Wired State

A Strange Piece of Hate Mail and an Epiphany about SOPA

I got a strange piece of hate mail from somebody named Karl Heideck who implies he is an IP lawyer. He may be this person, although there are a number of people on the Internet with the same name (I wonder if this is the same Pennsylvania law firm related to various Second Life lawsuits on property issues -- anybody?)

The text is as follows:

You seem to be......a very intelligent, passionate person, with strong opinions.

 But you also seem very, very hateful, and to have a deeply flawed understanding of American history and politics. And you have WAY too much time on your hands.

However, you should really leave discussions of copyright to the experts. We lawyers already have enough trouble protecting it without people like you going out of your way to make every content freeloader seem reasonable by comparison.

It's fun, though, reading your shrill interjections around the web and watching as sane people expose your rhetorical sophistry. But you really do need to stop with the armchair quarterbacking. Not everyone is intelligent enough to realize that how incorrect your notions are.

Naturally, I reject all of these hateful claims. I don't have "way too much time on my hands," I just type fast and like to think aloud and write blogs. I get to do that in a free society, thank God.

My interjections aren't "shrill" but pointed, in answer to what are really hysterical and shrill agitprop campaigns that in fact are appalling emotional -- and not technical -- in their arguments.

I'm attacking huge Silicon Valley platforms with millions to spend on their lobbying with a simple moral premise -- that their business model is deliberately criminal.

My notions about law and technology aren't incorrect -- if I state that there are defitions, remedies, and defenses in SOPA that hysterical geeks can't or won't understand as a context, I'm right, because they are there, and I point to the text -- unlike most geek screeds against SOPA, and -- I might add pointedly -- unlike ANY "First Amendment lawyer" pieces that don't point to any text in the law, but merely repeat geeky edge-casing.

If I point to dubious arguments against DNS schemes and "breaking the Internet" -- it's because they aren't grounded, aren't persuasive and not really based in technology so much as invoking technological complication in obfuscation to scare away critics.

As for the bit about a "flawed understanding of American history and politics" -- that's silly. People have diverse understandings of their own country's history and politics. Why would a disagreement be a "flawed understanding"? IP lawyers in particular tend to focus on arcane aspect of copyright law that helps them make their cases, sometimes dubious, for their clients. So what? I tend to focus more on the nexus of digital content as a commodity and the community needed to sustain the creator, and the commerce that links them (as Larry Rosenthal/cube3 has always explained).

The "leave the driving to us" bullshit in this hate mail is just what technologists say, in reverse, as if ordinary people can't comment on a regime that affects them profoundly. My neighbourhood is devastated by the removal of once-thriving businesses involving newspapers, video and music stores, book stores, and the little coffee shops that people used to have to read those newspapers and books. Hundreds of jobs went missing from my neighbourhood. It's a gulch. My neighbourhood's losses aren't made up for by a Starbucks chain with 30 zombies fipping i-pad pages on tablets. It's a devastation not made up for by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, also in my neighbourhood, funding Four Square or other things in our town that don't replace the jobs of those other content industries and don't create livelihoods except for a few engineers and VCs.

It's very interesting how it is written, because he is bitching about me "speaking about things I don't really understand" although he can't really cite any arguments to prove that. I can and will point out when geeks are double-talking and obfuscating deliberately on things like "Breaking the Internet" with the DNS regime -- and I don't need to understand the intricacies to call them on their scare-mongering, or to ask very pointed questions with reason by analogy. Geeks block malware sites all the time. Why can't pirate sites be blocked? Geeks tell us encryption can never work for digital content. How come it can suddenly work for the new https regimes? I get it that streaming media may be different technically than the process by which server handshakes and such are made. Even so, principles are similar and involve the same set of hacking issues of spoofing and trusted signatures and such. So, how about it?

I've been wondering why it is that "Hollywood" and all those evil "IP holders" and big entities like the RIAA in fact aren't lobbying harder for SOPA. They are supposedly spending $100 million on lobbying, but it must be going all to quiet lobster dinners in Washington, DC or talks behind doors, because I don't see them using any of the methods of their opposition in waging this battle. There are no op-ed pieces anywhere in mainstream media supporting SOPA, although there could be, easily, as companies like The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal are themselves paid content and trying to keep alive the idea of protection of intellectual property.

Given that this is "Hollywood," it could easily hire actors and make viral videos like the nerds have, cunningly slipping them into the meme-stream to terrify teenagers that their Tumblr blog with a Lady Gaga clip is going to cause all of Tumblr to be taken down and make their parents pay $1 million fines. So why aren't they?!

Instead, you don't really hear from them in any kind of visually stunning way -- although they have that capacity. Perhaps they think this isn't the time yet; perhaps they don't realize it's important to fight the fight on the same battlefield, Youtube, with the same methods, Youtubes. And do the same kind of screaming as the geeks are doing. All they'd have to do is tell one real story about the band that was really good, really popular, and couldn't make ends meet by CD sales at rock concerts or giving away tunes on a website or MySpace or Facebook. Show them really eating their last box of pizza on the tour bus with the measly proceeds before they disband. Show thousands of kids walking around with their (by most of the world's standards) expensive i-pods listening to their free song, while the band dejectively goes home for Christmas without money to buy presents.

In Second Life, when the merchant class faced rampant "copybotting" by exploits that the company refused to fight (there was a ban of extremist geeks there who kept saying you "couldn't" stop copying technically there it was foolish to try), they used all kinds of techniques. They staged a mass store shut-down so that the company who made Second Life -- Linden Lab -- got the idea that if they wanted hundreds of customers who paid them lots of money for servers and gave them a percentage of their profits in fees for sales, advertising and currency exchange they sure as hell better do something about copying -- pronto. The merchants made effective lobbying groups and made poster ads showing naked avatars without clothes, explaining two things at once: that avatars wouldn't have clothes if conditions for merchants were so terrible that their designs were ripped off -- they wouldn't be willing to make them; and that by stealing merchants' designers, you were stealing the literal clothes of their literal backs in real life -- you were harming their livelihood.

Linden Lab, which contains the same kind of laissez-fair copyleftists as EFF (*exactly* the same people), was forced to create a content protection road map. To create a third-party viewer policy and registration policy to stop rampant rogue viewers. To develop a machinima policy. And so on -- numerous policy changes and changes to the TOS were eventually drafted that make it far more sophisticated in dealing with today's challenges than Facebook or Google+ (and Facebook, too, after a huge popular uprising, was forced to take out the geek-tropic TOS language giving the platform provider "perpetual, paid up, royalty-free" rights to everything, and articulate that you own your own IP and FB can't steal it to make a buck.

On Twitter, Martin Mueller responded to my comments on his essays about surveillance technology by saying that he opposed SOPA because he thought it wasn't the rule of organic law, as I maintain, but "rule by IP lawyer accusations."

I understand his fears, but to that reasoning, I can only answer with the following counter-arguments:

o all law starts with an accusation invoking authorities to fulfill its norm -- you don't say laws against armed robbery constitute "rule by irate merchants" because you don't go by somebody's possibly biased or false accusations, you use due process and the rule of law itself in the judiciary system to establish the facts and prosecute the case. The same applies to prosecuting IP infringement. It truly won't require a law degree to tell that the top 20 existing and established pirate sites are pirating content, and with most sites that have slews of obvious infringing content, you won't have to worry about prosecution somehow being wrongful; indeed, that's how ICE could seemingly "outrageously" hold sites up for a year (sure, they should have been processed much, much faster especially since they likely really did have a good case).

o And if it is wrongful, you have remedies. The geek edge-casing in analysis of organic law doesn't admit that when law-enforcers have to make their case in a situation governed by the rule of law and independent courts -- not China or Russia  or Iran -- they have to make their case. Knowing that they have to make their case they gather the evidence to make it. They know that a teenage Tumblr blog is not how you make your case.

o Technologists are so used to "making their case" with edge-casing and nit-picking bug producing on the yes/no binary model that they don't realize that in the real organic world, you have to make the case based on other more complex criteria that doesn't reduce to binary categories. And that you will face a judge and jury, also making judgements not as machines in binary categories, but as human intelligence weighing many factors simultaneously.

But ultimately, I think there's a class of people who may not be rewarded by SOPA, if all goes well, and that is IP lawyers. And not for the reasons that Martin Mueller says,  that SOPA means a lot of them will get windfalls of business.

What gives IP lawyers windfalls of business now is the DMCA takedown regime. To really get a platform to take down content, and abide by their own TOS against uploading infringing content, you have to chase them with the DMCA -- and even go further when they refuse or ignore you. This can be an arduous and slow process. Interestingly, in the Congressional hearing, we got more transparency on the "California Business Model" than ever before: Google claims they processed 5 million of these requests, and satisfied 75 percent of them. But clear-cut cases like that could have been taken down by Google itself without a lawsuit. Oh, but they can't and won't do it that way, they say, as they fear their losing of "safe harbour" status -- that they will be liable themselves for holding content. But the question isn't that 25 percent of the people couldn't make their case and force Google to act (it may be that they weren't persistent enough). It's that 75 percent could.

This will have to change, and will change, because in fact, their removal of 75 percent of the content means that most IP holders have a case, and that Google should do a better job of enforcing their own TOS by obvious means with obvious cases without the cunning invocation of civil rights principles that only reward their own criminality. The lawsuit shouldn't be for the removal of content; the lawsuit should be for the restoration of content proven not to be infringing. There'd be lots, lots LOTS less of those cases (and of course, it's the tiny, tiny, tiny percent of them that we hear TechDirt invoking when they claim dajaz1.com was just a discussion and review site and had all the music sent to them in fact granted for free -- a story that I don't buy, after visiting the Wayback Machine).

