Last night I went to the panel discussion on Aaron Swartz at Fordham Center on National Security and just as expected, it was terribly one-sided, and as the organizer even told me afterward -- deliberately so. They could only conceive of "the other side" as someone actually from the Department of Justice (who wouldn't have come anyway). And they clearly wanted to first frame the debate around the figure of Swartz as hero-coder and then only some other day discuss the national security implications of people "like Galileo". "Or Oppenheimer," as one old man enthusiastically declared to the panelists. Sigh. One old grey-haired 1960s activist woman in the audience ranted about "the war on the young" that the crackdown on hackers symbolized. Oh, please. The Internet Revolution has eaten its children; and these children are making war on all of our rights and should not be so lightly given a pass by people claiming to be human rights advocates.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"
The first people that the hackers will come for are the lawyers, when they install code-as-law -- and law and lawyers will become obsolete -- they already are, as we can see how a bill in Congress designed to govern the unruly Internet is overthrown by an Internet-incited mob before it could even come to a vote.
I don't believe the videos are online anywhere from this discussion, and there's lots to debate in it, but let me focus on one problematic thesis, that "we need more technologists in Washington," i.e. to write legislation affecting complex new technologies.
My robust answer to that is: no we don't, no way, keep these cultists as far, far, FAR away from our democratic institutions and human rights as possible. That's because of their total lack of civics education; their total immersion in binary 0101 type thinking without consideration of the nuances and complexities of actual reality; their literalism about how law works as if it were code, instead of in living dynamic institutions like the Supreme Court, and a host of other pernicious features of their authoritarian culture -- these are all deadly for democracy.
They've already made very fearful and significant inroads, and people need to push back very, very hard before they do indeed literally overthrow the Constitution. This seems like a preposterous abstraction now; it won't when you realize that a good many of them think the Constitution is flawed or obsolete and belongs to some outdated operating system and should be rewritten with a new Constituent Assembly controlled by themselves, or else thrown out completely, along with Congress and the Supreme Court, which are outdated and "in the way" of progress, and we should just run the state off their iphones. This is why I started this blog. This is not something I'm kidding about. I absolutely do not care if you find this extreme or find me loony.
MISLEADING HACKER LORE
There are number of very clear reasons why you cannot trust Chris Soghoian, the privacy guru now working for the ACLU whom I have criticized in the past.
And it's very simple: because he misleads the public -- er, lies -- about things that are in fact checkable, and if he can do this on smaller things, he will do this on larger things.
Tekkies pride themselves on being experts and having esoteric and arcane knowledge that the public doesn't know and can't be bothered to parse. But often what their "knowledge" is, is in fact lore -- lore that they get from each other in tightly-knit fiercely tribal circles and networks, and not ever debated, subjected to even the most basic journalistic scrutiny, let alone proven as "fact".
Example: Soghoian's claim in his talk that fear of hackers began with ignorance and superstition, and that it was only creative interesting people probing new technologies then in the 1990s (phone switching software) that caused the panic, which was unnecessary. Silly police and justice officials thought that phreakers could launch nuclear weapons with whistles out of their Cracker-Jack boxes, he chided, and the audience laughed.
Oh, nonsense. Read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, which I'm doing now. Sterling, a science fiction author and cult hero himself among the tech set, is extremely kind to phreakers and hackers, and writes very generously and lovingly about them, but even he concedes they were doing some dangerous and damaging things, like stealing AT&T's manual for running the 911 emergency phone system or running up huge phone bills on other people's numbers. Even Sterling is ambivalent about the destructiveness some hackers cause and does indeed take seriously some of the hacks and doesn't claim it's just kids whistling.
The issues posed by the hacker revolution are real and not trivial and one cannot accept the hackers' narrative about themselves as a starting point or as an end in itself. You have to step outside their narrative -- peddled massively now through their invention of social media featuring themselves as hero and influencers "recommended to follow" -- and ask basic questions about this struggle for power.
