Yet another story of a teen evidently killing his family members, inspired by a violent movie. This is like the one I reported last week who killed his whole family and said violent video games pumped him up to do it; it's like the Colorado killer who dressed up like the Joker and acted out the latest "Batman" movie; it's like the killer in the Newtown massacre who played violent video games; and other killers who had violent video games or violent movies in their biographies. Of course, there will be plenty of those to say that not all watchers of violent movies or players of violent video games commit murders; if you point out that other factors like Aspergers/autism or mental illness or neuroleptic drugs were a factor, you will be told the same. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the culture or environment can ever be blamed, say these sages, yet these cases keep coming and coming and coming. "They all drank milk with Vitamin D in it, too," they'll say. "Correlation is not cause," they'll explain, knowier-than-thou.
So what? I'm going to go on asking the question about the relationship of violent media to these cases. There are so many of these cases, they keep on coming, and so many of them have happened on Obama's watch. So I think he should call for a presidential commission to examine the effect of violent movies and violent video games on people by examining these cases, and also look for other factors whether mental illness, drugs or other environmental factors.
Yes, availability of guns is a big part of this, and that has to be studied as well; in this case the murder suspect said he took his grandfather's pistol.
What's especially creepy about this latest one is the 911 call which was released. The 911 lady does a strange job: she tries to keep the kid on the phone after he's just told her he's murdered his mother and sister, and tries to prevent him from killing himself or picking up the gun and killing anyone else, and to go out peacefully with his hands up -- no mean feat, but something she does by playing the role of a nurturing mother figure who sympathizes with the terrible distress the teen feels after killing his nice sister and mom who hadn't really done anything terrible, as he said.
What is telling about this 25- minute dialogue of our time, where murder is medicalized by the system -- the 9/11 caller seems to be operating with some kind of protocol -- is how narcissistic this young monster is. He is worried he might have nightmares, and wonders whether the prison authorities can give him medication for that. The 9/11 lady assures him that they're there to help. "We're here to help," she keeps saying. It's absolutely chilling.
It is human nature to murder, and to have impulses to murder, and that's why people kill. But most of the time, they restrain these impulses because they are uncivilized. What I see with these cases is that the restraint is lifted; it's as if through a combination of desensitization through violent video games, and isolation and narcissism, the conscience is killed or suppressed and the young male -- it's always young males -- decides that his urge to kill people is something that should be entertained and will make him feel better. There is no "thou shalt not kill message" that pops up anywhere.
This kid was homeschooled -- not because his mother, who seems to be a wealthy stay-at-home mom, was a born-again type -- but for reasons unknown -- likely he wasn't doing well in school, was suffering some problems there and not getting along and the problem was solved by bringing him home and probably parking him on the Internet for most of the time as a coping strategy.
He doesn't sound confused, dazed, schizophrenic, or even catatonic and cold in this 9/11 tape. Instead, he sounds like a whiny self-absorbed teenager speaking logically about what he felt he needed to do to achieve equilibrium, and now regretting that it was going to mess up his life. It's just awful to listen to.
c3 says MIPS is responsible even for things like Bush believing there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I think that's getting too fanciful myself. After all, Saddam used chemical weapons on the Kurds; he filled up mass graves with conventional means; he refused to cooperate even with the most kind and gentle UN investigation teams, so it wasn't somehow an insane hypothesis to make. I personally think that rather than invade Iraq, they should have continued to try to get the UN inspections to work, as frustrating and pointless as they seemed. Everything from the Arab Spring to the change in leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency when ElBaradei left might have changed the dynamics -- although some argue that the Iraq war itself was part of what brought about the Arab Spring.
In any event, regardless of how you define it, on the left or right, with Guy Debord or Marshall McLuhan or Mike Huckabee as your inspiration, you might concede that in our time, mental illness takes the form it does for a reason, and maybe there is some sense in parents turning off the switch more often than they do.
Details at www.rhsmith.umd.edu/miniMBA2.0/courses.aspxSocial Social Media Marketing Marketing strategy has been revolutionized by the rise of social
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Faculty: Dr. David Godes Panelist on the Oct 2010 Session: Panelist: Shashi Bellamkonda, Director Social Media, Network Solutions Panelist: Rohit Bhargava, SVP Ogilvy/Author Panelist: Teddy Goff, AVP, Blue State Digital Panelist: Peter LaMotte (President), GeniusRocket (cc) Shashi
Bellamkonda www.shashi.name Social Media Swami Network Solutions Please credit as above if using this picture
I put all the details of this picture from Flickr because it lets you know how social media marketers morphed to political marketers and then won the election for Obama. Above is Obama's Digital Director, Teddy Goff, formerly of Blue State Digital. We will come back to him at the end.
You know that Silicon Valley saying, "If you are not paying for it, you are the product."
I think most people don't care very much about this and feel if they get a free product like Facebook or Linked-In, with maybe some premium options, they don't care. That is basically the social bargain.
I do think it's always worth peering at the business model, however, especially as the free/freemium platforms' business model always involves you working for free and often supplying free content, too.
A tweet fell into my vision from my feed from a guy named Ross Dawson, one of those typical newfangled Internet gurus who is famous for being famous and who tells you he is "sought after" and "in demand" as a speaker and consultant. It may be so.
Futurist/ Entrepreneur/ Keynote Speaker/ Author and contributor to global brain. Visualization of my neural activity: http://bit.ly/AHTGpBizModel
You know, I haven't clicked on that visualization of Dawson's neural activity -- I prefer to see if it is evidenced on Twitter for now.
So Ross was having a Twitchat and I decided to ask him a question.
He had begun breathlessly, but had few takers:
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
In 23 hours I will be doing a Twitter #crowdchat on Crowd Business Models - tune in if interested! http://bit.ly/11N5W1G
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
A "crowd business model" is a business model based on participation and value creation by many, often outside the company #crowdchat
So I asked if these companies were profitable -- I figured to start with that. Answer:
@catfitz most of the companies on our Crowd Business Models visual are profitable. Jigsaw mentioned earlier sold for $140m
So, not all of them are.
My next question was to ask what the crowd gets paid. But his talk was over before you knew it.
If you look at Jigsaw, you get the answer: of course the crowd doesn't get paid. The crowd is relied upon to upload business cards of other people -- without their permission -- to fill up the data bases and create the service. They use it and get something out of it. They pay for premium accounts/advertising/consulting whatever -- although we never learn if this company *made a profit* on its own, running its business; it is so telling that in the hustle and shill of Silicon Valley, it is described as "making a profit" merely if it is sold to another entrepreneur and its original venture capitalists take a cashout. It's never about *the company*.
Salesforce, a much more gigantic and older and successful company that does customer service and all kinds of other things for companies found it in their interests to buy out a competitor. The data is criticized as being sloppy/erroneous/not with customer's approval. The New York Times wrote enthusiastically four years ago.
Jigsaw may disappear into the mists of Salesforth's maws, another little piece of the delusional history of the dotocom and web 2.0 manias. But for Ross Dawson, it's Exhibit No. 1. Jigsaw figured out how to get all those sales people out there to input data of those they were targeting in exchange for getting their peers' data -- and they could pay to access more for $25, or as a corporation, get unlimited access (the way LinkedIn, like an old Oriental Bazaar, makes you pay bakshish into the palms of Reid Hoffman, in order to make a connection to another person who might advance you in life; sometime, if it doesn't exist already, we will see the relationships reduced to commodities as they are in Russia or China, where you pay money not just for introductions; you pay money to get the job itself, as a bribe.)
So all those middle-class sales drones input data for free into this service, paid a little to get more of it out, and put $142 million cash into the hands of Jim Fowler, the owner, when he sold it to Salesforce. Great work if you can get it -- and he did, by not doing it, because you did.
Ross Dawson has a point to make:
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
Q9) we will see a dramatic rise in crowd-based businesses. In addition many established orgs will start to tap crowds in earnest #crowdchat
I had more questions, but it was hard to find answers about those other profit-making companies and what the user really got out of it (do we ever learn what percentage of LinkedIn premium users get actual jobs?).
But suddenly, my eye was struck by another piece of news:
Jo Brothers @jobrothers
Futurist @rossdawson joins Obama’s Digital Director at Air NZ Social Media Breakfast http://www.theflyingsocialnetwork.com:8080/archives/9175 via @FlyAirNZ
And then this:
Dawson joins headliner Teddy Goff at the Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast on Wednesday 13 February. Goff is the groundbreaking Digital Director of President Obama’s data-driven 2012 re-election campaign. Teddy Goff’s team harnessed data effectively to fundraise a ground breaking US$690 million, build online followings of more than 78 million people, and register more than a million people to vote in the largest online promotion programme in political history.
So, while Kim Dotcom was rolling out his new company in New Zealand, having fled American justice to his empire in NZ, and was twitting the content industry once again by encouraging uploads of content while he looked the other way and collected fees and ad revenue, Obama's digital director, head of Obama's "data driven" win, was breaking bread at an Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast.
