Wired State

Idiot Wind: A Compendium of Snowden, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum Topics

 

Jacob Appelbaum and William Binney at the Whitney in April 2012 (Poitras, not visible in the photo, is also on the platform).
Photo by Audrey Penven.

 BY CATHERINE A. FITZPATRICK

Read my new book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack on Kindle or Scribd.

Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press / Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out quick but when they will I can only guess /

Idiot Wind - Bob Dylan

 

UPDATED 8/13/2013 with additional conflicting narratives that have come out from Peter Maass portrait of Laura Poitras in the New York Times Magazine and also to add information gleaned from Snowden's girlfriend's (now deleted) blog showing the convergence of various hackers in Hawaii at the time Snowden was there.

An episode that sticks out for me in the story of how Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jacob Appelbaum came to get in touch with Edward Snowden, write about him, and spill his secrets is the furious response Greenwald has to Walter Pincus' articles containing his findings and questions on the connections between WikiLeaks and Snowden and Greenwald's role.

Pincus' article tracks with the sense a number of us have who have been following these radical activists long before the Snowden story broke that these people all knew each other long before, and collaborated much closer than they admit to bring about the Snowden defection to Russia.

In fact, I've been following them for years, long before the Snowden story, and I was the only one to cover critically the appearance of Poitras, Appelbaum and William Binney, their celebrated NSA "whistleblower" of last year's (2012) talk circuit.

It's my conviction, too, that they all have known each other a long time, and that if they hadn't found Snowden, or recruited him, they'd have to invent him. And maybe they did -- the fable he tells -- and which Greenwald repeats -- about the "direct access" between IT companies' servers and the NSA is, in my view, one of the greatest active measures of our time against the United States. It's an active measure that fits into a whole series of attacks by anarchist hacker movements related to Anonymous, WikiLeaks and Occupy who have either been used by Russian and Chinese intelligence or have colluded with them from the beginning, as I describe in this long time-line.

Sure, my basis for these contentions is basically just a hunch based on tracking how these people behave or a long period of time, but it's based on repeated experience of seeing how they operate; how they edge-case and obfuscate and distract about their motives and actions. I always feel with these people that it's like playing Monopoly when you're kids, and you invent all these extra rules, like "if you roll the dice and ding my hotel on Boardwalk, you have to pay me $100 in damages" -- and then endless arguments about whether the dice really came near the hotel, or whether it was really $100 you agreed on.

Walter Pincus' contention that Greenwald had a prior relationship with WikiLeaks and his story had essentially been "previewed" or shaped by them came from two things -- a video interview with Julian Assange on Democracy Now! on May 29 2013 before Greenwald's story came out -- which was also about Stellar Wind and how the NSA purportedly invades privacy -- and a story that he saw on WikiLeaks' website by Greenwald about the NSA.

Greenwald flew at him like a bat out of hell with corrections to what he implied were outrageous errors -- in fact Assange had been talking about the NSA's eavesdropping programs in the past and (supposedly) didn't have the information about PRISM (yet); and Greenwald first published his piece on Salon.com, and WikiLeaks' blog just reprinted it later, which is why it appeared as if it came from them.

But these aren't substantive corrections; they're the sort of technical error that Greenwald thrives on discovering to distract from a reader's catching him out in the bigger picture of his seeming collusion.

And the reason they aren't substantive is because indeed, Appelbaum and Poitras did indeed prefigure (that's the word I'd use) the Edward Snowden story with ex-NSA employee William Binney more than a year previously in New York at the Whitney Museum (I was there and blogged it and it was also online, along with interviews with Democracy Now!) at a "Surveillance Teach-in". And Greenwald has indeed shilled for WikiLeaks for years, and not been honest about admitting that both Poitras and Appelbaum  had radical histories of anti-government activist that led to US agents stopping them at borders for questioning.

You can view Binney as a trial run or a stress test or a beta and you can view Snowden as 2.0; but the fact is, they are written from the same code.

Greenwald succeeded in stirring up an uproar and getting the tech and lefty media echo chamber to make that uproar even more fierce against Pincus, who was associated long ago with the CIA and hated by the "progressives" and libertarians. (They made it seem as if it was some outrageous crime against journalistic ethics that he took awhile to research and respond to the attacks with some corrections, but it was within a few days). But this shouldn't distract from the essential truths that Pincus was stumbling on and all of these things bear re-examination.

Why is it important to show that these people in fact knew each other in the past, and collaborated on this story earlier than we knew and aren't telling us everything? Well, not only to show that if they lie about this thing, they could be lying about the entire NSA story (and I believe they are); but we can see more clearly the deeper activist agenda they have and the larger plot involving WikiLeaks assault on America, with Russian help.

As I explained in my long timeline, the purpose is to weaken and discredit America as a champion of Internet freedom; to claim that it is a hypocrite and not true to its ideals; to act as if it is no different than the surveillance states of Russia and China; and to make it seem as if the "sovereign Internet" plans of these authoritarian governments then are justified due to the discreditation of both US commercial and government involvement in the World Wide Web.

So here are the topics that all bear re-visiting on the Snowden story and further investigation:

GLENN GREENWALD'S RELATIONSHIP TO WIKILEAKS

Glenn did not just discover WikiLeaks when he worked with Appelbaum this year to handle the Snowden story, and that's why his neuralgic reaction to Pincus' claim that he was published directly by WikiLeaks is so silly.

Glenn is a long-time supporter of WikiLeaks, directly and repeatedly in touch with Julian Assange. For example, in March 2010, he wrote an article in which he said:

I spoke this morning at length with Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks’ Editor, regarding the increasingly aggressive war being waged against WikiLeaks by numerous government agencies, including the Pentagon. 

Many people didn't really tune into Assange until November 2010, when he leaked the State Department cables; the war cables didn't get as much attention in the mainstream media although the anti-war and leftist media covered them. Likely Greenwald goes back further than March 2010, but I believe this is his first major defense.

Greenwald also published a major piece in support of Manning on the second anniversary of his incarceration on May 31, 2012.

GLENN GREENWALD'S RELATIONSHIP TO JACOB APPELBAUM

In early November 2010, Glenn also wrote about the people who were being harassed at the border for their support of WikiLeaks -- he wrote about hackers David House and Jacob Appelbaum. He notes that Appelbaum addressed him openly on Twitter about how his equipment wasn't returned after border searchers. (Appelbaum openly supported and fund-raised for WikiLeaks when he took Assange's place at a hacker's conference, and is widely believed to have been deeply involved in WikiLeaks, which had its start in the use of the circumvention software named Tor which Appelbaum develops and whose non-profit organization he heads.)

In 2010, Greenwald also got into an epic fight with Wired over their spilling of a chat log between Manning and the hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned out to be an FBI information -- he had become alarmed at the kinds of secrets Manning was going to spill when he was contacted by him (they had mutual contacts in the MIT hackers' community), and he decided to report him to the FBI. Greenwald mounted the same sort of savage and hysterical attack on Keven Poulsen, Wired editor (no angel he; a former indicted hacker from the phone phreakers era) over what he felt was disloyalty and endangerment of Manning and also incomplete disclosure of the full texts of the IRC channel chat logs, which he felt was damning. Poulsen said at the time that full disclosure had not been made merely to protect features of Manning's private life like his transgender status and ultimately ended up publishing the whole thing.

Lamo rebutted Greenwald's charges and as other tech news sources reported, outed the fact that Greenwald's main source for his claims against Wired came from Jacob Appelbaum.

(See, if you're going to get into a fight with hackers or over hacking, bring your own trusted hacker to the fight; that was poor Walter Pincus' biggest mistake.)

Said Lamo at the time:

Unfortunately, the appearance of that source turned out to be suspiciously convenient. Described in the Salon article as "a well-known hacker of the Tor Project who has known Lamo for years," Appelbaum has other associations - namely as a high-level volunteer for Wikileaks.org, who has personally met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (who started the site with documents stolen via the above-mentioned Tor Project) and has been tracked to the same location as Assange as recently as this year. And it's clear that Assange and Appelbaum share a huge vested interest in trying to discredit me and exonerate Manning, with Assange even allegedly sending Wikileaks.org lawyers to try to defend Manning.

See, Glenn failed to do this little thing -- explain in his Salon story that Appelbaum wasn't just the Tor guy but was a huge WikiLeaks supporter -- and as many believe, engineer/helper/encryption maven/whatever.  Greenwald then said rather unconvincingly that he just didn't know that about Appelbaum, he just hadn't read the news. As always with Greenwald when he literalizes and edge-cases like this, there's little you can do. Everyone else following this topic knew about Jake -- he says he didn't. Oh, well.

It's awfully similar to the way that Glenn didn't really explain in his angry rebuttal to Pincus that he really had no call getting so angry about being accused of publishing on WikiLeaks blog because good Lord, he's been stumping for WikiLeaks constantly since 2010, from their lips to his ear. And it's awfully similar to the way that Glenn's story about the way in which he first heard from Snowden has some kinks in it or his omission of crucial information about Poitas (see below).

Greenwald has long been a close contact supporter of Appelbaum; last April 2012, he tweeted support of his Democracy Now! "prefigure" video (as I call it) about the NSA.

WIRED BREAKS STORY OF NSA EAVESDROPPING

James Bamford of Wired broke the story of a new facility being built in Utah and the Stellar Wind program in March 2012. It would be interesting to see if he ever dealt with Appelbaum or Poitras but maybe not, given possible antagonism between Kevin Poulsen, Wired editor, and Appelbaum over the Manning/Lamo chat logs that "betrayed the hacker movement". And wouldn't it be funny if this grave breach of our national security was rooted only in a pissing match and turf war over a couple of haxxors?

I remember when the story came out, and it didn't really get much attention beyond the nerd pack.  But he does mention William Binney -- who is about to make his Democracy Now! debut the next month and be featured even on the mainstream nytimes.com then in August 2012.

GREENWALD'S RELATIONSHIP WITH LAURA POITRAS

It's not known when Greenwald actually first met or contacted Poitras. But his first big article about her suffering in "40 border detentions and searches" came in April 2012 (remember that date).

This was an uproar on the left and libertarian blogs, and film-makers even signed an appeal on her behalf.

But just as Greenwald had failed to tell his readers in the Wired epic clash that his hacker friend Appelbaum worked for WikiLeaks (he claimed he didn't know yet), so Greenwald failed to tell his readers why Poitras was being stopped at the border, really -- not because of her criticism of the US government, but for an incident involving allegations that she knew about an ambush of US troops while embedded with insurgents in Iraq covering the war, but didn't tell them.

This story has been around and the Weekly Standard covered it, and there is also a book chapter mentioning the ambush and the effort to positively identity Poitras, which failed. US troops involved remained convinced she was the one on the ridge filming them for her movie My Country, My Country.

Ever since, this MacArthur genius award fellow and Pop Tech speaker and beloved film-maker of the anti-war movement has been stopped at the border, yes, because the US government continues its investigation of this and other incidents.

I don't know whether the New York Times didn't know of these allegations in August 2012, when they published her tendentious film on William Binney, "The Program," on the nytimes.com site as an "op-ed piece". But this film also -- to use my word -- "prefigures" the Greenwald story of Snowden.

Important contradiction:  The Weekly Standard notes that Laura Poitras denies being on the roof at all before the ambush. But in her interview with Maass, now Poitras says she accompanied the family of the doctor she was filming up to the roof several times. Now she admits she was on the roof. Maass tries to frame this story to her advantage by saying that Iraqi troops, backed by US troops, raided a mosque. Of course, terrorists misused mosques to hide in all the time, and bombed mosques as well in the Iraq war and still do. Whether or not the US committed a wrong here can't distract from the question of whether Poitras knew of the ambush or not.

LAURA POITRAS' ASSOCIATION WITH WIKILEAKS, HACKER AND CRYPTO PARTY MOVEMENTS

Peter Maass praises Poitras' skills in defeating surveillance from US government agencies she has actively opposed as a radical film-maker. She learned these skills, as she recounts it, from Jacob Appelbaum, developer of Tor, the circumvention software originally developed by the US Navy which has been involved in a number of controversies. Appelbaum has also been wanted for questioning by the WikiLeaks grand jury after he openly took Assange's place at the HOPE hacker conference and actively worked for WL.

Photo by Daniil Vasiliev.

Poitras appears to be the person seated here at the right who attended a Crypto Party, i.e. an event arranged by a hackers' movement to teach activists to encrypt as can be seen from this picture by Daniil Vasilyev.

WIKILEAKS' ASSANGE PREFIGURES THE NSA STORY

A week before Glenn Greenwald's story broke and then Gellman's story appeared, Assange gave an interview to Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! about the Stellar Wind program at NSA. Pincus felt that the story line was so similar -- the evil NSA eavesdropping on all our email and telephone communications -- that he described this as a "preview' of Greenwald's story -- as if Assange knew about Glenn's story and was plotting with him and this constituted proof.

I think Greenwald, Appelbaum, and Poitras (or any one or two out of the three) alerted Assange to the big story of Snowden about to break. How could they not? Maybe Greenwald and Poitras aren't especially close to Assange but Appelbaum is, and he'd also have the chops to make encrypted comms with him to reach Assange's comfort level. He'd also want to vet Snowden through Assange to avoid all of them getting burned, I should think. After all, while we think of these people as constantly winning in their struggle with America, they're paranoid and playing victim all the time and imagine they'll be stung at any moment. How could they be sure he's the real deal?

I believe the proof of authenticity was a quest given to Snowden to get an example of bugged communications that the hackers Appelbaum or Assange would know about or suspect, to see if Snowden would a) get the goods and b) help their side out. When Snowden tells Poitras and Appelbaum in the Der Spiegel article about  "the suspected hacker's girlfriend" whose cell phone abroad was ostensibly snooped on, I think that is the story; that's the quest he had to fulfill. That suspected hacker is either Appelbaum himself, and the girlfriend is a friend who is a girl in Boston (a story he tells in his Berlin speech of July 25, 2013 where he's anxiously trying to line up narratives to match his digital footprint), or someone like Quinn Norton, the ex-girlfriend of suspected hacker Aaron Swartz -- or perhaps someone else in this circle. I was told this was a manual hack and not a Stellar Wind scrape, but no matter; the quest trophy is similar to the one Bradley Manning brought to Assange in the form of an Iceland cable that showed Assange was under surveillance.

Since Greenwald has bent over backward so hard to discount ANY connection between Assange and his "prefigurement" story and his own work, it's worth looking at closely:

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, let’s look at this phenomena from two aspects. Don’t be deceived by what appears to be small maneuvers by the Department of Justice to go after AP, to go after Rosen, to go after us, etc. We have over here the bulk surveillance industry run by the National Security Agency that already has all these records. It has them all already. The National Security Agency—and this has come out in one court case after another—was involved in a project called Stellar Wind to collect all the calling records of the United States, every record of everyone calling everyone over years. And the result of that lay out the entire community and political structure, based upon who people are friends with. You can infer that by who calls who, and what the status is by the relative flow of calls around the country, to suck out the entire community structure of the United States. That has already been done. Those calling records already enter into the national security complex.

What we’re talking about here are mechanisms to use that information in a court case, and therefore it has to be clean. This is the dirty team; this is the clean team. And so, these are maneuvers to pull people into court cases that will become public to set a deterrent against national security journalism. And the most pernicious aspect of that is the abuse of the Espionage Act and other mechanisms to try and conflate the activities of a source with the activities of a journalist or a publisher, and to try and say that whenever a journalist deals with a source, they’re in fact engaged in a conspiracy. And if there’s an allegation—of course, allegations can be very easily made, placed on the table, just invented from thin air—that a source’s behavior affects national security and is therefore espionage, and therefore, extend that allegation over to the journalist and to the source—and to the publisher. In the case of Rosen, they have done that in order to get at Rosen’s emails and other records, to then back reflect onto the source or onto other sources. You know, it is simply a disgrace. It is unethical conduct. It is politically worrying conduct. It is chilling conduct. And it is—why is it being done? Because they believe they can get away with it. It is part of advancing the frontier of the national security state to roll on over the First Amendment and every other traditionally accepted U.S. value.

Note how Assange strives to get us to look away from the IRS or AP story, ultimately, and look at the larger NSA picture (because that would be personally about Obama and his Administration and WikiLeaks has always gone through these shenanigans to appear as if they are not attacking Obama, but the security state actually built under Bush).

The problem of "conflating a source with a journalist" is of course the very problem Greenwald now faces regarding Snowden.

I could add as an aside that the claim of "sucking the community structure out of the US" (which I believe to be a gross exageration) is something actually foretold by The Sims Online and Second Life, which I always try to explain are testing grounds for hacker movements and Big IT and anyone else who shows up anonymously. The "balloon connections" invented by Will Wright, inventor of the Sims (which he's still tinkering with in other settings) made vivid the whole social tree of everyone online in that world; map-tracking of avatars online in Second Life and then later the proximity data scraped by the short-lived SL Watch also accomplished the same thing of showing how everyone related to everyone else, and how often and how close. These sparked huge outrages about privacy violations in these communities and while people laugh at virtual world problems, in fact we inhabitants of these worlds were the first completely digitalized people (at least as far as our avatars went) who got to see first-hand what it would be like living in the Panopticon we're getting today in real life on the Internet at large.

So -- sure, Greenwald has the alibi that Assange is talking about the sort of larger issue of privacy and the Panopticon that I myself might discuss or Evgeny Morozov or anybody, and it's not really a preview of Snowden. Except, well, it is. We know it in our hearts.

