Wired State

When Stealing is Still Stealing, Even if a Rutgers Law Professor Claims It Isn't

You've seen this argument on every Redditt, BoingBoing, TechDirt and of course Second Life forum for the last decade: taking a copy of a digital item -- a song, a picture, code -- isn't stealing, because the creator and/or owner of the original of the digital item still possesses his original. Herp derp!

Obviously, due to the inherent nature of the digital, the owner keeps his original and everybody else's identical copy doesn't take away his work. Norp dorp!

And elaborating further, the forums regular will tell you that in fact, the author didn't even lose a sale, because the person who swipes a copy wouldn't have paid anyway, had it been digitally locked an impossible to copy.

Oh, but nothing is impossible to copy -- or crack and copy -- or hack somehow on the Internet! Any forums-dweller will tell you that -- but IANAL.

Now you can hear it from a bona-fide professor of law, Stuart Green of Rutgers University, "When Stealing Isn't Stealing: 'Theft' Law in the 21st Century"

Yes, but there is something you have stolen from the creator when you take a copy: the monetarizing capacity of that content.

Sure, maybe that first thief wouldn't have paid you, but if he uploads it to his site, and hundreds and thousands more begin to grab it, maybe some of them would have? And will anyone want to, when it is available for free?

The monetarizing capacity --  it is a real if ephemeral capacity of the digital item -- is diminished if not destroyed when copies are taking without compensation.

Because it is so ephemeral and easily taken should it be discarded and distained by 21st century lawyers?

No, because that element of a product -- the monetarizing capacity -- is a real value and real artifact of that digital commodity -- indeed, it is what makes it a commodity and not merely a shared thing.

And it's that element that is most denied and most weakened by the copyleftism syndrome of the Internet.

In Second Life, this concept is very visibly at work. If you make something with your own original artwork or script something with your own ingenuity, you can set it to "copy/mod/transfer" or other variations -- "no copy/mod/transfer" or "copy/mod/no transfer". This is essentially that much-scorned Digital Rights Mangement (DRM) regime that tekkies always claim "can't" work but does by and large work in the virtual world of SL for the simple reason that the chief reason that makes people want to download unauthorized copies -- their need for multiple copies for personal use on a variety of other devices -- is removed in SL because you can make the digital items "copy/no transfer" so that a person can put up multiple pictures all over one server or many servers and yet not be able to resell the item to others.

Sure, this regime is hackable but the premise holds: the Creative Commons machine stands unused and unwanted. This machine -- a DRM that sets the tone even if breached -- is what works in a community of content linked by commerce -- commerce that is wanted, validated, cherished.

So most people in fact set their creations either on copy/no transfer or "no copy/transfer". That way it can be resold or given away but you can't resell its copyability and its monetarizing capacity.

In the real world, if you make a knitted cap or a wooden chair, it exists in only one edition, without copies, and that unique nature of the product already contains inherently in it the monetarizing capacity. You can sell this unique item. Even if you mass produce the item in a factory with templates, perhaps reducing its price, each discrete item is used up when sold out of the bin, it's gone, and you would have to order and make more to keep selling it and keep gaining the monetarizing capacity.

When you make a digital creation, you the monetarizing capacity is weakly represented precisely because Internet culture and Internet ideologies have heavily undermined it.

Creative Commons, for example, works very consciously to decouple commodification from content, and to disrupt deliberately the monetarizing capacity of an item by brow-beating you into sharing your content with others -- with only the reward of getting credit for your work, but not with the reward of money.  Oh, you say, brow-beaten? Really? When you don't have to use the system? Yes, brow-beaten -- because there is no Creative Commons license that says "pay me and then copy this". No system of easy payments, especially micropayments, was ever developed with Creative Commons -- and that's no accident, comrades. Creative Commons doesn't want you to sell your work -- they want a digital commons of shared content. When the Internet is awash with your freely-shared freebies, so the theory goes, people will want to either tip you or order custom items and then you'll make money.

A very few people do this; a few write books about this method or give lectures about it to get more money, but it's a scam, because most people will never be able to make money by deliberately stripping out the monetarizing capacity of their item.

Stuart Green not only wants to remove the moral stigma of theft -- although you have in fact stolen something of value from someone when you nullify their monetarization capacity through unauthorized copying. He wants to upend the moral paradigm completely by nullifying "theft" as a concept and converting it to a permissions problem. "You are not authorized" or "You were not admitted".

Like a lot of people who go through an elaborate fan dance to pretend they care about copyright and think it's important, Green doesn't really offer a solution when he substitutes "theft" with "unauthorized use" (because he hasn't solved the problem of culture or of hacking):

Illegal downloading is, of course, a real problem. People who work hard to produce creative works are entitled to enjoy legal protection to reap the benefits of their labors. And if others want to enjoy those creative works, it’s reasonable to make them pay for the privilege. But framing illegal downloading as a form of stealing doesn’t, and probably never will, work. We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation.

If we can't invoke moral stigmas in the mass context of the Internet; if we can't have people literally reap benefits by being paid by a click on the Internet, how are we really helping them to be "entitled to enjoy legal protection to repeat the benefits of their labors"?" We're not. Reframing the debate with different language or different legal terms doesn't remove the problem of the erosion of monetarization capacity.

Usually the lawyer or the forums-dweller at this point will argue that doctrines of scarcity in order to retain monetarization capacity won't work -- you can't keep digital items scarce.  Well, in one sense, all our user-generated content is "scarce" in that most people can't find it unless they have a way to find it on search, or through social networks.  My blog is very scarce -- only thousands, not millions, have read it! lol.

But in fact, holding on to monetarizing capacity isn't creating artificial scarcity, it's just holding on to monetarizing capacity. Why let go of a good thing?

The New York Times, for example, since it moved to paid online subscriptions, far from what the doomsayers said, has increased the numbers of online subscriptions, to something like 450,000, and increased its revenue. Good! That may be a far cry from all these people in every little town who would go and buy the Sunday Times for $1.00 or $2.00 back in the day, who have stopped doing that, but now if they want that content, many of them are willing to pay for it. Otherwise they don't get it. It's behind a log-in paywall. Good!

These other legal notions trotted out -- unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation -- not a single one of them addresses the issue of the monetarization capacity. You aren't "using" content. You are validating its monetarization capacity by paying for it. Trespass? No, it's not that you came on my server from the boardwalk when you copied my song, but rather than you took away my ability to make money. Conversation doesn't seem to make sense and "misappropriation" isn't right either for the simple reason that outside of Second Life, most people copying songs or pictures or text or code on the Internet aren't trying to re-sell it -- indeed, the same ease with which anything can be copied is going to mitigate them from capturing that monetarizing capacity again that they've just undermined in another.

The problem with all this doesn't just rest in the ease with which the monetarizing capacity is instantly stripped out of a thing on the Internet.

The problem is prior -- it rests in the ideological aversion to having commerce and content coupled; the ideological aversion to recognizing that monetarizing capacity is a good and right thing to have in content.

The early pioneers of the Internet like Tim Berners-Lee either believed in utopian sharing and believed that like the scientific commons shares knowledge, all people should share everything in a collective farm in cyberspace -- or they believed that their own costs -- the costs of programmers and servers and computers -- had to be disguised. That's really evident in Youtube videos showing the first newspapers delivered over the early forms of the Internet. The set-up of the computer, the line, and the printer was so expensive that of course you had to make the newspaper free as a loss-leader! And so it goes!

I believe that instead of going down the route of all those more exotic legal concepts and their weak support in precedent law on the Internet anyway, we can steer the Internet in the same direction that Amazon took it back when everyone said Amazon would fail. And that is to recognize that commerce -- buying and selling things -- is a legitimate and needed purpose on the Internet (in other words, to get away form the John Perry Barlow diktat).

We can say that in the next iteration of Web 3.0, it's absolutely imperative that engineers create safe and secure and effective micropayments systems attachable to content. There is no reason on earth or in hell that they can't do this. They can change their minds from their goofy 1.0 and 2.0 days where they wanted it to be a big free-for-all while they got paid, undermined other people's industries, and nobody else got paid. That's going to have to end, or the Internet itself will end or fracture into a lot of aps attached to a few big companies with wallets on smart phones (and they won't be just telcos).

The hilarious thing about Square and the movement to make it easier to pay for things in the real world is that the makers aren't simultaneously making these inventions usable ONLINE. Duh! You know, on the Internet. For things on the Internet. Digital stuff. Why can't I tip someone on Twitter with Square or pay somebody for a blog post with Square? Why is Square only outside the Internet on phones buying real-world stuff?!

All this will change! Because people will need it to change.

 

Resistance -- and Alternatives -- to John Perry Barlow's 'A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace'.