My mind boggles at things like that. Obama's ICE and prosecutors are trying to round up Kim Dotcom. He eludes their capture and eludes the NZ law-enforcers as well and the FBI are left bungling and fuming.
The smart thing to do then is to start to say to New Zealand, "Look, we understand you have your laws and all, and you need to respect civil rights and perhaps you haven't, but Kim Dotcom is wanted for piracy, we still have an indictment out, and we think maybe what would be appropriate because you keep refusing to cooperate in his extradition now is for us to cease to do business with you."
That's how technologists themselves do it.
Instead, Obama's Digital Director flies to New Zealand the week of Dotcom's rollout (was he in the audience for the big show? I bet he was!), and breakfasts with Air New Zealand, which is of course one of NZ's biggest businesses getting US revenue.
It's at moments like this that I realize Kim Dotcom will never be extradited during the Obama Administration.
I wish I had a big old blank page with minimal graphics visited by billions needing to search for stuff to counter this blatant propaganda the way Google purveys their own, but, I don't : )
It is not transparent because we never learn the *criteria* and the *reasoning* and the *process* for how takedown judgements are made; it's just raw Google executive revolutionary expediency, and that's it. Google is now the Global Glavlit. We get a handful of examples of "takedowns we didn't do" -- any of them could be argued on the merits but we don't have enough information and there's no appeal process; indeed, no due process as all as people cannot face their accusers, mount an adversarial process, etc. It's just what Google decides.
All these lawfaring lawyers screaming about US prosecutors overreaching need to stop kvetching about cases that didn't ever come to court, or which led to probation, and look at the huge overreach Google has acquired to adjudicate cases completely outside any national sovereignty, international treaty body, or any court of law whatsoever. Look at this:
Why do you remove some URLs but not others?
It is our policy to respond to clear and specific notices of alleged copyright infringement. Upon review, we may discover that one or more URLs specified in a copyright removal request clearly did not infringe copyrights. In those cases we will decline to remove those URLs from Search. Reasons we may decline to remove URLs include not having in enough information about why the URL is allegedly infringing; not finding the allegedly infringing content referenced in the request; deducing that the copyright removal process is being used improperly (see next FAQ for examples) or fair use.
On what basis does Google decide what does and doesn't infringe copyright? On the basis of whether they can continue to earn ad money themselves on that stolen content? That's the question to ask about this blatant conflict of interest with the search loss-leader for the world's biggest ad agency.
By publishing stark numbers on spare white pages -- like the huge increase in takedown requests related to copyright, or huge numbers of requests from the US government -- Google can ensure enormous resonance through all its tech media mouthpieces and loyal outlets to make it appear that evil Amerika is the worst in the world and evil Hollywood moguls are the worst at suppressing us all in our liberties.
But...the reason there are more copyright notices is because there is more piracy, and more piracy with impunity, and Google's help in monetarizing said piracy. Not to menion its own hijacking of content for the sale of ads and its own largesse made from this practice.
We never learn how long the content remains on Google's servers *before* it is taken down, and how much ad money Google earns on other people's content before they must reluctantly let it slip from their giant paws. Now that would be transparency; we don't get that. What we get is something else in the FAQs -- they remove content generally within six hours of getting a DMCA notice of infringement. But it can take awhile to prepare those, and the IP holders don't always realize there is infringement at first.
The reason that you don't see the real authoritarians of the world in absolute numbers of the sort that geeks with 0101 thinking can understand and the tech media can be impressed by is that countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan etc. don't submit any takedown notices or at least very few -- they just block all of Youtube. Or all of Facebook. Or all of sites they don't like, when they want. Different!
Tajikistan, which just closed off access to Facebook, Twitter, other social network sites and their own opposition sites, isn't shown to have a single takedown notice to Google. That's because "takedown" is already the gentleman's way of doing things on the Internet -- the real thugs just cut the cable or shut off the Internet or block all the sites, period.
Russia, which has huge aspirations for Internet control and achieves them in a variety of ways, from thuggish blocking to thuggish beating of journalists, as well as many more subtle ways, has only 176 requests, 174 for national security in violation of the extremism law, and two on "defamation".
The purpose of Google's report is to serve the cause of copyleftism, and try to prove that the real culprit in the world is the US government, which they fight more assiduously than China, and the real problem in Internet "innovation" is the call to remove stolen content. You can see the nakedness of their intent, with its thin global veneer, in the Faqs.
All the examples of "intentionally abusive copyright removal requests" come from the US and the motional picture industry or advertisers in the US or UK, not the authoritarian Egyptian or Russian or Chinese governments dealing with their own dissenters. That's because what Google is interested in is not free speech, but freedom for its ad agency.
They hope by publishing these skewed and misleading figures they will prevail in their own self-interested struggles for their own ideological and business interests. Their report tells us nothing about how they make money from ads with rampant piracy they encourge, and tell us little about the actual state of freedom in the world and how governments suppress it.
I was sorry to see that in addition to Robert Amsterdam, another prominent human rights lawyer get on the band-wagon with the copyleftist gang -- Scott Horton, a veteran human rights advocate and international law expert who has a column at Harpers and who has done a lot of important work on rendition, torture, and the defense of political prisoners in Eurasia. He used to be my boss at the International League for Human Rights and I've known him for my whole professional life, that's why it's particularly sad to see him joining this circus.
I can understand why he has taken up this cry at Harper's, which is a liberal bastion and publisher of many a "progressive," but he really ought to talk to publisher Rick MacArthur about just how duplicitious the copyleftists and hackers are -- they really ought to have this conversation and even a public debate because it's just plain wrong what is happening.
The hackers community -- ethics-free, anarchist, scornful of the rule of law, ignorant of how justice works in the round, and eager to scapegoat and persecute people they think get in the way of their freedom -- have shouted enough and screamed enough and bayed enough that they have succeeded --with the tech media's very deliberate help -- to try to convert hacking into a human rights cause. This is actually part of a much longer march of the institutions that began a decade ago I've written about. It's actually personally very sad for me; when I first came across the people I would come to understand as the new Bolsheviks scornful of human rights in Second Life and later on social media like Twitter, Facebook and G+, I always thought they would not succeed because when their wave of revolution from the West Coast came crashing against the East Coast establishment liberals, despite the winning of the technologists of the war of the Two Cultures, some sense would get knocked into them. I thought the combination of Congress, universities, human rights organizations, intellectual publications that the East Coast has to offer as a challenge to the West Coast's criminalized Internet anarchy would be a tempering influence and the result would be if not prevailing of sense at least a tempering. I'm beginning to despair that this is the case now.
I totally understand your long-standing need to slap down US prosecutors for all kinds of legitimate reasons you have acquired over the years. But you shouldn't convert piracy and hacking into a human rights cause; it isn't one.
As I've written about copiously at my blog Wired State, Swartz committed a braven "propaganda of the deed" to demonstrate a point for a cause he had worked in for years. It was a form of civil disobedience; really, it was 'direct action'. He knew the consequences but thought his friends like Larry Lessig would get him out of this jam; they didn't go to bat for him after preaching copyleftism and essentially inciting him to this act.
You, like others pursuing a crusade against prosecutors for other reasons, fail to mention the six-month plea bargain he was offered. You also fail to note that these two congresswomen, Lofgren (who opposed SOPA) and Warren (who is a champion for the "progressive" cause) are highly ideological and using this case for their pre-existing cause of copyleftism and the "California business model".
I know how it happens among liberal lawyers who persuade themselves they are fighting the good fight against "the Man"; they pile on; they tell each other taller and taller tales; they accentuate the victimology. But I hope you will come to see you are undermining human rights when you set the stage for thuggish hackers to succeed like Bolsheviks, and take away free choice on the Internet.
This "standard trick" you claim is used by prosecutors to "scarify" is one that Kim Dotcom and his lawyers scoffed at and fought -- and so far have kept at bay. Yet suddenly, we're supposed to believe that such prosecutors are ineffectual in Dotcom's case but deadly in Swartz's case merely because he committed suicide? That's hardly persuasive and the attitude toward prosecution in both cases is stark and tends to undermine the wild caricature of US prosecutors as evil bullies who torture innocent geniuses bent only on "innovation".
Swartz was offered a plea bargain; don't start with the Fisking about the results a felony on his record would have with the kind of friends he had; and Ortiz noted that his lawyer could have sought probation. Indeed. The challenge for all you human rights lawyers suddenly converting to the copyleftist cause is to look at *precedents*. Where on earth in America have you see a case of a hacker go to jail for 50 years, 35 year, or even 7 years? It doesn't happen, Scott; they get off; they get nothing; they get one or two years. They turn state's evidence, like Sabu; in the UK they use the Asperberger's defense and avoid extradition to the US. There are no hackers sitting in jail for 50 years, don't be preposterous.
