Wired State

Y SO SRS?

Assange Didn't Publish the Story that Was Critical to Manning's Decision to Revolt

So, as expected, Bradley Manning is pleading guilty to some charges of hacking the US military servers and stealing the files published by WikiLeaks, but he's not pleading guilty to the charges about "aiding and abetting the enemy".

Ed Pilkington ‏@Edpilkington

BREAKING: #BradleyManning has pleaded guilty to being the #WikiLeaks source - 10 lesser charges carrying a max sentence of 20 years

The hearing today is being live-blogged by The New York Times reporter Charlie Savage and The Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington, and of course they are doing a much better job of reporting this accurately than WikiLeaks, and its hordes of day-old alt accounts who are heckling critics and the legions of Free Bradley tweeters and of course Firedoglake's anarchist supporter Kevin Gosztola who is going with the narrative that the US press "failed" Manning.

Most interestingly, Savage tweeted this:

Charlie Savage ‏@charlie_savage

Manning upset WL didnt publish material about US-assisted Iraqi police arresting people for printing pamphlet decrying Iraqi govt corruption

...but didn't include that point in his story later.

The "progressives" and Manning defenders are playing up the news that Manning tried to reach the Times and Washington Post with his materials as the mainstream media "letting down" Manning. They're misreporting it and conflating it and spreading disinformation about it, so read exactly what the reporters tweeted, which in sum was this: Manning didn't call the news desk, the foreign desk, or an individual reporter, but at the Times, called the public ombudsman.

And look, you guys can't keep telling us there is no story there -- citing Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and everybody under the sun claiming that there was no real damage and no real news and no real information -- and then suddenly double back and say the US press "failed Manning".  Failed in what, not getting a story which was about a nothing and didn't really do any harm to the US? Oh, right.

So...That's fake. Oh, I get it that you contradict yourself. On the one hand you tell us that "even Obama" says no damage was done; on the other hand you claim there is devastating information about war crimes. Well, which is it, guys?

You could only say that the US media "failed" if there was a story -- but there never was much of one. No smoking gun of some terrible war crime that wasn't already reported elsewhere -- we know from many sources from people actually working to do something about it that the US used torture abroad. To be sure, there are people directly harmed by WikiLeaks and I know them personally -- but they will not be standing up to paint a bigger target on their backs than they already have.

Manning has also been allowed to read a long and "serious" statement.  The fans think it's big news that Bradley complained that when he called the New York Times, he got put in a voice mail, and when he called the Washington Post, they asked to see what he had, and somehow it didn't come together, and he ended up calling WikiLeaks.

Well, too bad he didn't get some of those telegenic hacker friends of his at MIT, even Aaron Swartz, who were better at media work and could turn out scads of press stories.

He called the "public editor" at the New York Times, not the newsroom.

Charlie Savage ‏@charlie_savage

@charlie_savage Rather, when Manning deciding what to do w/ war logs, called NYT public editor (not newsroom) & left msg tht wasn't returned

That's odd, because that's whom you call or write if you think there is a story that is biased, not if you have news, i.e. documents, exposes. He didn't think to call the foreign desk or news desk or a specific reporter, I guess. But the breakdown with Washpo isn't clear -- but I suppose if you call and speak vaguely about having something about the war and sound like you're ranting, maybe you don't get taken seriously.

Given the experiences the The Guardian and the Times had with Assange, there's nothing to suggest it would have gone any different with Manning if he had reached them.

And as I pointed out, if that New York Times reporter or intern or whomever had taken the call and taken Manning seriously, would they have been as patriotic as Adrian Lamo and called the FBI over their concerns about treason? I bet not... That's the funny thing...

Note to future hackers and leakers: don't go to Julian Assange or WikiLeaks or other shady operations like that, go to as reputable news organization with accountability which is less likely to blow you into the feds or accidently leak all your sources.

Now, to me, what's much more interesting over the squabble or who took whose phone call is Manning's evidently anguished statement that Assange didn't publish his file about the arrest of the Iraqis with the printing press and the newsletter about Iraqi government corruption.

Now, you'll recall that story, which sounded like it could become a PEN Club case or a Committee to Protect Journalists case was oddly never in the WikiLeaks cables.

Given that it was the incident that turned the tide for Manning, and made him decide to take the irrevocable decision to hack the files and leak them, it's awfully strange.

In fact, it's the failure to see that published that is chief among the reasons I refuse to accept Bradley Manning as a whistleblower or as a human rights activist. I see him merely as an anarchist interested in harming the United States in an obvious and cheap way that he was able to do, inflicting as much damage as possible to make the US become unlike its purported nature, i.e. to become closed, and to prosecute Manning, whom it should have celebrated as a whistleblower. Right? You know how there is "suicide by cop"? WikiLeaks was "punishment by government".

So, if Assange didn't publish that story -- there was time -- why didn't Manning publish it somewhere else? Why didn't he go to a human rights organization? To MIT hackers, even? To the Times to a specific reporter? To even start a Blogspot account? Why? That's a mystery.

But it's awfully interesting, given that Manning describes that as his definitive story, that Assange didn't publish it. So it lets us know several things: Assange is a self-centered asshole who just didn't understand its importance to his source/client; Assange isn't really a human rights activist and didn't understand this was the most important of the cases (because other cases were already knew, like the helicopter killings).

Important, that is, if it were air-tight. If it really showed what he claims. Maybe it didn't. And maybe that's why Assange didn't publish it. Because it might have rapidly led to exposing those people as in fact militants or terrorists and undermined Manning's belief. Maybe Assange -- or even the Guardian or somebody in the loop -- were more sophisticated about this incident and its ramifications than Manning.

Oh, and the WikiLeaks sock puppets on Twitter INSTANTLY began suggesting that it was Daniel Domscheit-Berg who failed to publish the printing press story. Well, I'm waiting for him to weigh in. Meanwhile, any claims to the effect that Assange couldn't publish the printing press story because it would have outed Manning as the hacker are fake. They could have seeded it in among the thousands of documents they leaked and it wouldn't have stuck out. It's much more likely that it's just not the story he thought it was.

Manning says he spoke repeatedly to someone named "Ox," and he believed that to be Assange. So he implicates Assange.

Ed Pilkington ‏@Edpilkington

#BradleyManning says he engaged in prolonged internet conversation with #WikiLeaks member called “Ox” - assumes was Julian Assange

Ed Pilkington ‏@Edpilkington

#BradleyManning took Iraq and Afghan warlogs out of Iraq on a memory stick in his camera. Uploaded to #WikiLeaks from Barnes & Noble

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The Backwardness of the Global Village

I saw a few references to The New Westphalian Web by Katherine Maher on Twitter, and I read the article. It was fairly mediocre, as it was basically just a compilation of the utopian ideal of the Internet as a borderless "autonomous realm" and a knock on the evil states that try to control it -- like the US, which is placed on par with Pakistan or Saudia Arabia or Russia as always happens in these sorts of pieces.

There didn't seem to be anything significantly new in it, except the fact that the person writing it represented Access, a relatively new organization headed by former Google lobbyist and former White House staffer Andrew McLaughlin. Maher used to be at NDI, but I don't think I ever heard her speak, she is one of the people who has been going around working the Arab Spring with the idea that mobile access will increase freedom. It's too bad the authoritarian state under Morsi and the Islamists get in the way of these ideals.

JOHN PERRY BARLOW LOST IN CYBERSPACE

The article might not have gotten a second look, but I decided to leave just a short comment when I saw her invoking uncritically John Perry Barlow's silly "Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace" which I countered years ago (my latest revision was done last year with a refutation of much of his collectivist and utopian ideologies that are antithetical to human rights and the rule of law).