THE DISCREPANCIES IN THE STORY OF HOW GREENWALD FIRST CONTACTED SNOWDEN

There are at least five different version of this story and they bear a close analysis, even if it's boring, because they contain important clues, working backwards:

1. May 2013

The Guardian reports that Snowden arrived in Hong Kong (still underground) on May 20, 2013. In his angry rebuttal to Walter Pincus, Greenwald rages in typical accusatory fashion as quoted in Sargent's June 24 story:

“Anybody who wants to accuse me or anyone at the Guardian of aiding and abetting Snowden has the obligation to point to any specific evidence to support that accusation,” Greenwald told me. “Otherwise they’re just spouting reckless innuendo.”

“We had early conversations about setting up encryption, so we worked early on to set that up,” Greenwald says. “We didn’t work on any documents. I didn’t even know Edward Snowden’s name or where he worked until after he was in Hong Kong with the documents. Anyone who is claiming that somehow I worked with him to get those documents or helped him is just lying.”

Well, maybe people thought that because he said that he was in touch with Snowden in February in the other version of the story; but Greenwald's response to the confrontation from people on Twitter was merely to call them names.

The blogger The People's View is one of those who assiduosly makes timelines and asks questions about when Greenwald knew Snowden and what did he know about him because the story seems to vary.

2. February 2013

In a tweet arguing with Joseph Weisenthal, Executive Editor of Business Insider (@TheStalwart) on Twitter confronting him about timeline issues, Glenn wrote:

@TheStalwart The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with him since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman

Glenn apparently felt upstaged by Bart Gellman, who worked with Laura Poitras on a separate story for the Washington Post on Snowden.

The reason this timing matters is because people began to wonder, once they heard the revelation from Snowden in his June 24 interview with the South China Morning Post that he had deliberately joined Booz, Allen in order to "hack moar," as the kids say, whether Greenwald knew about this plot and was in on it.

And the people confronting Glenn on this are not exactly conservatives or neocons; here's a Hillary supporter and Twitter developer, Zach Green, who asks:

@140elect @ggreenwald Since you started working with #Snowden before he started working at Booz Allen, how were you not instigating the crime?

Indeed. Glenn says February; Booz Allen themselves confirmed that Snowden started working for them as an NSA contractor in March 2013. 

Greenwald's response to Green for daring to ask this question is to accuse him of "drooling level imbecility" and others pile on to explain that of course Glenn was only trying to set up comms with a stranger who claimed he had a stash of docs.

By June 24th, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post helped smooth out these discrepancies for Greenwald (and for Washpo, which had backed his story and then had to go through multiple correction cycles on the PRISM slides and the "direct access" issue) by saying that he didn't even know his name when he first heard from Snowden (although he neglected to say that in his first renditions of this story).

3.  December 2012  

As the blog Nuclear Diner discusses, Glenn Greenwald told Harpers something different on July 17  -- that he first heard from Snowden in December 2012.

He emailed me back in December of last year, anonymously, and said something along the lines of “I and a few other people have some things that you’d be interested in. The problem is we can only communicate with you by encrypted email, so do you have PGP encryption?” I answered him and said “I’ll do it in the next couple of days and then you can email me back.” And he emailed in a few days and said “Did you do it yet?” and I said, “No, I haven’t done it yet,” and then he sent me step-by-step instructions — encryption for idiots, basically.

At this point I still didn’t know who he was or what he had. I frequently get people saying, “I have a huge thing for you,” and the vast majority of the time it turns out to be bullshit. So I didn’t prioritize it, but after a couple of days he wrote me back, and I still hadn’t done it. Then he made me a step-by-step video that he posted on YouTube about how to install and use PGP encryption. But I still didn’t do it, and so then he got frustrated and went to Laura Poitras, who he knew I had worked with and was friends with, because she does have encryption, and he said, “I’m going to give this stuff to you and then get Glenn involved.”

So I almost lost one of the biggest leaks in national-security history because I didn’t bother to install encryption.

4. November 2012 

In his interview with Peter Maass for the New York Times Magazine, Greenwald now places the time of this first contact with Snowden "more than six months before" his contact with him in person in Hong Kong in May 2013, i.e. November 2012 or even earlier.

Of course, Glenn gets furious when people nail him on this discrepancy because he can explain it away by saying the email contact from Snowden in December 2012 (possibly under a pseudonymn) (or earlier, as he is now telling Maass) and the handing of the documents from Hong Kong in May 2013 were really two different things, or stages in the same process of first trying to vet Snowden and see if he was useful and authentic.

But it is important to note that he tells the story differently, emphasizing different things and to probe further -- is it November or December or even earlier? And how can we establish this outside the circular loop of Greenwald and the other close-knit circle closely guarding this secret?

Greenwald said Snowden made him a training video and uploaded it to Youtube. Where is it? Can Greenwald provide a link?  What was the date of its upload?

So naturally I've been scouring all the PGP how-tos uploaded seven months ago or six months ago that might fit the timeline (did Snowden learn languages?), but there are lots of them and one can't be sure which low-view video could be his (and he may have removed it by now. Somebody could methodically study that, but it occurred to me that Snowden could also avoid having to repeat the wheel and leave clues about himself online by using someone else's training video, oh, Jacob Appelbaum's, for example, in his surveillance workshop of April 28, 2012 in New York. That might not be a for-dummies enough explanation (I'd have to study it more) but there it is. Somewhere, there is (was) a PGP training video with Snowden's fingerprints.

Let's pause for a sec and wonder how Greenwald, so enamored of WikiLeaks and reporting natsec stuff all the time, wouldn't have a PGP, but that's what he says.

So this "different version" in a sense "tracks' because it's involves Snowden, a first-time contact who is frustrated, Poitras is involved, then they come back to Greenwald later. Still -- it all bears scrutiny.

5. March or April 2013

Now you'll see why I've put this out of order, because here's yet another version from Michael Calderone of Huffington Post that you can now understand could be later because of the initial flub on the PGP.

Or not necessarily PGP but Tor or something even more elaborate because it wasn't just some email but loads of files.

Greenwald set up the encryption software and began speaking directly with Snowden in late March or early April, he said.

But see, these date stamps don't satisfy everybody, because then there's this, from Greenwald speaking to the New Yorker:

As Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the story, pointed out on “Morning Joe” today, this wasn’t a WikiLeaks-style data dump. “[Snowden] spent months meticulously studying every document,” Greenwald said. “He didn’t just upload them to the Internet.”

Months.

But Snowden didn't get his job at Booz, Allen where he could go back to serious NSA hacking until March 2013. So he had like...month. Not months.

Unless he started hoarding stuff while working as the NSA contractor at Dell. BTW, what connection does Dell have to the NSA?

THE PGP KEYS

Naturally, the hordes of script kiddies out there in the IRC channels like little busy hornets are always available to crowd-source and look at stuff like this and even turn against their own when they feel like somebody's story just doesn't add up. That is, even people who are four-square against the NSA and are for hacking the hell out of anything might turn on Greenwald if they were on the Wired side of the epic fight (or Wired itself). Wired's story about the NSA's new hive was overshadowed, big-time, by Snowden via Greenwald. That's why I think we may live to see the day of the great Wired takedown of Greenwald. Don't forget Greenwald (and Snowden above all) were exposed as mistaken/ignorant about tech in their "direct access" story from the PRISM slides.

But what these kids look for then is the dates the PGP keys appear out there in cyberspace. And here's the unfailing Cryptome story about all that which I also parse here, asking if Michael Vario is a persona or sock puppet for Snowden or what that's all about. But just as surely as Snowden was shown creating keys in March and May 2013, so @kapora of all people was busy telling us about how such things can get spoofed. Oh, well. Somewhere, on some server -- just like the Ars Technica readers had saved Edward Snowden's chats from 2007-2009 (!) -- there are more Snowden digital footprints and we will eventually find out more about his troubled crisis of conscious period following 2009.

SNOWDEN AND APPELBAUM IN HAWAII

Naturally, since Jacob Appelbaum went to Hawaii in April 2012 and again in April 2013 to celebrate his birthday, right when Edward Snowden was also there, we're all wondering. LibertyLynx broke this story from a reliable source who had noticed the "alibi video" Jake desperately made in Berlin trying to explain the reason for something he feared NSA analysts might have noticed -- that he was in Hawaii in April 2013 when Snowden was also there (and I could add - in April 2012 when Snowden was already there, too).

And it's important to know (because some newspapers are muddled on this and Pincus tripped on this and then Greenwald whacked him) that Snowden goes back to March 2012 in Hawaii. Talking Points Memo fetched that out of his girlfriend's blog -- and I saw her blog before she deleted it and it was definitely there as a timeline she described (and you can still find her blog in the Wayback Machine).

Snowden first came to Hawaii to work for Dell. Then he left Dell to go to Booz Allen Hamilton where he worked less than three months as BAH tells us in a terse statement on their web site after these events.

The Times is the only source I've seen (correct me if I'm wrong) that posits a segue between Dell and BAH where his hacking for the ultimate great revelation starts at Dell, and gives him reason then to move to BAH.

In what may have been his last job for Dell in Hawaii, he was responsible for the security of “Windows infrastructure” in the Pacific, he wrote, according to people who have seen his résumé. He had enough access there to start making contacts with journalists in January and February about disclosing delicate information. His work for Dell may also have enabled him to see that he would have even more access at Booz Allen

Somewhere in the numerous Appelbaum videos online, somebody might someday find some "windows infrastructure" help-desking (naturally Appelbaum loathes Windows) or some clue that will tie them together more intimately in Hawaii. For now, it's only same state, same time, but we don't know if Jake passed through Honolulu to talk to his future WikiLeaks protege Ed in April 2012 or April 2013.

Of course, the essence of hackers is to be online and be anonymous and "exist in cyberspace". But for virtual worlders, they do in fact spend a lot of time in meet-ups and conferences and hackathons and teach-ins and whatnot, and that's what has to be studied. December 2012 at 29c3 (the Chaos Communications Club conference) is when Appelbaum openly recruited government programmers to "leave the dark side" and come join his chaos club...

From Snowden's girlfriend's now-deleted blog, we also have an indication that Edward flew somewhere in March 2013 for a week or so "on business". To Maui, 100 miles away, to see Jacob Appelbaum and other hackers at the Spring Break of Code? An even that Appelbaum first described as a birthday gift for a vacation that he spent with 20 of his friends, but is described by other people at the Spring Break of Code as an event they organized in January to encourage young coders intereset in privacy encryption. If they are separate events, they intersect, but maybe they aren't. Snowden may have also flown to the mainland, possibly for BHA training at this time -- this is March-April 2013 before he fled Hawaii to Hong Kong.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS FOUNDATION

Many Internet sleuths make much of the fact that the one place where you can find Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and WikiLeaks all in one place is the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a relatively new outfit built out of old networks (of the same Mitch Kapor-founded Electronic Frontier Foundation gang and their front groups).

Yes, surprise, surprise, these folks, spearheaded by Gramps, as I've called the Grateful Dead's John Perry Barlow in several heated debates in person, raised a bunch of dough to help out WikiLeaks, whose coffers were emptying out in the past year because they had trouble getting payment providers after PayPal and MasterCard and such blocked them.

But this isn't a smoking gun so much as a gun that was due to go off in the first act years ago, as Chekhov would say. These people have long been working together before, as we've seen. They grace the masthead of this operation with various other lesser known hacker types because they felt that flush from their victory defeating SOPA/PIPA and CISPA -- legislation to regulate intellectual property and cybersecurity and privacy, of all things -- they should move on to bigger projects like tackling the security state more ambitiously with WikiLeaks.

One could ask questions about in which form FPF, a 501-c-3 nonprofit organization raises money to WikiLeaks, and whether it is going to Assange's private entity, which is a for-profit business that is not a 501-c-3 equivalent overseas. They could be in violation of charity law if they are not exercising expenditure responsibility and keeping to nonprofit activity.

Of course, there are other operations that do this work and probably have even more political clout, like Access, which has the ubiquitous former Googler (and former White House tech official and former just about everything else) Andrew McLoughlin.

I pointed out they weren't very transparent about their funding in a number of tussles with their people, and now I see they do have a funding page where surprise, surprise, it's a family foundation and Google.

They're also leading the charge on the NSA issue -- who knew?! And there is an entire network of these organizations, and they literally get millions from the Soros Foundations and other "progressives".

CONNECTION BETWEEN POITRAS AND APPELBAUM

These two were likely in Iraq together; she was there in 2004-2005 (when the ambush incident happened); Appelbaum was there in 2005 (which he brags about endlessly; he ran with the rebels and carried an AK47 himself).

We can't prove they ran into each other, but Laura refers to Appelbaum as her friend who helps her with encryption stuff at the time on several occasions.

Here's the Salon interview:

Did you immediately know what was the best, most secure protocol to go about it?

I actually did. I have a lot of experience because I’ve been working with — as you note in your thing, I’ve done filming with WikiLeaks, I know Jacob Appelbaum. I already had encryption keys but what he was asking for was beyond what I was using in terms of security and anonymity.

How did it proceed from there?

So that’s where I’m not going into a lot of details, but sort of ongoing correspondence. I didn’t know, I didn’t have any biographical details or where he worked, had no idea. He made claims and said he had documentation. At that point it was all completely theoretical, but I had a feeling it was legit.

You know what jumps out here? The "I've done filming with WikiLeaks". Because her film on Binney posted on the Times doesn't seem like a WikiLeaks project and doesn't mention WikiLeaks; I don't know what she means, actually (before Snowden). And even with Snowden, her first interview with him doesn't make him a WikiLeaks "brand" or "mascot" -- it's her show, and Greenwald's show up to that point. This point bears more study.

Then there's the major interview with Snowden that Poitras and Appelbaum do without Greenwald, for Der Spiegel, in which Appelbaum tells this story:

"In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me," Appelbaum said. "She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her."

"She was in the process of putting questions together and thought that asking some specific technical questions was an important part of the source verification process. One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower. I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment. We sent our securely encrypted questions to our source. I had no knowledge of Edward Snowden's identity before he was revealed to the world in Hong Kong. He also didn't know who I was. I expected that when the anonymity was removed, we would find a man in his sixties."

EWEN MACASKILL

So there are still loose ends to tie up -- lots of them -- but one dog that hasn't barked is MacAskill. Who is he? That man has quite the low-impact online footprint! He's with the Guardian in Washington, and was in the hotel in New York with Poitras and Greenwald when all of this was going down.

He also flew to Hong Kong with Poitras and Greenwald:

1 June Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill and documentary maker Laura Poitras fly from New York to Hong Kong. They meet Snowden in a Kowloon hotel after he identifies himself with a Rubik's cube and begin a week of interviews with their source.

HACKERS CONVERGE ON HONG KONG

To come -- the other hackers who also were in Hong Kong at the time of Poitras, Appelbaum and Snowden; they may include Christine Corbett, a scientist and friend of Appelbaum and MIT hackers who was also at the Hawaii Spring Break of Code with Appelbaum.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Poitras and Appelbaum were due in New York City in June 2013 at PS1 to do another happening like the one they had done at the Whitney in April 2012. They didn't show. They cancelled. Others, including Thomas Drake came in their place. I don't know why; I speculated openly on Twitter whether it was because they knew they might start facing a lot of questions about the timeline with Snowden.

Well, actually, now we do know why, because Appelbaum has decided to become an immigrant in Germany and apply for a resident permit, as he announced in his recent speech at the Technische Universitat in Munich. He believes US authorities will ask questions about his presence in Hawaii at the time Snowden was there and his ongoing support of WikiLeaks which has now culminated in a defection to Moscow. And Poitras has said she also fears returning to the US since her involvement in the Snowden story.

***

Now everything's a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
What's good is bad what's bad is good you'll find out when you reach the top
You're on the bottom.I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind
I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed your eyes don't look
Into mine

Bob Dylan

Why is Hal Abelson Believing Quinn Norton's Lies about Aaron Swartz's Guerilla Manifesto

Schwartz entered this door at MIT to go into the server closet.

Prof. Hal Abelson's long-delayed and much-anticipated report on the Swartz case is finally out -- and perhaps hoping not to be noticed very much on the same day the verdict in the Bradley Manning case is mentioned -- or who knows, just the opposite, hoping to piggyback on the "national conversation" about all these, er, "agonizing issues" regarding unethical hacking.

The report appears to be swathed in miles of politically-correct cotton wadding and the Volokh Conspiracy coverage of it already lets us know how we're to view the precious little darlings who hack, through the lens of the "lessons learned" for the "communty":

The responsibility to help brilliant and innovative students navigate the ethical choices that accompany their technical empowerment

I'll have to read the whole thing before I blog more about it, but I want to single out one glaring problem which I was shocked to see.

How could Abelson accept Quinn Norton's lie abouty the Guerilla Manifesto?

Abelson may have first tried to diminish the significance of this anarchist call by dubbing it a "statement about free information". But he then does describe the incident as something the feds may have accepted as a motive for this hack that would have criminalized him for it, since Aaron Swartz openly calls for hackers to copy everything they have, legally or illegaly, and dissemiante it.

But here Abelson then decides that instead of saying "That's wrong" or "We ethical computer programmers and scientists teaching at MIT don't accept that as a premise in life" he dodges and ducks like Anonymous and then invokes Quinn Norton's utterly biased take on it.

In fact she lies, as I discovered.

When I researched the drafting of this Manifesto, I read about the conference in Italy where a number of activists discussed these issues.

Quinn pretends that there were "multiple authors" and takes responsibility on herself as editor of it.