I fail to see what Ortiz's husband's "false statements" were on Twittter, or why you think he "failed to disclose" something that "the Internet" found in seconds. He challenged Mitch Kapor -- the greatest founder and funder of all the copyleftist organizations, including Swartz's -- with his failure to acknowledge the 6-month plea offer -- and thereby contriving a scary exaggeration of the case along with the rabid tech media. That was absolutely the right thing to do -- and true -- the sort of truth repeatedly drowned out by the mob on this case.
You claim that Ortiz "whitewashes the facts" by stating that she never claimed Swartz sought profit. But she didn't. Where do you find that she did? The damages claimed by MIT is a separate issue.
Judge Kozinski can say what he likes in Nosal, but he can't wish away the facts in Swartz:
o that he used an alias o that he created a fake account o that he wrote a circumvention script called "keepgrabbing.py" to do just that, stealing 4 million files o that he accessed servers to which he was authorized through Harvard as a student, by hacking MIT o that he hid his face with a bicycle helmet o that he logged in from a wiring closet when bounced out to circumvent the standard checks at MIT o that he ran from police
Swartz and his defense have never disputed these acts; instead they've attempted to accentuate other aspects, like the alleged mere "inconvenience" this caused MIT; or that he returned the files; or that JSTOR dropped their charges.
But that doesn't take away from the cause Swartz was bent on pursuing aggressively and zealously with this dramatic act: he wanted to "liberate" university files, like the Pacer court files, in the "information wants to be free" revolution. How can you whitewash the sorts of *Bolshevik* activities that anarchist hackers do like this, Scott, when you're willing to raise Kozinsky's being born in Communist Romania?! If he was born in Communist Romania, then he should realize that *when people thugglishly deprive everyone of choice on the Internet, and harm commerce and the ability of organizations to offer paid content and walled gardens, they are no better than the communists*. And you should understand that as well, if you weren't so busy climbing on this bandwagon for other reasons.
Whatever is wrong with the DOJ, prosecutors, the criminal justice system, torture, renditions, and on and on, is not something solved through *this case*. And trying to convert a hacker case into a human rights cases harms the cause of human rights in the long run.
Only those on the hard left pushing the hard "progressive" agenda could conceive of a prosecutor who is a Democrat, appointed by a Democratic president and sworn in by a democratic governor with Holder as the Democratic attorney general, as being "bullies" merely because they lawfully and properly pursued an obvious, large-scale hacking case with MIT's cooperation in the interests of the law and deterring future hacking.
By baying for the heads of these prosecutors along with the copyleftist anarchists and their storm-troopers in Anonymous who out the private of law-enforcers they don't like and harass them, you're actually helping to undermine the rule of law and erode human rights on the Internet for all of us. You have no idea!
I already spoke of how disappointing it was that Robert Amsterdman, a prominent human rights lawyer, known for many years for his work in Eurasia, joined the Kim Dotcom circus. As even copyleftist Mike Masnick put it aptly about this latest Dotcom gambit to take a man with a reputation for working on legitimate human rights cases from Russia to Thailand
This strikes me as a huge longshot for a variety of reasons, but it
certainly makes for an interesting storyline to follow. If such an
investigation actually does get somewhere, there could actually be
blowback for those who led the charge against Dotcom. As it stood, it
seemed unlikely that, even if the case fell apart, there would be any
ramifications for those who championed the cause in the first place.
I've known Amsterdam for a number of years, talked to him a number of time about cases in Russia and Central Asia, and I know he always passionately cared about his clients and believes in his cause -- and that's why it's sad he's been ensnared in the Kim Dotcom mania. I view it as part of the very cunning and concerted effort that the whole copyleftist gang from Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow on down have been waging for a decade to convert the cause of copyleftism into a free speech cause, and to erode the distinction between due process and lawyering for hackers and make them over into "Internet freedom fighters". Unconvincing -- and dangerous long-term for real democracy and human rights, which is why I object.
I don't care what law-faring you do with this; I don't care what edge-casing and hysterical hypotheticals and Internet screeching and flash-mobbing you do with this, you will not get me to believe in it, ever. Because I've seen how this works from the inside of the open source projects of these people for the last ten years and I know them not to be acting in good faith.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation pretends to give advice to bloggers -- but they aren't really interested in classic free speech cases and seldom take them up -- they're more interesting in law-faring, i.e. using literalist and stretched notions of the law to wage warfare for a political case, for hackers. That was in their origins; that is in their current aggressive campaigns (although...they didn't take on Swartz's case while he was alive because they shy away from big criminal cases like that, even though they let all their operatives nod and wink about prosecutorial overreach and the need to change the computer fraud law and all the rest of it -- if it were Abbie Hoffman, it would be Steal This Book).
But when they give this advice, they tell you as an example not to criticize lawyers -- they have very cunning and aggressive lawyers on their staff themselves, and they don't defend bloggers who criticize lawyers unless they can show they are working for the Hollywood industry -- they love exposing and vilifying anyone who files a DMCA copyright infringement notice that they think they can gin up as a "chill on free speech". In fact, they have an entire "chilled speech" page that they work with Google on for such purposes).
Kim Dotcom isn't a case of EFF's, although he fits in their propagandistic sphere, and all of the Mitch Kapor founded and funded outfits are happy to add to the chorus around Aaron Swartz and Kim Dotcom even if not directly working on those cases.
And I can't hope to answer all the many legal fiskings and literalisms and maneuvers and even legitimate uses of the law in that post because a) I'm not a lawyer b) I earn a fraction of what Amsterdam does and don't have the resources to study this all day and counter it. Even so, I'll call out some of the main problems.
Let me say on all the counts regarding how the New Zealand government treated Kim Dotcom, I give a big eyeroll. No doubt they violated their own laws in their frustration to try to pounce on this cunning and elusive and flamboyant creature. It's easy to do.
As for some of the other claims about American prosecutors:
o Amsterdam joins a long line of copyleftist tech bloggers and lawyers who fail to mention the six-month plea bargain (BTW, Shava Nerad is even purveying a rumour that the family says that this plea-bargain was withdrawn two days before Swartz's death, which I think has to be untrue -- the lawyer confirmed the plea-bargain finally after his death and never made that claim; the Boston Globe covered this and he never refuted it; in her own statement recently Carmen Ortiz, the prosecutor, re-iterated the plea offer). Amsterdam, like Declan McCullough, the most prominent of the copyleftist tech journalists on this, reiterated the scary 50 years, although he knows full well, as a journalist (although he is not a lawyer), that there are no cases even remotely resembling anything like that in the US for this type of crime. Precedents count for a lot in this country, unlike others, and there are no such cases -- hackers get one year or two years -- very large spectacular ones may get more, but mainly we've seen hackers let go after turning state's evidence or on other grounds like the Asperger's defense.
o Amsterdam implies Chris Dodd has done something corrupt and wrong. Nonsense. Like lawyering for controversial celebrity cases, working as a lobbyist is lawful in this country. Dodd is not doing anything improper by representing Hollywood and lobbying for SOPA. He's not doing anything more improper than Google and its lobbyists and the numerous Mitch Kapor nonprofits are doing lobbying *against* SOPA, although we could argue that some of those NGOs really should reclassify themselves from 501-c-3 to 501-c-4 given all the blatant political and legislative work they do. Dodd has ever right to try to represent Hollywood and the record industry in trying to cope with blatant copyright theft.
o Amsterdam implies that when Chris Dodd threatens legislators that Hollywood won't keep writing checks for their campaigns if they can't get behind anti-piracy law, he's doing unethical -- but it's what Silicon Valley does every day of the week. Daryl Issa and Zoe Lufgren of California and others stumping against the copyright legislation have people writing them checks, too. The other day a Silicon Valley activist started a campaign to get the US and Big IT to defund the ITU, something I oppose because it's just thuggery and a failure to negotiate in a multilateral settting. On Fred Wilson's blog, we see calls for wealthy MIT alumni to stop giving to MIT over the Swartz case -- financial blackmail is the way Silicon Valley and its hacker culture always rolls.
We just saw how Silicon Valley used outright thuggish blackmail over SOPA, turning off Wikipedia and other large sites and letting us know that they would withhold service if this law passed. That's too much power. If Amsterdam cares about human rights, he should worry about that thuggery, and not the actions of a few weak prosecutors and the one lone lobbyist Hollywood has gotten to step out into the public eye with support against piracy -- something that guarantees a person will suffer vicious and multiple and awful attacks from legions of Anonymous shock-troopers, with their privacy exposed and websites hacked, and more. Chris Dodd and Hollywood lost, remember? And Kim Dotcom isn't in jail, remember?
o Amsterdam implies, along with other tech bloggers now, that there's some horrible evil Hollywood/record industry cabal that is ruining young people's lives and forcing them to commit suicide and improperly chasing foreigners. But... again, Hollywood has lost. "The Internet" produced not only Google's 7-million ginned-up clickers, Mitch Kapor supplied all the funded cadres and John Perry Barlow's Anonymous foot soldiers already came and sunk SOPA before it could even come to a vote. The real menace we have to fear isn't beleaguered Hollywood, but the hacker mob riot that refuses to recognize the rule of law and basically used its skills to win the election for their candidate Obama in the hopes of even more concessions like the end to SOPA. PS, they lost on CISPA, too, which never came to a vote, and instead got yet another executive order. Amsterdam should be worried about that, and yeah, I realize Obama hasn't yet written as many of those as other presidents. But...so what? Let's look at the content of what those other presidents wrote them on, and see if they are as crucial to our liberties, eh? Don't see any charts on that, now, do we.
o I continue to maintain that it's precisely because there is no SOPA/PIPA or any law of any sort that we have these demonstrative cases, in my view. That substitute law supposedly opposing piracy supposedly being written, that technologists and Google supposedly supported never came to anything because they never meant it to. When there isn't legislation with definitions and case law building up -- when there isn't the rule of law -- that's when you see prosecutors making "show cases" -- and I'm not even sure that's in fact what they are, I'm still skeptical.