My comment was this:

The problem is that nobody elected or even appointed John Perry Barlow, and people in fact like their nations and like and defend their states and the defense of liberties they bring. This borderless woo-woo pretends that authoritarian states and terrorism won't take over instead of their pastoral utopianists bringing us back in fact to the village, not the urban life.

 http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/03/resistance-and-alternatives-to-john-perry-barlows-a-declaration-of-independence-in-cyberspace.html

GRUMPYCATFITZ

The next thing I know, Ethan Zuckerman, who has never gotten over my critique of his dissing of Twitter in Moldova to fight the communists back in the day, is telling Maher to follow @GrumpyCatFitz which is the parody made about me -- I'm fairly certain by either Joshua Foust or Nathan Hamm or both or someone in that circle around Registan. GrumpyCatFitz is a hilarious grumpy meme cat who takes my tweets and makes them sound like "get offa my lawn!" sort of harumphs by dividing them into two parts, one at the top of the meme poster, and one at the bottom in capital letters, a method which can make just about anybody's tweet sound like a cantankerous old curmudgeon, but my tweets can lend themselves especially to this method : )

The anonymous GrumptyCatFitz also created @opcatzhunt and began to harass me together with the Anonymous newbies from Ohio who decided to make the heckling of me on Twitter an "op" to earn their Anon spurs -- but failed. GrumpyCatFitz began her life in December telling all the Registan regulars and their little extended circle of lefty Internet freedom fighters like Zuckerman to follow her -- and they did. Grumpy had an active life for a few weeks but then got bored until she could join the Anonymous assault on me. This may be due to the fact that bout Foust and Hamm became unemployed recently. I guess the Sequester is already starting to bite hard in the defense analysis industry...

In any event, Maher, whom I don't know, but who seems youth and thin-skinned as youth often are these days, rushed to Twitter with in minutes of my comment (perhaps she was refreshing her article's page waiting for more comments!) and typed:

A LEGENDARY TROLL!

katherine maher ‏@krmaher

My FP article just got trolled by a legend. This may mean I've said something good.

When Zuckerman urged her to follow @GrumpyCatFitz, I realized she meant me. Imagine, my little paragraph questioning her utopianism and JP Barlow, and I'm a legendary troll!

Well, I reject the entire notion of "troll," which geeky boys have been trying to impose on us since the days of the Well to mean "anything we don't like", and I fail to see why calling out the obvious utopianism of this piece was somehow "trolling". But that lets you know just how much they believe they are the new normal -- although it's hard to believe anybody would conceive of themselves as the new normal with JP Barlow in their midst. There it is, however.

THE WORLDWIDE TREND TOWARD...COUNTRIES

I first heard the term "Westphalia" years ago as a young person at the UN. There, people often look into the middle distance and talk about the realities of "Westphalia" to mean "sovereignty" which they find gets in their way of their more idealistic ventures like international human rights. The reality is that human rights, although about such universalism that tends toward the ideal and "world government," has evolved now to be about "the responsibility to protect" -- which was a clever device thought up by the Canadians and Francis Deng, the UN special rapporteur to sort of use ju jitsui on states -- con them into thinking they wouldn't have to part with their sovereignty but in fact would be called upon to exercise it -- but in the cause of treating refugees or internally displaced peoples better. I've written a fair amount on why RTP is so fundamentally misplaced as an idea, as it assumes good will of states like Sudan that it doesn't have, and pretends that 8,000 Sudanese policemen who were busy displacing IDPs five minutes ago are now going to protect them.

Speaking of Sudan -- well, that's just it. While people like Maher are pursuing the utopian notion that states are withering away and borders are disappearing, real people in the real world are doing things like trying to carve South Sudan as a new country out of greater Sudan, to get away from oppressive Bashir in Khartoum. And on and on around the world -- there are all kinds of states that either came into being recently (Kosovo or Tajikistan) or which want to come into being and are oppressed (Kashmir or Chechnya) and movements of peoples that want their own states, like the Tibetans or Uighurs. They're not content with the hipster borderless Internet, you know.

I've spent years and years at the UN, OSCE, and other international bodies. And it's very clear to me from observing reality instead of ideology that most of the people of the world want countries, identities, languages of their own, and don't really want to be part of some internationalized, homogenized conveyor belt of jet-set intellectuals. That is, sure, there are some international civil servants, NGO staffers, various carpetbaggers particularly of the left who make up this jet-set that go around to all the conferences -- as one suffering Internet freedom fighter from an oppressive country was heard to say to another sufferer in Vienna at the OSCE conference I just attended, "See you in Amsterdam next month" -- where the next occasion for per diems and nice hotels and good food would be had by all sufferers for freedom!

INTERNATIONAL JET-SET AND THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

And it's very easy when you live among these jet-setters with i-phones and i-pads especially now to enhance their international elite status to believe they are "taking over" and they are "all as one" and the Internet is uber alles. But the reality is, well, countries. They still do what they want. And that's because most people either want them to do what they want, or they are oppressed. And if they want to get out of their oppression, the path of international pop fronts organized by elite collectivists isn't always the appetizing one for them.

Well, there's more about the borderless Internet I don't like -- the Global Village, I've come to find out, is pretty oppressive and reactionary all its own.  (McCluhan never meant it to be that). You know how you left your small town to come to the big city? To get away from the place where everybody knew your business and got in your face? Well, now you're back there again, where you have no privacy when you are doxed by Anonymous or scraped by corporations or eyeballed by a potential employer who doesn't like your Facebook party photos. You're back there again -- you might as well be in the grade school play yard -- being bullied and heckled and told to conform -- or else.

Or else people like Jillian York will get you fired from your job! Or Anonymous will harass your relatives, even though they are not relevant to their beef with you. Or Katherine Maher will call you a "troll" -- the greatest of Internet curses! -- and whistle to her friends to come protect the Motherland.

Like Dan LaTorre who calls himself a "change agent". And then calls me a "known stinker":

Daniel Latorre ‏@danlatorre

@krmaher ha & a known stinker at that. sigh. was about to dive into the comment thread then just noticed that flury. ignoring steadfastly.

Are these people like...twelve years old?

And you would ignore a robust discussion because a "troll" has commented in it? Oh, my.

LOBBYING FOR GOOGLE'S LAST MILE

Well, if you can get past all these childish antics, here's what seems to be going on:

Access is flexing its muscles hard, getting ready for more serious lobbying and the March Through the Institutions. Andrew McLaughlin may be "ex" to about most of the powerful things of our time -- Google, the White House, ICANN, the Berkman Center, etc. -- and is now at Betaworks -- but obviously he retains ties to all these things and is a powerful networker and influencer -- recall how he said to The Wall Street Journal's Crovitz that he believed the ITU should "have its kneecaps broken". (!)

Access will take on a menu of various things like the anti-CISPA crusade -- it will be interesting to see how much they load up their advocacy agenda and keep to c-3 versus c-4 status or how that will work. Certainly they oppose SOPA and advocate for net neutrality. Basically, they are about ensuring somebody else pays for Google's last mile and that Google never has to see a law it doesn't like. But they will likely steadfastly, hand on heart, declare they have nothing to do with Google. Maher already wrote to me:

"katherine maher ‏@krmaher @catfitz I missed the part where we have Google staffers on our executive team. Or, you know, are sectarian.

I had said:

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

@krmaher Access, a Google-run sectarian cadre organization.

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

@krmaher Who said "staffers"? You are saying w a straight face that Andrew McLaughlin has no relation to Google?! http://andrew.mclaughl.in/about-me/

Now, does it have to literally have Google staffers to be "Google-run"? No. It's my belief that it's enough to have McLaughlin there, who can be trusted to run the Google line, and communicate with whomever he needs to communicate with at Google -- exactly as he did at the White House, an act for which he was reprimanded -- about which you can read either the left or right version of the story.

GOOGLE'S REVOLVING DOOR TO THE WHITE HOUSE

What's interesting to me about that first link under "left" for TechPresident is that Darrell Issa began by launching that probe alleging that McLaughlin talked to two dozens Googlers -- TechPresident says it was not such a big deal -- but today, you see Issa eating out of Google's hand, taking donations from Google, and advocating vigorously against SOPA/PIPA and demanding investigations of the prosecutors in the Swartz case. How did this happen? Did he get knee-capped?

Everyone has long forgotten this story now as it was back in Obama I. But eventually McLaughlin resided as Deputy Chief Technology Officer.  Google spends more money lobbying than ever. In a way, they don't even need some ex-Googler who is under something of a cloud to lobby their issues, but Access is something that has a lot of Silicon Valley backing with every single aggressive cadre fighting for the copyleftist/Google vision on their board -- and was involved in what I consider was aptly called RightsCon (more later on that).