Oh, and with lots, lots less DMCA cases, there'd be less work for IP lawyers.

If there was a way to structure the law such that Google would be indemnified for the actions of their customers, but that they also had to take good-faith efforts to respond to customer complaints about infringing content immediately and effectively, maybe there'd be no need for SOPA. But that's not the world Google or other platform providers want to live in, and not because of the "safe harbour" concept, but because of their own cunning and duplicitious "California Business Model" -- look the other way while illegal content is uploaded, sell ads against it, then take your time answering DMCA takedowns.

But if SOPA *were* passed, what would happen to IP lawyers? We would have less need for them. Why? Because all it would take is a few obvious air-tight prosecutions of a few very obvious pirate sites before platform providers would realize they can't go on being so criminal. Even without the "breaking of the Internet" stuff that geeks shriek about with the process of resolving of domain names, a few such major prosecutions will be enough to start changing the dilatory and lax if not deliberately conniving behaviour of Google and other big platforms. They will have to figure out how to either make big licensing deals to big record companies, as they've done, or they will have to start doing much more massive deletions of accounts -- which they already do.

Right now, if I happen to make a Second Life machinima of somebody's zombie game in a sim, and they happen to have an Internet radio station playing on their parcel and I happen to pick up even half of it in my movie, along with our dialogue and the game action, within a day or two, I will get a notice explaining the following: that my content on my Youtube channel is infringing, because it contains copyrighted work (the half of a song by a performer that was on a radio station at that time). The software on the site is able instantly to pick up the "alike" digital bits in that performer's song as she recorded it, and the bits of it that happened to end up in my little Second Life movie with perhaps 17 views from my friends discussing mesh, which was a new feature in SL.

The other thing that happens is that I was notified that now my Youtube channel is not visible in Germany -- it's been blocked, because I've joined the throngs of unlawful content uploaders -- accidently -- that the EU or Germany itself is blocking. Good!

I'm just that sort of geeky edgecase -- somebody with an amateur channel of very low views just messing around testing a free piece of software to make movies who just happened to catch some song on the radio that I didn't even like -- so that the content is thrice removed from its source -- Internet radio station, virtual world, and then Youtube. I remember going back to study the Camtasia dials to see if there was a way of stripping that song out, and putting one of the legal free tunes put out by various companies, some of which you can subscribe to for a low fee, but it was too time-consuming to figure out how to strip out and then drop in the other stream, so I gave up, and then my trial expired. I do hope to go back and eventually buy that suite and figure that stuff out.

Oh, but meanwhile, Youtube didn't go to the next step they could have, and simply delete that content. It's still there. Why? The same system that found the two tracks and identified them as identical could have also simply removed the item -- and made me chase *them* to RESTORE it, possibly with its new lawful soundtrack, rather than the other way around.

Youtube pretends that it's about people making amateur videos, some at a professional level, themselves, and uploading it. But 90 percent of the content is NOT that. Should I cry because my little amateur machinima, on a parcel essentially blogging about and advertising somebody's neat zombie game that they created themselves, scripting, artwork, everything, that they admitted the "fair use" treatment of in a news show, should now be eligible for removal? Why, of course not, because if I weren't busy or less technically inclined, I could have dropped in the legal song by now.

When the SOPA prosecutions start, Google/Youtube and others will be forced to change their ways and delete that item until I chase it. And take a much more pro-active stance than they have now, and not make IP holders chase them with requests to remove 75 percent of the material that they admit shouldn't have been uploaded.

When the platforms start policing themselves more, there will be less for DMCA lawyers to do (Google and other video sites are already doing that, despite their vaunted "safe harbour" -- as a test I favourited some 40 videos on Youtube and put them in my favourites' queue, and now I see more than half of them have been removed "at the content owners' request". Good!)

The entire shift of IP lawyer work will shift from protecting content-holders, to protecting those who have an edge-case that content was unlawfully removed -- that it was only fair-use, or it was only used by poor black kids who in fact had a gift from one of their hip hop heroes, or was only used by old ladies who logged in on Sundays to make machinimas -- like me.

The work will telescope dramatically because the edge cases are just that -- edge cases. No wonder I got this hate mail.

 

 

 

Milton Mueller Gets it Mainly Right on Not Obsessing only On Surveillance Tech

I've talked before about how anti-corporate (sometimes at root, anti-capitalist, really) campaigns against companies doing business with repressive regimes can be a distraction from those regimes themselves as the real culprits.

The subject of evil companies selling evil surveillance technology has been endlessly recycled on LiberationTech, the subscribe-only "open" mailing list out of Stanford for the cool kids following Internet policy and the "progressive" agenda (I won't say "Internet freedom" because they aren't always about freedom, but putting themselves in power.)

I posted to the list that rather than fighting surveillance technology that we might be able to stop for a Western company but which would only be replaced by a Chinese or Indian company, we would achieve more if every nerd looked up and got either the Russian or Chinese or India nerd sitting next to him at work or school to think about the issue of Syria and Iran and ask his government why they were propping up those regimes, than trying to get this or that company to stop selling this or that technology.

Sure, it's great if you can get a targeted boycott going that you can really show makes sense. Example of something no one ever did: if the Austrian telecom that agreed to enable the Belarusian regime to get the opposition's text messages last year could be boycotted, forced to cease doing business with Belarus, etc. -- unless it agrees to keep serving the public in general without prejudice and refuses to turn off dissidents phones or turn over their logs -- or leave the country if they can't get those terms met.

Or it can be symbolic and not work; it can be about naming and shaming. The problem is these things start to acquire a life of their own, and then there are even people who want to create an entire NGO-run regime over the Internet and technology that will decide what is ethical and what is not (another excuse to ram the "progressive" agenda).

No would pay any attention to me with this thought of course but when one of their own says the same thing, nerd girls like @Katrinskaya then can start nodding.

Such is the piece in the Internet Governance Project by Milton Mueller. He notes the same thing I said -- that you distract from the perpetrator when you become too caught up in the magic bullet of removing tech. And there's something to be said for looking at both how technology is not neutral, and in fact has features that facilitate evil, and that it is also merely a tool, and that evil has organic roots.

Mueller is absolutely right that the "magic talisman" (all tech is such a magical totemic item) of the surveillance tech hasn't helped the regimes in Tunisia or Egypt that fell (well, sort of fell).

As Mueller says:

Second, we need to recognize that it is political institutions that need to change more than trade in technology. It seems obvious, but gets lost in the shuffle: the problem lies in the users and uses of the technology, not in the equipment or software itself. The only relevant difference between US use of surveillance technology and Libya's (or Iran's or China's) is that in the former case there is a rule of law which (most of the time, and imperfectly) protects individual rights and limits the use of the technology for arbitrary surveillance, repression and harassment. Therefore this is not, at root, a problem of governments having or not having a specific device or piece of software. It is an institutional problem - one of balancing and routinizing social processes in ways that effectively limit, regulate and distribute political power and hold those who exercise it accountable

Thank you, Milton. You just argued why we should indeed have SOPA. Because we aren't China and therefore anti-piracy blocking techniques or technology aren't "like" China because we have the rule of law over the Internet -- or should. I'm sure you wouldn't see it that way, but you may be forced to realize why SOPA is right exactly as a rule of law project over the unruly Internet.

As I often say: the US, China, and Iran all have handcuffs. Who do they arrest them with? That's the point.

Even so, it doesn't bother me if politicians "put technology on restricted lists". It's a good idea to stop high tech companies from providing aid and comfort to regimes, even if that's not the only reason they are abusive and even if it doesn't work. And -- again, we don't have to be binary thinkers here as Morozov and others were on the Haystack issue -- the State Department can put in place a generic ban, and then review exceptions, i.e. help to a dissident group versus the regime's propaganda center.

Making further excellent argumentation against that completely idiotic meme that many anti-SOPA lobbyists and friends are peddling, that we will be "like" China, Mueller says:

The problem with this approach is that information technology, unlike bombs or tanks, is fundamentally multi-purpose in nature. You cannot isolate "bad" information technology in order to control bad uses. There is no technical difference between the devices and services for digital surveillance used by the Chinese and Iranian governments and those used by the American, Canadian, French or British governments. The same capabilities inhere in all of them.

To be sure, there's a conversation to be had about whether you can look at each technology and its functions and see if certain functions are being misused. For example, Twitter and the Taliban issue. Is it just a propaganda issue? Or is it coordinating terrorist attacks?

But here's where Mueller goes off the rails, because he's thinking in abstractions only:

We should be pressing for free trade and free markets in communication and information technology products and services in those countries, not creating restricted lists and throwing everything that can be misused onto them.

Um, with Syria? With Iran? With Belarus? These are not countries where we can "press for free trade and free markets" whatsoever. They are busy massacring their citizens in large numbers or putting all the main opposition in jail and faking terrorist attacks. They are in no shape to create and sustain "free markets" -- an entire root and branch change of the government and system would have to take place.

This idea of incremental betterment through trade, and eventually freeing up of markets, comes from the China playbook, of course, where the Communist Party itself there has a line about perestroika before glasnost. There's no reason to believe it. Making China more "capitalist," i.e. having more business with a greater variety of ultimately state-controlled entities -- doesn't mean that somehow you are then aiding the democratic opposition.

Mueller takes on the silly "neoliberalist" canard:

Competition and liberalization of the telecommunications industry, for example – though often excoriated by lefties as an aspect of the dreaded “neoliberalism,” has been one of the most powerful tools limiting state power over communications.