HISTORY OF DISSECTION AS A MODEL FOR UNDERSTANDING HACKERS
After all, physicians in the old days stole bodies and dissected whenever they wanted, and ranted about the general public being superstitious and getting in the way of "innovation". But society eventually regulated them so that they had to follow procedures and show respect for the dead and gain consent -- something that people, however unscientific and outdated they were viewed as by the innovative physicians -- insisted on, and got their way about with institutions.
The history of dissection is actually an interesting one to contemplate as a model for the demands -- and the pushback of the public -- for scientists. Physicians insisted on the smelly and horrifying business of dissection to "learn" despite cultural and religious taboos. They persisted and persisted and got their way, but were eventually regulated. And as time went on, in fact the very science itself -- or rather the obsessive and aggressive practice of it -- got pushed back from the realm of medicine as "diagnosis," and got put more properly in its place as necessary only for forensics. Not every death gets an autopsy. Physicians don't need to endlessly engage in autopsies throughout their careers after med school. The physician needed the autopsy at one time to prove himself right, despite cultural resistance. That's all it was about, really, his own need to be right. Even he could find less objectionable ways of proving his rectitude, and his aggressiveness desisted.
And isn't it ironic that today, the geek-produced computer models are preferable rather than cutting up the human body? That says it all. Society produces innovators, then rejects them, but eventually tames them. Hackers will be no different *shrugs*.
NO, SWARTZ DID NOT INVENT OR CO-AUTHOR THE RSS
Or let's take up take another claim from Soghoian: "Swartz co-authored the RSS" (some geeks even say "invented" RSS).
But anyone who has been around this field observing it for even a short while simply knows this isn't true. Dave Winer invented and applied the RSS, and even that legend has its qualifications.
Soghoian condescendingly told the audience that if they had ever accessed "This American Life" as a podcast, they had used Aaron's invention.
Nonsense, they would have done nothing of the sort. Let's leave alone the notion that people listen to podcasts outside of a hardcore fanclub of nerds, or that anybody still uses feed readers to read blogs. In the age of i-phones, they now use apps, and that's not technology that came out of the RSS. Even Winer discusses whether the RSS is obsolete, as do nerds on Quora, look it up on Google.
Twitter, Facebook, etc. have all made the RSS feeds, the hope of certain open source geeks for a Better World where we would all be As One reading each others blogs constantly on an open, shared standard system, completely beside the point. People discover content through social networks and people they follow now and just read those streams, not RSS feeds through readers. The entire reason Google retired i-Google is because people didn't use it. Sure, people still do use RSS here and there. But it is being made pointless.
And Swartz's contribution to it is even more pointless today, and was obscure even at the time he was involved in it. He worked on one version of it, 1.0, which is not used now and which was a branch of the system. This is all something you can read about from those actually in this field, and from tekkies who waited a week until the uproar over his death died down, but then laid out the facts. You can read them in an otherwise hagiographic study of Swartz in Slate.
So unless Soghoian has been living under a rock for the last few years, he has no basis for claiming that Swartz "co-authored" code that people "use for podcasts today" when in fact that was never the case and isn't now.
What geeks mean to say about Swartz and the RSS is that they were enthralled and entranced that he worked on a geeky branch of it at the tender age of 14, thereby illustrating his status as a boy genius. But like child actors, child geeks often come to bad ends. They don't mature. They bloom too fast. And the adults eager to make them bloom too fast and gain benefit from them should be held to account (and I will write another post about my exchange with Carl Malamud).
But with Soghoian, we are merely seeing him pass on lore, like he constantly picks up and passes on lore and gossip and opinion from the "hysterical hypotheticals" hothouse he lives in.
FAKE CLAIM THAT CONGRESS IS NOT TECH SAVVY AND THERE ARE NO TECHS IN DC
Now let's look at his claim that there are "no" technologists or "not at all enough" technologists in Washington.
You won't need me to object to this, as a million Gov 2.0 goverati could likely howl at this claim, and you don't have to "be the only Congressman running your own server" to be tech-savvy or have access to appropriate tech expertise -- like you would get expertise on any other subject, whether health or education. Congressmen write legislation on health, education, and welfare -- and nuclear missles -- without being doctors or nuclear scientists. They get the appropriate expertise. There is nothing special about computer science, by the same token, and the "science" is really often lore or propagandistic struggles for power dressed up as "science".
