I wrote about how I think the Swartz saga will turn out -- badly. The rule of law in the round will not be upheld; hackers and "the Internet" mob will succeed in overthrowing or at least undermining the institutions of justice with impunity; the copyleftist crowd will gain a new martyr and a new impetus to go on imposing technocommunism on the Internet and harming all our rights and liberties.
But how would I like to see it go instead?
1. It would be my wish that the Swartz family give up the path of revenge and attempting to avenge a death that may have been related to despair about a court case, but ultimately was about deep and dark depression that shouldn't be indulged. Hackers never make anyone or anything, least of all themselves, truly free. They always bring unfreedom in their wake, often for themselves. Really, the only thing that has liberated people is education. So the Swartz family should refashion their grief quest into one of establishing educational trusts, memorial, programs that celebrate what they see as the brilliant and creative sides of their son, instead of trying to make him into the Internet's Hussain.
2. Everyon3 should stop vilifying and harassing and blaming Carmen Ortiz and other prosecutors. They were just doing their job. And here, I think nothing short of the president of the United States can fix this. Obama appointed Ortiz; he needs to step up and say that those concerned about what they see as injusticies should not use the method of witch-hunting people applying the law in good conscience. Any other persons in authority, either in their professional capacity or in a political capacity, like the governor, should pronounce on this and tell people to stop seeking vigilante justice, that there are no grounds for suspecting overreach here. Anyone is welcome to file a lawsuit if they think they have a case, using the proper procedures, but hounding and harassing on the Internet, including by exposure of privacy, is not acceptable in a liberal democratic society. When Obama wants to, he interferes in everything -- pronouncing on the Koran's burning as wrong and saying that Trayvon could have been his son. He can defend his appointed prosecutor in this case, too.
3. MIT, in the form of both its president and its chief IT guy, have to step up and say while they feel sorry for the family, they cannot accept a regime that would involve them sacrificing the integrity of their computer system to satisfy this or that person's need for a political crusade at their expense. The privacy of their students also depends on this. Those who wish to create "commons" are free to do so without removing choice from others who want pay walls or walled gardens -- MIT should be at the forefront of reiterating this fundamental truth of propery law and the rule of law and political pluralism, or we really are doomed.
4. Abelson should concede that the prosecutors did their job, and if he is unhappy with laws he finds too strict for his prodigees and proteges, he should focus on changing the law in legal fashion. The same goes for Lessig.
5. People in authority have to emphasize the values the rule of law, all human rights for all, privacy, private property, and the integrity of business as a choice for many people. The cybercommand just added 4,000 people because the war in cyberspace is one that has to be fought whether you like it or not; the alternative is to concede that the communism that failed on the earth gets to have a new life in cyberspace as technocommunism, destroying people and economies along with it as it did on eaerth. It is a cold war that has to be fought on both the domestic and foreign front; it's not hypothetical or hysterical but real and those pretending it doesn't need to be fought, or shielding and minimizing those who actually began the war, like Anonymous, will have to be exposed as in fact threatening people's liberties. That's what it's about -- not taking away their freedom as the script kiddies always hysterically imagine it, but ensuring they don't take away other people's freedoms.
6. The Anonymous hackers who attacked ussc.gov and threatened the Supreme Court Justices have to be pursued and prosecuted. You don't get to threaten a branch of democratic government without consequences even if your act is symbolic or even silly. it must have consequences.
7. Danah Boyd has written sappy stuff about power and men and the Internet and MIT as part of the patriarchal power structure and blah blah. I have been waiting to get over my revulsion before blogging about it. She calls for the men who dominate the hacker/open source/copyleftist cult to start doing things more peacefully and essentially, although she doesn't put it this way, with less criminality, so as not to lose people in the war. I personally don't believe that calling on people bent on criminality to be less crimnal is such a viable plan; I think only containment, deterrence, isolation are possible until they really change or their methods become sufficiently discredited so as to reduce their influence.
8. CFAA should not be rewritten. And new SOPA/PIPA needs to be drafted and passed despite the loudest Internet ruckus so that the issues are defined, the measures of protection of liberty are put in place, and case law develops with sense.
I'll think of more, but these are the basics. They're essential because otherwise, the Internet will not be free.
Swartz campaigning on January 18, 2012, a year before his death, against SOPA, a bill he claimed would "break the Internet". Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski
There's endless wrangling on the comments here on this blog and of course on much bigger blogs with many more people about "what might have been" if Swartz had been forced to face a trial, if the prosecutor had been forced to try to make her case before a jury, and on and on. But, as T.S. Eliot put it, "what might have been and what have been point to one end, which is always present".
What really matters now is not the sidetrack of the hypotheticals, edge-casey and hysterical as they always are from the open sourcerers.
What matters is what happens next, what the repercussions are. After all, the Massachusetts federal courts are not going to try Swartz posthumously, like the Russians are now trying Magnitsky. The charges are dropped and the case is closed because he died. No one will ever know whether "the Internet" mob scene and media circus around a jury trial would have gotten Swartz off, as I believe.
But there are two formal investigations that are ongoing -- one conducted by Prof. Abelson at MIT (see below), and one conducted by Daryl Issa (and I'm actually not sure how formal that is, but it's serious in the sense that he is a prominent member of Congress). Issa is a Republican representing the 49th district in California, but he is four-square for the copyleftists as an extreme Libertarian on Internet issues -- he is for an "open and accessible and free Internet" by which he means he is for defending the California business model of his state. Issa was a champion of the anti-SOPA cause who has really gotten religion on this subject.
Issa pledges to probe the Department of Justice on how this case was prosecuted. This week, he got his fellow member on the House Oversight Committee, Democrat Elijah Cummings, to join him in appealing to Eric Holder in a letter.
PORTRAYAL OF SWARTZ AS A POLITICAL PRISONER
The two have REAAALY upped the ante here by turning this into a "prisoner of conscience" case. They've dropped the bombshell of an allegation that they think the DOJ trumped up this case as punishment for Swartz's anti-SOPA work, as Huffpo reports:
The letter from Issa and Cummings asks Holder about factors that led to
the decision to prosecute Swartz, along with key decisions after the
case began. The letter also asks if Swartz's political advocacy,
including his anti-SOPA work, were factors that DOJ considered relevant.
It's funny, not even the rabid fanboyz of this cause like Declan McCullough have played up that angle much. Maybe because the hack and the arrest came before the SOPA campaign in time. The arrest was January 6, 2011. He was released pending investigation. On July 19, 2011, the federal grand jury released its indictment on federal charges, but Swartz was released on a $100,000 unsecured bond.
The SOPA campaign grew prominent in 2012. Swartz was the keynote speaker at the F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012 event in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2012.
One could just as well posit that Swartz took up the SOPA campaign as avidly as he did precisely to make himself into an Internet hero and seeming "victim of the Man" to help his case along. All the while as his case was moving forward -- he was released on a bond -- he was stumping against SOPA very deliberately and vigorously and with lots of resources for his funded organization Demand Progress (basically a new shell for the very old Mitch Kapor copyleftist groups in existence already for a decade to do this campaign).
HACKERS ARE JOURNALISTS?!
But Issa lets us know just how biased he is on this probe with this sort of statement:
“I’m not condoning his hacking, but he’s certainly someone who worked
very hard,” Issa said. “Had he been a journalist and taken that same
material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it. It
would have been like the Pentagon Papers.”
Naturally, that's nonsense, because journalists don't write circumvention scripts, hack into systems, disguise their identity, break into wiring closets, cover their faces, etc. If you think they do, you haven't ever studied the Food Lion case. It's not considered ethical for journalists to pretend to be something they aren't to hack into something and gain information illegally. When they do this on the right, boy, are they savaged by the left (see Acorn). So there is no comparison and this is nothing like the Pentagon Papers because there is no war and no conscience issue over people dying needlessly -- nobody is killing somebody and napalming a rice paddy because they can't get a dusty dull old professor's paper; it was never about the content but the idea of smashing the relationship between commerce and knowledge (which is what Creative Commons was set up to do).
