"A Family of Monkeys Raids the Banana Trees and Engages in Shrieking Battles with Dogs"

Photo by Enygmatic-Halycon

I tweeted a lot already about Peter Maass's story in the New York Times magazine about Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden so you can read my timeline, but let me reflect some more.

It's sickening to me to see how many people who should know better think that this story is about some grand heroine, some Joan of Arc who is taking the veil from the eyes of the American people so they see the dastardly crimes of their evil government "done in their name," blah blah.

This entire saga seems so contrived to me -- so fake, so manipulated, so hysterical, so very Second Life, that I simply cannot find a single thing wrong with a single "revelation". So the NSA took metadata about Verizon business phone calls. So, nu? They had a big phone book of everybody's cell phones (you can't get those like you can for land lines!) and who they called, and they scanned them to see if they matched info about criminals. Good! They scanned overseas fiber optic cables for metadata and dipped in when they had a warrant. Good! They made 2700 mistakes or errors and unlawfully dredged content they shouldn't have. Good, the system works, it knows right from wrong, somebody is watching.

I'm just not going to chime in with this "we need a national conversation" stuff that everyone is repeating like zombies because...I remember where that phrase came from. It comes from the socialist movements. Back in the 1980s, when the Socialist Scholars conferences and DSA meetings and union hall meetings and peace movement meetings were all being held in New York -- and I attended them -- I would always hear this same concept.

"We need a national conversation on X." This was fake. This was part of the entire stealth-socialism gimmick and contrivance whereby failed socialists who couldn't win elections and couldn't get the American people to believe in their ideals would break up their agenda into "single issues". Then they'd plug those single issues, as if they only cared about child care or health or education or women's rights as "ordinary people". Meanwhile, they'd be plotting and planning to "put over" what amounted to "the party line" conceived up by the comrades. It really annoyed me -- and today it appalls me when I see Obama and his cronies doing the same thing.

The conversation in this case was coerced and forced by a hack -- an anarchist hack meant to bring US security to its knees, hatched by WikiLeaks with the help of the Russian government. That's not a conversation, that's a self-criticism circle with the fear of firing or jailing if you don't toe the Party line.

The idea that Obama has now "validated" Snowden -- Assange's cunning and malevolent contention -- is really sickening. In fact, I think Obama *is* doing this because I think quite frankly, Obama is happy to have some outside force batter at the forces of the military and intelligence that he never quite got comfortable with or got control over (the fact that at first he kept the same people as Bush had was quite telling). There are times that I think that if Obama isn't in on this, he's at least facilitating it. It's all really disturbing.

I used to think, when I encountered the griefers and hackers and channers in Second Life about 10 years ago, that everybody would get it about them if you could just explain they were just like the Bolsheviks. Same nihilist ideology! Same Leninist "the worst, the better" or "the end justifies the means" or "no no vote"!

I would never have dreamed back then when characters who seemed merely like marginal, odd-ball professors -- Beth Noveck or Lawrence Lessig or Peter Ludlow -- would actually be advising the president of the United States, getting on the New York Times op-ed pages, and even ending up with jobs in the White House. I thought the hackers might remain in virtuality; I never dreamed they would so metasticize, and spread, and go into real life, and actually shut down government and corporate websites by the hundreds or court houses or even water mains. Then I thought lately that surely when this bunch -- the former Tor director was somebody I always debated in Second Life -- finally found their way to Moscow, that surely everybody would get it. Surely everybody would see now! These are the new Bolsheviks of our time!

So it feels to me constantly now as if everybody is under some kind of mass hysteria. Can't they see what this is? Can't they get it? I marvel that people who should really know better, people in my field, former colleagues even, smart people, are so utterly entranced with the Crypto Kids, as if the New Journalism and the New Black consists of writing code or gibberish or social media loops "about themselves". It's just damn freaky when it doesn't seem actually scary.

I'm nearly at a loss as to what to do about these awful times when people can't think critically about the most obvious, blatant Big Lie, but I think all you can do is try to write down what you know and keep debating. It was for just such a giant hugely-viewed and widely-praised article on Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras that I wrote my long 7,000 word compendium of everything I had gathered about them for several years, even before Snowden became a story.

Of course, for some people pretty jaded about radical anti-government activists and Greenwald in particular, this article is mainly entertainment. Yes, there's this:

Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.

Gosh, that last line -- a trope for the Internet, you know, as some wits have already pointed out!

And that fridge, with just a little enjambment, it's like a William Carlos Williams poem:

The refrigerator

     is not always filled

            with fresh vegetables...

or

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

So yes, there's a good deal of spectacle in all this, even in the artful, shadowy photographing of Laura Poitras without her Rasputin eyes usually glowing so ominously -- you can almost hear the editor at NYT Magazine instruct the photographer -- try to make it so that she's intense, but not with her eyes looking too crazily, like Michelle Bachman, you know?.

I put up several comments at the New York Times, and then on this replay by the notorious Natasha Lennard at Salon: 

Natasha Lennard has long been a WikiLeaks and Occupy Wall Street activist. I think more critical journalists have to be assigned to this story. There are just too many discrepancies, shifting narratives, gaps. Salon says: "As was pointed out by Irin Carmon for Salon in a profile of Poitras following the first flush of NSA revelations, Greenwald and Poitras had been working with Snowden since February.