Two years ago, I wrote a line-by-line retuation of John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace" on my avatar's blog about Second Life. The post has a lot of time-specific Second Life events of that day, which included the appalling positions Electronic Frontier Foundation (which Barlow founded) took on the intellectual property rights of customers of virtual world platform providers.

Those issues might have seemed exotic at the time, but as with many things, Second Life was merely the incubator and the prototyper. Later, Facebook customers took up the issue of demanding ownership of their digital creations from that social networking platform; today Pinterest has been forced to revise its terms of service to acknowledge intellectual property rights of customers.

Since JPB has become very active again in pushing these ideas he has long promoted, spearingheading the anti-SOPA campaign, for example, I think it's good to re-publish my alternative manifesto that not only resists every one of JPB's technocommunist and technolibertarian notions that mitigate against real human rights, but proposes alternatives grounded in the real world.

You can read his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace -- an infantile wail of a pampered cyber-pioneer in Davos (!)  in 1996 -- who soon served as a spearhead for the rapacious interests of large corporations such as Google.

Let me revise the infamous "Declaration" of John Perry Barlow, to fashion it for the next stage of the Internet so that it might really serve real people, and not hippie ideologues in California who have made billions exploiting the willingness of people to work as serfs on their collective farms. Here you go:

Ideological Overlords of Cyberspace, you weary giants of pixels and bytes, I come from a virtual world, the new home of the Individual.

On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. Your scripted machinima bots, your automatic data scrapers, your coded copybots have no place here: we ban them.

We *have* elected real-life governments, we will *go on having them*, and we will increasingly *turn to them* to fashion liberal, democratic and viable policies to regulate the space where we all have our being, so that it is not the exploitative and destructive space you have made it.

I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us with both the formed collectivism of Creative Communism, the Free Culture of oppressive socialist social media, and the lawless corporate TOS regime that you tacitly aid and abet by never challenging it.

You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Your calls to use code as a gun and ban critics from Twitter, or your chilling and violent speech on blogs, or the power of the venture capitalist to throw the media his way do not scare us, because when you wield those weapons, you discredit yourself.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Real-life governments don't disappear at the "electronic frontier" -- they are an integral part of it now in Gov 2.0 and other projects. You have neither solicited nor received our public input in policies of the Internet, whether open standards of IETF run by unaccountable geeks or other deliberately-obscured bodies of "Internet governance" that do not report transparently and openly to the public in a way that is clear. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our individual actions and collaboration.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation in virtual worlds and social media, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces in walled gardens and through APIs. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the existing real-life codes that already provide our society that moved online as a natural continuation of organic socities to a cyberspace that we do not view as a transhuman and transnational space but a continuation of all human earthbound orders -- more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions -- even as we can witness the destruction of your lawless anarchy.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve like "lack of open standards" or "lack of hooks for apps" or "lack of fair use". You use these false claims as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of the real world, not your fake world of hippie cyberspace.

Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of communications, transactions, interactivity, and expressed thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, and is a natural and organic extension of where our bodies live and our handheld devices like mobile phones, i-pads, laptops and other devices.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth, and most importantly, as full-fledged rights-bearing beings whether or not they are coders, and whether or not they possess the code used to interact in this space.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your unlawful concepts of liberation of property, suppression of expression in the name of  political correctness and your corporativist agenda, anonymity, interoperability, and corporate-owned context do not apply to us. They are all based on antequated hiearchical structures rooted in coerced collectives, and there is no collective here.

Our identities have bodies, so that crimes of cyberspace coercion like cyberbulling, content theft and invasion of privacy will be investigated and prosecuted by courts of law. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge, rooted in the best liberal democratic traditions of our real planet. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions, but our citizenship in this case in the United States of America means that Cyberspace ultimately cannot trump our First Amendment, our property laws, and every other law of the land which has been fashioned and adjudicated by a free people with free elections. The law that all our constituent cultures generally recognize is the Golden Rule, which means that we do not fashion a double standard of collectivist coercion benefiting cyberlords such as Google and Twitter and Facebook and harming individual people and associations. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

We question your claims that the Telecommunications Reform Act in fact repudiates the Constitution or that new FCC polices on "net neutrality" could spell freedom and prosperity, and call for a broad and deep and free democratic discussion in every venue by every constituency and interested person in what real law should govern the domains where we now nearly exclusively live and move and have our being. The dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis did not include silencing critics on Twitter and kicking people in their virtual nuts on Typepad. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. We live here. You don't. Because you fear us, you entrust your bureaucracies -- Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linden Lab and all the social media and virtual world corporations with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits emerging from organic life on our real planet, and integrated with life on that planet without artificial separation and abusive utopian beliefs of the lawless "electronic frontier". We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Russia, Iran -- not in the United States (because telecom policy and the need to cover costs of scarce bandwidth is not a freedom, but a consumption problem) or Australia (because filtering out simulated child rape isn't suppression of free expression, but due diligence in avoiding the incitement of crime), governments are trying to silence citizens using social media. And you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting data scraper bots and proxy servers and anonymizers throughout Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media wielded by people in the real world truly empowered by them, and not diminished by them and doomed to live in a deracineated and oppressively transhuman Cyberspace.

Your increasingly obsolete Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 industries would perpetuate themselves by opposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to control speech itself throughout the Metaverse via unconscionable TOS. These laws would declare code and coders to be a special product and class of people higher than others, although they are no more noble than pig iron. In our world, what the human mind creates and reproduced and distributed should be compensated if he wishes it, despite the misleading belief that there is "no cost" to distribute that in fact rests on costly servers and bandwidth. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your forced collective farms to control it.

These increasingly hostile and collectivist measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to reaffirm your lack of rule over our bodies in Cyberspace. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a continuation of our planetary civilization of the human being in Cyberspace which is not artificially separate from it. May it be more humane and fair than the world your utopian pixel governments have made in the last 20 years that has destroyed civilization, destroyed the print and broadcast business and the public interest it serves, destroyed the music business and harmed millions of people through invasion of privacy, theft of identity, oppression of free speech, theft of content, and cyberbullying.

Prokofy Neva

Sutherland Dam

Second Life

President Obama is Going to Fire a Drone Missile at John Perry Barlow Because He's a Terrorist

Yes, despite his "progressive" background in the Democratic Socialists of America, and his reputation as the most liberal president in history and our own "community-organizer-in-chief," President Barack Obama is going to fire a drone missile at John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist, rancher, and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder, on the grounds that he is a terrorist because he supports WikiLeaks, the anarchist collective. Indeed, Obama may be re-writing the old Traffic and Dead-covered John Barleycorn Must Die title and lyrics for the occasion.

No, I'm not kidding, that's exactly what JPB said at an avowedly political and in fact one-sided "nonpartisan" roundtable during the Bridge Sessions on Yahoo Entertainment the other day organized by TRI Studios and Headcount.org, an organization that pretends to "get out the vote" in a general, bi-partisan sort of way even as it lards up its social media footprint with subtle and not-so-subtle cues to follow the "progressive" agenda. The videos aren't online yet although they may be at headcount.org eventually.

JPB whipped up a special new version of Brother Esau for the occasion, song by Bob Weir, that updated it from the Vietnam War era apparently for today's wars.

And yes, JPB really did say that. He first noted that as a supporter of WikiLeaks (and I might add, an inciter of WikiLeaks' storm-troopers, Anonymous), and inventor (as I learned recently) of the notion of Iceland as a radically transparent and free autonomous space for WikiLeaks and other radical projects, he believed he was seen by the United States government as a "terrorist". No responsible US official has ever called Assange a "terrorist" or put WikiLeaks on the government's terrorist list or described that the crimes he is charged with under the Espionage Act as "terrorism."

But that didn't stop JPB from -- preposterously -- claiming that as WikiLeaks supporters, he would be deemed a terrorist, along with other supporters at the table, and that because Obama had recently passed the NDAA, which allows for the targeted killing of a US citizen determined to be a terrorist, and because he has endorsed killing insurgents in Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere with automatic unmanned drones, why, so the implication goes, he might take out WikiLeaks supporters in this way. Fanciful!

I supported protests against NDAA because indeed we must be concerned about how some of the terms of the act would impact civil rights. I think protests are warranted to pressure the executive to exercise caution. While somebody might be sure that Obama wouldn't use this act unwisely, they feel a president like Bush might be tempted to exploit it. Of course, the far left thinks the US is "authoritarian" and Obama a war-mongerer, so they will never be happy. The president and his advisors were unmoved by the arguments which -- a lot like the craze against SOPA -- were based on hysteria and hypotheticals. For me, the authorization for the state to kill might be an occasion when hypotheticals, without the hysteria, might be in order. Certainly fighting piracy or child pornography isn't an occasion for either.