Yet the organizers of the conference in Italy themselves, apparently unable to coordinate the script of "the movement" together with her, put something completely different on their website when they posted an announcement of his death.

They called him the author of the Manifesto.

That's because he was. I believe them, not Quinn Norton, quite frankly, because she has constantly manipulated the public's understanding of the case by her selective telling of her cooperation with authorities questioning her. And she lets us know that her motive in her "nuanced" re-telling of the story was to help her old boyfriend.

I wrote about this at length on this blog post in March.

Here is an excerpt:

While looking for news on Swartz's case, I found that the people at the monastery retreat in Italy where he wrote the Guerilla Manifesto posted a tribute to him right after he died, and said this:

Aaron penned the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto while at the Eremo.

So I wrote that on Twitter, and while I didn't approach Quinn Norton, she responded.

She had made it sound in her article published in The Atlantic that there were multiple authors and therefore you couldn't tell who the author was and therefore the feds couldn't use this document as evidence.

This is parallel to her -- and others' -- argument that even citing this document is prosecuting thoughtcrime.

I think it's cited merely to show motive. [...]

Norton felt awful about giving the feds the Guerilla manifesto when it seemed they didn't know about it:

So this is where I was profoundly foolish. I told them about the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. And in doing so, Aaron would explain to me later (and reporters would confirm), I made everything worse. This is what I must live with.

This is insane, of course, because they could find an open document on the Internet anyway, and sooner or later they would have found it. And it's precisely because the feds were not pursuing "thoughtcrime" that they didn't go trawling through all his blogs.

So after the feds got this and she felt it was now the smoking gun they lacked to prosecute her old boyfriend, she switched tactics:

Aaron was incredibly angry with me. I pointed out that any journalist worth a damn would have the manifesto in no time; he agreed, but said these guys weren't as smart as journalists. I said the press would uncover it when the case went public. He told me, as he had so many times before, that the press wouldn't be interested in the case. We were both wrong.

Is Mr. Demand Progress really telling the truth when he claims his case wouldn't be interesting to the press?!

So Quinn then tried to spin it with another constructed narrative based on part of a phone call she heard:

Later I listened to Aaron on the phone as he described to a journalist how he had downloaded 400,000 law journal articles to do text analysis, revealing what kind of legal research was being funded by what kind of companies in 2008, and publishing an academic paper at Stanford about it, all as explanation of why he might have downloaded the JSTOR articles. It was the best answer legally to the question I'd been asked in that small fluorescent room surrounded by big men. Listening to him say that I felt my insides collapse.

That is, it's ambiguous, as others have pointed out before me, whether he himself is saying this is his JSTOR hack motive, or whether she's interpolating that as his motive -- it seems the latter.

Of course, you could ask JSTOR for access to do a big data drill if you really needed to as a fellow of the "ethics" center at Harvard, you know?

Quinn then turns in this bit of very fancy footwork -- just too fancy:

They put the manifesto, the cause of so much grief, in front of me to read to the jury. I read what they directed me to and they asked me if Aaron was the author. I explained I didn't know, it had been authored by four people, not one. I'd edited it right after, still in Italy, but Aaron had brought it from the group and his name got attached to it. I told them there was no way to know if he'd written the part they were trying to use to prove his intent. Asked if it reflected his current thinking, I looked at the middle-aged audience and said, honestly, that he'd moderated many of his views in the last few years, I couldn't know. I referred to the drift of a young man's mind and said we shouldn't be held to everything we said in our early 20s. I caught one of the woman in the back nodding. The prosecutors were furious.

Too fancy, because the people who hosted the conference said, "Aaron penned the manifesto" in their tribute to him. Unwittingly. Because they didn't square the story with her -- how could they? And she must have failed to allign her story with what they had written -- she didn't see it or realize it. Well, she is under stress and on Vicodin, too.

But despite the obvious statement on the Italian site and her contradictory statements here, this is what Abelson ran:

<
http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_
djvu.txt
>
Aaron Swartz was not the sole author of the memo, and it is unknown whether he authored the sentences that were quoted. Quinn Norton told the Review Panel that she did the final editing of the piece, and that she does not know who the other authors were, or who contributed which part.
14 Supra at 4 n.15; see also USAO Press Release July 19

Guardian: Pay No Attention to that Little Man Behind the New Iron Curtain

The Guardian somberly intones that the story isn't Edward Snowden (pay no attention to that little man behind the new Iron Curtain!) but the "real story" is "the Internet" (that thing Evgeny Morozov claims doesn't really exist, and some days, one could believe him when they see the Internet described like this, as a fragile thing shrinking from rumour and innuendo).

John Naughton's hysteria:

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.

But the NSA hasn't accessed the meaningful content of citizens' digital content across the world; it has at best scanned only metadata and at worst machine-scanned content of some flagged accounts for cause in order to make matches. This "secret court" that has Naughton and others so outraged is already known (and wasn't revealed by Snowden) and is a court that has oversight by Congress -- and has to perform the function of countering terrorism. What's your plan for combating terrorism if you publicize everything you know about their plots with open data on suspects? Did you have one?

My comment:

In other words, what the Russian delegation and other bad actors at the World Conference on International Telecommunications wanted with control of the Internet and "sovereign Internets" has been achieved. Mission accomplished, with the help of WikiLeaks, who guided Snowden to Moscow where he was either always scripted into an "active measure" against the West or was exploited as one. No accident, comrades!

Snowden hasn't committed any public service or whistleblowing (he was deliberately misleading about the "direct access" issue to sow panic); with this Kremlin-inspired agitprop, he has helped unleash mass hysteria and anti-American hate campaigns to the advantage of Russia and China, um, those friends of Internet freedom.

But it's mainly the Guardian stoking this moral panic about privacy that no one has yet to prove is really violated by blind machines scanning metadata for matches to terrorist groups -- you know, even less intrusive than the way G-mail scans the content of your email to serve you ads. No one has produced a single case of actual civil rights violations except a vague invocation by Snowden of "a hacker suspect's girlfriend" having her cell phone bugged. Tell us who that is, and maybe we can assess the bona fides of this entire caper better, you know?

I expect that companies will respond with a bit tightening of opt-in or opt-out privacy issues usually described as access to data for marketing purposes, and life will go on. Capitalism usually does trump communism.

The longer Snowden stays in Russia and the less we hear from him, the harder it will be for the Guardian to make this entire narrative stick.

 

I personally have always thought "the cloud" was an iffy proposition due to hackers, intramural rivaly among the Big IT corporations fighting over it, and bad actors like Russian and Chinese government sponsored hackers.

The cloud, put simply, is other people's computers, not your own. When you put your data on other people's computers to save money or time or have virtualized machines or whatever, you lose the ability to protect it on your own private property. It's a very simple proposition that has literally been clouded over by the fantasy elements afforded by imagining that the Internet is heaven.

 

Evgeny Morozov's Vicious Attack on America's Internet Freedom Fight and How They Do it in Belarus

A satire by Roger Lancefield based on the classic comic by xkcd

Evgeny Morozov has turned in one of his most sly and vituperative pieces to date and not surprisingly, his usual coterie of copyleftist sycophants retweet it and some call it "formidable, thought-provoking" which says more about the state of the diminished American intelligentsia than anything else.

The piece which appears in both German and English portrays the US as a decrepit data addict reduced to sucking up data for a living, something like the meth addict Wendy in Breaking Bad.

It might be funny even if weren't for the horrible, vicious barb -- NSA did all this slurping, but it couldn't even stop two brothers who had big social media profiles and bombed Boston.

IT'S NOT FBI FAILURE TO GATHER DATA BUT FSB FAILURE TO GIVE DATA

Of course, there are two real reasons why the Tsarnaev brothers could succeed at their deadly plan:

a) Evgeny's beloved Mother Russia did not help the FBI as he and others duplicitiously claim but in fact witheld crucial information. While ostensibly warning the FBI about the behaviour of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Moscow Central failed to deliver the most important news they had about him -- which they revealed only much later -- that he was in the company of a jihadist that they assassinated, and that two other jihadists they assassinated were also believed to have been in contact with him. Hey, that's pretty important metadata, you know? And the FSB held it close.

b) When the FBI did get the tip at look at the terrorist brothers' Youtubes, with its celebration of 9/11's losses, its extremist Islamic preaching, it's Russian-language jihad trainers, it's hate-fulled arguments in the comments, it decided it had no grounds for arrest. That's because a general hatred of America or even incitement of terrorism in a general kind of way are protected activities under the First Amendment. In fact, the FBI didn't violate the Tsarnaevs rights, even after getting the tip to look at their media, which is something that anti-American antagonists like Evgeny can never concede. The FBI didn't try to get a wiretap, or install one illegally or put an illegal GPS on the car, where they might have found Tamerlan going to buy explosives from a firecracker warehouse in New Hampshire, or might have found Dzhokhar testing them. No, they did none of these things they are forbidden to do by law and court cases without probable cause.

Russia could have given them that probably cause; it didn't. Evgeny is silent about that glaring factor, as so many "progressives" are, starting with Glenn Greenwald.

So while Evgeny might want to portray America as an old crack hag with meth mouth to boot, in fact her toothlessness, if we're going to call it that, is actually a function of exactly the kind of activism that Greenwald represents, civil rights crusades that ultimately stick in law and affect police practice.

EDWARD'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE OR HOW MOROZOV AND SHAMIR SAY THE SAME THING

With his trademark dry humour, Morozov mildly reprimands Snowden for having "poor trip planning skills." Of course, that's to pretend that he is tacitly conceding that going to Moscow makes no sense for freedom-lovers, but it's also to distract us from really asking why the lad never went to Venezuela in the first place, or didn't stay in Hong Kong after he kindly leaked helpful information about America's response to Chinese hacking to the Chinese government. The whole Moscow thing seems to be WikiLeaks/Assange's idea, and given how Assange has his own TV show on Kremlin-supported RTV and relies on a notorious Russian agent provocateur to do some of the circus-acting around this entire big-top performance, it seems like Moscow was the plan all along. I suspect it was for Edward, too, as I think the ideology he embodies -- technocommunism -- and its Bolshevik methods like hacking states to make a point -- inevitably wind up in the home of those ideologies, which has only shorn their outward form and continue to make heavy use of their methods.

And Morozov calls Snowden's felonies -- which he admits to -- and his defection a "noble mission" -- so you really can't have any doubt about his agenda -- to defeat America in its present form and turn it into something else. And of course that was his mission back when he began whacking away at Clinton's Internet freedom program in the most unseemly way -- given his purported at least Internet freedom seeking credentials. Yeah, Morozov was all about debunking Silicon Valley utopian hucksterism and gloatingly telling us that the authoritarians of the world were the real ones making use of all this social media and all this free data, but he was supposed to be for freedom, too, right?

Well, no, because he starts barking this nonsense, straight out of the Moscow agitprop handbook with its eternal lament of the Unipolar World ruled by evil Amerika:

Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.

In fact, Israel Shamir says exactly the same thing. As he put it:

Among supporters of Snowden in Russia, there was my friend, the poet Eduard Limonov, who called Snowden the harbinger of Unipolar World collapse.

Yes, imagine that, National Bolshevik Limonov and hipster Internet guru Morozov on the same page!

Edward Lucas doesn't think Morozov belongs in a timeline that smokes out the connections between WikiLeaks and Anonymous and Snowden as part of the forces seeking to weaken America by making it appear the thing it is not -- the thing which the regimes it fights like Russia and China really are. They are the real culprits and they wish to distract and distract from that, and so they make use of useful idiots and fellow travelers and agents of influence.

MOROZOV'S LONG CAMPAIGN AGAINST AMERICA'S INTERNET FREEDOM PROGRAMS

So of course Morozov belongs there because as I've said a 100 times before in numerous posts, Morozov is always doing the regimes' work for them, cynically demolishing any hopeful plan for cyber-freedom by "helpfully" pointing out that some regime will exploit it so it's not worth trying (that's always his message and this piece is no exception with it's call to "forget Internet freedom"). That, when he's not busy trying to convince skittish liberals that they are harming the very people they want to help -- the Secret Policeman's Ruse (yes, you need to go back to 2010 when Morozov first began viciously attacking Clinton's Internet program in the strangest way).

This part of the typical active-measures manual is one that both Morozov and Sami Ben Gharabi used to ill end when they hysterically campaigned against Haystack (a circumvention program devised for deployment in Iran by an outside coder that the State Department in fact didn't use) and the prospect of trying to do circumvention work in Iran. At the same time, WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum joined the chorus on the Mighty Accordian by dumping on the Chinese dissidents who used VPNs that were not his Tor to try to discredit them in the community and with the State Department, their funders. All of this highly concerted effort led not only to disarray and loss of funding for some; it led to a planned hearing about help to cyberdissidents being cancelled -- and this was before the Arab Spring.

Google the term "Haystack" and see the enormous deluge of tech media that piled on here -- joining the frenzied hate of the State Department and its programs ostensibly because this experimental software was going to harm people. The reality is that it wasn't accepted by the State Department, wasn't used, and no one was harmed. But you would never know this from the hysteria wall that prevented rational discussion. What this was really about was the gang of thugs like Appelbaum demanding that people who had proprietary software projects they didn't want to reveal "share" (be collectivized) in the open source movement  because this was "better". That the thousands of eyes working on the bugs include secret police and Appelbaum didn't trouble Morozov and others screeching about this. It was one of Morozov's most successful active measures.

See, there was a very strenuous effort by some Arab bloggers and Jillian York and others around the Berkman Center to try to derail the US from helping opposition forces -- and some of these people were either coopted by regimes or simply of anti-American and anti-Israeli political persuasion. In the end, they couldn't stop US involvement in the Arab Spring, which has been a wild tiger to try to ride in any event, with the US damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. The main take-home here is that the kinds of programs and connections and lessons learned that might have taken place got dented at least in part by this vicious campaign against Clinton's program -- one that the Russians also waged on their end by blocking passage of an Internet freedom resolution in the OSCE and hysterically launching a "foreign agents" witch hunt among NGOs, starting with one that they said was "sponsored by Hillary" which monitored elections -- and found them to be fraudulent in Putin's controled space.

All of this strenuous tactical work Morozov and co. were waging in bureaucratic battles in Washington and intelligentsia magazine blog posts and such seemed to fly under the radar of his "larger" intellectual work debunking the sillier concepts coming out of Silicon Valley. There were so many people eager to see some of these inflated egos punctured like Jeff Jarvis or Clay Shirky that they seemed oblivious to how much damage the ultimate message was causing: don't really try to win the Internets because the very process of doing so enables tyrants -- hey, your companies that make stuff only wind up having it accidently sold to the bad guys, boo, hiss. America could never do right.

People in the State Department would laugh when I would point out this was going on. Are they laughing now? But then, some of these people were the same ones funding Jacob Appelbaum well past the sell-by date -- until finally those WikiLeaks grand jury subpoenas on his email and such forced them to realize that they had to let it go.

I think RevMagdalen got it right in the comments to one of Morozov's many Haystack blogs in which among many dubious points he claimed Haystack had attracted politics around itself but Tor had not (false):

Many readers have noticed that this blog seems to be entirely about Haystack these days, and it didn't take them long to Google and discover that you, Mr. Morozov, have been a longtime and very vocal proponent of the idea that the internet cannot and should not be used to promote freedom. With that background, I'm sure it would be hard to resist crowing over Haystack's demise. Some authors would consider it unethical to fail to disclose that history to readers who might be unfamiliar with your past, but hey, it's their lookout if they can't be bothered to research people's motives on their own, right?

CYBERSPACE EXISTS LIKE ALL HUMAN MENTAL CONSTRUCTS

Finally how Evgeny so fussily obssesses with scholarly punctiliousness abuot the existence or non-existence of the Internet or "the Internet" or "cyberspace". Of course these things exist; he's soaking in it. What is not cyberspace if it is not his endless afternoons indulging in his net addiction while he refrains from locking up the Internet in a box and throwing in the screwdriver (which he actually claims to do to get work down)? His tweets are a case study in virtuality: the Sage of Soligorsk as witty salonista and flâneur dropping mot after mot, some of them no doubt written by interns.

From two hours ago: "Advice to budding theorists: When in doubt about the originality of concepts you've just coined, just capitalize them. Or use Latin." From three hours ago: "Now we know why the Mayans died out: They ran out of hackers." Or another from three hours ago: " Evgeny Morozov ‏@evgenymorozov 3h Excellent essay title in search of excellent content: "Luther Was a Hacktivist."

I think you could probably string these all together at some point and make a book like "Shit My Dad Says".

A MISREADING OF MICROSOFT?

And do we chalk it up to non-native English or just ill will when Morozov takes a statement like this -- which could just as well mean that Microsoft realizes it will have to offer customers more protection because of the enhanced government interest in tracking people -- and pulls this out of it?

Buried in Microsoft’s non-denial is a very peculiar line. Justifying the need to make its digital products compatible with the needs of security agencies, Microsoft’s general counsel wrote that “looking forward, as Internet-based voice and video communications increase, it is clear that governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels of privacy and security.” Read this again: here’s a senior Microsoft executive arguing that making new forms of communication less secure is inevitable – and probably a good thing.

If we have less security and privacy on the Internet than imagined, let's not forget why: the inherent flaws welded into it by one of its chief architects, Tim Berners-Lee, who wanted the Internet deliberately to be open, free, copiable, nonprivate and non-commercial. The very same piracy and copying functions that undermine intellectual property rights are what make it impossible to create a world of privacy, too; the technolibertarians and the technocommunists both failed to realize this.

