Wired State

No, We Don't Need More Technologists in Washington, Chris Soghoian

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.

 

Should Health Records Software Be Open Source or Closed?

This piece in the New York Times today skewers this proprietary software company that doubled its income after getting a fat Obama infusion.

And so predictably this will have something for everybody -- Libertarians who hate Obama and pork legislation, and lefty geeks who insist on open source uber alles.

I only had one of my responses published (so far) and now I've lost my longer comment, but it went something like this:

o what's the big deal, income of only a $1.4 billion doubled from last year? Microsoft, Google, Apple all make tons of billions more, and you don't flinch

o so Obama had a slush fund to help his friends on a topic for recovery, health records ($19 billion). Is this the worst you got?

o even so, good, New York Times, critical of the Obama Administration! This wasn't the best place to start, but it's a start!

o when are we going to hear FROM YOU that you have not had a direct, unscripted interview with Obama in YEARS! In fact, you should have a box on the front page with a countdown "Days Since We Asked President Obama for an Interview".

It's disgraceful that he never gives them to the print media (which is online too) and has social media funfests that are guaranteed to have softball comments and not hard questions from seasoned journalists.

But more to the point, I do remember when this fandango was rolled out. There were some open source nerds who were so furious at this program, and that it was going to go to proprietary companies that bid for it, that they said it was better not to give any money at all, not to modernize health records (!) than give it to proprietary companies.

If I'm not mistaken, it was that same guy who scripted the Howard Dean web presence and became a big Internet deal for the blue states after that -- I will look this up.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in these comments -- from coders, doctors, thoughtful people. My conclusion is still that we need CHOICE and it can't be all or nothing, but that open source cultists can never concede this, and that this story is feeding into their narrative.

 

 

Looks Like a Very One-Sided Panel at Fordham Center on National Security

February 20th, 7:00pm - 8:30pm

Fordham Lowenstein Building, 12th Floor

113 West 60th Street, NYC

Scott Horton is a New York attorney known for his work in human rights and humanitarian law.  In April 2007, he joined Harper's Magazine as a legal affairs consultant and national security contributor, and he currently authors the No Comment blog at Harper's Online.  He is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School.

Christopher Soghoian is the Principal Technologist and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the ACLU. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project and a Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University.

Trevor Timm is an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  He specializes in privacy, free speech, and transparency issues. He is also the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which supports and funds journalism organizations dedicated to transparency and accountability in government

Wesley Yang is a contributing editor at New York Magazine.  He recently authored "The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz," a thought-provoking article about Aaron Swartz's life and legacy.

Molly Land is an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School, where she focuses on access to knowledge and the intersection of intellectual property, information law, and human rights.  She is affiliated with the Institute for Information Law and Policy, the Center for International Law, and the Justice Action Center.

To RSVP for this event, email us [email protected], or visit our website:

http://www.CenterOnNationalSecurity.org/RSVP

Refuting the Smear of Racism

If you followed Anonymous' hack of Burger King yesterday, you noticed what wildly racist and stereotypical tweets and pictures were posted -- stories of black employees shooting up drugs in the bathrooms and liberal use of the N-word. This is the hallmark of Anonymous culture; these are the same people who bought you the man with the Afro hairdo saying "Pool's Out" and numerous racist memes. The tweets are removed now, but go and Google it and see any tech blog coverage of this phenomenon. Anyone who has followed Anonymous especially around 4chan knows this. That this hackers' cult is now whitewashing itself with various socially-active causes (named "ops") doesn't mean its nasty essence changed.

And Anonymous is very adept at playing the racism card opportunistically, despite its own notorious and blatant and outrageous racism on display in ops like the Burger King hack. No, it does no good saying that Anonymous is a looseknit movement of opportunistic and spontaneous people who just use it to do whatever, so that no one of them takes responsibility for what the whole hive does. The fact is, it has a rigid hierarchical structure, it has leaders, who are sometimes arrested, and it consciously decides to culture jam -- either jamming with racist stereotypes when it wishes, or jamming with faux-horrified accusations of racism when it wishes. Both are manipulative methods to gain power and influence, and nothing more.

So right now I'm undergoing an onslaught of harassment from Anonymous, so one of the ways it is trying to discredit me and my blogging is to accuse me of racism.

And as Anonymous is an open-source harassment toolkit that anyone can grab on to in order to settle scores, several anonymous people who ordinarily don't take part in Anonymous operations are exploiting this onslaught of harassment to also join in to the accusations that I'm a racist. The accusation they tried to drum up last week that I "hate gays" or am "cruel to people with AIDS" was starting to fall apart when they read the real story of how I merely covered a troubled griefer online who in fact used anti-gay and racist memes in his attacks on Second Life, who then claimed to reform but then later died of AIDS under mysterious circumstances. There was only so far they could go with this smear, once they read the guy's own articles and other articles about him, and realized it was a case of researching and writing about Internet histrionics and Internet hoaxes, not some hate campaign -- in fact I support LGBT rights. I may have differences with some tactics used that attempt to take other people's rights of freedom of expression or association away on the road to LGBT equality, but I'm for such equality and for gay marriage and all equal rights. So those harassing me have found they can go only so far with trying to trump up this story and seem to have dropped it, but will figure out to wield it again when they find a fresh audience.

So now they're trying to "racism" card, that ever-ready staple of American political life which the left wields as a club particularly against the right, and as I have found, anyone who doesn't agree with them and challenges them. Those heckling and harassing me for my views critical of copyleftist, online hacker movements and opponents of cybersecurity who tend to minimize terrorism find that if they can impugn my reputation as a human rights activist by invoking "racism," they can seem to discredit me. They gloat that they are merely using my own writings to make me self-discredit, but of course, maliciously and tendentiously portraying these. If I felt honestly that anything I wrote was racist, I would delete it or apologize for it. But I don't.

The people who are accusing me of being "racist" are largely accusers I cannot face -- most are anonymous or Anonymous. They have deluged me with tweets and blog posts making this false claim and demanding accountabilty from me invoking universal human rights standards, but they hide behind fake names and are unaccountable. While some of them have persistent pseudonyms, their real identities are not connected to the accounts. To be sure, one particularly "irascible" defense analyst, Joshua Foust, is picking up this claim, but the rest of his cronies are keeping their identities hidden.

It's telling that the people making this smear of me are not identifying themselves, and Foust, the one who has has a long history of harassing and heckling me, even accusing me of "lying" on Twitter for my accurate reporting on Central Asia. The people making this accusation are not black, but white; the people making this accusation are not in organized anti-racism groups or movements, but not in any human rights groups that I can tell.

They are making this claim to try to discredit me in the eyes of any colleagues or peers in the human rights movement where I have worked for many years, because if they can succeed in doing that, then they can attempt to discredit my valid critique of them and their views as antithetical to human rights. That's all that it's about, and in that sense it's not worth bothering too much about, but I will take the time to post this refutation, especially because some of them think that I somehow need to correct my statements or apologize or rectify something they feel is politically incorrect -- and I won't be doing that.

Although the harassment I have suffered over the last 10 days has subsided, several opportunistic hecklers who joined in with Anonymous using the same hashtag #opcatzhunt (!) persist; one has made an account @opcatzhunt and admitted he is the same person updating the account @grumpcatfitz which was made to parody me last year.

And now the security analyst Joshua Foust has also picked up this heckling, and likely he and/or Nathan Hamm or other hecklers from Registan.net have joined him. Interestingly, they both seem to have more time on their hands as they have both become freelancers in the last months. Foust announced that he would be looking for a job starting in March, and Registan stepped up its advertising  for consulting work. Then I noticed Hamm was appearing at conferences as an "independent scholar" and now describes himself as a "freelancer" on LinkedIn and is no longer with the defense contracting agency. I wondered when these people would be decoupled from the establishment, and it seems sooner rather than later, but who knows, maybe they are only being groomed now for greater glory. In any event, they continue to pester me.

As I noted, they picked up the story of the "AIDS journalist" who accused me of cruelty; actually, because of the prevalance of Internet histrionics, the community had trouble believing him; as a blogger I checked his story and wasn't convinced it was true when I had no confirmation. In the course of researching his story, I put some of his awful chat, including his racist remarks on my blog -- while this was quoted material, @opcathuntz apparently has trouble seeing where the quotes are.