But to the extent that you can even say that some prosecutor wanted to "make an example" of Swartz, it's because Swartz himself, leading one of the Mitch Kapor NGOs, Demand Progress, successfully defeated SOPA, and while that in itself isn't a crime, because indeed, "thoughtcrime" isn't a crime, he went on, emboldened, to hack into MIT's servers and steal 4 million JSTOR documents. Were these prosecutors being vindictive over SOPA? No, these are prosecutors who are Democrats in the liberal state of Massachusetts, appointed and sworn in by Governor Patrick, with Eric Holder as attorney general. These are not people with a Hollywood axe to grind; they have the liberal hackers' paradise MIT and the Berkman Center in their state, not motion pictures.
They applied the law properly as I've explained here on this blog, and as Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr explains in expert detail.
You don't code up a circumvention script called "keepgrabbing.py" and hide your identity physically and digitally if you are just accidently taking out too many books from the library and using authorized access that is merely an "inconvenience" if you take 4 million files. Nonsense.
o So it seems to me, Amsterdam is more interested in "redefining American crime" so that it isn't corruption, and taking lawful activity and trying to portray it as corrupt -- all this silly stuff about "getting money out of politics" -- which of course doesn't mean getting the money of George Soros or Katrina vanden Heuval out of politics. So he sees this as a drama involving evil and corrupt Hollywood moguls and lobbyists against bright geniuses in the computer industry that bring "innovation" to our land.
In part this is because he just doesn't see and never had to deal with evil and corrupt Silicon Valley moguls and lobbyists, or else they just seem more clean to him.
o Amsterdam complains that the movie companies never directly sued Kim Dotcom. But that's like saying dozens of little shops in New York who never launch civil suits against obvious thieves who steal from their shelves don't have a case. They don't sue robbers because... they call the police instead. The police and prosecutors and in this case ICE are the proper authorities to pursue massive piracy on a large scale with large personal gain, not direct personal civil lawsuits, that's preposterous. The record industry counts on the customs authorities to do their jobs, just like MIT counted on the prosecutors of Massachusetts to do their jobs, upholding the law. Amsterdam isn't redefining corruption; he's redefining crime, and that's always scary when a lawyer does that -- especially with the mighty clout of Google and Silicon Valley in the wings, eager to overthrow Congress and the courts, who just successfully got the FCC to bend to their will.
Amsterdam concludes:
With this attempt to “colonize” the global internet under U.S. laws,
Washington is quickly making a bad name for itself, and putting its
considerable influence on the wrong side of digital rights, free
markets, and competitive innovation. They do this in the name of
protecting a broken business model, subsidizing monopolies, and seeking
to destroy crucial online functions instead of adapting to the
incredible opportunity afforded to them through mass connectivity. We
deserve better, we can do better, and everyone can benefit from a more
reasonable approach focused on the best interests of the public, not the
best interests of lobbyists and the politicians in their pockets.
We see this as a grand ideological debate with far-reaching
implications, and sadly, my lengthy experience in countries where
special interests control the levers of power may have some utility
here.
He's right it's a grand ideological debate, but he's on the wrong side of it, as are many, with the false chimera of "connectivity" leading to anything but more Google ad clicks and more dollars for Google and its cronies. The politicians now in the pockets of Silicon Valley are obvious, and the revolving door of Google into the Obama Administration is obvious. Look, guys, if you want us to believe your "competitive innovation" hoopla, stop pirating and hijacking content to sell your ads, eh?
The "California Business Model" favoured by Kim Dotcom -- an avatar of technocommunism who rightly says he is doing nothing different than Google who followed MySpace in originating this sleazy method -- involves creating open platforms, letting people sign up for free and upload whatever the hell they want, and then forcing intellectual property holders to chase them with DMCA notices -- all while they profit making ad revenue next to that hijacked content.
That is the broken business model, not only because it makes it impossible for people to make a living online with digital content and have choices about commerce and copying instead of coercion as we get from Creative Commons. It's a broken business model because ad revenue is not enough to sustain these businesses. All the AOL properties have to supplement ad clicks and consulting sales with big expensive tech conferences and other special events for which they charge a fortune. Every single web site that makes revenue really has to rely on consulting and sale of other products besides digital ones. There is no path to prosperity built from "connectivity" alone -- save for a few moguls and their ideologues and shills like Cory Doctorow, who himself does not make a living from sales of his free book but from consulting.
"Your information wants to be free; mine is available for a fee."
The narrative of "prosecutorial overreach" instead of "professorial overreach" isn't convincing and even if Kim Dotcom and Swartz's many supporters succeed in overthrowing the rule of law, they won't have created any "sustainable business model" or solved the problem of criminality on the Internet at all, they will have only fueled it.
I find these people to be immoral and will always find them to be so, regardless of whatever technical legal maneuvering they make to get themselves off, and to undermine the prosecutors and courts as if they were the problem.
And speaking of morality, I have to ask Amsterdam about the last case I interviewed him about a year ago for a story, a Tajik mining engineer named Said jailed for 12 years in Uzbekistan for the highly dubious charges of "espionage" merely because he worked for a British gold-mining company named Oxus. Oxus was first welcomed into Uzbekistan in sunnier times and mined away happily with the state joint venture taking its cut. Then the Uzbeks got mad and/or greedy and suddenly nationalized the whole thing and seized the assets -- that's what happens in Central Asia and that's why Maplecroft has recently called out these countries as being terrible for investment.
For a time, Oxus published press releases, as did Amsterdam, about this engineer, as part of their whole effort to fight their case, get their assets back, and get the criminal case withdrawn. They fought for some time on this, then finally, they either lost or made a deal, it's not clear to me. They withdrew and fled the country -- they had foreign passports. The engineer -- a Tajik in a country where the Tajik minority is distrusted -- remains languishing in one of the worst prison systems of the world where torture is rampant. They never spoke of him again. How is he doing, Robert?
Lawyers aren't required to keep caring about past clients, pro bono or not. They are lawyers. They move on. They defend clients, not the law; that's the important thing to understand always about lawyers. They are officers of the court; they pass the bar and are duty-bound to uphold the law. But that includes understanding it as they like, with whatever interpretation they think they can get away with, as we've seen in all the discussions around Swartz or the past ones around SOPA with copyleftist attorneys.
One of the big problems with lawyers and clients with deep pockets is that they don't tolerate criticism, and are happy to use libel law to try to silence you. It's very hard, given their determination and their resources, to avoid making a statement that they might exploit in their use of libel, especially in countries without as rich a First Amendment culture as the US. So I doubt I will be able to go on trying to criticize this case and these people. Even so, they will never have convinced me that what they are undertaking is a moral and just proposition.
I know I'm supposed to care about the government snooping on us online, but I never do.
I'd like to care more, because it seems important, but I don't.
The reason is simple: most of my day-to-day experiences of privacy erosion come from geeks on the Internet, not the government.
They either come from the big services like Facebook or Twitter, that just "know too much". Or they come from individual nasty geeks harassing me over my critical blog and trying to make my life miserable in various ways, in Second Life, on my web sites, or even in real life. It isn't the US government that has called me at home and scared my kids or blasted the Soviet national anthem over my phone -- it's Anonymous.
I follow the privacy issues involved with NSA's increasing ability to encroach on our online lines, and as I said, I do try to care because I don't want Big Brother or Big Government ruining our freedoms and civil liberties any more than I want Google to.
I just see Google as the much, much bigger threat now in so many ways.
Both leftists and libertarians got all crazy about the TSA -- I yawned. I went flying and had to go through those metal detectors and I didn't get what the big deal was. I got pulled aside and patted down and searched and questioned in line to New York -- who knows why. Randomly. Or because I spent four hours in the airport translating texts for a job, that happened to mention Uzbek terrorists. It was nothing. When I said after one search and questioning that I had been to a human rights conference, the officer quipped ruefully, "We have less of those than we used to"; possibly he felt slightly chagrined to be searching a middle aged translator over nothing. I don't care. It's all good. I still stare out my window at the Quonset hut with the chilled remains of some 3,000 New Yorkers, so I don't complain. I don't confuse inconvenience with loss of freedom. Say, inconvenience....wasn't that the term the copyleftists want to use about Aaron Swartz's crime?
