Wired State

But Palantir Isn't Charged With Any Crime

Photo by TechCocktail, 2007.

Andy Greenberg always exasperates me. He's supposed to be reporting from "the Capitalist Tool," as Forbes used to call itself before it became pro-Putin (Mark Adomanis) and pro-technocommunist (see all the Internet, hacking, WikiLeaks, etc stories). But he's always on the side of the hackers sort of surreptiously, golf-clapping, secret-sharing to get the story. He always acts so dewy-eyed and enthusiastic about these hacker heroes he's ostensibly covering critically (I'm reading his book now This Machine Kills Secrets and the passages on Assange are so thrilling and dramatic -- for him. (Secretly he imagines WikiLeaks is like Woody Guthrie's guitar with the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists"  -- maybe it just isn't in the hands of the right player yet!)

Now he's got a piece up today dumping on Palantir, the cybersecurity company which, like Microsoft or Comcast is the company that geeks love to hate: How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut.

Palantir's CEO is called "deviant" because...his hair stands on end and...he's like any geek in his views and tastes and probably no different than Andy Greenberg himself.

It's called "CIA-Funded" because....it has an investment from the start-up investment arm of the CIA and because it has CIA contracts.

If every Silicon Valley that has government contracts were called "funded by" the government, that would be ridiculous, of course. Greenberg can invoke this "funded by" -- as if Palantir lived on public assistance like a welfare queen -- because of this start-up funding and its contracts with the NSA to do scanning of Big Data.

But if one of those "Start-Up America" type of things comingling government and AOL funds and involving Tim O'Reilly were to "fund" something, why, that would be cool and not exposed as "government funding". Some other friend of Obama getting masses of green stimulus cash wouldn't be exposed as "government-funded" by Forbes but would be a cool start-up. Oh, you know, like Tesla, Musk's electric car company, gets government subsidies (isn't it 30%), but Andy isn't writing an expose about how this form of technocommunism is functioning in our society.

Instead, it's only evil Palantir and evil CIA that gets the scrutiny because everything is tied to the NSA scandal now.

My comment buried in the collapsed comments at Forbes:

Nothing you’ve reported here indicates that Palantir is committing any crime or suspected of any crime.

Katz-Lacabe never complained about Google driving around and vacuuming up his wireless connection data because Google is “cool” for geeks and Palantir is “evil” — maybe because it doesn’t have the usual “better world” technocommunist mantra, but is made up of technolibertarians (they are fiercely at odds).

You reference the HBGary scandal that indirectly involved Palantir. But HBGary created a proposal to do things like create fake Internet personas or try to discredit Glenn Greenwald. This was a pitch to potential customers in the government, not actualities. You neglect to mention that we know these private *thoughts* and *intentions* of this private company because they were hacked by Anonymous as you well know, using coercive, fraudulent and illegal methods *for which some of them were arrested and are now in jail*. HBGary was also not found to have committed a crime; it’s not a crime, thank God, to want to “get” Glenn Greenwald, or tens of thousands of people would be in jail over nothing.

As for this, the self-referential ethics created on the fly, the Bat phone and all the rest — this is no different than any geek anywhere in power. John Perry Barlow told me the source of his ethics was himself and his friends when I challenged him directly on this, given all his loopy ideas. Any geek running any code anywhere thinks they are smarter than others, above the law, and don’t need to answer to “corrupt” politicians or “outdated” law that “stifles innovation”. This is a problem throughout the entire industry that doesn’t self-regulate and never met a piece of legislation from Washington trying to curb its anarchy that it didn’t hate and didn’t unleash its techno firepower and agitation of the geek masses on Youtube to stop.

One thing that represents a glimmer of hope in terms of ethics here is that the paranoid leadership at Palantir at least creates firm data trails for every engineer accessing every thing so they have records. Maybe they should do more of that at Booz, Hamilton Allen.

* * *

As for Katz-Lacabe whining about his license plate -- along with his kids -- getting snapped, I'm finding it hard to care about this in some deep way and it reminds me of the TSA whiners.

First, when information like this is scanned and put in a data base, it isn't read by humans -- it's not humans gawking at his kids. It isn't combed by humans -- it's a machine, filtering for matches. Obviously, the ability to make a data set like this saves the lives of children abducted, as Palantir notes citing real cases. And no one, least of Katz-Lacabe, can show how he has actually suffered some loss of rights or false arrest or false anything due to this record. It's a hysterical hypothetical. It might be used wrongly. It might compromise him in some way -- but it hasn't nor can he demonstrate that it will, really.