I do have to say I chuckled when reading today how Cory Doctorow, a vicious copyleftist nerd who has campaigned aggressively against any kind of cybersecurity or anti-piracy regulations, has now come around on DRM in a funny way, as we learn from libtech; finally gets that the same features that protect easy copying of content might come in handy to protect grabbing of data and invasion of privacy, too.

SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE REDUX

Now comes the Secret Policeman's Ruse again -- making Americans feel guilty for their sins not because they might hurt themselves -- oh no (because they might have trouble believing because, you know, there's no case; WikiLeaks has no case). No, it's about their troubles harming someone else. You know, getting that dissident in trouble if you visit him or contact him.

The secret policeman wants to grab hold of your liberal guilt and gullibility and convince you that if you help a dissident hack out of a dictatorship, why, you might harm him. Better not to. Better to wait. Better not to help. Mission accomplished!

So, we want to catch all the terrorists before they are born? Fine, Big Data – and big bugs in our software and hardware – are here to help. But, lest we forget, they would also help the governments of China and Iran to predict and catch future dissidents. We can’t be building insecure communication infrastructure and expect that only Western governments would profit from it.

Except -- that thinking is circular and ridiculous. We never said, "Because the Soviets had tank superiority in Europe, let's not have tanks, and let's not even have Cruise missiles". Just because they can use the same infrastructure for ill doesn't mean we abandon it -- it's a fight. And wait, who said Microsoft is building deliberately insecure infrastructure to let governments in the back door to fight terrorism? Evgeny has frankly pulled that out of his ass. I really want a third and tenth opinion on this because the paragraph he's cited out of context reads like in fact it may say the opposite. Does anybody else dare say this? Does everybody just swallow this shit whole?

Evgeny couldn't be more delighted about "information sovereignty" -- in fact he practically wets himself welcoming Iran's foreward-thinking policies that ensured it could control, dissidents, sure, but more importantly, be protected from that awful evil NSA that Snowden has brought ill tidings about. Hmm, and maybe that was the idea all along with this defector and his Kremlin-friendly hacker pals -- to enable Russia and China and Iran and other autorcrats to tell their people that in order to protect their social privacy from the Man -- GosDep! -- they have to have sovereign Internets filtering out everything that could harm healthy living and right thinking. Yes, that means snaring some dissidents along the way, but privacy is so important, it's worth it.

It's like one old peacenik recently told me on Facebook -- she'd be happy to have 9/11 repeat every 20 years (!) if only our privacy could be ensured. Imagine! 3,000 people are to die every generation just so that her email with her addle-headed ditherings about evil American capitalism and imperialism can be hidden from, um, Big Brother.

But, you say, if Morozov is explaining how people will suffer from information sovereignty, how can you claim that he is welcoming it? Because he's making it seem inevitable. Because he's not explainIng how in fact people fight it, at home and abroad. Because he is deadly cynical -- and his description of everything in this deadly cynical tint is then invoked as diktat. You see, now, we should just go along with what they want at the WCIT.

LIVE JOURNAL WASN'T DOWN

Morozov makes it seem like he's savvy -- and concerned -- about maintenance issues on Live Journal seeming to crop up at strategically important times.

But...it's not true. I was on LiveJournal all night for two nights running in the days before Navalny's verdict; in fact I was reading his LJ; in fact I was translating his LJ and a few others and refreshing the pages and reading comments. There was no maintenance problem. I didn't hear anybody else claiming there were. Sure, there are at times, not only because it's big and slow but because the Russian government probably really doesn't interfere. But it hasn't in fact gotten in the way of a huge outpouring of expression around the Navalny trial. Therefore, how are we to understand Morozov's strange claim: as a threat?

See, that's the sort of thing that must be asked about this man, so I ask it.

THE SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE FOR REAL

Now here come the nut graphs -- and Morozov could have saved us the other 3500 words that are rehashes of his dyspeptic views already spun for years now:

This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning. America has managed to advance its communications-related interests by claiming high moral ground and using ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” to hide many profound contradictions in its own policies. On matters of “Internet freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in neither.

Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of specific evidence has allowed America to buy some time and influence. These days are gone. Today, the rhetoric of “Internet freedom agenda” looks as trustworthy as George Bush’s “freedom agenda” after Abu Ghraib. Washington will have to rebuild its policies from scratch. But, instead of blaming Snowden, Washington must thank him. He only exposed the shaky foundations of already unsustainable policies. These policies, built around vaporous and ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” and “cyberwar” would have never survived the complexities of global politics anyway.

But nothing about these paragraphs is true. The Internet freedom agenda of America stands. The job of protesting when anti-corruption bloggers like Navalny go on trial remains -- along with other bloggers in Russian and elsewhere who have been silenced, beaten, jailed or even killed. These are very, very basic human rights causes that America will continue to take up and continue to be appreciated for when it does.

US officials will have hard explanations to make, especially due to the riotious uproar of agitprop that Snowden himself has concocted and perfected with Assange's and Poitras' assistance -- and amplification courtesy of the Kremlin. It takes awhile to explain to people that no one has actually read their mail and that their real problem is their governments that in fact do -- and published them in the paper as Evgeny's homeland does.

But I doubt any dissident getting a grant or equipment to help with Internet freedom is suddenly going to reject the financing due to Snowden. Oh, there may be a few who will be whipped up by Jillian Yorke or something, but not really.  Abu Ghraib definitely tarnished America's reputation and undermined its ability to advocate for human rights. Yet it did press on in world fora, and among those people it helped and those rights it advocated were Egyptian and other Arab NGOs, despite whatever objection Morozov and Sami had. And Morozov and his likeminded nihilists never have a good explanation about terrorism -- the terrorism that continues in Iraq after we leave and will continue in Afghanistan after we leave; the terrorism that led to 50 people killed in marketplaces and schools and mosques again and again and again in Iraq to the point that most of the 100,000 people killed there were killed by terrorists, some backed by state, not US troops. And the same is true of Afghanistan. The anti-anti-tyranny club Morozov gleefully commands never has a way of coping with these realities -- they are de-rendered.

HOW THEY DO IT IN BELARUS AND RUSSIA

One of the most irritating features of this whole NSA hysteria deliberately unlished by Edward Snowden and his hacker pals at WikiLeaks is that Americans and West Europeans discussing this don't seem to realize what real surveillance of a real totalitarian state with real consequences is. And so as always -- with SOPA, with CISPA, with CFAA, with a host of other Internet legislative issues -- they take the hysterical hyperthetical and the breatheless edge-case over the actual sense and meaning of real practice.

In Belarus, the government simply jumps in -- actually, with the help of an Austrian telecom as it happenS -- and exploits features of Skype -- that were present even before Microsoft, actually -- or just makes use of Firefox's handy feature to save passwords -- and grabs everybody's email and chat and online footprint -- just because they can.

They allow some websites to thrive just to capture everybody going to them. As a Belarusian trade union leader told me even 25 years ago before the Internet, "Glasnost is a cowbell around our necks they use to find us." That's how it works.

So they get everybody's yammerings, then they just dump it into the main newspaper, still called Sovietskaya Belarus, just like the secret police are still called the KGB, and the materials are not only used to embarass and tendentiously frame opposition leaders, it is used to prosecute them. They actually go to jail because their government has a huge surveillance component; they don't just spout hysterically on Twitter about how someone is seeing their cat pictures; they really go to jail.

In Russia, an opposition leader like Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny will find the transcripts of their cell phones and their emails spilled out in the press -- by a murky process that no one every seems to investigate too closely -- and the whole world gloats at their petty squabbles or nasty characterizations of each other -- or in the case of Navalny, is actually surprised not to find much of a scandal.

WHAT'S THE BIG DATA SCRAPE REALLY ALL ABOUT?

This sort of thing is all too common in these countries -- and people in the West don't seem to get it.

That is, they get the process when it happens to somebody like Anthony Weiner, a mayor candidate exposed once again as sexting on the Internet with young women despite already supposedly apologizing for this electronic ego-pumping addiction and vowing to reform. The government didn't get in Weiner's mail, but perhaps some right-wing group did and then they become suspect.

But the public can't seem to grasp that when there's something like the last phone call Trayvon Martin made to his friend, the reason why we can't really pin it down today, and have to rely on the words of a flustered teenager changing her story, is precisely because the government doesn't store and retain and make accessible the content of your phone calls. Hello! If they did, we'd know much more about what happened that night.

As I've always explained on this blog, the big IT companies scraping data not only for marketing but for political campaigns (as we discovered with Obama's successful campaign) are the source of the problem, and blaming one of the end-users, the NSA, is merely to succumb to the grand distraction these very cunning WikiLeaks hacksters have created in a kind of open-source active measure along with the Russian and Chinese governments -- and anyone else who wants to pile on.

The slurping up of metadata by Verizon is meaningless because it doesn't scrape the content of your call; they don't have your call's sense and meaning, it's content. Duh, we get it that the various proximity data points and social network and location data points might yield some sort of profile about you, but so do your Four-Square check-ins and tweets.

When Google scans your g-mail to pick out keywords and sell you ads for Geico, you don't complain even though every word of your communication had to be stored and analyzed for that to happen; when the government peels off the top layer of this data packet to match it to known information about terrorist groups or other criminal activities, you whine that your privacy is invaded. How childish.

Given how much hysterical hype there is on this now, I'm simply not going to yield to all the facile talk about FISA courts and such and will keep demanding findings and cases. We haven't had a single case of anyone claiming their rights were violated by this big NSA dragnet, and meanwhile the constant whining that we can't know because the FISA courts are secret doesn't cut it -- when there are clients whose lawyers are concerned they've been nabbed only on the basis of a secret FISA court review of such electronic information, they complain. Maybe they don't keep complaining becuase they know the government has a case. Or maybe they have another strategy. If there were a person who really could point to a false arrest on the basis of invasion of his metadata, we would hear about it in the country that has produced Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, journalist, friend to hackers, threat-conveyor, and who knows, possible defendant in some future case hinging on the decision of a judge that journalists who know about crimes committed and refuse to testify about them cannot expect immunity from prosecution. Whether that judicial decision is right or wrong actually depends on whether there really was ever any good will or sincerity on Greenwald's part -- and I remain unconvinced to date.

INTERNET OF THINGS DRIVES MOROZOV TO THE STATE FARM

Morozov plays his hand here more clearly as a statist in the end -- despite his endless derision of weak Western states faced with cunning Eastern tyrants -- because he lauds European regulation of the Internet and thinks it was a mistake to "go into the cloud". Here we will learn anew the difference between sovkhoz and kolkhoz.

He converts this old-fashioned bureaucratic centralist statism of his, that went out with Brezhnev and Tito, into a faux anarchy fighting the machine -- fighting the capitalist bourgeois Internte of things with a revolutionary plan to turn it into a state arm.

Yes, why, just like me, (although I've been writing about IOT for years before he did) he begins to warn of the Internet of Things and how dangerous this is. But here's the difference: for me, every threat that comes from the Internet in the form of people or companies or governments has a remedy: a free market in levels of service -- in our case, First Amendment levels and Fourth Amendment levels, if you will. The Internet is merely another human artifact and the laws of humanity apply to it; maybe Morozov's problem is that he isn't a technophobe but a misanthrope. What has made the Internet -- and yes, it's a real thing, very real, and will bite Zhenya in the ass some day -- is that it is diverse and pluralistic -- made of individuals, companies, nonprofits, governments, and multilaterals. These represent competing interests and that's ok. It isn't the end of the world if some companies demand that you show your real identity and use a phone to sign you up and end your unaccountable anonymity but also sell your data to make a living; if someone wants unaccountable anonymity, or no data sales, great, they can live on a darknet but then they can't then expect to organize 20,000 people on Facebook, they'll have to make do with Twitter. And so on.

GOVERNMENT FIRST

For Morozov, like others in his jetset, only blanket police changes will do -- he implies that the entire Internet has to be run from Geneva by UN bureaucrats who have read Zizek (although he's sly enough never to really come out with a detailed positive vision, you have to etch it in like a batik). Even so, he gives away the store at times:  He pictures the smartness of yours shoes or your umbrella or your toothbrush as somehow *first* being available to the government.

But that's arrant nonsense. The government is the last in line for the dregs. Like the dystopia envisioned in the sci-fi novel Snowcrash, which prefigured the Internet and virtual worlds, we're in the world of Mr. Lee's Hong Kong (already visited by Snowden!) and the US as a kind of diminished postal services island. So the real people who first have this data are corporations and mafias and of course hackers. They already control us and already find us and know where we live. Gen. Alexander explained the threats to the Internet are hostile governments and hackers like Anonymous, and that tells you who already really controls the Internet.

The hackers that Morozov seldom chastises (because they're thrilling! because he's still hoping to harness their revolutionary fervour to create the state farm!) are the ones that already thrive in this and can plan to hack into your pace-maker and shut if off if they don't like your blog -- unless of course they die first testing zappers on themselves or snorting heroin, because that's what hackers often do.

The government in fact is what you will want to have to keep you from being persecuted by these other entities; they will be the protectors of civil rights, not a bunch of drugged out Silicon Valley start-up freaks or the goofball script kiddies and sinister and seasoned anarcho-communists trailing behind them.

And there he goes again -- glibly claiming that because Google scrapes our g-mail to pitch ads -- which troubles him not one whit, though it should -- that the NSA has access to our content. It doesn't. It has access to metadata that no one has yet proven was misused to violate a real individual's real civil rights.

LEGAL NIHILISM

Oh, and here it comes, Bazarov-style legal nihilism!

Laws Won't Be Much Help

As our gadgets and previously analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere. One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost. In other words, you get your smart toothbrush for free – but, in exchange, you allow it to collect data on how you use the toothbrush. It’s this data that will eventually finance the cost of the toothbrush. Or, for objects with screens or speakers, you might see or hear a personalized ad based on your use of the device – and it’s the ad that will underwrite the cost. This, for example, is the model that Amazon is already pursuing with its Kindle ereaders: if you want a cheaper model, you simply accept to see advertising on their screens. Amazon’s ultimate Faustian bargain would be to offer us a free ereader along with free and instantaneous access to all of the world’s books on one condition: we will agree to let it analyze everything we read and serve us ads accordingly.

But...the world already works that way. And if anything, in the wake of the Snowden-induced hysteria, Verizon is now sending out emails asking customers if they want to opt out from data sales.

And laws will be of help -- and hey, that's what CISPA was before you all hacked it to death, remember? It regulated relations between the government and private Internet companies so that privacy could be protected while crime could be fought -- but you didn't like that. You wanted Obama to be able to issue edicts instead -- and get James Rosen's emails for real.

THE BIG DATA BAZAAR

Like Jaron Lanier and Eric Schdmit and Jaren Cohen, Morozov climbs on this crazy bandwagon of predicting the sale of services like medical care based on big data in some actual marketplace. They don't seem to realize that human services are really still not replaceable by bots (especially in hospitals, in fact) and that the data is terribly devalued and is only kept artificially inflated by the fiction of the social contract of "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" that social media now gives us -- we provide content they can copy and scrape and sell and they give us a crappy platform.

This is going to be changing as increasingly the idea that content has to be sold catches on -- in fact already some of these pioneers are speaking of this now even as they scorned it in the era of Farmville or Groupon when they thought they could just keep getting time-suck in exchange for ad-clicks -- ad-clicks that never gave any ROI, as finally they found out. Morozov must not have noticed the revelation at TechCrunch from one of the Facebook execs that click ads just don't work for anybody to pay anything seriously -- especially on mobile. The model -- and the world will change as a result.

That is, the marketplace that Morozov hysterically invokes as a violator of rights -- big sales of big data by evil exploiting capitalists -- isn't going to happen that way -- and where it does exist it is waning, but instead, individuals and small and medium business will at least find its place as the bigger Internet monopolies like Google are forced to break up. A facebook will be something your local phone company puts on for you.

Fumes Morozov, however, behind the times, "Market logic has replaced morality" -- as if commerce and capitalism is by definition immoral. Who says? Sour post-Soviet socialists? But market logic -- a willing buyer and a willing seller -- is what freedom is all about. Why is that so distasteful to this post-communist East European scold? As he admits, people willingly turn over data and time to these gadgets and aren't horrified by either corporate or government intrusion as much as the tech set thinks as they are scared by their own shadow on Twitter.

When Morozov invokes the notion of "political latency" (what a term! worthy of Zizek!) i.e. that if  the environmental cause is making progress -- lights now go off when no one is in the room -- then the efficiency of "scientific" notions of "betterworldism" deciding what is "best" for us now works to collectivize ourselves and our property. He must not have looked out the window in any big city. Loads of people never turning off lights; many of the lights are the little screens of gadgets. The reality is, the gadget revolution that made so many millions spend millions and put further stress on the electrical grid as a result completely undid whatever advantage you might have gotten from conservation in the pre-Internet days.

Then Morozov winds up as dishonestly as any of his targets of derision like Shirky or Jarvis. He completely manufactures a model -- that "we're all" going to make this Faustian bargain where in exchange for having "smart gadgets" we will sell the data they scrape to either the highest commercial bidder or the government or both. But who said we were going to do that? Who said anyone values our data beyond a one dollar one-time sale -- when they already got most of it for free?! It would be great if it goes as I'm hoping-- with more access to a more diversified market for content and services on the Internet. I'm more hopeful than Morozov and I think it will. Humans usually correct the monsters they make.

ALL POWER TO THE CODERS

But...The power is in the hands of the coders, not yet in the digital commodity which has been devalued -- and in fact, what the Internet of Things does is not commodify data but collectivize everything and put it all in the hands of the technocommunists -- not the user with his scraped data. In fact, it may be too late to imagine yourself as an economic actor on this scene.  We'll have to see what cartels and what hacker attacks occur, in fact, and then there's this: all these wired gadgets will work like ass. Tech stuff always breaks down.