But the attacks against me as being "racist" stem not only from that case, but from several blog posts in which I frankly discuss the problem of the Republican Party  and their failure of their digital team and GOTV program. I said very plainly that Romney used Democratic Party operatives as his digital experts, and consulting firms with Obama supporters, and that they didn't put their heart and soul into the work for him, obviously, and this was a mistake. I said that the Republicans had to stop simply buying what they believed to be the best talent in the business -- Democrats -- and stop using firms with young people voting for Obama (or Ron Paul) and just laughing at them -- and keep their digital work inhouse, with loyal people dedicated to their cause.

Say, that's what Obama did, and it worked for him. His digital analytics people were all inhouse, hugely dedicated, voting for him, and utterly devoted to him. They also all happened to be white, with only a few exception for support personnel, as often happens in Silicon Valley.

As anyone can read in my past blogs, I didn't blame either the failure of ORCA or black people (!) for Romney's loss in the elections -- he lost for a number of reasons having to do with his own failings but also the ability of the Obama operatives to seize the narrative and pump up three big themes successfully with an uncritical public: a) Romney, although a modest Morman businessman, was Little Richie Rich and hated poor people (the 47%) and was evil and exploiting people and causing their factories to close and wives to have cancer; b) Romney was supported by Republican leaders who wanted a war on women and wanted to take their sexual freedoms away and right to birth control and abortion; c) Republicans were suppressing the vote for minorities and disenfranchising blacks and Hispanics. To the extent that any of these narratives were true -- and they had elements of truth in each one of them which made it possible to turn them into full-bore propaganda programs -- large numbers of people believed them.

Anyone can go look up the texts in question and pour over them and render their analysis, but let me try to get people to focus on matters of principle.

Let's go over what we could all agree on is racism:

1. Advocating or practicing discrimination against black people in employment, housing, etc.

2. Making disparaging remarks about black people as a race or using racial slurs.

3.Maintaining suspicion against blacks as people and suspecting them of crimes.

Let's go over what most people would agree is not racism, but "progressives" might disagree and *might* call racism because they realize the value of provoking neuralgia around the topic:

4. Even talking about race at all related to any subjects, but particularly gun control, crime and politics.

5. Reporting that there are large numbers of black people who commit crimes and those who are mainly the victims are other blacks.

6. Noting that 96% of blacks voted for Obama, which means only a very tiny number - 4% - did not vote for Obama.

Now, if you think any of these last three things are "racist," there is little to debate with you because you have accepted such a rigidly PC and extreme notion of what is "racist" that you can't be reasoned with -- you oppose the truth. If you're going to see racism in these positions of stating the truth, there is little hope that you'll ever be taken for sincere, and you'll likely have a propensity for taking this extreme notion of racism and applying it to any blogger you don't like.

So let's now look at the policies that might ensue from any of these beliefs. If you believe in the first three premises that we can all agree are racist, you would believe, for example, that George Zimmerman had the right to have a weapon and use it to shoot at Trayvon Martin in the "stand your ground" doctrine of deterring a perceived trespasser. I actually don't believe that, which puts me at odds with Liberty Lynx, an avid gun enthusiast who also happens to have a black son. (She has not explicitly expressed approval of Zimmerman's act, but she stands by his right to own and use a gun, that's where we differ.) I happen to take Trayvon's side -- just because there had been a series of robberies by blacks in this neighbourhood doesn't give vigilantes the right to shoot a black kid running across the lawn. I'm not for vigilantes or "neighbourhood patrols". I'm for having law-enforcers, not civilians having and using guns. To every question of "what about the Second Amendment," I reply that the Second Amendment never seemed to have intended to enable moms to buy assault weapons that their mentally ill violent video-playing teens could grab to massacre 27 people, and we need to review this seriously.

It was in this context that Liberty Lynx, who is a libertarian but not of the Ron Paul sort, accused me of "near" racism. I oppose guns and don't think safety is improved by having them, especially the assault weapons. I think crime with guns would be reduced with reduction of guns. This isn't a popular view with Libertarians - they get absolutely crazy and furious on this topic as I discovered. But I won't be dissuaded by endless arguing over this -- I oppose guns.

In a discussion about the more than 500 gun deaths in Chicago, which were not deterred despite strict gun laws, Liberty Lynx linked to an article about how black people mainly supported gun ownership. I responded with the tweet that this was understandable, given membership in gangs by some and the desire to oppose gangs or have protection from them by others. After all, my belief in the second category is based on the fact that the crimes of violence are mainly against other blacks, not whites.

As we read from this study publicized in the Atlantic, precisely the success of law-enforcement decapitating some of the gang leadership, there are smaller fry having a tendency to fight more with each other.

I think if guns are illegal, no one should get to own them, and even blacks needing to protect themselves from gang warefare should not be exempt. I think the police have to deter guns, not civilians. These are my views; they happen to coincide with the views of many liberals and "progressives". And I think that's why some of my Libertarian debaters on Twitter get so livid about my views counter to theirs -- on other issues like criticism of Russia, or criticism of criminalized hacker groups or WikiLeaks, they are in full agreement. They aren't on this issue, which they see as a "freedom" issue. I see it as an "unfreedom" issue, in which many people lose their lives because others insist on having this "freedom" -- it's a classic Art. 30 issue, where people use one right to take another right away from others.

Now let's take another issue where I differ with conservatives and Libertarians, which flow from my beliefs: attitudes towards social welfare, preferential treatment, and set-asides. I personally don't oppose such programs and believe they need to remain in place for blacks and other minorities who historically suffered discrimination. After all, it has only been about 150 years since slavery was ended. That is actually not a very long time. It was a great evil and has been rightly appraised as a crime against humanity. Therefore the rectification of that historical wrong is required and the outcome of that institutionalized system needs to be opposed. I don't believe in the "reparations" that the extreme left proposed at the Durban World Conference and which President Obama himself denied were the appropriate response to this injustice. But I do believe that extra social programs for families and at-risk youth, special opportunities for minority business contracts, university admissions policies and so on, are not really about "reverse racism" as some believe but are necessary given the continued lagging behind of blacks in America in areas of health, education and work. I just think these are the programs that we as a country need to do, and I think these should be decided in each state, and to the extent possible, at the federal level. Naturally, someone might take an opposing view, and some Libertarians do, but then I would expect their opposing view on the *policy* that should flow from deciding what is racism in elements one through six above would not make them racist in any sense, simply conservative. That's all.

Now, let's come to the topic that has been most neuralgic of all, both for hard left geeks and right-leaning Libertarians -- and those like @larussophobe who claims she isn't a Libertarian (I guess some Libertarians of the non-Ron-Paul variety like to call themselves Whigs or classic liberals or something else.)

Digital analytics of the scientic sort which Nate Silver made famous taught us assiduously, through endless media coverage, that 96% of all blacks in America voted for Obama; their polls supporting Obama before the election were similar. So that means 4% of voting blacks did not support Obama, and either wrote in a candidate or imagine, even voted for Romney, although he was viewed as the embodiment of the "racist" Republican Party.

I'm not the one who invented demographics as a weapon, or digital drilling as a weaponized science; Obama For America did, Nate Silvers did, Jim Messina did, and the Democratic Party even before in campaigns against Bush. This demographic scientific profiling isn't my invention or wish; indeed, we can see how it plays out viciously and nastily in politics when the left ridicules and harasses and harangues Nikki Haley, the conservative black congressman who replaced Jim DeMint. See, because of this "4%" factor, the left can claim that any black politicians on the right must not really have the support of even his own constituents, since it can't be statistically possible, given the black support for Obama, that they would then support a Republican, even locally -- there must be some gerrymandering or voter suppression or some manipulation, so the reasoning goes. The left uses this "4% science" viciously to harass this minority congressman; LaRussophone uses it to harangue me with much the same misplaced sense of rectitude and Sesame Street political correctness in service of her agenda. It's all fine if people have their different agendas, but using the race or women or gay card on top of that to try to gain silence and suppression of views is despicable.

So precisely because this man isn't politically correct, and no one will give him or the black community as a whole the benefit of the doubt -- always assuming that there might be that 4% chance at least that they are not supportive of Obama/the hard progressive line -- that I report on this harsh reality and its implication for politics.

And that implication is that sadly, although the GOP might desperately need to recruit more black members and leaders and campaign workers, they will find it nearly impossible, given the demographic reality of the 96%.

Now, being a liberal, I'd like to think that the GOP might reform, might recruit more members, and these rigid and harsh demographic checkgates devised by scientific data-drillers might yield to reason, and it might be that blacks who voted solely on the basis for race might vote for a conservative candidate like Herman Cain, if one is found, or blacks who voted for a leftist ideological slate might chose even a white candidate, if they fit their views, if that white person happened to be running against a black person. Sure, anything is possible.

