most of us, are content mixers and copiers, and ad-clickers.

Rowe tries to incite indignation, nonetheless: "Groups who have bought content from others -- middle men trying to maximize limited rights, but don't have concern for us, the artists."

Of course, there's nothing wrong with middle men helping you sell your content. Most musicians and writers still seek this, if they aren't part of, oh, O'Reilly's geekosphere. There's only relative handfuls that can work directly with customers and the incredibly treadmill of social networking, constant concerts, constant sales hypes to sell their CDs is a very wearisome and low-margin proposition -- I know because I watch some of my favourite local musicians wear themselves out on this treadmill and I see its costs.

"Their business model is undermined by the Internet, so it's an attempt to re-entrench themselves," says Rowe airily.

Well, actually, no. The business model that is undermined by SOPA -- which in fact will strengthen the next iteration of the Internet -- is the California Business Model -- let people join for free and upload first, and force IP holders to chase the company with DMCA takedown notices.

Now Brian winds up for the big pitch -- the "SOPA breaks the Internet!!!" cri de coeur:

SOPA "violates" the "norms of sharing information."

The notion of sharing links of all sorts -- although, of course, what's meant here are *links to pirating sites*.

All you have to do to blow this argument out of the water is to invite the geek to try to apply these airy collectivist notions to the malware site. Geeks don't think sharing links to malware sites is cool; they block people who do that ruthlessly. They block such sites ruthlessly. They do overkill in blocking such sites as they are willing to accept specious, politicized reports of alleged malware in their geeky systems, as I've found. Geeks hold it as an absolute religious truth that you fight malware and you don't allow links to it and hijacking sites that force people to it. You combat this.

No geek would ever accept a First Amendment argumentation about malware sites; they wouldn't say that banning malware distributors and linkers as "a chill on free speech" and "speech that somebody doesn't like." That's because it hurts them in their own little realm of code in their narrow understanding of things. it's just that they don't stretch their tiny horizons to grasp that infringing content sites are exactly the same thing. They are crimes. They are morally wrong. The community should stop them. Same with illegal drug sites. But given the lefty/libertarian/nihilist mindset of the average geek, only malware out of all those bad things that are crimes strikes him as being actionable.

But no, Rowe says blocking search results leading to pirate sites is "screwing with the DNS system" -- although he'd never say that about malware sites. "The credibility of linking to sites" is undermined," he intones somberly -- although he'd never make that argument about malware sites or sites with zillions of pop-up ad-ware invading your computer.

"Don't use a hammer on Pirate Bay," he says. But why not?

If you don't let people upload game videos for video game reviews -- readers won't buy the game, is the argument there. huh? Fair use is fair use -- a portion. You don't need the whole thing, and of course readers will buy the game. The video game business may be declining, but there are many more purchases from the demographics that Chris and Brian represent of boxed games or MMORPG subscriptions than of music CDs or movie CDs. Wonder why? Because the geeks in the game biz really lock down their stuff tight.

"There's another way to accomplish it," says the law student. Oh? How? they never say. They point to a website that they say has adequate model laws, which I'll definitely examine, but I'm hugely skeptical, seeing the bad faith and mendacious ploys used in the debate so far.

Chris, trying to leverage the "masses" of his own audience (which is at least 8,000 people who viewed this relatively dull video), tries to get a prescription for action out of this wonk. He says -- without mentioning any First amendment! --

1. show content on their site that could be pulled
2. stress "out of date" concept
3. we need better proposals and have a "dialogue"

All fake, and all lies. The content they are showing that could be pulled wouldn't -- it's about pirate sites. Laws aren't so hard to update and in fact *are* being updated -- it's just those with an ardent believe in the Internet as an Autonomous Zone instead of a normal human marketplace are getting a wake-up call to reality.

And you can't have a dialogue with people who don't in fact value copyright or IP and claim even with their own content that it should be given away to make money.

"We haven't had a rational intellectual property law passed," whines Rowe -- as if everything he has said up til now is rational, and not a lie.

Let me say this: I hope we're about to!

First Amendment Lawyer Supports SOPA

With all the hysteria around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the related legislation on protection of intellectual property, with outrageous campaigns being run by all the big Silicon Valley companies to protect their infringing "California Business Model," you never see any analysis of this law by real lawyers. There are IANAL anal Internet lawyers who literalize -- selectively -- what they cherry-pick out out of the law -- if they bother to read it. But not real lawyers with experience in litigation and understanding of the actual law and of course the constitution.

In fact, you never see any lawyers associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation actually invoke the real jurisprudence of the actual First Amendment. What you see them do is just talk vaguely about "a chilling effect" that anti-piracy legislation might supposedly have on free speech.

The argumentation against SOPA from EFF doesn't mention the First Amendment -- instead, it projects hypotheticals into a dark future when some putative method of enforcement of SOPA might lead to shutting down entire sites like Flickr, Etsy, or Vimeo. They claim in a concocted infringement notice they've made up themselves out of whole pixels that if Joe User puts up a Justin Bieber t-shirt on his Etsy page, that all of Etsy would be shut down, instead of just payments to ads on Joe User's pages. This ridiculous hypothesis that SOPA will involve shutting down entire huge platform providers like Flickr or Vimeo will self-discredit once the law goes into effect. But in the meantime, the hard left lobby will make as much havoc as they can with the scarifying notions.

There's nothing in the law to suggest this sinister implementation -- it's just in the minds of EFF and other copyleftist lobbyists with an ulterior agenda. (And they trash DMCA as well -- so you have to wonder *what* they would accept as an anti-piracy regime. Answer: watch their founding board member JP Barlow's videos on why everything must be shared in an online commune to get an idea of the real agenda.)

What you don't see in all these legal hypotheses is a reference to the First Amendment.

There's a reason for their vagueness: SOPA doesn't violate the First Amendment.

Fortunately, Floyd Abrams, a veteran, respected First Amendment lawyer, has come forward to explain all this, as the MPAA blog explains.

Abrams sent a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith and Ranking Member John Conyers reaffirming that the Stop Online Piracy Act in no way imperils the First Amendment.  He wrote,

“Any legislative efforts to limit what appears on the Internet, or to punish those who post materials on it, requires the closest scrutiny to assure that First Amendment rights are not being compromised. That is true of all limits on speech, and it is no less true of the Internet. But the Internet neither creates nor exists in a law-free zone, and copyright violations on the Internet are no more protected than they are elsewhere.

“The notion that adopting legislation to combat the theft of intellectual property on the Internet threatens freedom of expression and would facilitate, as one member of the House of Representatives recently put it,  ‘the end of the Internet as we know it,’ is thus insupportable. Copyright violations have never been protected by the First Amendment and have been routinely punished wherever they occur, including the Internet. This proposed legislation is not inconsistent with the First Amendment; it would protect creators of speech, as Congress has done since this Nation was founded, by combating its theft.”

Absolutely! That has always been the issue -- copyleftists trying to pretend that theft isn't crime, but is just a kind of happy communal sharing and even "innovation" that helps business.