THE RUCASS RUCKUS

But to get back to Westphalia, something Alec Ross also discussed as if it were now history.

It isn't history, and it isn't as if Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or Sudan any of the others in the aptly-named RUCASS caucaus at the ITU making trouble for the free Internet just started controlling the Internet today. They have been at it for years, and I catalogued some of the latest round here.

Despite whatever international regimes get going, there are always states that simply don't play. In the OSCE context, out of the 57 members, only 48 have signed the Fundamental Freedoms document affirming that "offline rights apply online" -- something that John Perry Barlow and Katherine Maher actually would do well to learn, because there are many rights they'd like to dispense with in cyberspace in the quest for their collectivist utopia.

A NEW HELSINKI ACCORD FOR CYBERSPACE?

I've been mulling over whether there should be some kind of new "Helsinki Accord" for cyberspace to prevent militarization -- just as the Helsinki process did -- but I think it's likely premature when the very same bad actors like Russia can't even sign the document affirming the "offline=online" stuff.

Naturally, for Maher, the militarization of the US looms huge and scary in her eyes although with her experience abroad, she should know better that the US is the least of our problems.

She incorrectly refers to SOPA as "breaking" the DNS system, when in fact it was *alleged* to *hypothetically* break a *future* regime of DNSSEC, not in place yet, which in fact big companies haven't adopted because its expensive and complicated. We've had that long discussion on my other post about the "breaking" of the Internet and how fake it is. As for "warrantless searches" under CISPA because information might be exchanged that could affect privacy, again, I don't believe this particular bunch ever met an Internet law they liked, and they are never serious. When CISPA isn't a law, we get an executive order, which is worse.

It's not fair to book to the US some horrid edge in "militarization of cyberspace" because of Stuxnet, either. Russia and China militarized and weaponized cyberspace long before the US did, and made the US their constant targets as we know full well. What is the problem that Russian or Chinese hacking is supposed to solve in the world? American capitalism? That's not a problem, that's a solution; they're the problem. And what was the problem Stuxnet was to solve? The intractable problem of a nuclear Iran. It's not like the US dreamed up Stuxnet to be mean to a nice country and throw their digital weight around. They dreamed it up as a means of dealing with the meat-world challenge of Iran in real life, where it's authoritarianism is a misery to its own people and its neighbours and the world.  Stuxnet is a response, not sui generis; fastening on this effort to digitalize the Cold War with Iran instead of bombing Iran outright and calling that "militarization of cyberspace" is fairly lame. Why?

FAILED TWITTER REVOLUTION OF 2009

Because it doesn't address the problem of the failed Twitter revolution of 2009. Cyberspace could not save Iranian democrats. And the leftists and "progressives" of the world, even those who did pay attention, couldn't save them either, especially not by tweeting. It was good to tweet, but the Internet cannot save you. So it's really reprehensible to forget the blood in the streets of 2009, and people not saved by Twitter, and then suddenly get indignant about Stuxnet and the militarized cyberspace. Who militarized real life -- and Twitter, for that matter -- first?! Oh, and please don't whine to me about Israel having the bomb -- they are a democratic state under the rule of law, unlike Iran. And that's where we Internet freedom fighters differ with Katherine and Jillian and all the rest of them -- they think the US and Israel are the problem; Iran is only a dim memory by now.

DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN CYBERSPACE

What was interesting amidst this discussion was a reference to a new pushback against that wily old Grateful Dead nerd Barlow. This is a Declaration of Interdependence in Cyberspace  put out by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, something I am just learning about but which is described in the comments as a corporate shill or a Republican shill with Darrell Issa and Orrin Hatch. Well, good! We need diversity in this space, and with the Mitch Kapor run groups and things like Access, we haven't had much of that.

Given that I haven't been able to win the lottery yet and open my Institute for the Study of Internet Ideologies (plural), it's good that there is something like this new "Interdependence" manifesto that could be seriously lobbied in Washington.  The Institute itself has existed since 2006, but it seems to have lobbied on specific technology issues and not gotten into the overarching ideological battles (such as I've been involved in for years). I've never seen them in this space. I mean, somebody more informed than I am about Washington lobbyists can tell me if I missed the memo on this, but the op-eds of this group have been things like "ARPA-E’s RANGE Program Will Boost Battery Innovation" or "The Tesla-Broder Debate and What It Says About Decarbonizing Transportation" more than they've had larger, overarching ideological texts like "The Declaration of Interdependence".

I do wonder if Darrell Issa, who is stumping against the prosecutors of Aaron Swartz, who was no doubt inspired by Barlow's manifesto, realizes that Daniel Castro's "Interdependence" manifesto would tend to mitigate the radical anarchism of Swartz. Do they talk about these things at board meetings?

The Declaration isn't quite something I can endorse because I think it has some incorrect referencing to international law in it (i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't support property rights and capitalism to the extent implied) and needs more input from international human rights lawyers -- and not of the sort captured by the Googlers like Susan Crawford But by and large, it calls out some of the real fatuousness of Barlow's stuff and I can only welcome this initiative.

Perhaps soon I can retire from blogging. It is now shaping up that the West Coast Mitch Kapor or John Perry Barlow organizations and all their permutations have some resistance on the East Coast  -- from Berin Szoka's organization, which mounted the alternative manifesto to the Free Press' socialist cadre group's collectivist manifesto -- the alternative also stressed private property and capitalism as legitimate; and also from the Tech Liberation Front bloggers, some of whom are at George Mason, even from Red State's Tech at Night.

I won't retire just yet, however, as these are two extremes of the left and right that tend to meet each other behind the barn and come together around things like opposition to SOPA or glorification of Swartz's anarchic "propaganda of the deed". There has to be a better balance that is not antithetical to real human rights.

 

 

 

 

How is a Google Chief Different Than A Basketball Player?

Dennis Rodman. Photo by OPEN Sports.

This is funny, from the State Department briefing today.

But...not so funny because it shows that these people either just don't get it about this regime, or they pretend not to get it.

Of course even if you go on something "innocuous" like "kids and basketball" you will be dealing directly with the regime. The regime will be all over it. Sports are the very essence of the regime -- like the Soviets and all communist regimes, sports are how they manifested themselves and how they trained and indoctrinated youth. Sports are a HUGE deal to these regimes, and foreigners are always made much of, especially naive foreigners who can help them keep up the illusion that they are accepted and normal -- when they should not be, because they have deadly labour camps and are a horrendous totalitarian society oppressing people.

This is of course the money shot: "So the Google chief gets a sharper admonition before a nuclear test than a basketball player gets two weeks after a nuclear test."

Well, and don't forget -- although he was overshadowed -- that Google chief was with Governor Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and former ambassador to the UN.

Maybe Google can release a sat map of all the basketball courts in North Korea two weeks after this trip, and make it all okay.

So here we go:

QUESTION: I wonder what the State Department’s reaction is to the visit by Dennis Rodman there. Is this – is basketball diplomacy the same as ping-pong diplomacy with China?

MR. VENTRELL: Well, not exactly in this case. We have not been contacted about this travel to North Korea by this group. We don’t vet U.S. citizens’ private travel to North Korea, but we do urge U.S. citizens contemplating travel to North Korea to review our Travel Warnings on North Korea as well as country-specific travel information available on our website. So we just don’t have a position on the timing of this travel or otherwise.

QUESTION: Really?

QUESTION: The one that – the visit by the Google executive, Eric Schmidt, earlier this year you characterized as unhelpful. How would you characterize the visit by this basket --

MR. VENTRELL: I mean, we just don’t take a position on this particular private travel.

QUESTION: Even that he’s unhelpful or --

MR. VENTRELL: I mean, look, you know where we are in terms of the track with the D.P.R.K. and their threatening and provocative behavior and how we’re working very hard in New York for a very credible and strong response. In terms of this private travel to do basketball with kids, we just don’t take a position on this private travel.

QUESTION: So the Google chief gets a sharper admonition before a nuclear test than a basketball player gets two weeks after a nuclear test.

MR. VENTRELL: I don’t know if I’d parse it that way. I mean, I think --

QUESTION: That’s not parsing. That’s just exactly what you’ve done.