The people who will above all possess the data -- completely left out of Morozov's equation and no accident, comrade -- are the coders. They're a ruling class that Morozov hopes to work along side (like Joshua Foust does) because he will understand them and understand them so well that he will like them and imagine they are some bulwark against the depradations of the exploiters. But it is this New Class that will be the problem for us all, not "commercialization".

So Morozov's solution is actually to demarketize -- to get rid of markets -- because markets are horrors:

As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would simply buy – on the open market – what today they secretly get from programs like Prism.

But in fact, a free market of Internet services, including data protection, including making the stuff work, including user-generated content, is what will enable freedom, not destroy it. That's because of the plurality of actors and the free determination of value. Like so many Soviets, Morozov fears commerce -- hates it. That blinds him from seeing that markets, like the one that enables his books and lectures to sell, are good things. Right now, in fact our information isn't very useful, and it is being scraped to feed a threadbare and dying model --the click ad. In the future, the other models of individual users assigning value and marketers emerging to aggregate and harvest this will change things.

PIRATE PARTY IS 'NONSENSE' -- EXCEPT, NOT REALLY

Morozov pretends that he advocates not leaving everything to those young coders, and even the sectarianism of the Pirate Party. But listen to how diabolical he is with this:

What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it. Rather, we need more topical domains - “privacy” or “subjectivity” to overtake the domain of the network. Forget an ambiguous goal like “Internet freedom” – it’s an illusion and it’s not worth pursuing. What we must focus on is creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved.

Note the message here really is this: forget Internet freedom, it's an illusion. Sublimal it's not! Before he would hammer this message subliminally, by constantly having water wear away the stone, telling us the tyrants were really winning the Internet, so we should give up. Now, he's saying airily that the Pirates are has-beens and he envisions a world of topicality like "privacy" to be above the mechanics of the Internet and the corporations that run it. How? By taking them over with a network of elites and/or an agency in Washington that regulates them? In one of his essays for the New Republic in fact Morozov advocates just that to deal with the problem of uneven Apple "innovation".

But aren't we saying the same thing, if I'm saying we need to enable free markets in goods and services and Morozov says he is for "creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved"? Not at all. For Morozov, that environment is a state farm, at the end of the day, run by the smart people, like him. (So, the coders want a collective farm; Evgeny wants a state farm. You know the difference.)

Morozov is right that the Pirate Party's utopian vision of remaking governance by Internetizing it is bunkum -- but I would say it's because they follow the same rules of the Benevolent Dictatorships of Open Source which are antithetical to liberal democracy.

And what he would do is spout incoherent nonsense himself, after saying the Pirate Party's notion of running parliament like Wikipedia (the horror!) was nonsense:

But the good thing that did come out of the Pirates was the nudge to get everyone else thinking about digital matters and their impact on the future of democracy. This is the content – rather than the process – part. That project must continue but, perhaps, be reoriented from pursuing the faux goal of “Internet freedom” to thinking about preserving real freedoms instead.

Er, just having a "national conversation" are we -- and "thinking about digital matters"? what the hell is the content behind that? That's not concent, that is in fact content-free process waiting to be filled with some prefabbed ideology just like the technocommunism that always seems to be lurking behind Morozov's door. Faux Internet freedom? Is that like Marxist "false consciousness"? Real freedoms are preserved by law -- but Morozov gave that up many paragraphs ago when he said it would do no good against the Internet's tide of anarchy. Oh, we'll see about that.

And finally, the Grand Insight:

Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.

But by that, Morozov means that anybody wanted to make money from the Internet and data and content anyway, when it should have been all a selfless subbotnik. Pretty soon we will be told not to consume because that is so bourgeois. He's forgetting that there are consumers and buyers -- but also prosumers, and that the buyers cannot harm their consumers or they don't have customers anymore.

SNOWDEN UBER ALLES

And finally, there's this: why in Germany, why now? I'd love to know who and how this piece was commissioned, eh? All of a sudden? In Germany? Now? Where Jacob Appelbaum has decided to remain indefinitely, after publishing his sensational interview, along with Laura Poitras, of Snowden in Hong Kong? After Snowden was awarded a whistleblower's award? When Snowden has become an item of domestic warfare for the SDP against Merkel?

In the end, Morozov has said nothing more original than "information wants to be free". But it doesn't. As any consultant or writer like Morozov will tell you, "your information wants to be free; mine is available for a fee."

 

 

 

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Obama Spouts Marxism Again in NYT Interview

Some people hate it when you mention Obama's socialist past or socialist theories or Marxist beliefs embedded in his seemingly anodyne "progressivism". They start hyperventilating that you are a McCarthyist with that particular "anti-anti-communist zeal" that was such a hallmark of the 1960s through 1980s; they condescendingly tell you that you must not know the "real" definition of socialism if you could so casually ascribe Obama's community-organizing beliefs to this ideology; they tell that you're a neo-con gun-toting Wal-mart shopper in an SUV who worships Sarah Palin and watches Fox TV, and so on.

But it's true -- as I can tell you from having gone to the same socialist meetings as Obama did in the 1980s in New York -- that Obama's beliefs are as socialist as the day is long -- and you can see it in his latest (rare) interview with the New York Times.

One of the essential propaganda platforms of the Soviet Union regarding the Third World and America's minorities -- continued to this day by Cuba, the Soviet Union's best pupil -- is that racism is not a phenomenon in its own right, based in hatred and prejudice, with legal and moral remedies, but is instead a by-product of economic determinism -- specifically, poverty, which is always and everywhere viewed as an economic injustice.

So the cure for racism isn't really education or legal challenges or cultural and religious work, but the defeating and overthrowing of capitalism and installing socialism by force, through revolution. Once you have a socialist -- or let's say social democratic or "socially-just" (as the euphemism can be) society, you will not have racism. There won't be an "objective" reason for it.

Cuba used this nefarious ideology with South Africa at the UN World Conference on Racism in Durban in 2001 (an awful event, I was there). This was in their ideological papers submitted to shape the program of the conference. "Neo-liberal policies" and "imperialism" and "capitalism" were all to blame for racism -- never those good socialist states, even though there is racism in their countries (as there is in Cuba, of course, and as there was and still is in Russia).

In fact, it's standard third-world rhetoric about the first world -- that it is "racist" and this is based on its capitalist system above all.

They can never explain why racism then occurs in the communist and socialist worlds...how Jews or Chechens could be persecuted in the Soviet Union; how in India, with a socialist government, and a protege of the Soviet Union for so long could oppress the Dalits...how China, the communist leader of Asia, could repress the Tibetans, or how African blacks in poor countries could oppress other blacks from different tribes...

So now in this interview, Obama spouts this exact thread-bare Marxist theory, absorbed in the socialist movements he spent time with in the 1980s in his youth, and embedded into the ideology and practice of the "community-organizing" movement:

A few days after the acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case prompted him to speak about being a black man in America, Mr. Obama said the country’s struggle over race would not be eased until the political process in Washington began addressing the fear of many people that financial stability is unattainable.

“Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot,” Mr. Obama said. “If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested. Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction.”

Well, leave aside the basic redistributionist, collectivist theory underpinning the notion that there is scarcity, and people have to fight over society's goods -- and the failure to even imagine a generative theory about wealth being created.

THAT there is a shrinking pot then becomes the basis of racism -- and nothing else -- and therefore the fix then becomes socialist programs to redistribute wealth.

Obama really lays it on thick when he re-casts the civil rights movement as the Black Panther movement he appears to wish it were:

He uses it, he said, to remind people “that was a march for jobs and justice; that there was a massive economic component to that. When you think about the coalition that brought about civil rights, it wasn’t just folks who believed in racial equality. It was people who believed in working folks having a fair shot.”'

You mean socialists who wanted to overthrow the capitalist system. But the civil rights movement, as liberal and leftist as it may have been, wanted equal rights and justice, not overthrow of capitalism in revolution.

See, this is the difference in outlooks between Bill and Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who don't have that visceral hatred of business and capitalism that Obama does, and who have more of a sense of society improving through law and rights. Obama instead comes out of the tradition seeking Marxist revolution and leftist ideology as a remedy, not the law. That he is a lawyer and law professor doesn't change that, as community-organizers entered that profession merely to "lawfare," or exploit legal technicalities and loopholes, and stress the court systems, in the redistributive revolutionary movement as a tactic.

They could be in the same Democratic party, but the differences couldn't be greater between the rights-based and the revolutionary-based approach to change, the former coming out of peaceful change to institutions through law, the latter out of turbulent social movements, even violence.

Every time Obama gets on this fake middle class kick, I see it as a distraction from his redistributionist policies trying to get traction. He pretends he cares about the working class that is relatively affluent compared to the "47%" who suck down welfare, as Romney was castigated for reporting. Obama pretends that he has a theory of middle class well-being as necessary to a balanced and prosperous society.

But he doesn't, since the core of his belief system is over-celebration of the idealized union worker and the victimized poor, and redistribution and collectivism, with the remedy being that the middle class need to get soaked of taxes to feed the burgeoning ranks of municipal union workers -- the people called "budzhetniki" in Russian because they are paid for out of state budgets.

Obama keeps trying to portray the Republicans as intransigent, unable to compromise, ideological, stalling, duplicitious, etc. But I have to say that it's really more about Obama's uncompromising socialist worldview that continues to see the job of government and society as one of redistribution instead of getting out of the way, or helping to create opportunity for business to thrive.

Socialists hate austerity and always campaign loudly on it because they know they can exploit the pain or pinch that people go through when things are tighter for them to recruit them to the socialist cause.

Government leaders can change attitudes toward austerity by showing leadership, getting people to grow their victory gardens, so to speak. But Obama doesn't do that. Instead he stokes the feeling of victimhood.

Obama is merely trying to shift attention away from the justice system and the still-simmering problems of Trayvon Martin's case and Eric Holder's response, and to shift attention away from his many failures in foreign policy (Egypt in flames, Russia gleefully holding our defector; Benghazi); and domestic scandals like the IRS, the AP wire-tap, the NSA issues. He's trying to get people to think during their summer vacations in fact how unhappy their are and to shift blame to those evil rich people and racist Republicans who are to blame for them perhaps not having a job or only a part-time job or less than they had in the 1980s.

“If once a week I’m not talking about jobs, the economy, and the middle class,” Obama says, “then all matter of distraction fills the void.”

But this talk *is* the distraction. The government "creating jobs" inevitably means more federal and municipal jobs that drain tax-payers and in some areas hinder rather than helping recovery and growth. Every society needs federal and municipal jobs. It's not a question of Randianism or Rand Paulism or whatever the hysterics claim when you question ANYTHING about the burgeoning cost of these unions. It's about whether this works and whether it is sustainable -- and it is not.

Obama should be talking about how Silicon Valley can bring their jobs home and crack loose some of the cash stash to create jobs in the private sector serving their customers and working on R&D which adds rather than subtracts. That's not socialism; that's investment that businesses themselves should be making as I've said -- and can make if they have incentive from Washington.

 

 

 

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Does An Interview Regarding Obama's Past Indicate He Is Pushing For Social Unrest Today?

US, Russia and World Timeline for WikiLeaks, Hackers, and Edward Snowden

The partial time-line that Joshua Foust has produced on the Snowden affair is incomplete and misleading. And he has published it without giving any of bloggers credit (including myself) who found various key parts of this time-line, i.e. LibertyLynx who revealed Jacob Appelbaum's June 25 speech containing his admission of travel to Hawaii in April 2013 at the same time Snowden was there; Streetwise Professor who put it into further context; and my further round-up of Appelbaum's data trail and my long-time analysis of his antics.

I think the Snowden affair has to be seen in a much larger context of 1) assault on the US by anarchist collective WikiLeaks and its collusion in hacking and disclosure of sensitive military and political files; 2) concerted and repeated attacks on US government, business and media organizations by radical anarchist hackers' movements (Anonymous, LulzSec) and arrest and trials of some members; 3) the case of Bradley Manning, the soldier who collaborated with WikiLeaks to leak US government files; 4) concerted attack on US Internet freedom programs, led by Evgeny Morozov and Jacob Appelbaum; 5) the rise and fall of Occupy Wall Street; 6) the failure of various US legislative initiatives to regulate intellectual and cybersecurity issues on the Internet (SOPA/PIPA, CISPA); 7) Obama's courting of Silicon Valley to win the 2012 elections and use of Silicon Valley's social media platforms and digital analytics to influence public opinion; 8) the campaign of Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and others against the NSA begun in 2012; 9) the revelation of PRISM program and flight to Hong Kong and Moscow with the help of WikiLeaks

This isn't to suggest a causal relationship among all the items in the timeline, although all students of hacking should look closely at the trajectory of WikiLeaks campaigns against the US, its collusion with the Russian government; Evgeny Morozov's concerted assault on US government Internet programs along with elements of Silicon Valley's social media platforms and WikiLeaks promotion of Snowden. Rather, viewing the timeline should prompt people to think of the context for one of the largest assaults on US security in history, which also coincides with Russia's bid to control the Internet internationally; its backing of WikiLeaks and the US hacker movement; Kremlin TV's propagandistic celebration of US hackers in Anonymous; WikiLeaks and Occupy; Russia's own crackdown on Internet freedom and "foreign agents" at home (mirroring its one-time championing of Western peace movements by the Soviet government even as it jailed pacifists at home).

If you think timelines linking these elements cast too wide a net, you haven't been paying attention to the news. Well, and as William Burroughs once famously put it, "Paranoia is having all the facts."

Timelines are helpful for things like seeing the long-term role of Evgeny Morozov in attacking US Internet freedom programs and Internet regulation against cyberattacks; in seeing the handing of Julian Assange of his own TV show by the Kremlin's TV in the context of an overall propaganda assault on the NSA by Democracy Now! and other left and liberal outlets;  in tracking the rise and fall of legislation in the US congress to rein in Internet criminality and cyberattacks , hacker attacks, and Obama's condiminium with Silicon Valley tycoons and their help in his re-election.

American and British hackers have steadily been launching attacks on US web sites and servers, and in a few cases getting caught and being jailed and sentenced, although never to the draconian 25-year-sentences that overwrought tech media supporters imagine they will get -- they get suspended sentences, parole with psychiatric assistance, or sentences up to one-two years, in fact.

But by and large, their assault on the US government, business, nonprofits and media has been an unprecedented effort to undermine US cybersecurity that has occurred simultaneously with attacks by Russian and Chinese state-sponsored hacking on the US, and their crackdown on domestic human rights activist and opposition leaders.

Aaron Swartz who hacked JSTOR and MIT;  Andrew Aurenheimer who hacked AT&T, the LulzSec gang who hacked Sony and Stratfor; Jeremy Hammond who attacked Stratfor; the Anonymous who hacked the websites of the CIA and Pentagon and the US Sentencing Commission; these are all part of a movement that has been battered a weakened US state under Obama, savaged by Chinese and also Russian hackers. The hacker movements have used both judicial and extra-judicial means to get its way -- a world in which states have maximum transparency (and are weak) and individuals have maximum secrecy (and thus the sovereign group reigns).

The hackers were also involved in a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act and related legislation and were ultimately successful with some Congress people such as Darrell Issa supporting them. The hacker networks and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation also began to aggressively call for changes to the CFAA in light of some of the cases.

They also campaigned against CISPA, prefering to the rule of law the condominium Obama maintained with the major Internet companies who helped fund and secure his election through social media analysis and bundling of campaign donations. CISPA -- which might have regulated the ways in which Internet companies collect data and the use to which metadata is put to fight terrorism. Instread, ad-hoc arrangements took the place of clear legislation.

As hackers and "progressive" organizations attacked the US and weakened its ability to pass legislation to combat hacking, piracy, and other online crimes, they also half-heartedly and belatedly countered Russia and other bad actors in the international arena at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) but Russia, with long experience in controlling multi-lateral institutions through manipulations and vetos, prevailed.

So they failed, and Russia's big grab for power over the Internet at home and abroad was successful, up to a point. At home, Russia increasingly cracked down on the Internet as it also continued to undermine international institutions and programs for freedom.

And the timeline adds some support for my thesis that the Snowden affair helped to distract  from Bradley Manning's confession of guilt and the exposes of his collusion with Assange in the trial as well as the decision to try him for assistance to the enemy -- all big losses for the hacker movement seeking to exonerate him. And Snowden's flight also distracted attention from Russia's internal crackdown on domestic critics and its own far more considerable efforts to control the Internet.

Whether that means the Kremlin's masters are just good at exploiting US weaknesses or whether they script and execute attacks in concert with WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and Occupy remains to be studied.

America has enemies from both domestic and foreign non-state and foreign state actors, some of whom show signs of collusion with each other; they are succeeding to alarming degrees; the pushback against them causes new backlashes and enables enemies to portray the US as "oppressive" and distract from the greater oppression of Russia, China, Iran and other authoritarian states; nevertheless we should keep fighting.

This is a work in progress; feel free to put corrections or additions in the comments. Hat-tip to David McDuff for additions.

February 10, 2010

WikiLeaks begins leaking US cables.

April 4, 2010

WikiLeaks publishes "Collateral Murder" video claiming to show US deliberately attacked journalists and civilians in Iraq. Government sources told Reuters the clip was authentic.

June 10, 2010

Wired publishes some of chat logs between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo.

