"We will never commit suicide." (Bill Binney (L), Jacob Appelbaum (R) at Whitney.
I decided to channel the 1960s last night and went to the Whitney Museum to see a "teach-in" led by Jacob Appelbaum of Tor and WikiLeaks infamy and also a film-maker named Laura Poitras. This was supposedly about art but was more about conspiracy politics.
Unfortunately, I had another meeting run late and missed a lot of this event, but I wasn't really there so much to hear what I figured would be a canned speech by now, but to see him in person and how the crowd responded -- so that was interesting. And scary. You can see it online here and here.
The meeting was jammed with something like 250 or 300 people spilling all over the balconies and along the stairways, so that guards kept shooing people off the stairs. Everyone was wearing yellow 4/20 stickers which I took at first to be a pot joke but may have been a dated sticker the museum hands out to guests to check them in. Har har.
So the crowd had many hipsters with the 1950s eyeglasses that Appelbaum wears and black jeans and suit coats, but also the Occupy types with purple, red, and green hair and the hippies of 60 or 70 years old with matted hair. (Note: hipsters and hippies are different!).
It really did feel exactly like meetings I went to in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s (does this reoccur every 20 years?) in which leftists ranted about The Man and the surveillance state, and then somebody who had defected from The Man with a kind of rumpled suit and funny eyes talked rapidly about The Secret Files They Keep on You. (See, we have been here before).
I've never heard of William Binney, and he seems to have just come out on the lefty talk circuit (he had a show on Democracy Now!), although he left the NSA in 2001, after 9/11. I see he was covered a year ago in The New Yorker within the better-known story of Thomas Drake, the whistle-blower who faced arrest for retaining NSA secret documents.
There were some very clear journalistic questions to be asked here, but they weren't asked by "journalist" Jake Appelbaum (the evening was put in a format of him interviewing Binney). Number one, where has Binney been all this time since 2001 and what has he been doing to survive? He has only just now appeared on Democracy Now, said to be his first TV interview. Was he waiting for some sort of 10-year contract on secrets to expire so he couldn't be prosecuted?
Number two, he says he left the NSA because after 9/11, they "took off the wraps" and started violating various laws requiring anonymizing of information they scooped up, or protection of privacy in various ways. But then he also told us that after leaving the NSA in 2001, he tried for a time to set up a private consulting business with some other ex-agents to sell to the government the same services they provided as employees, namely, as head of technical affairs, or something like that, the ability to try to "keep up" with all the technological developments.
So...wait. If he left for reasons of conscience, why would he keep trying to work for the government as a private consultant? That makes no sense, if he claimed to have moral objections. And if these laws really were violated and there was all hell breaking loose, why didn't he do as other officials have done and whistle-blow and take it to the Senate or something? Well, apparently he did *quietly,* and he says he got himself shaken down then by the feds -- they broke into his house while he was in the shower and interrogated him about a complaint he made with others. I have to say -- the story really seemed sketchy, and I have to wonder why no other news outlets but Democracy Now, for which I have no regard, as it's an aggressively tendentious lefty propaganda outlet, has covered this. We'll see.
Appelbaum wasn't so much giving a teach-in about how you could secure your own personal privacy, so much as interviewing an ex-agent bent on exposing the NSA, and inciting and rallying the troops to go and attack the "security state". He handed out and posted around a list of addresses where supposedly the NSA legal intercept points are located for snooping on communications traffic. I missed exactly what we're supposed to do with this valuable information. Start digging at the intersections of those streets and see if we hit cable? Um, place giant magnets over it? Just what *do* you do? And I can't help thinking that if this was leaked by Jake now, and it was real, wouldn't the NSA people be busy moving their intercept thingies elsewhere, big-time?
But the crowd was lapping it up. @ioerror (Appelbaum's name on Twitter which is an in-joke with geeks because it means basically "something you can't read" yuck yuck) was delivering his usual victimology vamp -- he ended by saying that if anything happened to him or Binney, we must all assume it was murder, not suicide -- even if there is a video. Sigh.
An Occupier named @jopauca seems to be the only live-tweeter of the event with anything more than a tag or two about its existence. It was all Big Brother stuff:
"What the NSA began doing was mapping everyone's records. We saw that with AT&T & Narus. Verizon is subject to similar surveillance." -W.B.
"What does Section 215 of the Patriot Act mean?" -@ioerror "That any commercial data can be handed over to the govt. No 4th amendment." -WB
When we elect a president, we think they have some agency to change something. -Jacob Appelbaum
But when you have three intelligence communities presenting limited options, what agency do our political leaders really have? -J. Appelbaum
Consider this piece of paper as a way to reclaim your agency. -- @ioerror
[hands out list of addresses].
Think of it as a way to engage in direct, nonviolent civil disobedience. -- @ioerror
Somebody named ArtSuperheroes tweeted a picture:
Jacob just distributed a list of possible NSA interception points. http://pic.twitter.com/qlaVWcOd
What I encourage you is not to feel despair. What I propose is that you reclaim your privacy bc we can change these things. -Jacob Appelbaum
Possible Domestic NSA interception points disseminated to audience. http://twitpic.com/9c62cs
Q: Did u ever regret working for the NSA? A: No, they were legitimate. Until, that is, they began targeting the American people. -W. Binney
"We want to make it perfectly clear that if something ever happened to us, & even if there was a video, it was murder. Not suicide." -WB/JA
***
I'm not sure how instructions to sabotage the government's communication monitoring capacity by handing out addresses purporting to be interceptors qualifies as an art or educational event, but, well, this was an evening when Appelbaum called on the crowd at the end to "Occupy the Whitney!" because the time was up, the guards, who were clearly annoyed and nervous, were trying to shoo people out. But he then said he was "just kidding".