MR. VENTRELL: Look, we have --

QUESTION: And I want to know why.

MR. VENTRELL: We’re talking about somebody who is a former significant American official and businessman who were going there on different – for different purposes. Here we’re talking about sports. I mean, we just don’t take a position.

QUESTION: Well, we did see the propaganda value of the – of Eric Schmidt’s visit, and the statements and pictures that were put out by the North Korean media. And I imagine the same thing is going to happen with this visit as well. I mean, it’s the second high-profile visit in a matter of weeks to North Korea.

MR. VENTRELL: Yeah.

QUESTION: A country with which you have no ties.

MR. VENTRELL: You know where we’ve been on this more broadly, which is that they probably should focus their money on feeding their children, taking care of their families, and providing a more prosperous future for the North Koreans. On this specific basketball trip, I just don’t take a position.

QUESTION: But is it because it’s more about kids and something cultural than opposed to some kind of business that the regime could possibly benefit for? I mean, we’re just asking why you’re making the differentiation.

MR. VENTRELL: That would be a safe assumption, Elise. It’s that kind of – look, we’re talking about a basketball and a kids’ clinic. It’s different than some sort of dialogue directly with the regime.

QUESTION: And where are we on the resolution at the --

QUESTION: Is it your understanding that there’s no regime contact on this trip, as far as you know?

MR. VENTRELL: I don’t know. I really refer you to the travelers, and just don’t have any information.

Related articles

Google's Eric Schmidt and the Cult of Connectivity in North Korea

Ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman in North Korea; Obama administration shrugs

Rodman arrives in North Korea on peace mission

How Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends Freedom of Expression Their Way -- By Bullying

This was astounding -- Jillian York, the "Internet Freedom Fighter" lady is *calling for a man to be fired from his job due to his legitimate, protected speech on the Internet*. She whistled to her pals in the Anonymous storm-troopers and they made something of an "op" out of this and began bullying and hectoring this fellow and hounded him into removing his post. That's how they police content on the Internet.

Not only is she openly calling for this acknowledged misogynist and politically-incorrect fellow to be fired, she's doubling down and saying that's okay to do so in her job as a program officer for "freedom of expression" at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Are no grown-ups going to see to this problem?!

It's absolutely outrageous, and it's why I keep pushing back against these Mitch-Kapor-founded-and-funded groups because they are entithetical to freedom of expression, even as they cunningly grab the concept as a cover for their copyleftist political struggle for power. The nature of this guy's content isn't the issue. Yeah, we get it that it's gross and stupid. Anything called "How to Rape a Woman" is by definition going to be awful.

But unless you can find that it means some incitement to imminent violent action, it gets to stay under the First Amendment and you don't get to solve the problem by harming his livelihood and exposing his privacy -- it's like they are running a libel suit in reverse.

I'm not even sure that this speech, while disgusting, falls afoul of whatever ISP or blogging service this guy has -- in any event, after the fuss over the post, he removed it. Now another conservative blogger has written about it -- which I stumbled on, I had no idea. He thinks Jillian is a "feminist" -- I beg to differ in my comments, below:

Oh, Jillian York isn't a feminist at all. She's a hard leftist pro-Palestinian "Internet freedom fighter" who is highly selective about which rights she fights for in her private activist life and her public role as a program officer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She's hardly a feminist, in fact. I first began debating her when I was appalled at how she dismissed the very real sexual assault of the American journalist Lara Long on Tahrir Square. She did so like a good little leftist because it would mar her efforts to portray revolutionaries as better than they were and because she thought no one should ever criticize Arab men -- for her, that mandate trumps any feminism she might feel -- which she very selectively applies. When a Washington Post commentator questioned Al Jazeera's silence on this appalling attack (it didn't fit *their* narrative of reality, either), Jillian York dug in and kept defending ALJ.

Her attack on this writer isn't so much about feminism per say, but about wielding the sword of political correctness to silence debate on the Internet. It's about establishing that this gang of "progressives" get to decide what the speech boundaries are, not by any legal principle but "just because". This "freedom fighter" who will fight to the death for some Palestinian blogger will block or ban people like me who question anything about them or her in terms of inciting or condoning violence, and she'll actually gloat over the threat of a man with loss of employment because of his questionable speech. It's really creepy, given how much power and money EFF and its related Mitch Kapor-supported organizations all have, i.e. Free Press.

As a blogger who is critical of EFF, the open source movement and Anonymous, I've been viciously attacked by Anonymous lately over the Steubenville story. I supported the victim of rape and called for just prosecution, but I definitely didn't endorse the vigilante tactics of Anonymous. I was viciously harrased for exposing their methods and just kept documenting them -- they're pious about the rape victim in Ohio whom they think they're helping (although they were the ones not only to out her name but also give the video of her humiliation far more views than it would ever have had if they hadn't become involved). They subjected me to the most foul-mouthed and awful abuse, heckled me with all kinds of threats and falsehoods, put creepy videos threatening me on Youtube, and doxed my private information. Anonymous are the footsoldiers for WikiLeaks, OWS, and this sort of vicious politically-correct attack on speech.

Here's the tweet discussion -- and note that his highly influential copyleftist with more than 27,000 followers instantly gets 16 retweets from her fans.

 

Jillian C. York ‏@jilliancyork

I wonder if this @realmattforney has a job. Because he won't after his employers see his "how to rape women" blog: http://mattforney.com/2013/01/22/how-to-rape-women-and-get-away-with-it/ …

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10:16 AM - Feb 22, 2013

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1. Feb 22 James Losey ‏@jameslosey

   @jilliancyork @realmattforney But it's " satire and is not intended to be taken seriously." Also when did that become an excuse for bigotry?

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2. Feb 22 Jillian C. York ‏@jilliancyork

   @jameslosey @realmattforney Lawful, sure, but I'd still prefer this guy get fired from his job.

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3. Feb 22 James Losey ‏@jameslosey

   @jilliancyork @realmattforney I certainly wouldn't hire someone like that, or want to work with them

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4. Feb 22 James Losey ‏@jameslosey

   @jilliancyork @realmattforney I also think it's absurd that painting revolting comments as satire or humor is somehow an excuse

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5. Feb 22 Alex Trebechdel ‏@drunkpiano

   @jilliancyork I like how he calls everyone retards and pansies then asks for the benefit of the doubt

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6. Feb 22 Asher Langton ‏@AsherLangton

   @jilliancyork But he seems like such a nice guy: http://mattforney.com/2012/06/04/young-white-female-needed-for-companionship-and-sexytime/ …

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7. Feb 22 Jillian C. York ‏@jilliancyork

   @AsherLangton Even if it's intended as parody, it's poorly done and not funny.

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8. Feb 23 ｃｏｎｔｉｎｇｅｎｃｙ ｒａｉｎｂｏｗｓ ‏@heySMM

   @jilliancyork @realmattforney @verylemonade know what’s just as bad and possibly even worse than the original article? his “apology”.

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9. Feb 23 AK ‏@AnatolyKarlin

   @jilliancyork Very consistent with your position as "Director for International Freedom of Expression."

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10. Feb 23 Jillian C. York ‏@jilliancyork

    @AnatolyKarlin It is, actually. I protect people from governments, not criticism.

Of course, no angel he -- Karlin is notorious for his pro-Kremlin blogging and heckling of Putin critics like me. In any event, it's just...breath-taking how high-handed these new "freedom of expression" promoters are. Freedom of speech for me and not for thee. The way to address bad speech is with good speech, not attempts to remove bad speech or threats and boycotts and bullying and harassment of people you don't like. It truly is awful that the left now believes these methods are legitimate forms of political struggle.

Yes, It's Okay for the DOJ to Take Anarchist Manifestos Seriously

You see this photo here from the video camera? This is Aaron Swartz , in the server closet at MIT, with a laptop placed under a cardboard box, jacked right into MIT's LAN. Yes, the only thing missing is Col. Mustard. And he's breaking into this wiring closet because his previous attempts at rapid and voluminous downloads from JSTOR with a circumvention script and with spoofing of his MAC address and other ID masking had led to him being knocked off the network. So he had to try again -- directly, using more physical stealth.