Julie Angwin of the Wall Street Journal, who has done excellent exposes of Silicon Valley tycoons (her book on MySpace is state of the art) and who is critical of the Internet boosters has decided to adopt this cause of banging on the government's various plans for surveillance. That's good, that's what a free press in a democratic society should do.
I'm puzzled by the dynamics of it because I still try to wrap my head around why it is that a conservative, Republican-leaning newspaper for businessmen would undermine the state in this way, so to speak, but I guess it's the libertarians in them. And this is Murdoch's paper, and I think he'd like to papers do the snooping, er investigative journalism, thank you very much, and not have the government do it.
So in this this podcast with Lopate:
Wall Street Journal Reporter Julia Angwin
discusses the National Counterterrorism Center’s new authority to
access and keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years,
and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior even if there is
no reason to suspect them.
No one except the EU gets half as worried about Google keeping data for that period of time, but maybe Google doesn't "analyze for suspicious patterns".
So that's the part I look at, think about, and I conclude: I'm not worrying so much about this.
I'm happy to have you convince me why I should care more, but here's my thinking so far:
If the NSA or the NCC or any of these acronym outfits mount massive, automatic, mechanized operations to sift through all digitalized communications looking for patterns, they are not "reading my mail".
This is where you need your machinopology to kick in -- a machine is reading it, not a man. And they are not reading your individual mail thoroughly first, then looking for that tell-tale terrorist pattern like you saying you are "going to a wedding", Al Qaeda-speak for going to a suicide bombing.
Instead, they are just looking for the pattern.
That might be a distinction without a difference, but it reminds me of the two types of KGB surveillance, I think they were called operational and surveillance files. In one type of operation, they would just passively collect stuff about you merely because you, say, came into contact with foreigners at your job, or you were a nuclear physicist or because you lived in a closed city. They would pile up this stuff and not look at it until they had instructions to really follow you. Then they'd open up a more coherent and intrusive file that involved then more active following, tapping, etc.
So that's how I think of it. Neither of these things is good in the hands of the KGB; even in the hands of the FBI or CIA it can be violating civil rights.
But if there is a passive search for patterns that screens through the whole deck, it's hard to see it as personal. It's not. Only the pattern is of interest.
Oh, but you say, what about false positives? Well, let's say that active screening process went along and picked up these blogs, because they have Uzbeks, terrorists, and even lines about going to weddings.
Someone with intelligence in intelligence would look and see, oh, that's just a blog with newspaper clippings and somebody gabbing on about their opinions -- and move on. Nothing to see here. In fact, I've caught a few people like that gazing -- they should be more careful, especially if they are in the cybersecurity departments, of leaving their URL exposed as having visited LOL.
Perhaps I might earn a file because I've been on trips to some of these repressive countries, but I don't think it's much of one.
The point is, the massive filtration of the Internet isn't a direct and imminent danger to any one individual; it is only theoretically a problem of a false positive that in fact could be easily undone.
Naturally, people like Glenn Greenwald make a huge uproar of times when this sort of thing is wrongful, but I suspect they are doing a lot of edge-casing. He's not to be trusted on determining what it fact might really be a "clear and present danger" because he's always and everywhere minimizing that danger when it comes from real bad actors like WikiLeaks.
My problem is that people like Chris Soghosian and Greenwald aren't credible; they edge-case, they exaggerate, they hypothesize hysterically, and their noble and pious intonations when they do that aren't any more convincing.
I'm trying to think of who I would find credible about this, and I'd have to say Julia Angwin precisely because she gets it about the evils of Silicon Valley. Yet she's taken this libertarian turn on this issue that I just don't find convincing.
If it were up to the Kim Dotcoms and Anonymous and their friends, everything they do would be in a locker that no one could ever see -- giving them that free autonomous realm they crave which, as we know from Second Life, so quickly devolves to the mayhem of fraud, theft, child pornography, and illegal drugs, and must more.
The police lawfully wiretap old land lines with warrants -- how are they going to tap cell phones if they are encrypted by Jacob Appelbaum and beyond surveillance? What will society do to deter these criminals. THAT they are outlaws who defy the rule of law is already clear about them; that they lie in doing this is also clear. What is to be done?
Look. When you can show me somebody who has wrongfully been put under surveillance -- and that wouldn't be Jacob Appelbaum -- and when you can show me somebody other than Kim Dotcom squealing about improper state surveillance, even if technically true, then I might get more worried about it.
During the whole anti-SOPA saga when geeks were screaming nonsensically about a law that in fact would have prevented show cases like those of Aaron Swartz or Kim Dotcom (if in fact that's what they were, and I'm not entirely convinced), they kept bleating about "breaking the Internet".
So if we "couldn't" have the Internet be "broken" for the purposes of this new shiny (and expensive to implement) DNSSEC -- that is so wondrous the largest companies don't use it yet -- what's your real argument for the Internet being "broken"? I don't think you have one.
Then there was Richard Bennett's piece, as an engineer,debunking all the hysteria, and calling out one of the signatories who had himself invented blocking software, so it was pretty hypocritical that he was now telling the government to remove it. This is the only piece I've found by an engineer outside the Silicon Valley/open source cult/EFF tank, and likely someone would denounce him for favouritism to telecoms because he debunks a lot of the hate around them, too, on his blog. It really is refreshing!
But let me tell you where I find the depths of hypocrisy on this "breaking the Internet" stuff and blocking links and "putting a chill on free speech" -- I mean aside from the mute, block, ban, expel, etc. that geeks often build into their systems. (Google never worries about "breaking the Internet" -- a hyperactive imaginary literary concept if there ever was one! -- when they "disappear" your post on G+ and tell you it "doesn't exist anymore" -- although of course it does -- merely because some thin-skin geeked blocked or muted you.)
But let me tell you where geeks block the hell out of the Internet, without any qualms, and don't ever think they are "breaking" anything.
And that's in their blocking of links to Russian sites that they believe are related to malware -- on a kind of blanket prejudice toward the country -- and possibly because bad governments report opposition websites as "malware sites" to get them out of search and out of the view and blacklisted That's something that has happened to me with this blog, too, even in America, necessitating me having to write some geeky gatekeepers to get unblocked as "malware" which of course I'm not, on a top commercial blogging site with no downloads or anything. It's just speech -- but speech they don't like.
I put out a weekly newsletter on Tajikistan. It always contains some "ru" links because people in Tajikistan tend to use the Ru domains as the government is always blocking them on tj.
With my first issue, the makers of TinyLetter, which is the free form of MailChimp I opted to use after using MailChimp at a few jobs, I was completely blocked and locked out of the entire service merely for a link to news.tj.ru, the top opposition/independent news service in Tajikistan. I routinely put these links on my Different Stans blog and nothing happens, Typepad doesn't block them or block my account or send me harsh messages. It links, and that's all there is to it.
I complained to TinyLetter, and after some days, finally my account was restored and my newsletter was unlocked and it was let through. Annoying because I had carefully transferred addresses and pictures there and such -- and I faced losing it all.
Then this last week, I tried issue No. 6, after about 4-5 issues went through without incident -- although they ended up in the spam file in Yahoo.
And the whole newsletter was held up and I was told that an administrator was reviewing my account.
So I complained, and got this message:
Thanks for writing in. Our review team was able to look over your
message here and that has been resent. Just to clarify a bit more, many
.ru domains are linked with malicious/spammy content so our automatic
filters are more sensitive to them by default. Unfortunately this means
that valid .ru domains can get rounded up as potentially dangerous to
our system as well, but we do have these measures in place in order to
protect our sending servers/delivery reputation.
Yeah, I get all that. The point is this: you set up automatic filters that likely include ANYTHING with "ru" in it -- and possibly things the authoritarian government has put out there if not EVERYTHING.
Russia, Tajikistan, and all the Russian-language former Soviet republics make up one-fifth of the earth's surface and together they are the second largeset "bloc" of population in the world after China. It's a HUGE Internet space. Of course, much of the world's hacking, viruses, spam, and malware comes from this spiteful territory, and a lot of it is government-incited.
But...there are things you can do, when you have someone who is a customer, and has contacted you live, and has a record (and a real name) -- even if that customer doesn't pay for your lovely service.
You can just block the link, and not the entire newsletter -- remember when the anti-SOPA gang screamed about how "entire sites" and "all of Facebook and Tumblr" would "go down" because of one pirate link? Nonsense. That doesn't happen. They don't work that way.
But geeks sure do work that way on malware, without blinking an eyelash, when it comes down to their property -- their servers, their tribe, their rules.
They could care less about Hollywood, another California tribe with whom they are at war.
There's yet another thing you could do if just blocking out one link from a newsletter isn't practical or the engineering is too hard or whatever.
You could just block all links in the newsletter, but let the text through.
Of course a service like this isn't going to customize a damn thing for a non-paying customer and that's understood, although they dine out on their free-ness as a "Freemium" business model. When I used their MailChimp paid service, I never recall a single newsletter larded with RU links ever being stopped LOL.