July 17, 2010

Jacob Appelbaum speaks in the place of Julian Assange at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York City, claims to be chased by Dept. of Homeland Security agents. See more connections at HOPE website. Also see Quinn Norton's article about this conference.

September 16, 2010

Evgeny Morozov claims US State Department Haystack program endangers Iranian dissidents it meant to help and TechDirt piles on although State denies it has used it.

November 29, 2010

WikiLeaks publishes US State Department cables.

December 9, 2010

Evgeny Morozov essay in the New York Times praises Angela Davis as an organizer.

December 2010

Jacob Appelbaum starts secretive gig at University of Washington (hacking into electronics of cars) working with Ed Lazowska which sparks critical report in Seattle Weekly.  Appelbaum says he didn't respond to questioning because it was the anniversary of his father's death.

January 11, 2011

Evgeny Morozov claims US Internet online democracy programs are "the worst thing ever to happen" to the Internet.

February 5, 2011

Anonymous hacks security consulting firm HBGary which had been planning to infiltrate Anonymous and among other campaigns, discredit blogger Glenn Greenwald; Anonymous victory-dances over its successful defeat of plans to retaliate against Anonymous hack of PayPal, MasterCard, Amazon and others.

February 17, 2011

President Obama meets with Silicon Valley executives -- Eric Schmidt of Google; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook et. al to discuss tech policies; these are the powerful donors and media influencers who help secure Obama's re-election in exchange for pledges of Internet freedom and immigration reform.

February 28, 2011

Evgeny Morozov publishes Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom claiming that authoritarian governments are really winning the Internet and social media freedom campaigners are dupes.

May 23, 2011

New Yorker publishes article about Thomas Drake, former NSA senior executive, charged with "unauthorized disclosure".

July 11, 2011

Wired publishes rest of Manning-Lamo chat logs revealing direct connection between Manning and Assange

September 17, 2011

Occupy Wall Street begins protest camp in Zucotti Park in New York City near September 16, 1920 anniversary of terrorist attack on Wall Street.

October 27, 2011

Jacob Appelbaum detained at Rejkavik Airport

October 25, 2012

Occupy Oakland riot.

December 3, 2011

@JPBarlow  issues his call to arms to Anonymous on Twitter to fight back against Paypal and MasterCard blocking WikiLeaks:  "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. #WikiLeaks"

December 18, 2011

Manning revealed to have sent links to commanding officers of "Collateral Murder"

December 24, 2011

Hacker-initiated consumer boycott of GoDaddy domain registration company which supported SOPA

December 28, 2011

Anonymous attacks US security firm Stratfor, stealing emails and passwords including of government subscribers, shutting down the site for days while it is repaired, and using credit cards of subscribers both for forced charity donations and purchase of games and merchandise online.

February 12, 2012

President Obama signs executive order on cybersecurity even as he threatens to veto CISPA; Kremlin's RT reports ACLU approves.

February 12-17, 2012

Seattle Hackfest featuring Jacob Appelbaum notice on CSE;

March 15, 2012

Wired report on NSA's construction of "biggest spy center" in Utah.

April 2012

Edward Snowden starts stealing secrets while working at Dell.

April 3, 2012

Jacob Appelbaum 29th birthday retreat in Hawaii.

April 12, 2012

Jacob Appelbaum attacks US-sponsored circumvention programs to help Chinese and other dissidents that compete with his Tor; Evgeny Morozov gives a "bravo"on Twitter to Appelbaum for "ripping apart DC lobbyists favorite Internet tool: on Twitter; I criticize Appelbaum's obfuscation and false claims

April 13, 2012

Julian Assange gets his own talk show on Kremlin's RTV.  The premier is a bit later than the originally-reported March launch.

April 15, 2012

Anonymous hacks North Korean web sites.

April 20, 2012

Interview by Amy Goodman of William Binney, "The Government Has Most of Your E-Mails"

April 20, 2012

Interview by Amy Goodman of Jacob Appelbaum on "NSA is Lying".

April 20, 2012

Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and William Binney appear at Whitney Museum to have a personal security teach-in, denounce NSA and call for destruction of NSA underground cables.

April 23, 2012

Evgeny Morozov once again attacks Hillary Clinton's Internet freedom programs; claims that along with Anonymous, she is "harming the cause" of the free Internet.

April 26, 2012

Interview by Amy Goodman of Jacob Appelbaum on CISPA, Surveillance and "Militarization of Cyberspace"

April 26, 2012

Jacob Appelbaum speaks at Occupy Wall Street forum in Tribeca

April 28, 2012

CISPA passes in the House of Representatives 287-127. Kremlin's RT features dissent to the bill.

May 2012

Howard A. Schmidt, White house official associated with opposition to CISPA steps down. Army General Keith Alexander of the National Security Agency applauds the appointment of Michael Daniel in his place.

May 22, 2012

Aaron Swartz's speech at Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, DC (see transcript), "How We Stopped Sopa".

July 19, 2012

Glenn Greenwald announces he is leaving Salon after five years and moving to the British Guardian.

August 2, 2012

CISPA fails to pass in test vote on Senate floor.

August 22, 2012

The New York Times publishes as an op-ed piece Laura Poitras's video "The Program" critiquing the NSA

November 5, 2012

Anonymous announce Guy Fawkes' day attack on PayPal's servers, claiming to steal 28,000 passwords; PayPal denies it was ever attacked

November 11, 2012

Barrack Obama wins his second presidential term to the delight of Google's Eric Schmidt with the help of Silicon Valley coders' Get out the Vote apps and data drilling

November 2012

Senate votes down Cybersecurity Act sponsored by Lieberman Collins; Kremlin's propaganda station RT campaigned incessantly against the bill, with American activist guests from CDT.

November 2012

Russia begins scheming its big grab at Internet control through International Telecommunications Union at the World Conference on International Telecommunication (See Wired State, Streetwise Professor) (less visible are simultaneous Russian attempts to gain control of human rights programs at OSCE and treaty bodies monitoring international human rights covenants at UN).

November 29, 2012

Release of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum and Andy Muller-Maguhn.

December 2012

US loses vote at WCIT to Russia and other third-world Internet suppressers.

December 8, 2012

Newton massacre of schoolchildren by alleged autistic shooter prompts debate on violent video games and Internet incitement of violence; Lieberman calls for panel on violent video games.

December 10, 2012

Alec Ross, State Department's "innovation" director, put on 24-hour Twitter clearance

December 2012

Freedom of the Press Foundation announces program to fund WikiLeaks and other radical organizations. Founded by Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, John Perry Barlow, Laura Poitras, Xeni Jardan and others.

December 12, 2013

Anonymous hacks notorious Westboro Church.

December 19, 2012

Forbes includes Jacob Appelbaum in its list of "30 Under 30" in tech.

December 27, 2012

Jacob Appelbaum's keynote "Not My Department" at Chaos Communications Conference in Berlin, calls on government computer programmers to defect from their "dark side" to join the radical hackers' movement; activist security consultant Bruce Schneier praises.

January 13, 2013

Aaron Swartz, facing prosecution for hacking JSTOR and MIT's computers, committs suicide.

January 25, 2013

A federal appeals court in Virginia ruled that the government can keep hidden its efforts to obtain internet users’ private information without a warrant. The appeal stems from the legal battle over the records of three Twitter users sought by the government in connection with its investigation into WikiLeaks: Birgitta Jonsdottir, Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp.

January 26, 2013

Anonymous hacks US Sentencing Commission and Supreme Court web pages in protest against Swartz case

February 2013

At least 25,000 people call for removal of Swartz's prosecutor, Steven Heymann. Berin Szoka and others call for amendment of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; raucous memorial service for Swartz on Capitol Hill; EFF also organizes memorial service.

January-March, 2013

Anonymous begins leaks in Steubenville, Ohio in the case of a teenager sexually assaulted by members of the football team, hacking accounts, exposing alleged perpetrators; even divulging the name of the victim, and harassing journalists and bloggers who criticize its vigilantism; uses (now-banned) Russian server to host pages; in the end Anonymous only delays and obstructs justice.

February 5, 2013

Russia hires Goldman, Sachs to improve image for investments.

February 28, 2013

Bradley Manning confesses his guilt in serving as a source for WikiLeaks.

March 2013

As South China Morning Post reports, Snowden deliberately takes a job at Booz, Allen Hamilton in Hawaii as an "infrastructure analyst" to hack more material.

March 3, 2013

Quinn Norton, ex-girlfriend of Aaron Swartz and ex-wife of Danny O'Brian (EFF), explains in an article in the Atlantic why she gave evidence against her lover to the grand jury, including about his hacker manifesto; her vague claims that his manifesto had multiple authors is contradicted by the others present at its drafting who gave him the credit.

March 5, 2013

Release of To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov's critique of Silicon Valley utopianists

March 6, 2013

Eric Holder says in response to Congressional probe that DOJ has done their jobs properly on Swartz prosecution.

March 2013

Alec Ross, Tweeter-in-Chief, leaves his job at the State Department to become a private tech consultant.

March 2013

Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, begins probe into Aaron Swartz case and CFAA reforms; earlier, Issa had campaigned against SOPA/PIPA.

March 14, 2013

Matthew Keys, social media editor for Retuers, indicted for colluding with Anonymous to hack his former employers the Los Angeles Times and a local Fox TV affiliate; there is an outcry of sorts but ultimately he is suspended, then fired.

March 2013

MIT continues to stall on Swartz case probe.

March 11, 2013

Bradley Manning's statement at his military trial, where he complained that neither the New York Times or the Washington Post got back to him when he tried to leak materials to them, and ultimately he went to WikiLeaks. Manning reiterates Assange's "Collateral Murder" propaganda and explains that Assange suppressed the files on the closure of an Iraqi printing press that Manning wanted to publicize -- the beginning of his decision to hack military servers.

March 20, 2013

Andrew Auernheimer ("Weev") sentenced to 41 months for hacking AT&T. Orin Kerr decides to defend him as part of campaign to reform CFAA.

March 21, 2013

Democracy Now! profile of Thomas Drake and how he beat NSA charges down of "unauthorized access" down to a misdemeanor.

March 23, 2013

Panel on WikiLeaks with Jacob Appelbaum, Joseph Farrell, Angela Richter, Judith Horchert

March 25, 2013

CISPA dies in the Senate.

March 31, 2013

Edward Snowden begins work as an infrastructure analyst of the NSA with Booz, Allen Hamilton. He takes a week or longer business trip to unknown location (Maui? to meet Appelbaum and other hackers gathered for the Spring Break of Coders in Hawaii?).

April 1, 2013

Claims of "chaos" in Swedish prosecution of Assange but generally manufactured by WikiLeaks

April 4, 2013

Apple "bans journalism" according to developer Anil Dash (i.e. refuses to publish intifada app in Apple Store).

April 4, 2013

Anonymous hacks Turkish websites in protest against government crackdown on demonstrators.

April 13, 2013

The Magnitsky List is released by US government of Russian officials suspect of human rights violations.

May 1, 2013

Snowden and his girlfriend move out of their house in Hawaii where they had only been since Marcy.

May 8, 2013

Spencer Ackerman, national security blogger at Wired's Danger Room, joins the Guardian.

May 16, 2013

Barton Gelman of the Washington Post says he has his first direct contact with Snowden.

May 28, 2013

Jacob Appelbaum speaks on surveillance and privacy in Bangalore.

May 29, 2013

Julian Assange interview with Democracy Now! on WikiLeaks, Manning trial and NSA Surveillance; mentions NSA's program Stellar Wind "collecting all the calls" -- the "prefigurement" of the Snowden story.

June 3, 2013

Opening of trial of Bradley Manning, allegations of connections to Julian Assange

June 5, 2013

Glenn Greenwald publishes his first story in the Guardian about Verizon's collection of call metadata for the NSA.

June 6, 2013

Washington Post publishes bombshell story by Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras claiming nine Internet companies are mining data for NSA

June 7, 2013

Claims that Silicon Valley's reputation will take a hit due to PRISM expose.

Jun 7, 2013

Veteran Washington Post journalist Walter Pincus publishes article "Questions for Snowden" raising questions about links between Greenwald and WikiLeaks; he is forced to publish corrections about what he had claimed was Assange's May 29 preview of Greenwald's article and Greenwald's post on WikiLeaks, which was actually re-post. (He should have raised Appelbaum, Poitras and Binney previews of attacks prefiguring Snowden.)

June 8, 2013

Poitras and Greenwald stories on NSA begins to fall apart as tech press in particular tackle incorrect claims of "direct access" to Internet companies' servers; Washington Post bombshell story unravels forcing retractions.

June 10, 2013

Salon interviews Poitras, who says she first heard from Snowden in January 2013.

June 10, 2013

Greenwald attacks article by Walter Pincus which questions his possible collusion with WikiLeaks and Appelbaum.

June 10, 2013

Dan Baer, Hillary Clinton's main State Department staff person who worked on Internet freedom in Washington, DC at the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is exiled to Vienna to become US ambassador to OSCE.

June 11, 2013

Russia announces it is willing to consider giving Snowden asylum,  while he is still in Hong Kong.

June 11, 2013

Blasphemy bill passes unanimously in Russian Duma along with ban on "propagandizing homosexuality"

June 13, 2013

Gawker exposes Anonymous KnightSec hacker in Steubenville and reveals many of Anonymous claims regarding the "rape crew" were fakes and hoaxes as originally reported by Lee Stranahan of Breitbart.com and on my blog.

June 25, 2013

Jacob Appelbaum speaks in Germany at Digitale Gesellschaft and provides counter-narrative to his presence in Hawaii at the time of Edward Snowden in April 2013.

June 26, 2013

Golos, leading elections watchdog, is suspended for refusing to register as 'foreign agent'

June 27, 2013

Bruce Schneir, acclaimed critic of US national security policy, joins Electronic Frontier Foundation board.

June 29, 2013

Russian WikiLeaks agent provocatuer Israel Shamir calls for public meeting with Snowden

July 6, 2013

Glenn Greenwald protests that Edward Snowden statement published by WikiLeaks was written exclusively by Snowden after skeptics' complaints

July 7, 2013

Cryptome article appears on public PGP keys made by Verax, the pseudonym used by Edward Snowden, in generation of keys in May and March 2013. Possible tie to Michael Vario?

July 7, 2013

Poitras and Appelbaum scheduled to appear at PS1 in New York to talk about the "surveillance state"; they cancel, Poitras sends video about Snowden, and Thomas Drake speaks in their place.

July 8, 2013

Interview of Snowden by Poitras and Appelbaum in Der Spiegel 

July 11, 2013

Posthumous trial of Magnitsky

July 12, 2013

Edward Snowden's staged meeting with human rights activists and lawyers at Sheremetyevo Airport with Russian security minders.

July 13, 2013

Genri Reznik and Anatoly Kucherena give RT interview saying "Snowden is not a phantom".

July 17, 2013

Testimony of Ex-NSA Agent Stewart A. Baker to House Committee on the Judiciary on Administration of FISA Authorities

July 16

Snowden's request for asylum formally submitted. Although it's actually just a hand-written letter handed to the Federal Migration Service ostensibly by his lawyer. Anatoly Kucherena says he will remain in transit zone while asylum request being processed

July 18, 2013

Judge declines to dismiss "aiding the enemy" charges in Manning trial.

July 21, 2013

Jacob Appelbaum article calling for encrypted communications in Ecuador's El Telegrafo

 July 22, 2013

Discovery of Jacob Appelbaum speech placing him in Hawaii in April 2013 by LibertyLynx

July 17, 2013

Anonymous hacks FEMA server.

July 18, 2013

Verdict in trial of anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny

July 18, 2013

Anonymous hacks Congressional constituent contact vendor.

July 22, 2013

Strange story -- probably fake -- of the power-ministry veterans' union claiming they received an email "with a North Carolina IP address" asking to join them, and they publicly offer help to Snowden with clothes and even "a tablet to contact his family".

July 23, 2013

Russia Today reports that Snowden has decided to remain in Russia.

July 23, 2013

Snowden gets whistle-blowing award in Germany

July 24, 2013

Article appears in Frankfurter Allgemeine by Evgeny Morozov, "Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy" blasting US for "hypocrisy" over Edward Snowden and condemning US Internet freedom programs

July 24, 2013

US Congress narrowly defeats bill by 217-205 to restrict NSA collection of phone records

July 24, 2013

US seeks clarity on Snowden status in Moscow; White House reiterates it does not see Snowden as "human rights activists"

July 27, 2013

Russia spins US request for clarification as "talks"

 August 15, 2013

Russia media reports Snowden had an encrypted chat with his father, Lon Snowden.

August 15, 2013

Wall Street journal reports of disarray in the Snowden camp and splits between Lon Snowden and his lawyers, and Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks on the handling of Edward.

August 15, 2013

Statement supposedly from Snowden released by Michael Calderone of Huffington Post in which Snowden purportedly says his father and his lawyers don't represent him, and speaks of the "tragic vacuum of my father's emotional compromise for the sake of tabloid news".

Why WikiLeaks is No Different than the NSA (Only Worse) -- and Snowden's Snow Job

Film by Laura Poitras. A rare moment when poker-faced sober-sides Snowden smiles in the film, when asked if he had in fact planned to burrow into the NSA as a mole via his job at Booz, Hamilton Allen.

I've been a long-time critic of Tor, going back to 2009 and earlier even before I heard of WikiLeaks and its use and championing of Tor. I've criticized Tor and its government origins and its evolution in the hand of unaccountable coders (and the arrogant and ethics-free coders are both inside and outside of government, and that's why the phenomena of Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden happens).