This is action, and not "thoughtcrime". It's an act. A deed. And as I keep explaining, *propaganda of the deed* which is what anarchists do.

One of the poignant moments of the panel discussion at Fordham Law School last week, which was one-sided and which I criticized here, is when Chris Soghoian suddenly confronted Trevor Trimm, the dashing young copyleftism promoter from Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I called out Soghoian in this post for his call for "more technologists in Washington" to write technology-related law like CFAA reforms ostensibly because "Congress is stupid. That's because a) I think there are plenty of technologists, including well-paid Google and Facebook lobbyists and groups like the Sunlight Foundation and b) it's not really about technology, but about radical geeks trying to bring themselves to power under cover of "technology". The "enlightenment" they promise is in fact obfuscation.

But interestingly, in this meeting, there came a point where even Soghoian had to interrupt Trevor Trimm's apologia for everything Swartz did. He said something like this (I'm paraphrasing because there is no transcript or video):

"But wait. Aaron went in the server closet and put a laptop on their LAN. He broke into a locked server closet. I knew Aaron and liked him. But..."

There was silence in the hall.

It was the silence of hundreds of geeks, ACLU employees, law students, and other assorted types like me just marveling that Mr. Privacy-for-Me-and-Not-for-Thee was maybe appearing as more complex than might appear to be the case at first blush -- and saying something nearly blasphemous about Aaron.

Now, afterwards, geeks were hotly debating whether in fact the server closet was indeed locked. It's interesting that Mr. Privacy Guru from the ACLU said it was locked. I'm not sure how he came to hold that opinion or fact. Others say it wasn't locked, but that it was still trespassing and still wrong. Still others think that because MIT ran the loosest and most free-flowing network in the Metaverse, that Aaron's hack was "okay" and shouldn't have been prosecuted.

I went up to Trevor Trimm afterwards and said, "But Trevor, it was your fellow geeks at MIT that called the cops when they saw somebody who had been repeatedly knocked off their network for massive downloading millions of files, and who was now hanging a laptop off their LAN in the server closet! Your fellow geeks!" In other words, it wasn't some suit in the president's office, or some PR flak, or some old-lady librarian who didn't get technology. It was the geeks themselves. Your geeks. Perhaps even geeks who felt bound by some ethical principles (see the end of this discussion at Ars Technica).

He just kept jamming on his version of the story, and I never really got a chance to hear how he justified the laughingly self-serving proposal for reform of the CFAA which amounts to this: "If we're leet hackers who are especially cool and creative when we do a hack, we should get off."

Thus when Mike Masnick of TechDirt picks up the cudgel and claims that recent revelations about the Congression briefing by the DOJ staff means the feds were prosecuting "thoughtcrime," I simply have to object. He writes about the "admission" by the DOJ that the manifesto was influencing the prosecution:

More importantly, it suggests that Swartz was arrested and prosecuted for expressing his opinion on how to solve a particular problem. You may or may not agree with it, but I thought the US was supposed to be a place where we were free to express ideas. There's even some famous part of our Constitution about that...

But...Aaron Swartz amidst the wiring in the closet with a laptop he puts under a cardboard box so it's not visible is not engaging in mere thought or blogging; he's acting. There are those that think the other picture showing him with his bicycle helmet over his face isn't proof that he was disguising his identity to better commit a crime, or even a Guy Fawkes Anonymous sort of simulation, as the radicals would have it, but just Aaron covering his face because he had to do something stupid to get everyone to see what he thought was a more brillian point. Even so, it was an act, not a thought.

Leave aside that we are three layers removed from the source here -- it's Mike's interpretation of what Huffpo said about a Congressional staffer leaked about a DOJ staffer.

Masnick thinks it's "thoughtcrime" for the feds to invoke the Guerilla manifesto as proof of intent. And he then narrows his proof-test for that down to whether or not Swartz actually distributed the files. He did not. But maybe that's because he was caught. And I would submit that the deed wasn't really about actual distribution, but hacking and downloading large amounts "because he can" -- to show that the system is penetrable and therefore "stupid". It was an act of display; it was propaganda of the deed.

JSTOR seemed to prove this point -- that it wasn't about distribution -- by not pressing charges, and then REALLY prove this point by themselves releasing 4 million files -- right before Swartz killed himself. And perhaps that was their ultimate revenge, and his ultimate despair, you know? Because they did this willingly, when they could take the time to find the files they felt could deservedly be in the public domain -- AND they did this without putting themselves out of business or violating any of their licensing agreements -- things Swartz was not willing to wait for. Swartz -- like other hackers -- wanted to take away choice. You could see JSTOR doing this in a spasm of guilt and remorse; you could also see them doing this in an act of sanity and reason, which extremist hackers without ethics do not have, to prove their way was better.

Now, Mike Masnick is spinning all this now because of news leaking out of a closed briefing by DOJ staffers of Congressional staffers -- note how this got dumbed down from a briefing to members of Congress to just their staffers -- and was never at the level of a hearing.

I demanded that this briefing be open to the public with a transcript and video, like other Congressional briefings -- I was the only one, as the geeks would just as soon having their beloved heros like Issa "manage" something like this and control the news flow -- these people are only about "information wants to be free" when its your private information being doxed by Anonymous, not a Congressional briefing on a matter of public interest -- whether hackers get to destroy our institutions or not.

They'd rather take secret leaks from the closed briefing from unnamed staffers -- in a briefing about how supposedly their hero wants to liberate information for the knowledge commons!!! -- and then manipulate it and serve it up to you as their propaganda. That's how they roll.

I'd definitely like a second opinion after seeing how this story is being treated by Huffpo and TechDirt. But I bet a transcript doesn't even exist... enabling the geeks and their pwned "progressive" media to say whatever they want:

A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.

"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive," Swartz wrote in the manifesto. "We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access."

Although the DOJ could have mentioned his actual acts, and the calls from MIT -- and we don't know that they didn't -- obviously any hint of "thoughtcrime" that the progs could grab on to came first.

When considering punishment, courts are supposed to impose an “adequate deterrence to criminal conduct" under federal statute. Swartz's "Manifesto," prosecutors said they believed, made clear that he intended to share the academic articles widely.

Well, he doesn't actually have to "share the academic articles". He doesn't even have to intend to share them. He just has to hack and liberate them to make a point -- that this can be done any time, by anyone, for any reason or no reason, and these walled gardens and pay walls "shouldn't" exist and can't exist with people like him around.

Prosecutors would also be mindful that Swartz hacked the Library of Congress with the same motivation and ideology; he hacked PACER with the same motivation and ideology; and JSTOR was just a natural progression.

As we know from Lessig's lectures and statements from Carl Malamud, who conceived of the PACER hack, they used a "legal loophole," i.e. they had "legal access" to PACER, as anyone would who had an account; they used a library code evidently, and it's not clear how "authorized" that was, but let's assume it was -- and then they used that "legal access" to download "lots and lots", i.e. millions of files "to make a point".

The FBI was unable to make charges stick on this because Swartz and Malamud used a cunning Fisk-like maneuver which is so common to the manipulative hacker culture -- find some technical flat point that is the case in a limited set of circumstances to make a larger point that already stretches the truth, or find something literally true and literally legal, then jimmy it just a bit to get it to be used in ways not intended by the maker or steward of the system. That's the hallmark of the peverse hacker mentality.

Carl Malamud is quoted at least as expressing remorse about Swartz's suicide -- he at least asked himself the "dark night of the soul" question as to whether he had urged Swartz to hacking and then got him in trouble he couldn't get out easily. He at least had the decency to ask whether he had incited Swartz's hack -- certainly more than Lessig did.

We can read about this in the New York piece here:

At a memorial, Swartz’s friend Carl Malamud confessed that he wondered if his own hot criticisms of ­JSTOR—he had tweeted that charging $20 for a six-page article was “morally offensive”—had incited Aaron to take undue risks in hacking it. When I spoke to him a week later, Malamud still hadn’t answered the question for himself. I asked why he had said that he sometimes feels guilty.