-- and that's all to the good. Except the notion of idealistic competition among entities in a market isn't enough of a theory of good. We don't have to collectivize and liberate property to ask whether markets where you only have Fox as the main alternative to the mainstream networks or only have NPR funded by the tax dollar are perhaps incomplete, and needing of help from foundations or alternatives that cost less that people can run (social media). Of course, what kind of people? Dave with his Darknet?

This becomes clearer when one broadens one's perspective. Stop focusing narrowly on information technology, and examine the tools of repression and aggression more generically. Yes, nasty spyware embedded in mobile telephone infrastructure can lead to the capture and shooting of people the government doesn't like. But what about the bullets and guns themselves? Or the airplanes and tanks? Why is the information technology being singled out?

I keep coming back to Turkmenistan, where the government simply *shut off* 2.4 million people's cell phones by ending the contract of the Russian provider MTS and seizing their towers and infrastructure.

That Gazprom-owned satellite that went out for a few days right before the big marches. Did anybody besides me wonder if that was a "test of the emergency de-broadcast system" to make sure no TV would work, anywhere? I'd have to hear more about what was on that satellite -- I know that television in some of the stans was dependent on it.

And Belarus, where they simply turned off the electricity on the squares where people were demonstrating, and turned off cell phone service, or turned off electricity in buildings where opposition offices were.

I would go further. Why examine only tools of repression like guns or fighter jets? The nature of the regime and the methods of repression that are organic are maybe more important to study.

Evgeny Morozov in his earlier (better) days would examine these questions and report on them in interesting ways, for example, on the Russian intelligence agency's manipulation of the web to fill the ideology vacuum and control public opinion.

Agitprop and disinformation and deploying of agents of influence -- all those techniques perfected by the KGB in the Soviet era long before there was an Internet -- are so streamlined and effective and amplified now. This article describes the "30 ruble army" which is like China's "50 Cents Party" -- the droves of regime fanboyz who will work to run forums and bully and harass dissenters and make others conform (these methods are now used by Anonymous on Twitter).

Seeing the Anonymous agitprop techniques on Twitter these days is a good reminder of the essential organic nature of totalitarianism -- how the Big Lie gets started. It's in conversations like this: I ask the e-thugs if they believe in collective punishment, because they want to punish all the police in Boston, not just the ones with whom they might have a possibly legitimate beef. The answer of their apologists goes like this:

o distraction -- "but this guy in Florida unrelated to OWS was pepper-sprayed and died" -- how can you not care? (I persist: are you or are you not for collective guilt and punishment?)

o dodging -- "but you yourself don't agree with everything in the groups you support, so why are you asking us to denounce a group for something?" (So...I take it I can put you down as against vigilante actions against police in Boston, then?)

o prevaricating -- "But why do you think I agree with everything Anonymous does, I'm just here reporting the news on Twitter" (when of course, the person has shown up to dog me precisely because I've published a critique of Anon's attack on the Boston police).

o smearing with McCarthyism -- "but demanding that we denounce something in a group is hypocritical" -- to which I can only return to the topic: but are you for the unlawful notion, contrary to domestic and international law, of collective guilt and collective punishment? Yes or no. That's not asking "are you now or have you ever been a communist?" It's asking whether you are a vigilante, and can own up to being a vigilante, and stop distracting from your anti-human rights and illiberal ideology, so we can see what you are really about. Ah, but you wouldn't want that to happen, would you!

o pity-party -- "but I'm a stay-at-home mom"

etc. -- you get the idea. A technique of dissembling and disinformation that many don't recognize as it unfolds.

Ultimately, I think the activists on Liberationtech won't be persuaded by Mueller because they need talismans and targets and they need "surrogate advocacy," i.e. attacking the thing that props up the thing you can't get at, because it's too hard to protest directly against authoritarian governments. They also hate corporations so much in line with their lefty views (except Google) that they won't want to give up the satisfying anti-corporate fight. It's too much work to look in the cubicle next to them and persuade someone to change their mind about their governments. And, it's happening without them, in Russia for example.

My post:

Should the Taliban Be Banned from Twitter?

Soldier on sentry duty 25 miles north of Kandahar, December 2010. Photo US Army.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, who already got someInternet freedom advocates mad (but not me) over his call on Amazon to abide by its own TOS and not to host WikiLeaks, has got "The Internet" mad again over his call to ban the Taliban from Twitter.

Predictably,  Boingboing.net has a post that makes it seem that this is only a propaganda problem:

Lieberman seems not be targeting terrorists who plan attacks using the service, but rather Taliban propagandists famous for political hysterics, gloating, and bickering with NATO counterparts. It makes no sense at all except as censorious weight-pulling for its own sake.

Well, geez, yeah, if we were going to start banning "propagandists famous for political hysterics," we'd have to start with Cory Doctorow himself at Boingoing.net, who is always running hysterical rants, i.e. against SOPA, claiming that "no technologists" were invited to the hearing, when the CEO of Google himself testified. So no, we can't do that!

But it is a serious issue, and the conservative Telegraph explains the broader implications:

The Taliban movement has embraced the social network as part of its propaganda effort and regularly tweets about attacks or posts links to its statements.

The information has ranged from highly accurate, up-to-the-minute accounts of unfolding spectacular attacks, to often completely fabricated or wildly exaggerated reports of American and British casualties

Oh, so it's not just Twit-fights with NATO, but actual enemy propaganda that may harm national security by making it seem as if casualties are worse, and the Taliban is stronger than it is.

So then should it be banned?

Well, no, I don't think so. If it were seizing the airwaves, i.e. taking over TV and radio, or seizing social media servers and broadcasting into everyone's account somehow, then you might make a case.

But if you don't like exaggerated reports of American casualties and boasting of attacks on innocents, then just don't follow those accounts?

That's the best the Twitter devs can suggest, and that's what I tell everybody who doesn't like something on Twitter. Just don't follow that account. That's all. Problem solved. Why block someone from following *you* easily in their stream just to be a bitch? They can always use global search and find your account and read it anyway. Twitter is nice that way. (Facebook isn't, and more on that in another post.)

Twitter doesn't have a Terms of Service like a lot of sites, especially news sites, various blogging platforms, etc. that say "thou shalt not publish libelous information" blah blah.

There are no defined speech offenses at all on the Twitter TOS. Yay! Twitter cares more about people trying to run automatic scripts on it or uploads of infringing content (so they can at least indemnify themselves) than speech -- it's actually different than it was in early days when they had that boilerplate legalese about libel and hate speech.

Actually, I was reading through Google Plus, and didn't find any there, either. That's the way to go. Again -- don't like something, don't follow, don't put in your circle. (There are larger issues to be discussed about that sort of filtration by the Influencers, but again, another topic.)

So, isn't it terrible that the Taliban -- the Taliban! -- can get on Twitter and victory-dance like griefers in MMORPGs about their griefing and killing? Yes it is. So start up a counter-account if you like, although counter-propaganda isn't always as interesting and you may not get as many followers.

BTW, if the Taliban starts using Twitter to coordinate attacks -- like Anonops and other Anonymous/LulzSec types do, or those looters and rioters did with the Blackberry messaging service in London some months ago, then law-enforcers might have a case for a court order to stop it, because it may be calling for imminent violence. "Imminent violence" definitions have been hammered out in Supreme Court decisions.

Basically, both Twitter and G+ tell you that they are not responsible for your experience, and that it changes.

And it's not as if you don't have organic law to work with. Libel law is libel law in the US. It doesn't matter the medium it takes place. Platform providers shouldn't be policing speech. Twitter seems the best in this regard -- they just got out of that business early on, and if you don't like something on Twitter you feel is libelous, you can call a lawyer (i.e. if it is false, and injurious to your livelihood).

 Twitter would accommodate the issues raised by Sen. Lieberman that go beyond propaganda, however, as Jeffrey Rosen explains:

Google has also been under pressure from the U.S. government to remove terrorist videos from YouTube.

"They refused to remove all the videos because they said they were protected speech," Rosen says. "... More recently, Twitter was pressured by [Sen. Joseph] Lieberman to remove pro-Taliban tweets. And Twitter's even more pro-free-speech than Google — it doesn't have a terrorism exception; it will only remove content that is illegal or promotes violence. And since they concluded that these tweets were pro-Taliban newsfeeds that didn't promote imminent violence, they refused to remove them."

Currently, Google's lawyer can be woken up in the middle of the night and make a ruling like a circuit judge on the basis of Turkey's complaint that Greek soccer players are calling the founder of their state "gay". Of course, I'm wondering how it is that Google has to get involved in this transaction, and Turkey can't block things in their country that they'd rather block -- not that I suggest they do that.

Rosen then concludes:

At the moment, lawyers at Facebook and Google and Microsoft have more power over the future of privacy and free expression than any king or president or Supreme Court justice. And we can't rely simply on judges enforcing the existing Constitution to protect the values that the framers took for granted.

Oh, I'm not for ceding them that power by having scare stories like that.

Courts and precedent law still count and can adjudicate these cases, the idea that the Internet is a magical realm with special non-natural laws should be discarded -- it's a normal human venue where normal existing law can be applied.

 

Stratfor, What For? LulzSec is Slipping

 

I don't know why it is, of all the things that Anonymous/LulzSec could do to get attention for its highly dubious "cause" (when of maximum eyeballs as people are surfing the Internet on vacation), that they'd attack Stratfor.

