Wired State

Fake Bullies, Real Bullies

From the viral meme machine at Procter & Gamble on Facebook.

I noticed that there was one of those "promoted tweets" showing up in my feed from something called @meanstinks.

This account with its more than 26,000 followers isn't something you might figure out right away, but it's basically a marketing campaign by Secret deodorant against bullying -- sort of a public service campaign.

But not really, because as we learn from Ad Age, Secret has boosted sales with this campaign.

Since launching the "Mean Stinks" program, which has also included a publicity tie-in with "Glee's" Amber Riley and an iAd campaign launched last month, Secret's already strong sales growth kicked up a notch. The brand had momentum anyway, with a current streak of 17 consecutive quarters of share growth, according to P&G. Sales are up 8% to around $250 million in channels tracked by SymphonyIRI for the 52 weeks ended July 10, but they're up an even faster 9% for the 26 weeks ended June 26, a period affected by the "Mean Stinks" campaign that launched in January on Facebook. Secret, already the leading U.S. deodorant, saw its share rise 0.6 points for the past 52 weeks and 0.7 points for the first half of 2011.

So...social media "engagement," even encouraging people to give $1 to an anti-bullying charity -- is really about improvement of the bottom line.

I find this creepy. And remember, I'm not the socialist around here, I don't hate corporations or business. It reminds me of humdog's famous article "Pandora's Vox" which I critiqued as being too anti-capitalist at the time -- from her first days at the Well, she chronicled how all of us online personas were being milked for all our thoughts and hopes and dreams to be exploited in marketing campaigns.... I guess I had never thought of how bad it could get, even though I remain a supporter of capitalism and think overall, Carmen (Montserrat Tovar in Second Life) was too socialist...although she came back to her religion towards the end of her life...

In any event, I don't like the anti-bullying campaigns because they are too vague, too shallow, and too baggy -- they can apply to almost anything anywhere. When bullies are everywhere, they are nowhere. Often, "bullying" seems to mean something about hating gays -- but then that means if you question anything about the way that some aggressive gay activists are pursuing their cause by boycotting or trying to silence other groups they don't like, why, you're the "bully" then -- even if what they do would be classified as bullying in anyone else's hands.

Sometimes bullying is about somebody being "different" in school -- but it's a sliding concept that can differ from state to state or situation to situation -- whatever someone decides who can get the news media -- and more importantly, social media -- on it. Sometimes it's really serious, cases culminating in suicide - horrible situations. Other times it seems to erode the significance of the need to fight such serious cases by being merely something "mean" said on Facebook. If bullying is everything from humiliating a rape victim to causing somebody to commit suicide, to causing somebody to get their feelings hurt because of a failure to like something on Facebook -- how can we combat it? We can't -- we can only helplessly fall into the hands of managers who will be sure to follow every twist and turn of the party line on this matter...

These campaigns and their witless boosters on social media are awfully manipulative and shallow and stupid. I see the campaigns as kind of an open source meme that are now being both exploited by corporations (like Procter & Gamble) to use in faux "public interest" campaigns that are merely sales campaigns, and also exploited by the counterculturalists like Anonymous, which makes much of "bullies" now in their own reputational laundering exercises. (If you ever wanted a really good definition of online bully, you'd have no further to look than 4chan and the behaviour of all the creeps like Weev -- and yet recently with the Steubenville #JusticeSec campaign, Anonymous was pretending they lead the charge against "bullies" -- which can include anyone who criticizes their past or present vigilantism.)

To Anonymous, and to Procter & Gamble (and they are symbiotic), everybody is a victim of a  "bully". There are bullies everywhere! The P&G account @meanstinks claims there are 2.1 million bullies in America (!), and that's where I had to ask: but where do you get those numbers?

I never got an answer, although somebody said "Parent Magazine" -- like that's a source?!

There are about 100,000 public schools in American, and about 33,000 private schools. So that would make 15 bullies per school! One of those scant-looking new accounts with few followers -- those accounts you suspect are made by the gadzillions by the propagandists who run these campaigns from either P&G or Anonymous -- said "that number is low". I tried to think of every school I'd ever been in myself, or where my children or relatives have been in. I just couldn't concede that each of these schools had "fifteen bullies".

So...nonsense. The number is ridiculous, ill-defined, and it's all stupid. Who are these bullies? People who don't get with either the totalitarian Anonymous program or the ad agency's superficial campaign to sell deodorant?

It would be better if people could identify more the behaviour or methods of bullying -- you know, what Anonymous and Adria Rich had in common in last week's scandal -- than decide certain people are to be labelled as "bullies" and then ostracized "from the community" (which is bullying itself).

I knew it would take only about 6 tweets before these anonymous and unaccountable personas would lable me a bully merely because I questioned these crazy numbers -- and the entire craze of making kids feel like they are victims and have to fight these mysterious armies of 2.1 bullies who exist because the figures of authority in their world don't do their jobs? Or? Are afraid of lawsuits if they do more than tell the little darlings they have to "use words"?

One person attacking me because I questioned the meme campaign had an account with a name like "QueerFlag" or something and claimed that there was "hetereosexual apartheid"  in America because not everyone was getting behind the lastest campaign for gay rights. After a few rounds, I didn't hesitate to identify this person as a loon, because we're in a huge tide in fact that is finding more support for gay marriage and gay marriage rights in many states and the issue is even being examined now by the Supreme Court. Regardless of this or that temporary loss of the battle for equal rights, it has turned a corner.

Yet talking in terms of "apartheid" is just crazy -- there is no such thing. Get a grip. Look at Syria. Realize you are not in some oppressed hell. No one has stopped you from doing whatever you want -- you're hysterically fantasizing about oppression on Twitter because ad agencies and Anonymous are ginning up meme campaigns. Criticizing your crazy notion that there is "heterosexual apartheid" in America isn't "being a bully"; you're the bully for thinking you can put over such arrant nonsense as politically-correct straitjackets we must all don.

Then...Who needs separate nonprofit charities or government agencies when you can have corporations and social media do the work of helping society and making a "Better World"? Says Ad Age:

The Mean Stinks Facebook page also includes a referral page for counseling centers, some positive video shoutouts from Ms. Riley, a section where women can upload video apologies or complaints about past acts of meanness, and a store that sells T-shirts with anti-bullying messages (along with links promoting F-commerce sales of other Secret and other P&G products).

"We're more than just products and brands, but we're actually doing something  meaningful for our consumers," said P&G spokeswoman Laura Brinker.

Really, Laura? How are you measuring this? How can we evaluate it?

Part of the meme train is to get people to paint their pinkie fingernails blue. I'm not sure why. "Pinkie promise" is a concept that teenage girls sometimes invoke. Blue -- as in blue jeans -- seems to be the colour of this campaign. Just to be different, I've had all 10 of my toenails painted blue. You can never be too careful....

If you look at the Facebook account, and read some of the tweets, too, you see that middle-aged women still reliving their bullying traumas are as represented as some teens. I've also noticed that a few enterprising and aspiring hip-hop artists have seized the meme train to try to get attention to their videos. I thought this one by Tae Stax had a great name -- Fake Friends, Real Enemies. Don't we all have them! And any one of them could become a bully at any time!!!

 

 

Related articles

Sad Little Life of #Anonymous #JusticeSec Operative

The Hysteria About Bullying is a Chill on Free Speech -- and a Whitewash of Anonymous

Cyber bullying

Stamp Out bullying

Cory Booker, You're So Facebook, What Happened with Zuckerberg's $100 Million for Newark Schools?

Cory Booker is insufferable -- I really don't care for him. He's a populist blowhard, always distracting from the hard questions with feel-goods. Right now he's using Twitter to fund-raise to run for the Senate. He's endlessly "leveraging" social media where he has gadzillion followers, many of them gushing fanboyz and fangirlz, and it always feels like a concoction.

The Times' Anand Giridharadas ran a gushy article about him as a politician "of the future" (because he's on Twitter, whoop de do) saying Booker was from "the Googley-Facebookish wing of the party" -- and and that elicted Bruce Sterling's dry tweet. Get out your barf-bag, here's Anand on Cory:

He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat, so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital.

Honestly, Cory! Being mayor of Newark, NJ is hard enough -- you should just concentrate on that and do that right rather than exploit this poor town and its problems as a springboard to more power in the Senate!

And hey, Anand, why couldn't you ask about what happened to Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark schools!!!

I've asked this over and over again on Twitter of Booker for the last two years, and in various blogs  -- I see Mother Jones has finally taken this up just three days ago:

In Newark, a local foundation established by Zuckerberg and the state have spent more than two years deciding how to best create a schoolyard revolution with $100 million dollars. At first, the "Facebook money," as it's called in Newark, helped the state hire consultants and establish several new charter schools. But the reform effort has floundered at moments: The first million dollars went towards a poorly conducted community survey that had to be re-worked by Rutgers and New York University, and criticism was fierce when a foundation board established to decide how the Facebook money was spent included only one Newark resident: Cory Booker. ("Yes, it's their money. But it's Newark's kids," an op-ed that ran in the Star-Ledger read.)

Then last November, nearly $50 million of Zuckerberg's money went to pay for a new teacher's contract, the first in New Jersey to offer performance pay for teachers who are deemed as "highly effective." The contract offers up to $12,500 in bonuses for the teachers rated as the best in the district. It's the first contract in New Jersey to offer performance-based pay, a policy that's been instituted in a few cities such as Washington, DC. In DC, the plan was so controversial that it might have cost Mayor Adrian Fenty his job. "I think it helped—I know it helped—to be on our side of the table and have deeper pockets," one school district official said about the Newark negotiations.

Somehow, I'm not surprised that the teachers' unions got their hands on this to pay themselves more.

I didn't realize that questions around this money were persistent enough that even the ACLU filed a lawsuit to get the emails and files on this gift.

Hey, Booker may plan a run at the presidency some day so the stakes are higher -- who knows, perhaps he is the One Obama might annoint, as we know there will be *somebody* he will annoint and give the word to for Obama for America, now renamed Organizing for Action, that has all the coveted -- and locked-up -- data bases of drilled social media data that helped Obama win  the elections, and will be turned over to his choice in 2016.

So....I was a bit surprised to see Bruce Sterling mention this  -- and I don't know whether it was with a bit of archness because what amounts to the Alec Ross or Anne Marie Slaughter wing of the party is still likely to the right of him, where he's located, which is far more to the technocommunist extreme. I figured Bruce Sterling roots for the hackers, and therefore inevitably does Google's business.

But perhaps Google isn't close enough to its hacker roots for Bruce anymore, I don't know. His account is on private, so you can't tell. Rayne, an Empty Wheel blogger is one of the lucky ones (along with some 25,000 verified special persons) allowed to see his closed account, which is how he  focused on this -- and seems to take a further response from Sterling (which we can't see) as meaning he still doesn't "get it" -- about oh, that evil Democratic Leadership Committee which "coopted" the party (even though Rayne himself seems to be fighting to interpret Booker on his side).

So Rayne fulminates in indignation that anyone might not sufficiently appreciate People's politician in this manner.

But keep that barf-bag handy, because here's what Rayne thinks Magical Cory produces for the People:

What both NYT missed, besides categorizing Booker as belonging to the “Googly-Facebook” portion of the Democratic Party:

— Booker’s efforts with regard to his one-on-one interactions with constituents do not compare with a considerable portion of the party to which he belongs;

— His actions are highly transparent, his words sync with his deeds right there in the public forum of Twitter;

— The tool he uses for outreach more closely matches his constituents’ demographics, not that of the “Googly-Facebook” crowd.

— Booker uses “big data” to make and justify decisions; “big data” is merely a contemporary expression of polling data used in the near-term past and present.

Rayne seems unburdened by the need to prove any of these claims.

My comment on Empty Wheel (before Mother Jones!)

The extraordinary efforts put in to denying Sterling’s apt comment about Booker and then Lanier’s valid critique let us know just how deep the sickness is.

I marvel how you could get through this entire piece and never mention Mark Zuckerberg’s huge gift of $100 million to the Newark schools — a gift that Cory Booker no doubt benefits from in reputational enhancement value and in having pots of money to manage as he wishes, if not personally. Booker is essentially a fake, in my view. He uses the “community managing” populist technique of appearing to be “down with the people” on Twitter, but it’s highly selective. He does star turn after star turn engineered for its retweet value, shovelling snow, running into burning buildings, living on food stamps. But the big picture issues he ducks.