You can read my back pieces here (on Jacob Appelbaum's assistance to WikiLeaks in shameful propagandizing); on the murky business of Tor, the Navy, the State Department, and Jacob Appelbaum (who was once a grantee of the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, but who wound up being wanted for questioning by the WikiLeaks grand jury); on Appelbaum's shameless bashing of his rivals in the granting process; on Appelbaum's paranoic and rabid pursuit of the NSA even before the Snowden affair, calling for sabotage of the NSA's cables; on his shameful display at a public meeting at Open Society Institute where he heckled an FBI agent saying he could hack her phone; and recently on his strange contradictions regarding the Snowden story;  and his admission that the data trail places him in Hawaii with Snowden at the same time in April 2013, earlier than he originally claimed -- and that perhaps he's the "suspected hacker" in Snowden's story of the "suspected hacker's girlfriend".

THE TROUBLE WITH TOR AND JACOB APPELBAUM

Even back in Second Life, when I first began strenuously debating Shava Nerad (whom I came to call "the Tor crone" for her vicious defense of Tor and attacks on me), I had heard from some ethical coders that Tor had a bad reputation because its people had taken advantage of its users and sniffed the packets of Chinese dissidents.  That seemed pretty sleazy, but par for the course in the world of arrogant nihilist hackers with which I first became acquainted with in 1999 in the Sims Online beta, and then observed more closely later in the early days of Second Life in 2004, where I found the first versions of Anonymous harassing critics of their vigilantism like me, and planning their attacks on Scientology even before they surfaced in real life.

THE SOFTWARE AUTOCRACY

I spent a lot of time blogging about the Software Autocracy for years then because I found these people really menacing and disturbing, and the implications of how they would abrogate all our rights through our increasing dependency on their coded artifacts a real concern. I had no idea that some of these people I met in Second Life would actually end up advising the president of the United States in real life (Lawrence Lessig); that they would even be in office in the White House and have influence over Congress (Beth Noveck -- who is out of office now but continues to have deep influence). I could never have dreamed that the people like Julian Assange or Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, of the hacker types that I encountered in Second Life all the time crashing my Sims, or trying to throw the devs in the early days of Twitter, would wind up wrecking havoc in real life; that the prototyped incidents I saw of document hacking and privacy hacking and destabilization of authority in Second Life would have their real-life counterparts in the hacks of Cablegate, Stratfor, Sony, the Pentagon, the CIA, and now the NSA (with one infamous hacker, Barrett Brown even connected both the Second Life and real life).

WIKILEAKS HAPPENED DUE TO WIKIFICATION OF GOVERNMENT

These people are all part of a movement; they are all part of a continuum; they are all in a tribe or network. WikiLeaks couldn't happen unless first, a group of arrogant hackers in government, and their academic and corporate counterparts began having Wikipedia weekend seminars and wound up wikifying the entire US government, to its doom. (And what has to be understood about this isn't just some literal wiki with some mundane useful stuff on it, but the mentality of the software autocrats). Snowden's hack could happen if it weren't for the casual arrogance and neglect and even sabotage with which most systems analysts and programmers and coders do their work in government and outside in contractors.

DEFCON

Some people think that the message about the ethics-free nihilist hackers inside and out of government, inside and out of corporations, is that this persona, especially its most remedy-resistant forms, is the problem -- male machismo, if you will, and the arrogance of the Anonymous hacker heckling and doxing someone is no different than the arrogant NSA analyst who spies on people and pulls their files.

And that's true enough, although not a complete description of the problem. But let's look at it in this most basic form first. DefCon is one of the places where that is on display. I remember a friend of mine went to DefCon in the year that HPGary was hacked by Anonymous and the government's efforts to try to do something to combat Anonymous, and combat the destructiveness of Glen Greenwald, the activist lawyer-blogger and ardent hacker supporter, ultimately blew up in their faces (unless it was a sting?). This friend -- with deep concerns about unethical hackers -- felt that HPGary and Anonymous were no different in their nasty methods and their dubious methods like creation of personas on line to fool the public. DefCon was always one of those conference watering holes where spooks and contractors and script kiddies in mom's basement would all mingle and exchange shop talk, because ultimately, their tribe is where their loyalties lay, and not their various affiliations -- which are fungible as they are bid out and bought by the highest bidder constantly among the Big IT firms, all of which have a revolving door into government.

Then recently, one DefCon organizer announced that NSA was not welcome this year (they had come covertly, or semi-covertly in the past, and many people found it titilating and it added to the enjoyment for some of the civilian hackers). Interestingly, at Ars Technica, one of the top nerd forums, a contributor in the forums under this piece objected to the undemocratic way in which this announcement was made, as he didn't agree that NSA should be blocked from the conference. I wonder how that will pan out.

In any event, while Jacob Appelbaum goes to great lengths in his Chaos Communications Club speech in December 2012 to define a dividing line between the "unethical" hackers inside government who have "gone to the dark side," and himself and his friend whom he believes are the "ethical" ones on the "light side" (it's actually just the opposite), if you look at how WikiLeaks and Appelbaum's role in it evolved, you would have to conclude that WikiLeaks is really no different than the NSA in its philosophy of "collect 'em all".

THE ORIGINS OF WIKILEAKS IS A BIG DATA HACK

Just as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which many perceive as some bastion of free speech and online freedom actually got its start in legal defense and edgecasing and lawfaring for phreakers (phone exploiters) and hackers facing criminal charges -- i.e. originated in criminality -- so did WikiLeaks.

I've been reading the book by Luke Harding (who is also a great reporter on Russia) and David Leigh, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. This book came out in 2012 and I meant to get it but it slipped my mind with everything else -- and now I see it's a must buy.

The authors describe Tor:

Tor introduces an uncrackable level of obfuscation. Say Appelbaum in Seattle wants to send a message to Domscheit-Berg in Berlin. Both men need to run the tor program on their machines. Appelbaum might take the precaution of encrypting it first using the free-of-charge PGP system.

They then describe the "onion-layer" mode of encryption which you can read about on Wikipedia or Tor's site or other locations -- basically, to simply if it, by splitting up packets of data and spreading them over nodes, no one person accessing the system can see the whole story and therefore obfuscation encrypts your communications. But the people with the top-level view of the system who know where the nodes are or who can access the end points can snoop on you.  And of course, as ethics-free hackers with a sense that they are right and everyone else is wrong, they do so with no sense of shame and even with a sense of entitlement -- you know, just the way they claim US government agents do. And if we were ever to submit to the encryption regime that the crypto kiddies like Jacob Appelbaum and their enablers like Rebecca McKinnon envision, we'd merely have them as the coders in charge with the top-down system-wide view, with far less checks and balances than the NSA (which is why I chose the NSA over them any day).

We knew this story of the unethical origins of WikiLeaks, but Harding and Leigh in fact have pulled it all together very coherently so you can really see it starkly:

"Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," Assange told Rolling Stone, when they profiled Appelbaum, his west coast US hacker associate. But Tor has an interesting weakness. If a message isn't specially encrypted from the outset, then its actual contents can sometimes be read by other people. This may sound like an obscure technical point. But there is evidence that it explains the true reason for the launch of WikiLeaks at the end of 2006 -- not as a traditional journalistic enterprise, but as a piece of opportunistic underground computer hacking. In other words:  eavesdropping.

On the verge of his debut WikiLeaks publication, at the beginning of 2007, Assange excited messaged the veteran curator of the Cryptome leaking site, John Young, to explain where his trove of material was coming from:

"Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inexhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We're going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new... We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, opec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and falun dafa associations and...russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We're drowning. We don't even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1TB [one terrabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes]."

A few weeks later, in August 2007, a Swedish Tor expert, Dan Egerstand, told Wired  magazine that he had confirmed it was possible to harvest documents, email contents, user names and passwords for various diplomats and organisations by operating a volunteer Tor "exit" node.  This was the final server at the end of the Tor system through which documents without end-to-end encryption were bounced before emerging. The magazine reported that Egerstand "found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the UK's visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organisation in India's Ministry of Defence. In addition, Egerstad was able to read correspondence belonging to the INdian ambassador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama's liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong. "It kind of shocked me," he said. "I am absolutely positive that I am not the only one to figure this out."

The speculation was largely confirmed in 2010, when Assange gave Raffi Khatchadourian access to write a profile. The New Yorker staffer wrote:  "One of the WikiLeaks activists owend a server that was being used as a node for the tor network. Millions of secret trnasmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers form China were using the network to gather foreign governments' information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction h as ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site's foundation, and Assange wa able to say, "We have received over one million documents from 13 countries.' In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a 'secret decision', signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China."

The authors then proceed to describe how WikiLeaks also grew out of the anti-capitalist radicals movements and a WikiLeaks stall was first set up at the World Social Forum in 2007 -- as I said -- must read!

Now, what can we draw from this? Yes, that WikiLeaks is just like the NSA. Or rather, just like the way they claim that NSA is.

Jacob Appelbaum's Data Trail

As noted, LibertyLynx received a link to a video of Jacob Appelbaum speaking in Germany at Digitale Gesellschaft on June 25, 2013 in which he admits that he was in Hawaii in April 2013 -- which as we know was the same time Edward Snowden was -- and then goes on to paint a picture of this as some kind of fantastic coincidence, i.e. that he hasn't now been caught out in a lie claiming he hadn't heard of Snowden before he was contacted by him in May over encrypted email with Laura Poitras' help.

Naturally, I don't believe him, for all sorts of reasons. One, because in my first encounters with him, I found him to be such a liar and such a thug, whistling for Anonymous to harass me because I kept calling out the propagandistic lies of WikiLeaks in the "Collateral Murder" video. Appelbaum, like so many WikiLeaks propagandists on day-old accounts on Twitter assigned to heckle bloggers, claimed falsely that American soldiers deliberately shot the children in the van in Iraq. I continued to challenge this as false, as they couldn't possibly see that the van had children in it, and there was absolutely nothing to support this narrative, which was concocted.

Then when I saw Appelbaum's other performances, either in person or on videos on Youtube, I saw what a fabulist and paranoic racconteur he was, and I really was skeptical.

On this story, he makes it sound as if the trip to Hawaii -- paid for by friends unknown -- was some kind of "dream come true" as if it were the fulfillment of a long-held wish.

But he was in Hawaii the year before doing the same thing, so it sounds odd to speak of the second (or next) trip as being this long-awaited wish fulfillment.

Here's the transcript -- where he describes the Hawaii story and then goes on to tell a Boston story:

To give you an example, I just turned 30 and now that I'm halfway to death I...I uh just kidding...you can't be halfway at 98%, but whatever happens it was murder...so...um...terrible...anyway...uh...I..I...I think it's important to understand this...right.

I'm in Berlin right now because I had the really fucking awful unfortunate mistake of for my whole life dreaming to go to Hawaii, to go swimming with mantarays and dolphins and like all this other like you know unicorns and rainbows and all that stuff, right? We didn't find any unicorns and rainbows; well, we actually found two rainbows but no unicorns. And uh, so I was in Hawaii in April for my 30th birthday. And 20 of my friends came. And it was like the most incredible thing I had ever experienced.

Like, if you want to feel loved, have 20 people fly for a really fucking long time to an island in the middle of an ocean, right, and to fly you there as a gift for your birthday. So I felt really loved and I felt like this is incredible, what a fantastic thing and what great friends, and I'm so lucky to have, you know, friends like this in my life.

The problem with data retention is that it tells a story about you which is not necessarily true, and I've said this many times, but it's made up of facts, individual facts which may be correct, but the story that they tell depends on who's telling the story. So the narrator of a story...Like let's say an analyst, looking at your data trial because of a grand jury, let's say related to WikiLeaks, or other things, let's say the largest national security leak in human history. Well, can you imagine what that analyst is thinking, now that I've had the misfortune of finally living this childhood dream? Only to have two months later, a guy from Hawaii being stationed in Hawaii, leaking these documents. So here's a great threat, I don't actually trust that my country is a safe enough place. That I should wait around and see if justice still exists. So I came to Berlin because I thought it would be a much better place to write about some of the things that are taking place now, to work with people that are interested in understanding the surveillance, because for a decade I've worked on these issues, and finally, we have the information, as you've seen in Der Spiegel recently and in the Guardian, and it's possible for us finally to really understand the way the world is working, the way these systems are really watching us

But with data retention, it might tell a different story for an analyst. And can you imagine that, what that story might be. I can imagine that. Because several years ago, I had the misfortune also of flying to another place, from a different island, which is that I was in Iceland with a fellow by the name of Julian. And I happened to be in Boston which I flew by on the way home. And I stopped in Boston for a number of days. I've never talked about this in public, but I'm fucked enough now that it really can't make it any worse but and if it does, it's still worth telling.

I just happened to be there to visit a friend of mine. And then I went home. And it was no big deal. But think about what an analyst would think of this, right. So you've got these like spook analysts, they look at the data trail you leave behind

Well, what happened was that during the WikiLeaks grand jury, the friend that I went to visit in Boston, she was interrogated about me. And the story they told which is not true was that Manning -- again, not true -- had handed me everything -- which is not true -- I gotta keep saying that every other word, right? Think about that.

And the reason that out of 6 million other people in this area that they would say that is because there was a data trail where I used a credit card, where I used a telephone, whatever the case might be. So my friend was interrogated about this theory. Which was just a theory, and it turns out that when Manning's trial started, he actually talked about what happened, he actually leaked documents to WikiLeaks, and you'll note that he did not mention me at all. But the analysts, and the Department of Justice, they told a totally different story because with all the data there you can tell whatever story you like This is an incredibly dangerous thing. So I just decided, I'll spend some time in Europe. I've been through this once before with the Manning issue. I can't even imagine what these analysts are thinking now, and the only thing worse that I can imagine than diplomats and army people and military people is spies. Shit, what bad luck.

So perhaps what we have here finally is at least one name in the case that Edward Snowden gave in his interview with Laura Poitras for Der Spiegel. Remember how I kept asking and asking for the one case -- the one concrete case! -- that Snowden mentioned admidst his flury of vague generalities?

He said there was a "suspected hacker's girlfriend" who was interrogated on the basis of the NSA snooping on her cell phone.

Snowden: Yes, of course. We're   in bed together with the Germans the same as with most other Western countries. For example, we² tip them off when someone we want is flying through their airports (that we for example, have learned from the cell phone of a suspected hacker's girlfriend in a totally unrelated third country -- and they hand them over to us. They  don't ask to justify how we know something, and vice versa, to insulate their political leaders from the backlash of knowing how grievously they're violating global privacy.

 

Snowden seems to have implied that this snooping was of the PRISM sort, or somehow involved the "Tempora" program and the hub in the UK, although one source (completely untrustworthy because anonymous and in comments under a news article) told me that he knew who it was, knew that the story was accidently leaked by a "small publication" (unknown) and that it was a manual surveillance, not the big electronic dragnet of the sort Snowden is gasping about.

Could Jacob Appelbaum be the "suspected hacker"? and could the "girlfriend" be just the girl who was a friend in Boston?

I was guessing before that this was Quinn Norton, and it could still be. But it might be someone else, we'll have to think.

I don't believe a word of what Appelbaum is saying here, but I do see that he is spinning madly, trying to obfuscate, trying to put versions out "in plain sight," trying to set up people to stare at "the hall of mirrors that is the Interwebs".

(I'm wondering how the LibertyLynx's source found this rather obscure video of a meeting that few would know about if they weren't in hacker circles -- maybe that source had some help, and maybe from WikiLeaks.)

I don't believe him when he says he didn't help Manning because of course he helped WikiLeaks. And the story could simply be more complicated, and he is merely being literalist and cunning. For example, he could have helped someone else who helped Manning, and be two or three people removed. The hacking circles at MIT keep cropping up in all these stories. I believe Aaron Swartz could be related to the WikiLeaks story as well because of the Grand Jury questioning of his ex-girl friend Quinn Norton, and because of the FOIA's that he himself filed on Manning, as if he wanted to see "what they know about me".

 

Related articles

Snowed on Snowden

"My Eyes Are a Telescope"

Where is the Rest of Edward Snowden's Online Footprint?

PRISM Distracts from the Real Root Problem of Outlaw Silicon Valley -- and Manning's Anarchism

"Opened, There, the Box Pandora"

Tuesday Reads: The Snowden Conundrum

WikiLeaks - Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, Birgitta Jonsdottir seek injunction on Twitter Data

Snowden Spiegel Interview (with Jacob Applebaum).

Jacob Appelbaum de @TorProject apoya petición a @IFAImexico sobre #finfisher hecha por @PropuestaCívica y @ContingenteMX

Unicorns and Rainbows and Edward Snowden?

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Read my new book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack on Kindle or Scribd.

 

@LibertyLynx got an important tip -- a videotape of a lecture in Germany by Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks booster and anarchist hacker known for founding Tor and making chaos in which he acknowledges that he was in Hawaii in April with 20 friends for his birthday.

But which April?

A Streetwise Professor has blogged about it here and helfully provided a transcript albeit a bit garbled.

Good! Because these kinds of things can get scrubbed -- interesting there is even a videotape of the impromptu talk for hackers in Germany while he was there, with only about 327 views.

And I found this tweet confirming a birthday trip to Hawaii, mentioned in the lecture in Germany, but dated 3 April 2012.

 

Jacob Appelbaum ‏@ioerror

The best birthday is a yoga retreat without internet on a small friendly island.

 

 

Yes, Edward Snowden was in Hawaii, too -- but that was this year, not in 2012, which is indicated in Jacob's tweet.