Yet the reality of real life -- not my chosing and not my invention -- is that we have this 96% demographic placed in front of us. In Silicon Valley, the 4% have even less a likelihood of appearing, as it tends to be a climate that rewards the left and the socialist perspective -- furthermore, there are very few African-Americans in the computer field, precisely because Silicon Valley firms just have not been as good at making an effort to recruit them as other industries, and tend to feel they have punched their minority recruitment tickets by hiring women, or Indians which are highly represented in the field. So that's that.

Therefore if I say that a digital analytics consulting firm has a) the former director of Al Gore's 2000 campaign in it b) likely Obama voters, then *for these reasons, not literal race* that they will not do a good job making Romney's aps, this is a report on reality, not an advocacy of racism or an endorsement of racism or some racialist comment. I simply refuse to believe that reporting on reality can be such a thing.

There are some -- like LaRussophobe -- who finds it so in opportunistic ways. Her championing of anti-racism never, ever stretches to her own ugly diatribes against the Russian people who *as a people* are always failures, malign, etc.

LaRussophobe has always treated me strangely. Although so many of our views on Russia are similar that some people think I *am* her (I most definitely not, and I think there is more than one female or male behind that account), she has always taken a bemused, elitist attitude toward me as if my status as a mere nonprofit worker and translator, not a professor or government official, makes me ill-equipped for political battle. Well, that's life in the big blogging city. There will always be people who use pseudonyms and claim they seek a "better world" free of prejudices related to race, religion, or social status, yet replicate all these things even worse online in their virtual worlds.

LaRussophobe is particular petulant now because I described her as a Libertarian, due to her ardent pro-gun views and views supporting unrestrained capitalism. She views herself as something else. So she decided to climb on and heckle me as a "racist," saying that I "must apologize" (!) for writing that we should view blacks as having a 96% chance of being Obama voters and supporting Obama's platform. She wants me to go on living in a fictional and politically-correct world (PC in the way that she isn't on a host of other topics, i.e. her own vile racism against the Russian nation in countless hateful screeds about the people as an allegedly sub-par nation or ethnic group). She demands that I retract my statement that if we look at digital analytic specialists who happen to be black, we can't assume they are Obama supporters and on the left politically; we must go on nurturing the fiction that they might be Herman Cain or his supporters.

Well, sure. And the tooth fairy might come tonight. It's all good. Yes, we should hold out hope for the 4% because it actually means a path of diversity and freedom that I think some blacks don't live in now, as they fear that if they oppose certain views, they will be seen as "race traitors". I think if we as a country keep working at social programs and advances that right historical wrongs -- which I don't think are so far back in history, as we can be reminded of by seeing the "Lincoln" film recently -- that this diversification of views -- capitalism vs. socialism -- will begin to occur. I think it is as inevitable as the other demographic drill being exploited now by both Democrats and Republicans -- the findings of the Pew Charitable Trust that 18-20 year old Hispanics tend toward socialist views and 30-40 year old Hispanics tend to favour capitalism. Why? For the simple reason that they own homes or businesses and not school loan debt.

Droves of people on Ars Technica and Little Green Footballs picked up my blog about the need for the Republicans to stop using Democratic digital analysts because their heart wasn't in the campaign, and tried to use this to smear me as crazy, racist, out of touch with reality, a conservative blah blah. They tried to make it sound like I was blaming Romney's failure on "sabotage" (I wasn't; I was merely for keeping an open mind about this as one hypothesis); they tried to make it sound as if I was either blaming blacks for Romney's failure (!) or that I was for discriminating against blacks and not giving them jobs -- ridiculous.

And that's because they didn't like the two premises that I put forward:

o that geeks are inherently unreliable as helpers for any Republican campaign because they are not ethical and tend to the political left (or the similar extreme Ron Paul Libertarianism); whatever reliable conservative geeks there are who may exist are decidedly in a tiny minority;

o that Democratic analytics experts did not in the end help Romney win the election and he should find dedicated, inhouse Republicans.

You know, do it the way Obama did?

Neither of these statements are about race, but about a class of professionals in the computer business and the need to do damage control and due diligence. Now, someone might object to making prejudicial, blanket statements about a class of people, but that's another debate. While it would be nice, again, to live in that idealistic and fictional world that treats all people as operating in good faith, the reality is that with the huge prevalence of Anonymous hacking everywhere, and the huge propensity of geeks as a class to wink and nod and even applaud them, no computer professional can automatically be seen as reliable. If you don't like my prejudicial remarks, you're welcome to debate them and slur me as prejudiced in any way you like. I'm not going to be changing my views on this very deep problem of geek unreliability in our society, that has gone from a few hundred hackers mainly celebrated and lionized by Bruce Sterling and Stephen Levy in the 1980s to more than 7 million today deciding everything in our society from our jobs to our social life to our health to our elections.

Geeks didn't like my first premise, even though some of them confessed it was true. They all know they tilt to the left, and they all know they as a profession have never really signed any ethics code. None of them or their "standards-setting organizations" have ever vowed as a class of professional to oppose and stop DDoSing, doxing, and other vile behaviour as unethical. They know that full well. They don't deny it. If anything, they minimize or even excuse these antics by their fellow geeks in the next cubicle. Doctors and lawyers have ethics enforced by professional boards; computer programmers do not.

That's why most of them didn't launch into a tirade about my prejudice against an entire class of people -- geeks -- but tried to re-focus on my alleged "racism" against blacks. That works better to distract from their own unreliability and refusal to govern themselves and enforce ethical standards.

They also know full well that Obama himself didn't invite Republicans to do work for him; he also didn't try any equal-opportunity-employment in his own campaign's digital operations, but took the pasty-white purple-hair nose-ringed types from geekdom that had the reputation of being the most badass, awesome coders.

So this conversation for me is pretty much over. I am not going to keep repeating myself in defense against these allegations, but just link to this blog post. If someone comes up with some new argument or has some really serious allegation that they wish me to respond to, or if I see someone is blatantly misrepresenting my position in ways I haven't covered in this blog post, I will answer in the comments.

The reality is that the people making these claims against me aren't interested in stopping racism, really. They are not interested in helping to cope with the aftermath of historical wrongs. They aren't interested in telling the truth of the situation so that durable solutions can be found.  They are only interested in trying to silence and humiliate somebody whose views they don't like because they are interested in keeping their power and influence.

 

Anonymous is a Rigidly-Disciplined Cadre Organization Not a Loose-Knit Movement

Here's a summary of the events to date:

As you can see from past blogs in the last week or so, I've been under a barrage of assault from Anonymous, the hackers' collective which far from doing good and bringing justice is really quite sinister.

And every bit of the harassment and heckling I've endured in the last week only confirms even more in spades how much of an escheloned cadre organization Anonymous and its various "ops" and hashtag operatives like #JusticeSec are. It's a secretive, rigidly ideological and harshly hierarchical organization, not just some loose-knit group. Even if it only has "disconnected cells," like the mafia or the communist party, or any other conspiratorial or criminalized group, it has operatives who recruit, train, and move the cadres up the ranks based on their knowledge, learning of habits, memes, and ideological precepts as well as actual deeds and exploits against selected targets or new improvizations. Anyone who has followed how I have been harassed and by whom can figure that out.

One of the ways that #JusticeSec performed #OpCatzHunt as the operation was dubbed (to silence my blog) was to attract and instruct various "bag men" or cutaway accounts of theirs to heckle me, in the most obscene and awful ways, in a series of bannable (and therefore banned, of course) accounts. These accounts were kept organized with followers and search attention through several
"social binders," i.e. accounts that do not engage in harassment and don't show themselves associated even sometimes, but who support openly or tacitly the one doing the heckling.

So in this way the notoriously foul-mouthed @Supersteve2dope account harassed me viciously, with the most vile sexualized comments and misogyny, and then as he was abuse reported, would form new accounts, bragging all the while. I only AR'd him on two of those accounts, but since he bragged he had something like six suspended by the Twitter management, other persons, possibly even Roseanne Barr's social media managers, had AR'd him -- he had dragged her account into this harassment as well by CCing her to the attacks on me and trying to make it seem as if I was someone she should target around Steubenville. I saw how her account stopped following him, and he complained about that, and later sent him the same message I got, "don't smear me or I'll sue you".

In any event, I persisted in documenting and protesting this harassment of me, and then announced that I was going to a conference of 300 Internet officials and activists and would be telling everyone I met about this Anonymous harassment, and also reported it to both national and international authorities to document the increasing ways in which this criminalized hacker cult is trying to silence journalists and bloggers. I made the point that the continued Anonymous harassment of me discredited its claim that it was doing good around the Steubenville case.