Now, this would be great news, except that the technocommunists completely dismiss Abrams' reasoned law-based argument -- because he wrote this letter on behalf of American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Motion Picture Association of America.

For the copyleftist, this makes him a mere hired lobbyist for evil entities and they dismiss it. Of course, that's crazy. If Floyd wrote this interpretation of the law on his private blog for free, they'd find some other way to dismiss it. There is nothing wrong with working as a hired lawyer for companies -- that's what lawyers *do*. The lawyers working for the radical EFF and and the IT titans like Google do example the same thing -- work for their clients.

But while lobbyists lobby using lobbying language, there's a limit to how much a lawyer can skew the law. The law is the law, and it has a rich body of precedent in the United States that you can't jump over. And that's what Floyd Abrams brings to the table -- experience and knowledge about how law is *applied*.

I recall Floyd as a founding board member of Helsinki Watch, which later became Human Rights Watch. He has a long, distinguished career associated with liberal causes and with interpretation of the First Amendment. As Wikipedia notes:

He has worked on the Pentagon Papers and Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), to Landmark Communications v. Virginia (1978) and Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co. (1979), to Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart (1976). He has defended numerous clients, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art from Rudolph Giuliani over the Sensation exhibition, NBC from Wayne Newton, and Al Franken from a trademark lawsuit brought by Fox News Channel over the use of the phrase "Fair and Balanced" in the title of his book.

Yet ignorant people on the Internet will merely see the letters "MPAA" and like Pavlov's dog, say "evil content companies".

In a funny way, it seems to me that people like Abrams and a few other very famous First Amendment lawyers are sort of victims of their own success -- because of their litigation and landmark decisions, it's increasingly rare that the First Amendment is really violated with publications or broadcasts. (BTW, it's not being violated by policemen clearing Occupy Wall Street sites -- another widespread misinterpretation of the law -- freedom of speech does not entail freedom of urban camping -- more on that soon.)

 

How Hackers Actually Destroy Critical Infrastructure

The other day my daughter showed me a photo on Facebook of a friend in college who has some kind of app or website or something that shows when the washing machines and dryers in the college dorm laundry room are full or empty, so that she can tell whether or not to bother to go down in the basement.

Now wouldn't that be great -- and that's how it starts. The usefulness of the Internet of Things, and away we go. That's how they rope you in -- making it all seem like convenience and efficiency and goodness -- remember the spimes and their ability to monitor air polution.

With little concern about not only the privacy issues involved, which are plenty, but worse, the *property* issues involved when the business of a laundromat company that leases machines to institutions becomes dependent not on its direct relationship with customers and their quarters -- or increasingly, customers and their electronic cards that store information about credits they've downloaded from their credit cards, and debits from their use of the machines -- but depends on *the interface supplied by the Internet and its coders with their hacker culture.*

Want to pull a college prank? It used to be you would "room" somebody -- take all the stuff out of their room and put it on the commons. Ha-ha-ha. Now, you could hack into their laundromat web page and keep the machines appearing as if they are full for days on end so no one does their laundry. Or, I know! Keep it appearing as if they are all empty so people keep going down there when it is in fact full, frustrating themselves. Gosh, that would be so much more fun. As some goon wrote to me recently on Twitter, he was coming to SL to fuck with me, because he found it so much fun to fuck with people, and fucking with people on SL was so funny, he really had to do it again.

Nobody ever thinks about the malignant and vicious nihilist hacker culture you bring with you along with Internetifying everything -- but they should, and soon.

It's not just about the interface with its Media Induced Psychotic Syndrome or whatever it is cube3's MIPS stands for. All understood. It's that property is decommodified (as I wrote about Getaround and AirBnB, the rental services that takes slices of time of your apartment or your car from you and re-rents them out for you to the peoples of the Internets) and then part or all of the property is then rearranged and put in the hands of essentially other owners -- coders, runners of services, runners of aps. When you wier up property to the Internet, essentially, what you are doing is nationalizing it, or collectivizing it for coders to run, and not you. It really is no longer yours. It belongs to both coders of software and managers of Internet service providers. It's in the cloud; it's in the commons. Welcome to technocommunism. Why is this always so hard for people to get!

I remember once talking about the problem of allowing the malignant Anonymous culture to run rampant on the Internet during the HBGary saga, and some nerd on TechCrunch scornfully told me that there was no way that hackers could actually affect things like dams or electric stations or water pumps. That those facilities' web sites, if hacked, weren't really an attack on infrastructure because the real programs weren't run from websites that could be reached by hackers.

I remember thinking that the software attacks on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, wherever they came from, were an example that sure gave the lie to *that* theory of scorn about hackers really ever doing any real damage (an argument hackers themselves invoke to minimize the actual damage they do, such as Sony).

Well, here's another story that gies the lie to that lie -- and should give many pause. I bet even if the cynical enabling bunch in the tech press who ignore or minimize this kind of destruction, the feds are taking it seriously.

Here the US is probing a cyber attack on a water system, Reuters reports:

Federal investigators are looking into a report that hackers managed to remotely shut down a utility's water pump in central Illinois last week, in what could be the first known foreign cyber attack on a U.S. industrial system.

This is likely coming from China. If the question is, why would China, as in "Red China, a world power" want to attack some pump in central Illinois?

Answer: because they can. That's how hackers are, whether directly under control by the Chinese People's Army, or just in an environment the People's Army tries to maintain with lots of young hackers tacitly being supported and enabled by the government.

I'm surprised Reuters is describing this as "the first" attack -- I believe that the research Vanity Fair did on Chinese hacker attacks of a lot of firms, including defense contractors, showed other attacks -- but I'll go check that, as while these institutions were attacked and hobbled in various ways, perhaps the actual critical infrastructure of water or electricity wasn't harmed.

So, sure, it starts small, with some small company in some small place because that was what was vulnerable. Or that was what was *doable* to keep everyone guessing whether it was intentional from the actual leadership, or just a one-off from some kid. That's deliberate, too.

 

Why Isn't It OK to Have Lobbying Firms Undermine OWS? Chris Hayes of MSNBC and Reuters Smear Lobbying Firm

Here's a totally misleading headline from Reuters, or at least the way Yahoo News ran it:

Report: U.S. lobbying firm aimed to smear Occupy movement

Reuters itself apparently used this headline, still a scare:

U.S. banks should "undermine" Occupy protesters: memo

Why misleading? Well, first of all, because this memo was unsolicited, and sent by a consulting firm to get business in a climate of anti-bank sentiment which they thought propitious.

And they get to do that, you know, under the First Amendment, the same First Amendment OWS is always complaining is being "violated."

So it's a nothingburger, in fact. It didn't happen. But what if they had gotten the job to undermine OWS through the media? Why wouldn't that be legitimate? You know, the same way that OWS uses all its propaganda capacity to undermine "the 1 percent," banks, the government, corporations, rich people, etc.

This story actually originated with an investigation from MSNBC, which was first to give it the sinister evil spin:

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

This reminds me of the HBGary story, where a firm that wrote a memo on how to fight Anonymous got its ass handed to it by Anonymous. That's how those e-thugs -- real-life thugs -- are. HPGary didn't actually do any of the things it said it might do, some of which *might* have been illegal (Glenn Greenwald made much of plans to "smear" him, which may have in fact been lawful -- although, I really don't think a court case with an accusation of libel wouldn't have gotten far in that case.)