“Because the boy got in trouble and he killed himself,” he said. “Did I encourage him to do ­JSTOR? There were quite a few of us banging the table about this. Did we incite him to do this, and could we have done more once he was arrested? I don’t know. I ask the questions, and I can’t answer them. I can’t look in somebody else’s head and figure out what he was thinking. I could second-guess myself and ask what I did wrong, and I hope folks at ­JSTOR and MIT are doing the same. This was a tragedy.”

Malmud instantly answered my tweet with a link to the New York piece by (some people are always scanning for their interactions!) that I "didn't know what I was talking about".  Well, I get to comment on public figures and their positions -- he is a controversial public figure in that he believed he had found "a legal loophole" in the PACER system to "make a point" but I don't believe it is a valid point. I believe PACER gets to recover their costs. I also think he indeed did properly express doubt and some sense of remorse, whereas Lessig has only dug himself in deeper and deeper with self-righteous twaddle. Of course, even in the midst of asking whether he bears culpability, Malamud is trying to shift blame to JSTOR and MIT for running walled gardens.

At the Fordham meeting, the international lawyer Scott Horton cried out in a loud voice, "LIES! LIES!" about the PACER claim to need to meet costs. He said PACER is "breaking the law" and that it is merely "fund-raising" with this charge of 8 cents a page.

PACER essentially is Westlaw only with composition or pagination. And I asked other lawyers outside the open source cult circuit what they thought of this and they said, yes, it is a legal question of whether they get to charge, but on the other hand, there are costs.

All of this could be handled by direct petitioning with PACER or the DOJ or Congress; you don't have to hack. But hackers are impatient, dramatic, and they want quick results. I'm unimpressed. I think legal minds will disagree what is right here. Maybe it should be one cent a page.

When the Obama Administration recently sanctimoniously vowed to have open access for publicly-funded research, they were also playing the Aaron Swartz and Carl Malamud game and taking a star turn for their open source pals. But the costs of servers, bandwidth, cataloguing, personnel still have to be met -- out of one pot or another. Whether the federal government "fundraises" though legitimate charges per page or through more taxation, it still has to fundraise.

In short, what we have here is a whole lot of nothing. We have some lower-level DOJ staffers -- the principles wouldn't bind themselves to it -- talking to some Congressional staffers. Some of those staffers -- probably Issa's or Lofgren's -- leaked the results to their press to spin it their way. They of all people should have been advocating for open access to this meeting, and it should have been at a hearing level with transcripts, not a low-level briefing.

Huffpo concludes:

Reich told congressional staffers that prosecutors offered Swartz a plea bargain early in the case that would have given him a three-month prison sentence in exchange for a guilty plea to a felony, according to three sources with knowledge of the briefing who would not agree to be quoted by name. Reich told the staffers that the plea deal would allow Swartz's lawyers to argue to a judge that Swartz didn't deserve a prison sentence.

Why can't you be quoted by name, cowards? Would this reveal that you are all from Issa's or Lofgren's staff and biased on this issue? And note that what the DOJ said is what Ortiz said: Swartz's lawyer was free to argue for probation. That was a distinct possibility in this case. Anyone hyping it to "7 years" let alone "35 or 50" is just hysterically hypothesizing.

Some congressional staffers left the briefing with the impression that prosecutors believed they needed to convict Swartz of a felony that would put him in jail for a short sentence in order to justify bringing the charges in the first place, according to two aides with knowledge of the briefing.

Well, they're entitled to their "impression," but that doesn't mean the DOJ *said* that. And the issue of deterrence does remain important. How can laws against hacking be taken seriously if you don't enforce them?

Again: he doesn't need to share the stolen goods to still show his intent from the guerilla manifesto, which is to encourage and incite widespread break-ins in order to smash the system -- an anarchist's approach to "liberate" knowledge.

There's an article in the New Republic by Norm Scheiber, touted on Facebook by Chris Huges, with oceans of white space and big hipster print (two kinds of people need big print these days: old people with poor eyesight and hipsters with little to say). It seems to strangely accomplish subtly what the nouveau establishment of the West-coder-turned-East-coder is saying about this kind of essentially criminal activity: hack, but wait until your 21st birthday. "Act like you got some sense. Greyhound don't float on water." This is why I called it "shorter Chris Hughes" on Twitter -- although the article is by Norm Scheiber, it has all the instrument marks of Silicon Valley handling all over it to "send a message" and make a political point.

"So Open it Hurts" with the URL label also beaming "The Internet Can't Save You" is supposed to be about "all" such tekkie suicides, but it only very briefly mentions the few other cases like Ilya Zhitomirsky, the coder of Diaspora. Along the way, it establishes more than any other long thinky piece on Aaron that he was, well, a loser. He had this zany, quirky teenage life as mentored by Lessig and other greats because he was a brain who believed even more than they did in their utopias. But he couldn't hold down a job or show up to work on time -- he was too much of a free spirit and possibly on the autism spectrum or suffering from some sort of 2e disability. He couldn't finish anything he started -- he would start projects and get bored or quarrel with people. These aren't the traits in young people that Silicon Valley wants to promote in the name of "innovation" -- they want stamina, and the message emerging from Norm's tongue clucking is clear -- if our venture capitalists value your shitty little product idea at millions of dollars, you better show up for work and show up at the right parties and nod and smile at us, or else.

One of the basic ethics-free principles of Bruce Sterling's in The Hacker Crackdown which I'm reading now is that all sorts of phreaks and crackers and hackers and credit-card kiters get to talk endlessly about their crimes, discuss their subtleties, write manuals for how to do them, plan them, even brag about them, even if they haven't quite done them, and we're all supposed to endlessly accept this as free speech and never touch it. We're supposed to weep when the Secret Service comes in and confiscates the computers and hardware of phreakers and hackers who ran the old Bulletin Boards of the 1990s, just because, oh, their wife's half-finished dissertation was also on that computer, or the next RP product in the their science fiction game business, or whatever. Well, boo-hoo. Be more careful. Don't associate with the guilty if you don't want guilt by association. We're unimpressed with these endless gyrations that you are only passing a few copies around of that AT&T 9/11 phone manual, and it wasn't really ever going to be hacked, and it really is all just in good fun. Blah blah. I'm with the Arizona attorney general in 1990:

"Agents are operating in good faith, and I don't think you can say that for the hacker community."

Oh, the Internet! The kids think that EVERYTHING related to it isn't real! Just wait until Mark Andressen gets done with them!

Could Corporations Actually Choke on Big Data?

TechCrunch's nimble Jordan Crook has an interview with the venture capitalist John Backus.

A good way to figure out trends for the year is to talk to the people who actually invest in tech and make the trends happen.

Interestingly, Backus indicates that while Google Glass will be a big deal, it might prove a challenge with "too much information":

As far as consumer-facing technology is concerned, Google Glass seems to be of some interest to Backus (along with the entirety of the tech industry). Backus believes that the most valuable asset of Google Glass, and other wearable computing devices, is the amount of data these products can collect. “When you think about that much data, we are going to have to start thinking differently about the way we use this much data, and how we parse through it for the stuff that matters.”

Well, it's true, that if GG is going to be looking at your cat for much of the time or at the alarm clock on your bedside table for eight hours a night or be turned off or whatever, what good is it, really? Who will parse all that dreck?

Backus also sees great potential with Google Glass in the education sector. “The courses and the professors at a particular school are much less relevant,” he said. “It’s all about the community.”

No, it's about the professors and the courses. What, you're going to learn something from your fellow partying undergraduates?

Google is now in the process of field-testing GG's with what they consider "norms," i.e. non-developers, which is a little silly as they will still be friends of developers and have the $1500 or whatever to buy this expensive toy.

Sergey even put them on the runway at Fashion Week in New York recently to try to give them chic. Obviously people will wonder how putting those nerdy things on them will affect their looks.

Photo by Loic Lemeur.

Notice when the French tech entrepreneur Loic Lemeur wears them, they're perched above his eyes so he can still look out normally, but then if he wishes, look up into the GG.

Photo by Infocux Technologies

But note when the guy from Infocux Technologies is trying them, he's looking through them as part of what seem to be his regular glasses -- or possibly wearing them *as* glasses.

 

Here's the official Google promo video, but like...your life consists of roller costers, skydiving, swordfights and holding poisonous snakes.