The headcount.org people pretended this was a round-table when we would "overlook our differences" and "reach hands across the aisle" and "find what we have in common". By that they meant they would very heavily tilt the discussion by bringing together loony libertarians with lefty loons at the place where they meet: "First Amendment," by which they mean fighting for Google's business model and encouraging copyright theft and "sharing" under the guise that it harms "innovation" to prosecute piracy legitimately, and "taking money out of politics" which is a utopian nerdy dream pushed by Lawrence Lessig and other progs these days and really amounts to trying to kill Citizens United. This was yet another propaganda show whose main effort, when all the rhetoric was scraped away, was about sinking CU before the elections.

Citizens United enables corporations to give money and make super PACS just like unions and some NGOs and law firms have -- the very entities that brought Obama to power. I'm just fine with CU as a legitimate Supreme Court decision actually brought by an organization that in fact wanted to collect money to make hate youtubes against Hillary Clinton, oh irony of ironies. I don't have a problem with money in politics. People must be free to donate to candidates, bundle donations, do what is within the law, and it is transparent and it is what it is. Usually when the loons get talking about "money in politics" they only mean the Koch Brothers, not Soros, or they only mean politicians they don't like that they think should have the logos of arms dealers and oil companies all over their track suit like a sponsored race-car driver.

Bob Weir -- who looks like the Ancient Mariner at this point, being at a grandfather's age -- was set up then to say that if corporations were people, how come they were never arrested or executed yuck yuck. That's silly, because the question can be turned around to ask why nonprofits like his own Tamalpais foundation or Headcount.org or any other union or non-governmental group can't be "arrested or executed" as they aren't people, either. Except, the lefties never mean that. 

The roundtable also featured homey-sounding independent presidential candidate Buddy Roemer, climate change activist Jessy Tolkan who kept shouting "Disrupt, Disrupt, Disrupt" and touting Occupy's spring revival; No Labels cofounder Mark McKinnon, a "progressive" who pretends to hide in the "beyond politics" and "post-partisan" woodshed even as he recites typical Sil-Val memes like "Congress is broken" and appears on prog Colbert's show, not Fox TV lol.

The real question is to ask how Headcount.org can hang on to its 501-c-3 status when it is clearly lobbying on certain propositions -- like against SOPA -- by featuring only that perspective, prominently displaying John Perry Barlow, who is notorious for starting the battle, and not having a single speaker at the "political roundtable" to say they support SOPA on behalf of musicians who need to make a living. Trying to defeat Citizens United is also lobbying about legislation and it shouldn't be doing that, either. It's carefully manipulative web page on supposed generic topics like "human rights" in fact misleading makes it seem as if abortion is a human right (it's a civil right with limitations) that evil Republicans want to remove -- along with tolerance of gays, as if all Republicans want to unravel LGBT rights.

Supposedly this group is just getting people "of all persuasions" (snort) to sign up to vote so they can "study up" and "express what's in their heart," according to Bob Weir. But the heavy hand of agitprop is on your shoulder on headcount.org and you pick up what the party line is immediately.

I hadn't realized that Yahoo as a company is so overly politicized. I thought they were more mainstream than Google and Twitter. Indeed, that's why I have them and not those other sites as my home page and my email. They seem to have a balanced menu of wire service news, anyway, and commentary from all persuasions.

But not on the Entertainment channel which his probably run by string-tied California reps in the Silicon Valley ideological tank. There, we got the awful obscene and nasty Bill Maher for days on end, including his snide jokes on the Google vandalism of Santorum's name. And then this, with the aging Dead.

 

 

What, Neocons Have to Pay More to Stop Bad Guys?!

You've probably seen the Amnesty International ad about paying a certain amount a month to stop bad guys.

On the pages of New York Times, the New Republic, fergananews.com, all kinds of liberal publications , the ad looks like this -- for $5/ a month:

But when I browsed over to Commentary, the neoconservative magazine, suddenly, Amnesty upped the ante:

 

 

No doubt their ad server company has some kind of algorithm that determines the wealth of the readers by the IP addresses and their location or who the hell knows how (data-mining is a vast science).

Or maybe they even placed the ad separately?

I have to say that I don't donate to Amnesty for a number of reasons, one of which is the scandal involving the forced departure of their gender adviser, who complained about the organization's too-close proximity to extreme Islamists spouting jihad and suppression of women's rights.

 

The Occupy Big Lie

It's spring, and OWS is back, with its sly and fraudulent "democratic" demonstrations, pushing on police fences, pushing on policemen physically, and calling themselves a "non-violent movement" -- confusing -- and deliberately so -- the ideals and traditions of civil disobedience, i.e. the passive and peaceful sit-in -- with in-your-face aggressive "direct action" and self-justifying mendacious law-faring to pretend such disobedience shouldn't earn an arrest.  I notice Ad-busters CEO, Kalle Lasn, uses the term "militant non-violence" to cunningly describe the OWS mode. It's really deceptive -- don't literally have a knife or a gun or a club in your hand or throw rocks (at least most of the time), but push and shove and yell and get in your face and pretend you didn't encroach or grab to avoid arrest for urban camping after hours.

Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist James Taranto got it exactly right. Jeff Rae, an OWS demonstrator who was among those who blocked the Brooklyn Bridge and crowed about it on Twitter, taunting police, can't exactly cry "foul" when police use his tweets as evidence of his intent to block the street. What's so disgusting about these OWS infantiles is that they demand the "right" to block a bridge in the name of the First Amendment, they insist on the "need" to engage in what they claim is "non-violent civil disobedience" because they think there is a deeper wrong with Wall Street and capitalism, but they won't be accountable and face the music of the consequences for those actions: that they will be arrested.

Instead, they think they can go on huffing and puffing about "police abuse" and whine well past the sell-by date that "the whole world is watching" when the whole point of civil disobedience is that yes, you do get arrested -- and hey, you aren't so civil. Video shows how much they push fences and police; one OWS protester is on trial for elbowing police; another is on trial for trying to grab a gun and radio. This isn't going limp and falling to the ground and putting out your hands to be cuffed.

Taranto, in calling out the "criminal stupidity" of OWS really upends the whole argument the "Internet freedom fighters" are waging to demand maximum access for disrupters and riots on social media and minimum -- or no -- interference by government:

These people may be tech-savvy, but they're so street-dumb that it apparently didn't occur to them not to post incriminating statements all over the Internet. A further irony is that the claims of "entrapment" are not only false but inverted. The lawbreaking "protesters" evidently sought to provoke arrests, which they then claimed were unjustified. If we were prosecuting these cases, we would demand a formal apology to the NYPD as a condition for any plea bargain.

As Mayor Bloomberg acidly put it: "You want to get arrested? We'll accommodate you." That is indeed what you have to say to the entitlement-happy law-faring nerds in OWS who think they can have their "civil disobedience" cake and eat it to -- without eating the dry PB&J they have down at central booking.

Today, OWS has some competition downtown at 26 Wall Street as the Catholics are protesting the HHS decision inflicting the demand to pay for contraceptives and abortion-inducers with health care plans. Good! The demonstrations are in cities all over the US today. I don't know how well they will be attended but Catholics are getting visibly organized against this menace from Obama, a deliberate assault on freedom of conscience. OWS has focused more on Marxist economic prescriptions and class hatred, but if they feel they can advance their cause, I won't be surprised if they take up the sex/cultural war-cries of the left as well, especially if they literally have Catholics demonstrating nearby.

I think as spring fuels the young men's fancies to occupy, we will see the Marxist-Leninist underskirts showing much more in the movement than ever before. That's because the strategy is to use the weakness of the Obama administration and the confusion and disruption he has caused to push harder from the left to radicalize him. That means more "direct action" and forthright destructive calls. Obama himself is gambling that radicalization and more "in your face" policies are going to win the elections -- that's why he has assaulted the Catholics on the HHS decision.

There isn't any doubt that the radical leftist and anarchist views that the Bolsheviks disseminated and installed on the Eurasian continent are very much the spring of inspiration for OWS.

Streetwise Professor had an excellent column aptly datelined November 7 last year which traces a likely "agent of influence" in the OWS/RT/Anonymous blogosphere named "Zero Hedge". I had missed it but noted it now because Edward Lucas flagged it today. Sure, the guilt of the father doesn't extend to the son, who in fact may not be any kind of actual agent of influence but simply more of a fellow traveler. The method doesn't have to be "paid for by Moscow gold" still to be used by the extreme left -- packaging the memes inside a sandwich of legitimate news.

Perhaps the comments are closed now because I couldn't get a comment to go through, so here it is:

Very good public service, thank you. RT is definitely in the tank with OWS and visa versa, the old propaganda shop of the KGB just never got dismantled and still tracks that Soviet third-worldist anti-Western groove. And of course, look at RT's recent talk show host acquisition, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks' antisemitic rep in Russia.