But in the Maass piece, it says this:

"Snowden told her early on that she would need to work with someone else, and that she should reach out to Greenwald. She was unaware that Snowden had already tried to contact Greenwald, and Greenwald would not realize until he met Snowden in Hong Kong that this was the person who had contacted him more than six months earlier. " That means November 2012 or earlier. 

Snowden posted his PGP key in March 2013 with his lavabit email address.

Greenwald and Poitras both have told the story of how and when they first contacted Snowden multiple ways. And even allowing for the fact that first he contacted them with a pseudonym, then they only spoke to him online, then they met him in person, so it was a process, the story and its emphasis just keeps changing.

And this matters, because the timeline for when Snowden could have gotten his NSA materials after *deliberately* joining BHA in *March 2013* is very, very short for hacking, torrenting, encrypting and handling these materials.

That means long before he went deliberately to BHA, Snowden had materials that he hacked, and he worked with Poitras, Greenwald and of course Appelbaum on this, and the question is whether they are in collusion with his deliberate joining of BHA to hack more.

There is the entire wacky story of his defection to Moscow with their assistance and scripting by Julian Assange.

And there are other funny questions to ask about why all the hackers converge in Hawaii in April 2012 and April 2013 when Snowden is there, and then later in Hong Kong.

If only these people were as accountable and transparent as they want the US government to be.

As I noted about this piece, it had two big holes:

1. Laura Poitras' flip-flop on whether or not she was on the roof -- she says she was up and down on the roof to Maass but she had denied it to US soldiers -- Joshua Foust caught this contradiction on Twitter.

2. Yet another variation -- this is the fifth by my count -- of Greenwald's story of how they all contacted Snowden and when.

He swore up and down in the debate on Twitter with the Business Insider editor that he first heard from Snowden in February. Now it sounds like he is saying November/early December 2012 (if we go by Maass' statement that Snowden contacted them "more than six weeks" before they met in Hong Kong, which was June 2nd (they took a flight from New York on June 1st). Yeah, I get that he has explanations for all this, and Washpo journos try to smooth it out for him, as does Maass.

The one question Maass does ask that is the slightest probing of Poitras -- other than to dig for more personal details which he failed at -- was to ask about this exact date question. He may not have realized what a controversy it was -- how Walter Pincus tried to pin it down and get whallopped (though his instincts and perceptions were true); how others kept trying to confront Greenwald on this -- and for their troubles would be told they were drooling idiots (!). Guess they probed a nerve.

But Maass then seems satisfied, unfortunately, with this answer (emphasis added);

Snowden began to provide documents to the two of them. Poitras wouldn’t tell me when he began sending her documents; she does not want to provide the government with information that could be used in a trial against Snowden or herself. He also said he would soon be ready to meet them.

Now that the information has also come out that Snowden in fact stole documents when he worked at Dell -- and left a digital trial -- a year before he was said to start working with Poitras and Greenwald, what does this make of their narrative?

I think it makes hash of it. There was already the discrepancy between Greenwald saying "months" were taken to go over the documents, yet they made contact only in April -- which meant only one month was available. Now it's a year? There's also a sense of haste and of overload, as if they can't get through everything "in time" -- in time for what? What was the hurry? Why couldn't they take their time? It's not as if Snowden would be found if they didn't leak anything, no one would notice and he had the alibi of his epilepsy treatment. I think they were rushing because they needed to hew to a larger propaganda time-table in part or in full prepared as an active measure in Moscow, involving distraction and manipulation of public opinion around the time of Bradley Manning's trial -- and other events that we need to piece together. If ever there was a time for Guy Debord to call his office, it would be for this:

Greenwald’s first articles — including the initial one detailing the Verizon order he read about on the flight to Hong Kong — appeared while they were still in the process of interviewing Snowden. It made for a strange experience, creating the news together, then watching it spread. “We could see it being covered,” Poitras said. “We were all surprised at how much attention it was getting. Our work was very focused, and we were paying attention to that, but we could see on TV that it was taking off. We were in this closed circle, and around us we knew that reverberations were happening, and they could be seen and they could be felt.”

Yes, that media pond that the narcissists could stare in and admire their own reflection rippling endlessly...

And speaking of digital trails, I was reading the trove of Snowden comments at Ars Technica again which were discovered here by Reuters -- Ars Technica is the forum for the "better geek" who actually has a job working in Big IT or even government and keeps the conversation more to technical issues than is usually the case at other forums.

And aside from his bitching about corporations that cooperate too spookily with the government for his anarchist taste, there's this:

Last visited:

Sat Sep 01, 2012 5:56 pm

I had noted before that Snowden's entire digital footprint seems to drop off in 2009. You just don't see him post or do things from then until he posts his PGP key and starts his life as a defector. But in fact there are a few posts on Ars Technica -- like once or twice a year in 2010, 2011, 2012. So it's interesting that he last visited in 2012 -- but then even being an obsessive geek who probably loved reading the Internet about his favourite topics, he didn't come back to Ars Technica. At least not on that name.

His last substantive non-gamer post there was this.

On December 29, 2001, he wrote sarcastically:

NSA's new surveillance program.

That's the sound of freedom, citizen!

The ruins of 9/11 were still smoldering. How could he write shit like that? How do people like this get jobs in the government? I've wondered this about other people claiming to be government coders on that forums -- and I just hope that the people who run these agencies are tightening up the ship now and looking to the ethics and personality issues, and reducing the number of narcissistic psychopaths they are hiring...