Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010. Talk Radio News Service.
There are two people in the world who hate Hillary Clinton's Internet freedom program with a vitriolic passion, and scream about it regularly and often more than anybody.
One is Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia, sustainer of the Butcher of Damascas. The other is Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born nomadic scholar in the US who makes a living trashing what he views as other people's cyber-utopias.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, was enraged with Hillary when she unveiled her Internet freedom initiative at the ministerial meeting of the OSCE last December in Vilnius, which was supported by many OSCE members. Lavrov freaked out even more when he found that an NGO that monitored the Russian elections online called Golos (Voice) got some measly grant from the National Endowment for Democracy -- read "Hillary" -- you would think the simple act of encouraging people to post reports of election fraud on an interactive map was going to bring down all of Russia (I was actually critical of this program for other reasons, but good Lord, the grant was utterly dwarfed by the kind of "administrative resources" the incumbent had in the elections with his total control over state television, and Russia's a big country, they ought to have room for a few NGOs critical of the state).
Lavrov and other Russian officials have fussed and fumed again and again over Hillary and the Internet so much that when I turned on a Livestream watching some of the big demonstrations and followed a guy who was riding around with a web cam, again and again I heard Muscovites joking about how they were agents of "Khilary" -- "Khilary hasn't bought me a new car yet," lamented one fellow with a rust-bucket. "I'm cold, Khilary hasn't bought me a fur coat yet," joked another marcher.
"Khilary" is part of what has engendered a post-election backlash, with some reactionary parliamentarians threatening to vet all NGOs for foreign funding and out them and bully them into submission or non-existence. (BTW, that was a story that strangely, long-time pro-Kremlin blogger Kevin Rothrock subtly led with in his debut post at the lefty Global Voices, creating one of those "fact sandwiches" whose purpose seems to have been to cast aspersion on two in fact distinguished independent NGOs for allegedly not reporting foreign grants -- although they are not charged with any offense by the Russian government.)
So there's Lavrov -- understandly -- harshing on Hillary's Internet aspirations.
And then there's Evgeny Morozov. Nothing gets his goat like Hillary's Internet programs as we see from his toxic Slate piece today, Why Hillary Should Join Anonymous -- he was furious about the ill-fated and soon-dumped circumvention program Haystack, even though the State Department didn't use it; he was critical about possible help to the Arab Spring that might be the "kiss of death"; he thought the entire Internet-related foreign policy initiative was a scam; it's not just imperfect, but dangerous, and you never quite figure out why, even reading his many long posts. Um, because they challenge authoritarian governments? Because we're supposed to leave all the driving to him and a committee of international elites? But why can't we have an Internet freedom foreign policy?!
Always and everywhere, like the rest of the Harvard Berkman Center gang and faux-freedom fighters exploiting the Internet freedom issue to settle their own political scores at home, Morozov implies that Hillary can't do a thing about tyrants abroad and their blocking of the web, for fear of being a hypocrite at home on various controversial Internet policy issues that are the real targets of Morozov and other "open Internet" cadres. Net neutrality, anti-SOPA, anti-CISPA -- all of these campaigns to challenge any kind of law enforcement over the unruly Internet whatsoever -- are all viewed as worse than Iran's or China's jailing of bloggers or blocking of websites for free speech content.
In other words, in the strange and warped world of Evgeny Morozov, as a freedom fighter, I'm supposed to be as outraged at the strange death of Oleg Bebenin, the webmaster for charter97.org, who was found inexplicably hanged when the presidential election campaigns in Morozov's native Belarus began (he's never mentioned the case), as I am that my son can't get his pirate movies from Megaupload anymore, or my yahoo or gmail might be snagged by the NSA's trawling for key words in search of terrorists. Boo hoo.
Say, just in case anyone is that ethics-challenged, let me state for the record that the Secretary of State appointed by the most liberal democratic president America has known in living memory, who is trying to open up societies of deadly tyrants of Iran, China, Syria, Russia and elsewhere that pose a threat to themselves and the rest of the world, is nothing like the sullen Anonymous e-thugs who cost businesses and individuals millions of dollars in losses and irreparable harm to their privacy by hacking or defacing their web sites and exposing their personal information.
Morozov has some mysterious and elusive notion of the perfect Internet freedom program he might endorse that he's never quite unveiled but we know what he's *not* for -- no Western government program, no commercial software circumvention run by private sector or government, no law-enforcement activity against piracy or for security, no real-names policy, and much more.
Strangely, I find the emphasis that Hillary Clinton has placed on Internet freedom -- getting people around state-imposed firewalls on content, getting people to more safely get information out, advocacy on behalf of journalists and bloggers attacked and arrested -- to be more relevant, whatever disagreements I might have, than anything Morozov has come up with.
That's in part because his menu of concerns changes oddly over time. I sometimes wonder if it was Morozov's interloping alt that published that great piece long ago on opendemocracy.net about Russian secret police sock-puppets and the "outsourcing of hate" -- he never criticizes anything about Russia anymore.
And now he's decided to -- as Stephen Colbert once put it rather graphically in describing how Anonymous screws with people who cross them -- stick his penis into a hornet's nest. With sinister IRC-style humour that even the skiddies aren't finding very funny judging from the comments from Anonymous under his piece, Morozov thinks Clinton should join Anonymous -- evidently because both are suspect in their freedom-fighting in his view and both are -- or should become "bureaucratic." Yes, he even -- insanely -- calls for Anonymous to become "more bureaucratic". As if this is a natural tendency like all good Leninists in revolutionary struggles, you know?