Sublime Oblivion: so what if "most Russians" (on the Internet, anyway) applaud your pro-Kremlin anti-Western and anti-capitalist blog posts? One thing you can say about the Soviet Union, it metastasized the sovok very effectively. They massacred some 50 million people deliberately, and that included some of the best intellectuals and educated, thoughtful persons, and they have never recovered. If the "aggressive-obedient majority" (as Yury Afansyev called them) shows up in numbers to applaud your blog or sneer at my blog (as they did when it was in inosmi.ru the other day), so what? They have a lot of help getting that way with their totalitarian past, their zombie state TV and Nashisti and other type of state organizations penetrating all aspects of civil society. Where else could you put video cameras in every polling station and still expect to win by cheating, especially in the Caucasus? Because you already own the TV and the NGO and party registration process. Prevailing doesn't mean you are right, it merely means you are more of a thug.

Every time Putin rages about "Hillary" funding some little Russian NGO with some tiny grant from NED or something, I simply point to RT and its budget and the way it has introduced itself into the meme stream everywhere, even with ads on New York City bus shelters. Yeah, brilliant branding that "RT" -- it's like how KFC took the word "fried" out of the view.

In general, I think studying the active measures and agents of influence of Russia is a worthy occupation, especially on the Occupation.

You can learn a lot from just the Post's visit to the camp, Salon, which is pro-OWS, in this piece about Kalle Lasn, and from the Mondoweiss interview or see these hilarious critiques of Ad Busters from disgruntled Anonymous rank and file.

The point is not to say OMGZors Ohnoes Lasn is a communist agent and OWS is a communist plot blah blah blah! The right-wing conspiracy blogs make much of this and find books mentioning him as a socialist, etc.  He doesn't appear to be an avowed socialist but is more of an anarchist and conceptual artist.

He fled communist Estonia as a child and his family for a time had to live in a DP camp in Germany. But what's relevant is that Lasn is typical of a certain kind of East European refugee who in fact does articulate a set of anti-Western, anti-corporate views and whose experiences have shaped those views, coming from a country with both resistance and collusion with communism and fascism. Some refugees from the "Captive Nations" become staunch conservatives and anti-communists; others are the opposite, and it's more than fine to debate them. Some become nihilists.

These are ideological battles fought fiercely in their homelands, and to some extent in their adopted countries. The problem with liberal politics in America is that no one can ever debate communism without being smeared as a McCarthyite, so it dumbs down debate. I've always rejected those attempts, because I think condemnation of communism is legitimate because it's antithetical to human rights.

I've written some on the Marxist-Leninist ideologies in OWS -- I marvel that people so strenuously try to deny this, but denial is in fact one of the hallmarks of this kind of Bolshevik-style stealth socialism -- in posts here, here, here and here.

Why is it important to track and identify the socialist and communist underpinnings of OWS? Because these are criminal and deadly ideologies that have demonstratively led to mass crimes of humanity in a number of countries, with millions of deaths, and, needless to say, they don't work without coercion and violence. They don't work, period. It's not as if you can posit some "better" version of them in some better setting in some wealthier country where you can do less damage. The criminality is contained within the ideology, and it's no accident, comrade, that crimes such as theft, rape, drug abuse and even murder have emerged in the camps. This is human nature. Communism and socialism do not fix human nature; they exploit its weaknesses with terrible outcomes. Capitalism, with all its flaws, has the means within it to correct its flaws; communism doesn't. And so on.

It's not a debate you're going to win with Mr. X or Sublime Oblivion, but you keep going over the arguments so that you can consolidate a following and can resist the Bolshevik-style takeovers.

The Big Lie is alive and well with Occupy Wall Street -- cunning and manipulative just like their long-ago Bolshevik ancestors, they first of all lie about their nature (extreme leftist); they lie about their intentions (to overthrow capitalism) and their lie about their methods (that they are just "peaceful" or "civil disobedience"). But as Jesus said, by their fruits ye shall know them.

What's the Real Moral of the Story of the Kony2012 Meltdown?

Tens of millions of people have found out about the Kony2012 viral campaign against mass-murderer and warlord Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army -- and now tens of millions will find out about the ignoble way it ended:  the maker of the film, Jason Russell, in acute distress from the enormous controversy and media attention from his viral brainchild, wound up having a freakout, stripping himself naked on the street, pounding the pavement, masturbating, and hitting cars before he was detained and hospitalized. No charges were filed and he is undergoing treatment.

Basically, Jason Russell picked up the firecracker of the Internet and thought he could have a festival of lights, but it blew off his fingers.

In the weeks since Russell's video got as much or more attention than a Lady Gaga music video, a "progressive" establishment made up of liberal journalists, humanitarian workers, pundits, and academics, as well as some Ugandans themselves and black activists in the West have tried to beat down this incredibly popular invention of a white California Christian evangelist.

The pundits attacked the video for being simplistic (Kony wasn't even in Uganda anymore), providing simplistic answers (it was hard to arrest a warlord roaming in the bush with an armed gang without harming some of the children in his thrall); inflicting American do-gooding naivite on the world or worse (inevitably the narrative of Western imperialism and colonialism in Africa was invoked).

This discussion at Ethan Zuckerman's blog "My Heart's in Accra" is a good digest -- it boils down to saying that untrained white people without the politically-correct sensibilities of lefty cadres in NGOs should stay out of meddling in difficult African affairs they know nothing about, or have only hopelessly prejudiced ideas about. The culture war between Christian provincials and secular urbanists was manifestly visible here, with all its variations.

There will be all kinds of morals of this story drawn -- already at least one doctor is trying to exploit it to try to build tolerance for people suffering from either metabolic disorders (Russell was dehydrated when he went beserk) or bi-polar disorders (his manic "up" phase in launching the video was believed to be followed by a depressive "down" when he began to face severe criticism).

When I first saw this phenomenon, I was critical of the "Facebook Nation" web meglomania involved, although I thought that we as human rights activists who had not accomplished anything substantive in the 15 or more years we had been working on this case should be willing to show some humility. We should concede that whatever its flaws, and whatever the pitfalls of politically-incorrect mis-steps into paternalism or even racism, the notion of a mass campaign to bring a warlord to trial in Africa wasn't something we should sneer at if we were true to our values.

After all, these same lefty pundits endlessly tell us that whatever its extremism and violence and idiocy, the Occupy Wall Street mayhem has "started a national conversation" -- they're willing to claim this and imply that only persistent urban camping extremism and violence qualifies to get such a "conversation" going (as if somebody dividing society into classes for class warfare and vowing to overthrow capitalism is about having "a conversation," when it's more like "the propaganda of the deed".)

Yet when the conversation started about mass crimes against humanity in Africa in this innocuous way of spreading a video and images for Facebook pages, there was no willingness to concede "the international conversation" had been started about how lawless violence in African can be ended.

What I was much more worried about with the Kony2012 campaign was the notion that anyone, good or bad, left or right, Christian or secular, could decide that it's a good thing to have ten percent or even all of the 800 million people on Facebook and the 100 million on Twitter and so forth to "do something together". It's manipulative and totalitarian and it didn't work for good reason: human beings are fallible and flawed, and no one person or group can decide to arrogantly galvanize "the world" in this fashion -- period.  Viral machines run by charismatic but flawed human beings are not a good substitute for parliaments and free media and liberal democratic governments. They aren't even a particularly good helpmate for these institutions given the motivations for self-promotion and power that often drive those exploiting them.

Mark Zuckerburg, inventor of Facebook, of course set the stage for this when he explicitly explained at SWSX in 2009 that he believed the connective power of Facebook could transform Arab men who were hesitating between choising jihad and terrorism or democracy and human rights (or at least friendship and entertainment!), or that it could stop the terrorist movement called the FARC in Colombia. These were arrogant and foolish claims. I wrote "We are Not 69 Million of Anything' back then in protest because I didn't want Facebook membership to be transformed into a collectivized "better world" operation run by a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley and their pals in NGOs.

And I think this even more fervently now that we are viewed as "800 million of something" by the makers of Kony2012 and some of those they interviewed. "Direct democracy" in the form of clickocracy isn't democracy -- it isn't liberal and doesn't protect minorities and due process and the rule of law.

When you see the Kony2012 video, you realize it isn't so much the story of Kony and the need to get him and save the boy once in his clutches, but the heady idea that "we are the world" and we can all "do something together". It's like saying "I'd like to give the world a Coke" or singing "We are the World." Exhilirating stuff, with pictures of the globe, stirring music, and yourself starring as world-historical important Actor in concert with a lot of other egos now bent to this collectivized purpose. What can't we achieve?!

That the propositions are simplified and set up by only a handful of people never troubled the millions spreading and clicking; it troubled the far lesser numbers of establishment pundits, but only to the extent it threatened their power.