Time and again I’ve asked him how that $100 million is doing, and if we can get some serious report on the abysmal schools in Newark, and whether any improvement is actually coming out of throwing all that cash at them, and I never, ever get an answer. I ask whether it was in Facebook stock and whether that is now devalued and there isn’t any $100 million and I never, ever get any answer. And he never talks about this subject at all. As you don’t. Why? Of course he’s Googly and Facebooky — I’d be Facebooky too, if I had $100 million to play with on the schools from FB.

Then there’s the remarkable — eye-popping, really — refusal to here to criticize Harper Reed and company and the huge, awful Obama data grab that went on — which is now all locked up in a private nonprofit with big spenders that is not the public political party that ran the candidate, and is not available to that party — the DNC. That’s wrong. That’s unethical. That’s been questioned by many including the Sunlight Foundation.

And to think that elections aren’t decided by big data and its drilling! Come now, we’re not children. The entire gambit with the 47% is exactly an example of how social media (Youtube and Twitter) were galvanized and manipulated to turn public opinion into a seething frenzy of hate. In fact, there wasn’t factually anything untrue about the statement Romney made, as louche as it was. In fact, the bartender who taped him didn’t even focus on that remark, but thought the bigger scandal was moving the factory to China. In fact, David Corn and other “progressive” journalist operatives made hay with this often by not really quoting the original statement accurately — Romney didn’t say people were welfare mooches, he just said they were dependent. The entire story then became a “story” pushed relentlessly through all the social networks, emails, DMs on Tweets, etc. etc. It’s *that* use of weaponized social media that is troublesome.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/harper-reed-and-the-soulessness-of-the-new-machine.html

I've never gotten an answer about the Zuckerberg $100 million when I directly asked Mr. Transparency, and never heard from anyone. I figured it  probably got pissed away buying computers, gadgets, ed-tech consultants, etc. etc. and probably had little or no effect. Now we're learning finally from the ACLU's probe and Mother Jones that it went to paying teachers' bonuses -- without sufficient community input to determine how effective that is.

The comments at Empty Wheel are filled with critiques of Booker, in fact, accusing him of corruption because he has "privatized" schools (i.e. gone with school vouchers) or he has ties with "private equity" which they find "evil," of course, being socialists. I don't know the facts here, but for me, Booker is largely a fraud -- there's nothing about him that's "transparent" just because he's tweeting inanities on Twitter, if he doesn't answer about the big questions -- and frankly, that $100 million is one of them (not to mention questions about how well the entire school system is doing, given the controversies over vouchers and such).

Now I can see more clearly the issues around Booker -- the leftist anti-corporate socialist wing of the Democratic Party doesn't like him and they will try to sink him around the $100 million and other issues. I questioned the same thing, but from the liberal center, where the more Googley-Facebooky Democrats are still to the left but not as left as Empty Wheel  -- they are Hillaryland, not Obamaland, but I don't want them to become worse than they are. It's a terrible thing when your support of free enterprise in the Democratic Party has to hinge on these sorts.

Meanwhile, Audrey Waters, who I've followed on social media for some years, has an interesting blog post up reviewing Morozov's book and questioning the ed tech stuff.

 

From SpamHaus to Your House

There's this whole drama going on about the battle between SpamHouse and CyberBunker, which has now become one of those "Internet" "narratives" (as Evgeny Morozov might scare-quote it because he believes there is no such thing as the Internet) that invokes this literay concept, so beloved of geeks, that the Internet "might be broken" or "is breaking".(I've pointed out in the past how selective geeks are about deciding what "breaks" the Internet.)

Before you start sweeping up little broken pieces of Internet around your doorstep, consider what this is really all about, more of the War in Cyberspace which is like the Cold War -- and with really, the same players and the same "active measures" and "agents of influence" on the Kremlin side.

When the Times wrote about this attack first, they ended up writing repeated corrections because nit-picking little hacker nerds corrected them to try to minimize what they were saying, and Pirate-Party boosters were in the comments busy telling us that copyright theft "isn't stealing" blah blah. (Of course it's theft, as it steals the ability to commodify digital properties).

Then the Times blogged about it:

A squabble between a group fighting spam and a Dutch company that hosts Web sites said to be sending spam has escalated into one of the largest computer attacks on the Internet, causing widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world, John Markoff and Nicole Perlroth write on Wednesday in The New York Times.

And Markoff continued to write about it and I had this comment, which got a NYT Pick:

Please pay attention to what we learn from this. Spamhouse is blacklisting Cyberbunker over the issue of spam and malware. Note that it could do this normally, as an accepted practice, as a matter of course. It blocked the URLs. It blocked the DNS. And guess what, it did this on a vast basis, as we see it rolling now throughout the Internet, and yet the Internet is not breaking. Or, if it is groaning and threatening to break, it's for good reason, because we'd all like spam and malware to be controlled.

Now, the exact same thing -- but on a far, far smaller level because there is far, far less of it than spam -- is involved in blocking piracy sites and sites that permit massive amounts of copyright infringement persistently, over time, of a certain commercial value, for profit.

And yet everywhere, geeks -- starting with Google, which wants to promote free content for its ad business -- complained that we "couldn't" block pirate sites because this would "break" the Internet. See how ridiculous that was?

And we also see now how Google required this "breaking" notion to stick as a business matter for their new DNSSEC which other big companies have *not* implemented because it's either too expensive or really not needed.

What's really breaking the Internet? It isn't SOPA, that would have blocked pirate sites. It's the inability to respect private property.

The "broken Internet" meme is one I always counter -- SOPA would "break" the Internet but Spamhaus, though it might try, isn't really "breaking the Internet" -- and in any event, the clash of the titans is what really strains -- but doesn't break -- it.

Naturally I could see one of my SL interlocutors, Gwyneth Llewelyn in the comments with many other geeks claiming this was something oh-so-hard to parse. She admits it's "tricky" but points out that the great ROI for 100,000 pieces of spam means that spammers are only incentivized to keep spamming and SpamHaus has good reason to exist because the law doesn't cope with this phenomenon enough. She chastizes CyberBunker for DDoSing which she says  (unlike so many) isn't justified, and says they are no better than the mafia. That produces more comments about how the victims are to blame for their bad security -- the Anonymous "rape crew" logic ("She was wearing a short skirt.")

Now there's even more reporting -- the Times loves this story as it has business, tech, and politics all in one, something for every department. Unlike the tech press, which never critically studies one of their own, but always errs on the side of giving them a pass, the Times does a very critical profile of Sven Olaf Kamphuis, the CyberBunker owner, the Dutch hacker who makes awful antisemitic remarks and exists to enlarge that "lovely" Autonymous Realm that hackers always defend as their own "country". Says the Times:

He describes himself in his own Web postings as an Internet freedom fighter, along the lines of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, with political views that range from eccentric to offensive. His likes: German heavy metal music, “Beavis and Butt-head” and the campaign to legalize medicinal marijuana. His dislikes: Jews, Luddites and authority.

The Times also reports this:

For a time, CyberBunker’s clients included WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay, a Web site whose founders were convicted by a Swedish court in 2009 of abetting movie and music piracy. In May 2010, six American entertainment companies obtained a preliminary injunction in a German court ordering CB3ROB and CyberBunker to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay.

I got another NYT pick for this comment (maybe they are finally coming around to being more critical of hackers -- for so long, they weren't, and I'd find my comments even suppressed at times by the comment perlustrators)

The chief tactics of Anonymous and other hacker collective conspiracies is to lie blatantly about their own culpability, and try to aggressively shift the attention to their victims as somehow deserving of hacking or as somehow being oppressive or suppressive of free speech.

So we Kamphius loudly proclaiming "Spamhaus a censor that judges what is or isn’t spam" and even accuses them of "Jew lies" (!). Hopefully that lets you know how discredited they are. The real forces taking away free speech are groups like CyberBunker and the stormtroopers from Anonymous they whistled to in their battle against the freedom of others.

One of the big enablers of hacking, malware, spam, etc. is Russia. It's a state policy. It is about undermining the West. 2.4 million cyberattacks last year in Europe emanated from Russia, overwhelmingly more than from any other place, including China. NATO is characterizing this as enemy activity. Russian state TV rushes to portray these people as freedom fighters and shift the locus of blame from their own country.

And yet what these antisemitic totalitarians always hope to do is to distract from their own crimes to the measures liberals have to take against them, and to get skittish "progressives" to worry about whether they are "censoring".

It is all a very old story from the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. Now they exist in cyberspace in cyber-garments and are none the more attractive for it -- or shouldn't be.

And I responded to the usual hacker-apologists blaming the victim and saying it's all the corporations fault for having poor security.

Now, interestingly, John Dvorak, who is sometimes a little bit critical of the tech he mainly sells with his articles (he's the only one I've ever found to roundly critique Creative Commons as a system), asked the question whether in fact this entire drama is really about WikiLeaks.

He senses that there's "something else" going on with this story -- and I totally agree. One  of the very taciturn commenters put it this way "CyberBunker is a fence for criminals". Indeed.

Now Dvorak's perfectly legitimate query, trying to get at the story-beyond-the-story -- and framed as a question and not a report -- put the hacker set into a tizzy.

Adrian Lamo, who is the hacker notorious for reporting Bradley Manning to the FBI, was among the most vocal and aggressive.

Still can't get over how conspiracy-heavy, evidence-lacking @JohnCDvorak's http://j.mp/15ZSchU  is. @PCMag should apologize to readers.

He felt this was poor reporting and PC Magazine and Dvorak should "apologize". Why, for analyzing a story and giving their opinion?!

Oh, yes, says Lamo and other hackers, because it was so easily "discounted". Well, by that they mean, that they can come up with a web cache page that merely looks like a page "about" WikiLeaks, like any such tech website with services and the views they have might put up -- a kind of infomercial, and not "proof" that they hosted WikiLeaks. The Times reported it as hosting.

Meanwhile, Lamo points us to RT -- hardly a paragon of news credibility even by his own admission -- to get the quote that CyberBunker "only" provided a mirror site. Well, gosh, that's still hosting, really. I mean, if the main host is down and a lot of the mirror sites are down -- which they have been -- that *is* the source for these ill-gotten diplomatic cables.

What's really telling in this story as in other hacker stories is the RT take. Russian Television, in case you didn't get the KFC-like disguising of the fat content -- which in this case comes from the Kremlin directly. RT utterly exonerates -- celebrates -- Kamphius.  In sharp contrast with the Times, they don't report on any of his antisemitism or craziness or controversies. They take him as a "freedom fighter" and they use the coverage of him to hammer on their favourite anti-Western theme -- that those who fight for Internet freedom, i.e. against Russian censors who are busy blocking social media, searching NGOs, and taking down sites -- are themselves "hypocrites" because they wield too big an axe when they fight against spam, piracy, child pornography, and illegal drug sales . All things which primarily originate in Russia.

When you visit any RT page on a hacker story, you will marvel at the enormous effort the Kremlin's mouthpiece puts into covering the hacker sagas -- numerous stories, videos, interviews, high production values, special features, linked pages -- it's a real extravaganza, which makes you realize the talk show with Assange is only the half of it.

My guess is that indeed this goes farther than the clash between an anti-spam provider and a piracy bunker and isn't about WikiLeaks per se -- except insofar as WikiLeaks is part of the Kremlin's overall clash with the West, keeping it in a perpetual state of new Cold War. When you have 2.4 million attacks, that's a state policy, not about a weak legislature or administrative power. This is about Russia, it's about the Kremlin, and it's about its own self-initiated war on the West.

In that war, it's always been a problem trying to get Europe to stand up to the Russians, or to criminality of the Bolshevik type. This comment on the Times from "jh" sums it up perfectly and tracks with everything I have encountered about the Dutch over the years -- freedom-fighters, people to be admired for standing up to Nazis and Communist alike in their day; friendly to Americans, when other Europeans are snotty (the French); easy-going and tolerant of lifstyle "sins" that the US won't legalize (prostitution, marijuana) -- but then for some of the hacker set, endlessly indulgent of licentiousness that takes away from others' freedoms:

I love Dutch people whenever I meet them, and I admire their freedom, but their toleration is selective, and they often end up tolerating the wrong things and refusing to tolerate the right ones. They will jail somebody for being "divisive" by insulting Islam (for its crimes against gays and women), but they are loath to lock up a Muslim extremist until he actually kills somebody (like Theo Van Gogh). Defining Spam shouldn't be so difficult that private firms like Spamhaus have to do the Dutch government's job for it, and pay the price in an anarchic internet environment abetted by legal and law-enforcement lackadaisicalness. It took forever for the Dutch to do anything about Pirate Bay, and even after they did, they allowed Kamphuis to go his merry way disseminating Spam and encouraging cybermischief. Why are they only NOW investigating him? In the U.S., he'd have sent up red flags at least a decade ago, and be on a permanent watch list for the illegal activities to which he is obviously prone. And although I have a lot of trouble with some of the provisions of the Patriot Act, or some of my government's Big Brotherly behavior about the internet, I feel completely comfortable with their being vigilant about the internet skinheads of the world.

The other contribution which the Netherlands makes to the underworld of cybercrime is the anonymizing agencies. Whenever I see a spam attack or a hate attack on my own website, more often than not it traces to the Dutch anonymizers that such persons use to conceal their tracks. Yeah, I get it that Iranian bloggers are using them, too *cough*.

But I do think you have to look past the shoulders of these footsoldiers and lieutenants in the cyberwar to the generals. They're in Russia.

This article in the Atlantic explains the history of how the Soviet Union would sponsor terrorist groups abroad. "Russia is the birthplace of modern terrorism," explains even the left-of-center Atlantic -- and that's absolutely the case. Al Qaeda is often falsely described as something the US created (as part of Russian anti-American propaganda); in fact, the US never supported Al Qaeda and its support of Afghan freedom fighters couldn't do much to prevent the Soviets from killing one million civilians in their war in Afghanistan and setting up the stage for hundreds of thousands of refugees, especially orphaned boys who were taken into Pakistani madrasses to be trained. I'll never forget how a colleague once returned from Afghanistan in the 1980s and said it's a war between Communism and Islam, not Communism and the West; we're irrelevant.

In any event, Russia's birthplace of modern terrorism means its methods -- the socialist and communist terror methods of Lenin and other Bolsheviks -- have been ported into many extremist methods supported by the Soviet Union in their day, whether Palestinians or the Baath Party in Iraq under Saddam and Syria under Assad. And these methods are now used in cyberspace, whether or not some group is technically or literally in touch with a Kremlin paymaster. The coverage of RT tells you all you need to know about which side in this war the Kremlin is on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Massive cyberattack hits Internet users

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Is the SpamHaus DDoS Attack Over? - PC Magazine

Aaron Swartz Was a Hypocrite

From the indictment of Aaron Swartz: photos of him disguising his face with a bicycle helmet from the surveillance camera as he comes into the server closet to plug a laptop directly into the LAN.

Sometimes it pays to read the hard copies of the news media, I find, although it gets harder to find. You wouldn't notice this letter to the editor on the New Yorker's page, filled as it is with graphics jumping off the page to entice you, and under the blogs and articles, zillions of comments vying to be heard.

But here is Jane Scholz's letter to the editor online -- which caught my attention in the hard copy of the New Yorker and not online. I buy the New Yorker on a case-by-case basis, because sometimes it doesn't seem very substantive these days -- although by contrast now with New Republic, it's feeling a lot more substantive. After reading Jane's letter, I immediately put $25 into an envelope from an offer I got in the snail-mail for only $1 an issue! went online to their offer for $25 for 30 issues -- and I will even get the "weekend tote". So I can impress my friends when I go out of town with a bag that has the New Yorker logo. Woot!

Do read Jane's letter, which has such an important point I wish I had thought of. Despite writing tens of thousands of words on Aaron Swartz, I just didn't quite think of it. It's the obvious point: Swartz is just like Mitch Kapor in his day, in that he made millions of his software's patents, but then set about busily undermining other people's copyright online with his anti-SOPA and other campaigns -- culminating in his guerilla "propaganda of the deed" against JSTOR and MIT -- which ultimately left to his suicide.

I don't know if this is the same Jane Scholz who was a McClatchy editor -- McClatchy is a serious investigative news operation and every time hackers "liberate" the fruit of their hard labours with "information wants to be free," they all lose.

Swartz's suicide might have been treated as the casualty of bipolar or depression -- the mainstream media (Boston Globe) reported (while the tech press suppressed it) that the judge in Boston had ordered him to seek mental health treatment when she granted his bail bond and released him before trial.

But it's really more like a suicide-bombing, Palestinian style, the way Schwartz's friends and family have picked up his death as a banner in their struggle against the rule of law, online and off.

Scholz took on Lisa MacFarquhar's piece Requiem for a Dream, which some felt was critical, but which I felt wasn't critical enough. MacFarquuhar dutifully repeated much of the tech-take on his death, thereby displacing blame to mean prosecutors and IP protectors, even if in her pastiche of quotes, she turned in the very telling quote from Swartz's girlfriend what explains the case more than anything -- the folie a deux -- that she literally had to plead to him through a locked bathroom door on the morning he committed suicide not to hurt himself.

In any event, here's what Jane Scholz said:

Some people may consider illegally downloading content from the “1942 edition of the Journal of Botany” to be benign, but downloading periodicals such as the New York Times—or The New Yorker, for that matter—without paying for them would harm the people who worked for those publications in the past and who write for them today. I find it ironic that Swartz made several million dollars selling the rights to his own copyrighted programming to Condé Nast. Swartz’s is a sad story, but it’s not a heroic one.

Helps to remember that the New Yorker is owned by Condé Nast, too.

Of course, the geeks would be quick to say, Swartz was uncomfortable with the selling of his software and even the millions reaped and didn't feel like he fit the role of a rich man, even nouveau riche. He was to go on sleeping in closets and living on pasta. He was seen as some kind of St. Francis of the software set.

I've pointed out -- nobody else seems to want to look at this angle -- that Paul Graham of Ycombinator was the one to pressure Swartz into merging with his other protege, Redditt and then sell the whole thing to Conde Naste, so that Graham could have his "liquidity event".

So many versions of this story have put Swartz heroically as "co-founder of Redditt" which is supposedly "the front page of the Internet" that they don't want to admit that Swartz wasn't at the founding, and didn't seek Reddit on his own, but was sort of forced into the marriage by Graham, from all indications. He then parted with his own brainchild, Infogami, which got subsumed. So, some algorithms or whatever got taken over...and Swartz didn't like working in an office, or didn't like working in a disciplined fashion, period, and preferred to do his own thing, and left.

So many times are we told by gushing articles in the fatuous tech press that Swartz didn't like wealth and was uncomfortable with these millions that we tend to forget: this money is what enabled him to just hang around and do whatever he felt like, for years afterward, including working at Demand Progress, which likely only had a small nonprofit salary.  Yes, it's sad that his millions got eaten up in legal fees later, but then, none of those Creative Commons pro bono lawyers who so boost his case now wanted to take him on pro bono then.

That's because no matter how you reform the CFAA, and even if you rewrote it the way EFF and Lessig would like it, it would still not likely wrap around Swartz's case and exonerate him then. Because of the server closet break-in and the LAN jacking, and of course, the large scale hack and the paralysis of the system for several days. While Orin Kerr and others want to stretch " protected computer" and "unauthorized access" to the breaking point on Weev's case and others, on Swartz, Kerr believes the law was properly applied, and while he is for reform of the law, and apparently lesser punishments, I don't see him characterizing the Swartz hack as somehow "authorized," as much as the script kiddies keep bombarding his blog with claims that it was like "taking too many books out of the library".

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for MIT's report which was promised back around January 23rd to be coming "in a few weeks" -- and with documents as well, although identities redacted. Maybe after spring break?

 

Related articles

The Sheer Sickness and Grandiosity of Aaron Swartz: Folie a Deux

Weev Goes to the Big House: "He Concocted a Fiction"

Definitive -- and Not Surprisingly, Supportive -- Slate Piece on Swartz

The "Middle-Aged Svengalis" Who Used Aaron Swartz

MIT's role in Aaron Swartz prosecution assailed at memorial

The Unknowable Truth of Aaron Swartz

What's Wrong with Matthew Keys

Regardless of the outcome of the trial of Matthew Keys, the Reuters deputy editor for social media, the ethical issues will remain for "new journalism" with social media as a heavily politicized and manipulated tool.

Matthew Keys is heckling me now right on the pages of the once-defaced Los Angels Times about my legitimate blog posts questioning his innocence here, here and here. Speaking of journalistic ethics, it's okay for me to post that I don't buy his alibi, and it's okay for him to heckle, I suppose, although I think most employers would tell their employees not to heckle the customers. News is a business. That's okay, too. When it's a business, it has certain quality-control issues and standards to maintain that blogs are not burdened with.

WHY DO SOCIAL MEDIA WRANGLERS GET CALLED 'JOURNALISTS'?

And that's fine in an open society -- or should be, unless, of course, journalists of the new format intimidate bloggers who criticize them. Not for the first time. My challenges to Anthony de Rosa, Matthew Keys' boss (above) regarding his portrayal of the Occupy protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, led him to block me on Facebook -- which is a creepy function of Facebook that I find has a horrible effect on the "town hall" claims of these private platforms. But in my view, if Reuters is to be ethical, the public feed of Anthony de Rosa -- as a public figure, performing a public function casting the news from his "progressive" perspective for Reuters, really like a columnist -- should not be blocked from the literal view of members of the public who don't agree with them and have expressed dissent against the very process they are slyly engaging in. I don't buy the "in my living room" logic that these sly dogs invoke to keep the mindshare tilted their way.

It would be one thing if the owner of such a feed blocked *from commenting* someone he didn't like, who rained on his vanity parade. That would be irresponsible and also worthy of a call-out, but it would be something that the Facebook "social" notions would support -- Facebook is supposed to be for "friends" -- and only friends who "like" things (and that's why social-activist news corps love them). Friends who don't like things are unfriended. That's its devious premise, of course, which makes it unfit for political work -- or actually, very fit, for those who are adept at manipulating the public, as the Obama team has done in the last elections. But it's another thing when they block you as a person totally on Facebook, removing their *public* feed completely from view. That's really wrong -- but of course, the platform, also bent on social "progress", lets them do that.

I note that Twitter doesn't admit that kind of vanity manipulation of public figures. When Anthony de Rosa or Matthew Keys or other thin-skinned media geeks block me there, I can still look them up in search and read what they say, or use Google or Topsy.

Not so Facebook -- or I might add G+ -- which turn me and my statements into non-persons -- and makes those people who blocked me invisible to me as if they were non-persons, too -- an innovation on the old Stalinist airbrush trick -- so that we can all be cushioned in the cocoon of our same political beliefs with other "likers". Note that Anthony blocked me not for some kind of "TOS violation" -- there wasn't anything rude, hateful, racist, etc. There was just critical speech. But that's too much for them.

IS SOCIAL MEDIA WORK 'ANALYSIS' OR 'OPINION' OR POLITICAL PROPAGANDA?

The entire role of the social media manipulator that these news companies hire is to be questioned, which is the focus I took in first discussing the indictment of Matthew Keys. This post may be what he believes to be a "conspiracy" theory but it certainly isn't -- I've observed time and again how the person playing the social media maven at either nonprofits or news organizations or corporations (Andy Carver at NPR, Lara Kolodny at Fast Company and Alec Ross while at the State Department instantly come to mind) is used for political organizing. It's used to push one perspective -- the "progressive" line. It's not for the sake of real engagement as in "dialogue with the public" or "debate," but a way of purveying a line and getting massive cheers for it from a manipulated public -- or in some cases, an activist public that needs no manipulation as it is already subject to the propaganda flow of various cadre organizations like Moveon or Daily Kos.

I really think the people in these roles step out of all kinds of professional and ethical bounds as they perform them -- they should have a box around them labelled COLUMNIST --  but are forgiven for this under the guise of "innovation" and the ecstasy of "the new". And I constantly see it in operation. Matthew Keys describes himself as "breaking news," and believes he even provides professional tips about how to "break news" (i.e. this gem -- look up key words to find amateur videos on Youtube!). But the feed is always selective, beyond the very top stories that no news organization can afford to pass. It's always delivered with the snark on certain hate targets on the right, and with amplification of the left's own beloved story. It's worse than the liberal establishment media, however, precisely because it purports to be "of the people" and "authentic" and engaging -- yet blocks and mutes and ignores those that dissent from the left-of-center perspective. There's no letters section for the social media editor, you know? No op-ed column where you get to dispute his "authentic stream".

UNDERCOVER JOURNALISM OR UNDERHANDED ALIBI?

But of course, the ethical problems with Keys go far beyond the Twitter newscaster function, into consorting with a thuggish anarchist hacker collective, Anonymous, and pretending now that this was just news-gathering.

First of all, the question I had about this alibi was: which news organization gave the assignment to cover Anonymous? These events came before Matthew worked at Reuters, but certainly Fox TV didn't give him the assignment. He tells us on his Tumblr blog that in fact he did this in his capacity as a "freelancer". Some news corporations have strict rules about what their employees can do as freelancers, some don't; it's not clear if in fact Matthew was on a 1099 type contract relationship even when he did his social media chores for the Fox affiliate so that they may not have bound him with a clause that he couldn't write for other publications -- and they may not have even had a social media policy that would have provided some check on him as he went and cavorted in the IRC channels with Anonymous.

The sketchy freelance status of his original coverage of Anonymous as an "undercover journalist" is covered up by his later posting on the Reuters news site (while employed for Reuters) of a retrospective article about Anonymous featuring Sabu and his cooptation. Obviously, Reuters editors at that time didn't have any qualms about the nature of this piece, or that it was obtained by "undercover journalism" of the sort they should have had more questions about.

WITH ANONYMOUS, IN THE IRC CHANNEL

Second, I question the ethical implication of hanging with criminals for so long. By Matthews' own admission, he spent two months or more in the Anonymous interfeds IRC chat room -- an invitation-only chatroom that you would get to first by friending up the b/tards in other more open settings -- this is how their very rigid, hierarchical cadre organization in fact is structured. It is anything but the looseknit network over-eager liberal journalists -- and their lying propagandist sources in Anonymous -- always portray them to be.

During that time, he heard about operations even involving the theft of credit cards from people. Shouldn't he have reported that to the authorities? He didn't. If anything, in his statement on his own blog about this,  he even amended what was apparently a typo in an early blog post to make it absolutely clear that he did not go to the authorities with what he heard in these chatrooms -- an act he took so that no one would start calling him a snitch, as they do Adrian Lamo, for reporting Bradley Manning's activities, or Sabu, a LulzSec operative who was turned by the FBI to cooperate with them -- and who may even now be the source for the indictment against Keys -- and maybe motivated to set him up or trash him after the fact, as we obviously realize.

Two months of pretending to be with the goons -- and then oops, telling us all it was "undercover journalism". Leave aside what this tells us about movement solidarity on the left. It's an ethical problem for journalists that since the Food Lion case really, really needs to be questioned. Since when do you get to hear about crimes and do nothing just to hang with the cool kids and burnish your story as...a freelancer? While working for Fox which you hate? Which is then later hacked?

OTHERS QUESTION KEYS' BEHAVIOUR

On the Huffington Post, an anonymous reader with the handle SeattleSlew98337 questions the story about Fox with the following post:

06:31 PM on 03/20/2013
Really? So when Keys' changed Fox40's twitter handle to SacNewsWire and locked the rest of the station out of it as well as their Facebook page, he was acting as an "undercover journalist" too? Sorry, but I saw his behavior online right after he was fired and still have the emails (and screenshot of the Fox40/SacNewsWire stunt) between myself and a different Fox40 employee discussing his antics online.

Keys should be ashamed of himself for hiding behind the title of journalist and own up to what he did. Otherwise he is just cheapening the profession that right now isn't doing so well. Part of growing up is learning to admit when you screwed up and to make amends for it.

Presumably he knows what the feds know, given the confidence they feel in bringing their case -- that Matthew Keys -- or his account that he's now later after the fact going to tell us "wuz hacked" -- was involved in these email exchanges involved in stealing email addresses, including some of government contacts that this TV station had in their files.

Again, Keys commented on his "undercover journalism" on his Tumblr post back in the day, and then of course there's the Gawker article resulting from his leak.

But...NBC did just a bit more real journalism than Adrian Chen ever does at the Gawker however.

They read the Gawker piece, then contacted Keys directly, and got this damning statement from him:

"I chose to allow myself to be credited as the source of a piece of information in the Gawker article only to lend credibility to their story, but did so fully understanding the risks," he told me in an email.

As for that downside, he says, "During my two month engagement with their group, I witnessed a lot of what Anonymous can do, from harvesting emails of Amazon.com employees to gaining access to jailbroken iPhones to stealing credit card numbers ... From what I've heard, Anonymous hackers have already gained access to my address and phone number."

So what was the risk he thought he took -- firing or arrest? And...two months!

Here's what one of the anonymous commenters has to say under the handle Jerm Deeks:

Jerm Deeks a year ago
Also, what's going to happen to the people who turned these chats over to the authorities? If these people in the logs are guilty of what Anonymous has taken credit for, aren't they just as guilty? Not for the things that happened after they left, but everything before? That chatroom was by invite-only, meaning post-HBGary hack, they were still members of the Anonymous "leadership", will they get hit with criminal charges as well? After all, they didn't say they left because the group started committing criminal acts, they left because the group was using kids and other complaints.

Paging Ashera Research for comment...

WHAT WILL KEYS' ALIBI BE?

Matthew Keys denial is categorical -- he says he did not give an account name and password (Parmy Olsen also says he made that statement to her back when she questioned him while writing her book about Anonymous -- but she then didn't use this material and reported on it later on Forces). I have to wonder if this is going to turn out to be word salad -- what he will actually mean is that he gave an account name and password that he was convinced was deactivated after his departure, or even had proof was deactivated, and was then surprised later to discover wasn't. That would be my guess about how this cunning little maneuver will play out. Or he will simply say he was hacked, and who knows, gosh, those IP addresses are so dynamic and variable you just never know....

Keys may even brazenly say that he gave the authentic log on credentials knowing that all they'd do is a minor defacement that took 30 minutes to correct, merely to establish his bona fides in his "undercover journalism" caper. Hmmm. Well, that may be just like, um, helpfully "checking" AT&T's security for them with the i-Pads, and the judge and jury just may not buy it.

And even if Matthew Keys wriggles out of this case, or gets some kind of suspended sentence for something minor, I'll hardly be convinced. Not merely because he seems to have been an online thug for years before that, but because he's crossing the street to harass me merely for expressing my opinion that he's guilty -- and doesn't have a case, because no undercover job merits this amount of consorting with criminals, and the consorting was not necessary to cover the story anyway.

I'm not alone in my concerns about Matthew Keys --even Huffington Post in its headline about "rogue employees" implies Matthew Keys was one when he seemingly turned against his employer. Sure, they put in the word "allegedly," but the headline lets us know what they think about it. The Washington Post, even while clucking about the purported long sentence -- one that will come nowhere near him and is the usual hysterical take on the charges which isn't the same as the sentence -- still says Keys "is no Aaron Swartz".

Interestingly, although Orin Kerr, the former DOJ official and lawyer who writes for Volokh.com, did not take up Matthew Keys case, although on the scale of  the trolldom where Keys inhabited for years, he's less of a nasty character than Weev, the hacker Kerr has decided to defend against the CFAA. Here's what the Post says:

But while it’s easy to see the CFAA as one monolithic relic, Kerr says, the law actually has several parts, and Keys was charged under the least controversial one. That’s because the CFAA’s biggest problem lies in its use of the phrase “unauthorized access” — a vague, only loosely defined term that has left prosecutors and courts to their own interpretations. Keys’s part of the law doesn’t mention that term. Swartz’s does.

Aside from the difference in their alleged crimes, there’s also a split in apparent motives. As many of Swartz’s defenders have pointed out on social media, Swartz was a documented Internet activist who fought publicly for freedom of information.

On the other hand, in chat room transcripts released by the Department of Justice, the user alleged to be Keys urges an Anonymous hacker to “go f--- some s--- up.” That isn’t just a public-relations issue: motives can factor into sentencing, too, Kerr says.

“For example, acting with an intent to profit can turn a misdemeanor into a felony,” he says. “Also, acting as part of a broader criminal scheme can lead to a sentencing enhancement.”

Kerr and the Washington Post -- like me -- took the indictment on good faith as the government's belief that it has a case. Of course, the defendant and his lawyers and the geek public are entitled to take a different view. But they didn't see fit to say "but Keys denies all this" (and maybe it was a timing issue, but there isn't an update).

Poynter also asks some questions. Even the lefty Atlantic has suggested that Keys' lawyers should tell him to shut his yap, he may incriminate himself further or make contempt-of-court type of statements showing lack of remorse that could get him a longer sentence, as it seems to have done for Weev. Yet Keys -- and his Anonymous-defending lawyers -- have brazened this out, in the mistaken belief that Keys, as a social media manipulator for Reuters, is expert at handling the media, whereas their other clients they tell to keep quiet are incapable of handling media.

Hmmm.... And imagine this, Ashera Wolf, community journalist for Anonymous that has turned in some loving profiles of their heroes, has asked questions about journalistic ethics around Keys. Naturally, she'll do that because he's harmed her friends and perhaps helped them go to jail.

I wonder....Is the difference the over-enthusiastic tech and liberal mainstream press is showing for Matthew Keys, "progressive" hipster social media wrangler for Reuters who exposed Anonymous, refused to cooperate with authorities, and Sabu, poor unemployed Hispanic programmer with kids to support, did? Did Matthew expose Anonymous for the sake of a news story (for which he had no assignment) or because they humiliated him by kicking him out of the chatroom once they cottoned to his treachery?

The Anonymous-defending lawyers think that you shouldn't go to jail for just a prank. Well, some of us beg to differ that it's just a prank, and we don't know if at trial, only the defacement of the LAT will be at issue. BTW, I'm calling out the lawyers here not because I don't think that people don't deserve legal defense, and the best they can get, or that people can't be viewed as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law -- of course they deserve defense and the benefit of the doubt as far as the court is concerned.

But these are partisan, vocally biased crusaders -- lawfarers trying to change law they don't like. They aren't even nonprofit advocacy lawyers; they are private lawyers with practices where they can pick and chose their clients -- and pick these ones to make their crusading point. Why, in a free society, would they get to advocate through lawfaring, but bloggers like me not get to say we don't buy their story line?

I won't be "apologizing" as Matthew Keys says I will be, as I haven't written anything that's wrong or that I regret. He's the kind of person who might start papering me with warnings of libel suits from his lovely pro-Anonymous lawyers, too -- once lawyers like this start lawfaring, they will stop at nothing to get their way. Hey, see you in court guys. Your clients are thugs.

Related articles

What are the Real Damages in the Matthew Keys Case?

"Boomerangs Don't Always Return to the Thrower." "This One Will."

Matthew Keys Heckling me On the Internet

Social Media is In the Hands of the Enemy in Any Company #MathewKeys

Reuters editor Matthew Keys says he did not conspire in hack

Reuters Suspends Matthew Keys, Anonymous Hackers Step In

As you may have read, Reuters' Matthew Keys - who is a contributor to SFB - has been indicted on conspiracy charges related to the hacker group Anonymous.

Matthew Keys denies charges in 'Anonymous' case

Matthew Keys Heckling Me On the Internet

It's been suggested that Matthew Keys, the indicted defendant in a case involving hacker charges under the CFAA, might do well to keep his mouth shut in the days before his trial. That hasn't stopped him from continuing to comment about his case to reporters and well-wishers -- and to engage in heckling of me as a critical blogger about his case in the comments at the Los Angeles Times. Here they are in case they get deleted:

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

So you guys didn't mind being hacked then? Or?

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/03/social-media-is-in-the-hands-of-the-enemy-in-any-company-mathewkeys.html

Reply · Like · Unfollow Post · March 14 at 8:51pm

• 

  Matthew Keys · Following · Top Commenter · Deputy Social Media Editor at Reuters · 21,588 subscribers

  Dear Catherine,
  
  Setting up a Google Alert with my name, reading all the articles on me and then commenting with your conspiracy theories is not a good use of time. There are soup kitchens, homeless shelters and food banks that are in dire need of volunteers -- take an hour or two out of your day to do some good.
  
  In other words, get a better hobby.
  
  -m

  Reply · Like · Sunday at 11:42pm
• 

  Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

  Hi, Matthew. Has anyone told you that you have the right to remain silent and anything you say may be used against you in a court of law? For example, heckling of bloggers covering your case critically could hardly be said to be helpful in building a character reference, but I suppose you stopped caring about things like that when you first began using the Internet to harass other people years ago. I haven't set up any "Google Alert" for your name, don't flatter yourself. I hardly have to look even in Google to stumble across breathless articles about you everywhere in Atlantic, etc. I don't have a "conspiracy theory," but I have a lot of hard questions of the sort journalists don't always seem to be asking. Perhaps the LAT could supply some evidence in this case. I don't need to volunteer at any soup kitchens as I have a family to feed and plenty of work to do, paid and unpaid. And I chose to do good in this world by writing about and challenging thugs like Anonymous and those who make common cause with them like you. Shame on you. You should have gotten a hobby yourself instead of harassing your former employer and others you don't like. But I guess that's a resume-builder in today's world, especially for Reuters.

  Reply · Like · Yesterday at 1:22am
• 

  Matthew Keys · Following · Top Commenter · Deputy Social Media Editor at Reuters · 21,588 subscribers

  Trials don't play out on the blogosphere, and the best legal advice comes from attorneys, not Second Life aficionados.

  Reply · Like · 10 hours ago
• 

  Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

  If trials don't play out on the blogosphere, big guy, then why do you keep spouting about your case on Twitter and fora?! As for your slur about Second Life, let me tell you, I'm not the one living in virtuality with thugs from Anonymous for years on end playing Internet tough guy and harassing people endlessly -- as you have been doing your whole life. You're a disgrace to your news organization and they harm their reputation by having you there defiantly heckling people and brazenly declaring your innocence. No matter what the outcome of your trial, you will never be able to fix your reputation of cunning alliance with thugs.

  Reply · Like · 9 hours ago
• 

  Matthew Keys · Following · Top Commenter · Deputy Social Media Editor at Reuters · 21,588 subscribers

  I see, in your mind, I've been convicted already.

  Reply · Like · 7 hours ago
• 

  Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

  Oh, sure, Matthew, everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. That's a liberal value of civilization that we wish you and Anonymous had when you serve as judge and jury on individuals and corporations and punish them with hacking and DDoS attacks and doxing and worse.
  
  No, I just don't believe your alibi. Due to your past bad behaviour and the bad faith you exhibit now in heckling me on the Internet, *I simply don't believe your story*. Maybe you'll get it to stand up in court, maybe not. But you aren't credible. Both you and your lawyers are dancing around the key issues and mumbling about some of them. You're going to claim you were hacked and didn't control your account the whole time? Mkay.

  Reply · Like · 2 hours ago
• 

  Matthew Keys · Following · Top Commenter · Deputy Social Media Editor at Reuters · 21,588 subscribers

  Okay, Catherine. Okay. You're a bitter old woman taking it out on me, having only known of me for a week (likely never heard of me before March 14th). You'll be proven wrong soon, and you'll have an awful lot of apologizing to do.

  Reply · Like · about an hour ago
• 

  Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

  Oh, nonsense. I'm not a "bitter old woman" but a critical blogger, and it's perfectly legitimate to call into question "social media journalists" on their ethics and behaviour as public figures. Regardless of how your trial turns out, big guy, I'm not going to have any apologizing to do whatsoever. I haven't made any false claims, I've reported on the many dubious and contradictory aspects of your story. I think it's wrong to apologize for and make common cause with the thuggish hackers in Anonymous, and that's *exactly* what you did, and bragged about repeatedly. Chumming around with them in the IRC channel and actually hacking or "pretending to hack" in order "to get the story" just doesn't impress me. That line hasn't worked since the Food Lion case. If you and your lawyers are going to hustle and come up with an alibi like "I was hacked," no one will ever really believe you after all the victory-dancing you did. And what is this really all about? Wanting to fit in with the cool kids? To feel "needed"? http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/03/boomerangs-dont-always-return-to-the-thrower-this-one-will.html And who cares if I didn't focus on you personally before your indictment? I certainly followed your superior, Anthony de Rosa, and saw his cunning and duplicitious antics on Facebook promoting the "progressive" line, and challenged him any number of times. If I didn't focus on his deputy, so what? We all know what it's about: your struggle for power and influence.

What's Wrong with Obama's Speech in Jerusalem

Obama's speech in Jerusalem, widely appreciated by the Israel-supporting left such as Peter Beinart, and viewed as a public friending of Israel intended to remove all doubts about US support for Israel under Obama, still contains with in it troubling indications of his essential world view. That view harks back to the 1960s-1980s socialist left's view of the Middle East, and support for "national liberation movements" and violent solutions to the problems of peoples.

Until that changes, there won't be peace in the Middle East. It doesn't change by a myopic focus on Israel's real or imagined sins; i.e. the story of the Palestinian journalist's baby killed, which was widely portrayed everywhere as the faul of Israel, turned out to be the fault of Palestinians. Who noticed, besides Breitbart?

I could put this post in my Different Stans blog, since it covers Iran -- and other conversations about international affairs.

But since the Middle East is the favourite thing everyone loves to argue about on Twitter, I thought I'd put it here for more discussion and any time someone starts one of those factological debates on Israel based on endless scientism about what each side did or didn't do over the last century, I'm going to point to this blog to get at the essential problem I think is never addressed in these debates: the Soviet past and the left's support for violent national liberation movements. These issues will never be solved on Twitter and I will not be changing my own views on them.

Typical example: The other day I got into a Twitter debate with a developer named Benjamin Black. He came to my attention first by re-tweeting my blog posts about unethical hackers, and even made the point that Threat Level at Wired magazine was filled with snitches who were unethical. I replied that I hadn't studied the characters there as much as other hackers like Weev and I would come back to it.

The next time I heard from him, he was criticizing my views on Israel and Palestine. I made the point that Israel will never have a "partner for peace" until Palestine renounces violence and terrorism -- for real. It has never done that. It has never really felt concerted pressure from the left and the international liberal commentariat on this issue. If Palestinians had behaved like Tibetans the last 20 years, instead of like terrorists and a militant, defiant movement advocating violence, they might have had more success. A key reason why the Tibetans could gain as much sympathy as they did is that the Dalai Lama did not advocate violence and Tibetans did not use violence. (BTW, their recent spate of desperate self-immolations are a form of violence, and it was my understanding that the Dalai Lama did not condone suicide as a form of protest.)

If the Palestinians had even behaved like the IRA -- another Soviet-supported "liberation movement" and converted itself into a political opposition that renounced terrorism and violence, even if imperfectly -- we might have a better Middle East. But it didn't, and we don't.

I'm not an expert on the Middle East and I don't follow it closely. Even so, I'm just as entitled to an opinion on it as anyone else, and I've found that those who keep arguing from "expertise" will never admit that any expertise is enough given their ardently and emotionally held views on this subject.

No study of the Middle East is complete without a full-bore recognition of the way that the Kremlin designed, implemented and funded most of the mayhem for many years by supporting terrorist movements in the Arab world and elsewhere against Israel.

To me, the most important thing that has been said about the Palestinians in recent years has been said by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet political prisoner and refusenik -- and recently reiterated eloquently by David Keyes, who once worked with Sharansky: Palestine faces a democracy deficit, and until it changes along with the rest of the Arab Spring changes for the good -- and is sustained (in ways some of them have not been), we will not see peace. It's not merely about Israel, as it always seems to be portrayed. Partner for peace really does mean, well, partner for peace.

For anyone who has followed the Soviet Union, a key element of Soviet policy was to fund the terrorist organization called then the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and to protect Palestinian violence politically as a "national liberation struggle," in keeping with Communist belief about nationalist liberation struggles everywhere against imperialists (except for their own imperialism) and capitalists. The Soviets supported the ANC in South Africa with this idea and injected this politics into the apartheid struggle which is still felt in the South African government's antipathy to Israel today. The entire BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) is based on this essentially Soviet-produced perspective and politics of decades ago, that demonizes Israel, that claims falsely that "Zionism=racism," and that tries to portray Israel as some kind of imperialist/capitalist/oppressive force like the targets of other Soviet-supported national liberation movements around the world.

The Soviets obviously never accepted that idea that their own Soviet Jews would like to be liberated from their notion of "liberation," and fled in huge numbers from antisemitism, many to settle in Israel, like Sharansky, and embrace the legitimate idea that Zionism is nationalism for the Jewish state and is legitimate as such (an idea that Obama is careful to reiterate in his speech to distinguish himself from Farrakhan).

Mindful of the Soviet dimension involved in externally, artificially, and massively funding the Soviet anti-Western perspective through movements from Africa to Palestine and of course Latin America, Sharansky and others with this perspective have always said that until a "perestroika" comes to Palestine, and until the Palestinian regime reforms, and until the Palestinian people have genuine democracy, which means not a mere majoritarian tabulation of votes, but liberal democracy in which due process and protection of minority viewpoints and minorities is paramount, we will not see change for the better.

Most of the world places their hopes for change in the Middle East on trying to change Israel, as Israel isn't the murderous, terror-mongering oppressive authoritarian power that Palestine is, and seems amenable to pressure. After all, Israel conducts investigations of human rights violations -- Palestine never does.

Even those that demonize Israel and call it the "apartheid state" (merely a reformulation of the discredited "Zionism=Racism" gambit in fact renounced by the General Assembly when the Soviet Union collapsed) don't think it is somehow immune to pressure -- that's why they pressure it relentlessly. Nobody ever pressure the Palestinians directly -- either because they believe they are victims with a "defensive jihad" alibi, or because they rightly know that such pressure is deadly, especially from the inside, as "traitors" are dragged to their deaths by thugs on motorcycles. People pressure Israel because they can; because they are a liberal democratic society with critical newspapers, opposition, and even a Supreme Court that can sanction torture. You may not like the hardline government, but that government is in a context where it is pressured by an opposition, and a liberal to left opposition at that.

Not so Palestine, where different fighting factions don't represent civil society pressing for the rule of law against authoritarian thugs, but merely various forms of thugs struggling with each other for power.

Hamas has rightly been declared by the US as a terrorist organization, and it controls Gaza. When it won by "democratic" elections in a setting in which the population is mobilized for violence and hatred and is not free to form any critical factions under penalty of arrest, torture and death, the West responded by freezing aid and demanding that Hamas, this lovely democratic thing, renounce violence, which is what democracy really means in the civilized world, and acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, which is recognized in the civilized world.

It didn't.

Then there was the Hamas-Fatah split and all the rest which you can read about in Wikipedia -- and look for alternative sources as I don't know if it is accurate.

In any event, two key features of Obama's past visits to Israel, or Obama administration officials to Israel, or the visit of the UN's Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, or any number of other Western liberal politicians have been: a) denunciation of the settlements, to put pressure on Israel b) silence about Palestinian violence and terrorism and failure to make a direct call on Palestinians of all factions and forms to stop. Now, maybe you can Fisk this statement and find something that looks like a hemi-demi-semi denunciation of violence, but you won't likely, because I've noticed for years that the Soviet line, permeated the left to this day, always retains: no one ever ceases to legitimize the violence of the "national liberation struggle" to overturn "the imperial power"  -- least of all Obama, who came out of the socialist movements in the US of the 1980s and follows many of their basic precepts -- unrecognized -- to this day (which is why I always call it "stealth socialism").

So it was with this understanding that I made a bet about Obama's latest trip to Israel that he would denounce the settlements and fail to denounce directly Palestinian violence. You know, equal-opportunity bashing, a plague on both your houses (which is the best you can expect with liberals who will never see the authority based on revolutionary violence and repudiation of the rule of law as worse than the state based on affirmation of the rule of law and state violence as self defense).

It looked like Obama might get through the trip never mentioning the settlements, as clearly this was a feel-good, back-patting trip to sweeten the environment, the way the dinner with the GOP in the expensive restaurant was.

But sure enough, true to form, and true to the socialist idea laid in stone by the Soviets in their communist doctrine of national liberation struggle, Obama denounced the settlements:

Israelis must recognize that continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace, and that an independent Palestine must be viable– that real borders will have to be drawn

Then he didn't denounce Palestinian violence directly -- he "pulled a Durban," as those of us who have watched the world left's gyrations since the UN World Conference Against Durban have termed this cunning exoneration of excessive focus on Israel every time, and refusal to denounce Palestinian violence every time.