FAST AND FURIOUS
If you read the Huffpo piece all the way down, you'll see why Issa loves the Swartz case -- it exhibits his hobby horses and his much bigger fish to fry with holder on Fast and Furious:
“I’ll make a risky statement here: Overprosecution is a tool often used
to get people to plead guilty rather than risk sentencing,” Issa said.
“It is a tool of question. If someone is genuinely guilty of something
and you bring them up on charges, that’s fine. But throw the book at
them and find all kinds of charges and cobble them together so that
they’ll plea to a 'lesser included' is a technique that I think can
sometimes be inappropriately used.”
Funny, that; in order to get back at Obama's appointee as Attorney General over what is seen asa bungled gun-walking sting operation against smugglers to Mexico, where one gun was even found implicated in the death of a US federal agent, for which Holder ultimately was held in contempt of Congress and Obama invoked his executive privilege, Issa will use the case of alleged "overreach" in Swartz to further discredit Obama and his appointees. It's funny to think Holder reportedly once accompanied black radicals who violently occupied an ROTC office, so the Daily Caller reports. That was sort of the hacking of its day, if you will. Holder has more in common with Swartz than not, if true.
WHAT WAS MIT'S ROLE?
One of the key issues to clarify is whether or not MIT really dropped this, or really egged it on. Frankly, there is no definitive answer to that, because if MIT really, really wanted this to go away, given that Swartz's father worked for them and Abelson of MIT was a founder of Creative Commons, friend of Lessig, and Swartz, and there were many other ties, they could have made this go away. They didn't. Says Cummings:
"I'm pleased that it's a joint effort, by the way," said Cummings, whose
signature on the letter raises the pressure on the Justice Department.
"There's more than one issue here. Is the law too vague? Why was he
being charged the way he was when the university decided they were not
going to prosecute? Did that have any bearing?"
A lot of people don't understand that if an injured party doesn't wish to pursue charges in a civil suit, or cooperate with prosecution in a criminal suit, that doesn't mean that the prosecutor cannot go forward if he believes that a federal crime has nevertheless taken place. I just don't see how we can pin on these Democrats in Massachusetts any vindictiveness over Swartz's role in the anti-SOPA campaign -- none of them are associated with pushing this bill on the Hill; Ortiz may think that "stealing is stealing" -- and she's right -- but that's because she's applying the law, not because she has Chris Dodd on the speed dial. She and the other prosecutors are unrelated to the drafting of SOPA or its unfolding saga, from all appearances.
It's not clear of the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility will do any investigation beacause there isn't actually a concrete complaint of wrongdoing. There is a vague notion that the entire case is "overreach" or "intimidation" but nobody has been able to prove this systematically, it's just the rhetorical cry of the Internet mobs and copyleftist professors. Lessig may have the influence and power and money to push this -- we'll see. I suspect he will succeed; guilt will animate him. Meanwhile, Lessig calls for an investigation of Ortiz, distracting from his own complicity in both the hack and its aftermath.
ABELSON INVESTIGATION AT MIT
Professor Hal Abelson, a computer scientist from MIT has been asked by the president of MIT also to investigate this matter, because the community wants to understand why the MIT leadership backed the prosecutor on this case. Abelson is a founder of Creative Commons with Lessig and close to both him and Swartz, so it's not at all unbiased, but he was chosen precisely because MIT is dealing with an angry mob and needs a figure that mob will trust. Abelson gave a promising statement by saying that he was confident he would find that people followed procedure, setting it up so that he will not be seeing as leading a witch-hunt
Meanwhile, I suppose other agencies like the GAO could investigate the DOJ in broader terms as they have in the past, or other congressional offices.
Swartz's father could bring a lawsuit against MIT. Do wrongful deaths suits related to suicides succeed in this country the way they can in, say, Central Asia? I don't think they do, but they're welcome to try that theory. They could claim mental pain and suffering.
Now, will any of this work?
WHAT IS THE LIKELY OUTCOME?
Here's what I think will happen:
1. Issa will find, surprise, surprise that the laws were too harsh, that the sentences, even being routinely invoked, were too intimidating, and that plea bargaining and prosecutorial overreach are big subjects and should lead to...something. Review of laws. Firing of prosecutors? Passage of the ill-conceived "Aaron's law" that Zoe Lofgren is pumping -- Issa's partner in the anti-SOPA struggle. I don't know if Issa has the power to get a prosecutor in Massachusetts fired or reassigned and the mechanisms for this but it may not take this form; he may focus on the use of plea-bargaining itself as something he'd like to get rid of for various reasons -- until a case comes up that he likes when plea-bargaining is used, then he may drop it. My hunch is that he will be able to posture around this for awhile, and maybe even get congressional action to amend the CFAA or pass Aaron's law, but I suspect that it will be hard to sustain the momentum because deep down, he and others know that Swartz was a hacker, and they don't have their real constituents pushing this, they only have "the Internet mob" which is different.
2. MIT's Abelson, despite his politesse at the outset, is going to conclude that MIT officials relied on prosecutors to create a deterrent to hacking of their system. He will find that they began so harshly because they thought it was the Chinese (who just hacked the New York Times), but that they kept it up even after JSTOR reneged because they were just plain mad at the breach -- the way tekkies get. Remember how nothing would pry loose Google from China? Dissidents going to jail over the government looking at their gmail, or the government blocking search -- that wasn't enough. But the minute the Chinese hackers actually *touched Google's servers*, then they cried foul. Then it had "gone too far" and they had to leave.
No one ever names the network administrators and others in charge of MIT's computer system. Ever. In their lives. The tribe closes ranks at times like this. One of the reasons that "the Internet" is so vicious about Ortiz is that they have been sicced on her as a distraction from asking why Mr. Network Administrator or Geek-in-Chief at MIT decided this wasn't an "incovenience," as Anonymous calls it, but a hack.
The tribe didn't turn in that person or persons -- but Abelson might flag them as part of the problem, and they may be fired. Or disciplined. Or just have their names put out on Pastebin so Anonymous can savage them and call them corporate prostitutes and sell-outs.
But the buck went higher than those geeks at the actual servers, and Abelson will write something anguished and soul-searching about how the commuuuunity has to come together and understand that we must all share and work together and be as one and create commonly. Just as JSTOR threw out 4 million files for free two days before Aaron Swartz killed himself (was that part of the despair factor?), so MIT will announce some openness thingy and make available some millions of something or another.
CIVIL SUIT?
But there's still Swartz's father, who wants their heads. He thinks the prosecutors killed his son, with the help of MIT. So they will have to make it right. He may try to launch a suit against the prosecutors but I don't think he will get anywhere with that; he may try to launch a civil suit against MIT -- it won't succeed but it will get settled with perhaps a promise of funding a professorship in Aaron's name, or a center for computing, or an annual series of lectures. People like Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist, who went to MIT and give generously as alumni may throw their weight around and ask for more blood. Either the IT guy or some lower level manager who kept cooperating with the feds. As with Benghazi, the president won't resign but some officials may have to.
This is a complicated story to gain revenge on by quick impact projects. "The Internet" will try to do that by focusing on getting Ortiz gone or getting the law changed, but neither of them are guaranteed.
THE RUINATION OF ORTIZ' LIFE
I do think that Ortiz will be forced to resign or be reassigned or informally not allowed to work on computer cases -- but she faces a bigger problem. Every time somebody puts together a jury, they will have to ask the jurors if they are aware of any reputational issues with Ortiz, and some hipsters and even oldsters will say "Wasn't she the one who wanted to jail that nerd for 50 years and killed him." The Anonymous activity against her, as in Steubenville, is so vicious, and so much has been dragged out, that she may even have to assume a new identity to have a life.