Are they such uneducated and naive bunnies that they think Stratfor is like, oh, the Trilateral Commission used to be for conspiracy nutters? (BTW, I used to have an office right across the hall from the Trilateral Commission, can you imagine?! And I was astounded to see that it was a small place, with the usual pathetic spider plants, and sometimes newspapers piling up outside the door as people didn't always come in -- it was that dinky an office.)

Did they think they were striking at some bastion of world strategic security work that would cripple the world's power brokers or something? Do they think -- in their literalist script-kiddie binary way -- that they would actually succeed in embarrassing this company that deals not with Internet security, but global security, if their customers' credit card info got hacked?

So what if Stratfor didn't hash their salt or salt their hash or whatever it is you are "supposed to do" to avoid hacking *for now* until the losers think up some other angle to attack you with.

If they moved a million dollars from credit cards over to charities, so what? George A. Normal out there in Wisconsin, some retired security officer, will simply move the $180 back stolen from him by calling the credit card company. No, George A. Normal will not be embarassed into leaving the donation with the Red Cross or Save the Children because he can't live on his social security and needs prescription medicine, so he will ask for it back. No mission accomplished. With that many transactions, the credit card companies will be able to help in catching the perpetrators even if they are "careful" and use proxies -- they will slip up and will be caught. Good! Thank you. They've maximized the surface level for being handily caught that way.

As for the list of customers, why would that be embarrassing or important? I'm truly not getting that. So the Pentagon or the State Department or the Miami Police or Bill Clinton gets security reports. This is like subscribing to the Wall Street Journal. It's a news and analysis service. Truly, so what?

Yeah, we all get it that Stratfor incites derision and snark, of the sort Registan.net specializes in, for example.

Herr derr! So what? They put out volumes of stuff, some of its wrong, but it's useful and some of its right. I can tell by the really smart people I know who sometimes forward me something from the free service, which I already get, which they found interesting.

And even when it's wrong, it's one version of the narrative, and you need to gather lots of versions of the narrative in a region to try to triangulate the story. It tells you what the establishment is thinking here or there, or the best level of intelligence that former CIA agents working in Austin, Texas can get on a situation, which can sometimes be laughably little or laughable wrong. Again, so what? It's a free market. Don't like their service? Try another one. The Anonymous hacksters themselves will go into the risk analysis business when they get a little older and realize they need jobs, there's money to be made in risk analysis, and that actually stealing from people's credit cards will bring that party van a little faster to Mom's Basement.

Interesting, too, how, with this action, LulzSec -- which is more aggressive and greedy than garden-variety Anonymous (think "Occupy Wall Street" versus "Moveon.org") -- has lost a certain ethos, if you will, of the whole Anonymous shtick. LulzSec has slipped badly. As much as these goons hacked and slashed at all these sites over the years, they prided themselves on claiming that they never stole people's credit card information in order to steal from them, they were just, um, helping with the security, you know? Showing up that absymal lack of hashing and salting. That was important to establish their credentials as, um, selfless fighters for, uh, the lolz.

If they think this is Robin Hood stuff, taking from George A. Normal and giving to...the mega-charities in America, they really are naive bunnies. They should take a closer look at some of those charities, what the CEOs get, how much their fund-raising costs are as a percentage of their budget, and how much direct giving they do and what impact they have.

And what is all of this for again, this week of hacking? In support of Bradley Manning. I'm not seeing any direct connection between WikiLeaks/Bradley Manning and Stratfor, but maybe the name fools them, they think "wow, a big fat security firm with big fat security clients and we can make them look really stupid by haxoring their unhashed salt-free credit card info and impress everybody with our mad skillz!" Yawn.

Stratfor will recover, and go on doing what it does, and likely not lose customers, because the credit card companies will reverse the charges and issue new cards, Stratfor will batten down its hatches better, and will go on producing that strange medley of grounded insight and the analysis equivalent of the back of the cereal box that it produces.

Meanwhile, the more criminalized the script kiddies become, the more imperative it is to stop them and catch them. Fortunately, as they become more greedy for power and influence and more criminalized, it becomes a bit easier to catch them if you just keep your head on straight.

BTW, Stratfor, welcome to having essentially a vandalized Wikipedia entry, as now the short entry about you on Wikipedia contains information about "Operation Anti-Sec" as if that is the most important thing in your biography and profile -- just like my Wikipedia entry is itself an act of vandalism (made to somehow deliberately expose my privacy -- silly idea -- and make it seem as if the harassment of me by a group of Anonymous hackers in Second Life, some based in Woodbury University, were the most important part of my life LOL.)

Oh, and I see Forbes has fallen for this same glib geeky gotcha-stuff of LulzSec itself, thinking that not hashing and salting is somehow "embarrassing" especially for a security company.

It's not. Because when you hack credit cards, it is easy to fix the problem -- credit cards are hacked often, and the companies fix them quickly. You don't accomplish a theft because the charges are reversed. And then the company hashes, salts, does whatever and -- what did you accomplish? By Anon's own claimed "do-gooding" thieves' law, this is a "service" because now the victim is "made stronger".

Secondly, if Stratfor were a company specializing in *Internet* security, and not *global security* -- i.e. of organic countries, you know? -- having their "goods in the store window" displayed like this *might* be embarrassing, but ultimately, let's not take the focus off the criminals here, shall we? You know, the people who did the hacking. They're what's wrong here, not whatever geek service Stratfor used to store its files.

Of course, it's good for Stratfor to think about how Internet security and organic global security are getting uncomfortably intertwined, but that's ok, it's good for them to have their own experience. Two weeks ago if I wrote them and told them that anarchic web vandals and hackers  were really the greatest threat to the world, more than terrorists because they affect more people and shift mindsets in crowds more easily and effectively, they would never believe me. Now maybe they will. Good!

And once again, all those good people taking the thugs at Anonymous on board their social movement in the belief that it's great to have storm-troopers to help out your, um, civil disobedience (like Occupy Wall Street), perhaps this mass theft from credit cards will make people think twice.

No, Glenn Greenwald, I'm Not an Intellectual Coward

Glenn Greenwald is infamous for his take-no-prisoners style of debate, in which he stokes a high sense of moral dudgeon with white-heat lawerly and journalistic brilliance. Basically, it's a faith question, however. Either you think the US government, even Obama, is a band of crooks and thugs utterly craven and evil who deliberately mounted a fake war in Iraq and killed 100,000 people, and nothing short of "cleansing fire" can fix this -- as somebody calling himself "Alan Watts" wrote in a comment here with the usual rant about "the prison industrial complex" blah blah -- or you don't, and have a different opinion. I do have a different opinion. It's easy to be against the war in Iraq and I was -- it's also ridiculously easy as the many Internet infantiles have illustrated in gadzillion comments -- to say "Bush lied, people died," because there were no mass weapons of destruction. Christopher Hitchens believed there really were. I used to wonder if maybe the Russians helped spirit them away with Syria's help, but I was happy to take the UN's word for it.

There was indeed a weapon of mass destruction that killed 100,000 people, however, and that was terrorism. And you will not get me to agree that this is "caused" by American troops and that after the WMD thing was over, in fact fighting them wasn't really the tacit reason for the war. I think liberals have a lot to answer for, when they can't come up with a way to combat terrorism except ensure happy childhoods.

Greenwald was scathing the other day on Hitchens, and quotes Charles Davis and dumps on the liberal George Packer:

In what sense does "decency" compel — or even permit — that line of thought? Packer, as he usually does, is simply giving voice to the standard mindset of Washington’s political and media class. As Charles Davis put it to me by email a couple of days ago when discussing David Corn’s expressed admiration for Hitchens — the irony that the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones, of all places, waxed so effusive about one of the nation’s leading war zealots:

    That’s Washington. Issues of war and peace — life and death — are just something you argue about from 9 to 5, and only when the cameras are on. Disagreeing on the wisdom of invading and occupying other nations is like disagreeing on whether the minimum wage should be $9.50 or $9.25: nothing serious enough to end a relationship over (see: Lake, Eli). And what’s a few hundred thousand dead brown people between friends?

Oh, that's just leftist hyperbole talking. You can't claim Hitchens didn't care about "brown people" in Iraq when he supported the war against "Islamofascism" precisely because he believed that would liberate them. And it's hardly fair to tar David Corn with that brush, he surely cares.

The reality is that quite possibly Glenn Greenwald and Charles Davis are really the ones objectifying these  "100,000 dead brown people" -- as if they were victims of racism! -- because they can only exploit them in their hateful theory of American war criminality. Their deaths were more complicated than that, and their own people and Al Qaeda-supported fellow Muslims killed them. Terrorists. It really does damage to the truth to keep converting these 100,000 into "victims of America". They aren't. They are for the most part victims of terrorists. Terrorists who could have fought like men, and fired only on troops or even only on police. But terrorists who killed civilians in unprotected civilian places like marketplaces or universities or places of worship. And who are continuing to kill people in exactly this way after our troops have left.

In Greenwald's universe, people who disagree with your highly moral take on things aren't just people with another point of view, they're villains -- intellectual cowards. And I understand that style and myself share a high sense of morality -- it's just that we have different moral instincts. So people who both claim to have moral rectitude really find very different things to say about 100,000 dead people -- I will continue to blame terrorists and extremism for their deaths, regardless of whether American troops triggered them or exacerbated them -- and Glenn Greenwald will go on ardently believing that we are to blame for every single death fully. As I said, these are faith questions, they are usually passed off as "science" by the left. Whle not exonerating US military action in Iraq, I will also put the view squarely on the terrorists and demand accountability there -- a factor seemingly absent in Greenwald's world view on Iraq but at least present in some form -- albeit in a bloodthirsty manner I found repugnant -- in Hitchen's world view.