The film has particularly disturbing exploitative scenes with Russell's young son. This was a calculated move to make the millions identify with the cause -- either they were children barely older than the son, or they had children themselves and could identify with both the white and black boys. I don't think he should have used his son in the film -- it can't be anything but manipulation to try to prompt and rehearse a young child into making "wise" comments on a subject this awful and complex.  That was disturbing.

As for claims that it was all white people with their wonder-bread complexes meddling in the affairs of black folks who know better, in fact numerous black activists are shown in the film, including many Ugandans themselves speaking on camera, not to mention the main protagonist, a victim of Kony's whose brother was killed. It's just that Ugandans -- and black Americans -- don't agree on the approach to be made to an intractable situation like this.

Yet those who dislike the film can't concede that what they do didn't get Kony arrested, that their methods of quiet "culturally sensitive" NGO work in the field with perfectly-calibrated racialized notions of their own of balance or "empowerment" of locals didn't work.

Interestingly, the Invisible Children group went to great lengths to emphasize institutions in the real world at the same time as they celebrated and exploited -- and exploded -- a viral video reaching tens of millions of people. They spoke of the importance of reaching 24 cultural and political decision-makers or "thought leaders" -- which amounted to writing them via their Twitter accounts. They spoke of the importance of writing and even visiting your Congress people (many non-Americans saw it but it was directed at Americans originally) -- and I realized that it wasn't Human Rights Watch that accomplished the decision by the Obama Administration to send 100 advisors to the Ugandan army to help capture Kony, it was this viral NGO and video campaign which actually got started some time ago.

Most intriguingly, Russell gave pride of place in the film to an important but controversial if also charasmatic figure, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the current chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Ardent belief in the impartial international powers of a world court is something that both the Christian evangelists in Invisible Children as well the lefty NGOs and journalists actually share in common -- although lately some NGOs are fretting, due to pressure from the backlash of oppressive African leaders, that the ICC is too "obsessed" with Africa and should go elsewhere in the world for other cases in other regions.

Almost unnoticed in the Kony frenzy is the fact that finally after a number of years, enormous expense and controversy, the ICC has rendered a decision in its first case. It concerns another bad guy like Kony, Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord, guilty of recruiting child soldiers.  While, as Ocampo mentions in the Kony2012 film, the first arrest warrants of the ICC were for Kony, the first verdict comes against Lubanga. As the Guardian notes,

All 28 people indicted by the court have come from the African continent, which has led to charges of bias. In 2010, Chad – the first ICC signatory visited by Bashir following the issue of his arrest warrant – defended its decision not to arrest the Sudanese president by accusing the ICC of only targeting African leaders.

There is real disagreement as to whether these decisions are just or more importantly, whether they serve as a deterrent. I think here, too, the world's efforts at creating a conscience and an adjudicator shouldn't be discounted, while imperfect, because the court has indeed grappled with actual crimes against humanity that states themselves proved unable to cope with.

It's interesting that the world's first attempt to get "The Internet" to do something that merely tantrum about its own demands for licentiousness (as in the anti-SOPA viral campaign) did involve a reference to Congress and to the ICC. That's not trivial, but a lot more thought has to go into how to continue to build on it and follow up on it. Ultimately, I believe it has to start with an awareness that a few people cannot expect to whiplash 800 million or 100 million or 10 million people in simplistic and manipulative ways. Liberal democracy is about considered debate and due process, not merely clictivism, and that counts when we want a liberal outcome.

 

 

 

 

Where's the Real Techno-Panic?

My response to Adam Thierer at Forbes about his theories of The Six Things That Drive TechnoPanic:

Let me invert all of this on you, bro.

Because the real technopanic isn't all of these things, all of which are speculative, never came to pass, and which are themselves part of the induced hysteria that Silicon Valley inflicts on us constantly in service of their rapacious business model.

The real techno moral panics are these six things:

1. Copyright enforcement harms Internet freedom. "SOPA is going to kill innovation, cause entire sites to be closed down, and break the Internet."

We saw an absolutely outrageous anti-SOPA campaign that made use of the most audacious lies -- that a teenage blog with an infringing video would bring down all of Tumblr; that the feds would burst on legitimate music critic sites without a warrant and seize original property; that a putative security regime not in place yet was going to be harmed, although geeks block malware sites all the time -- it was really crazy stuff.

2. Prosecuting child pornography is going to harm Internet freedom.

Any time Congress tries to legislate against this obvious menace the geeks go wild. The latest hysterical campaigns make the usual groundless claims about supposed warrantless searches and chilling effects and thought crimes. All of its crazy, because the laws are narrowly targeted against specific forms of pornography that are pretty obviously what they are, involving kids. Reddit finally closed its awful "jailbait" section because they finally realized that they couldn't keep leaving their business open to the liability of legislation. The world did not end.

3. Aaron Schwarz, the kid who stole all the thousands of JSTOR files is going to go to jail for like 50 years and this case is going to have a terrible effect on academic freedom and paid educational content is keeping our country in the Stone Age.

Well, Aaron never went to jail and likely never will -- he has good lawyers. No academic freedom was harmed in this simulation. JSTOR goes on charging and people going on paying. America did not fall any farther behind any other country as a result, and PS, people still pay those whopping fees for hard-copy textbooks!

4. If David Cameron and BART aren't stopped from their intentions to shut off social media during times of violent public unrest, the entire Internet will freeze and people of good will and faith will be gagged and everywhere.

In fact, both Cameron and BART didn't take back a thing they said. No legislators were able to cook up some eminent domain for Blackberry or Twitter or any other platform during public emergencies, and life went on. There's every chance that either Cameron or BART or some other authority will keep as a back-up plan or actually use the power to shut off cell phones during violent unrest like riots when people and property can be harmed, and everyone can then go...on Facebook...if not national television and radio to complain bitterly about the terrible draconian loss of their rights.

5. Sen. Lieberman has caused a terrible chill on speech by urging Amazon to follow its own TOS and bar WikiLeaks from storing stolen State Department cables on its services, and unless commercial IT businesses roll over and accept any and all forms of content on their servers, the democratic republic of America will and the free world in general will be brought to its knees.

Well, actually, no one, least of all Amazon, which is a big boy, could find a reason why its TOS shouldn't be obeyed regarding a possible felony. Neither Amazon nor many other companies would store the cables, nor would PayPal and Mastercard and others accept payments for supporting ongoing criminal activity. Everybody "got it" that *publishing* the material wasn't a crime and the NYT and the Guardian could do it; but companies got it before Rebecca McKinnon and Human Rights Watch that their right to decide what to keep on their servers or accept as payments (freedom of association) wasn't trumped by anarcho-hackists' right to freedom of expression. PS WikiLeaks appears to be pretty much past the sell-by date now and "broken".

6. The power of evangelical Christian groups who care about trying to stop the heart of darkness in Africa to make viral videos and win over 80 million teenage views will outweigh um more proper governance by the usual cabal of cynical journalists, pundits, academics and humanitarian workers to tell us that white people can't work on black people's problems.

No worries, Internet! The unfortunate maker of this viral video was so brow-beaten by Jon Stewart (who made a wicked satire, "My Little Kony," and so bullied by scores of other smarties who set us all straight and sent numerous hate messages his way that he was reduced to stripping naked, pounding the pavement, masturbating, and whacking at cars before he was arrested and hospitalized. Happy now?

Adam Thierer is a really important critic of a lot of the silly techno-utopianism that the techno-communists of our day foist on us, and he's one of the few serious scholars of this topic. But unfortunately, what he's using to combat these ideas is a form of techno-libertarianism that confuses techno-communism's usual alternate grab for anarchy or state intervention when and as it suits them with the need to somehow remove all state involvement in the Internet.

It's what libertarian always leaves out -- the need to be free not only of the state, but from each other. The extremism of the licentiousness of the Silicon Valley businesses in their rapacious quest to hijack content to sell ads regardless of whose property it is; the extremism of the nihilist geeks who want eminent domain for all their platforms regardless of our privacy or public order concerns -- this has to be combatted with the rule of law or Anonymous turns the entire Internet into a totalitarian nightmare.

 

 

Maybe Kony2012 isn't Such a Bad Thing, But I'll Tell You What You Do Have to Worry About: "Facebook Nation"

All the smart people, the thought leaders, the Twitterati, the pundits, are fretting about the Kony2012 phenomenon, which is a case study in an overnight viral spreading of a meme and a cause. Every single teenager in the known universe -- Tumblr and Facebook are that known universe, far more than Twitter, but they are instructed to message their "culture makers" and "policy makers" precisely via Twitter -- are posting thoughts on one side of the issue or another about Kony.

First, my teenage son grumped that it was stupid to arrest a world-class criminal like Kony, "they should just put a bullet through his head," he reasoned. No, I explained, he needs to be arrested and put on trial so that his crimes and accomplices can be known, justice requires this process and this transparency, and you have to use justice to get justice -- otherwise, in countries like Libya or Romania, where rebels just execute the leaders gangland style, justice has a much harder time taking root. Besides, nobody has ever been able to catch him, even those willing to solve it with just a bullet to the head. Usually when that sort of thing happens in the world, it's because he has some state or quasi-state backing.

Then, my teenage daughter saw all the Kony stuff, thought it seemed awfully fake, just like that ridiculously stupid meme thing a year or so ago about stopping child pornography just by clicking. She quickly found the critical Tumblr about the Kony thing, and reasoned quickly that all kinds of people were being fooled into donating money to a two-star operation that was none too open about its books.

Today, as I got on the elevator, I saw that a child had put up a Kony2012 poster by the elevator doors -- he had gone to the trouble to print out the image and cut it to fit above the elevator buttons. Perhaps he instinctively felt this was the way to reach the grannies who aren't on Facebook. Kony2012  was jumping the synapse into the real world.

Fifteen years ago -- fifteen years ago! -- a Ugandan preacher visiting New York called me urgently and asked if he could visit my office with some files about atrocities. I didn't know hardly anything about Uganda or any African countries at that time because my field was Eurasia, but I was just coming to assume the directorship of a small organization that had affiliates around the world and worked at the UN on a variety of country situations, so I was eager to learn more.

When the clergyman came to my office, he brought files stuffed with newspaper clippings, paper reports, and photos of atrocities. We had the Internet back then, but we used it sparingly and kept the web with 'pictures off," looking at just those diamonds and triangles, because the connection was slow (56k) and it made it run faster. Everybody was on igc back then, there were even some Africans. But of course, not this fellow and his church -- so he had everything in paper.

I listened to the Ugandan's tales of terror and tragedy, the kidnapping of children from their homes, the forcing of them to shoot their own parents to harden them for participation in a horrible cult. The name of the cult was the Lord's Resistance Army, and I could tell from this Christian pastor that not only were the atrocities terribly painful, but so was this literal taking of the name of the Lord in vain for such a diabolical purpose.

I hardly knew what to tell him. Groping to try to figure out what we could do or where we could put this, I explained to him that when the perpetrators were "non-state actors" l ike this, i.e. not governments of countries, it was hard to get action at the UN. Even so, we would try to get attention to the issue. The pastor made the rounds of a number of church groups and human rights groups, and returned to his homeland dejected.

For the next 15 years, I went to various UN meetings, sometimes with very high officials, with various Security Council ambassadors, the head of DPKO, the heads of the various humanitarian agencies, even the Secretary General himself, raising this and other causes from the world's conflict zones. There are groups that work on this issue far more than I could, and had up-to-the minute information.  For years, it was hard to get anyone to bother with it; the answer that came was always automatic. This was not "a threat to international peace and security," i.e. the threshold for the Security Council to take something up. It could be given to this treaty body or that humanitarian agency -- there was little they could do.

Even so, groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented the atrocities, tried to get action, tried to get various resolutions and statements. At some point countries began to be more willing to "do something" because the LRA was crossing borders and creating refugees and moving closer to earning that badge of "threat to international peace and security".

But it was complicated. The government of Uganda was itself abusive. I knew people who worked in the field who patiently tried to deal with abuses from the government, from the LRA, and then even from one refugee to another -- these situations of post-conflict and protracted conflict dragging on years are brutal and awful in Africa. There was a period when the humanitarian groups said the children were so afraid of being abducted that they would come and sleep on their porches. This issue got a LOT of attention, but then it seemed to subside.

The groups I know in New York have probably spent more time in the last year or so raising the issue of LGBT rights in Uganda, rather than the issue of the LRA and children's rights, mainly because there were leaders in Uganda itself who wanted to advance the LGBT cause, and one was murdered for his work. But there was a more important reason: Kony himself wasn't in Uganda anymore, at least not permanently. He was roaming around here and there and seemed to have settled in the Central African Republic, which despite its name, is one of the poorest and most desperate of countries, with little literacy or resources and overwhelming numbers of refugees from Sudan and other countries. That's the sort of situation the Konys of the world prey on.

Among the various wars that our Nobel Peace prize laureate president has involved himself in is this one, too -- he sent 100 military advisors to Africa to help countries try to catch Kony. This was at the behest of groups like HRW who would be unlikely to sanction something like that in other parts of the world where they fret about the excesses of American influence -- but desperate situations call for desperate solutions, I guess.

So am I mad that some two-star charity exploiting social media has decided to make this an issue? No, not really, because it is awful and because none of us really did anything that effective in at least the 15 years I've been following it. Few professional human rightsniks would admit that, but they should. Yeah, I get it that a military intervention isn't advisable and that the African countries should capture him, not the American commandos. Hmm. Now why haven't these African countries gotten together and done this until now? I'm not sure it's about a lack of capacity.

We're likely to hear more and more about what a bad idea this campaign is -- it may evaporate and be replaced by a video like "Friday" or another Google lobby-inspired anti-SOPA rage fest. But meanwhile, it has some useful side-effects, in that school children begin to grasp something they rarely learn on the Internet, especially in various Redditt forums and Facebook chats -- that there are malignant killers in the world who do awful things, and that America is by no means the worst of them, and in fact is called upon to help. That's not the worst lesson to learn. In fact, there is a decided contingent that works very hard making children UNLEARN that lesson because they think they have to counter "US imperialist propaganda," but then they end up grossly mangling the truth.

And there's another salutary effect, which is that black school children are learning that some African warlords in fact are mass murderers and should be arrested. You can't appreciate this lesson unless you yourself have children in New York City schools and see the outrageous amount of Marxist-inspired clap-trap that is pedaled to kids in their "education". Critical race theory of the sort being debated now around the Obama "vetting" film is exactly the order of the day, and there's a certain premise: that all African nations and rebel leaders are victims of colonialism, which of course they are, but then a certain premise -- that therefore they should not be criticised, and to criticise them is racist and imperialist. This is a very, very hard point to get across in many places where the black power movement has left indelible marks.

I give it about another week, however, before some of those old lefties begin to call this a white man's campaign to distract from white crimes, including the white imperialist crimes committed even by black Obama.

The Save Darfur movement always struck me as rather white -- the demonstrations I went to had only a sprinkling of black folks, usually Darfurian emigres or visitors themselves. This movement put the issue on every single t-shirt, mug, bus-shelter, NGO agenda, and school fair booth. There probably hasn't been such a mass movement related to a foreign issue since the anti-apartheid movement and then the Euromissile protests.

But it was worthless. The agitators spent money mainly on themselves and their advertising (like the Kony2012 people do), and after the South gained its independence, they stopped working on the issue and turned to other causes. They exist, but they've folded into other movements and have less resources -- there are competing causes. And after the secession, more violence broke out and now it's like it was in the days when Save Darfur fretted constantly that no countries would give any helicopters to the cause (funny how they instantly came up with them when they had to go to Libya). Of course there was a reason for the helicopter problem: a) the Russians who had them wouldn't outfit them with weapons and UN staff didn't like flying in unsafe Russian helicopters with the gas tank in the front seat b) more to the point, the Sudanese government in Khartoum wouldn't allow them and threatened the mission with expulsion.

See, that's why these problems are very intractable in Africa. Tyrants, enormous amounts of guns and young men to wield them, and the inability of the West to do an awful lot.

Maybe Obama will ride the Kony2012 wave and get his 100 advisors to actually help arrest Kony and chalk up another scalp to his belt. We'll see.

I'm more worried about something else entirely, however, and that is the "Facebook Nation" crap surrounding this that leads people to begin utopianizing about it.

David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, says this on Facebook today -- and since it's a string of quotes from other people with this theory, I'll quote it in full:

Anti-SOPA Silicon Valley Incites Geeks, Teams Up with Child Porn Lobbyists to Sink Child Protection Bill

The author of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, undeterred, has drafted another bill to try to rein in the unruly Internet, HR 1981, Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers.

It's co-sponsored by Rep. Debbie Schultz (D-FL). Watch these two and any other other supporters get viciously harassed, hacked, pilloried, bullied online now -- merely for trying to do the right and decent thing.

We saw how hysterical and full of the most outrageous hype the anti-SOPA lobby was, fueled by Google, which organized numerous influential tech bloggers and got 7 million people to sign a petition against SOPA and the related PIPA regarding protection of intellectual property.

And not surprisingly, the same degree of hyped outrage and incitement of hatred is unleashed now by the same lobbyists, over the same "Internet freedom issues" (they are actually merely Google business issues and the desire of a certain hardcore geek continent to secure an unaccountable licentious realm in cyberspace where they can do WTF they want).

Already, you cannot find anything in Google that calmly explains the reason for this bill or outlines the arguments for supporting it -- all you can find for page after page is the shrill baying of geeks screeching about their realm being encroached by the government -- and the scarifying of hordes of young people to feel as if Big Brother is now going to be watching them.

That we have a lot more to worry about from privacy-busting Google or Facebook scraping us all on social media than the government trying to fight child pornography of course escapes all these hysterics.

Most of the argumentation hinges on two tendentious and even false claims:

1. "The government will watch everything you do online and require companies to monitor your every movement and click online and all your content will be stored 18 months, so that they can turn it over to the feds any time."

2. "The government will obtain this information without a search warrant."

But, if you actually read the text of the law on the Congressional site thomas.loc instead of various distorted and skewed tech blog versions of it, you find out two operatives facts:

1.  The government isn't requiring companies to gather and store ALL data or ALL content or ALL clicks of customers -- it's just requiring them to store the IP address -- the address by which their computer logs on. Good Lord, you would think the world was ending -- your IP address! That's all! That's obvious to anyone logging on to any website to any website owner -- and is indeed stored for long periods or even indefinitely by platform owners to enable site owners to block malware, spam, and unwanted contributions.

None of the geeks object to, oh, Redditt retaining their IP address and using it to block them if they violate the TOS. But suddenly, the government can't ask ISPs to do what land line telephone companies do -- obviously tie your phone number to your name and keep a permanent record of it "in the phone book".

Of course, the Internet is magical and sprinkled with pixie dust, so the ISPs can't do exactly the same thing and keep what amounts to "your phone number" -- which is your IP address!

Panic-mongerers and hysterical speculators,  i.e. a law student in this case, for example, claim that if a law-enforcer gets ahold of your IP address, why, they can use that to access information about all your content, everywhere. Well, they could do that if...you publish your IP address all over the place. Or if they then go and request the information from another provider.

But it's pure hypotheticals (as we saw with the anti-SOPA jihad). There's nothing really to tie you to your speech or content on line -- remember, this is a law about child pornography, and IF the law-enforcers get a complaint about it online, or find it online, they want to investigate it, and for that they need to see who uploaded it.

It doesn't work in the way that geeks hysterically describe -- that corporations must monitor every single thing you do and keep it all available for the government, which sifts through it until they find something, dinging lots of people on the way.

Instead, FIRST there has to be objectionable content and a complaint, then an investigation.

2. There's no indication in the text of the law that companies will turn over this information without a warrant. They are not required to turn over data merely at a request -- and they don't.

Twitter was recently asked to turn over information from the account of Jacob Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks' related hackers. They didn't. They demanded a warrant. Then the feds went and got a court order and a warrant and came back again. The ACLU and Twitter's lawyers tried to fight this (showing that warrants aren't really what the Google and EFF lobbyists are demanding; what they are demanding is never have to give customers' information, ever.)

They lost the case, the judge didn't find their arguments compelling, and with that warrant, presumably they did get that customer info (I haven't heard exactly how this went down -- I'm speculating that Twitter finally then decided to comply rather than trying to be a cowboy about it.)

Again, the law student and others concoct a whole list of parties that they think will try to use this bill to go trawling -- spouses seeking divorce, companies checking on employees, etc.

But as always, this speculation is context- and reality-free -- those parties would have to make a case that *it's child pornography* that is at issue, not just any content. AND there is nothing in the law that says corporations have to hand over the IP addresses on a whim of whoever comes calling.

There is no reason to consider that this is law would permit warrantless searches because they are not specifically mandated. Again, they hypotheticals that they might be are just sheer hysteria. The geeks are hysterically waving their arms around in a climate of absolute nihilist disbelief that the justice system in this liberal democratic state doesn't function fairly -- when in fact it does, a good deal of the time (these tech bloggers should go try blogging in Russia or China for a time to see how it really works when the state goes after you).

Law-enforcers have to make their case. They can't just go trawling everywhere about everything. They have to have an allegation of child pornography -- not just anything. And the ISPs are likely to demand a warrant and likely they will have to get one -- I don't see why they would behave any differently than they behave without the law.

Even so, we are seeing hysterical blog after hysterical blog claiming that the government is going to "spy on everyone" and that crazed troopers are going go barging everywhere without warrants. There is no evidence for this, and it is not in the text of the law.

Of course, this tendentious bad-faith coverage is typical of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other Google-sympathizing lobbyists but it's also a function of the child porn lobby.

This is something always sickening to see. Before I encountered these people in the online world of Second Life, where they existed in full force and are regularly curbed by the company providing the platform, Linden Lab, I didn't realize they existed. I would have thought that child porn viewers were lonely, isolated individuals living furtively in basements, ashamed, fearful of being caught. I wouldn't have thought they'd be defiant, organized, united with others.

But that's exactly what they are. They are absolutely aggressive, nasty, brutal and determined in their demand for access to their criminal content. They use every fake argument in the book to justify it, from claiming that it's a victimless crime (not true, as children are obviously exploited to make the pornography in the first place) to denying that there is no relationship between pornography and actual assaults of children (of course, every time law-enforcers raid one of these people found to have actually harmed a child, they are usually found with porn on their computer, but the denial persists).

This lobby -- it's organized, resourced, networked, aggressive -- shows up every time there is a law like this and bangs and bangs away on the topic, ridiculing and savaging opponents, demeaning critics, and trying to find something to shame them with.

That's what we saw happen to the Canadian official who tried to get a bill like this passed in Canada -- whatever embarassing things about his life that could be dug up were accessed and paraded and ridiculed. He was endlessly vilified on Twitter. Usually the technique is Alinsky-like -- "isolate and freeze the target and accuse them of something that is the opposite of what they are fighting for to make them appear as hypocrites."

The most cunning feature of this lobby is that if anybody -- like this official -- calls them out as being what they are -- lobbyists for child pornography -- they indignantly claim they are merely fighting for freedom of expression and privacy against an overbroad law.

Mention that any law is "overbroad" and you can get most lawyers to concede that it might be -- any one of them would like to think of their potential clients' defense.

This lobby particularly targets journalists or bloggers and ruthlessly harasses and vilifies them -- this happened to a New York Times journalist and even on my little level as a blogger I've experienced incredible harassment merely for reporting on this phenomenon critically in SL -- the sheer, sustained relentlessness of these people is really creepy (Anonymous and the pro child-porn lobby are often intertwined either because they are practitioners or because they see it as an "Internet freedom" cause for their own nihilistic licentiousness).

So it's no accident that everywhere now you will see sustained, screechy moralizing about what is in fact immoral -- trying to hobble law-enforcers from investigating and prosecuting child pornography. You will loads of people pick up the cudgel and bang on conservatives and fight yet another cultural war. Every comment on every blog or newspaper online will be filled with anonymous screeching. Many a pious columnist will concede that sure, it's overbroad, and sure, freedom of expression or privacy could in theory be harmed...

Perhaps Lamar Smith and others have learned something about the Google and related lobbies and how persistent and cunning and networked they are, and perhaps they are more prepared for the battle now. Let's hope they will do the basics and get on social media and TV themselves with this message and try to pass this bill:

1. Keep getting people to READ THE BILL -- 98 percent of the people spouting about it haven't read it and won't read it.

2. Keep pointing out that it is not all content, not all clicks, not everything *like on Facebook and Google+ which is already scraped and retained in fact to be able to stream the content to you* -- be sure to mention Google and Facebook! -- but it is ONLY THE IP ADDRESS.

3. This is like a phone number, it is gathered by every Internet service anywhere, and already stored in most places for ID purposes and to enable companies to control spam and violations of their existing TOS.

4. There is nothing to suggest warrantless searches, it is not in the text of the law, law-enforcers have to make their case; the law is aimed at prosecuting child pornography.

5. Ask what the opponent's plan is for investigation of allegations of child pornography on the Internet.

I predict that Lamar and co. are not going to be strong enough to withstand this onslaught because they really have no idea how bad it is. They think that hysterics and aggressive loons who got on the anti-SOPA bandwagon to support piracy can't possibly be the same way about the more obviously criminal act of child pornography!

They will be wrong. They have no idea. And we will see their email hacked, their sites DDOSed and their personal lives turned instead out merely because they wanted to protect children and stop the spread of this evil.

But one thing that will likely emerge from this lost battle is what I keep telling the progressives: win the cultural war, lose the elections.

 

 

EFF Rushes to Trash Western Companies for Journalists' Killings, but Russia is Really the Issue

When war correspondent Marie Colvin of Sunday Times of London and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed in Syria and other journalists were injured, it wasn't long before there was speculation that authorities had homed in on their satellite phone and used that information to target and kill them.