Oh, it wasn't always that way with Evgeny -- this attack on Anonymous is in fact very new. Only last year, Morozov was regularly re-tweeting every #Anops announcement and constantly golf-clapping as the e-thugs took sites down -- of course exploiting that hipster pose that "retweeting ≠ endorsement". Oh, come now, of course it does. More to the point, during Social Media Week in New York, he ducked and weaved when debating with other panelists about whether the DDOS was an acceptable form of "civil disobedience," and gave the semblance of being "concerned" but then piously intoned that DDOS for a good cause was allowable, and that we should be very concerned about the young lads who were getting such heavy sentences, it wasn't fair, and not commensurate with the crime, supposedly. (In fact, there hasn't been a single Anonymous case that has had a heavy sentence; the sentences tend to be a year or two and tend to get commuted -- watch for this to happen with Sabur, as he is still not on trial, and has dodged court appearances repeatedly by claiming that he was in danger, ostensibly from his vengeful ex-buddies in the Anon gang.)
Morozov never, ever criticized Anonymous before this piece -- he gleefully chortled over Stratfor's misfortune when Anonymous took it down; he was indifferent to the huge blood-letting Sony took; he ignored attacks on everything from the Pentagon to Gawker. He's kept the street cool neutrality or dog-whistling to like-minded as I've indicated that most of the "Internet freedom" gang adopt.
So for him to change on this -- just to cross the street and bloody Hillary's nose more effectively with this wacky comparison -- is...odd.
Did the line change from...wherever it is that Evgeny checks to see which way the wind blows? Did he think that if he could somehow align Clinton with these creeps that this would be a more effective dis for both parties?
Is Anonymous getting too frisky in Russia these days, is that the problem? Is RT over its not-so-private love affair with the hacksters?
Or is it that he's getting ready for his next gig as a nomadic scholar and realizes that the hottest new thing in cybersecurity is pushback on Anops and trying to dope out Anonymous' next move -- and for this, you have to give up some of the adulatory contact-high that people like griefer-professor Gabriel Coleman indulge in about Anonymous.
I mean to start another post in which I examine what Morozov is for, and what he is really about; my working conclusion lately is that he is the Bogdan Denitch of our time (waves to the two and a half people in my audience who will have any understanding of this reference).
But meanwhile, I have to wonder what's "up" with this strange Hillary-Anon comparison. Yeah, I get it that in his meta-meta-metaplace, he believes that he has grokked to the fact now that Anonymous is only the secret-sharer of the FBI or NSA in the end, because it justifies their expansion, and that the more they take down sites "pointlessly" and don't do "good" things like take down sites over the crackdown in Bahrain, they are only feeding the surveillance and security state of Amerika, etc. Set your watch for tomorrow morning, when Evgeny will be tweeting like the New Scientist that the hackers have "changed" and are "giving up" their evil ways and now turning to "good". (Elsewhere in the news, Vladimir Putin reminds us that once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent.)
In his Manichean mind, Morozov believes that if Anonymous defaces Iranian or Chinese government websites, the US government must "like" them and are even happy not to crack down on them too hard to keep them available to sic on their enemies. I really don't see any evidence that our government thinks that way, but I'm not an expert on cybersecurity. (Meanwhile, every single pro-Kremlin ankle-biter on Twitter has tweeted me to ask if I'm happy when Anonymous crashes a tyrant's website, as if I don't have principles and don't reject the DDOS as a matter of principle, always and everywhere.)
Perhaps Morozov is, er, channelling, if you will, a public message that various forces like the Kremlin want to signal to Anonymous, whom they have been tacitly backing or helping or applauding (like with giddy RT shows about the hacksters), saying: "You can expect our help -- or rather, our failure not to kill you off in the way only we can -- but you're going to have to make sure you stay off our patch."
The "grooming" of Anonymous goes on all the time, of course, as various geeky bloggers and macho mainstream news men wail that Anonymous "does good" but then they do all these bad things, too, like mercilessly harass young teenage girls on Youtube. Or dump high-prim commie cats and Chinese flags all over my Second Life servers, I might add.
Of course this idea that Anonymous is a "loose coalition" (*bursts out laughing*) really is silly, for anyone who has observed them at any length of time or been their repeated victim. They are as rigid as a telephone pole. There is nothing loose about thuggish cults. They have hugely conservative and conformists beliefs; they repeat their memes and their pranks and their rituals over and over again the way some disturbed children bang their heads against the wall repeatedly. Of course they have leaders, who in fact are in the power-curve 2 percent of the swarm who decide everything, and they have a vicious pecking order and disciplinary regime -- if you think they are bad to other people, you should see how they are to each other. "Because none of us are as cruel as all of us," is one of their credos.
Like Rebecca MacKinnon, who also really strangely called the US "the number one threat to Internet freedom" (has she been in, oh, Uzbekistan or Syria lately?), Morozov claims that Anonymous "may end up posing as great of a threat to Internet freedom as its main nemesis, the U.S. government" -- thereby implying the US is a great threat to Internet freedom.
Anonymous has ALWAYS been a threat to Internet or any other kind of freedom as long as it has existed because it has a shrill, rigid, thuggish notion of how the Internet should be used, and a grim determination to force anybody who uses it in any way they don't like right off the Internet. Like the communist movement was in fact a conservative movement against the Enlightenment and against modern free market philosophies that brought more freedom, so the technocommunist movement exemplified by Anonymous is against commerce, private property, business, law-enforcement against piracy and anything else that would make the Internet a place where the maximum number of people could enjoy the most amount of freedom and sustained livelihoods.
What's particularly curious about Morozov's broadside is that this is part of some paid production of a bunch of academic and hip journo types doing serious thumb-sucking on Internet policy, as we read:
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
Now what the fuck do these people think is really accomplished by comparing the Secretary of State to a bunch of basement-dwellers?!
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