Hence, my answer to his column about The Intellectual Cowardice of Bradley Manning's Critics.

Sorry, but I don't feel any bit of "intellectual cowardice" in looking at this case and concluding Manning is very different than Daniel Ellsberg.

First, Ellsberg himself was in government, in a study group, with access to classified documents he was working with. He leaked his own documents.

Second, Ellsberg wasn't in the military. He was not under any military code of conduct.

Third, his purpose was consonant with his general stance of conscience regarding the Vietnam War, and he took action for the purpose of making US policy better, and ending the war.

By contrast, Manning was under military discipline and it was not his job to access the 250,000 cables and other items like the "collateral murder" video; it was not part of his job assignment and he was not working with these documents.

He had some conscientious objection regarding certain things he saw, like the Iraqis arrested with the printing press, which he thought was wrong and overkill, but he didn't leak documents directly related to that case (nor did he even seem to seek them).

Instead, he just did as much damage as he could, deliberately, as part of an anarchic "the worse, the better" sort of Internet-bred ideology to stick it to the US government, and harm it, not make it better.

It doesn't matter if Ellsberg's documents are "more top secret" than Manning's. So what? Intent does matter; and job description does matter; and past position of conscience does matter, too.

Ellsberg was in a connected circle of people and documents that were intimately related to his job and his moral stance as a citizen; it was his career. Manning was not, he was a kid who decided to stick it to the man because he was upset about many things, including -- we're told by his lawyer -- his "gender disphoria" (I find this defense anti-LGBT myself, and don't accept it fundamentally).

It doesn't matter that Ellsberg himself doesn't see these distinctions between the circle of colleagues and New York Times reporters in the world before the Internet, when there was less disassociation and disaggregation, in fact more relevant connection to conscience and action. He has his ideological axes to grind with his "progressive" agenda, and he is grinding them on this case that is like a bastard child of his own story. Let him. That doesn't take away from the real issues of military discipline, job description, and anarchic vengeance -- which shouldn't be confused with acts of conscience and deliberation.

Assange was also directly connected with Manning -- something the leftist press has denied through this entire 18 months but which is now revealed as false by the prosecution's evidence. And Assange did not approach this act as a thoughtful one of conscience-driven necessity, but rather with the extremist, anarchist position of bringing the US to its knees by forcing such openness on it that it would be forced to close and therefore become crippled in its activities. He makes this abundantly clear in his writings (and see i.e. the excellent explications by his sympathizer, Aaron Bady).

Newspapers that use sources -- Ellsberg was a source, and Assange was a source -- shouldn't be prosecuted under existing US law and Supreme Court precedent (Pentagon papers case). But what are you to do when ethics-free anarchic hackers enter the picture? (And thus the case may include Assange.) Ellsberg did his own leaking of his own materials to which he had access with, without having anarchic locksmiths, bag men, etc. in the chain.

Manning took advantage of the affordances of the modern machine to do as much damage as possible. He even asked that question at several points -- wouldn't this material or that material have a terrible effect? His act is not one of conscience or civil disobedience, but of massive vandalism.

Now, the more serious part of your article is this: whether we can say, if the WikiLeaks shows the US to be committing war crimes or mass crimes against humanity or any serious human rights violations, that even anarchic vandalism should be exonerated, even if it isn't an act of conscience. Or worse, that "only anarchic vandalism" can work against such "horrific" crimes. And here I'm simply not persuaded by *your* writings that this is the case. But I don't rule out that in fact the Iraq war logs may show something that should be prosecuted. I don't see that Cablegate does, but I haven't read every single cable. My sense at this point is that it does not -- but see if you can get a case brought, using this material, if you can, as a lawyer.

We're probably not going to agree on the "collateral murder" video. It has been outrageously and tendentiously presented in many quarters, including from WikiLeaks Jacob Appelbaum, as a story of American troops wantonly killing journalists and even children. I don't accept that analysis because the journalists were roaming around with men with guns, and the soldiers couldn't have possibly known that there were children in the van of a man who stopped to pick up one of the wounded people. Again, there may be a case here for excessive US of force or wrongful death. But the spin of evil, bloodthirsty war criminality that the left has put on it just doesn't hold up.

I don't feel any necessity to "contrive" a difference between Manning and Ellsberg. It's very clear as day to me how these are difference cases involving completely different degrees of conscience and its connection to action. Ellsberg belongs to the honourable American tradition of whistle-blowing in positions of government or corporate power; he was in power himself. Manning belongs to the dishonourable American tradition of political vandalism.

At the end of the day, it's about the nexus between thought and action, conscience and deed. It's not about "disloyalty" or fetishizing of the national security state. It's about morality. Ellsberg's actions were consistent with an intellectual life of conscience that involved material he directly comprehended and had even written or commented on or had *lawful* access to himself. Manning's actions were consistent with the anarchic nihilism of the Internet generation and involved *unlawful* access, in defiance of rules and regulations and training. Lax oversight or hackability aren't defenses here.

The only thing wrong in the charges against Manning is "aiding the enemy". What enemy? The terrorists who kill the overwhelming majority of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan already saw the collateral damage video years ago when human rights groups saw it, too. They don't need the weakening of the US by over-exposure to already commit their deadly acts. The authoritarian countries exposed in diligent and even inspired reports from State Department officials and diplomats are only more contemptible, not the US. No, we have met the enemy and he is us, but the enemy isn't the government itself or the military, normally protecting the secrets that a liberal democratic state does get to keep. The enemy is Wikitarianism that led to the wikification of this material in the first place in injustifiable ways; the enemy is Internet-bred cynicism and anarchy that has a chance to be amplified and accelerated and made more vicious and malignant. And that is something the government will have to go on coping with even more as a result of this case, and if Manning is not prosecuted, we will cede the cause of the organic liberal thinking human to the machine and the cynical vandals.

And in reply to a further comment:

No, I think whistle-blowing is a time-honoured tradition and even to some extent legally-protected act, and as I explained, Ellsberg was leaking his own documents and those he *legally* had access to. Manning was committing politically-motivated vandalism, not leaking his own work or materials he had *legal* access to. Indeed, he didn't seem to look for or publish anything about his one ostensible concern of conscience -- the Iraqis with the printing press.

I don't believe the liberal democratic country of the United States under Obama is "paranoid and punitive." But that's because I don't start with the premise that the US is "the worst" of all countries or that it is "a war criminal" because of findings in these leaks.

I also don't buy the line that the NYT did something shameful or wrong in somehow "not reporting the facts of the war in Iraq." They did report them -- if that's your point. Gosh, the New York Times was good enough for Assange to leak to at first, you know?

If Manning doesn't think the New York Times is any good and somehow doing something dastardly, then that reveals him to be a very extreme sectarian or simply someone very young and impressionable and easily led by extremist chatter on the Internet. I don't take the NYT to be the problem that you do.

And maybe we're going to be learning more about how Assange coached Manning from army prosecutors.

We've read on Gawker.com from Adrian Chen that Manning had a friend in the White House, in charge of special media projects. So he could have gone to the top.

As for the Iraqi video I made the same point, I said others had it long before, media, human rights groups, etc. In fact, they didn't make the tendentious hash of it that Assange did, while they urged the military to conduct an inquiry.

I didn't say the video was hard to come across. Huh? I said that Assange deliberately tendentiously presented it and ballyhooed it. And you can read about how in the New Yorker piece here:

I've always condemned Wikileaks absolutely roundly, along with Manning.

I haven't made assumptions about Manning's intent and his relations with WikiLeaks and Assange, I've merely read the chat logs Wired published which were leaked by Lamo. It's all pretty obvious there. And they tell the story. That story is now validated by the military's forensics.

 

The Trouble with Registan.Net

A defense of my criticism that was itself removed by managers of Registan.net

Welcome, Registan readers! I see dozens of you coming to my little site to take a look-see because of the drama caused by Joshua Foust today and my permabanning (!) from Registan.net.

To my surprise, someone named Chaz Martin I don't know and haven't heard of has come to my defense, and in doing so, has basically summed up the incident -- and not surprisingly, his post was removed (hence my screenshot above):

Ms. Fitzpatrick raised valid criticism of Mr. Foust’s post in a professional manner worthy of educated debate. Mr. Hamm’s petty, vindictive, and Soviet decision to censor her comments raises serious questions about the journalistic integrity of the facilitators of this website.

Foust’s orginal post was itself an attack on another scholar, Matha Brill Olcott. When Fitzpatrick challenged Foust by referencing one of his articles that arguably made the same argument as Olcott, Foust responded by rideculing her name (“Catty Catty Fitz Fitz”). Foust’s aggressive response not only called Fitzpatrick’s arguments “idiotic”, but actually accused her of dishonesty. These kind of charges in what should be a scholarly exchange are disgusting.

It is therefore disturbing that Natham Hamm has chosen not to censure Foust, but to remove Ms. Fitzpatrick’s “free speech rights”. Apparantly, the management of this website can not tolerate criticism of its writer friends. It is ironic that a website intended to be one of the few uncensored sources of information on Central Asia has chosen to silence the voice of one of its critics.

Indeed, Foust attacked Martha Brill Olcott, a scholar of Central Asia, taking cheap snipes at an article on her website that was submitted before the shootings in Kazakhstan, as he admitted. He whipped up a posse of snarkers, and they got to making more pot-shots and they even made fun of her name -- in short, the behaviour of a bunch of kids on Facebook or Youtube. I find that continual Gawker.com-style sensibility, coupled with the forums-dwelling practices of somethingawful.com to make for a nasty culture at Registan.net and its related Twitter feeds.

Without having any particular need to defend Olcott's piece -- I viewed it as establishment-oriented at state-tropic, as I put it, I pointed out that Foust had in fact taken a similar position to Olcott's, and was therefore rather hypocritical. She said that "no major crisis" had taken place in Kazakhstan -- it hasn't -- and he minimized the shooting of 16 workers as "a local labour dispute". He didn't make any of the caveats and nuances he claimed later, after Nate Schenkken disagreed with him in a "guest post."

I challenged him to explain the difference, truly. This -- after making a long answer to his original piece on The Atlantic -- on, because it is the online version of a site, and the article appears on there -- in which I showed how he had misrepresented another author cited, Jacob Zenn, claiming his article was too hysterical, even envisioning Kazakhstan as "a center of global jihad".

Foust took particular offense at my objection to his characterization of Olcott as "shameless regime boosterism". I believe on the face of it -- but don't have any intimate knowledge of this situation -- that Olcott is not uncritical of these regimes; she is merely tactful as an establishment academic who wishes to keep ties to these governments needs to be. If anything, I ask the question of Foust's own stance -- his strident and vicious attack on the human rights movement and various critical news sites including eurasianet.org where I contribute -- isn't objectively accomplishing much the same thing.

I'll get to a more detailed rebuttal to his other points in another post, but the reason I'm posting this on Wired State and not some other topical blog is this: the creepy factor of web site managers censoring speech needlessly and banishing a critic from their midst, acting like some medieval clerics.This grows more and more widespread, especially with the big social media managers on Facebook and Google+, and they are controlling the discourse about important things from domestic to foreign policy -- and our de facto freedoms are being taken away when they do this. It does no good to whine that blog owners aren't censoring when they decide to have "civility in their living room," as they often put it -- they usually aren't very good judges of what civility is or persuasive in convincing us that their public forum of many strangers is a living room.

If Vadim Lavrusik or Lora Kolodny block you on Facebook among their tens of thousands of followers as they push the main views of the day; if Andy Carvin blocks you on Twitter; if some other thin-skin geek blocks you on Google -- then you don't have the old media of CBS News or even NPR or even your local pub. The online spaces are the replacement of old offline broadcast media and real-life meeting places, and yet they are not as free when they are run by these arrogant control-freaks. Saying you can go on your own blog isn't the answer to this problem, duh, we get all that. It's a larger social and political problem especially at times of elections (which thankfully, we still have!) and the answer will have to be First Amendment compliance by social media platforms by rule of law, if not all of them, perhaps some of them voluntarily, or perhaps some government-run venues.

All my life I have been in discussions and governance -- school government or church or neighbourhood groups or political clubs or public town halls or conferences or meetings of every kind, large and small. All the years that I debated professors or people on a council somewhere or in a political meeting, it never occurred to me to begin to ridicule someone older I disagreed with as a crazy cat lady. Never, in all those years, even when I lived in Russia or visited neighbouring countries, was anyone expelled from the meeting or the hall for their speech.

It wasn't until I came to the Internet in the 1990s that I found vicious, censorious, controlling and mean-spirited tactics worse than the comrades from the Soviet Peace Committee and their KGB shills. The muting, stifling, bullying, banning, blocking -- it's atrocious stuff. I thought that it was the sectarian nature of certain online communities like The Sims or Second Life -- merely the culture of hackers and gamers. I didn't expect to see it in my field.

It would be one thing if there were actual swear words, or racist or hate speech or "ad hominem attacks," that great dread of the denizen of the Boys' Latin School debate club. But there wasn't anything like that.

Just to reprint the indictment, in case it gets erased. Nathan Hamm, whom I don't know, the site manager, claimed all these falsehoods about me, and reiterated the old chesnut that "freedom of speech belongs to him who owns one":

• Whereas, Registan.net is privately owned intellectual property, there are no free speech rights beyond those I grant, and
• Whereas, the length of your comments kills the flow of discussions I try to create here, and
• Whereas, your repeated attacks on others not only derail discussions but border on libel, opening me to potential liability, and
• Whereas, you simply have a digital black thumb, and
• Whereas, you have your own blog and other platforms where it is far easier for me to ignore what you have to say, and
• Whereas, it’s Christmas and I really deserve a gift to myself,

Be it resolved that your continued use of the fora I provide to state your opinions or promote your work is unwelcome. It will all be deleted, disemvoweled, or otherwise altered as I deem appropriate at the time.

It would be interesting to have a trial on these charges -- they are outlandish. I don't even know what a "digital black thumb" *is*, but I make no apologies for long posts. If you have to refute people writing misleading and wrong posts about items you know something about, you sometimes have to go line by line. Registan.net has set a filter to put in moderation any post over 5,000 characters -- but it has no box that cuts you off at that limit so you don't realize it until your post is held.

When Foust spoke nastily of "actual journalists, you know, the ones who are there and not with Russian racial axes to grind" -- he meant me, and apparently not only is his own "not being there" much of the time in the region where he is an expert not at issue for him, and only for me (LOL) -- as an American of Irish descent who speaks Russian, I have "Russian racial axes to grind." That's a new one for me! I don't think I've ever been called a "Russian racist" or "Russian nationalist" in my whole life. Of course, my children are half Russian and two sets of inlaws are Russian but don't let that get in the way of a good hate-fest. What I *think* this is about is my efforts to try to get "Will" to come out of his own racialist approach in the thread about the suicide hoax -- as he put it, Uzbek sources were more believable and reliable for him, and the Russian human rights activist was only an object of suspicion and even scorn, even when she inquired exactly about the things he had outlined in his own posts as necessary for a proper investigation.

But this actually gets to the point of what I think is wrong at Registan.net  -- and this is worth going into detail about as it says something about how criticism is organized in our time and how non-academic discussions are structured online.

What's Wrong With Anne-Marie Slaughter's Theory of Collaborative Power

Waiting outside the sim with the town hall in Second Life...it's too full to get in...

It's not everyday that a former US State Department official actually drafts and publishes a theory for the Wired State -- which is what I call this blog, and what I call that future form of governance when elites without loyalties to states or organizations will rule the world from their smart phones.

But that's what Anne-Marie Slaughter has done in A New Theory for the Foreign Policy Frontier:  Collaborate Power in the Atlantic.

In almost giddy fashion, Slaughter, a Princeton professor who used to run policy and planning at State, describes how a tweet from armchair MENA analyst Andrew Carvin of NPR, amplified through her to her former colleagues at State, then on to the influential Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times, was able to save a prominent Egyptian-American journalist and blogger Mona Eltahawy with 60,000 followers on Twitter who was arrested -- well, not completely save her, as two bones were broken and she was sexually assaulted.

My first thought about this situation is that Mona's 60,000 followers, especially in Egypt, might have had more to do with keeping her alive than American power, but I could be wrong, I don't know the situation well. That is, we don't know if *their* connections and appeals that must have instantly been made could have had an effect.

My second thought is to recall an early Twitter rescue of this nature -- an American student was detained in Egypt in 2008 in the early days of Twitter, and he managed to tweet out one word -- "Arrested." He was soon released -- although his translator, an Egyptian, wasn't so lucky and spent much longer in jail. People became absolutely rhapsodic about Twitter and wrote entire books about this wonder. But I wrote at the time this headline, "$29 Billion in US Foreign Aid to Egypt in 30 Years Saves Twittering College Kid."

I don't know how much that may still apply in Slaughter's example of "collaborative power," but if someone in the US Embassy in Cairo got on the case through the new smart power (to use Susan Nossel's term) of Twitter, that 30 years of aid and relationship with the Egyptian military probably had somewhat more to do with the effectiveness and the outcome than anyone would like to admit.

To be scientific, this theory of twitter advocacy should work much more than it does. It doesn't. Example. I emailed a colleague in government about Azimjon Askarov's case in Kyrgyzstan after seeing his colleagues tweet about it in Russian on Twitter. They got somebody at post on it, and an Embassy official actually went to his trial and tried to raise the case. His sentence has been reconfirmed; he's still in jail.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, please, please tweet to your friends at State about my friend Andrei Sannikov in Belarus. I know they've done a lot already by imposing sanctions, but they could try to get Russia to do more. And Nicholas Kristof, please write about Sannikov and Belarus. You never have. The foreign news section at the Times has (although the first dispatch from the crackdown on the demonstration last December 19 said "Minsk, Russia" -- ouch). But that was old media. Maybe new media will work? So please please please put your collaborative Twitter magic to work for my friend. And here I'll even ask Mona Eltahawy -- I realize you've just had your bones broken! So has Andrei in the past. You have 60,000 followers. He only has 1,114, and he hasn't tweeted since December 19, 2010, when he wrote, "проголосовал против диктатора. сустрэнемся на Плошчы" -- and that was it. There's less tweeting out of Belarus...

OK, so much for that -- but then after reciting this extraordinary Twitter story -- that may not work every time for everybody, but will work enough times for some elites that it may become Gospel -- let's look at the next part of Slaughter's article -- the actual theory of collaborative power.

I was surprised, at a meeting on social media and Twitter revolutions at the Council on Foreign Relations, when Anne-Marie Slaughter invoked Lenin as someone whom we should appreciate as having achieved amazing results in fighting the Tsar's tyranny -- without Twitter. (Well, he did seize the telegraph stations and Smolny...) I wasn't the only one who was surprised at that invocation, and she hastened to explain herself -- but sort of dug herself in deeper. Sure, we acknowledge the Tsar's yoke of oppression, which Slaughter focused on in her admiration, but look at the terror and totalitarian system that Lenin brought! (I will have to dig out the Twitter exchange I had with her after that).

I mention this because I think Slaughter surely knows the difference between collectivism and collaboration. Collectivism is coercive, and often involves forcibly diminishing the individual, with a few unaccountable secretive leaders actually taking over by stealth or deception (as occurred with Lenin and Stalin and the Bolsheviks). Collectivism can involve nasty things like peer pressure, group-think, self-criticism circles, agitprop, etc. Collectivism can involve "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" and so on. But collaboration involves voluntary, congenial work together with people who are likeminded, on shared goals.

Likemindedness is really the key precondition for Anne-Marrie Slaughter's theory to work for good, and not evil -- people really need to have some sort of shared values that constitute a higher power than their own group or collaboration itself, that bind them together, or otherwise, any one power-monger in the group can override the others. But likemindedness is just what people don't have -- and they don't have it in this country about simple things like global warming or health care, and they don't have it in the world at large about things like what to do about Syria. The mantra of "progressives" is that they can just identify the *science* involved in this or that issue and then keep "fact-checking" those people who "spread myths and lies" and...prevail. Then they don't. And that's just the problem. They aren't persuasive. They won't be, because they are not likeminded. The real trick of the world is to get along even when you are not likeminded, not to force artificial collaborations that involve people shifting away from their minds.

For how collaboration goes wrong and becomes collectivism, you can study not only Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" and my refutation of Shirky, "The Core is Our Own Worst Enemy" (although I don't recommend doing more than skimming the end of my piece, as it is very specific to Second Life dialogues and may be impenetrable -- I need to rewrite it for a more general audience.)

In a nutshell, Clay Shirky says that groups can only remain true to their mission if a core takes over and keeps the group in line, "gardens it," so to speak, and remains cohesive. But I find that recipe to be precisely the negative form of collectivism hiding as a group that in fact is really run by a few people. The core itself has to be democratically legitimate, and flexible to newcomers and willing to revise and refresh -- and that's exactly what's missing from Shirky's very rigid notion.

Shirky's collectivism is encapsulated in dictums like this:

The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group. If the ease of use is only calculated from the user's point of view, it will be difficult to defend the group from the "group is its own worst enemy" style attacks from within.

This is in keeping with his collectivized notion of the individual, who becomes merely a social creature when on line, defined not as an individual but as a networked identity.

Slaughter's notion fits right in with this -- and like Shirky, she'd like the individual and his mindset to erode -- "shift," as she puts it:

Collaborative power can take many forms. The first is mobilization; to exercise collaborative power through not a command but a call to action. The second form is connection.  In contrast to the relational power method of narrowing and controlling a specific set of choices, collaborative power is exercised by broadening access to the circle of power and connecting as many people to one another and to a common purpose as possible. A third form (many more dimensions of collaborative power will likely emerge) is adaptation. Instead of seeking to structure the preferences of others, those who would exercise collaborative power must be demonstrably willing to shift their own views enough to enter into meaningful dialogue with others. The first step toward persuading others is often an evident and sincere willingness to be persuaded yourself.

There are 10 things wrong with this idea:

Sinking Ron Paul's Campaign

I was glad to see that due to the diligent reporting of James Kirchick in the The New Republic, it looks like the Ron Paul campaign will be sunk.

I've always found Ron Paul creepy and extreme -- which is why he is so popular with Internet-bred young people who reach for shallow but sure answers in real time in texts no longer than their hand. It's always amazed me that geeks who were five minutes ago spouting the typical "progressive" leftist menu -- collectivism, liberation of property, government entitlement programs -- would five minutes later start embracing Ron Paul in a forums debate, despite his seeming conservative, right-wing position. Ah, that's because he's a libertarian, and as I've learned over the years, there are sometimes virtually no differences between the hard leftist and the libertarian -- see, for example, the way they've both embraced the shrill anti-SOPA campaign. CATO has been particularly shameful with exaggerated hyperbole and even appearing on Kremlin TV to stump for the cause.

I knew things were *really* extreme when my son, who tends toward the Tea Party in likely rebellion against my liberal values, said he found this antiwar video by Ron Paul extreme. That is, global leftists and isolationist libertarians have in common the desire to end America's wars. But there is just something so...freaky...about this film. I can't find it now among the huge scrum of Ron Paul stuff on Youtube, but the video hinged on the hypothetical of China invading America, and how that would feel, and therefore, understanding how awful that was, we should realize people hate us in other countries we've invaded.

While there may be some truth to that, it was strangely xenophobic to use China. China may hold Tibet and the Uighurs in thrall, but it doesn't project its troops outside the country, the way Russia has over the years. It's more likely to send peace-keepers to Haiti than try to deploy troops even to guard its pipelines abroad. To be sure, it gets involved in training other countries' militaries, like the US, but the actual presence of troops is a rare thing and not typical of how China projects its force.

Meanwhile, while there are plenty of bad things to say about the wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and they're all said loudly and frequently, there are aspects to these wars that aren't "about" the US -- terrorism, and facts like the Taliban killing 85 percent of the civilians killed. Ron Paul could have done a more sophisticated video in which he talked not about the hypothetical of China invading America, but simply interviewed Afghans or Iraqs after their towns were bombed or their people killed by terrorists that they believed wouldn't have done this if US troops weren't in their country. Wouldn't that be compelling enough? But see, that's what the left would do -- Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!". Ron Paul needs a holistic theory -- a conspiracy.

As Kirchick put it in The New Republic, libertarianism is an ideology, not a philosophy for government. Like communists and fascists and others with *ideologies* and not *philosophies for government*, because they are ideologically-driven, libertarians are horridly rigid and extreme and just believe in trying harder and more fiercely to apply their ideas -- which is why we get the awful results we do, even if some of the ideas are "good".

What I find equally repulsive about the Tea Party mailings and moveon.com mailings I subscribe to is their rigidity and isolationist belief in a wholistic ideology that covers all issues with an answer for everything, and brooks no dissent or compromise.

Leftwingers are always opportunistically fund-raising in craven ways -- no sooner did Occupy Wall Street appear than moveon.org had its hand out to collect money for...online petitions which had achieved nothing to grow their movement for a decade, by contrast with activists on the streets organized from a Canadian anti-capitalist outfit, Ad-Busters. Funny, that. But they stuck their hand out for funds and took credit anyway, and played catch-up.

Right-wingers I find even more craven and creepy because of the way they try to scare people with their "reporting" first, then try to get them to pay money to save themselves. They're like a version of the tele-evangelist who tells you to send him more money so you can find salvation.

So, for example, they'll tell you about some scary economic statistic of unemployment or rising food costs, then they'll tell you to click on a link where you can learn "The eight things you need to stockpile" or "the three things you need to do to survive the coming crisis". Often, these are to include financial tips. The Washingon Times, which is supposed to be a journalistic operation, puts out these ridiculous medicine-show pieces, and it really undermines their mission.

Do they really think people are that stupid? If you click your way through all those ads -- and it can take 20 or more clicks some times because they pretend to tell you a long story in many sequences -- you will find that in order to get that list of those precious 8 things to stockpile or those absolutely vital three things you need to do to survive the coming collapse of America's economy, you have to pay some guy $99 -- or $199 in three installments. You can't help wondering, if he were really altruistic, why he wouldn't just tell us outright in the first email those all-important 8 things. But I suppose he only wants his own people and those who pay him money to get those 8 things, because there will be a shortage, and we can't have everybody stampeding and buying...nylon rope or iodine tablets or whatever the secret thing is.

(I wonder why more people don't go through all those screens, pay the $99, then tell everybody. Just as a kind of experiment and an effort to end this particularly pernicious cultural atavism.)

The Ron Paul newsletters with their lurid depiction of race wars  and fake scandals about Martin Luther King, Jr., are part of this genre. TNR asks why conservatives don't care about these newsletters? That's because they are steeped in this culture of the medicine show and preacher's fire-and-brimstone speech culminating in a passing of the collection basket. This is so culturally deeply ingrained, they don't hear it anymore. They don't think about it. It's just what it is. If asked individually whether they really believed there was a coming "race terrorism" in American cities, they'd likely immediately dismiss it as extremist fear-mongering. But they accept it in the package it comes -- a financial tips newsletter, a political campaign email, a Youtube video -- because that's just the culture.

Michelle Bachman was finished off not only because she's a woman and had migraines, but because she ran a clinic that was anti-gay. Ron Paul makes her look like a liberal by contrast with his brutal claims "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities" and that people with HIV/AIDS "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.""

Like the left, which I wish would make its case by persuasion rather than labelling and name-calling, I wish the right would make its case not by this tacky cultural affectation of hyperbole like a preacher's sermon -- or worse, a KKK rally!

And now the seemy underbelly of this culture has been exposed -- it's not peculiar to Ron Paul alone, there are many political figures with these same kind of newsletters. But he's the most popular Republican, doing the best in the polls, so it matters most that it's about him now. When you see all the newsletter topics, you will recognize your old friends from forums -- like avc.com where Kid Mercury reigns -- and even gets Fred's ear -- with his conspiratorial theories about gold.

All the lefty geeks who embraced Ron Paul because they thought it would mean no government interference in the Internet, Google-friendly Internet policies, no foreign wars, etc. according to either the progressive or libertarian value chart will have to come to grips with his actual documented extremism and explain themselves. Of course some of the lolbertarians share these Social-Darwinist, racist and antisemitic views themselves. A problem with technically-minded binary thinkers is that simplistic arguments by self-assured people who seem like "winners" and not "losers" are very appealing to them. Under Ron Paul, I have no doubt the Singularity would be ushered in sooner than it might otherwise.