That legislation can be hard to write, because it requires attunement and skill to everything else Congress has done before that in that field and to the norms of how legislation is written is one thing. That's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about the technical skill of writing legislation (for which we do not need technologists, even when the legislation is about technology; we need experts on the jurisprudence of Congress).
What Soghoian's claim is that technologists -- geeks -- aren't let in on the process of legislating over and regulating technology, and therefore it is all screwed up.
I cry sheer, unadulterated "nonsense" at this, particularly on SOPA. I went up to him after the meeting and challenged him, and I found he had a hard time replying. He replied with all the usual set-pieces of lore he had mastered from his tekkie circles without debate or questioning, and it was hard to get him to break out of the vicious circle. He blew me off by pretending this was a deep conversation for email and gave me his card -- but Mr. Privacy's card consists of a graphic of an eye and a generic gmail with his name -- not even his ACLU coordinates. Please. That's not serious. You're not serious, when you do that, Chris. You are not trustworthy.
I pointed out, as AJ Keen has also pointed out, that geeks had plenty of access to the SOPA process. None other than Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, testified at a hearing in Congress that came about precisely to humour the howlers that techs weren't involved. That was not enough for Soghoian, no doubt because he conceives it as only the top level guy at one hearing, and as we all "know," these suits at the top aren't really involved in the day-to-day work.
Nothing less than a top coder of the Harper Reed lore quest level would have been sufficient for Soghoian, but that implies that defining piracy and punishment for it is some hard job that "breaks technology" if you "mess it up" -- a fictional approach dictated by extreme politics to start with, and therefore needing of challenge.
SOPA was directed at high-volume, high-traffic, high-income piracy websites of the MegaUpload type that clearly fit the criteria laid out in the bill for commercial interest, resistance to takedown warnings, persistence over time, monetary value over a certain amount, and so on. Not somebody's Facebook page.
As we know engineers wrote alarming letters about the DNSSEC impact, something that I've questioned, as a non-technologist, just on the usual tendency to disbelieve any geek-induced "hysterical hypothetical," and which technologists themselves have questioned (and one obvious point is that big companies have not moved to use DNSSEC, despite all the hysteria about how SOPA would "break" it).
But...Technologists and tech agitators like Mike Masnick had a HUGE impact on SOPA -- via Darryl Issa and Zoe Lofgren. Soghoian objected that this was only after SOPA was drafted and began to pick up steam. Huh? So what? It's not my fault that geeks have only discovered "how a bill becomes a law" yesterday, and think that the way to influence it is to create a monstrous flashmob and take away the right to vote. There was considerable, ample, repetitive, and hostile input into the drafting of SOPA, but hey, it never culminated in the drafting of a viable alternative bill that was passable now, did it. That would be the test of seriousness about participation in the legislative process, and that this was NOT the result is proof of the nefarious intents of the geeks, in my view. The fake alternative Issa promoted desultorily for awhile doesn't count -- Google was never serious about that and it didn't happen for obvious political reasons.
WHY DO TECHS FEAR VOTING LIKE THE PLAGUE?
I asked Soghoian why he and others were afraid of this law coming to a vote. As that was what it amounted to when they flash-mobbed Congress with 7 millions Google-incited signatures and all the tyrannical, temper-tantrun threats of blacking out Tumblr and Wikipedia.
I asked him point-blank if he wished to circumvent Congress, as some hackers openly call for and incite the mob to do. He said he would like Congress to vote "regularly and often". Sure, on his terms.