While I don't know if he invoked the same tactics at the Whitney as he did in Australia, in this speech he called on people to go spy right back on agencies they saw as spying on them. Find out where they are, go and see who enters the building. Take pictures of them. Take pictures of their license plate. Find their names and addresses and out them. Put their faces up everywhere.
My, that sounds nasty. And morally and legally wrong. Why harass people just trying to do their jobs?! You can demonstrate peacefully if you don't like the policies of their managers or political leaders.
The sense of self-drama is pretty major here, of course.
So, since you can see all this online and Twitter and didn't have to "be there," let me report to you what the interstices were like.
I would say most of the crowd was young and Occupy-like, disheveled, but with the usual expensive vitamin drinks also chatting and glued to their smart phones and not paying attention always.
But when Jacob descended down into the audience, people went into worship mode. They were enraptured. People gathered around him and queued up for questions. The expression in their eyes was something like a cross between how children look at a birthday party and worshippers at a Pentecostal service.
Usually, in New York, audiences are cynical, hard-core, inured to anything, meta, preoccupied with their cell phones, etc. These people had all been Cause without a Rebel -- and now they had found one. They were quite young. (Appelbaum himself is now pushing 30.)
A gaggle of young boys who looked to be just past the Pokemon-card-collecting stage who stood in a circle quietly and just looked at Jake suddenly got a visitation -- Appelbaum swooped down and rapidly handed out something to all of them which he had dredged up from a side pocket in his jeans. It turned out to be stickers with the Tor logo of an onion (layers of messages en route are stripped away, see). I couldn't help thinking of a friend of mine in the Belarus opposition who believed strongly in the power of stickers for young people -- and it's true they get stuck up all over and it helps spread the word.
The kids clutched their totems gratefully, and then I saw Appelbaum move over to another circle of adults and reach into another capacious side pocket to hand out something to them -- I queued up, too, in the hopes of getting a cool Tor sticker, but for these older people, he had business cards -- because they recognized each other. Lots of full-body hugs and jump-ups -- Jake has lots and lots of friends. He also has designer water hitched to a loop on the back of his pants, a pager, a smart phone, and I think some more gadgets.
Rebecca MacKinnon was in the audience, slowly walking through, approvingly. Outside, a guy was handing out Occupy Wall Street's newspaper which is less interesting than it was last year, and mainly consists of laborious descriptions of 60 workshops on all kinds of arcane aspects of their nerdy, dwindling Marxist/Leninist movement. "Occupy" seems to have disintegrated for many merely into a cultural affectation, and gearing up for a decidedly socialist/communist-associated May 1st action seems really a non-starter to have any wider appeal beyond sectarians. Of course, the unions may supply their rent-a-crowds and factory-printed posters.
When I gazed at all these young people so adulatory of Jacob Appelbaum, I tried to figure out what it was about for them, and what it meant for real movements for human rights.
And the answer is that somebody who can supply the frisson of cowboy cool of getting frisked regularly by the FBI and appearing as the victim, yet who can then appear at the fashionable Whitney and step out for a latte afterwards before his next gig. Somebody in trouble, but not TOO much trouble who is still walking around and talking about it, and not getting you into TOO much trouble, either. That's the best thing when you have to resist The Man -- that you not make any big sacrifices, you know, like people have in Russia or China.
I view him as basically a kind of fraud at this point, and the Internet freedom movement tendency he represents as largely about distracting from foreign authoritarians with far less serious American concerns, usually by trying to make them morally equivalent.
I also think with all this nerdy interest in the Internet and coding, there hasn't been much of an application for any of the learning and experimentation. But if you can tell people to go after the surveillance state and kill it, that gives them Something to Do. (Remember how we were always solving the problem of Things to Do in Second Life lol?)
If you were immersed in this metaverse of paranoia and conspiracy and the government with its big eyes watching you and detaining you 14 times "for nothing," you would feel a sense of adventure. Or at least, "Until the grown-ups come to fetch us we'll have fun".
The Democracy Now interview before his Whitney appearance accentuated that sense of desperado victimhood. Appelbaum has been detained 14 times by ICE when flying in and out of the country, apparently. He finds it appalling that an agency dealing with customs that should be only looking for contraband like drugs or fake watches is interrogating him about political matters.
This seems enormously duplicitous to me. Hey, if you are under investigation for helping steal classified cables -- and that's what the investigation is about, WikiLeaks -- how can you imagine that you will not be a person of interest to law enforcement, and that customs -- which could also deal with stolen cables hacked abroad in a war zone and given to foreigners -- wouldn't be interested in you? At least be a man and admit that much.
Then there's the coy little bit of theater when Amy Goodman asks Appelbaum what the ICE people did with his cell phones when they seized them at the border. His laptop was likely copied -- so what happened to the phones? He demurs and says he can't tell her, "Because we don't live in a free country now, do we?" Oh, puleeze.
Er, what he may mean to distract from here is that the agents took his phones and got all the names and phone numbers of his friends. Were they on a password? Was he forced to tell what it was? what's the mystery here, then?
Remember, his unhappy story -- the child of a heroin addict, and so a co-dependent type (more here).
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