Quick, you're skydiving, and even if you're a pro, you're going to want to concentrate on things like when to pull your chute or whatever -- you're going to dial up Facebook and find your Skydivers' Club and GG them about your sky dive? Really? I think we're in for a LOT of bumpy amateur videos on Youtube!

And truly, how will Big IT find that Big Data in all of that? Will it be worth it?

Watch this, and you will be forgiven for thinking that Google Glass will make you able to skydive, land on a building, ride a bike to the side of it, climb down, and ride a bike up to the podium and talk to Sergey Brin.

 

Where Will the Smartness Come From?

Annual Wikimania conference, held in Haifa, Israel in 2011. No one knows who most of the editors are, but they are generally found to be white males. Photo by Sebastian Wallroth.

So here's one of those PandoDaily posts that help sell the gadgets better. So Nathaniel Mott is using that "iconoclastic" trick of bloggers purporting to go against the status quo (the hatred of fanboyz of something stupid tech companies are doing) to in fact support the establishment.

I can't help thinking of that deliciously awful put-down by Nick Danton, the Valleywag entrepreneur:

Oh @sarahcuda, you matter. As scraping courtier to the tech princes, flatterer-in-chief at Pander Daily, you are a gift of a subject.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) January 29, 2013

Somebody aptly calls the overpriced $1300 new Google-manufactured Chromebook a glorified browser with a keyboard attached to it, that oh, yeah, you can swipe on, and Mott turns it into an epiphany about Luddites Who Stop Progress.

I remember it was one of the pioneers in virtual reality in Second Life at Stanford who bragged on Facebook that his little two-year-old daughter automatically tried to swipe the TV set because she was used to swiping the i-pad, and found that it was "b'oken" because it didn't behave as she, an obviously evolved creature, expected it to.

I remember my father, an engineer, coming home from work at Xerox Corporation one day some 45 years ago and telling me that "the boys in the string ties" as he used to call the people in California making up different wild gadgets were making them try screens with "light pens" as he called them. In other words, if you held this "light pen," a pen made to be able to interact with the pixels on a TV screen, you could make the screen "do things". It was among those early tests with interactive screens -- the pen would make the screen "do stuff". But this was an annoyance because you'd have to take your hands off the keyboard, then pick up that pen, which would get lost, so they had it corded to the computer like a phone. This was before the mouse.

In any event, here we all are, and we're supposed to swipe stuff. All well and good, soon everything -- bathroom mirrors, kitchen tables, bedside stands, etc. will have screens or be screen-enabled and be swipable.

But here's the problem with ubiqituous computing or the semantic web or the Internet of Things or whatever they will call it, and it's not that awkward gap between keyboard and hand-swipe: the knowledge base.

You're supposed to be able to touch anything or call to anything and get answers from those "smart" things -- smart phones, smart tablets, even smart bathroom mirrors or tables in the future.

And where will this smartness come from?

Well, it will only come from Wikipedia, which is highly flawed and written by a bunch of anonymous and unaccountable geeks nearly impervious to the rest of the Internet because there really aren't valid votes on their work or even the ability to share the pages for discussion (and recently I was told by a  well-informed Wiki-geek that this was due to fears of privacy concerns, that they'd have to hook their pages up to Facebook's servers to process the "likes". Sigh.)

To be sure, there are a few competitors, like the drama-ridden and sectarian-hobbled Quora, which I don't play, because nobody pays me to write smart essays on my areas of expertise there -- they don't even pay me in Quorabux to enable me to buy a t-shirt or a free Coke or something. There's also Qwiki, that was an attempt to make an encyclopedia pulling in your social web and Wikipedia both, with sometimes hilarious results, which is now morphing into yet another "innovation" of the tired three elements of social/video/pictures only this time as video/pictures/social.

So that does leave Wikipedia far out ahead.

As you know, I have at least 21 theses against Wikipedia -- and more. I could add "and this awfulness is used as the tainted basis now for the 'smartness' of all smart-phones etc."

Imagine I'm at a party and everyone whispers into their Apple Watch or their Google Glass, "Who is Catherine A. Fitzpatrick?" And they get my vandalized and ridiculous Wikipedia entry partly taken from Enclopedia Dramatica. So while they are all whispering to each other that my entire career seems to have been obsessed with taking down a Soviet-themed commuter college digital arts department named Woodbury in suburban California, or fattening up my children adopted in Soviet Russia in order to eat them, or that I am "the biggest asshole of the Internet" (if the vandalism happens to not yet have been removed at that particular hour), what am I to do?

Well, fortunately by that time, someone will have created the Right of Reply ap or some other kind of Propaganda Layar (which is how it will be seen) to counteract that, um, "voice of the people," Wikipedia. So Wicked Impediment would have harmed yet another social transaction, but who cares? The nerd in New Jersey who lives to spite middle-aged WikiLeaks critics he loathes lives to fight another day in anonymity.

That's just a tiny thing -- what if the Olympics managers asks the smartthing for the national anthem of Kazakhstan, and gets not the real national anthem, but Borat's Song? (That actually happened in real life).

Or what if the President of the United States summons on his aging Blackberry or Google Glass, if he wears one, the facts about some country he is about to order invaded, and the Wikipedia entry is skewed with over-hype from that country's defense ministry about its defense capacity that in fact is wildly exaggerated?

And so on.

I used to think the only solution to fix the awfulness of Wikipedia that would actually happen (because disbanding it or making all the editors unmask themselves and be accountable) would be having Google buy it out. They might fix up some of its obvious stupidities and make it work better. After all, it's Wikipedia that provides the fig leaf to Google, the Ad Agency, by turning up search results with actually non-commercial "knowledge" or the appearance of same, on every search, before you see the SEO-skewed results or the paid ads. Google Glass needs Wikipedia even more voraciously than regular online search sitting at your computer or i-phone.

Will the new scrutiny and burden on Wikipedia finally make this open-source cult bastion crack and crumble like the old Soviet Union and finally be forced to reform? Will that reform perpetuate it and/or make it worse?

That same well-informed geek told me that no one in Wikipedia would ever countenance the idea that Google would buy out Wikipedia because a) it's not for sale and is nonprofit and b) they knew that Google had failed at this task only a few years ago with its Knoll thing. Nolls. Whatever they were called. "Units of knowledge". Yes, it failed and closed. So what? Google is better, maybe, at buying out start-ups that already had some user testing.

And yes, there's a price that likely Jimmy Wales could be bought at. Well, as I said to the Wiki-geek, get rid of that creepy leader of yours with the creepy eyes and then maybe they'll talk.

 

You Are Not the People

Forbes' enthusiastic friend of hackers Andy Greenfield has a blog post up, White House Owes Response To Petition To Fire Prosecutor Of Aaron Swartz And Other Hackers

My response is posted below.

But first let me note that recently, I had a chance to express my dissent against this entire ridiculous geek-induced Gov 2.0 monstrosity, really -- and the answer dismayed me even more.

During Internet 2013, I chanced to have an opportunity to talk about my deep distress about "We the People" with a US official. The context was a discussion about how the First Amendment in fact doesn't apply on government websites like whitehouse.gov or state.gov and that the typical corporate TOS has in fact migrated back to US government sites. Even some advocates of free speech who know better, I've found, irritably justify this because otherwise, the sites would be overrun with "birthers and truthers". BTW, a new category of "truther" devised by the left is anyone who demands the truth about Benghazi.

Sure, sites like the Office of Science and Technology began opening up to comments under Beth Noveck's stewardship, but then she quickly ended up first disappearing and then closing off comments because indeed, the "legalize pot," "birthers" and "truthers" overwhelming the comments. Any common diva of a Second Life fan site knows what you do then -- you make a threaded board with rubrics and you put a heading like "Sound Off" or "Hyde Park" or "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter" or whatever it is you want to call it, and tell everyone with a rant that they have to go under that rubric so that other people don't have to read all the arguments and insanities if they don't want. You move them there deliberately if they refuse to go there themselves. That way you don't have to become the speech police and you can still allow free speech. It's organization, not moderation that serves as censorship.