But then yes, after a little more searching it turned out Jacob did go again this year to Hawaii as @LibertyLynx discovered, as can be seen from this tweet.

 

Jacob Appelbaum ‏@ioerror

Successful indication my birthday diving trip is off to a good start: Subsurface 3.0.2-79-g218fd994eea9 #hawaii

Is that code for something else? Diving...into what, exactly?

Hmm. It looks as if this were a slip-up and a match -- but these people are pretty wily -- and it isn't, exactly a match. Where was this island where Jake snorkled, was it near Honolulu or did he pass through Honolulu? Did Snowden go to the island or meet Jake in Honolulu  -- months before May?

Interesting coincidence? Booz Allen has an office in Honolulu, and Edward Snowden went there to work -- deliberatley, as he later explained, in order the better to hack the NSA -- in about February 2013.

The Telegraph says he was there in Hawaii working for BH until May 1, when he and his girlfriend abruptly moved out. Did he make any business trips in the year before that? So Jacob did go back, perhaps once he'd established his alibi of swimming with the manta rays? Who are these 20 friends, the "G9" team?

Why does this matter?

Because Jacob claimed in the Der Spiegel article that he only heard about Snowden in May, when Laura Poitras called him and they worked out this interview with Snowden while he was in Hong Kong which was then published:

"In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me," Appelbaum said. "She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her."

"She was in the process of putting questions together and thought that asking some specific technical questions was an important part of the source verification process. One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower. I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment. We sent our securely encrypted questions to our source. I had no knowledge of Edward Snowden's identity before he was revealed to the world in Hong Kong. He also didn't know who I was. I expected that when the anonymity was removed, we would find a man in his sixties."

Jacob goes out of his way to tell us that he had "no knowledge" of Snowden until he was "revealed to the world" in Hong Kong. But maybe they partied on the beach together in April 2013? or even earlier?

So who are the 20 friends? Are those re-tweeters and birthday-well-wishers among them, and are any of them involved in handling Snowden?

"Data retention tells a story about you that isn't necessarily true," says Jake sagely to his hacker buddies.

Well, maybe, then maybe not.

 WikiLeaks claims the interview Poitras and Appelbaum did was conducted over encrypted email before Snowden left Hawaii on May 1. But maybe they were there in person even before?

Where are Remedies in President's Obama's Speech on Racism? Just Vague Suggestions and Feel-Goods

President Obama's speech on racism following the verdict in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin has many people on the left inspired, even gushing and maudlin and many on the right cynical or even angry. That's because racism is no longer a subject in its own right, but a means by which the predominant left clubs the right -- ultimately, in my view, over differences on economic theories and remedies for society's ills like crime or terrorism.

Yet even if you admire the speech, if you stop for a minute and get beyond the propaganda -- which some even view as incitement -- and look at Obama's actual recommendations, you might have to concede they are very weak and vague.

What's the program here -- practical if not political -- and what are the remedies?

They seem to be only about one set of people -- whites -- absorbing a lesson from the former law professor and community-organizer, and that lesson is: don't be prejudiced. Give our young people a chance. I could have been Trayvon, but now I'm president, see?

Yet as a solution for this grave ill that has now inflamed a nation, the outcome of a verdict involving a Hispanic man shooting dead an unarmed black teenager, we are to have only...police training at the state level to avoid racial profiling and...maybe a thinky discussion about whether "stand your ground" laws are really the right way to go to solve community disputes. And then maybe some mentoring clubs.

WHO'S PROFILING?

The "stand your ground" laws are very unlikely to be removed from the books despite public outcry given the huge support they have -- and therefore the only effect in calling for their review is to polarize the nation further (Obama's always trying to "break up the blocs") and -- as with the gun laws debate -- re-entrench the right in its position. That's, of course deliberate; that's, of course, calculated -- and if you could ascribe good will to Obama (and I don't) by the time Isaac Chotiner of the New New Republic is cockily saying "bring it" to the right, you know it is on purpose to freeze, target, isolate, split, and demolish.

Although the incident originated in a Hispanic man's frustration with repeated crimes in his neighbourhood that in fact had been established as committed by black men, the only frustration we get to validate in the president's vision is black people's understandable frustration with prejudice -- not white and black peoples' inarticulated frustration with disproportionate crime among young black males.

The only solution we get is police training -- but the problem in the Zimmerman case wasn't racial profiling by police but racial profiling by a "neighbourhood watch man" who could justify his freelancing by the presence of crime in his community.

When the 9/11 dispatcher first asked Zimmerman what race the "intruder" was, then told Zimmerman not to follow his suspect but to stay put.

So the remedy Obama would rather be suggesting is training for Hispanics -- and whites and others -- in how not to racially profile -- even if their neighbourhood had been burglarized eight times and they knew the perpetrators were black, and they had lost confidence in the police. They are to learn to condition themselves to stop seeing young men in hoodies as menacing and tolerate them.

But a national plan to indoctrinate people to get rid of their suspicions would likely incite a worse backlash because of the PC nanny-state implications -- and it has to be said that the efforts to incorporate this kind of training and indoctrination into liberal school programs already isn't working. That's because eight black men really did commit robberies in this neighbourhood, and suspecting the ninth one wasn't merely profiling, but common sense.

There's already a debate about whether there should be "stand your ground" laws -- but the fact is, the Zimmerman case did not technically involve an adjudication of this concept, as far as I understand. It's unlikely that those who feel that the central issue of crimes against persons isn't being resolved here will be willing to give up "stand your ground". We can expect they will dig in harder if the attorney general Eric Holder decides to open up a civil rights violation case against Zimmerman. The backlash of demonstrations, many of which have turned violent, will make those who favour this law embrace it further, feeling endangered. As I explained, I don't support the law or the concept -- and I don't even see how the concept migrated out of one's own house and home into a public space such as to be wielded by a vigilante.

While offering really no substantive solution for the underlying claim that racial profiling -- and not criminal acts themselves -- are the problem, Obama avoids the challenge of really recommending a solution to the "disproportionality" problem and seeking a remedy for this, not just the problem of profiling.

Surely he knows that ending prejudice and making people less suspicious by itself will not reduce crimes unless the charges are all false and the crimes never happened.

But that's not the case. Even if there are cases of excessive punishment, the underlying crimes weren't fictions. Even if there were cases of false accusations -- and there are -- other crimes still abound. What's the plan to stem them?

"DISPROPORTIONATE" and "POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT"

So for the very real issue of the high prevalence of criminal acts among young black males -- a problem the president -- unlike so many "progressives" -- actually admits by referring to "the disproportionate" issue  -- we are to have only feel-goods, self-esteem workshops and "positive reinforcement". Even in the course of acknowledging that young male black crime is "disproportionate," the president implies that mainly the historical legacy of racism is to blame -- and that implies that only whites need to change their prejudices, and violent black youths don't need to have accountability:

The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

Now, this isn't to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they're disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence.

It's not to make excuses for that fact.

Although, black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that, some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country. And that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.

Some of the violence is traceable to slavery. But not all. So what are we to do about the rest of it, traceable to personal responsibility right here and now?

Here's what the president offers -- the vague feel-good:

Number three -- and this is a long-term project -- we need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help, who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them, and values them, and is willing to invest in them?

What does that mean, exactly? The First Lady is suppose to start a new self-esteem program for teens? What would be the concrete way we could prevent a young fellow from turning to crime?

What is the "negative reinforcement," exactly -- absent fathers? Overstressed mothers? Peers and peer pressure or refusal to bring juvenile delinquents -- that's what they used to be called before the euphemism "at-risk youth" was invented -- to accountability?

Where is this "positive reinforcement" to cancel out the "negative enforcement" supposed to come from? Communities now inflamed with the idea that they and theirs aren't doing anything wrong, but it's the creepy ass crackers who are to blame for their racism and profiling? Really?

The president continues with a vague notion of a federal mentoring program:

You know, I'm not naive about the prospects of some grand new federal program. I'm not sure that that's what we're talking about here. But I -- I do recognize that, as president, I've got some convening power. And there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out, how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they're a full part of this society and that -- and that they've got pathways and avenues to succeed? You know, I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was, obviously, a tragic situation. And we're going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.

So how is that going to work? Black celebrities are going to give a shout-out to black youths and tell them not to do crimes but work on their basketball and hip-hop video editing skills? Isn't there something awfully patronizing and demeaning in that, at the end of the day? Do people of any reace really commit crimes because they don't feel they are "part of society"? What's that all about, exactly?

IT'S NOT BLACK AND WHITE

See, it is how different racial groups look at this -- and it's about how "progressive" whites amplify their championing of minorities to settle scores with conservatives. Blacks think the story of Zimmerman and Martin was created by racism, profiling, unfair suspicion -- made deadly by the mix of guns, and "stand your ground" reinforcing this white patriarchal structure -- and they simply white out the history of robberies completely so it is entirely missing from the picture and the analysis.

Conservative whites -- and Hispanics -- think that the story is rooted in the problem of eight robberies committed by young black men in this neighbourhood and the ninth black man to appear on the scene walking into a statistical likelihood trap that even if unjust, even if went tragically wrong because of vigilantism, doesn't have anything to do with a history of racism and profiling.

Much energy has been spent on some fora to say that these robberies happened over a long time, or weren't all committed by blacks. Yet Reuters reported they were and were in everyone's recent memory, and they even reported a black woman saying that this was "the elephant in the room" of some black youths committing crime --the large fact everyone could see and everyone knew about but wouldn't mention.

Of course the story didn't turn out to be black and white, so to speak, and wasn't entirely about either perspective. Yet the president blesses one problem -- the problem of negative expectations and experience triumphing over hope and change -- and evades criminality even as he gives a nod to the need to "not make excuses" for the fact of a disproportionae number of young male black men committing crimes. So ultimately, he avoids a remedy that includes both real deterrence and a robust validation of the experience of the victims -- both blacks and whites.

"WRINGING OUT BIAS"

Indeed, after reading the speech, we're supposed to vaguely believe that those young black males who chose to commit crimes -- and they aren't all young black males but certainly a disproportionately high number as the president even tell us -- got that way, and committed these crimes, mainly because they are victims of racism, and possibly had poor self esteem as well due to lack of boostering.

Again, the president turns to feel-goods -- subjective searchings of the soul in the Christian matter to improve whites about the way they behave to blacks:

On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there's a possibility that people are a little bit more honest and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

But where's the program where the young thugs are going to sit down -- and it won't be in a church or a workplace, but in a bar or a park or a stairwell -- and say: "Am I wringing as much crime as I can out of myself? Is it fair that I assault first and mainly other people in my community and then those outside as well?" Perish the thought, eh? A mentoring or jobs program is going to prevent that, guys, really?

ALL THE EXISTING ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS

And I think increasingly, after many years of legislative changes, programs, assistance, education to turn around the racist past, this excuse isn't holding up now for criminality only rooted in poverty and racism. At best, it's only a partial explanation, and we need to re-examine what we are fueling here, possibly unwittingly.

We have a full range of programs in society -- even in our capitalist society which socialists claim is exploiting the worker -- to address the wrongs of the past. These are all programs that I think we need to keep in place because I think the historical wrongs are real, they linger, and they need redress but we need to make them more effective:

o Head Start -- early education for children so that they have an equal opportunity to start school with those who are more privileged

o Aid to Families with Dependent Children or Temporary Assistant to Needy Families or however the welfare program is named (and its name and contents change over the years and from state to state but they remain in place)

o Low-cost rental housing or loans for housing

o Free or low-cost breakfast and lunch in schools

o Food stamps

o After-school programs, mentoring, business intership programs, art programs -- under Bloomberg NYC in particular these programs were richly supported

o Tuition aid and low-cost loans or grants for school

o Alternative sentencing programs or community service -- in fact, the decision of Trayvon's school superintendent to put him on school suspension for a school rule infraction rather than turn him over to police for prosecution on theft charges is the kind of diversion program that is widely used precisely to prevent young men's lives from being ruined by having early experiences with jail time that seldom provide the "bar therapy" that some think they should -- and to avoid having his resume ruined by felony charges.

o Strengthening black families through various neighbourhood support programs to provide child care, training, encouragement, etc.

In fact, both of Trayvon's parents worked, and while he may have benefited from some assistance program somewhere along the line, he had employed parents who were involved in his upbringing, not substance-addicted, and not involved in crime or serving jail time themselves.

10 DAY SUSPENSION

Yet all of this was not enough to keep him out of a 10-day school suspension  -- while his past offenses are mild compared to the charges of manslaughter, they didn't point to a life of improvement, as he was smoking pot, vandalizing with graffiti, and then found possessing stolen jewelry that matched the items taken in a nearby robbery.

And all of his support, from his family and relatives and society, wasn't enough to prevent him from winding up in that suspension and killing time -- and then getting into a rage and deciding to take what he viewed as an unfair profiling incident - and all indications are that it was unfair -- into his own hands. All caring and just liberals should condemn Zimmerman's vigilantism. Why can't we condemn Martin's, too? Zimmerman didn't have to get out of the car, but Martin didn't have to double back and "fuck him up".

I'll be the first to say that I oppose suspension programs that send miscreants back into the community -- which usually means home or out in the neighbourhood unsupervised while their parents work or are unavailable. I think people who commit serious offenses have to handled by courts of law -- and that might  mean alternative sentence programs and separate "drug courts" that divert to substance abuse or alternative programs rather than jail. And I think people that commit school offenses have to be kept in school, yet separated from the general population so that they stop undermining those who want to learn. Leaving them to their own devices is outrageous.

"WE DON'T NEED YOU TO DO THAT"

I'm also a full-bore supporter of the 9/11 dispatcher's take on this story , when Zimmerman says he's going to try to follow Martin and see what he's doing: "Sir, we don't need you to do that".

But you know, if Martin felt he was stalked by a creepy guy who might have a gun, he could have called 9/11 as well, and if he said he thought the solution to his problem was to stalk that creepy ass cracker and pound him on the pavement, the dispatcher would undoubtedly have said, "Sir, we don't need you to do that." Instead -- because he's in a community that for understandable reasons don't trust the police -- he called his friend who later testified -- with changing testimony -- on his behalf and she helped stoke his indignation, rather telling him to just get on back to his father's house.

This police document, obtained through discovery basically contains the "nut graph" of this case, in my view:

One police document contained in the discovery concluded, “The encounter between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin was ultimately avoidable by Zimmerman, if Zimmerman had remained in his vehicle and awaited the arrival of law enforcement, or conversely if he had identified himself to Martin as a concerned citizen and initiated dialogue in an effort to dispel each party’s concerns.”

It added, “There is no indication that Trayvon Martin was involved in any criminal activity at the time of the encounter.”

No, he wasn't found to engage in criminal activity when confronted, but his decision to double back and pounce on Zimmerman and pound his head into the pavement is assault. In New York City, the law would say that both he -- and Zimmerman -- had a "duty to flee".  In other words, the tragedy would have been avoided if Zimmerman stayed in his car -- but it it also would have been avoided if Martin went along to his father's house with his Skittles.

I'm not sure that someone who has already decided the guy he has spotted running across a lawn is a 'punk" who "always gets away with it," and the guy who determined that the man following him was a "creepy ass cracker" are going to have a "dialogue".

But maybe what is needed isn't "police training" but "community training".  What if the victims of crimes could have a dialogue with the black community leaders about what we all are going to do about this, which would not just be training police not to profile, but getting some accountability from the youthful offenders along with working on how to create those other pathways the president indicated?

Yet that kind of dialogue is never what is meant by dialogue or training -- what is meant is that one side must remove their prejudices and shut up -- and invalidate their experience. That's why this never goes anywhere, and tragedies like Trayvon's keep happening.

I'm really skeptical that Obama's suggestions for response to the tragedy of Trayvon will have any effect -- we already have police training and mentoring for youth.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

No, I think there's really only one political agenda here -- using the issue of racism to divide television watchers (MSNBC versus Fox News) even more starkly; to divide geographical areas (red and blue states and districts); and to divide parties (Democrats -- good, Republicans -- bad on race).

Nothing in the president's speech really unites, because it doesn't validate the very real experiences of both black and white victims of the disproportionate number of young male blacks who commit violent crimes. It doesn't validate them, even with the caveat of "that's no excuse" because it doesn't provide a real remedy for crime. No, the president just tells us to chalk this up to the legacy of racism, search our souls and wring out bias from ourselves as whites, and create another mentoring program to help young black  men feel better about themselves and that they are a "part of society".

But of course they're part of society -- which is why we have the right to demand more from them than excuses. Shouldn't being a part of society involve admitting that you are wrong when you commit violent crimes? Taking responsibility for crimes you have committed? Having remorse?

But in Obama's Christian redemption, only white people in churches should be searching their soul and wringing the racism out of themselves. While making a passing nod to the concept of "that's no excuse," Obama doesn't tell the black kids to shape up -- he doesn't do that because to do so in public will be seen as fueling white racism. So he leaves it at this: those young male black criminals shouldn't be wringing criminality out of their souls, but should only be taking the mite of racism out of their white neighbours' eye and ignoring the log of criminality in their own. Or at best, saying that racism is the log that everyone should remove, and that criminality is only a mite.

Once again, as with other speeches, he implies there's only one way.

With Obama, the quintessential "progressive," there can only be One, and there can only be hegemony and a cancellation of pluralism and genuine debate by invoking the illegitimacy of any opponent as "racist" and therefore contrary to universal human values. No one else has to take responsibility.

That's not how at least one black woman in the community -- afraid to give her name due to backlash! -- sees it:

Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.

"Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I'm black, OK?" the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. "There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood," she said. "That's why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin."