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).
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