So not only are you moderated when you file a petition on whitehouse.gov -- the geeks there can remove you "for any reason or no reason" as they do on any web site. There are also a system of heavy filters that prevent true democratic speech, even of the kind that there is general consensus about as legitimate and needed:

o display of popular or favourite posts tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies -- they get more votes because the management puts them in the customers' view, like any website offering content

o unless you have 150 signatures, you can't get into search and be found by like-minded persons looking for, say, a particular petition on fracking in your neighbourhood or justice for a wrongfully arrested person in your city or a call for Obama not to participate in a summit with Putin until the draconian new adoption law is overturned. That means you can't gather signatures from search unless you already start with at least 150 people in your social networks -- more than many people have -- who will see and sign your petition -- which dooms many people to non-views.

o the number of 25,000 signatures was arbitrarily chosen to engender a response from the executive, and that goal post was now moved to 100,000. That makes sense, because it reduces frivolity. Yet it also ensures that the flashmobbers who can work social media, or Google who can put petitions on the search engine front page, etc. can win the game.

It's a system that's gamed; it's a system that comes from the worst depths of open-source cultism about how democracy should run (it fans the "direct democracy" shill), and it should be dismantled.

I could see that the official I contacted about this felt there might be some troubles with this site. For one, I can imagine the chore of having to answer hundreds or thousands of petitions even given the new higher threshold was going to add to their burden. They'd have to sit and craft carefully non-commital and anodyne responses to things they didn't like, and figure out how to front and promote things that were part of the boosterism of Obama For America and Obama's own agenda. The Customer Service State, as Edward Castronova dubbed it. Enable more democracy, whereby everyone with an Internet connection can sound off, create more endless work for bureacrats who will soon start doing what Congress people do, which is create automatic mail answers based on key words in your letter to them.

But what distressed me most about this encounter is that the official said "We're discussing this now" -- about what to do with this site and how to improve it (presumably not how to remove it, as it is a beloved toy of Obama geeks and the Gov 2.0 goverati).

And that's just what's all wrong about it. Why is some bureaucrat in the government able to decide whether this thing changes or stays or goes? It should be "we the people," not the state only. It should never have started and become housed in the executive, the target of the petitions, where it can be manipulated as I've just explained. It's only a game to circumvent Congress.

Otherwise, There Might Be A Case...

A small town in Ohio, Steubenville. Photo by Dougtone.

I see that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is one of the local papers covering the Steubenville rape case of course, and they are covering the series of demonstrations that Anonymous has been planning.

At one point I read that Anonymous was planning a demonstration on February 23, which happens to be Soviet Army day, but now I see they seem to have put the demonstrations for the first week in March around the time of a trial hearing -- February 23 was some other "day of rage" about 2nd amendment rights or something.

This is the comment I put at Cleveland.com:

I hope that justice will be served and that those who assaulted the victim will be prosecuted. Rape is a serious matter and "rape culture" is indeed an issue that has to be challenged.  
 
But justice is not served nor victims vindicated and protected by promoting vigilantism. And that's what we're seeing with the hackers' collective Anonymous and some of the celebratory press coverage of this destructive movement that seems to have only tuned into them yesterday and haven't followed their exploits over the years. 
 
First of all, Anonymous is merely engaged in reputational laundering with their action #JusticeSec, as their roots are in 4chan, some of the most horrendous violent porn against women, and they have a long history of years of tormenting particularly young girls and women on the Internet. So they're hardly the people to be claiming to be wearing any white robes here in a crusade against rapists. It sure doesn't diminish support for real-life rape victims to point out that Anonymous hackers have engaged in online virtual sexual assault -- neither should be endorsed.  
 
The Anonymous operatives also replicate the same vicious logic of "rape culture" when they say that if they disagree with someone, or someone doesn't share their views about this case, or they suspect someone of involvement or cover-up, that they're entitled to hack and dox and harass and embarass them "just because they can" because it is possible to do.  
 
When someone like me or other bloggers or journalists question their behaviour, they go after them like junkyard dogs and then you really see how they talk to women: 
 
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/a... 
 
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/h... 
 
I think the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the other local press needs to report the antics of Anonymous in harassing and bullying anyone who tells the truth about their roots and their other hacking and harassment antics. They do not get to launder their reputation in Steubenville, and distract from their poster boy, Julian Assange, who refuses to appear before Swedish police to answer questions on rape charges. 
 
You do not want to live in a world where Anonymous runs your "justice" -- they will come for you next. 
 
And while some journalists seem to think these amateurs have accomplished some sort of investigative feats here, real reporters should be the ones checking the stories and how they are gotten, and they shouldn't celebrate bullying and vigilantism from these "justice-seekers". And the real justice system needs to function to bring durable justice. Chief among our civil rights is the right to face your accuser before a court of law before a jury of your peers, with an adversarial defense. When you deal with men in masks, you are unable to do that.

* * *

The appalling treatment meted out to be by gangs of JusticeSec operatives and cutaways has been documented and hopefully serves as a deterrent. I will be interested to see how both justice is served in Steubenville, and how the local media covers or doesn't cover the problem of Anonymous and their harassment of actors in the local drama.

It used to be that some townships forbade demonstrations by people in masks or who had covered their faces -- this was their way of preventing demonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, we can recall the famous case of the ACLU defending the rights of the KKK to march in the suburb of Chicago, Skokie, IL. There's a book by Aryeh Neier, then head of the ACLU, called Defending My Enemy.
In any event, I will be interested to see if there are counter demonstrations, better coverage by the press, etc.

I don't have the capacity to research the story itself as Lee Stranahan of Breitbart News and others have done. I realize they are taking up the issue of whether the story is even true, whether the girl was even raped in the legal sense, whether there were even more than two football players and all the rest. I can't get into these aspects of the case, which the conservative press has taken up because I don't have the ability to do the research from here for free as a blogger and no one needs me to do it, it's not my expertise. Just looking at what I've read in the trustworthy media, like the New York Times, I would take the side of the victim. Yes, I may have been duped by the liberal media, but I don't think so.
The rape video of the young man boasting about his comrades raping the girl is an appalling artifact of modern Internet life. It's hard to know even where to put such an awful thing. "This girl is as dead as Caylee Anthony?" What to say of such a horror?!

But for a student of Russian culture and world fairy tales and epic poetry, you can see where the bawdy tale takes its place in literature so to speak, if you can prevent from vomiting, and you can see that it is like a faint echo of the rituals of some ancient peoples. I thought for example the Meryans, a native people of Russia, about whom a film was made; after the beloved dies, the widower spends time describing in epic and obscene form the sexual exploits of the woman -- as a form of ritual. Again -- a rough approximation, a flailing effort to try to find the genre for this modern MIPS breakout...

The only redeeming feature of that otherwise horrendous piece of humilitaing phone-video porn is that during the young man's recounting of just how dead the girl is -- "as dead as OJ's wife" and so on -- some of the other boys in the room, admittedly, not very robustly, say, "Hey, don't say that, she could have been your sister". Or, "Hey, that's wrong, you shouldn't say that". It's weak, but even that glimmer of conscience coming from today's Internet-bred youth is still, well, something. What those modern knights of the smart phone should have done, if they were chivalrous -- or just plain decent human beings -- is call the police, as the girl was in danger -- and rape is wrong. Some raise the issue of "where were the girl's parents". Well, where were the boys' parents, too?

If you are the ACLU, however, you'd be compelled to say, if you weren't preoccupied with government snooping or CISPA or anti-bullying (a curious thing for the ACLU to have picked up, given its history as a maxed-out civil libertarian group defending the rights of tobacco companies to advertise -- and taking their money) -- is that as awful as the rape video is, it's protected speech. You can't show that it incites imminent violence -- it is made after the unfortunate girl is taken away by their peers and she is not there. Otherwise, there might be a case.

And isn't that like so much of social media criminality? Otherwise, there might be a case. The speech against me, doxing me, harassing me, revealing private information, speaking obscenely to me, threatening me -- this is all protected speech.  Interestingly, Lee Stranahan is now trying to take to court one of his serial, persistent persecutors -- and I wonder if it will get to court, given the great protections for free speech in this country.

When will the Steubenville story get the ProPublica treatment?

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