Soghoian objected again that Tumblr was only blacked out in protest for that one day. But I countered that for weeks -- months -- they had greeted their customers with a fake ICE-style message that their site might be seized by federal authorities. They disgracefully and shamefully propagandized wildly in order to scarify kids and stampede them into the anti-SOPA crusade -- which was very much a children's crusade, and the child-man Swartz led it, prompted to it by his older mentors. I saw direct evidence of this myself in the dozens of friends in my teenagers' feeds screaming about how the government was going to censor their Internet pages -- something that was never the target of the bill -- or even remotely some accidental by-product of the bill. Shame on Silicon Valley for exploiting kids when they couldn't make their legal arguments the normal way as adults in a democratic system.
And that was sheer manipulative 1930s style mass propaganda, and even some more sober heads like Pogue at the Times and even some tech commentators said later that while they opposed SOPA and didn't think it was a good idea, they were highly troubled by the way the tech industry went after this -- with thuggish, vicious abandon and the propagandistic spreading of lies and hate.
There was never, ever, anything in SOPA that would have shut down a teenager's Tumblr blog let alone all of Tumblr. The definitions and stipulations and remedies in the later drafts of SOPA would have prevented anything remotely like that from occurring.
Yet tekkies kept bleating like stuck pigs that their Internet was going to be taken away from them and that horrible evil censorship would descend like the Iron Curtain. It was all total bullshit, and I think some of them do privately admit it, but like true Bolsheviks, they felt "the ends justify the means".
Soghoian was untroubled by the coercive process of overthrowing the proper work of legislators on SOPA, and insisted that the problem is that not enough of his tribe is in place in legislative offices.
I countered that in fact they exist, such as in the FTC's CTO. He objected that no, their leadership are lawyers. Well, that's okay, given that *law* is indeed mainly what they have to work with, not "code-as-law". Soghoian claimed with a straight face that he only new a few interns in all of Washington capable of understanding the technology that was the subject of these laws.
BIG IT SPENDS MILLIONS ON LOBBYISTS!
Oh, do stop. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all spent MILLIONS on lobbyists in Washington -- lobbyists who *are* technologists or scripted by technologists. They all have their technologists in revolving doors in the government -- look at Andrew McLaughlin. Congressional offices have ample recourse to technologists who in any event are hugely busy lobbying them with far more connected and resourced outfits than the ACLU -- like the Sunlight Foundation. Congressmen like Issa have HUGE amounts of IT company contribution to their campaigns, especially from Google. Geeks want Congressmen to "get the money out of politics" and have logos on their suits like NASCAR drivers. Sure, I'm all for that, because we'll see law firms, unions, and yes, Big IT control congress as much as those evil energy or defense corporations that geeks love to hate (even though they probably work for Big IT that has numerous consulting contracts with those very firms).
Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist and investor in Twitter and other modern tech has an "activist in residence" now who does nothing but scan the horizon for "threatening" legislation -- something that has caused a certain amount of debate even among his coterie. One might argue that these things came into place AFTER SOPA. But *that* SOPA could fail as a draft deluged by a flashmob lets us know in fact the raw power of geeks that they apply without reason, without logic, and without debate. THAT is what we have to worry about.
I don't care if you find this post extreme. You're welcome to argue it more moderately if you like. I'm concerned that when extermist sectarians like Soghoian, who are willing to misrepresent the facts and weave narratives favourable to their tribe, insist on more power for themselves and their friends, we will all be worse off.
WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TO GET WISE TO TECH HYPE, NOT MORE TECHNOLOGISTS
We don't need "more technologists". We need ordinary lawyers, business people, and even people in the humanities who are in office to merely get wise to the tech hype and the geek hysteria and learn to start asking hard questions about their propaganda. Even other geeks question these extremists and we need to hear from them more. Most of what we are seeing in the tech/legal space around things like SOPA and CISPA are not really genuine concerns about free speech or privacy -- rights that these big platforms and Big IT are only too happy to whisk away from us at the drop of an absuse report or a marketer's payment -- but merely lobbying hype in their business interests.
There is nothing special about cyberspace. It is a human artifact that is no more complex than cars or telephones were complex in their day. It's not exotic and impossible to control, any more than the Wild West was impossible to control. The outlaws on the Electronic Frontier will be rounded up for their cattle rustling, if they won't turn themselves in.
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