Oh, but wait, you cry! This speech is filled with references to Israel's right to defense; it has even this very poignant phrase about how Israelis live in fear and have a right not to live in fear:

When I consider Israel’s security, I think about children like Osher Twito, who I met in Sderot – children, the same age as my own daughters, who went to bed at night fearful that a rocket would land in their bedroom simply because of who they are and where they live. That’s why we’ve invested in the Iron Dome system to save countless lives – because those children deserve to sleep better at night. That’s why we have made it clear, time and again, that Israel cannot accept rocket attacks from Gaza, and have stood up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And that’s why Israel has a right to expect Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Sounds so robustly empathetic with Israel, right? Yeah, but did you notice that isn't directly a criticism of Palestinian violence? That it shifts the entire thing to Israel -- once again. It makes it seem, well, subjective when it does that... It's empathy with Israel "We can understand how Israel gets like this" -- but it isn't a firm call-out of what is objectively Israel's situation -- unremitting violence from Palestinians who will not renounce violence.

It's negotiation-speak -- "Hey, Palestine, try to appreciate Israel's subjective point of view here, they don't feel safe" -- without saying *those are your rockets being lobbed at them*.  It's leftist empathy-speak -- which is why Slate can grab on to it and endorse it and try to isolate the right with it.

But it's not a voice of conscience speaking directly to pressure Palestine: "Hey, Palestine, stop those rockets. They're wrong. Renounce violence. Then you can be a partner for peace. You are not one now."

Contrast that with this other paragraph, which is supposed to be the other book end in this matched book-end set of moral equivalency:

But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished.  It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

Note here, the evil Other, that "foreign army".  That's Israel. Israel is cited as the problem -- the Other that is the Foreign and is responsible for the insecurity of little Palestinian children. The blame is cast -- on that foreign army. That the foreign army's acts in fact may be justified by Palestinian state violence -- never, ever denounced by the left -- are portrayed as if they have no context -- the context that includes that foreign terrorist organization, Hamas.

Not so in the preceding paragraph which cast the sense of insecurity that the Israeli child feels as not the responsibility of *the aggressive neighbour* and *the aggressive Palestinian state recognized by some, not all* and *a foreign terrorist organization" -- speaking of foreign stuff -- but just cast completely with the accent on Israel in neutral terms as something Israel "cannot accept" with those "rockets" never having an origin and an address -- in Palestine. Why can't Obama denounce the rockets directly? Why is it merely that Israel can't accept them?

Obama, I saw what you did there.

Pretty cunning and crafty, and the sort of thing that Israel will not formally be able to complain about without sounding whiny. After all, um, their concerns were technically checked off.

And that's what's wrong with this speech. Even when it pretends to assign equal blame, it never actually does that, but does some fancy footwork worthy of the WCAR Durban final declaration that winds up singling out only Israel, and then essentially reiterates the "Zionism=racism" canard it pretends to reject by placing the "plight of the Palestinians" under a section of racism and implying that Israel has a racist policy -- which it doesn't. The real problem is that Palestine has a violence policy -- and nobody ever wants to call it out.

Then there's the other cunning and distractive thing that happens in this speech, and people who know more about all this can explain it to me, but it looks pretty deliberate to me -- no direct confrontation of Hamas.

You'd think in a speech like this, where Obama is willing to pull up his socks on Iran and say very clearly, without mumbling about talks without prerequisites, that the US will not allow a nuclear Iran, that he could also state what is, well, American policy: that Hamas is a terrorist organization, designated officially as a foreign terrorist organization, and as long as you had a FTO that would not renounce violence in Gaza, you won't get peace.

Instead, he does something hugely cunning, and says this:

And that’s why Israel has a right to expect Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Why couldn't he say that the US and the civilized world expects that? Why couldn't he put this in objective instead of subjective terms, making it seem as if it's all on Israel? Why couldn't he say "And the US has designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization precisely for this reason?"  This might be subtle, and no doubt some might find it nit-picking, but I don't think it's an accident, comrade.

And I think the reason for this is that if you put the candle under Obama's speech and make the Democratic Socialists of America and "community organizer" socialist doctrine show up in the purple dye under the speech, burning away the rest of the distractive rhetoric, you will find it's because Obama and company are reluctant to drop their deeply-held concept -- despite what other security elements of the US administration have compelled with the FTO designation -- that Hamas is some kind of national liberation struggle for whom violence is justified -- like the Soviets always claimed when the KGB dropped off Moscow gold to these movements.

Having failed essentially to explicitly reiterate US policy that Hamas is a terrorist organization and therefore the world calls on it to renounce violence, Obama then switches the conversation to Hezbollah, which is easier to do because Hezbollah is not formally part of the Palestinian state but only backs it, and is tied to Assad, which the US -- Obama -- finds easier to denounce now than Hamas, and which is easily tied to the evil regimes of Iran and Syria.

Note that in this Jerusalem speech, the Syrian people  "have the right to be freed from the grip of a dictator who would rather kill his own people than relinquish power" but the Palestinian people are never acknowledged as having the same right despite having murderous dictators in charge of them as well. To claim so would be to depart the sacred Soviet framework of the national liberation struggle (African leaders have gotten a pass on the basis of this same doctrine as well).

The left and the anti-neo-con RealPolitickers will be so preoccupied with Obama's sturdiness on Iran (maybe his mind personally got concentrated on this wonderfully when the Iranians were found to have stolen the plans for the presidential helicopter from a consultant's laptop) and so preoccupied with his support for the Syrian opposition, that they won't be molified by his failure to mention and denounce Hamas roundly. Or his failure to confront Palestinian violence directly. Few on the left would be placated in any event, given that he still backhandedly pushes the onus on to Israel's perception about itself, which may still be "too much empathy" for them. And Israel already has enough "sweeteners' in this speech, even with the garbled Passover stuff and the cloying mention of "Bibi" that they won't want to seem churlish by mentioning this Hamas gap.

But I saw what you did there and it explains why Obama isn't a partner for peace, either. Until he can renounce and relinguish the socialist left's preference for politically-correct violence, whether in the hands of Palestinians or Putin, and until of course Palestine itself renounces this violence as a method, there isn't going to be peace. You can endlessly argue about what Israel is supposed to do and how its self-defense causes human rights violations at times -- no one needs any help from me on this as Human Rights Watch and the rest of the zealous miners of factoids take care of this.

Yet the essential truth about the "partner for peace" issue is that violence continues to be accepted as a "national liberation struggle" paradigm out of the KGB's playbook. Until this is finally defeated, we will never see peace in the Middle East.

 

 

The Killer Robot Logic of Orin Kerr

Killer Robot in 1951.

When I saw this 2010 Jaron Lanier video the other day, I had an epiphany. Well, it wasn't something that I didn't "already know," but things fell better into focus for me. Lanier said what he says in You Are Not a Gadget, but even more so -- he really pronounced the web 2.0 phase of the Internet (but not the Internet itself) as really producing no good at all. And one of the things he denounced was the way in which computers and by extension the Internet and social media, were making people adjust themselves to machines, and make themselves more stupid than machines.

I think of this each time a Facebook friend from the Caucasus or writing about Syria posts something about some horrible masscre; or about some raid of human rights groups in Moscow; or about the re-sentencing of an Uzbek writer -- and all I'm left to do is click "like". Many people do. What they mean is "thanks for letting me know" or "I appreciate the petition you are doing on this".

But inevitably, we are all Shanghaied into sometimes -- maybe always -- clicking "like" on things that in fact are atrocities -- because the meaning is stripped away by the machine. I don't "like" the massacres of children or the jailing of writers but I click "like" on these horrible stories from friends and colleagues to say "I saw that" or even the opposite "I don't like that, it's awful".

This isn't just about machines, of course, it's about the inherent geek default in the geek religion (yes, it is all those things) to not allow votes of "no" in the belief they will be "gamed" -- in the belief, they mean to say, that they will be used against them to vote them out of office. That's really what it's about. The script underneath that interface allows for a "dislike," did you know? But it is not implemented. Hence "like". Likelikelike -- there is even a program that assembles your likes now and makes a collage of you based on that.

Everyone knows how these machines think stupidly, right? But Lanier gets us to think about how we are dumbing ourselves down to meet them half-way, then becoming beholden to them. I accept the erosion of meaning around the "likes" and lose touch with the idea that you can't really "like" a tragedy. If McLukan talked about television as the "great reducer", reducing the five-o'clock news about Vietnam and the napalming of a village into a consumable chunk along with the Chesterfield commercials and the Mousketeers, then now, you are not just reducing everything into the box, but "liking" it, too -- beyond consumption to being subsumed.

And I realized as I thought about Lanier and about Weev and all the other characters I've been writing about -- like Matthew Keys, who is pleading innocent and denying the evidence of the chat logs (not sure what he'll come up with there) -- or Aaron Swartz -- I realized that this nasty, trollish, deviant and devious thinking that they are always engaging in -- denying that anything is wrong, denying that things are what they seem, denying that it matters, claiming that some literalism is all there is to the truth -- that is the robot thinking. That is it, in spades.

I used to think that people who did this Eddie Haskell act online knew the truth, but dissembled. They knew what they'd really done -- theft, server crashing, intrusion, etc. -- but that they just developed a patter about it, a gabble, a line.

Now, as I look at how this has spread to forums everywhere and there are always literally hundreds of kids who come on and angrily tell you that what Weev did was "just like what Google does when it scrapes any web site"  and I realize -- hey, they may no longer be in touch with the truth of theft and the truth of coercion. They may really no longer feel it. It could be their conscience is gone -- or never formed.

Not that it's poisoned, but worse, never formed. So Adam Lanza, or any number of other shooters, including the shooters of an infant in his baby carriage this week, are people who are in a game, shooting for the pleasure of it, and simply don't feel that it's wrong. It's not that they know, and suppress that knowledge, or know, and dissemble -- the conscience is never formed.

That this only happens to some people out on the edges of the young male population and not to everybody who plays games or reads 4chan or surfs the net or whatever doesn't mean we shouldn't think about what it is, what causes it, and how to stop spreading it.

The Weev problem is first and foremost a problem of bad faith. It's not that he's Puck, a jester and a prankster but fairly benign, but that he's Pan, turning women into objects or the Pied Piper of Hamlin, leading children away to their deaths. Someone like Biella Coleman whitewashes Weev into a jester or an emblem of carnival and not a criminal harming other people, as if the problem of the Internet is merely to find the right literary or social metaphor and everything will be all right.

But it's also about people being unwilling to accept that Internet crimes are exactly like real-life crimes, that tampering with mailboxes in real life and on the Internet are exactly the same, and that the latter is not exonerated and eroded merely for being digitalized.

Orin Kerr really disappoints me here by taking up the defense of Weev. This is not about an obnoxious asshole online "needing" a public defender because everyone is entitled to defense -- he already had one. This is about Kerr taking a political action to defend him as part of his cause of reforming the CFAA. I have to say, upon reflection of Reverend Magdalene, that lawyers who take up clients merely to further their own political cause might turn out to be the same thing that you become when you defend yourself -- and have a fool for a client.

In any event, Kerr is a lawyer with vast credentials and real-life experience and I can't possibly hope to out-argue him on legal grounds. But I can say just a few simple things that are part legal, part moral, to challenge this law-faring for the Internet Autonomous Zone, which I don't think exists or should exist.

Leave aside the defenses like "why is this in New Jersey" -- which might get it thrown out on technicalities. I hope the simple answer to that is, "because the Internet is in New Jersey, too."

Much of what Kerr hopes to do here is prove that hacking at servers if you have not cracked passwords or used log-on credentials is not a crime, and not unauthorized access -- and the correlary to that contrived fiction, which is saying that the computers therefore attacked in this way aren't protected. In other words, he wants to show not only that CFAA doesn't apply, but if it does apply, then it is overbroad and should be reformed.

First, why isn't there a basic matter of property here? Weev did not own any of the serial numbers of the devices he guessed at using algorithms and a "brute force" script. The deal was that you accessed AT&T's website with your Apple i-Pad if you bought the device and then read the number and typed it in. Your property accessed their property in a customer-business relationship.

This doesn't seem to count, however as scores of machine thinkers are claiming that if the site was open to such machinations, the context doesn't matter. The fact that the numbers plugged in were not those of the actual customer, but an malevolent algorithmist anarchist, trying to make a name for himself, "doesn't matter". Character doesn't matter. Past deeds of course don't matter. Intent doesn't matter. All that matters in this machine-world Orin Kerr is vigorously defending -- erroneously, in the name of free speech -- is that the server was accessed "legitimately," i.e. by a string of numbers forming the URL that got those open pages that popped up the customer's email and name. Therefore it's "public," you see. The prosecutor, judge and jury didn't buy this contrived logic -- the logic of bad-faith hackers and the machines they emulate -- but now Orin Kerr is going to defend Weev and get their common sense and human dimension excised. You know, like Pan cutting the reed -- a woman turned into a reed --  to make a flute.

Legions of script-kiddies accept the argumentation. While none of them have said this yet, surely someone will say, but what if you bought 250 i-Pads for an elementary school to help children, and then you as the IT person had to use all of their numbers to access the web. The machine can't tell the difference between you as an educator and helper and Weev, a cynical hacker.

No, it can't. But we all can. That educator bought all those numbers; Weev did not.

The avid desire to protect machines in their neutrality -- "net neutrality" is a lot like this -- is justified, so they say, on speech grounds, oh and "innovation". Otherwise, people poking around, doing data mining "for a better world," testing security -- won't be able to do their "good work" because it might trigger a hacking indictment.

But hey, if they can demonstrate their good faith and good intentions, how could it? After all, does anybody really believe that if Weev had sent an email to the information security officer or network administrator at AT&T that there was this security hole, that they would have pressed charges? Why would they? His claim that they would -- as an argument for why he didn't engage in this responsible disclosure -- is pretty threadbare.

Yet Orin Kerr tosses all that out -- for the libertarian goal of free speech untrammelled by government.

The First Amendment, however, does admit restriction as to "time, place, and manner". Isn't the manner of this -- and its rapid timing -- at issue? It's with malevolence, to do a big hack, embarrass the company -- and create a feeling of terrible vulnerability for everyone. Those people whose emails were exposed would feel not only they had to change their password, but would have to get new e-mail addresses now because they couldn't be sure that some idiot in the IRC channel wouldn't be writing them hate mail now or spamming them. It doesn't matter that we have Weev's word (*cough*) that he didn't distribute this list. That's not the point. The point is that Weev wanted to make a huge propaganda of the deed in revolutionary armed struggle -- where the arms are brute-force scripts -- and not really help corporate America.

At what point will Orin Kerr realize he's sawing off the branch of civilization, even just academe,where he sits with this sort of celebration of anarchic coercion that takes away rights from us all in the end?

I hope Orin Kerr fails in this gambit. I hope common sense and the law -- not contrived lawfaring, but the rule of law -- prevails. I hope that the decision helps establish in fact that unauthorized access means just that -- use of coercive scripts regardless of the putative "openness" of the target.

If you don't want killer robots to take over some day, as Human Rights Watch is now fashionably saying, you can't adapt your thinking to machine thinking and strip away acts of moral contexts and intent shadings. They matter. You can't say that automatic scripts malevolently designed by anarchists don't matter because you can't make value judgements or "subjective human judgements" but have to look at every access of a machine neutrally. You don't have to. You are human. They are robots.

The oldest picture of the Pied Piper copied from the glass window of the Market Church in Hameln/Hamelin Germany (c.1300-1633).

Why Aren't We Questioning What Anonymous Did?

Effigy made of me in Second Life and posted to Wikipedia to mimic disparaging Wired photo of me.

Yes, I had to wait for it for 10 years, but finally a headline from Silicon Valley that says:

Why Aren't We Questioning What Anonymous Did?

God bless you, Caleb Garling, whoever you are -- the SF Gate is one of the many Silicon Valley regional newspapers that never question Anonymous because -- well, ultimately, Anonymous clears the way for the gadgets and Internet and your privacy and information all to be free, to their benefit (but that's a longer story).

I'm glad that there's finally a conscience growing among the tech set, but gosh, I do have to point out that this conscience began twinging not when Anonymous brought havoc to the BART transportation system; not when Anonymous hacked PayPal or Amazon or Gawker; not when Anonymous hacked Sony after the tragedy of the tsunami and caused them millions of dollars of losses; not when Anonymous hacked Stratfor and stole people's credit cards and tried to demolish their consulting business;  not when Anonymous hacked the US Sentencing Commission or MIT.

It twinged only when a woman in fact used the nasty methods of Anonymous that have so migrated into real life from the Internet's social media, and got one of their own fired. Oh, then it kicked in, and how!

No sooner did the hapless dev post his comment to the start-up watering hole Y-Combinator  - "She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate" like some cyber country song about somebody done somebody wrong, then the /b/tards were off and running.

Read what a "friend of Anonymous" -- really one of them? merely yet another convert to their methods? -- had to write about this:

Anonymous has reviewed the situation and rendered judgment using their collective wisdom and experience. Adria Richards engaged in malicious conduct to destroy the another individual's professional career due to what she perceived as an affront to her own extremist views from a comment that was not directed at her, not meant for her to hear, and certainly not for her to provide unwarranted input on. As such, she should have her professional career destroyed just like her victim in order for justice to be rendered and balance restored to the universe. The hivemind's judgement is final and there is no appeal. No forgiveness, no forgetting remember?

Um, reviewed the situation? What are you, the Politburo? The Supreme Court, that you hacked?

Then this:

Your client list has also been obtained by Anonymous. They have already begun harassing your customers. These include obnoxious phone calls, emails, denial of service attacks, online vandalism and defamation, and even real-life harassment (we'll get to this later). From a purely logical standpoint, your customers should realize and understand that this is not Sendgrid's fault and continue doing business with you. However, in real life, the human condition remains dominant, with all the pesky emotions and instincts which defy logic at times. Some of your customers may just cut all business ties because they don't have the time or desire to deal with this nonsense. Anonymous has analyzed your business model, and based on your clientele and competitors, you are very vulnerable. They are very focused on this.

Did this have affect on poor SendGrid? Did they quiver in their boots?

Your financial backers have also been targeted for the same harassment. Normally, when a venture capitalist puts money into your organization, a bond is forged through your idea or product gaining the confidence of your financial backer for future returns. This is a strong bond that is not easily broken through petty harassment. However, if any of your backers have something embarrassing or illegal to hide (sexual misconduct, tax fraud, etc), Anonymous WILL find it (they are good at doing this) and make it public. I guarantee, given the reputation of Anonymous, this is a factor that they will be considering when deciding how to continue their dealings with Sendgrid.

And then, like the logic of the killer robot that tells warring humanity that it will reduce them to cinder if they don't get along, Anonymous pretends that "this little chat" will lead to some enlightened, conscious thought and action, instead of sheer terror:

So, in closing, I hope this information helps you make an informed choice on how to deal with the situation. I do not represent, speak for, nor am associated with Anonymous, but I have seen some of their tactics. I present this information NOT as any gesture of threat, but merely to inform. This information is being provided free of charge and I make no guarantees on the accuracy of the material. However, you do have a choice to make at this point: Do nothing, or Publicly announce that Ms. Richards will be fired. The opportunity to stop this growing mob in its tracks before it tries to tear Sendgrid apart is as simple as publicly announcing Ms. Richards' firing. Now, you also have the opportunity to be sneaky about it and just publicly announcing the firing but not actually do it. But if Anonymous ever finds out, they will bring the full fury on you and your company. To put it in perspective, not even secure government websites are safe. If you believe you can tough it out, by all means, do nothing. This attack will last no more than a month at most. Anonymous' one weakness is a short attention span. If something even more outrageous happens over the next few days, resources will be diverted elsewhere and you get off scott free. I wish you the best of luck.

The creeps who did this even wrote strangely that they had come up with "some interesting information about her dentist". Huh? WTF? Her dentist? And that's the least of it -- she's been subjected to a slew of death threats and hate letters and misogynist obscene talk for days on end. It seems that for now at least they've forced her off the Internet. Boy do I know what that's like. But you cannot back down. This isn't just about males: it's about the authoritarianism that can happen to both men and women and infected her and made her act wrongfully first.

Only if you had been schooled for years with griefing in SL, and got a message like that sent to SendGrid as I did three times in videos from Anonymous, would you say, "I'm going to call these thugs' bluff".

It doesn't matter if it "isn't Anonymous" or one of their overlords' approved "ops"; those overlords are silent and not disassociating themselves from this or condemning it. And some of them might, and it would only be a distraction.  Because the methods of Anonymous are the problem, and they are metasticizing everywhere, helped by Twitter. What is Twitter doing about this culture is is creating?

Of course, one of the ways that authoritarian states -- an Anonymous -- attacks people is by not just attacking them, but attacking their loved ones or co-workers or relatives who are not in the dispute in the first place -- innocent bystanders. And they can often get people to knuckle once they go after those weaker links in the chain of normal human defense. A woman might brazen out the tough killer robot talk against herself, but not when it comes to her child. And as I keep saying -- this is not about only women, and let's not pretend it is as that feeds into the whole rewarmed Marxist identity politics of "third-wave" feminism. 

When the leftist thugs who kept harassing Breitbart's Lee Stranahan for his accurate reporting of Anonymous vigilantism in Steubenville, they invoked the death of his infant in a tragic childbirth accident; they invoked his young daughters; they involed his wife. None of those people obviously were involved in his work as a reporter, but the thugs went after them to get at him. That's what they do. Fight back. And realize this is about methodology and movement tactics just as much as it is about individuals, and repudiate them everywhere.

I don't know the psychological state that SendGrid found themselves in. The CEO's message doesn't tell us. As I said, their business is not reforming geekdom and joining feminist crusades, but making and selling email systems. Go to church or your feminist book shop if you need someone to help you with morality. Sure, we want businesses to have some kind of social conscience, but this was just too crazy and outrageous and brings scandal to their reputation and no business in the universe is going to sit back while that happens and applaud your lack of impulse control.

All the usual morality police are lining up on Twitter -- are we surprised to see griefer-professor Biella Coleman, adoring office wife of the Anonymous goons, is busy trying to prove that we can't prove it's Anonymous and she can only find one pastebin and one video?

Like, that's not enough? The real point is that Anonymous' methods are used by Anonymous and by so many others, including you, you know, Biella?

And she emphasizes Adria's "right to report" -- but doesn't ever question what it means to have politically-correct conference norms based on clutchy fear and hysteria, and overkill behaviour that suppresses the free speech that these people are supposedly always fighting for on the Internet when they need, oh, net neturality or no SOPA or whatever.

Adria Richards tells us that she made three "gut checks". She checked her gut when she took the photo, and she checked her gut when she posted the photo, and she checked her gut when she tattled on the chatters behind her to the conference organizers.

Protesting sexual harassment isn't wrong, but all three of those gut checks were wrong. Her gut was wildly out of whack. Her gut was telling her that a picture of a girl on stage who had been chosen in a program to encourge girls to code was going to be betrayed if she didn't fight like an out-of-control killer robot. This is what c3 calls MIPS, media-induced psychosis syndrome. Maybe it was a "trigger" -- which is this all-powerful and nearly mystical thing that all the kids are talking about as if they can now absolve themselves of any self-control and any conscious executive-function decision making outside of their autosonomous nervous system. Thanks, Internet!

None of those things should have happened with her "gut" -- that automatic reaction based on fight or flight which Ted Castronova greedily wished for gaming companies and gamification experts to tap into and incite endlessly for fun and profit.  That is, sure, they automatically happen, but some other thing we used to call "common sense" should have kicked in for balance.

She should have said "Shh, you're gross you guys, stop it" -- and only taken it to the organizers if they didn't stop harassing her, and not talking to each other. I personally find this entire conference behaviour guideline thing suspect. Seldom are they democratically developed with any liberal notions like "the right to face your accusers" and "the right to appeal". I remember how this was invoked for several Second Life fan conferences and people endlessly fretted over it but it did no good. A critic like me still found myself heckled and harassed by horrid little 4channers coming up to personally harass me and nobody did a thing.

A developer has posted a list of the sexual harassment incidents that have happened at tech conferences.  Some are familiar to me. I remember the Second Life educators' conference where a Linden Lab employee sexually assaulted a woman -- and it never made the press, and the employee was reassigned but not dismissed, and everyone in the community kept it quiet. Ugh.

I could write reams and reams about the harassment I've suffered in Second Life, but let me skip to the last year, in which I began to have effigies of my real-life self, made from my real-life photographs, put around everywhere in the 3-D virtual world -- with glasses broken or arms broken, bloodied, mutiliated, burnt on spits, with head cut off -- giant, small, and put everywhere, so that not only I had to experience the vivid horror of it, but my tenants. Everywhere, the picture of me in the Wired magazine interview was used, where I spoke out against 4chan harassment of women -- and was one of the first to do what's fashionable now for the tech grrls and without any support from the likes of freaks like Shava Narad. In fact, in  my constantly vandalized Wikipedia entry, there is a picture  of an re-enactment of the Wired picture

The Wired picture was deliberate. The photographer literally took dozens and dozens of pictures of me. Me smiling straight into the camera; me with my son; me at my computer; me in this outfit or that outfit. At one point, curiously, the photographer asked me if I had any darker and looser blouses I could put on. I obliged, unconscious of any ulterior motive. He asked me to go into the kitchen and stand at the sink, and took a picture of my back. Right before he left, he asked if I'd be willing to take a picture of myself peering through the chain of the locked door. I said no, finding it odd. 

Although this photographer could have used a picture of me smiling with my child, or working at my desk, or looking confidently straight into the camera as I used my real name and documented the harassment of me and others in Second Life -- the precursor of so much of what was to come on the Internet -- he used the one he had expertly staged of me with a broad back at the kitchen sink -- where, you know, women belong.

The effigy re-creating this awful scene which is itself a misogynous act I was walked into without realizing it isn't me -- I wouldn't make an avatar of myself from real life and dress it up like that. No, the effigy is made by my persecutors in SL. And yet the Wikipedia page says it's my avatar, as if I enjoy "punishment". Creepy, eh? The name/account of the person who took this, required on Wikipedia "does not exist". How does that happen?

Read the lovely thoughts of Julian Dibbell on how we shouldn't take online harassment seriously, we should joke, along with the b/tards about the Internet as Srs Bizness, and we should treat griefing as a growing experience

Moving, and maybe even illuminating. In the end, no matter what they say, life on the Internet really is a serious business. It matters. But the tricky thing is that it matters above all because it mostly doesn't — because it conjures bits of serious human connection from an oceanic flow of words, pictures, videoclips, and other weightless shadows of what's real. The challenge is sorting out the consequential from the not-so-much. And, if Rich Kyanka's steely equanimity is any example, the antics of the Goons and /b/tards might actually sharpen our ability to make that distinction. To those who think the griefers' handiwork is simply inexcusable: Well, being inexcusable is, after all, the griefers' job. Ours is to figure out that caring too much only gives them more of the one thing they crave: the lulz.

He casually describes the death threats to a man's female infant and praises his steely bravery in facing it down. Remember who Julian Dibbell is? He's the one who famously wrote about A Rape in Cyberspace back in his book My Tiny Life 1998. I always wonder if he did it himself. That's why I took chat logs of my interview with him, knowing in advance he'd be selective -- he was -- and denounced him afterwards. (Does Wired routinely strip out comments on archived articles? I debated him and his legion of b/tard fans there, too but it's all gone now.)

 

Rachel Sklar is worried about SendGrid's appeasement to the troll armies. Indeed! I wish that both SendGrid and PlayHaven could walk back the cat and undo their firings.

But why isn't Sklar worried about the Anonymous methods -- methods that in fact predate Anonymous and go back to Lenin if not before -- those methods people call "Saul Alinsky" methods -- freeze the target, exaggerate some aspect of it that appears to go against his principles, hammer, hammer, hammer  -- isn't that what Adria did? Why is that okay for her to do, and not for them?

 

 

Men and Women War in Cyberspace

Da! Complete agitation! Scientific demonstrations of Westinghouse washing machine by smart woman with pointer.

"The Internet" is blowing up -- that is, a few hundred people who went to a conference about geeky Python coding stuff called PyCon and their friends -- over the case of Adria Richards. So now the Pythonistas are having various spasms and everyone is piling on. Here's the Pastebin version, favourable to the male victims -- but it makes some good points. Here's Adria's version, self-serving, but calling out the larger problem of male geek sexism.

After Richards tweeted about some sexist comments made by two men at a developers' comment and getting "the Internet" roiled, one of the developers, from Play Haven, was fired; then Richards herself, from SendGrid, was fired. So, "the Internet" wins, at least two developers lose, and many people have a chance to do a sanctimonious star-turn by dumping on one or both of the employers.

Shouldn't Tim Berners-Lee come around and mourn that we are two down? The man who made the sexist remark privately in a conversation -- not from the stage at the conference, not on Twitter -- a father of three, has now lost his job. Where are all those free speechniks that want to try to turn hacking into free speech? Is that the only free speech they're available for?

I'm grateful to VRHax for pointing me to Amanda Blum, who has the very important backstory on this where I've made a comment.

I don’t share Amanda’s rosy view of the open source movement, both because of its rampantly authoritarian methods and culture, and because of its misogyny — which is common to the geek world in general. So part of me was glad that this woman Adria, whom I don’t know, was able to publicize the awfulness of the misogyny and nastiness that make it so hard for women to be in tech, or even for women bloggers on tech to comment on the obvious.

But a common function of the open source/social media cult is this “gotcha” game and these Saul Alinsky/Leninist methods of harassment, stalking, heckling, smearing, etc. And Twitter gives you a big amplification tool for that purpose. These two men made their sexist remarks to each other, in a private conversation that constituted backchat to what was going on, on stage, if I have understood correctly. Adria overheard their backchat, decided it was offensive, and then aggressively took a picture of those men, and then put them on Twitter. This led to public vilification of them for their private remarks, it led to one of them getting fired after a scandal was attached to their firm’s name in public, and it led to Adria getting fired for the same thing.

Don’t people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their remarks made not in public but to each other sotto voce while a conference is in session. Those men after all didn’t tweet their sexist jokes. So rightly or wrongly in terms of content, their speech has a reasonable expectation of privacy as it is not made publicly for public consumption. Yet Adria overrode that with this nasty authoritarian gambit of her own, which was basically to say “We will forcibly reform you according to our feminist notions even for what you say in private, just to make a point”. And that’s just not on — it’s more imbalance and more authoritarianism.

When you put it all into context as Amanda Blum has here, you feel like you’re in an episode of Portlandia.

I can’t help thinking that had Adria returned to her blog that day and wrote a post on this incident, about the men — even naming them — about their hurtful remarks and how it made her feel — even with a picture showing that this conference, like so many dev and geek type conferences, was basically a sausage fest — well, that might have been more tolerable. It’s that real-time that really makes companies freak out. But on a blog post, she could have taken time to frame it, and they might have had an opportunity to response in a length longer than a tweet. I do wonder if she or they would have been fired, had this been a blog post — and had it been one without naming names, it would have ensured no one got fired, but maybe the cause of women’s right got advanced.

I think Ashera Wolf took this approach — and she described the awfulness of the misogyny at conferences, and she even named some names, but I think her method — not getting into people’s faces and taking pictures to instantly tweet and not shaming them on Twitter in real-time — probably was more effective.

***

If you've never seen the Portlandia Women and Womyn First Book Store episodes -- go see them, especially the very first episodes in season 1, they're hilarious, they capture perfectly that creepy, dysfunctional arbitrary authoritarianism of certain forms of feminism.

And that's what this story feels like -- deciding that the cause of trying to reform gross geeks trumps privacy and the normal give-and-take of human relations.

I don't support the action of taking pictures of a person at a conference and attempting to shame their behavious -- but in fact, it's free speech and these things aren't written in stone. A reporter could do this -- it's a public meeting -- and make a comment, and as long as the context was the hipster one that people might support, they wouldn't care.

Nothing justifies DDoSing a site -- which is what happened to SendGrid, Adria Rich's former employer, once Anonymous decided they had to weigh in.

Obviously, Blum has called this correctly -- they all lose, and certainly the pious sanctimoniousness of Richards in thinking she was saving a little girl from sexism by "taking a stand" just doesn't wash. You feel all along that it's a power trip, it's about her, and that she's using this issue as a "Shakedown Street" -- much in the way that the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the Rev. Al Sharpton have used the issue of racism to fight for political power, sometimes charging bundles for "sensitivity training".

That there is even a business or agency that manages these things and makes money off it is creepy here, and nobody has mentioned that except Blum -- to say that it doesn't work.

As I think about it further, I do want to say that firing employees seems an awfully harsh and I wonder if a lesser punishment could have been found -- put the Evangelist on desk duty for a week or two, take them off their lovely conference circuit with its per diems and free food and nice hotels, and force them to operate the Twitter account with no injection of sentiment. Gah!

But here's the thing -- SendGrid isn't in the geek-reform business. They're in the email business. Their job -- Dev Evangelist -- depends on having a kind and friendly face to their business. If they become the object of scorn, and worse, the object of Anonymous' ire, why should they be required to keep the employee who brought that on?

Maybe people have to stop thinking that they can dog-whistle to Anonymous or make common cause with such thugs and still keep their jobs.

That Anonymous picked up Adria's cause is only more proof of how her method was wrong. Indeed, any company that sees their employee making common cause with Anonymous for ANY reason has to consider termination, in my view. Because they can't be trusted to be decent and not coercive and destructive with the public or the customers. Adria used Anonymous methods when she took pictures and tweeted them to use social media to create social pressure on people. She essentially endorsed Anonymous to come DdOS her employer. Hey, I don't see her condemning Anonymous doing that.

Then there's the deeper question: what is an Evangelist and why is it that Silicon Valley, which has few jobs for women, puts them in this job?

SendGrid talked Newspeak with the rest of them in their explanation of Richard's firing when they described this essentially marketing job as a job that is "supposed to unite the community" (around what principle? Send more email and use SendGrid to do it? lol) but that then had the unfortunate effect of "splitting the community". Oh, gobbledegook. Your job shouldn't have such a goofy name taken from religion, and it shouldn't have a social engineering role. The job is to sell the product to other businesses as a b2b product, and that means reaching the devs and engineers at other businesses who make decisions about what to use etc. That's all.

It was easier to understand what this role was really all about when the woman was the part-time homemaker or the single unmarried daughter working part-time to demonstrate the Hoover in the store on demonstrating washing machines in early TV commercials. Then you realized her role was secondary, and she was being called upon her womanly charms to hustle a product.

I notice that when women get into tech companies these days, unless they are super badass coders, they are put in this womanly role of "evangelist" which is mainly a social role -- being nice and charming while you essentially take customer questions and demonstrate the product. You can dress it up with geek-speak, but it's about teaching and socializing and smoothing relations -- the women's role. It's not about science -- except for the lore you have to master about using the product, but note in our TV ad above from 1956, that the woman there could sound scientific while talking about spin cycles and removing cores.

I keep thinking of Scoble's film of that geek dude selling the phone cracker thing that jailbreaks your phone, and "his lovely assistant" who is now going to be taking over the evangelism/community manager role. She was silent throughout and Scoble to his credit tried to reverse the sexism and try to get her to talk more and featured her in the film.

A beneficial byproduct of Adria's picture is that you look over the shoulders of those two geeks talking trash to see a room full of men. It's the typical sausage fest and to a certain extent I feel for Adria having the bravery to get up and call these people out. But it's by adopting a form of authoritarianism that is as bad as the patriarchy they echo -- but only unevenly impose. I'll bet neither of those two neatly dressed white hipsters have been in court for beating their wives or girlfriends, but I could be wrong.

All these hipsters on Twitter wanting to sign petitions to reinstate her ought to ask the same thing of the geek who was fired for making the sexist remarks.

This is only the beginning, or really, the beginning might be properly have said to begun with Weev treating Kathy Sierra so abominably. Some people came to her aid back then, but certainly not enough -- I left a comment on a site about the story back then, but few people in the Second Life/web 2.0 community back then felt they should defend her -- there was this sense that she was wimping out. And Kathy Sierra did nothing remotely like Adria Richards. In fact, she did nothing at all except blog about tech and tell people to come to her talk. Weev, a fucktard extraordinaire who is right where he needs to be for malicious hacking right now -- in jail -- was the one who harassed her, doxed her and exposed her to untold pain over past episodes of her life, and made death threaths -- and  4chan, which was the early form of Anonymous from which it has not evolved at all, piled on.

That's why it's so disingenuous for Anonymous to say they have "weighed" the story and decided to harass SendGrid -- while some of their very members from 4chan and similar low-life sites are happy to send her death threats.