But Anonymous *did* do unlawful things -- breaking into servers, stealing email, displaying proprietary information, etc. And the FBI is investigating this but I don't know if they made any arrests. They have in other hacker cases. Good! Whatever the evils of HPGary, and they may exist because ethics-free hacker culture is inside the security forms as much as in the hackers themselves, it pales by contrast to the actual evils committed then and committed now by Anonymous.

So, to come back to the "smear" planned by this firm in the bank story:

Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, a Washington-based firm, proposed the idea in a memo to the American Banking Association, an industry group which said on Saturday that it did not act on the idea.

The four-page memo outlined how the firm could analyze the source of protesters' money, as well as their rhetoric and the backgrounds of protest leaders.

"If we can show they have the same cynical motivation as a political opponent, it will undermine their credibility in a profound way," said the memo, according to a copy of it on the website of TV news channel MSNBC, which first reported on it.

So, wait.

I'm not getting why this firm couldn't do that. Somebody *should* analyze the source of the money, the rhetoric, and the backgrounds of the leaders (yes, they have leaders). Somebody with more capacity and visibility than this blog, certainly.

That would be lawful and necessary behaviour in a liberal democratic society. Yes, you do get to scrutinize, examine, and call out radical groups in society seeking to overthrow government, corporations, and banks. That's ok. It is indeed protected First Amendment speech.

Despite being under the gun with all the sentiment whipped up against them, the banks weren't interested, so they say -- and it's hard to know whether the $850,000 for this 60 days of research was too high a price (it does seem awfully high) or whether the news media scared them into backing off.

Why does any of this really matter, and why will all the lefty blogs likely be bleating about this? Because:

The memo is from Clark Lytle Geduldig's four name partners. Two of them, Sam Geduldig and Jay Cranford, are former aides to House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, a Republican.

Again, elected officials get to speak out, and of course former elected officials get to form firms, and speak out, too. If you don't like it, form your own lobbying arm and fight against them. Oh, I guess groups like moveon.org have done just that!

But with a story like this -- about a thing that didn't happen, elevated to "a smear campaign" (!) -- what is really getting smeared is legitimate First Amendment protected activity in politics.

What's especially obnoxious about this story is that it paints a lurid portrait of evil lobbyists working feverishly with right-wing politicians to undermine OWS.

For one, what's wrong with that? OWS *should* be undermined. It's an anarchist, Leninist group bent on disrupting cities to make radical bids for power over government and economy. These are not people just "starting a national conversation". These are people occupying parks and buildings to promote a very determined radical collectivist plan. Why can't we question that?

For two, so a lobbying group gets together with like-minded pals and cooks up some negative press campaign for their enemies?

Isn't that EXACTLY what Ad-Busters did from the very start, in cooking up the provocative campaign to "occupy Wall Street" on September 17, and paint the "banksters" in the most lurid light, and denounce a mythic "one percent" to blame for the problems of "the 99 percent"? Didn't they use EXACTLY the same methods -- which are lawful? Getting rich friends to fund it, getting networks to spread it, getting their favourite politicians and public figures to boost it.

I personally don't think that a study of actual financial backing of OWS is really going to produce much. I don't think they had that much money to start with -- it's more about networks, determination, and the shock-troops of Anonymous. This loose movement has raised its own money to the tune of half a million dollars on Kickstarters, which of course, is an infrastructure that exists because venture capitalists like Fred Wilson funded it for this very purpose, to get around institutions (and make their own network in the Wired State).

Of course, there are various left-wing foundations or old NGOs of the left involved in giving the OWS movement a tax-exempt donation funnel, and these are only more determined than every to broaden the OWS experience into another concerted challenge to existing liberal institutions to refashion them by the lights of the left. That's all clear.

What's particularly distressing about all this is that no one sees the value of pluralism and having a variety of institutions of the left, center, and right anymore -- it's more of a winner-take-all rush these days.

 

The TechCrunch Drama Continues -- Lacy Out

But I can’t help feeling angry and sad over a lot of internal morale devastation and external brand destruction that simply didn’t have to happen.

via www.sarahlacy.com

Doesn't this about sum up the whole TechCrunch drama? Sarah Lacy quit Friday, following Mike Arrington, Paul Carr, and MG Siegler out the door. Those were all the people I read most. Since Arrington and Paul Carr left, I hardly ever go to read TechCrunch anymore -- it's just a scroll of gadget gab with over-giant headlines and scant content now, none of the thinkier stuff they used to do. Sarah Lacy is one smart cookie -- I remember when she belled the cat with Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW a few years ago, asking him point blank if his company was really worth billions, to the undying hatred of the geek squad on hand at the time. She weathered a sea of ridicule and hatred from the male techosphere -- good for her! So few women writing in tech, and small wonder, if you come out of the delivery room to find your job is given to someone else. Loren Feldman said when Arrington sold the site to AOL that independent blogging would end (i.e. major tech blogging that has substantive readership). He was right. I wonder if these former TC people will regroup somewhere, but it's unlikely. Now they're scattered.

Geeks Screaming About "Internet Censorship" Ought to be Ashamed of Themselves and Ought to Actually Read the SOPA Bill Text

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Silicon Valley is leading a shrill, hysterical and even mendacious charge against legislation called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would attempt to stop piracy on the Internet that is costing us billions of dollars a year in theft and loss of livelihoods. Tumblr is even outrageously forcing people to view a fake "censorship" notice as if this is something that will be "coming soon" if SOPA is passed. Naturally all the geek propaganda outlets from TechDirt to Mashable to ReadWriteWeb are going full tilt screaming about this bill, claiming it will "break the Internet" and its "culture of sharing" and lead to "draconian" censorship in which innocent individuals who have done no wrong will be mercilessly punished, or people who have copied only small amounts of content illegally will be brutally prosecuted. All fake. All hyperbole. All *deliberate* hyperbole -- because that's what works in our insanely emotional twitterverse and that's how cynical tech lobbyists try to manipulate popular opinion.

Andrew Keen has opposed this insanity better than I could, with all the reasoned arguments he's been making for years, since writing his book The Cult of the Amateur. His opponents claiming that he is only reciting what some SOPA lobbyist says ought to be ashamed of themselves, given his long career and credible body of work in print and on the Internet on this issue, and given their own shallow and ignorant regurgitation of Google lobbyists' memes.

I know it's really getting outrageous when I see not only Cory Doctorow *lie outright* about a Congressional hearing and claim that there are "no" opponents of the bill testifying -- when Google (!), the largest of the Silicon Valley lobbyists on this issue -- is included (Eric Schmidt, executive chairman himself) -- but when I also see all the kids on my daughter's Facebook screeching about "Internet censorship" and screaming that "the government" is going to come and take away their Tumblr blogs (!) and "Fuck America" because of this evil Chinese-like censorship (!). It's truly insane -- and even sinister -- when they do this.

Many of the tech blogs today are spreading this fake meme: that SOPA would involve *shutting down all of Facebook -- all of it! for 700 million people!* or *all of Tumblr* or *all of Twitter* if "only one" person is found uploading a pirated movie. It's absolutely insanely loony as there's absolutely nothing of the kind in this bill's intent, or wording, or implications.

Of course, these people aren't troubling themselves to read the bill. The intent of the bill is to go after pirates -- primarily "notorious" foreign pirates as it states -- not teenagers' Tumblr blogs. The intent of the bill is to punish those who knowingly, for commercial purposes, in large amounts, for significant amounts of money, gain financially for piracy. Not Facebook chatters and tweeters.

Read this section, from the bill:

‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided
under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed—
‘‘(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
‘‘(B) by the reproduction or distribution,  including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, or by the public performance by means of digital transmission, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copyrighted works, when the total retail value of the copies or phonorecords, or of the public performances, is more than $1,000; or ‘‘(C) by the distribution or public performance of a work being prepared for commercial dissemination, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial dissemination.
‘‘(2) EVIDENCE.—For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction, distribution, or
public performance of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement of a copyright.

So the possession of one copy of a pirated movie on your email, or a URL linked to your twitter, or on your Youtube account, is definitely DEFINITELY not going to lead to wrongful prosecution. Anyone claiming this absurdity is wilfully lying in order to get their way -- and that alone is the scariest part of this massive tech lobbying offensive.

When I see the ACLU misrepresent the law in this fashion -- the ACLU which is supposed to have sharp lawyers and supposed to have a reputation for upholding the Constitution -- I really have to wonder how bad things have gotten in the NGO sector around these issues. It's just insane. Whipping up insane fears of prosecuting people for their copies of Twilight episodes -- nuts.

Again, the *bill is aimed at piracy sites -- sites that do a large volume of distribution of copyrighted works unlawfully for financial gain*.

In all the shrill and hysterical pieces about this issue from the tech press, you see this other mendacious technique -- a claim that because the bill involves requiring that service providers remove content, that it will take away their "safe haven" status or undermine the progress of the DMCA legislation. Of course, the DMCA approach is a sop, especially for the individual content creator or small business who can't afford litigation -- it doesn't work and doesn't provide remedy. Its failures are part of why we have this legislation.

But repeatedly, the bill contains headings that say NO DUTY TO MONITOR. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I take that to mean that large services like Facebook or Youtube don't have to do pre-clearance or monitoring constantly and intrusively for copyright infringement. What they must do is what they already have to do and which complies with their own terms of service -- they must *respond to complaints* and take down material *when asked*. And here their own discretion operates as it always has -- human intelligence is at the helm of the implementation of this Internet bill, a factor that most geeks analyzing it fail to acknowledge, due to their own increasingly machine-adapted binary thinking.

The bill talks precisely of the mandate "to take technically feasible and reasonable measures." Technicall feasible! Reasonable measures! Shutting down the entire servers of Facebook (as if something like that would even be technically possible or advisable) would not constitute a "reasonable measure" or even a "technically feasible measure".

Under the sections on DEFENSE, the bill speaks of an acceptable defense if the service provider "does not have the technical means to comply with this subsection without incurring an unreasonable economic burden." So obviously Facebook would incur an unreasonable economic burden if it were to shut down its servers even for a day; so would Tumblr. Given checks against overweening prosecutorial powers built into the law like this, I really have to wonder how any tech lobbyist right now can claim with a straight face that this bill would require entire services to shut down over one person's infringing content or even 100 persons.

There's many other false claims being made about this bill:

1. It causes Internet censorship

This is breathtakingly bad-faith argumentation which I've been opposing for years -- because it turns the notion of real censorship (which technically can only be made made by governments, not companies) on its ear, and converts protection of intellectual property rights falsely into a restriction on speech. We saw how with "net neutrality," the geek lobby turned what is a classic case of a negative right -- the demand that a government not censor your speech -- and tries to convert it into a positive right -- to a demand that the government supply you with endless bandwidth, free movies, and other free stuff, forever -- and if it doesn't, it is "censoring" you. This is a logical extention of that false paradigm, claiming that the government's efforts to pursue intentional and criminal distribution of content for commercial gain can somehow be transmuted to harassment of individuals with a single copy or even a link.

It implies that free speech is the equivalent to downloading pirated movies, or, more cunningly, implies that if someone talks about where you get those pirated movies with a URL link, *that* secondary expression will be punished and censored. There's no evidence of this in the bill's intent or language and it's hard to imagine how even if it were, it would be policed. Having the government filter all email and Internet usage? But the government will not be undertaking this insanely expansive and expensive and *unnecessary* chore. It's going to go after *sites that engage in piracy, i.e. large amounts of distribution of infringing content for commercial gain*. And that's ok.

A friend of mine who is an ardent SOPA opponent put it like this: if I have a link to an illegal Harry Potter movie, or a Harry Potter movie on my blog as a download, somebody who doesn't like my blog could get the entire thing shut down. I find this a really stretched edge case of the sort we're long familiar with from the hackers of Second Life and their Fisking and literalism.  There are remedies in the bill and defenses. And these are readily apparent as I've noted above.

Eric Schmidt also mendaciously tried this route as well:

`The solutions are draconian,'' Schmidt said during an appearance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. ``There's a bill that would require (Internet service providers) to remove URLs from the Web, which is also known as censorship last time I checked.''

The old snarky hackers' forum meme, dripping with scorn -- "last time I checked". Well, last time I checked the text of the bill, Eric, I saw that the *intent of the bill* is to go after piracy sites (and illegal drug sites), not every Google search. I'm failing to see what's wrong with removing the ability of sites to resolve domain names to URLs that are in fact by definition these pirate sites -- i.e., not "my Tumblr blog" or "my Facebook page".

And indeed, the entire drama incited by big IT on this hinges on the hyperbole and the outright lies about how it will be enforced precisely to stampede teens on Tumblr and geeks on Twitter to send emails to their congressmen or even call them (perhaps for the first time in their lives) even though they aren't old enough to vote, and of course, to get thousands of geeks to call their Congressmen (although five minutes ago, chiming in with Occupy Wall Street, they were saying that representative democracy should be overthrown; that it is all bought out by evil lobbying interests; that change can only come from radical resolution and not legislation. Hah!

2. The bill did not involve technologists and is written by dummies who don't understand the complexities of the Internet.

We've been treated to the particularly annoying cacophany of the smug young geeks on Twitter who snark that the poor audio on the hearing was a function of congressmen who "are like your parents trying to turn on a VCR" and claims that Congress people are ignorant of technology and are writing a bill without understanding the complexities of the DNS and such.

Of course, they themselves are too ignorant even to read the bill -- they don't read any texts longer than the screen in front of them or the span of their hand. And of course technologists *have* informed this bill and it has extensive references to how technology does work.Again, read the damn bill -- it's been discussed in various iterations forever, and everyone has had their whack at the wording. This is a classic geek dodge, by the way, claiming that because somebody wants to do something they don't like or is against their interests, that they are technologically inept, and only "the right technology" or "the right knowledge" about gadgets will make it all right. Bullshit.

I'm going to call this out on a more simple level, as well. Congress need not be technically proficient, as it can hire experts. But more to the point, it's ok to have non-technical civilians not immersed in the depths of technology *applying basic legal principles to the Internet*. Geeks act as if the Internet is this magic octupus that does all these magic things and connects everybody freely with its tentacles for free and generates profits out of its ass -- for free. But the Internet is just a road or a pipe or a wire. It's not special. The property and commodities on it are not magic -- they're just in a digital form. The principles of property and law apply -- you never claim that you can't criminalize burglary because a thief can pick a lock, so there's absolutely no reason in hell not to criminalize piracy and attempt to make good locks. We get it that thieves pick locks and on the Internet, hackers circumvent and hack and copy. So what? It can be stopped. As Jaron Lanier has often said, "the Internet is this way because we made it this way," speaking of his fellow engineers. So make it different.

3. The bill will create a giant firewall around the United States like the great firewall of China.

What's particularly hilarious is to see the pious tech gurus telling us that "the US will have a firewall around it" -- although only yesterday they were telling us the "impossibility" of stopping copying; that DRM "can't work"; that anything can be hacked; that the Internet routes around; that it's better simply to give away everything for free because you can't stop piracy. Huh? So we went from a massive copying machine to...suddenly the Chinese-style firewall around the US because of a...bill?

Everyone acknowledges in this discussion that massive amounts of pirating goes on. There's a minority that says pirating should be blessed and decriminalized. Most of the guru influencers, however, are trying to take the pretend high road and say they are "for stopping piracy" or they "support the goals but not the means" of this bill. But in fact they never explain how they would stop pirating, and they never explain how they imagine we will go, in a day, from a regime with massive piracy, to a regime where....massive numbers of kids with Tumblr accounts are going to be "censored." They don't explain how that would REALLY work *technically*. And we all know it's a technical impossibility -- and no language in the bill supports this preposterous notion, in fact.

So what changed? Suddenly, there's magic new technological prowess on the part of the government? Suddenly, the government couldn't stop massive pirating today, and tomorrow it's going to be able to do this? Of course it won't *technically* and we get it that it will be hard, mistakes will be made, and it won't work.

But I'll tell you what changed: political will. And that is a wondrous thing to see here. Finally, after a decade of destructiveness, with the movie, music, newspaper, book and related industries nearly destroyed, with even government WikiLeaked, we are going to turn the corner. The fictitious movie-version of Sean Parker, in saying that "we used to live on farms, then the city, now we all live on the Internet" is right -- but living here means we have to be able to have the same livelihoods we had on farms and in the city.

We shouldn't have to retreat to collectivized tribalism or communism to live in the modern world on the web; we should be able to have livelihoods as individuals or companies where our content can be sold and not coercively "shared" and where intellectual property rights are protected.

4. Critics of the bill haven't been sufficiently heard.

That's actually not true when you have Google, the giant, testifying!

But so what if "only Google" got to testify in this hearing in which supporters of the bill testified. Good! I'm definitely for rectifying an imbalance we've had for years where the din of the copyleftist congregation has been all that has been audible on this subject.

We've had a decade of incredibly loud, shrill, persistent and even vicious insistence that "information wants to be free" and that everything can and should be copied and copyable for free -- with little ability to fight back and challenge these deep-rooted hackers' memes. Ordinary people represented in Congress have not had their say. The rest of the world outside the hothouse of Silicon Valley and its rapacious needs -- which feeds billions to a few oligarchs and provide very few jobs for people even as it destroys other sectors' jobs -- has not had a chance to democratically participate in decision-making about this incredibly powerful sector making people more and more dependent on it. So if the ardent opponents aren't given their say here -- good! They've had a say for ten years or more of web 2.0, gouging value far and wide, destroying property and "liberating" content for the financial benefit of the few, and now it's time to hear the other side.

I will never forgive the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other copyleftist lobbyists for their mendacious and *deliberately* cunning misuse of the notion of "censorship" around this issue -- undermining the real meaning of the word which has to do with governments taking away free speech by force of journalists and bloggers and writers. It's obscene to compare what happens to an artist in China or a student in Syria or an activist in Belarus with the inability of someone to download their Lost episode.

Did Occupy Wall Street Finally Get a Theme Song? Too Bad It's a Rip-Off from Another Protest Singer from an Earlier Era

Did the Occupy Wall Street movement finally get a theme song? This is a tune by a singer who goes by the name Makana (Matthew Swalinkavich), a Hawaiian performer. It doesn't seem to be very popular, but Makana himself tried to induce it to become popular by staging an infantile sort of "protest" -- singing this song while performing for a world summit at which Obama was present.

"Singer Crashes Summit with Occupy Song," roars the AFP headline. But he didn't crash anything; he had already been invited to perform. What he did was -- gasp! -- "get up the nerve" to play this, um, terribly revolting -- er, revolutionary -- song.

Makana, who goes by one name, was enlisted to play a luau, or Hawaiian feast, Saturday night for leaders assembled in Obama's birthplace Honolulu for an annual summit that is formulating plans for a Pacific free-trade pact. But in the midst of the dinner on the resort strip Waikiki Beach, he pulled open his jacket to reveal a T-shirt that read "Occupy with Aloha," using the Hawaiian word whose various meanings include love and peace. He then sang a marathon version of his new song "We Are The Many."

Too bad his "new song" sounds like a total rip off of another "change" song,

Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are 'A Changin'

Listen to the two and you'll just be embarassed for Makana. Makana heightens his Dylan copybotting by putting a Dylaneseque cap on -- which of course, is supposed to look like a worker's cap, or even Lenin's cap.
 

There's something terribly vain about Makana's music video -- the camera resting long upon his full face as if he were Sinead O'Connor singing "Nothing Compares 2U" and then propagandistically showing him against a flag (as if to say "I'm the real American, not you types who are the few.")

"I was pretty nervous. In fact I was terrified. I kept thinking 'what are the consequences going to be?'" Makana, 33, told AFP.

Um, why would anyone care if he put on a self-indulgent infantile act by singing...a song?! Does he actually think that the Secret Service would bum-rush him out of there for a...song?!

And if you listen to the lyrics -- really, how much less sophisticated than Dylan's -- which of course, were not War and Peace or anything like that, even themselves.

Makana's song basically says "the collective has to run things" -- and of course, makes it seems as if this tiny percentage of people -- that illusory "one percent" run everything, and as if we are all helpless serfs.

"We’ll occupy the streets, we’ll occupy the courts, we’ll occupy the offices of you, till you do the bidding of the many, not the few," sings Makana. No thank you! Violence, coercion, civil disobedience, but not for a just cause -- violence for violence's sake to seize power by an unaccountable extreme view.

Congress, the courts -- they are already doing the bidding of the many, not the few, and in orderly fashion under the rule of law. What, we're supposed to destroy civil society to have a few Bolsheviks run things in their caps?

Oh, and here, that clever "stealth socialism" in action:  

He sang it "over and over" for 40 minutes, varying his tempo and delivery to avoid triggering an overt reaction. "Whenever I felt the heat might come down, I would ease off. It was a very careful procedure," he said. Sigh. Big man! Sings protest song and bares t-shirt!

Contrast that with Dylan's more complex and nuanced lyrics. He is simply reporting -- the times are a' changing. You better move out of the way. There's a critical difference. It's not necessarily good or bad, but those who were losers might be winners. But truly, there's a difference between being a bard and a chronicler of an age and singing about how it is, and trying to incite and goad something into being by artificially injecting it into a state dinner. Call me unimpressed.

Naomi Klein's Really Crazy Idea That Climate Change Will Force Communism on Us All

Climate change caused floods in China. Did its communist system save it? Photo by SFTHQ

Naomi Klein, the firebrand Canadian leftist, has posted one of the most ridiculous pieces I've seen in a long time at the Nation. Lots of bobble-headed "progressives" will be nodding along with this for ages, but it's stupid. The premise of Capitalism v. the Climate is that even though hard left political movements (such as those she participates in, including Occupy Wall Street) have not persuaded most Americans to switch their allegiance to socialism or technocommunism; even though the Democratic Party is losing elections and the House has a Republican majority now; even though the ratings of the most progressive leader the left has -- Obama -- are all in the dumps; climate-damaged Mother Nature herself will persuade where nothing else has, because climate change will convince people forcibly to drop capitalism as their preferred social system.

Naomi believes that under this terrorism of injured Nature, people will be forced to adopt socialist planning and coercion -- and she's open about calling them as such -- which will involve nationalization of resources, forced long-term planning and policies, etc. Of course, you could argue that some of Obama's green jobs plans and green R&D handouts to universities and companies, and other environmental policies were from her sort of playbook, but of course it's not enough.

Her premise is that the Heartland Institute -- a conservative midwestern think-tank -- arguing against climate change -- or at least, arguing against the rigidity of how the left interprets climate change and its prescriptive policies to respond to it -- are now all running for cover and the reason they've become more active and vocal as they realize the very stakes at hand are capitalism versus socialism:

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

This is the sort of dichotomy that most G plusers and Facebookers snort or sneer at me for pointing out exists in just about every single major crisis of our time. It's not ok when I point out that it's about capitalism versus communism because I favour capitalism; but it's ok when Naomi Klein does it because she favours socialism (or even communism).

Perhaps the right has figured out something the left hasn't yet, says Naomi -- that it really is all about climate change literally forcing a choice of social system on helpless people:

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

There's a number of things wrong with this preposterous idea, and you don't even have to oppose climate change as a concept to find what's wrong with it. (And I'm not sure she's characterizing the Heartlanders' position correctly, either, perhaps they will respond.)

I personally have nothing against the notion of climate change as such and the need to reduce carbon emissions and footprints and whatnot and green up stuff. I don't drive a car; I recycle. I believe there is something changing about the climate -- and it sure doesn't feel right to me. The winter as it was 50 years ago and as it is today is disturbing to me, and I've lived long enough to see that. Below my window every morning this week during first an unseasonable jacket-free warm spell like a really late Indian Summer, and then even during a cold snap I can hear sea gulls. Sea gulls! What the hell are they doing here on the East River! (They didn't use to be *right here by buildings*. Shouldn't they be flying south? Isn't it time? Shouldn't they have left weeks ago? Hey, you, sea gulls! Fly! Fly away! (I realize some seagulls stay put up north if they have a food supply, which includes from humans feeding them or garbage, so that's part of the equation.)

I don't know very much about Heartland, which I only recently started following on Facebook, and I don't care if they are evil rightwing "denialists" who are funded by the Koch brothers or whatever their evil provenance is. Good! They are an important counter-voice to the climate change nutters and extremists -- and that's really only what you can call people who become so incredibly incensed at the idea of anyone arguing against their scientific premises.

I've never understood why the climate-change absolutists, if they are so sure they are right, have to worry so much about trying to argue with people who aren't sure or who think they are wrong. They should focus only on becoming persuasive and stop ridiculing and bangering and hollering and making you-tubes. But instead of patiently becoming more persuasive with something they really think is the truth, they are shrill and shrieky and sound like Jesus freaks in reverse.  Does the climate have a personal plan for their lives and is the climate bringing them prosperity? Have they put out a fleece on the climate lately?

More to the point, science is about debate. Even with the same set of facts, scientists can legitimately interpret them differently. Open society, as we recall from Popper and Sakharov, involves being able to freely mount even false hypotheses for the sake of thinking and trying to come to the truth. It's all good. I definitely respect the president of Czech Republic for standing up to what he sees as Soviet-style rigidity of thinking and Lysenkoism about science. There have been enough scandals and debates and retractions to make it worth continuing to debate.

But even if we all come to Jesus on the climate change issue, there would still be a legitimate Leninist quesiton: What is to be done?

And here Naomi's hilarious notion that only socialism will save it is just breathtakingly totalitarian.

For one, what comes to mind is China. Klein has written about China, and should know better. She's a big critic of China. So your friend China is communist, is able to commandeer all these resources and policies and people with its communism and yet...it is fixing to take over the West as the main carbon emitter and polluter. So what about that?! Communism isn't any system to point to as a friend to the environment, good Lord, look at Chernobyl, Lake Baikal, Khimki, and a hundred other issues in Russia, inherited from the USSR.

Even if Klein means some kinder, gentler planning and control but more "participatory" socialism, there's still no evidence that socialist countries have someone made some huge progress on turning back climate change.

Another thing comes to mind is how the market -- corporations -- respond to actual public health dangers or things that didn't seem even to exist as dangers 50 years ago, but today do.

Example: trans-fat -- whoever even knew what that was, even 5 years ago? Today, numerous products made by numerous companies have removed trans fat from their food items and advertised it as a plus. They've also moved away from high-fructose corn syrup. Today, those little Halloween candy corns make a point of telling you they have real sugar and honey in them, instead of that evil high fructose corn syrup. It may be no better for your teeth or insulin levels, but the companies absorb science, absorb the public's reaction to science, and they quickly adapt, and make a different product and even charge more, and even get it. The soup companies all have "reduced sodium" soup for much more now and the managers can't keep it in stock, many people buy only that kind of soup now.

Another example: bike helmets. Whoever heard of wearing a bike helmet when we were kids? They didn't exist, even. Eventually, statistics showed that people who got in accidents on bikes would survive if they had a helmet, or their head injuries indicated that if helmets could be provided they might survive, and now it becomes the norm and even the law. Even though people have to pay more.  The same with thousands of other now safety-ized devices -- air bags in cars, for example. Medicine bottles with child-proof caps.

We get it that things like recycling "aren't enough". But Naomi is silent on another issue: nuclear power. That would sure make things cleaner. But the left she embraces is against nuclear power, too. Can they have it both ways?

They may not even get to chose. I recall a lecture at the Andrei Sakharov conference several years ago about Sakharov's concerns, which concerned nuclear testing, human rights, the environment and social justice (he was a great historical figure many more people should get to know). And a nuclear scientist said that even if you overcame the public's reticence to go nuclear and the green movement didn't object, you couldn't put the nuclear power stations online fast enough to make a fast enough dent in the carbon emissions problem. How about that!

It's hard to imagine how declaring martial law will make this work -- the oppression and destruction of ordinary free market activity would likely cause more damage to people. After all, you have to put people first. What would be the point of saving an environment where the people all died from hunger or perished slowly from lack of work? Sure, sometimes there are national emergencies where the the government has to declare a state of emergency, but you'd have to ask whether the natural disasters (induced by climate change) where the government, local or national, went into emergency control mode then worked to make things better (Katrina?). No?

Recently, Japan underwent a profound multi-pronged disaster, probably the worst since Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- the tsunami and then the nuclear reactor explosions. What could be worse? Before that, the Japanese had put in a socialist government for the first time in a long while, as they suffered a downturn in the recession. Did this Japanese socialist government (and this is a relative kind of socialism), after these awful disasters in which so much was levelled and people were killed in essentially a climate-change-induced event then turn communist, nationalizing all business or forcing planning on big companies? No. To be sure, it has more of that then we do, but it didn't shut down Sony, for example  -- it took one of Naomi's fellow technocommunist hackers to bring Sony to its knees, eh?

And speaking of the recession -- the recession caused huge cuts in energy use. I only follow Eurasia, but I could see drastic drops in the purchase of Gazprom's gas, which really hurt that Russian monopoly. There was a terrible cold snap in Iran and Central Asia, children were dying, people couldn't heat their homes, they didn't have enough money to buy gas. Europe reduced its consumption enormously. Yet with all that, I don't think anybody saw a dent in climate change, or a change in carbon emissions, did they? Or at least, not significant. I ask this just to think out loud. I realize that it may be too short a time span. Still, it's worth studying to see if Naomi's notion of shutting down capitalism -- something that the recession did maybe even better than her plans for a desperate Mother Nature in tandem with technocommies to do -- had an effect on the climate. Whether the air got easier to breathe.

Or take swine flu -- H1N1. This was a force of Nature (and maybe one also facilitated by climate change) that was overwhelming and made countries have to address an overwhelming challenge (Mexico, remember?) Democratic governments and the market -- companies -- coped with this challenge and tamed it.

At the UN, you will frequently hear third-world countries complain about the whole green thing and climate change thing -- it's a "first world problem" that they don't see the rationale for. They are suspicious that the climate change thing is all about continuing to thwart their development (a fond and deeply-entrenched belief of theirs). They don't see why they have to give up having roads and cars and factories and such just because the global north is suddenly shrieking about temperature shifts.

What's most likely to happen is that faced with the stark results of climate change all around them -- floods, storms, bees dying, all kinds of stuff -- they will develop policies, or try to develop policies, but they will do this in freedom -- through elections, through parties, through policies with participation. They won't be inclined to submit to oppression to achieve these goals and nothing Naomi Klein has said is persuasive enough that they will have to do this.

But what's good about all this is that the furor now around Occupy Wall Street has made extremists of her type show their hands. They've dropped the pretense that they are just "starting a national conversation" or "working on progressive single issues" or doing someting incremental or partial. The mask has slipped, and it's clear that they want the big grab for totalitarianism -- coercion, force, revolution. It's better to be clear about this and not have to keep arguing about the nature of what we're dealing with from the left.

Two great videos of Lanier: on personhood versus sharing and a critique of Turing

Two great videos -- the first -- hat-tip to Reuben Steiger.

This talk by Jaron Lanier was at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. He talks about his music, his Jewish roots, and the concept of personhood and how it has eroded with networked computing and the Internet. These concepts are all linked -- it's fascinating. He says:

From my perspective, these ideas that I abhor -- they've been around since the origin of computing -- and in the book I describe the precise origin of them, which is Alan Turing, just before his death -- but the dominance of these ideas is incredibly recent. There is no reason to believe that that these couldn't be reversed. There's no reason to believe that we couldn't have a humanistic computing culture. Now, to add insult to injury or injury to insult -- the particular designs that devalue people don't just do so symbolically, they also make people poor. I'm personally convince that a lot of economic trouble and the general decline in outlook around the world has a lot to do with humanity's decision to regiment itself according to computer network designs instead of according to reality -- and human designs.

I couldn't agree more. Of course I've been writing along these lines and spelling it out even more, based on the experiences gained from Second Life and watching the rise of social media -- the Internet kills human livelihoods.  Lanier talks very emotionally, and therefore compellingly, yet he has done the research as well, about how this claim that "musicians make money while giving their music away" is really fake. He said there are a very few exceptions, as I've been saying, also quoting Keen, and that when he would track them down, they would turn out to be trust-fund babies. Fred Wilson is the latest in influencers to make this fake claim, again, based on a few use cases that don't extrapolate for a lot of people.

I didn't quite get what he was saying about Turing in the first talk, and apparently he talked about this in You Are Not a Gadget, but I don't recall it -- so I started looking on Youtube and I saw he had part of a a talk just about Turing.

Of course we all know about Turing, and I know the absolute reverence with which Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden) that other Lindens and various geeks and fanboyz regard him (that he was also a victim of anti-gay prosecution and torment for which the British government finally apologized of course adds to his lustre.)

I remember once I tried to make a joke of the famous "On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog."

"On Second Life, everyone knows you are a dog."

I meant this to be a sort of layered satirical comment.  That on SL, you could be in a dog avatar, and everyone would perceive you as a dog and would know you perhaps *only* as a dog; but of course, you'd be a human; and of course, your dog-behaviour (in the other sense) would also become known in this connected world.

But Philip didn't laugh or perceive it as funny -- it was one of those moments when I saw how...literal and flat...this great inventor's thinking was at times.

"That's the Turing test," he said, reverently.

But it wasn't. Because, gosh, on Second Life, everybody knows you're a dog, it surely does manifest, but of course everybody knows you aren't really a dog. And no fair saying you have a bot -- bots are run by humans.

So Lanier takes apart what Turing's thinking was before his death -- and he calls it a "truly spiritual idea," i.e. as in epic, in the changing of one era to the next.

He talks about the Turing test, which was a thought experiment, which were highly prestigious at the time.

He would have both a man and a woman speak, and if a listener couldn't tell apart their genders later, i.e. determine which was the man and which the woman, was gender then an artificial construct of no meaning (and Lanier adds that this would have had particular meaning for Turing, because at the time as he put it, he was being tortured by being forced to take hormones. What happened was that he was given the choice of serving a prison sentence for homosexual acts, then criminalized, of something like 7 years, or being given a "castration hormone" -- the female hormone which was supposed to then have "the opposition effect" and "make him right". Ghastly stuff -- and only 50 years ago -- he died in 1954). So Lanier says that perhaps his thinking was affected by these awful experiences -- he even grew breasts -- although he seemed to write letters with a caustic sense of humour as well at the time.

So pushing it further, Turing then tried to have people tell whether statements came from people or from machines. And then comes the moment breaking through the membrane:

"If you won't grant human quality to the machine," says Turing. "Then, aren't you like the Nazis?" That is, it wasn't just enough for him to see that people might confuse, at least for a time, at least in a structured test setting, a machine with a human, he pushed it immorally further: *if* you do that, *then* you must concede that machines are human, or equal to humans, or morally the same.

Lanier traces the entire geek religion from that formative moment -- it leads to the Singularity, and it also leads to nerdy culture where people lack empathy online -- a touch of autism, as he describes it, and says it mainly affects males. Where they feel no empathy for people (and, by extension, he seems to be saying that they take computers as more real than they should, and grants them personhood instead.)

Lanier calls this "a new form of death denial," i.e. then man may live forever in this form a la the Singularity, and he calls it "a fundamental component of building a new religion" -- the Turing test and the Turing ideas evolved into an elaborate form of religion.

And it came about because Turing saw programming as a "pristine form of life" -- and Lanier attributes that error in thinking as a function of working with small systems and not seeing what large systems are today.

"If a person could be a computer, a computer can be like a person," is what Turing saying -- and Lanier's thesis is that this contains the seeds of what has been particularly bad and destructive about the Internet in the last 10 years. It's funny -- and one questioner in the audience presses him on this -- he seems to imply there was this more idyllic period of the Internet where there was sharing without the twin evils of commodification into bytes and loss of privacy as well as destruction of value and collectivism. When was that? During the era of the Well and usenet? I'm finding that hard to believe, myself.

A lot of the statements Lanier makes in a speech like this seem brusque and intuitive or even religious in nature themselves, of course, and that's what drives binary geeks wild -- and if they're like some of the binary goons that stalk me on G+ like Jeff Brown, they would demand proof, linky-looes, evidence, blah blah.

Lanier speaks so convincingly because he has really done the thinking and the research and the testing and worked on these things. So in that regard, he's more persuasive than the usual TED speaker-snakeoiler.

Lanier's basic insight that we are all contorting ourselves to machines and that's the basis of a lot of modern problems seems perfectly fine to me. He even qualifies it by saying sure, there are still great things in collaboration on the Internet, but before sharing, first you must become a person in your own right.

 

This is A Test of the Emergency Broadcast System

When I saw this story about a seemingly apocryphal Lady Gaga playing during the test of a new emergency broadcast system (Lady Gaga is what Bradley Manning, the accused stealer of government documents and WikiLeaker was said to pretend to be playing as he downloaded classified cables) --  I imagined the "progressives" and the lefty tekkies are somewhere screaming about this -- and of course, ridiculing it. And of course they are (see the comments to this piece), and worse, they are also finding something Orwellian about it. Honestly, it's gotten so that the government can't do a single thing online (like include legitimately including Second Life in a list of places where organized criminal gangs may gather) without somebody screaming "Orwell."

The government bumbling around and trying to do an emergency broadcasting system in today's world, with not only the old-fashioned old media they could more easily get at like radio and TV, and trying to get to cell phones or social media on the Internet or whatever, yeah, we get it that it's laughable.

Except they need to do it, because in a world where we even the UN, which can be slow and cautious and pro-Soviet, so to speak (following the old foreign policy dogmas of the Soviet era and the G77) -- even the UN has said Iran is preparing for a nuclear weapon, you have to be prepared. It's ok to be prepared.

We in Second Life are used to the drop-down blue screen -- the way the platform providers reach every single person online (the island owners get a mini version of this being able to read every single person on their island). It used to be used much more often, to announce even events and contests when the world was smaller, but today, it's only used extremely rarely for truly grid-wide emergencies of, say, a security exploit. I don't think there has even been a drop-down blue for more than a year or even two. It's not needed. And there is a sort of social compact, if you will -- this intrusive device that controls everybody's attention space is not going to be used except for a truly five-alarm fire.

Except, the tekkies and the progs don't trust their democratically-elected government -- even run by prog prez Obama! -- to do the right thing here.

It's awful, really.

The government does need a way to reach people. They don't watch TV (I don't even have a TV). Radio -- iffy. I rarely listen to radio. Most people are listening to Pandora or whatever their Internet/itunes set-up is (one of the reasons they often don't know basic national and world news anymore). Says AP:

To that end, the new Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) system being developed by FEMA and the FCC  will eventually include not only the EAS, but  digital capability to send alerts to cell phones, websites and other tools.

I bet there are clever bloggers even cranking up a "get your IPAWS off me" rant now as we speak. 

Of course, since I don't oppose government as an institution and don't want my life run by geeks on smart phones linked to darknets as a substitute, I truly don't have a problem with the government having the ability to override Twitter, Facebook, Google, whatever they need, to get a really high-need message out, like "a nuclear reactor has just been bombed in your area" or "another plane of suicide bombers has just taken out the White House" -- stuff like that.

Of course, I remember these types of messages from the 1950s and 1960s -- they supplied me in my synesthesia my first notions of the sound and colour of the word "government" -- black and white and grey, on black and white TV, of course, or sounding fuzzy over the radio, and with the funny fuzzy sound meant to be "a test of the emergency broadcast system". What with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of Kennedy and various things, this system got a workout when I was a child. It always made me feel terrible, and yet, at least gave us the sense that somebody was looking out for our national wellbeing. I also knew that about 30 miles away at my father's factory, there was an underground bunker with cots and canned food and even board games where we might shelter out a nuclear attack, and until we could drive there, I could initially hide under my desk.

And even after Jonathan Schell in The New Yorker explained to us all that we were all going to die horrible wracking deaths in a nuclear winter, I still thought it was useful to get a heads up on TV and radio from the G-men, and maybe drink some iodine and head for some kind of shelter. Why not try?

The rest of the points in this story -- that people need redundancy and multiple channels -- I couldn't agree more. When we actually lived through 9/11, I first heard of the attack by *seeing* a knot of my fellow tenants, looking very worried, with one of them holding up aloft a cell phone...of somebody inside the World Trade Center he was talking to on an upper floor. In the jumble of things that happened I never did learn if that person survived. The next thing that happened is that a few steps later, I stopped at the door man's desk. He was listening to the radio -- which kept repeating news of the first tower hit. It being New York, and it being the second time the building was hit, and it being the case that everyone was already assuring themselves with a strange urban legend instantly available -- that the planes were empty, that no one except the pilot was hurt -- I calmly went upstairs. I kept preparing for a train trip to Washington, DC. It turned on the the TV, turned to a channel about the hit of the tower, then turned it low as I continued to type memos. That's the sort of thing that happens in real life.

Only when the phone rang and it was my babysitter saying the Brooklyn bridge was closed and she couldn't come; only when the phone rang again with my neighbour in tears saying she was trapped on the other side of the bridge and could I pick up her son from school, did I begin to think, hey, this is bigger than I thought. An email came that our hearing in Congress was cancelled, Congress was closing didn't immediately sink in for me as a function of the Pentagon being hit.

It still took another call that came in right after the others -- my office manager saying she was leaving the office immediately because the Pentagon had been hit and she was worried she couldn't get home across the 59th St bridge.

So here I had cell phone, neighbours, radio, TV, email -- and I still wasn't running and picking up my children from school because I still couldn't grasp immediately that it was a big city and national emergency.

That's how modern life *is*.