ANONYMOUS ATTACKS USSC AND SUPREME COURT JUSTICES
And speaking of Anonymous, the attack on the Supreme Court is their first attack on justice as an institution. Before, they attacked the Pentagon because you're supposed to hate the war machine. They attacked the FBI over HPGary or Barrett Brown singled out an FBI agent. But they didn't try to overthrow the independent judiciary as a tactic. Now they are doing that, claiming it's because they're disappointed idealists who are saddened by corruption, but of course that's the ruse and the pose used by these forces to smash, smash, smash as anarchists must do. (And I'll never be surprised if we discover some day that foreign secret police have helped this effort along on top of supposed genuine homegrown idealists).
One of the purposes that Assange and other anarchists like him in WikiLeaks, Anonymous and OWS do what they do is to make it so that the target has to "become unlike itself" and close down or become "a security state" worse than it was, to discredit it in people's eyes. An old, old terrorist tactic. The Leninist "the worse, the better".
Because the results are going to be somewhat fuzzy from these other "civic" processes -- Issa's probe isn't going to yield some clear-cut disciplinary path; the complexity of tackling plea-bargaining will be hard; the passage of "Aaron's Law" may not work --that Anonymous will step up its game in trying to smash the justice system. Nobody loves Barret Brown, but if he comes to trial or if Hammond does or if Sabu finally goes to court, Anonymous will have fresh reason to do smashing of the justice institutions.
Civil rights activists and Glenn Greenwald and all the rest will tell the DOJ and other officials that they shouldn't crack down on these anarchists as this will make them heroes and spiral into worsening cycles of hacking and violence. They should minimize the witch-hunt so they are not treated as heroes. The same philosophy use on the "war on terrorism" to make it not a war but a police action, and a minimal one. So Anonymous will be emboldened and empowered, and will have fresh cases to be angry about.
WILL PASTEBIN JUSTICE OCCUR?
There's several factors that might intervene to put a monkey wrench into these awful scenarios. Nobody ever seemed to ask for or take an interest in any toxocology test. But if it came back that illegal drugs or powerful psychotropic drugs known to cause suicide in other cases were found, this might lesson the hackers' cause all around. Or if some hacker friend or ex-friend or skeptic or just plain spiteful bastard tired of reading about the "Reddit co-founder" who didn't really co-found Reddit decides to investigate and put up on pastebin that Swartz's suicide was really about something else, not his case, or that in fact he had more ambitious and sinister designs for his hack than was known. The script kiddies always betray their own, and this is a matter of time before revisionism starts to happen in the hagiography. But I think this could be a slow process because hundreds of people turned out for the memorial services in various cities and there is a lot of passion around this issue with many people wanting to illustrate it with a martyr.
The petition on whitehouse.gov to remove Ortiz has to reach 100,000 signatures now to get an answer, because they moved the goalposts from 25,000. And it will get it, even if somebody has to make the alt accounts and the proxies or bring in the foreign vote. Obama will look this all over, see Issa and Fast and Furious in the landscape, and punt. It's too bad that federal agent had to die from that gun Holder let walk, because then Swartz's martyrdom could have been displayed in the pristine way it needed to be displayed by Issa to get full bi-partisan support. I could be wrong about this, however, given that Elizabeth Warren already got behind the cause and it will escalate.
EFF, Google and the Berkman Center have kind of stayed away from this story somewhat, making only brief comments or calls for laws to be reviewed. EFF never declared Swartz innocent and never took up his case, as they won't take criminal hacking cases, we're told. They haven't made the struggle against a prosecutor and institutions like plea-bargaining their own -- in part they may be waiting to see if this could backfire on them, because like anybody, if the plea-bargaining helped one of their own, they might come to like it again.
But my guess is that with Anonymous banging down the gates, with the Swartz family understandably angrily grieving and wanting justice in the form of punishment for prosecutors and/or MIT, with "the Internet" baying about MIT and prosecutors, what will be sacrificed in this case is truth and justice. We will all be that much closer in the end to the Wired State.
But I won't be doing that because I want to spread my privacy erosion over several services, and don't want everything bunched up on Google. Especially because if some thin-skinned nerd doesn't like what you post or blog on G+, he can abuse report you, you will have no right to face your accuser or appeal or even know what the offense is, and then Google can ban you *not only from that service, but all Google services across all their products*. And they tell you that in their TOS. It's frightful and egregious overreach, but nobody ever objects -- the place is filled with vicious Google fanboyz -- and the employees of Google are the worst. As soon as I got one of those warnings -- for no reason I could tell except criticizing Sergey Brin on some post and putting a link to my blog on some other people's comments, I removed anything of value I had on those Google services like Google docs or whatever, and I vowed not to move to gmail. Just not worth it.
But Yahoo mail is so god-awul that I actually keep my paid Juno account just so that I have a backup to Yahoo that isn't Google, especially for work projects.
Yahoo mail has been spectacularly bad this year and I keep tweeting Marissa Meyer, the new CEO, about this because it needs to be fixed, it's probably their most used product -- I'll use their email and look at their news service, but I won't use their search, just not good enough. Please don't babble to me about how the service is free and I can't complain. Verizon DSL, which I pay for, offers you an email account with that DSL line, with verizon.net in the name. But it was switched over to be used via Yahoo at some point -- they farmed out the job to Yahoo. So we pay for this Verizon/Yahoo account which works terribly. It hangs nearly every day; it loses attachments; it puts things in the spam folder after you've clicked that they are "not spam"; it loses things entirely and they aren't even in the spam file; the search hangs; etc. etc.
But I do like the interface better than Google and as I said, you need to diversify your privacy loss over several servers.
Yesterday, I got an email from a colleague with the description "hey" and inside "check this out" with a bitly link. Der, that was a virus. The guy was Russian and wouldn't write like that. But since I'd asked him to send me a link to an interview he did with me, I thought maybe it was legit -- I merely mouse-hovered over it, which is usually enough to tell whether something is bad or not -- i.e. all those really realistic-looking mails with bank logos that are fake and the Diablo "your account is being cancelled because we caught you selling it" messages (I never played Diablo in my life -- go away!).
I'm fairly certain I didn't click on what I knew had to be a bad link, but perhaps I did. Or maybe the mechanism was different. Or maybe one of the kids clicked on the same kind of mail they got. I don't know. The fact is, 24 hours later, I had literally hundreds of mail daemons and hundreds of people writing me that I was hacked, that they didn't know why I was sending such an odd "work at home" site to them, and lots of other jokes, like the Internet security guru who wrote, apparently snarkily, "what are your children's names" -- like I'd use them for passwords -- not!
I always wonder why people get upset over these kinds of email. Um, delete them? That's what I did when my colleague sent *me* the bad email -- obviously it wasn't his fault. I didn't even think to write him that he had malware -- he's on a big system that has people watching this stuff and why add to the traffic. But literally hundreds of people felt they had to tell me I was "hacked" -- because that is the word people use.
Even though a virus that goes out automatically by grabbing your email address list and re-sending it isn't quite the same as a hack that consciously breaks into your system -- but it's still within the realm of the meaning of "hack" as it is understood in the common usage.
I ran all the usual virus things -- I have Kaspersky, but Kaspersky hadn't found it to start with. Spybot picked up Wajam, but that's something different, and doesn't grab your address book for a re-send. It's annoying to get rid of, too, you have to edit the registry keys, etc. Malwarebytes seems to take forever -- hours -- to scan, so I did the critical scan and didn't find anything, the email folders, a few other things -- nothing. I started a long scan and tried to find some record of it online -- too many like it.
I decided that since what was happening is that I could still access the Internet and access Yahoo on other accounts and send email online, that maybe the trouble was Verizon, so I got on their help line. This frustrating chat ensused (below).
People like that in those jobs should at least tell you to try the obvious, Spybot, Malwarebytes, etc. and ask what virus protection you are running -- but that goes beyond "their job" and "their mandate". Annoying. It would have been nice for them just to clear that day's email off the queue so that those things didn't keep coming back to me and/or going out. It was blocking email that *I* tried to send out -- one wondered why it didn't block them to hundreds of people going out of my address book, you know? I don't see any good reason for that except that they have triggers or thresholds and don't trigger the block until a certain level passes or something.
I concluded all I could do was run the long Malwarebytes. I tried email again after several reboots and all of a sudden it was sending out again. So the help desk changed something? Or? It was already on quarantine?