I'm not going to plead a special case here for Russia and people who write exotic newsletters on Tajikistan, about whom few people care.
I have a larger point to make: WHEN tekkies want to block links on the Internet THEY DO. AND THE INTERNET DOES NOT BREAK AS A RESULT.
Of course there are blocks at the DNS level so that it doesn't resolve or try to resolve (remember that Bennett pointed out that this idea that sites seeking a bad URL leading to a pirate address would not in fact "keep casting about" and that was fictional. What happens is they, um, hang. Which often happens when I try to go to those Russian-language opposition sites merely using Firefox. Or sometimes I will get that "this is not a trusted site" message.
But tekkis form societies, share blacklists, make blockages ALL THE TIME. This idea that they "can't" do this for pirate sites is merely ideological. Of course they can and it's the same principle. But it's awfully hilarious that tekkis pretend there is something different about these conceptually similar practices. In fact, tekkies never worry about throwing the content baby out with the malware bathwater at all -- they never think a site deserves a second look or a special dispensation when evil malware is involved. But when it comes to piracy, suddenly they get all thinky and "oh, a chill on free speech" nonsense comes out of their mouths.
A point that keeps getting mentioned in the SOPA debate is that the DNS blocking it prescribes will cause security problems. Can somebody explain in simple terms just exactly how SOPA threatens Internet security?
Good question! And one to KEEP ASKING because so much bullshit has been thrown up around it.
A geek named Graham Hill on that IT security site answers and thinks he has the simple, correct, only answer:
o attackers may use false infringement claims as a denial-of-service attack. o ISPs may start doing deep packet inspection on their customer's traffic, to look for infringing content. o it may interfere with the effectiveness of, or take-up of, DNSSEC.
Let's take that last one first: we just saw (above) this same site discuss how big corporations aren't using this. It's expensive, hard, and unnecessary as they can use other things. The military uses it. Some sites, like Paypal evidently, uses it. But not everybody. Far from everybody. It is still controversial. So all that hoopla about how SOPA would "break" this thing was fake. Even if they did decide to use this new regime, it's not at all clear to me that DNSSEC would in fact be incompatible with a simple practice of blocking the big piracy sites for commercial gain. Like I said: geeks block sites all the time.
Next up: ISPs "may" start doing deep packet inspection looking for infringement. Well, no. There was never anything remotely like that in the text of the bill. This was a tekkie hysterical hypethical. They believed the ISPs would be on the hook for enforcement, when in fact the regime would continue as it always did: WHEN they get a report of infringement, THEN they act. Nothing pro-active was required of them; indeed, in the text of the bill, it specifically said that they need not pro-actively monitor. That would remove their "save haven." SOPA was not about removing that.
No ISP would undertake the expense, headache, and time to do this when the law did not require it. It was a way for tekkies to pretend that to stop these few pirate sites, somebody would have to sift through haystacks looking for needles. No, the needles were already easily found with a magnet. Next.
Now for the first claim, well, it's that paranoid geek thinking that projects the way they think and act on others who in fact don't work that way as they aren't binary and literalist. IF a false report is given (like on my blog, or by authoritarian governments claiming opposition is malware) then...you investigate it and fix it. It's not really the big deal claimed. Please find me the cases and case law on people claiming infringement to shut down *legitimate* expression -- and don't use Kit Dotcom or dajaz1.
Hal Abelson (L), Eric Salzman, and Larry Lessig (R). Photo by David Kindler, Dec. 8, 2012.
Prof. Abelson, the Creative Commons founder and MIT computer scientist chosen to investigate MIT's role in Aaron Swartz's prosecution, has made a statement about his investigation here. Interestingly, he says this:
I expect to find that every person acted in accordance with MIT policy. More than that: they acted in the belief that their actions were legally and ethically proper.
Well, like Lessig at Harvard, Abelson likely doesn't want to lose his position over this and so perhaps he is setting the stage for simply finding "tragedy" -- human error, lapses in judgement, negligence that wasn't malicious -- or simply beliefs that people were doing right that they could only see as "wrong" in retrospect.
It really is important what he ends up saying, and whether he exonerates MIT or condemns it. I hope it's the former, and that the extremists are put down.
But...He was obviously chosen not due to his impartiality, but due to his credibility/trust factor for the baying mob who want blood over this death -- the extreme hacker community.
Here's my response, in the moderation queue as it always is at these "open source" cultists' websites:
Prof. Abelson,
While I understand the reasons for the MIT president selecting you for this role when he is facing a baying mob of hackers, relatives and media, it must be said that despite your computer science credentials, you are not a credible person for this investigation.
That's because you are a founder of Creative Commons, and therefore a believer in decoupling commerce from copying and discouraging payment online for content -- in a word, a copyleftist. That's a conflict of interest because you will be supportive of what Swartz did as a hacker to smash the ability of JSTOR and MIT to charge for content or create walled gardens for content.
It was to pursue his mentor Lessig's obvious goal of removing commercial enterprise from knowledge transfer and indeed all digital content that Swartz made a deliberate act, a "propaganda of the deed" abusing MIT's servers.
This tragedy is too big and has too many public policy consequences not only for MIT but US law in general that you should have a whole commission, of both professors and lawyers, and not just hackers and copyleftists, but those also devoted to the integrity of the Internet for a variety of purposes outside the open source cult. It should be more impartial and credible than it is now.
You are always so incomplete and tendentious in your reporting of this story.
Once again, you failed to mention the six-month plea bargain offered by Ortiz before Swartz's death, and Ortiz's public statement after his death that reiterated it and noted his lawyer was free to seek probation. Name one case of a hacker who has gotten anything remotely like 35 years or even 7 years in America. They get 1-2 at the most; may get off.
You fail to know that Abelson is hardly a credible investigator because he's a founder of Creative Commons and avid supporter of the copyleftist cause. Maybe MIT thinks they can fend off criticism from the rabidly extreme hacking community inside and outside of MIT, but for the larger public, Abelson is not credible. If it is that serious, there should be a panel that has various views, of lawyers as well as computer scientists.
The questions invited aren't "from the public" as the public cannot comment there, but only of the MIT community.
I don't see that MIT is fairly characterized as "acting as prosecutors". Aaron broke into their servers disguising his identity and using a circumvention script and took 4 million files. It doesn't matter what JSTOR says or whether JSTOR thinks it wasn't harmed now, under pressure from the mob, of course. MIT has a right to protect its servers. It has a reputation already for being open and lax and catering to the hacking egos. So they draw limits and they drew them there, and that's okay. They suffered damage and had to clean up. And they have to have a credible deterrent or there servers will be on open season and also used to hack and harass and steal from others.
The rule of law gets to be applied over the unruly Internet; it's not special.
It's almost gotten so that when you see yet another one of these, you don't look, or you look and try to forget quickly, so saturated was the media with the massacre in Newtown.
Well, actually, not that saturated. There were so many questions left unanswered that the media never returned to. Did the forensic investigators get anything from the smashed hard drives? Did the teacher who was just shot in the foot and who was expected to recover ever talk to police or shed any light on the crime? What about that brain autopsy? And could we put to rest some of these crazy conspiracies that hinge on things like "a man arrested in the woods"?
Lacking specific information, the media has gone off reporting the impressions of Lanza's barber, who described Nancy Lanza as very controlling -- because apparently, that was what was required to get her son even to function -- or come up with the detail that he was wearing earplugs during the shooting.
The Washington Post ran a weepy story claiming that the reason we didn't know about Lanza was because he was "in the cloud", and got Sherry Turkle, the veteran computer and Internet expert (I remember her from before there even was an Internet!), to channel her narrative about his "isolation". Then an autism patient and activist was interviewed to lead us to the conclusion that the hard drive was smashed because it represented some isolated world.
It's very hard to get people to remain curious, open-minded, and actively researching the connections with psychotropic drugs, the autism spectrum, and violent video games. We didn't hear from the autopsy yet, apparently, as to what medications were in Lanza's system.
So the next atrocity comes along -- this time, a 15-year old in New Mexico who casually massacres his family; his father is a pastor, and reformed gang member who taught his son to shoot. He is said to be "frustrated" with his mother. The surviving relatives beg "the media" not to portray this monster who just murdered his whole family including his littlest sister, age two, as "not a monster". Why? Why can't we stigmatize murder?! Must we medicalize even that?
This little monster is still alive, so perhaps we'll get more facts than we've had from the Lanza case. But there's this, on page three:
Griego reportedly gushed to police about his love for violent video games during the interrogation, Houston said. He told police he loved to play Modern Warfare and Grand Theft Auto.
"The suspect was involved heavily in games, violent games, it's what he was into," Houston said. "He was quite excited as he discussed this with our investigators."
Houston said that Griego had occasionally lost touch with his family and then reconnected with them multiple times in his life. He told investigators that his father had taught him how to shoot the weapons and the pair had practiced shooting them together.