 

Muslim Leaders Set Pre-Conditions for Debating Islamic Extremism

Two stories in the Wired State today that illustrate the ongoing battle over Islam in America, regardless of whether one war, at least, in a Muslim country, is "over". (Not really, with 63 killed in terrorist attacks in Iraq). One urging people to control their speech in debating Islamic extremism and frame it only in certain ways. Another insisting on First Amendment rights for a jihadist who was convicted of material assistance to Al Qaeda.

First, there's Newt, going on a toot. Newt is not going to be the Republican presidential candidate. So while you can go on punching the punching bag set out there to make a more marked contrast with Mitt Romney, you will be punching in thin air soon.

The New York Times lays it out, In Shariah, Gingrich Sees a Mortal Threat to US.

And naturally, you see how this man can't be president, if he is going to antagonize not only one percent of the population (American Muslims) but the X percentage of the population that finds it bigoted to rant about the "mortal Muslim threat" as if it were some real thing. He launches the theory of "stealth jihad" to the effect that parallel to overt terrorist acts, jihadists are mounting a stealthier attack via politics and culture.

I'm more ready to believe in "stealth socialism," having seen its birth and adolescence and young adulthood since the 1980s (cultiminating in Obama), than I am to believe in "stealth jihadism." To be sure, jihadism borrows more than a little Leninism for its own ideologies. But "stealth socialism" was always articulated openly: package "progressive" (socialist) values in single issues, work as "community organizers" doing social services and promoting single issues, claim that progressivism isn't socialism -- and voila. But the reason the "stealth socialism" works is there is a huge audience for accepting progressivism, single issues, even hidden agendas. Not *that* huge (the Occupy Wall Street movement has now dwindled down to its loony and/or hard left core). But certainly way bigger than the audience for accepting a set of religious beliefs that will involve refraining from alcohol, not making interest in a bank account, covering your head, not being able to drive, or even being stoned for adultery. Just not there.

“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”

This is the sort of comment that plays in a think tank or plays on a blog or in a forums comment (or in a political campaign!), but it doesn't play as president -- as political leader. And walk over to any other think-tank and debate the obvious: where is this "mortal" threat? If your purpose is to explain how theoretically, there are aspects of the Islamic faith, or forms of Islamic fundamentalism, that are antithetical to American liberal values, you will simply not be persuasive if you claim that Islamic radicalism is a "radical threat". Not when most people ignore the precepts of Sharia law, including even some American Muslims (they're like Catholics in that regard). Not when terrorists are headed off or caught after they commit their terrible acts, proving that the threat is repelled.

Romney said in a debate in June "“We’re not going to have Shariah law applied in U.S. courts. That’s never going to happen.” He immediately added, “People of all faiths are welcome in this country.”"

Of course, there's something to be said for mounting the intellectual arguments against having shariah law in the US, in the event some local community starts demanding it. It *is* pretty theoretical, unless you think about what has happend in Great Britain, where there have been some cases where courts reportedly upheld Shariah law concerning marriage or property matters (certainly not anything like stoning adulterers or taking away women's driving licenses or something).

And while I respect that it sounds completely absurd "and takes your breath away," this notion of the "mortal threat," as Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington phrased it -- there's something very discomfiting about what comes next in this NYT piece:

But Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, said non-Muslims like Mr. Gingrich were not the most effective advocates for what he believes is really a debate within Islam.

“Unfortunately, as long as a non-Muslim opens the discussion, whether it’s Gingrich or someone else, it’s going to hit a brick wall in the Muslim community,” Dr. Jasser said.

Well, why can't we all argue against Islamic fundamentalism, regardless of our religion or ethnicity?!

So what if it doesn't seem effective, or is discredited for being extreme?

The debate has to be open. Open to anybody, regardless of their ethnicity, faith or views. That is what freedom of speech is about. Why are these preconditions being set?

Speaking of First Amendment values, let's go over to this other piece in The New York Times yesterday, about a US citizen convicted in a plot to help Al Qaeda. 

This jihadist is from an "upscale Boston suburb":

During the trial, prosecutors said Mr. Mehanna considered himself part of Al Qaeda’s “media wing,” translating and posting materials online that glorified jihad. But the defense argued that Mr. Mehanna was well within his First Amendment rights in posting such content and that he was expressing his own views against American foreign policy, not working with Al Qaeda.

Do we have another Mumia in the making here? Looks like it:

In a statement Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts said the verdict “undermines” the First Amendment.

“Speech about even the most unpopular ideas serves as a safety valve for the expression of dissent,” the group said, “while government suppression of speech only drives ideas underground, where they cannot be openly debated or refuted.”

I don't see the ACLU turning in a statement about the right of Lowe's not to advertise on a TV show they are not comfortable with, nor, of course, defending Ginrich's right to say extreme things (and they don't pre-emptively that way on a case not yet at trial -- oh, except for their campaign against SOPA.)

Well, nobody's suppressing Newt's right to speak, they're just suggesting he isn't fit to be president. Ok, so don't vote for him?

But that's not enough for these Muslim leaders:

Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim and an adviser to law enforcement agencies in Texas and to the Department of Homeland Security, is a conservative Republican who said he once idolized Mr. Gingrich. He said he no longer did.

He said the anti-Shariah campaign in the United States was “propaganda for jihadists,” offering fuel for the idea of a titanic clash of faiths. Those who truly want to protect American values should talk to Muslims, he said, not demonize them.

“There are plenty of American Muslim patriots who will defend American freedoms,” Mr. Elibiary said. “But you can’t be anti-Islam and find those allies.”

In other words, what this advisor to law-enforcement agencies is telling us is the following:

o don't go by First Amendment values, as we do for jihadists calling for support for Al Qaeda, don't speak on this issue at all unless you speak upon it in the form of a dialogue with hand-picked Muslim leaders who will defend American values

o don't speak out against Islam in any kind of strenuous way as Newt Gingrich is doing, or you will never get those allies to surface and show themselves -- they will run from you.

Of course, these allies are free to appear at any time and defend American values, and no doubt some of them do.

But you can see where this is going -- a "chill on speech," a refusal to recognize freedom of speech, even extreme speech. A demand for certain pre-requisites before you can even talk. Either you have to *be* Muslim, because you can never understand the special-snowflake situation and be credible in critiquing extremism ever-so-carefully OR you have to only discuss these issues in a pre-ordained interfaith dialogue mode, where you find the "good" Muslims to have the debate with so you can make sure the faith is shown in a good light.

Say, no one would ever tip-toe around like this with Catholics. They condemn priests' sexual abuse of minors -- and that's it. They go further and ascribe this offense to the entire priesthood or entire Church, and most people don't call them on it. Even conservative Catholic leaders don't demand that the press only speak of these offenses if they find a qualified priest who has reported such incidents or is a staunch proponent of prosecuting these cases.

Newt is pretty bad, implying there's a terrible mortal danger when there isn't -- in danger of not only crying wolf so that people become desensitized to the issue, but in danger of angering and inciting violence from jihadists themselvse, so these moderate Muslims tell us. Awful!

But frankly, they are bad, too. Because they make it seem like no one can criticize the obvious about Islamist extremists - like the terrorists who blew up 57 people in Iraq today! -- without inciting *more* jihadism because we have smeared the faith. Something wrong with that picture.

Tail Piece

I really hate stories like this that the New York Times lifts from the tech press uncritically. The definition of a scientific experiment as "scientific" is when you can replicate the results. You can't, with something like this, because it's a one-off -- and possibly even a one-off for this one comic. It isn't science, but a medicine show.

There's always one copyleftist Internet nerd -- like Cory Doctorow -- who steps up and claims that "you can make a living giving away your books". But he makes a living from giving lectures for fees...lectures about how you can make money giving away books.

And now there's this guy -- but half the way he's making his $5 right now is because the tech press and now the mainstream media are hyping him. The volume of $5 sales wouldn't be happening if it weren't for this artificial injection of old-fashioned old media attention. Take that away, and you just have one more guy undercutting the market who eventually can't keep selling himself short.

Have the credibility to tune into this guy 6-9-18 months from now and let us know if this "magic" is still working, hmmm?

The next guy to come along can't get noticed -- there's room for *one* or *very few* of these guys in various separate fields, not thousands. (That's why the miracle band that gives CDs away and makes all its money on a jingle some moviemaker purchased isn't replicable for *all* musicians, even all really good ones -- there's room for *just one* or *just a few*.)

It's really a disservice to all artists to undercut them all in this way, implying that they all need to give away their content for free or for only $5 to "make it".

Sure, the Internet needs to be revised to get people paid, with easy and secure payment systems and a philosophy that very deliberately links commerce, content as commodity (not freebie), and community. That day will come when SOPA is passed and this freebie Creative Communism stuff burns off as so much fog.

The mythical "long tail" is not a solution for getting content creators paid. The money and efforts required to get the attention (it's an attention economy) to those special vertebrae on the long tail are *just too high*. You have an artificial bubble here when you get the attention on the long tail *with old-fashioned media like the New York Times*.

It's like all those Twitter miracles of fund-raising -- they raised money by getting an old-fashioned newspaper to write about their fund-raising on Twitter.

Of course, Google has always loved the idea of the long tail taking over and search as king, instead of marketers and those "evil middle men" like record companies because then Google gets to be the middleman, providing search for you to find your spot on the long tail -- except, that won't come cheap, as your tail piece will have to have paid ads to get seen, given all the stampede of people coming online thinking they can make $5 a comedy hour...