Then at this point, the tactics began to shift. The original "doxers" of me (accounts @Anonymity47 and @anonloverz) kept trying to dox me, but Pastebin kept removing their doxes when I filed complaints. They continued to harass me, but some of the others who were most vociferous began to fall quiet.

Now some other Anonymous operatives higher up in the command chain stepped in, with names like Archangel (spelled all l33t-like) or @MindSec or other types of names and insignia and memes revealing their higher status.

Those Anon higher-ups then proceeded to bully those lower-down Anons who had bullied me, and then proceeded to dox them.

Thus the unfortunate SuperSteve2dope was outed -- supposedly -- as one Stephen Haines in Richmond, VA.

Meanwhile, oddly enough, I was able to confirm some of these claims completely independently, but not with a name.

I have no idea whether the dope who is SuperSeve is also the real Stephen Haines -- I don't have the capacity to find that out nor is it relevant. Because he is either a cutaway, a distraction, or a sacrificeable bagman who is either created to harass people and then disappear, or who is set-up and incited to harass people and then doxed and made to go away when Anonymous commanders need him to do so. It's all very obvious.

Another of the chief persecutors was @luxecunt -- she is known as a "newfag" or a new recruit -- see just how lovely these folks are in their abusive use of language against women and gays, all the while insistenting that they have created new, special meaning for these old terms of abuse. I'm not buying it.

Now this woman was pleading for her life in the Anonymous cadre organization with these older and more senior bullies. They also doxed her, submitting her to a sort of "tribunal" where they queried her and tested her loyalty and found her failing as an operative, and too desirous of fame, or being an "egofag" as they put it.

So these awful people in this awful movement are now harassing the people who either took the initiative on their own to heckle me, as a way of "gaining their spurs" in the cadre organization, or are now sacrificing people they had in fact originally incited and instructed to harass me (either or both could be true).

The reality is, doxing people is wrong, whether it is to silence bloggers or to punish people who have wrongfully silenced bloggers.

And the speech of all the Anonymous accounts that have persecuted me is in fact all protected speech. That is, possibly if the links to Pastebin persisted and weren't removed, it might be possible to try to get a harassment case going or a libel case, but that would be extremely difficult.

That's the reality of free speech on the Internet -- I practice free speech that Anonymous doesn't like, and their harassment of me to try to chill my free speech is protected speech as well -- at least until it reaches "incitement of imminent action" -- but a threat to kick me with pink stilettos if they ever meet me in real life doesn't rise to that test.

And the exposure of private information even doesn't rise to that test in most cases until the stalker attempts to steal from your credit card or hack into your accounts or DdOS your server, but even then it is hard to build a case. The FBI is motivated to go and find Sabu who was behind the Stratfor hack, but they aren't going to be bothered to find who is attacking me over my blog.

Even so, the moral of the story is that people, especially journalists, bloggers, those involved in cases, should not be intimidated by Anonymous but should document and report their bad behaviour assidulously. Far from "not feeding the trolls," this is the time to rebut, reply, document, flush out, abuse report.

If the people in the "operations" are honest about what they are fighting for, i.e. justice for a rape victim, then they will not want to associate with bad behaviour like heckling bloggers on Twitter and doxing and persecuting journalists.

I don't believe they *are* serious at the top, as I believe these "ops" are just about giant social hacks trying to take over society and gain power. I'm not interested in these thugs doing that and taking away our freedom and rights.

But in the short term for tactical reasons they need to appear as if they are sincere and therefore the harassment of people like me by their lower-ranking recruits isn't in their interests.

We are no better off when one group of thuggish hackers controls another group of thuggish hackers who are just not as skilled at what they do. Thuggish hacking, whether white or black, is the problem.

 

 

Related articles

Another #JusticeSec #Anonymous Threatening Video Against Me

Anonymous is a Rigid, Hierarchical Cult, Not a Looseknit Hacker Collective

Doxed by Anonloverz Over Criticism of JustSec on Steubenville

Latest #Anonymous #JusticeSec Video Threat Against Me

How the Anonymous Vigilantes Talk to Women Online

Of Course Its #JusticeSec of #Anonymous Harassing Me, That's Their Real Nature

#Internet2013 How Internet Hoaxes Are Perpetrated And The People Who Perpetrate Them

So I am at the Internet 2013 conference held by OSCE in Vienna now, and it is one of those painful multistakeholder mashups. KGB officials responsible for reining in social media mix with both real civil society people and those seminar-ians and resolution-aries among the GONGOS who pontificate about self-regulation,  justifying strange media laws and speaking of the need for an "international regime to regulate the Internet" and the "selfcleansing organ of the Internet". That stuff is all predictable, but what is unfortunate is how much of an inroad the Electronic Frontier Foundation has made into the rights world -- all the while exploiting the human rights lexicon and paradigm to cloak the hackers´ revolution.

The revolutionary approach as we know from decades of experience in this very region is one where the ends justify the means, and the self selected elite tribe gets to rule with a high quotient of legal nihilism without the rule of law. It is the opposite of the human rights approach stressing the rule of law. These people never met a law related to the Internet they liked. They have invaded every keynote, panel, workshop etc with this perspective as all the panels are onesided.

How does it happen that an OSCE conference has a speaker making claims like "Comcast censored Occupy Wall Street" or that numerous journalists were deliberately targeted for arrest and retaliation for their legitimate practice of journalism on OWS and so on, or people claiming that Net Neutrality is a free speech issue? (This is all from Tim Carr, Campaign Director from Free Press)

Its because in Europe, the socialist governments gravitate towards this sort of thing happily, and because OSCE itself as a process has never really established private property and property rights as a concept and value to withstand the collectivism that still remains everywhere in the old Soviet bloc and to a large extent in Old Europe.

In any event, I have told everyone I meet, official or NGO, about the virulent attacks on me from Anonymous and the wild campaign of hatred I´ve seen from JusticeSec Anon accounts on Twitter, including doxing, heckling, hacking attemps on my accounts everywhere, etc. It's important for people to understand what era we are living in. Some still have not heard of Anonymous or do not know what doxing is.

So as I affirmed this and tweeted this out with the conference hashtags, the accounts heckling and harassing me kicked up speed -- and just before I left, I discovered a funny coincidence - the GrumpyCatFitz account formed back in December 2012 by one of the people at Registan like Nathan Hamm or perhaps even Joshua Foust himself (it´s anonymous so you can#t tell) was the exact same person (as he let us know by announcing the update of the account) as OpCatzHunt. Of course, this sort of thing is very creepy. So how does that work, the defense contractors who don't like my blog critical of their positions on Central Asia uses the open-sóurce griefing kit that Anonymous online constitute to further harass me, or they are in Anonymous themselves. Creepz!

And the heckling themes are those already repeated by an earlier generation of Anonymous in Second Life:

o I have made a journalist ill with AIDS commit suicide

This is about a guy who griefed with a racist and homophobic group in Second Life named Deadlz Codec who ran the Patriotic Nigras, a group whose lovely name implies everything u need to know. He and his pals crashed sims and still do using the rhetoric of Westboro -- God will rain down brimstone, etc. and also using AIDS and racist textures and themes in particle spams.

So THAT guy, a coder and sometimes freelance contributor to a shopper (not a journalist, a blogger really for a shopper), who had a notorious history in an online community, suddenly claimed he was reforming, and then a few months later suddenly claimed he had AIDS, and people had trouble believing him as Internet histrionics and Munchausen by proxy is very common there.

I did basic journalistic research and tried to find proof that these events were as he claimed. When it was discovered first that a journalism student claimed he died when he had not died, I kept checking. I called the funeral parlour to check the story, as journalists do. Checking a story is not being unfeeling -- it is checking the story. This avatar had the name Deadly Codec and had a history of racist and anti-gay attacks: therefore it was okay to check this story.

o I have heckled and harassed this AIDs-stricken journalist's grieving mom

Nonsense. Reporting a story and probing for the facts about the life and death of a very PUBLIC figure is not harassment or bullzing. It is journalism and critical blogging. It is legitimate.

I have no way of knowing if the real mother came on my blog or a fake, with Internet hysteria. In any event, not believing the story of her son, a notorious griefer named DEADLY who claimed he was now DYING in real life is merely appropriate and healthy skepticism. That he turned out to be really dying now and no longer bluffing does not change this equation. In any, nobody not even the griefing mom, who could be fake, claims I killed him as he died of AIDS.

o OpCatzHunt also claims I am racist, merely the latest in many smear tactics. How am I racist? By writing about the racial profiling implicit in the New York City school districts banning of hoodies and dew rags and other headgear to break up gang insignia capacities. So just for describing this policy, which is not mine, but theirs and in effect, all of a sudden I'm the racist.