Heaven forfend that we ever, ever connect these atrocities to violent video games, even if the perpetrators themselves excitedly explain this to investigators. Ever. In our lives.
As for autism, that may be at issue here, we don't know yet. And I utterly reject the demand never to ask questions about this and never posit that there may indeed be a connection between these massacres and some forms of Aspergers/autism, when combined with drugs or violent video games -- and of course the easy access to guns (this latest maniac took his father's guns out of a cabinet).
I asked the question about the connection with violent video games from the outset with Lanza, and of course there was naturally a slew of objections; I persisted in asking the question and making this hypothesis because I saw an interesting phenomenon -- some gamers were so revolted by the Newtown massacre that they said they were giving up their violent video games. That let me know of the moral and spiritual connection even if people persist in demanding more "proof" -- they'll do this endlessly.
As they will for the Asperger's connection -- I posited the theory that what happens is that parents are heavily invested in being heros and trying to sacrifice everything to take care of difficult children who are volatile and angry and are the ones constantly intervening to keep them from becoming violent, but then they snap and are no longer able to cope. This doesn't happen in all cases; but it does happen in some. I just think you have to keep an open mind about this and not get into hostile denial which is what we're seeing.
You even have this incredibly loony version of the world posited by Second Lifer and old DEC programmer and TOR maven Shava Nerad on G+, who says that Aspies are special beings with rare theta brain waves that make them smarter than the rest of us -- make her smarter than the rest of us -- and they are the next wave in evolution who will be able to cope better with all the challenges of the planet because, well, they're just superior human beings. We "neurotypicals" are in the way of progress. I was going to write a very long rebuttal of this craziness and then I thought maybe a one-liner would be better: write when you get work. I hope your theta brain waves put food on the table, seriously.
Kotaku, the gaming website, remains in virulent and violent denial about any connection between video games and violence:
Just look at that sentence. "Nehemiah Griego did not elaborate on a
motive for the shocking crime, but he had plenty to say about his love
for video games"—as if there's some connection between his motive for
killing his entire family and his love for video games.
Well, because in fact scholarly studes say there is. You keep suppressing this.
One wonders how many of these atrocities it will take. And why everybody can't simply take more care. If you have children on the autism spectrum, stop being a hero and admit it's hard and get more help -- talk about it, despite the horrendous controlling types like Sarah Kendzior who try to shut you up by invocating everything from your own sanity and parental skills to your child's privacy.
And monitor your children playing violent video games. It has to start with parents. It won't start with anyone else. And maybe it shouldn't be anyone else's responsibility. But parents can be expected to assume this responsibility when the gaming industry stops saturating their controlled tech and gaming media with denial.
If you're like me, and you've been steeped in human rights for 35 years, you will read this handy meme poster from wh.gov and ask yourself "what's wrong with this picture".
If you're looking for the "guidestar" for the struggles for women's rights, the rights of blacks, and the rights of LGBT, and you were mining the preamble of the Constitution, wouldn't you pick "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights"? Isn't the inherency of rights acknowledged in the Constitution -- regardless of whether you believe in God -- your lodestone? Sure, "all men are created equal" -- but given that the "men" who first wrote that line didn't include women, blacks, or gays, don't you think it's helpful to root your struggle in the second line, about "inalieable rights" -- the means by which "equality" actually got its meaning? And couldn't you put them BOTH, when it comes down to it? Why would you go out of your way to accentuate the first as "the most self evident" in this fashion? Why?
I hope you will be sincere and think about this and realize that the answer to this question comes in the socialism that informs Obama's persona, regardless of whether or not "he is a socialist" in some rigid definition.
Already, whitehouse.gov is busy making social-media-ready posterlets you can meme around -- like this one above -- and there is gushing on Facebook and Twitter everywhere in the land about all the moving things the president says.
Well, I didn't vote for him so I beg to differ. I'm glad he mentioned gay rights and climate change -- but of course, even there he is merely dog-whistling and meming to leftist constituencies and not really going to the mat for a federal law on gay marriage rights -- but as I'm finding, gays are apparently easily placated. The climate change stuff sticks out to somebody like Newt Ginrich, who derided the "goofy leftism" in the speech, but only by responding to that red meat, then he doesn't take any intellectual leadership on the real intellectual problems of socialistic thinking in the speech -- and maybe that's deliberate.
Climate change doesn't bother me as a topic: if somebody wants to stop pollution, improve recycling, use alternative energy, I don't see anything wrong with it -- I don't have a car and I live in a small apartment. The theology and righteousness around the climate change crowd is annoying, and unlike Naomi Wolf, I surely don't think we need to install communism to have it, but eventually, I'm confident reason will prevail and compromises will be found. To be sure, what Obama tries to pull off here -- as so many do -- is a confusion between consciousness of the facts of climate change that appear before us like floods with an imperative then to all think the same way about what should be done about these realities. The debate that is always about whether or not to believe the dogma on climate change should be transposed to a debate about what leftists then want to do about it, because then we can smoke out the ideological from the practical.
He begins by affirming faith in "the enduring strength of our Constitution" and "the promise of our democracy" so that you can't possibly suspect any socialism/communism here and if you do, why, you aren't as American as the president!
What makes us American -- and I agree -- is our allegiance "to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago," says Obama:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
No one has ever successfully used these words to try to back up their socialist platform, let along their communist platform because they speak about rights and liberty, two things that those systems, in the hands of authoritarians (let's not have that usual boring debate about Sweden) never have.
But Obama's speech writers cunningly succeed in twisting this.
Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.
Right. Translate that as: "let's adopt these very well-worn and familiar memes to our socialist agenda if we can".
For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. (Applause.)
Well, they can't be self-executing, big guy, invoking God as you will. That's because freedom means that they don't self-execute. But when you talk about securing him by "His people here on earth," you must mean yourself, because what you lay out is a vision of state-supplied security.
The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.
Oh, bollocks. "We are the 99%," eh? The US isn't a country with only "the privileges of a few," even though the New York Times breathlessly reports that distribution of wealth in Manhattan is "like Sierra Leone". Sigh. At least he is willing to concede that we shouldn't replace tyranny of a king with "rule of a mob," although that is exactly what we are getting with technocommunism on the Internet. See SOPA.
Now Obama warms to his topic. This republic was never very great because it was only "half-free" because it was "half-slave". Not everyone would see it that way. Increasingly, there is a school of thought that says the institutions created by these framers are tainted because they did not include women, minorities, and gays at the very beginning. That people used the second sentence in the preamble to get the first sentence for all seems to escape them..
Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.
Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.
I'm actually in agreement with the idea that there have to be rules against monopolies and cronyism and fair play; I'm not a Randism, a Friedmanite, a market absolutist as some of the libertarians are that dislike Obama (or on the contrary, voted for him for other reasons). Social justice doesn't bother me. Laws against pollution or for clean air or alternative energy don't seem to me to threaten business, but require innovation for business because we can't endlessly use up resources. But I'm not sure that when Obama, the product of DSA, the Socialist Scholars' Conference and the community organizing movement talks about "rules" that he means the same thing as I would. I suspect not.
Here is where everything goes horribly, nightmarishly wrong in the speech, and I hope people are paying attention:
Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character.
But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.
No. No. No.
First, despite the changes of times, er, we do retain our skepticism of central authority -- especially of Obama. Those constants in our character I think will bring us out of the Obama socialistic phase. We do not need "collective action" -- code word for collectivism. You preserve individual freedoms by exercising individual freedoms, not forming collectives and embracing collectivism. Don't confuse collaboration of free individuals with collectivism.
How dare Obama invoke the fight against facism or communism as something that people "couldn't do alone" in service to his collectivist ideology?! There's a difference between people forming associations, parties, movements, concerted factions in government and fighting these things through celebration of the rights of the individual, and what he's talking about, which is collectivism of the very sort that those ideologies fought. That's why this is so sneaky.
And here's where it gets preposterous, demagogic and dangerous:
No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people. (Applause.)
Er, really, what the hell is that all about? We've never had a single person who did those things. It wasn't Ford or Rockefeller, if that's your point; it wasn't Robert Moses. Obama seems to be dog-whistling here to those who hate rich industrialists but it's an absurdity -- communities, religious organizations, unions, these have always been what built and trained and researched and did business, not big industrialists, who are only part of the economy. What is he going on about?
And more woo-woo about "endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention"; we are "made for this moment, and we will seizit it" -- but again, that collectivist call "so long as we seize it together"
No. We don't to collectivize even to have a spirit of bi-partisan cooperation -- which we don't really have and I'm really not certain that it's a bad thing. So often when we get the eye-rolls from Michelle Obama about Boehner or the ranting about how Congress is "blocking progress," we're getting a socialist steam-roll -- we're not allowed to have debate; we're not allowed to question where the hell we will get all the money to pay out all those social entitlements. Too often this debate is caricaturized on the left as a "call to abolish Social Security and Medicare" and blah blah, even if somebody just wants cuts. It's insane.
And here -- more 99% hogwash -- "For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.
If there is a shrinking few, the reasons are complex, and are not fixed by socialism. Does anybody ever ask whether the boom in credit cards in the 1970s that preceded the boom in mortgages in the 1990s might all be part of an excessive realization of the dream by living beyond your means, i.e. an end to that ethos of hard work and sacrifice the president wanted to invoke earlier? These "shrinking few" still pay the overwhelming percentage of the state budget with their taxes. Shouldn't somebody say thankyou?
The rhetoric about little girls born in poverty brought applause, but that little girl existed even before Obama, in a country that made it possible for Michelle Obama herself to come to power.
And now comes the Soviet speed-up, the Soviet Stakhanovite labour; the Soviet collective farm; the Soviet perestroika:
We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. So we must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.
Whenever someone tells you they need to empower you, head for the hills.
And now, the deft emotional manipulation to try to get the people who complain about too many entitlements to feel as if they are uncaring -- but with a heavy dollop again of collectivization:
We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us. (Applause.) They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. (Applause.)
It's fashionable for the New Realists to slam the neo-cons whom they think brought us war for democracy abroad to ensure our safety at home and failed at both. But they should realize their favourite president is far more an idealist than the neo-cons. For one, he thinks that the decade of war is "over" merely because he decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. It is far from the case. For two, he thinks "enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war" as if automatically, all terrorists and hostile nations will stand down just because he thinks so. His policy of "engagement" which can "more durably lift suspicion and fear" and avoid war hasn't worked through his first term (see Iran; see Russia).
And look out here for what is to replace that "perpetual war" and what will animate that "engagement" -- no human rights:
And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice –- not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice.
None of those four things mentioned are about human rights; they are about careful progression of the status quo, at best.
Now comes the money graph that no one will criticize because they find it the most stirring:
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. (Applause.)
I'm all for Seneca Falls (women's rights, and I bet not everybody got that reference), Selma (black rights) and Stonewall (gay rights). This is all indeed a stirring and alliterative section of the speech.
But no framer -- no interpreter -- nobody -- ever said that there are some truths that are more evident that others -- that "the most evident of truths" was that "all of us are created equal".
That's just not true. In fact -- while that is mentioned first in the preamble -- I wouldn't say that this is "the star that guides us" . The star that guided us through Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall (I guess the speech-writers couldn't think up an S-word for disabled rights) is in fact the second sentence in the preamble: "that they are endowed by their Creator by certain inalieable rights".
It has always been the characterization of struggles in the US that they fight for MORE rights by invoking the inalieability -- and the inherency -- of rights and by invoking "equality before the law" (that's why I oppose fighting for gay rights by trying to take away the rights of businesses or people who don't agree by trying to silence and boycott them -- I think the fight through the legislature is more rewarding and doesn't undermine all human rights for all).
The guiding star is the inalieability, but then, this president is not a human rights president. He doesn't like the term. He doesn't like the talk. He doesn't like the walk. It's alien, as it is for all the DSA types -- it doesn't fit.
Our individual freedom, actually, isn't inextricably bound to every soul on Earth. This is important, because this is where liberals and even leftists can disagree. Some people think that if a country is not totally free, and only some are free in it (South Africa), why, then the country is not free. Unfortunately, that isn't the case; you can have some free people and some unfree people, and the state then is partly-free. That's why you would not get a lot of people to somehow concede that America wasn't free until it could free all slaves or that it isn't free today until every minority reaches if not prosperity, at least a decent standard of living. They will persist in seeing in pre-Civil War America some free, and not free, again, because of how they look at inherency; they won't even concede a country as "half-free" if a minority in it are not. This seems like an unimportant wrangle over semantics until you realize what is happening when you try to declare "unfreeness" -- you are undermining inherency. You are saying freedom or rights are *conditional on* some sort of state arrangement. But I would submit that the emancipation of the slaves came about not because of some collectivism but because of a widening application of equality, based on the inherency of rights.
I really don't think inherency of rights exists for Obama, in his ideological framework.
Oh, but here comes Mr. Magnanimous, Mr. Ideologically Open: "Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time."
Doesn't that sound like someone not conditioned to the socialist meme? Willing to concede there is a debate about collectivism?
Oh, no. Because like all socialists always do in every debate or controversy, at some point they claim, "let's stop all this talk now and get down to action" as a technique, as an instrument for getting their way.
"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate," says our Community-Organizer-in-Chief; says our Net Nanny-in-Chief. Each one of these things is in the eye of the beholder, but Obama actualy thinks that if he can just demonize Republicans opposing his socialism, and make it seem as if they are a "spectacle" or merely engaged in "name-calling," he can prevail. Naturally his own fellow leftists do the same.
I'm not interested in making a "common effort" with this president because I really don't believe we have a "common purpose," no matter how stirring he makes his words. That's because I do not believe he has at the heart of his ideology a robust view of all human rights for all, but what he has done instead is replaced it with uravnilovka, equalization, collectivization and invoked the language of equality to cover his tracks.
Now, I'm well aware that challenging the socialism of Obama is the greatest taboo of our time. I first realized this when I went on Steve Gilmor's Gilmor Gang show back in 2008 and actually had my mike cut off when I tried to explain that Obama's infamous comment at the Silicon Valley dinner about "clinging to guns and religion" was straight out of the "opiate of the people" lexicon of Marx. (And now Clinton is recycling it.)
Unfortunately, the critique of Obama's socialism has almost exclusively been on the right; not enough effort has been made by true liberals to call out his utter absence of a human rights paradigm and absence of a forthright embrace of capitalism and free market economics. Worse, there's never any endorsement for free speech -- there is only calls for "dignity" or denunciation of other people with other views as "a spectacle" or guilty of "name-calling" -- as if that were against the law (it's not, see Times v. Sullivan -- from the very era of civil rights that Obama purports to draw inspiration from -- and about the right to call a racist names).
the people who trained Obama, who funded Obama and who sponsored Obama’s political career right through the Illinois State Senate to the U.S. Senate, and frankly they’re working with him today in ways I can talk about, if we have time, these people were all the Socialists–the stealth Socialist leaders of the Midwest Academy who very deliberately decided that you don’t talk about your Socialism out loud.
Independently of him -- and because I went to those same Socialist Scholars' conferences and all the sort of DSA activities in New York of that time -- I came to that same term, "stealth socialism" to describe that strategy of deliberately dividing up the hard-core socialist agenda into "single issues" and trying to form community fronts with unsuspecting liberals to push those single issues, and then slip in the rest of the socialist sectarianism.
The result of all those two decades of "stealth socialism" since the 1980s when the Socialist Scholars decided the strategy in the Reagan years was essentially to go underground was that the "s" word was scrubbed out of frank speach. No one could ever say the "s" word. Socialists got very, very good at this scrubbing -- so good that they got conservatives to be scared to use it as well, for fear of seeming too triumphalist and even McCarthyist.
Nonsense. In Europe, people call themselves socialists without hesitation; even in Canada. Get over yourselves and start being honest.
I'm also well aware that there is an effort to deflect criticism of socialism in culture by having demonized something called "cultural Marxism".
I must say I had never heard of this term and its associations until recently. I read Gramsci or Adorno long ago and didn't feel I was necessarily imbibing cultural Marxism, just reading socialist theories on civil society or whatever. But then, I studed at the University of Toronto, then went to a country of "really existing socialism," the Soviet Union, and studied at the University of Leningrad. So maybe I missed this.
Apparently there has sprung up a school of thought that argues against the "Frankfurt School" and sees them as "taking over everything". No theory of people "taking over everything" will ever be credible because there is always that human nature that surprises you. For example, I think we're all headed to damnation in a Wired State run by technocommunists that Obama is helping to usher in with stealth socialism. But I think it will be a fight and a struggle, the result will be something like that 1970s commercialism that remained after that 1960s idealism, with the beads and the bong pipes and the roach clips turned into recipe card folders in head shops. Oh, and I could be wrong!
Apparently this "cultural Marxist" set has become so rabid that the Southern Poverty Law Center has declared them a "hate group". I'm happy to take their word for it, but that doesn't mean we can't criticize Marxism, communism and stealth socialism -- if anything, it makes it important for liberals to draw the distinctions. I myself have had people grab me by the lapels at big conferences and tell me that Obama is a "homosexual Muslim sabboteur". Just because that's crazy doesn't mean that you can't call out the socialism he was busy nurturing and studying for years before he became an Illinois senator.
As always, what I fear more than Obama, are his passionate supporters, who come up with gems like this guy on Facebook:
Jose Rosa on Facebook
This speech was so beautiful, so inclusive, so far reaching, so grounded, so based in history, so longing for the future, so patriotic, so realistic, so eloquent and made me so proud.
If you know someone who can listen to these words and say they take issue with them, then you know who the struggle is against.
So vindictive; so nasty; so tear-jerking, and then so hateful. If somebody disagrees, let's get them. Let's make it personal; we know "who the struggle is against". So full of that viciousness of Latin American revolutionary movements -- echoing the Soviet Bolsheviks. Ugh.
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