My first thought was, "Like Dudayev, and that's how the Russians do it. The Russians are whom we have to blame for a good deal of all this." (Gen. Dudayev, the first president of the Chechens, was killed while speaking on his sat phone when Russian reconnaisance homed in on him.)

But that wasn't Jillian York's first thought. Her first thought, following the usual grooves of the "progressives" and the Electronic Frontier Foundation where she works was: how can we blame evil capitalist Western corporations?

Hence, her article at EFF, Satphones, Syria and Surveillance, immediately mentions corporations as the problem and fixates on technology:

Satellite phones can also be tracked by technical means and there is ample technology already on the market for doing so.  For example, this portable Thuraya monitoring system by Polish company TS2, which also counts several US government agencies as clients; these systems for monitoring Thuraya and Iridium phones, created by Singaporean company Toplink Pacific; or this satellite phone tracking technology from UK based Delma MMS.

Evil Polish company with evil US government agencies as clients! Evil Singapore and evil UK!

So, without any evidence whatsoever by her own admission, based on pure speculation, she places the blame on corporations. She then cites the notorious Jacob Appelbaum of the open-source circumvention software project Tor who adds the usual anarcho-hacky stuff about poor encryption -- it's all the company's fault if it is hacked:

Security researcher and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum says that satellite communications systems do not respect user location privacy needs, and aside from surveillance without the cooperation of a satellite phone provider, “such a company may betray a user’s location on purpose or by accident.”  Research published last year by the German Horst-Goertz Institute for IT Security, found that satellite phones use weak cryptographic ciphers that could easily be broken by sophisticated attacks.  The research identified serious security flaws in the encrpytion systems used by the two competing satellite phone standards, GMR-1 and GMR-2

And so on.

Then, with the usual sleight of hand, the topic is switched away from satellite phone de-encryption and tracking, to email monitoring -- and two more companies are mentioned, one of which no long deals with Syria and the other of which is not implicated in sat phones:

Earlier this week, EFF profiled Italian mass surveillance company Area SpA, which in 2011 was rushing to install mass surveillance gear for Syrian intelligence agents just as the Syrian government was ramping up its violent crackdown on peaceful democratic protesters. As Bloomberg originally reported, Area SpA was to install “monitoring centers” that would give the Syrian government the ability “to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country” as well as “follow targets on flat-screen workstations that display communications and Web use in near-real time alongside graphics that map citizens’ networks of electronic contacts.” After a barrage of media attention and local protests at its Italian headquarters, Area SpA announced in late November that it would not complete the project as planned.

And this:

Previously, Syria was found to be using technology made by US company Blue Coat Systems to censor and surveil Internet users, despite initial denials from the company.

The "finding" was in fact about equipment shipped to Dubai and then used in Syria without the company's knowledge and in defiance of US sanctions against Syria, but the fact that the US government investigated this, and the company said they did not wish to break the law just wasn't good enough for EFF -- they want corporate blood.

(Of course, this same bunch rushes to the defense of Twitter and Google and gushes that they have a great policy when they, too, invoke the notion of "laws that have to be obeyed" and censor tweets or blogs country by country.)

Companies are not human rights groups, and they sell in open markets and they use the same logic that Jillian and her friends use about going into markets like China and then "adopting to their laws" to censor tweets. But if there are sanctions, and stiff penalties, then they have a cost of doing business that is too great, and they don't do business. That's how it works. That's why you have laws, regulations, and fines and not t-shirts and bumper stickers when dealing with business.

But all of this is in fact irrelevant to the tragic death of the journalists because there is no evidence that these companies are relevant to sat phones and are implicated in any way in the deaths of these journalists.

Sure, it's a good thing to get companies not to sell anything to Syria. And it looks as if those caught -- whether having accidently or deliberately sold equipment -- respond appropriately. But this entire article is a smokescreen and deliberately misleading, trying to set up the fake proposition: evil Western companies sell detection equipment to evil Syrian regime.

That's why it was so refreshing indeed to see this article on Foreign Policy's site by Robert Young Pelton in which the author -- who had actually been in Grozny when the Russians bombarded it in 1996-- immediately thought "Chechnya -- journalists -- Dudayev" when he heard about the journalists killed in Homs.

The Russians were able to hone in on Dudayev's sat phone and assassinate him. So were their close military clients, the Syrians.

Pelton grasped what was essential about the Syrian situation: the Russians back it up with armaments, equipment, logistics, advice.  He also points to a Fox News story that in fact most likely, the sat phones the rebels had came from Qatar:

Flash forward to Syria today. The opposition Free Syrian Army is officially run by a former air force colonel who commands a barely organized group of army defectors supported by energetic youth. They rely almost entirely on cell-phone service, satellite phones, the Internet, and social media to organize and communicate. Early in February, according to a Fox News report, Qatar provided 3,000 satellite phones, which the Syrian rebels have used to upload numerous impactful videos and stories.

So...where did those 3,000 sat phones come from? Japan? The US? Saudi Arabia? What company? I couldn't find any record of it.

But what Robert Young Pelton focuses on is intent and training and Russia's role -- while the Western media has focused on Western inaction, he says:

What we haven't seen as clearly is the extent to which the Syrian regime (thanks to its Russian advisors) now has the tools of electronic warfare to crush this popular uprising -- and anything that happens to get in the way. Syria is one of Russia's biggest clients for weapons, training, and intelligence. In return for such largesse, it has offered the Russian Navy use of Tartus, a new deep-water military port in the Mediterranean. Moscow sold Damascus nearly $1 billion worth of weapons in 2011, despite growing sanctions against the oppressive Assad regime. With these high-tech weapons comes the less visible Russian-supplied training on technologies, tactics, and strategies.

$1 billion work of weapons! And we're focusing on some Polish company? Or Blue Coat?

Pelton writes movingly of his own time in Chechnya, where he also met Colvin, who covered that war as well. He said he wished she had remembered the lessons of Russia --the duplicity of the Russians, the deadly practice of shelling people using sat phones -- situations which he and she experienced then. He said the first mistake was to stay in the rebels' "media center," actually a four-storey family dwelling.

That was actually my second thought, after "Dudayev". What can you expect if you stay in a compound called "the rebels' media center?" They were likely pinned down, but Marie Colvin bravely reported from this set-up and described that it was "not a military target" -- although naturally a government at war with its people would indeed view the rebels' media center as a target. They would be following foreigners likely from the moment they entered the country, and they would obviously be following rebels even if they somehow overlooked a foreigner. One way or another, using their regular humint, they might not need satellite homing technology -- they could just be following them the old-fashioned way or through electronic bugs.

Pelton also notes that Colvin's persistence in remaining in the building and broadcasting from it, and clearly sympathizing with the rebels would make her a certain target.

It's war.

The lesson isn't so much what Jacob Appelbaum said -- that carrying a sat phone is itself the deadly giveaway (and he would likely merely seek to encrypt it better) -- but that journalists can't expect to be safe if they go to a reber media center; stay in it overnight; uplink from it when all cell phone coverage is shut off by the government so that they stand out; broadcast from it to the outside world with comments sympathetic to the rebels.

All pretty obvious points -- and with the operative evil actors being 1) Syria and 2) Russia and tragic errors -- and not evil Western companies. They are not absolved if they somehow cravenly sold their equipment to mass murderers just to make a buck, but we have no evidence that they did that. Meanwhile, we do have evidence that Russia sold $1 billion in armaments and training and has an intimdate relationship to this mass murder because they back the regime and defy the international community in attempting to pressure and even remove Assad.

You would think that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, given its history and long experience in covering Russia/Chechnya would have given a little more thought to all this and surely get the Russian piece of it -- but institutional memories, history, this is all eroding.

Hence, Luke Alnutt merely parrots what EFF writes -- as he often rushes to do in retweeting or linking to the Berkman Center gang (Jillian used to be at Berkman).

Alnutt then reprints a really goofy idea from Belgian Stefan Geens

So perhaps one (counterintuitive) place for legal innovation might be to make journalists' communications more visible and distinct, akin to hospitals. Uplink signals from journalist satphones could carry a specific signature that interceptors cannot fail to notice. Reports could be transmitted unencrypted -- so that they are verifiably civilian in nature. By transmitting GPS coordinates in the open, they would tell anyone who is listening where civilian journalists are at work, and where an attack would be illegitimate.

Well, first of all, hospitals' or aid workers' communications aren't open and visible somewhere to everybody -- where does he get that idea?

And walking into the lion's den of Syria, let alone Russia, and broadcasting that you are a foreign journalist?! This is the heighth of naivete. The notion of "transparency" is predicated on being in a nice European society like Belgium where authorities will behave in some decent and accountable matter and not shoot journalists. You can hardly count on that in war zones -- it's insane. And no journalist will go for this extreme notion of how to protect themselves, counterintuitively, by "hiding in plain sight".