If that´s racism, then a critical discussion about how rapes are handled  by the media and society when either whites or blacks are involved, which I had with a black SL friend on my blog  will also strike this heckler as "racism" as will my reporting on and discussion of the essential racialist profiling in the Obama demographics business as the NYT reported, as 99% of blacks voted for Obama. Therefore, my comment reporting that this means Obama voters now have race markers, and that means Romney had a hard time finding people to do his IT work as all the digital analytic shops were filled with Democratic voters. I said by using Al Gore's dev and shops full of Obama voters, as well as Obama's 2008 analytics guy, no wonder they couldn't expect these people to have their hearts in the work.

Does this mean that Republicans should never hire minorities, of course not. Does it means minorities cannot do a good coding job. Of course not. It means that when Obama wanted the absolute top drawer work on his IT side and digital social media etc analytics, he did NOT hire people from yesteryear's Republican campaigns, he did not hire Republican voters, he hired a team of pasty white geek guys who shared his sentiments. Full stop.

But the ops and the grumps have not found this story yet which drew thousands of hate comments from Ars Technica and other top sites where I was vilified and ridiculed, and deluged with hate traffic. They just are not up to speed.

o That I 'bullied' Shava Nerad because I vigorously debated the G+ nym wars with her, and she made truly wild and hideous accusations against me that 'got lib tech shut down'. Huh? The mom silenced Shava for a time, he didn#t shut the list down.

o Fake claims that I don't care about rape victims in general or gay people in general, blah blah. Of course I care about such victims, have spent my life advocating for human rights including gay rights and women's rights -- all that is happening here is the typical Saul Alinsky method to discredit someone by making it seem as if they have done something in violation of their own principles. Nonsense.

 What I do not accept as true, barring validation, is claims by ANONYMOUS accounts that they are rape victims as they harass me, not all rape victims. I don't find that real rape victims with pseudonyms online don't harass and heckle me in JusticeSec - only Anon does.

At the Internet 2013 Liz Henry gave a very good and compelling presentation on a panel about social media and journalism and the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax.

She made a number of excellent observations - that it took collaboration by both journalists turning skeptical like Andy Carvin and bloggers reaching him through back channels to disrupt the fake hoax of the gay girl in Syria - it was a man in Scotland.

She talked about sock puppets, online personas, and such and cited the examples the left cites as this phenomenon:

o Hillary supporters mad at Obama winning nomination in 2008 - she thought it was a largely astroturfed and contrived, although conceded maybe there were those with these sentiments. Of course there were - I was one of them, and knew many friends and colleagues who felt this way. Hard leftists and 'progressives' harassed and heckled and ridiculed Hillary and supporters to get their way, Samantha Power even called her a 'monster' in the media, then later got a job at the NSC. This is typical of how the progs roll, vilification, harassment, and bullying to get their waz, instead of tolerance of pluralism and consensus. 

o Others she could tell were hoaxes because they didn't seem right, those Moms with three children, who just happen to be deaf and therefore can't talk on Skype.

Precisely because she was so thoughtful and smart about making this presentation, I went up to Liz Henry and asked her to tell me her opinion of Steubenville and Anonymous vigilantism. She basically just sort of stalled on it though and never really made an assessment of Anonymous. It was hard to tell whether she just hadn't followed it, although every feminist in America has followed it. I kept explaining my concerns about the re-traumatization of the victim. Despite repeated claims from Anonzyous that Jane Doe, the rape victims, support them AND their methods, I'm not seeing it...

I've encountered people like this on the left who are steeped in the leftist culture to the extent they don't see it or feel it. They feel they are at the moral center and others like Walmart shoppers or gun owners are at the fringe. There is a constant normalization of the left as if it were normative and the standard bearers and not often sectarians engaged in awful political warfare that brooks no dissent.

Somehow I still had the hope that if only she looked at the facts - the bizarre stories in Steubenville of people being doxed and harassed and then not turning out to be relevant to the case; the harassment and doxing of me and others such as Lee Stranahan of Breitbart. Now, you can have a kneejerk reaction to the affiliations of Breitbart and Stranahan, which I don't share, or you can understand the principles here, as anyone criticizing vigilantism is being attacked.

I would like to think that Liz Henry, if enabled to make a goodfaith examination of the Anonzmous Steubenville story would give it a fair and credible assessment.

After all, she purports to have principles (which I share) that:

o there should be 'nothing about us without us' as in the old credo for union negotiations or negotiations about Baltic independence

o those purporting to represent 'victims voices' need a second look as they may be pursuing their own selfish agenda

o people coming up and claiming to have three children who can't speak on Skype because they are deaf (or I could add the SL equivalent, can't speak on Voice because they need tongue surgery) need a second look.

So how about taking those beautiful and worthy principles and applying them to the people of Steubenville?

Those families of the football players, the boys themselves, other townspeople, cannot face their accusers under due process with the rule of law. They cannot decide how justice will be served. Instead, anonymous vigilantes without accountability are doxing, hacking, harassing, vilifyzing, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and not really interested in justice so much as making havoc of the justice system.

So that Anon foulmouth claiming to have 4 kids, or JusticeSec's anonloverz who staged the operation against me, claiming to have had a cousin who committed suicide at the age of 13, a story he conveniently just remembered after months of campaigning on the issue of bullying, why don't they deserve to be doubted and questioned, especially when what they are doing is harassing and doxing those who question them?

I wanted to believe Liz Henry of all people would be capable of a good-faith and serious examination of the Steubenville Anonymous chaos and deception.

Of course, there are feminists writing that while vigilantism is troubling, justice would never have been served if not for JusticeSec, so their perverse theory goes. But surely Liz knows better. And we don't have to give up our commitment to the victim, commitment to women's rights, committment to justice, merely because we question Anonymous, which is up to no good here, mainly reputational laundering.

So it was disappointing to see Liz tweet later that she was indulging in the ignoble pasttime of laughing at the GrumpyCatFitz account.

I saw her go out with a clump of the EFF types from Jillian Yorke to Carr to others always in the same ideological cluster. Still, I had hoped for better.

Still, I have faith that she will come to see this, because it's not about me. These are principles as she herself outlined in her talk. And she herself will find that all these mothers of three who are rape victims, or was it that the tried suicide, or are they in fact boys in high school just don't pass the sniff test, the narratives keep mutating just as she said, and no, they never admit that. And I will be irrelevant to this process.

But to the extent that she can ridicule a fellow woman made the target of a hideous and obscene intimidation campaign by Anonymous to stop her legitimate criticism of defense contractors and then the anarchist movement itself-- well, it's why all our rights are vulnerable.

 

 

Latest #Anonymous #JusticeSec Video Threat Against Me

Low Mad-Lib production values of Ohio Anonymous.  There's also a Tumblr somewhere that goes with this.

The latest final-final warning to me from Anonymous, the ethics-free hackers collective and cult which is harassing me and others who report critically on their antics and vigilantism around the Steubenville rape. I thought Anonymous saved these kinds of scary videos for the big "banksters" targeted by Occupy Wall Street or the evil Pentagon. I guess they are getting to be a dime a dozen these days if any script kiddie can use the MadLib software and make a threat that will get...40 views. Does that possibly dilute their power? Surely some of the superiors in the vertikal of Anonymous command are considering that...

The video is filled with the usual poorly-prepared chopped-up word salad. I'm a "bully" and "should not dare to call myself a human rights activist" because...I criticized Anonymous vigilante tactics. One of their young operatives who may or may not be a concocted persona decided to take up a jihad against me, vandalizing my Wikipedia page and drawing in more and more Anonymous JusticeSec operatives to dox, harass, bully and heckle me endlessly on Twitter with some of the most obscene and gross stuff I've seen in my life. This, from people who claim they oppose rape culture. It's fake.I've documented this here and here and elsewhere on my blog.

These crazy vindictive assholes have doxed me, i.e. exposed all my personal information, some of it public, some of it aggregated by triangulating public sources or exposing private information they've picked up from somewhere. My relatives are exposed as well.

Constant attempts are made to hack into the accounts of my email, my Twitter and my blogs and even Paypal.

When Anonymous unleashes something like #opCatzHunt -- which is what they've named the operation against me -- who knows what they will do, but I can only urge people not to click on emails from me if they look strange.

In fact, I suffered two email viruses and strange hack attempts *before* this encounter with @hausofpain and all this latest Anonymous nonsense, right at the time of the Twitter hack where I was among the early-adapter accounts hacked, and I suspect that this assault on me began in response to my first blog criticizing Anonymous in Steubenville in January, and these other incidents are contrived.

Even if it turns out that @hausofpain is really in fact a real person who is a teen or young 20-something fragile Anonymous starlet in training who is triggered into rage and suicidal thoughts by a....critical tweet of mine, then...it's Anonymous and its circle of inciters and ragers who are to blame for preying on this person, not me. They are free not to follow me on Twitter; they don't need to vandalize my Wikipedia stupidly which is only undone even by the freaks at Wikipedia for whom I have little regard. (My Wikipedia itself is an act of vandalism in the first place.)

I have little time to keep updating these developments and writing in my own defense, so if anyone else wants to take up that effort they should.

I have to say I've been decidedly underwhelmed by the response of my friends and colleagues, that have run to this:

"Sounds like you got into a fight with a 15-year-old! Tell her to finish her homework and stop tweeting at the dinner table!"

"Regardless of what one thinks of catfitz, this kind of threat is silly!"

"Hey, write to me if they really get serious and I think I know a journalist who could cover this."

and so on.

Look, I know journalists, too, and this isn't a 15-year-old at the dinner table -- something they don't even have any more in many American homes. And if you think that having caveats about defense of someone, then you're not getting it. I have little use for Stranahan, but I've defended him on principle. That's what people need to do: take up the principle that those who write critically about Anonymous in Steubenville or on any other "op" of theirs are using unacceptable vigilante movements. And it's not whether they "deserve" to be attacked or not, because they will come for you next.

Related articles

How Anonymous JustSec Vigilantes Talk to Women Online - 3

Latest Anonymous Active Measure Distracts from its Own Sexism and Assange's Charges

Doxed by Anonloverz Over Criticism of JustSec on Steubenville

Sad Little Life of #Anonymous #JusticeSec Operative

My Own Personal Anonymous #JusticeSec Video Threat?!

Of Course Its #JusticeSec of #Anonymous Harassing Me, That's Their Real Nature

Geeks: Are Their Numbers Stabilizing?

Photo by Joe Hall

Forbes has an article about how 7 millions phones have been jailbroken. It's got a video with the typical freaky long-haired geek whose handle is @Saurik explaining how to jailbreak your phone and justifying it by showing all the neat little thingies you can do with it, like jumble your icons.

Seven million. Or maybe it's already 10 million by now! But some people have multiple phones.

Seven million. That's the number of people who signed the Google-orchestrated anti-SOPA petition. But some people used bots and alts and proxies to jack up the signature numbers which Ars Technica would be the last to admit. Sure, beyond Google, there were maybe a half million or something more.

But let's call it seven million for jailbreaks and anti-SOPA today. That's the operative number for the active geek population today in America.

So is this number stabilizing now? Or is this population a growing threat to society and the rule of law with its ethics-free hacking or the justification of same by power users?

Is it, as one man says in the comments, that "we are all" becoming a little bit geeky and more people jailbreak their phones even if not geeks. Or is it really mainly the core of the geek population?

Given the deplorable state of education in this country and the lagging behind of other industrial nations in STEM, I think likely that number is stabilizing, and only increased through immigration, which is indeed a good reason to encourage entrepreneurial visas and the rest in immigration reform.

What effect will this have on the stability of society in general?

In theory, if there was good will and ethics (there aren't), what Tim Berners-Lee prescribes (no angel he) would work to mitigate the Internet of Things:

“The right to have root on your machine is the right to store things which operate on your behalf,” Tim Berners-Lee told the audience at a Linux conference in Australia last month. Without that right, the creator of the world wide web contends, users are subject to agendas they can neither control or, in many cases, even be aware of. He acknowledges the need to devise better security protocols to make sure that users with such access do not inadvertantly instal malicious code, but it is clear that he sees this as a smaller threat than that of the ubiquitous opacity. Linux is the language of Android, so clearly his remarks were addressed to Apple. Why couldn’t root access be an expert setting for iOS? Only the geeks will use it anyway.

In other words, if you, instead of a proprietary company can completely control your gadget, they can't control/watch/modify you etc.

But, even so, it means being under the control of code and coders and their lack of ethics, amply demonstrated everywhere. That is, if to jailbreak your phone you need to go get something like RedSn0w, or then install Cydia aps, or get hooked up to other websites and services you are still in the hands of coders and code-as-law.

Where will it stop?

Oh, as you can see from this screenshot I found on Flickr, what this is all about is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Surprise, surprise! They're happy to stick it to the man and harass Apple by inciting jailbreaking, which people endlessly argue about being legal or illegal.

Cydia was a bit secretive in this interview. Scoble asked three times for a website address. They wouldn't give one. Why? Well, because it doesn't really describe much about jailbreaking or this company, says Saurik. He has just hired a community manager, which makes it sound like a company! But he admits the company really just consists of him and her, and, as he says, a vague network of "other people working on other things".

Why, so secret, Saurik? Both he and his community manager (who stays humbly in the background while Saurik pontificates although Scoble does his damnedest to try to include her as a woman in the conversation) claim that jailbreaking causes no harm and doesn't de-stabilize your phone. Oh, watch out when you upgrade the OS as you could lose all those cool aps.

The website is indeed ultra-spare. I guess what you have to do is hit up Saurik on Twitter, where as an ancient oldbie (like me on @Prokofy lol), he has 330,000 plus followers (I only have like 2000 lol, but then, I don't jailbreak phones or code cool aps!).

Or...maybe not. Saurik says he gets so many replies that he physically can't even scroll through them! Well there's (finally, as he says) his website.

But mainly his work and customer support for his aps has been on Twitter.

So...jailbreaking and the aps you can then add with it is...one of those things where you have to hunt around a little and find a guy who knows a guy or go in the IRC channel or Google around links to you get it eventually.

Would you rather have your phone under control by a company that has customer service, stores with customer service agents in real life, a board of trustees, fiscal responsibility, financial reports, stock, etc. etc. Or would you rather have your phone jailbroken and entrusted to nested variants of various shadowy aps made by people with nicknames that might or might not see your tweet? And do whatever with your information?

That really is the question. The geeks NEVER put it that way. They just assume that *as* geeks, they will jailbreak, control the actions of other geeks through peer-to-peer pressure, and that's it.

But the rest of us who don't want to bother to fish around in roots and whatnot will be at their mercy. And then it really is a question of trusting them or Apple. They don't trust Apple. We do. That's why they have two people in their company, and Apple has thousands.

h/t Robert Scoble who did the interview featured on the Forbes article and whose Facebook feed is where I picked up the Forbes story -- and all of this is actually stuck on something called Newsle which is tracking every article and share...

 

 

Why We Should Abhor the Internet of My Things

Babbage Linden in Second Life. Photo by Jim Purbrick.

 

It was bad enough when it was "The Internet of Things" -- wiring up things like your home or car to run them via your smartphone on the Internet. I've written about the horrors awaiting underneath the upbeat claims of tekkies of this Brave New World.

But now they are trying to make it even more palatable and saleable by calling it "The Internet of My Things" the way everything collectivized online is called "My" to make the user have the illusion he is in some actually personal private space. So some media that is drilling you and making you sign up for their forced social media scrape merely to share stuff creates things called "My Slate" which aren't really so much "my" anymore -- but theirs. And on some of these services, every time your friends go read an article, they see you "liked it," and they might even wonder why, and you might even wish you could get rid of some of that. In fact some of the services showed you when you merely read an article, and started posting it to all your social media automatically -- people hated this and those services began to die out. They'll be back. The drive to make "what is yours mine" is big.

I saw the Internet of Things prototyped in Second Life about 7-8 years ago by Babbage Linden (Jim Purbrick, a very creative fellow who probably doesn't think of himself as an IOT founder). I wrote about it enthusiastically initially as well as did Mark Wallace, thinking only in the context of the community of that little virtual world, not the wider Internet, and focusing more on the rating than the tagging functions. (Purbrick went on to conceive and prototype IOT as helping, for example, people use Second Life as a 3d data base to keep track of their real-life carbon-emitting objects to assess their carbon footprint; today he is doing things like making 3D printing from personal web information.)

But even then I had some misgivings about all this tagging and the inflation of the reputational system instantly welded into it back then, and watched as Grid Shepherd, as the scraper avatar was known, by the development company Electric Sheep, scraped the entire grid and took everyone's objects and put them into search -- and abuse-reported it back in 2007. This scrape including things accidently left for sale, sometimes merely to be moved from one person to another, which then became vulnerable to theft. People did not like having their property advertised in this way -- and it was all devised basically as a prototype of how to make an Internet of Things to increase shopping on the oneline marketplace. I called it "Greed Shepherd's Big Fleece."  The geeks then -- as they always do now -- snarked that people's items were in search "anyway" and were fare game and that the dbase "needed to be populated" to be "useful" and therefore they couldn't have "opt-in" or even "opt-out".

Well, but nobody thought some powerful force, funded by old media (CBS), would come in and scrape all their simulators and put everything they owned into search so, among other things, people could pry into their private lives and ridicule or even blackmail them, i.e. if they were gay online but in real life had not come out of the closet. It was awful.

For a while, there was a program that picked up everything on every sim, threw it into search, and then when you arrived on that sim, you could easily search it again to find the product or item you were searching for. This made scavenger hunts, a popular activity, immediately deprecated, and so people had to devise ways of naming things with fake names or hiding them in other things to play such a game. While it seemed convenient for a store, people hated the erosion of privacy, even in a virtual world where privacy is only a theory, really, easily defeated with cams and chat loggers and such. Eventually, this feature in the browser was removed -- probably it was too big a strain on the data base and servers anyway. It was replaced with a function you could toggle for each item -- to place it in search or not. Merchants defeated this by checking the object to be in search forever by closing the "mod" perms. And so on. Online life is filled with pernicious features with destructive social impacts as we constantly see in the prototype of Web 3.0 (or 3.D as it was known for a time) in Second Life.

Few people of influence take Second Life seriously, and don't realize it is a prototyper, consciously or not. And it doesn't matter, in a way, because real life gadgetry is soon overtaking even the fantastic prototyping functions of Second Life 7 years ago.

John Udell of Wired.com has an article about such wondrous technology being developed now to create the "Internet of My Things".

As usual, the way this technology is sold is not by thinking of its larger implications and negative impacts -- obviously -- but how it might be useful -- and make fortunes for people:

As usual my friend Phil Windley, whose distributed event technology I wrote about in the second installment of this series, isn’t just imagining this future. He’s helping to invent it:

“Kynetx is getting ready to introduce a product called SquareTag. SquareTag is a simple way to use personal clouds to keep track of things you own and imbue them with functionality they might not otherwise have.” – Introducing SquareTag

So far these are mostly just passive tags with QR codes, but the system is technology-agnostic and will happily embrace RFID, NFC, you name it. What matters isn’t the tag, it’s the connection you forge between a tagged item and your personal cloud.

And as useful, it's about how it would be useful to a nerd -- most people don't take their smartphones with them to change a filter and take elaborate notes on its date, make, place of purchase, etc. If they do have their smartphone with them, it's to text their girlfriend or watch "Waking Dead," not write about filter details. But of course, the "Internet of My Things" is rapidly developing and "the Internet of Your Things" is coming out to meet you, with the manufacturers taking the work out of note-taking by putting all this information into *their* tags. And so on.

My daughter recently asked what "the cloud" was. I had gone to TechCrunch two years ago and asked a number of the ardent evangelists for various cloud services to explain their technology to me. I went around and listened to their pitches, read some articles, and concluded:

The cloud is other people's computers, not yours.

In that sense, it is like the MMORPG game developers' fearful mantra about their games:

The client is in the hands of the enemy.

That is, their game has to be viewed through a browser that enables the user to hack them and bother other people. The cloud is merely you taking things you used to keep on your own personal hard drive under at least password protection, and under at least the theoretical obfuscation of being one of a zillion and not searchable unless you turned on filesharing programs -- and then putting them on to other people's computers. Putting them on to other people's computers so that you can "access them anywhere" and protect against data loss if your device is wrecked, but it's still about other people's computers, not yours, and your stuff becoming theirs, not yours. Really, that's all it is!

Hence, my intervention below. And I can't stress enough: it's not about the hypotheticals and edge-cases that your vacuum cleaner in the cloud is going to be hacked and start running on its own and wake you up in the middle of the night or all your doors will lock to keep you out of your own home, although we will see that happen. It's about how property becomes collectivized by coders when it becomes electronic and connected. Its inherency is broken up -- which is of course is that process Comrade Lawrence Lessig zealously began when he began to smash the inherency of copyright of digital art and induce people to "share" without paying the author.

* * *

Each item that you put on the Internet of Things becomes partly not yours -- in fact, at any moment, it could become entirely not yours. Each thing with its unique UUID uploaded and connected to the Internet becomes collectivized by coders and then available to hackers.

What matters isn't the connections *you* forge among your things and the Cloud, which only has the thin membrane of a likely poorly-devised password.

What matters is that each connection strips away the inherency of the property as yours, and makes it at least a little bit -- and then maybe a lot -- someone else's.

If a heating pad or a television or a coffee maker requires a remote control commander or switch to operate, and you automate that via the Internet to make it work, at any moment, whether because "technology just doesn't work sometimes" or because its hacked or because the coders and operators of the Internet -- oh, don't like your blog or your political views -- those items may stop working. When they stop working, they lose their main property -- use to you. Your property with a lot of electronics in it that doesn't work anymore isn't much use now, is it?

Now imagine if it is your pacemaker?

Now, technologists interested in the Bright Future skip over these problems and call them minor or rare or fixable with encryption or whatever. But the problem isn't just the *misuse* of the cloud and your own personal Internet of Things.

The problem comes in your collectivization of your things. As you put it, "I’m not the only one who can use it. I can authorize other parties to use it as well."

That means you've stripped away some of its essence as your property and for the sake of "smartness," collectivized it. You may find this useful now, say, to somebody changing the car in your oil. But surely it's not too hard even for you to imagine when this "smartness" might get "dumb" pretty fast.

You say: "These won’t be “free” services that we get by trading away privacy for convenience. We’ll pay for them. In return they will not only store our data. They’ll also run code."

But everything that is coded and uploaded to the Internet related to me and my personal property is now a coder's and "the Internet's," not mine. Have you ever seen how the thuggish hackers' movement Anonymous operates? Is *that* what you want done with your toaster or your car?

The privacy inherent in disconnected private property is stripped away by the act up uploading and connection through the UUID or RFID, and you can never get it back -- you won't be able to reset an objects unique identifier but will be forced to buy a new one. It isn't just that your collectivized property is vunerable; try to see it. It is collectivized and you are now in a commune. You may never get your private life back again. This is why I call it technocommunism, and I warn about the way in which we will continue to get this awful system online that was discredited on earth: the Internet of Things.

* * *

Go from "Internet of My Things" to "Internet of My Social Relations" to see the further collectivization potential for manipulation.

P.S. I'm trying to find my screenshots from back then of the parcel in the Linden sims around Derwent showing all those flowers and pots and things with taggability and rateability, and then the HUD to use to track them. Anybody else have any?

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More-than-Human Participation

Anonymous' Contrived Internet Histrionics

 

Anyone who has ever been in Times Square knows how the scam works, if they spend enough time there. Someone holding a big hotdog with mustard and ketchup slathered all over it suddenly comes up to you and bumps into you. Then, apologizing profusely, they start trying to get napkins to wipe off your jacket. While you are all busy struggling to clean your coat, somebody else in cahoots with the hotdog- bearer picks your pocket or swipes your purse.

Another variation on this theme: a person comes lunging at you holding that big old hotdog slathered with sauce, and you back up abruptly and glare at them, sensing the old scam, and then they suddenly start cursing you out, accusing you of being suspicious of them, and how dare you, and blah blah, and while they are distracting you with that, their pal picks your pocket.

So the Anonymous method is something like that. Operatives pick a fight with you deliberately, then go through fake agida over your angry reaction, then hack you to continue to find things they can "get" on and play outraged fake "gotcha" over.

Or you see them coming with some sort of strange angry reaction, and you call them out on it, and they go through theaterical gyrations to convince you how evil you are for not believing their supposed sincerity. So that's how it works in the attacks on me from Anonymous in the last week precisely: it's hard to know whether @hausofpain is a real person or a crafted concoction run even by multiple people -- Anonymous is a master at making such manipulative propaganda accounts and having them engage in drive-by attacks and simulated outrages. There are inconsistencies and also a pattern of narrative used before in some of these attacks -- they don't keep their personas straight -- which adds to the contrived feeling.

But even if the person is real, the old hotdog-in-the-lapel trick is all too real. You are smeared -- and smeared because the person is out trawling for victims even while crying bloody murder that they are victims themselves if you so much as look at them cross-eyed. Anyone who has been in online communities is familiar with these kinds of gyrations -- in Second Life there were people who had them down to a sick science as griefers.

I remember once I put up a voting panel to ask people's attitudes towards newbies with no payment information on file -- NPIOF. I myself didn't believe in banning them and had them as customers, and I also thought most people had no objection to them and that the hollering on the forums about the need to insist on payment information on file was limited to only a minority. So it was a poll seeking to learn what public opinion really was, not a billboard against newbies, as anyone could see if they looked at my actual questions on the poll, which included things like "NPIOF enables people from poor countries to be creative and start a business" -- and the land settings. But griefers tried to seize it to make it look as if I hated newbies or immigrants or some wild thing.

Another time a person with a female avatar who had long had a relationship online with another female was suddenly reported killed in a car accident after declaring she was nine months pregnant. A male who said he was the website manager for the allegedly dead female came on to report her death. But nobody could find any news clippings about this tragedy and as more and more evidence piled up that the web manager and the female avatar were the same person, people began to be suspicious it was a hoax. I examined it and decided it was a hoax, too. When I legitimately blogged my opinion about a story that seemed contrived, some people accused me of cruelty and hatred. Nonsense -- I just didn't believe an online hoax.

Not surprisingly, this is the form the current Anonymous harassment of me is taking, a faux pity party for a person who might or might not be real, who of course had the option merely not to follow me if they didn't like my criticism of their lovely movement Anonymous -- which I've rightly called out as violent -- or my criticism of Hammond, a hacker arrested for a number of violent offenses and the Stratfor hack.

A claim that this Anonymous person is "bullied" by me, and has to hide on a private account because...I criticized their movement isn't valid. Huh? By that skewed interpretation, any criticism of Anonymous is "bullying" and therefore grounds for "sanctions" -- Anonymous pretends that it doesn't attack journalists and bloggers for free speech and even criticism of them, yet it does if it decides that certain critical speech -- the kind that hits home because it's true -- is "bullying" and therefore outside the realm of free speech. See how that works?

This person endlessly engaged in externalized Internet outrage  --over my few tweets pointing out cogently that Anonymous' roots in 4chan hardcore porn hardly makes it suitable to accuse others about their porn -- is a person who by their own admission pulls out their hair to hurt themselves. Disturbing. And a person who spends the day on overdrive fuming and angrily punching pillows and vandalizing my Wikipedia entry because... I said I didn't want to live in a society run by fucktards who took away other people's rights, and that Anonymous itself is the bully. This *truth* was something this Anonymous cult victim couldn't handle.

But...the entire thing is contrived. Next, I get a chorus of Anonymous accounts, possibly all run by one person or only a few, all singing the blues about what a cruel, horrible, insensitive person I am for not respecting rape victims. Of course I respect rape victims, that's not what it's about. What that means merely is that I didn't buy the story of this *anonymous* online persona -- an *anonymous* online persona who interestingly, staged two hits this week:

o an attack and smear operation on Lee Stranahan of Breitbart.com, purporting to "discover" that he had BDSM porn on some web page of years ago -- an attack that was designed to discredit him as a critical commentator on what Anonymous was doing with its vigilantism in Steubenville

o a doxing and harassment campaign against me now with smears as well, claiming that I "don't care" about rape victims and myself engage in "bullying" by challenging Anonymous regulars.

Look pretty contrived and organized, doesn't it?It might not be. It might really be that @hausofpain just "happened" to dig up "dirt" on Stranahan and then just "happened" to bump into me. And maybe that's how it really did go down. I just happened to see the tweets or retweets about him which I felt compelled to say constituted hypocrisy and then became a subject of harassment myself.

But it might have been anyone. Anyone might have stood up and say, "Hey, how dare you, look at 4chan's hardcore section and look who's talking". That was low-hanging fruit (or should have been, if people like Adrian Chen actually reported the news of Anonymous instead of alternated between adulating them and baiting them).Then that person would have suffered a harassment campaign...

Then comes the Devil Bitch above, and the smear is complete -- "how dare I call myself a human rights activist" -- the heightened and contrived indignation and outrage from a complete stranger who in fact hasn't even read anything but has only been fed stuff -- or is herself an actress staging the agitprop herself.

So that's how you get orchestrated nonsense like the "AIDS Journalist" story (see my "Tips for Google Witch-Hunters).

The "AIDS journalist" was a long-time griefer in Second Life who was a leader of a racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic group called the Patriotic Nigras, which was everything the name implied. They went around crashing servers by spewing out hideous pictures, and putting out noise and chat spam claiming to be the Lord God raining down destruction because of gays, AIDS, Jews, etc. They disrupted numerous concerts, events, etc. in SL and harried and harassed people like me in particular because we abuse-reported them and documented what they did in blogs.

Then this fellow claimed in an interview with the Alphaville Herald, the leading tabloid newspaper for Second Life, that he had reformed and was now working on other issues and began writing for a local free shopper, sometimes publishing stories of his adventures in the virtual world. His most dramatic tale concerned how he fell in love with the editor of the Herald, who had a female avatar, only to discover he was a male in real life. This plunged him into a crisis where he began to wonder if he was gay. He began frequenting gay clubs, had unprotected sex, caught AIDS and then began to beg for sympathy.

Some people had trouble believing him because of his past in a group that not only harassed and bullied people, but used the themes of "AIDS" and "gays" in outrageous ways. It seemed strange -- the guy who had been crying "Pool's Out!" due to gays, and spamming weird apocalyptic chat about raining down destruction as if they were Westboro Church regulars now said he had AIDS. So I said I didn't believe him. I said I was not required to believe him given the circumstances. That's not about being insensitive or uncaring about gays or people with AIDS; it's about not buying the Internet Histrionics stories of this one guy with a context -- and for good reason, because you cannot believe every story you hear online from every anonymous persona.

This fellow -- Joshua McCracken -- then made a video ranting about all this. I mentioned a number of times that if he really had AIDS, that was terrible, but to have crediblity, he would have to get a journalist of a real newspaper, not the Herald, and/or a doctor to provide proof or the community could not find him credible. A doctor is not going to discuss a patient in this manner. So that left a local journalist. Although he worked for the shopper, he couldn't seem to get them to confirm his story, even though he wrote a number of articles, for example, on legalizing medical marijuana for AIDS sufferers. I wrote to the editor myself asking to confirm the story. The editor wrote back to me that he simply couldn't confirm it because this was a contributor whom he didn't know. 

Next, a hipster NYU journalism student  who liked the idea of this griefer-turned-security-consultant and saw "transgressive" hacking groups like Anonymous as Internet freedom heroes wanted to write a story about all this, and contacted me, but I urged him to do some basic journalistic scrutiny. He then later claimed that McCracken had died -- when in fact he hadn't. The mystery of why he stopped taking medications and seemed essentially to commit suicide isn't known -- the entire time from when he first went to the gay club, got AIDS, and then died was incredibly short, like a year or less. That's just not typical.

So that's the context for a seeming "cruelty" from a blogger like me -- my insistence on just basic journalistic scrutiny of the claims made by people seeming to suffer from Internet Histrionics.

This persona above claims to be "going back to school" and to be "a future nurse" and to be "pissed off" at my seeming cold cruelty -- you know, like Anonymous' cold cruelty when they dox, hack and current people. I'd have to worry about any "future nurse" who handled Internet histrionics claims this uncritically.

But she can do her faux outrage all she wants, the context of this story is clear and no one can claim otherwise as the record states it.

Saying you don't believe somebody's story on the Internet isn't cruelty; it's common sense and prudence. And even if they are telling the truth, questioning their motives in the use of the story is in order when you see flocks of them trying to silence critics.

I don't doubt that there will be more of this -- strange, curious smears, like the bunch of people IM'ing me that I must be sad that my children live not with me, but my ex, and call another woman "mom". Hilarious. There's no such situation. My children live with me, and my ex helps to raise them. We are working on his book. There is no such situation where I'm crying and my children are calling my ex's wife of many years "mom". Please, how ridiculous. But...this is your business because...why? Because you doxed me and now you are contriving some smear?

With people operating in malice and bad faith like that, there's no telling what they will come up with. I can't spend the time to come and refute each and every exaggeration, falsehood, amplification of the trivial into the tragic -- whatever it is.

So I can only say, look, if somebody is concerned about some horrible thing they've heard or read about me and they think this is just so vital, they can get a real journalist to interview me and do research on the claims.  That's all.

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