Finally the long scan of Malwarebytes was done and a trojan was found and removed.
It didn't seem to have a very good name:
Files Infected: C:\install.exe (Trojan.Agent) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
Funny how some people seemed to take an interest in me being "hacked" although it was just the usual email virus. Jillian York of Electronic Frontier Foundation asked why I sent her spam and asked if I was "hacked" - proof positive of the actual usage of this term if ever there was. I said I was sorry to disappoint, she had likely been looking forward to it.
Now, a few weeks later, there is this flurry of stories about Google
"helping to unmask the North Korean Gulag" like this one in the Daily Mail. But wait, Google already did that last
year, when its sat images were used and shown in a conference in
Washington DC in April by the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea.
David Hawks used them in his report the Hidden Gulag of last year.
So @Jayanth Mysore (Google product manager) isn't publishing NEW sat photos here, right? Or? Can he clarify?
Instead, what he's doing is publishing annotations that people
who are experts on NK have made because they know the scenes (not mere
random "crowd sourced citizens mappers") who in fact already annotated
this before. What's new is Google's publishing them now, not the images
or the annotations -- although some "polish" may have been added now. Are they in fact recycling to make a public relations stunt?
These series of stories saturating the tech press now and the mainstream
media misleadingly make it seem like Google just got ahold of these sat
images now and rushed to crowdsource them and put them up to
"uncover the story". But the story was already uncovered, which is why
people asked them a) not to go or b) if they went, to mention the labour
camps. They didn't.
There may be human rights advocates ready to
overlook this because the publicity now for the labour camps is greater than from a group of even 100 human rights advocates and specialists and officials trying to get attention to the report last year; Stanton says that the trip is "insignificant" compared
to what Google did by publishing the photos.
"To
build this map, a community of citizen cartographers came together in
Google Map Maker to make their contributions such as adding road names
and points of interest. This effort has been active in Map Maker for a
few years and today the new map of North Korea is ready and now
available on Google Maps."
But...come on, guys. This was available before Eric Schmidt's trip. Why
is it only active and ready to publish "today" (1/28) more than two
weeks after the trip?
The answer is: because Google has the power and the capacity to hustle
like this, and nobody will question them except a few people like me.
That paragraph sounds an awful lot like a very cleverly-worded story
that really should say this:
"We had these sat photos and people who
understand the terrain have been working years to annotate them, but we
just decided to publish it now, more than two weeks after our CEO went
there, when his hosts are distracted with other things like launching a
missile, so that we can look like we care, even though while we were in
the country, we talked business and pushed our gospel of 'connectivity as
progress', not human rights."
If it turns out Mysore has brand-new, never before seen
sat photos NOW, then naturally one wonders why they weren't available
before the first week of January when the trip took place. Sat photos
are expensive. But not for Google. Satellites can only orbit on a
certain schedule. But when states or companies need them to, they can do
it faster. Google Earth updates every one or three or who knows years
for many places in the world. But when they want to, they can make it
happen, and do.
I continue to maintain that 1,000 words said to
the North Koreans directly to their faces during the trip, or at the
very least, right after, in the press glare, would be worth more than
these pictures, which people are merely going to share and tweet and
retweet and ooh and ah over the pretty human rights atrocity, but then
it will get pushed down before the fold.
Regrettably, some people are so bowled over by the technological thrill of sat photos of this secret place, they aren't thinking this through. And human rights advocates who know better have decided That praise for Google is better than condemnation of their ill-advised and ill-time trip. As the Daily Mail reported
But Joshua Stanton, a Washington lawyer who blogs on North Korean human rights, said the trip is insignificant compared to Google's good work in revealing the truth about the state.
He told Irish news outlet RTE: 'The good that Google has done, however inadvertently, by helping people tell the truth about North Korea, will probably be reflected in the history of the country one day.'
Curious how he said "inadvertently". The product manager's press release lets us know this was a very deliberate decision, to feature actually several products -- the wonders of Google Earth and the wonders of Google Mapmakers.
But Stanton said "inadvertently" because indeed, that's how it first happened, before. Google passes over the earth and takes sat photos of everything it can and they are findable and viewable. They don't care what people make of them. How we laboured over them after the Abadan explosion, for example, in Turkmenistan! And Google ignored emails and Twitters to pass over *again* to help experts figure out what really happened.
I'm well aware that many people won't care about these nuances. They will figure it's better the camps got publicized now, big time, and Google's ill-advised trip will fade into memory. But...the main mission the NK leaders wanted was sadly accomplished: they got to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their elite and the wider public by roping Schmidt to come there and look at all their "people's achievements". Maybe they never intend to go back, which is why Schmidt's daughter's very critical and ascerbic travel notes are now published -- Schmidt -- and maybe Richardson too -- had to have cleared that.
A video made by a student named Jake Hammon for his history class, at BucsFan2276· While he and his teacher may have hoped to create a video inspiring a new generation to revolution for "peace," they can't help telling a story of a violent, chaotic, and sectarian movement.
Well, it was all there to be seen, as I pointed out. A disturbing gas-lighting, as I call it -- moving the memes just ever-so-slightly. Taking in fact the collectivist approach, by trying to sneak into folksy Americana notions of "collective action" the planks of the hard left -- and doing a switcheroo between those "we the people" notions in long-established cultural monuments like the Constitution, and socialist memes.
I thought it was particularly atrocious that Obama said that "the most self-evident truth" (as if there is a hierarchy -- there isn't!) was that "all men are created equal". But the next sentence is just as self-evident and arguably needs to be "most self-evident" because it explains how you get there: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights". Therefore, when you *do* find inequality -- between men and women, between whites and blacks, between hetereosexuals and homosexuals -- you don't just impose uravnilovka (levelling out); you invoke *rights*.
That, BTW, is the essential difference between the socialist revolutionary and the liberal human rights advocate so I think it's really important.
Those rights -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are all things that the state has to *get out of the way of*, and not supply. They are inherent. That's why the First Amendment goes "Congress shall make no law..."
Of course, as Mitt Romney discovered, and David Corn confirmed in Mother Jones, 47% of the people rely on the government in some way and tend to think of the government's job as redistributive, rather than to get out of the way of the generative capacity of the private economy. There just isn't that faith in the private sector that there once was after the banking scandals and the recession, and more and more of both the immigrant population and the first and second generations of new Americans are leaning to the socialist explanation for society. The New York Times published a Pew poll that showed, for example, Hispanics in their 20s more favourable to socialism and Hispanics in their 40s less favourable. I think this will change over time as the populations grow older and more established and have investments in small and medium business.
In any event, Obama has been waiting for the day, after spending decades in the socialist trenches hiding behind single issues (the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America and other socialist organizations of the 1980s during his college days), when he can spout these memes and have them resonate.
Now along comes John Judis in the newly-revamped New Republic, now owned by the Facebook billionaire Chris Huges who also made himself editor, something publishers generally don't do, unless they really, really need to turn an East Coast liberal establishment institution into a beach-head for Silicon Valley's technocommunist revolution.
Interestingly, Judis speaks, as I do, of a sleight of hand in this Inaugural Address.
But Judis is a self-avowed socialist -- even the hard-core Port Huron sort from the early days of the Students for a Democratic Society (Tom Hayden's radical organization). To be sure, he acknowledged the SDS "excesses" and became an In These Times socialist, even an editor of that paper, which is more critical of the Soviet style of communism.
A single dissenting voice risked "derision," in his words, by insisting that "once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism."
I was that lone dissenter. In the 1960s, I had been a member of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and even after that organization descended into violence and chaos, I kept the faith alive and edited a Marxist theoretical journal that advocated democratic socialism. Subsequently, I suffered my share of disillusionment with Marx and socialism, but I never bought into the facile view that the collapse of Soviet communism had altogether relegated these ideas to the dustbin of history.
Um, okay. For most people, even in Russia, where there is still a very hardy communist contingent, these ideas *are* in the dustbin. They aren't for people who had to live under "really existing socialism".
So...what's the sleight of hand that bothers Judis?
Well, he doesn't mention the "s-word" in this TNR piece -- Judis isn't that stupid to reveal his hand to that extent or use a discredited word whose taint will likely never be removed in America. Here's what he says:
Much of Obama’s speech can be read as a justification for a strong
national government—to provide Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,
to meet “the threat of climate change,” to ensure and promote economic
and social equality, to build roads, and to devise rules to ensure
“competition and fair play.” But Obama doesn’t talk straightforwardly
about the need for a strong national government. He praises instead “our
skepticism of central authority.”
He could have said "socialism" instead of the misleading "strong national government"; he didn't because he is still playing the 1980s game of stealth socialism.
Ah, so you would never know that he isn't banging on Obama for not being socialist enough; what's happening here is that he is chastising Obama for doing the socialist meme switcheroo, but not coming clean with it, and still ambiguously giving the nod to traditional American politics that are anti-communist -- and with good reason. He wants Obama not to duck and cover -- he wants him to come out for "strong nationalist government" so he can slip in the content -- socialism.
To sort of justify what Obama is doing, but just not doing enough of, Judis then gives a tendentious view of American history to suit his socialist belief system:
This rhetorical sleight of hand goes back to the debates between the
Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution. (I borrow here
liberally from Gordon Wood’s fine book The Creation of the American
Republic, 1776-1787). In arguing for a strong national government (with
aristocratic components) as opposed to the weak state-based government
laid out in the Articles of Confederation, the Federalists invoked the
idea of popular sovereignty and “we the people.”
Popular sovereignty had a strong democratic, egalitarian ring to it
that was borrowed from the rhetoric of the anti-Federalists, but its
real purpose was to discredit the anti-Federalists’ idea of state
sovereignty.
This revisionism makes it seem like "we the people" was never really a core, authentic principle, but only wielded by Federalists. Boo, hiss!
Judis has caught on to the Obama shill -- he realizes that Obama is coming just up to the edge of creepy socialism (not creepy for Judis) but not really delivering. I'm castigating Obama for even going that far, as he is deliberately mangling language and meaning by trying to convert "We the People" into a collective farm when they aren't.
Says Judis:
Obama uses the phrase “we the people” and the promise of collective
action to avoid a direct justification of what government can or should
do. It’s familiar and pleasing rhetoric, and, in Obama’s case, is in the
service of a democratic rather than an aristocratic conception of
government. But it ultimately avoids the central question of government
that has plagued American politics since 1787 and created nothing but
grief for Obama himself during his first term when Tea Party activists
invoked the phrase to justify their individualist or states-rights
interpretation of democracy.
Well, patience, John, he's going to get to your socialism and is already almost there. He's gaslighting with language. First, 45 degrees movement to the left, then he can go 90 another time. First establish that "we the people" means "collective action" (which it doesn't; it means individuals with rights who come together as free people -- different). Then later, he can swap out "collective action" for "collectivism" or simply "the government" in a socialist vision. "We're hear to help."
The comments don't bring clarity or relief -- you have to be a paying subscriber to leave them, and I won't support this Silicon Valley hustle at TNR now. They are the usual sectarians squabbling with each other about Tea Party stuff or history and not confronting the real problem of the import of this Marxism to our shores and Judis' long, long history of writing and speaking to try to bring a kinder, gentler version of the Soviet variant into reality.
Yes, you can keep portraying the political struggle in America as about "more government" or "less government" but it's really more about whether you have *a socialist government* or *a capitalist government*. I'm not kidding. Either you have a theory of socialism that eventually kills the golden egg you are redistributing, or you have a theory of capitalism that is democratic and liberal, not Randian (as "the Internet" always hysterically imagines it is), that may have social services, but that does not cripple the private sector with the burden of the 47% such that it can't regenerate. You don't have to be a Randian or even a Friedmanite to appreciate that business can't be too heavily taxed or it closes.
Enter Bobby Jindal and his recent speech. As governor of Louisiana, he is one of the Republican leaders now stumping for the GOP to reform and get away from that obsessiveness about social issues like abortion and rape and gay rights, where they've all made fools of themselves, and focus on what he thinks the GOP does best: preach small government and entrepreneurialism.
James Taranto has nothing but a sneer, oddly -- but I think this is cultural: I think not only does this wealthy Wall Street Journal columnist in the urban hipster setting of New York City loathe Bobby Jindal from the fly-over state; I think it's about white guys versus brown guys, too -- I'm not sure all the white guys are comfortable with the brown guys who turn out not to be socialists, but capitalists. We see how this works on the frantic and furious left, where the lone black conservative who joined Congress recently got nearly lynch-mobbed by the politically correct people of colour on the hill for not being "representative" in the way they thought he should be (96% of blacks voted for Obama). But I think it works on the right, too.
I began to think about all this when I began to ask myself: why do the business people from Silicon Valley, all of whom are entrepreneurs, side with Obama, the redistributionist and collectivist, instead of with the businessman Romney or with the Republican Party emphasizing the entrepreneurial over government?
Ponder it, if you will. It's not like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't want capitalism for themselves, even if they preach that "Better World" socialist stuff for everyone else.
Oh.
I think I have it now -- if the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are to keep having that capitalism-for-me-socialism-for-thee with all those free platforms and aps and freemiums and expensive gadgets to watch all of it, they need somebody to pay for their customers.
They don't think of how their products fit into an American world of small business and large business in other sectors that they serve -- say, machine tools or trucks or Xerox toner, or on the consumer side, say, like car, or vacuum cleaner or cereal manufacturers thought of the consumer, "the customer who is always right".
No, the things that Silicon Valley makes are invisible and ephemeral, and when you help yourself to them, you aren't richer, but often poorer. They try very hard to make a hustle around "innovation" coming from things like "crowd-sourced" business -- where you do the work for free and they pretend to pay you at least with a free platform. But then the platform gets eaten by a bigger thing and your work evaporates.
In any event, it struck me that in ways that the titans of the past never had to, the current entrepreneurs need to have the government keep their customers alive for another day. And their ideology of a Better World in any event is more about remaking everything to be free, shareable, takeable without penalty, etc. and not about interlocking with other viable business. There's also this: all of these new software-based social media companies and Big IT like Google, soaking wet, don't even make up as much staff hires as one big hardware-based sort of company like GM that still makes cars and still hires a lot of people. But the reason they call it the Rust Belt is that these jobs are shipped overseas -- yes, in fact the jeeps are to be manufactured in China, when they could have been manufactured in the US, and to serve not just China, but the growing Asian market, when they could have served it from here. Romney didn't lie, he just told the truth a little earlier and a little more long-term than anyone wanted to admit. Japan makes their cars in their own country, you know? They don't have Uzbeks make them to serve the region (like GM does in Uzbekistan).
Taranto, who is awfully smart and very good, and who I find to be right almost all the time, was sure flat-footed on Jindal. He didn't seem to quote him right. Here's one section on this issue:
We believe in creating abundance, not redistributing scarcity.
We should let the other side try to sell Washington’s ability to help
the economy, while we promote the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the
self-employed woman who is one sale away from hiring her first employee.
Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.
I have a suggestion for Bobbie Jindal, however -- he's going to have to get hard and mean about this just like the Democrats were, and he's going to have to take on Silicon Valley frontally and with full force to point out how much they are the problem and the engineers of the socialism we have now.
It isn't just just that Google and their people coded up the GOTV stuff and concocted the narratives and got the demographics. They were all there to be had given the Republican's bad story-telling. It's that Google and Facebook and all have a concept of America that really does mean oligarchy for them and socialism for the rest of us, that really does need a strong central government to do things to "help innovation" *cough* like lay out broadband in rural areas to help Google Ad Agency have more clickers.
Jindal sounds almost like a Gov 2.0 evangelist when he says this in his speech:
If any rational human being were to create our government anew,
today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of
the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government
workers.
We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.
The reality is that he will not befriend Silicon Valley by coming up with an idea like this that would involve firing, oh, 50,000 government clerks in Washington, DC, many of them blacks and Hispanics, and leaving them jobless with no place to go (Google or Twitter don't have a place for them). What the left of the Michael Moore or Katrina Vanden Heuval or John Judis type have absorbed is that big government=jobs for ordinary people that might not have anywhere else to go, i.e. at the Post Office or the Motor Vehicles Department or Health and Human Services. So you're not going to touch that, because the old style socialist left will explain it all to Mitch Kapor and he will never go for replacing bureaucrats and buildings with web sites and Second Life.
Instead, Jindal needs to craft a more complex message that calls out Silicon Valley for never creating jobs despite all their "innovation" and the government in their pocket -- they aren't really generative capitalism at the end of the day and that has to be said out loud. Are they degenerative capitalists who can't keep their customers alive? They're merely a higher-level redistributive system among big players like the venture capitalists. He should challenge them to bring their taxes home and invest more in communities - because the Democrats don't do that, and he could do it as a solution to not creating bigger government and draining people and businesses of more taxes here. Jindal is going in the right direction when he blasts the fake green business/professorial nexus that just pockets grants and then fails -- he should just add the social media crash to this narrative.
For extra credit, you can study more of the sectarian fight here where Rod Radosh, and old socialist, points out that Judis' mentar, Martin Sklar, in fact would advocate Bush as a leftist liberal (imagine):
Bush’s in contrast, was based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy,
“high-growth/job stimulus” program, and was not “ensnared in the green
business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to
both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.
Ron Radosh wrote this before the fracking explosion and the changes in the natural gas market, and it would be interesting to see if the lower costs of energy would make this possible.
While this may be overheated, it has the elements of the Obama problem of 'we the people" and "civil society" conceived as government-funded front groups that are "community organizers," the field he knows best; "fascist" is used here in the sense of "corporativists" i.e. assigning sectors in society with different roles in service of the state:
Moreover, Sklar is concerned, as he writes, that Obama will make
“central to his presidency” what he calls “proto-statist structures
characteristic of fascist politics- that is, ‘social service’ political
organizations operating extra-electorally and also capable of electoral
engagement,” that will lead to “party-state systems…in which the party
is the state.” Thus, he notes that during the campaign, Obama favored
armed public service groups that could be used for homeland security,
that would tie leadership bureaucracies to him through the unions and
groups like ACORN.
I chastised Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, Governor Bill Richardson and the rest of the Google team that visited North Korea recently for not speaking out about the labour camps and calling for them to be closed. Even if they felt they couldn't raise this "sensitive" issue with their prickly -- and dangerous -- hosts directly for reasons of diplomacy or politesse or even ideology (they probably really do believe that sequencing connectivity first is better), there's no reason why they couldn't have spoken out *after* the trip, when the world's eyes were on them for days on end while they spoke of their impressions.
As I noted, Internet connectivity doesn't automagically bring about democracy or freedom when the thing you're connecting to the Internet is the elitist New Class -- or I would argue oprichnina would be the better term -- of the dictator and his family. And when they have the "mosquito net theory" for new technology, which is: let in enough to keep themselves wealthy and in power, but filter out anything that might threaten that power.
Interestingly, apparently as a coincidence but maybe not, the news is now filled about how Google Maps is showing hitherto-unseen snaps of North Korea as the satellite goes by (see below), revealing that even more horrible tortuous labour camps are being built out on the sites of existing ones.
I doubt that the Google team said, "Let out that American tour guide you've arrested or we publish the maps" or "Start letting at least your loyalist apparatchiks connect more or the maps come out". But I don't know what the deal was.
Naturally, TechPresident covers this with breathless joy in a piece titled Blank Spot No More, the way they cover all things Internet and tech with this absolutely rhapsodic belief that merely by talking about stuff or viewing stuff or analyzing stuff online, you're actually "doing something" and "acting". Of course, much of the time you aren't. That's why I always found that
Ushahidi "we have/you need" stuff really awful, as so much of it was for
show and led only to vanity turns and too much "we have" and not enough
articulation of "you need" on the ground by competent relief workers.
"Three weeks after Eric Schmidt’s visit, Google has made its first inroads in North Korea — at least virtually," they say -- although the exact same pictures could have been seen and published BEFORE the trip (and in fact have been for years)-- it's not like the camps or even their new buildings are THAT new! -- and could have been raised during the trip. Oh, except if they did that, they'd be afraid that either they wouldn't get let in or they would get kicked out before the trip is over.
Well, if it's that kind of place, why cater to it?
TechPresident and to an even greater extent The Register capture the faddish "crowd-sourcing" of this shtick -- which had to do with going to specialists (not the "crowd") on North Korea who already had maps and getting them to collaborate -- although, again, why not before the trip?
Look, I have to say something about "human rights activism" and "satellite images". There's an awful lot of hope wrapped up in this concept. And I partly believe in it. For example, I think it was helpful to have "before" and "after" satellite photos of the villages in Darfur to make the case of genocide by Bashir and the Janjawid. Even so, just because we have pictures of a lot of people's suffering, and can now "prove a case", say, at the International Criminal Court, well, we haven't improved those people's lives, really. There is a certain kind of human rights activity -- and God knows, I've taken part in it all my working life for 35 years now -- that has a satisfying "the operation was a success but the patient died" feel to it. The Internet lets you have more and more of such experiences. The Sudanese are still dead and still dying, even though we do have lots of lovely sat photos. And I get it that sat photos are useful in all kinds of other ways.
We all got our hopes up about the explosion in Abadan, Turkmenistan. I remember trying to get Google's attention then -- anybody's -- to get the sat photos to update so we could see if eyewitness accounts that the village was flattend and hundreds were killed was true, and the government's version of less than a dozen killed and no major damage wasn't. And Google ignored me then. Finally some Russian company ran some before and after photos, but not really with enough breadth and clarity to tell much -- and hinted that more might be available, but for a big price.
It's good to know as much as we can about the North Korean labour camps and to keep pointing out this documentation. But we also have something better: we have people who have escaped to tell the tale. Shin Dong-hyuk wrote the book Escape from Prison No. 14 with just that experience. And in this case, a thousand words of his is really worth more than a picture. The picture doesn't make anyone act, really. They look at it, they share it, they tweet it, they ooh and ah at its human rights atrocity prettiness, but they don't feel as moved as they do when the real guy from there tells you his story and urges you to try to get your country's delegation at the UN to raise this at both the Security Council and the Third Committee of the General Assembly in New York (current resolutions don't mention these labour camps and should).
The tech press covering this are covering this because it's cool. And they give Google a pass -- if they ever thought to confront them at all for travelling to this country and never mentioning words about the labour camps there. Because they think that a picture is almost a substitute for action. It isn't.
Finally, I see a reputable Pulitzer-prize winning journalist from a prestigious college in Massachusetts -- Brandeis -- has in fact spoken up against mob injustice and said that Carmen Ortiz Didn't Kill Aaron Swartz.
In a January 18 column that is getting more attention and retweeting, Eileen McNamara takes a stand on behalf of people just doing their job and tries to speak reason to the Internet mob. To be sure, she comes out in favour of changing the computer fraud laws, but she points out that ways to amend laws have always been around for 25 years, and didn't require somebody to commit suicide and have his tragic death be exploited in this fashion.
It is understandable for those who loved and admired the prodigy at
the forefront of programming innovations from RSS to Reddit to want a
simple answer for their loss. But self-inflicted death is rarely simple.
Pretending it is helps nothing, including the cause for which some have
glibly labeled Swartz a “martyr.”
Swartz was no more martyr than he was dangerous felon. He was a
mentally fragile political activist who engaged in an illegal act of
civil disobedience to dramatize his belief that information should be
free. But, as Henry David Thoreau taught us long ago, civil disobedience
has a cost. Paying it is the price of the bold gesture. Presumably,
Swartz knew that when he donned a bike helmet to hide his face, broke
into a computer closet at MIT and downloaded millions of academic
articles from JSTOR, liberating information from the subscription
service that usually charges $19 per article.
He made his point. He got arrested. He was awaiting trial at the time
of his death, having rejected a plea offer from Ortiz that would have
had him serve only six months under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
(CFAA) for crimes that can carry a maximum penalty of more than 30 years
in prison.
Are those maximum sentences too great? Yes. Is there a solution? Change the law.
I disagree that any law needs to be changed: the laws need to remain exactly where they are, on the books, and avidly investigated and prosecuted giving the rising tide of destructive hacker anarchy. The task when you are faced with wild destructive revolutionaries is not to legalize them and endorse legal nihilism, but continue to prosecute them fairly. The sentences of 1-2 years, or even probation, that nearly all of these people get in America are absolutely the right way to go. The 35 years should remain in place for cases involving, say, destruction of a water or atomic plant or massive million-dollar credit card theft. And when the theft of files involve script kiddies or "resolutionaries" like Swartz in his earlier days before he became more aggressive, who go to conferences and dabble in civil disobedience as a lark, it should be a lesser punishment -- but still punishment of a crime that is defined just fine as it is. I'm utterly unpersuaded by anything I see on "reform" of these laws and I refuse to concede any need for reform as I see that is a tactic that most liberals are using merely to try to soften the rage-hate that they get from extremists when they try to criticize anything about this case.
Now, instead of attempting to change the law legally through existing channels, naturally we have the utter spectacle of the Internet jack-botted thugs at Anonymous hacking the US Sentencing Commission's website and screaming about how they will have "collateral damage" while they harm the Supreme Court justices with some "nuclear files" -- it's not clear how. The script kiddies have been upstaged this week by the real nuclear threats of Lil' Kim in North Korea, something they must be fuming about. I will get back to analyzing this if it seems like there is anything to it; right now it seems like the sort of bluff Assange did with the files he told all his little Anon pals to download and prepare for a Doomsday on his command -- which never came...
"The Internet" is still wildly savaging Ortiz and now has some new red meat: a judge has overruled her prosecution of a drug forfeiture case. The Christian Science Monitor is one of the many liberal publications covering this. They are trying to pull out of Ortiz' cases fodder to prove their theory of "prosecutorial overreach" in general, and in Swartz's case in particular.
Sigh. These people don't get life in the round, organic life, life of checks and balances. Truly they don't. 010101010101 is all there is...binary thinking...
Imagine if the government didn't have the right to seize property involved in serious crime. There's another case in Massachusetts now in which the judge has ruled that a company's assets have to be seized because they spread a meningitis virus in which people died -- and while being probed for this made internal payments to their officers. What, are we call going to get all Libertarian and anti-state on that one?! The motel maybe didn't rise to this threshold -- but hey, the justice system worked, in fact -- if we are to believe the motel owner.
You can't possibly judge a prosecutor on the basis of cases that they failed to prosecute as they wished -- if you did that, not a single prosecutor could function normally and you'd give criminals a veto on every case. Naturally, prosecutors try to prosecute. Sometimes they fail; often they don't get the sentence they want. They try to get acknowledgement of guilt because their aim is deterrence and upholding the rule of law, and that's fine. Sometimes they prosecute a case successfully and get a conviction but then later, it is overturned on appeal. Or a judge even finds something wrongful with it. So what? This is the normal give and take of a free and independent judicial system that isn't like Russia -- where a courageous whistleblower like Magnitsky who died in custody is now being tried posthumously (!), the first such case in Russian history, notorious for its legal nihilism.
The drug-infested hotel has gotten "The Internet" all into a lather -- it seems like the proponents of drug legalization and antagonists of the state get the perform storm with this case because it seems like a poor innocent guy just trying to make a living in a bad neighbourhood is unfairly having his property seized by evil Ortiz. Um, maybe. Everybody knows the drug motels in their neighbourhood, and everybody gets how hard it can be to prosecute them. And we only are getting one side of the story from "the Internet," and it just isn't a smoking gun against Ortiz, because once again, she was doing her job.
No doubt with the relentless agitprop furor that Anonymous can bring to this sort of task (as they are doing outrageously with Steubenville), we will see if not this case become persuasive, then some other thing will be found. Notice they've stopped harassing Ortiz' husband who formerly worked for IBM and now has some other Internet business -- gosh, that's just too much like the kind of place that the Anonymous thugs work at by day, you know?
The legal nihilism of Anonymous is understandable -- they're Bolsheviks.
But Declan McCullagh feigns to be part of the world of normalcy and
business and IP and the rule of law working for CNET. He really isn't.
Absolutely nothing Declan comes up with will be credible, given his palling around with the coypleftists and failure to properly report the six-month plea bargain.
Declan claims that "a new report" somehow proves that Ortiz "chose to make a case" of Swartz. But all Declan is doing is propagandizing on behalf of the defense with their version of the story -- which is not journalism, it's copying and pasting press releases.
If you dig down in the story past the headlines and first graphs that are all most people will read, you find that the "report" isn't written by some outside or even inside credible authority, but just an attorney from the same firm as Swartz's previous defense:
The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly report was written by Harvey Silverglate,
a prominent Cambridge criminal defense lawyer whose clients have
included Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley. Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,
is of counsel to the firm that initially represented Swartz in his
attempts to defend himself against 13 felony charges brought by Ortiz's
office. Those charges carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.
Once again, Declan can't even read the prosecutor's press release and the last version of the superseding indictment to admit that there were technically 35, not 50 years -- and of course he can't concede either -- he never does! -- that there was a six-month plea bargain. This is disgraceful.
If this were a real newspaper and not a copyleftist citadel, the headline would say "Attorney from Swartz's Former Defense Firm fBelieves Prosecutor Made Example of Him" not the misleading headline it got: "Swartz didn't face prison until feds took over case, report says" - with a misleading summary evading the truth of where the report came from -- one side:
The late Internet activist was facing a stern warning from local prosecutors. But then the U.S. Attorney's office, run by Carmen Ortiz, chose to make an example of Aaron Swartz, a new report says.
"Sick culture" of the Justice Department, Dan Kennedy? Oh, you have to study Anonymous closer, you have no idea what sick culture really is...
Pirrong makes the same point I made in my post that Amsterdam's defense of the notorious and flamboyant Dotocom, who is dancing around now edgecasing the law and fleeing US justice, is going to have harmful blowback on the seriousness with which people took Amsterdam's defense of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed oligarch who was a victim of Putin's selective prosecution -- which indeed is a human rights problem for the country, even if that doesn't make Khodorkovsky a democratic hero like Sakharov.
It's not about somehow denying that someone like Dotcom shouldn't have a lawyer, or that any lawyer who takes up his case is suspect -- that's nonsense (this is what some of the commenters say). I don't care about Kim Dotcom's other lawyers who are just doing their jobs and of course, working the angles and doing the media circus along with him, which is their right. What I care about is that a prominent human rights lawyer who has taken up cases of demonstrable human rights victims all his life is now trying to convert piracy into a human right. That's creepy.
Let’s not pretend like we all fell off the cabbage truck. It is more
than obvious that Megaupload was created to facilitate the uploading and
distribution of pirated copyrighted material. That’s what it was used
for. Megaupload profited from this by selling premium subscriptions and
by selling advertising to those who visited the site to view
copyrighted material. It’s not hard to connect the Dotcoms here, though
Amsterdam pretends there are none to connect. Megaupload had a direct
financial stake in facilitating the uploading and downloading of pirated
material. That’s what brought people to the site. That’s what induced
them to pay for premium subscriptions. That’s what brought the
eyeballs that paid for the ads. That’s what the indictment alleges.
That it was, in essence, a fence of stolen property. Intellectual
property, yes, but property nonetheless-under United States law. (More
on this below.) An entity that facilitated the marketing of stolen
property, and made money for providing this service.
It's that deafness, deliberate or not, to the tones of the California Business Model that disturbs me, too, about Amsterdam. I think like a lot of people who use the Internet avidly (he has a blog, although someone else is writing for it now and has for years), he hasn't really become thoroughly aware of just how sordid the whole Google Ad Agency Gambit really is. Google does a lot to disguise this.
BTW, because the usual Mr. X and others show up in the comments there claiming I'm in a "hive mind" with Streetwise Professor, I'll have to give a resounding: no. I'm not a Libertarian at all, in a 100 ways. I support gun control. I support Cuomo's actions and Obama's actions. I think the First Amendment is more important than the Second Amendment to keep this country free. I do not care for the theory of the strenuous, aggressive, and even nasty Libertarians on this subject that what they really care about isn't protecting their homes and families, what they really care about is being able to change the government if it becomes oppressive. I just can't get behind movements of violence that want violent revolution to restore even democracy because they inevitably become unlike their goals.
SWP was really nasty, as were some of his other friends (Liberty Lynx) in the debate around the Newtwon Massacre and I didn't appreciate that nastiness and it was utterly unpersuasive and only reinforced my conviction that Libertarianism is nearly a sect.
I also saw SWP in a fury at the thought that we might need more mandatory court-ordered residential mental health treatment than we currently get from a very liberated and lax system. His rage and fury about this was unsettling, as was the nastiness of some of his alts.
I realized once again why those who oppose the oppression of the Kremlin and Putinization of Russia aren't always very pleasant bedfellows or fellow ideological comrades, if you will. Amsterdam turned out to be disappointing in this regard, after all those years of seeming to be "on the same page" of the human rights movement. Reason magazine, which is constantly aggressively bleating about drug legalization is another disappointment leading even to revulsion for me.
The fact is, the CATO Institute Libertarians with which SWP seems to be more or less alligned on things like gun freedoms and other lesser-government ideals are horrible on the copyright/IP issues. He should go after them and try to persuade them to be more reasonable and rational about their curious embrace of copyleftism, where he might have some success, instead of trying to argue me out of gun control or commitments of the dangerously insane. I just think it's the more important job.
Meanwhile, I find that I have almost no company on the Internet for the liberal positions I take on a variety of cases, as always there are those to the left that share some of them but then go wildly overboard on copyleftism or minimization of terrorism, or they are on the right celebrating gun culture and violent video games.
It will be interesting to see if Obama answersthis outrageous petition against Carmen Ortiz, the prosecutor in the case of Aaron Swartz, the hacker of JSTOR via MIT who committed suicide on January 13 ostensibly because he was hounded by this case. I've been writing studiously against this thesis, and countering the deluge of propaganda against Ortiz for doing her job.
Here's an email I just sent to the president via whitehouse.gov:
I am appalled at the harassment of the Massachusetts prosecutor Carmen Ortiz via the wh.gov/petitions site over her proper prosecution of the case of Aaron Swartz, the hacker of MIT who committed suicide.
The petition site should not be allowed to be used to demand the dismissal of officials just doing their jobs. If you cave to that whim, you will face lawless demands from criminals baying for the heads of any law-enforcer doing their job. You're a lawyer. You know perfectly well this prosecutor whom you appointed is applying the law properly and performing her professional duties.
You must not let this woman be harassed and bullied in this way, or indeed any official. If someone has a problem with the way an official does their job, there are procedures both in the executive branch and in Congress to review them without inciting mobs to harass them. The same people signing this petition are in Anonymous, and the ones exposing the privacy of her and her husband and hacking into the sentencing commission website.
You capitulated to the Google-incited mob over SOPA, and you are continuing to reap your handiwork. You need to start drawing the line or you will have ushered in a whirlwind as Martin Luther King, Jr. could have told you about tolerating violence.
You also agree that your user-generated account information will not contain threats of unlawful violence or harm to any individual or group; obscene, vulgar, or lewd material; defamatory or fraudulent statements; terms commonly understood to constitute profanity or abusive or degrading slurs or epithets; information invading an individual’s privacy; and information that if published would violate criminal law or give rise to civil liability.
The statements are indeed defamatory and fraudulent.
The petition is as follows:
It is too late to do anything for Aaron Swartz, but the who used the powers granted to them by their office to hound him into a position where he was facing a ruinous trial, life in prison and the ignominy and shame of being a convicted felon; for an alleged crime that the supposed victims did not wish to prosecute.
This statement is false because Swartz did not in any way face "life in prison"; he was offered a six-month plea bargain, and even had he opted not to accept that, he did not face anything remotely like the technical maximum totals of the sentence possible if convicted because no hacker ever gets anything remotely like those sentences -- they get probation or 1-2 years at the most.
It is not true that the victim -- MIT -- did not wish to prosecute. JSTOR dropped the charges and accepted a return of the files but MIT did not drop their claims.
Next the petitioners cunningly speak in a vague sort of way about a putative female prosecutor as if not directly about Ortiz, possibly to skirt the TOS, but it needs to be called out for what it is -- a lie:
A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path.
It's crazy to say she has "extorted" a plea bargain -- she has offered one of six months that the defendant and his lawyer evidently didn't want to take, but chose the self-administered death penalty instead. That's insane. A prosecutor who has offered a six-month plea bargain isn't somebody who "doesn't understand proportionality". There is nothing to indicate that she "regularly" overreaches. This is just mob revolutionary justice, and the president shouldn't cave to it.
Recently, the White House petitions site announced that they are moving up the threshold to 100,000. Good! Because these petitions, which are signed by alts and even many people who aren't citizens of the US, are ridiculous at root and a poor semblance for real democracy as I've written.
In fact, the ability of a capricious executive to suddenly up the threshold is one of the many undemocratic features here. It's not clear if he will grandfather old ones or not.
The anti-Ortiz petition already has about 49,000 signatures.
I think the site should not be used to bully officials like this. If it must be used -- and I oppose it as a populist technocommunistic gimmick -- it shouldn't be used to harass officials you don't like but to propose actions on specific issues. If ever time an official does their job they get to be flash-mobbed on the Internet by assholes, they will not be able to do their job. Who will ever serve in public office?
The fact is, there are other legitimate ways to tackle the problem of officials you believe to be abusive (and there is no evidence of that for Ortiz that I can see). There are the DOJ's own internal procedures, for one. But if you find that too in-house, there is Congress -- and Daryl Issa (R-CA) has already launched an investigation. I find him hardly credible, as he opposed SOPA vigorously and carries water for Silicon Valley everywhere on these issues as a Libertarian Republican. The Huffington Post reported:
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is investigating the Justice Department's prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide on Friday after fighting felony hacking charges for two years. Issa's inquiry comes amid bipartisan expressions of sympathy for Swartz on Capitol Hill, including a statement from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Issa is naturally very biased, as are Warren and Zoe Logren. But at least they are elected officials in Congress and probes of executive abuses are what they are supposed to do. All the flashmob petitions do is achieve "revolutionary justice" by trying to overthrow the executive.
Adds Huffpo: "Assistant U.S. Attorneys Scott Garland and Stephen Heymann were directly responsible for handling Swartz's case. Ortiz, an Obama appointee who is friends with Attorney General Eric Holder, was their boss.
So, why is "the Internet" -- all those young white males -- going after this Hispanic woman instead of the two men? Well, because they can. That's how they are.
Fortunately, there are still some grownups around:
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, told HuffPost he would need to know more facts before judging whether the Swartz case is worth looking into. “As a lawyer, I realize that each case is based upon the facts that the prosecutor has in his hand,” Cummings said. “So without knowing what those facts are, it’s kind of hard to judge.”
The Office of Professional Responsibility -- the Justice Department's internal watchdog -- is what can be approached to investigate as well. The mob likely won't have faith in that, but their examination is crucial because they will have direct access to the facts. Their own report will be an important counterweight to what might be a skewed, lightweight, or even hysterical output from Issa.
It's amazing to me how the six-month plea bargain continues to be left out of reports. And it's not just a secret source for the Wall Street Journal; the lawyer of Swartz himself openly admitted it to the Boston Globe.
The WSJ mentions that Swartz attended a "private gathering for activists" before his death; was that a place where he concluded that his copyleftist friends would not come to his defense?
Andrew Keen
@ajkeen
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