I view all of this activity on the Internet as merely the electronic version of a cop on the beat. If a human cop walked down your street or drove down your street, scanning with his human eyes your car, your children, your lawn, you wouldn't care. This is acceptable and even needed. If his human memory retained some of these images, such as to be able to ask questions when he spots your car in a ditch, or spots your child being tugged away by someone who isn't you, you'd only be too happy.

The difference between human agency and machine agency is seldom analyzed in these debates.

Related articles

How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

The Strange Story of Barrett Brown and Peter Ludlow

CIA Funding Citizen Tracking Software Given to Big Banks, Police

Why is Larry Lessig plugging Palantir?

The Hot Breath of Silicon Valley is Breathing on the Neck of the East Coast Establishment

Forbes Reporter Gets His Car Hacked to Prove How Easy it Is

Bradley Manning's Apology is Fake and Just Meant to Lighten His Sentence

Many on the left believe Glenn Greenwald pwned Jeffrey Toobin in this interview and posted it to Youtube with claims of this nature. But a close study merely shows how distractive and manipulative GG is -- yet again claiming Bob Woodward leaked like Manning leaked, and because he was in the Washington elite, he didn't get punished. Nonsense. Woodward did journalism, you know; Manning did hacking. Learn the difference. As Toobin points out, he released 700,000 cables, "and the people they talked to risk their lives...and the idea that Bradley Manning is justified in releasing this material is just completely wrong". Toobin in fact shines as a moral voice here; Greenwald comes off looking like a creep.

 

Bradley Manning's apology and alleged expression of remorse is utterly fake.

For a good bird's eye view of how wildly different this same news event and this same apology can be seen by all sorts of media and pundits, see this compendium.

He's just doing this to get a lighter sentence, at the advice of his attorney.

That's all.

I continue to predict, based on what my friend who was formerly in the JAG has told me, and everything I've read, that Bradass67 will get 10-16 years, tops. Not 90. Not 50. Not 25. But 10 -- maybe a few more. This fake remorse enacted, plus that time in solitary, will knock off his sentence -- and the finding that the enemy wasn't really aided will help all this along. With good behaviour, with his case continuing to be raised for presidential pardons, we could see him out even before that 10-15. That's going to be the reality.

Why? Because one of the argumentations the advisors will make inside the government is, "Oh, let's not make these snivelling confused hacker brats into warrior heroes and enemies -- that just spawns more of them and empowers them. Let's not even give them the satisfaction of being believable martyrs. Let's give them light sentences to show how little they and their crimes matter to us."

I actually think that's all total bullshit, but I do know that there are minimizers of terrorism and apologists for hackers inside the government that spin these yarns.

In fact, I don't find that the theory of sentencing hackers to prison as a deterrent to their crimes has ever gone away, or ever lost its edge. Just ask Sabu.

But there is this reasoning and it is what is particularly prominent in the Obama Administration about both hackers and terrorists -- and we're going to see a lighter sentence as a result. But there had to be this eating of shit first -- just to make it look like Bradley knew right from wrong -- which he doesn't.

I marvel at Streetwise Professor taking Bradley's Eddie Haskell act at face value, even praising it as "Manning Up". Of couse, maybe SP is thinking that, like Plato's notion of virtue, if you just pretend to practice the virtue, it might stick, and if we clap our hands and believe in Manning's remorse, it will be true.

I don't, for a minute.

For me, the most telling evidence of how fake it was, was this:

I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was gonna help people, not hurt people. The last few years have been a learning experience. I look back at my decisions and wonder, ‘How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?’

This is deliberately calculated to make every script kiddie from here to breakfast to snort or beat his breast in howling indignation. It is meant as high IRC channel camp. It is faux as the day as long. Proper authority? Really? For reals? Guffaw. ROFL.

No hacker believes in "proper authoritity" -- they wouldn't be hackers if they did. In fact, even coders who don't particularly hack believe in "proper authority" -- except when its their own.

Streetwise admires this statement, but I think he has never sat watching his servers crash over and over again by these people, and then dancing around and pretending it's not them with the physics-enabled self-replicating cubes.

This apology is so fake, it's like some BEAT ME sign stuck on his back enabling "the community" to beat him up -- it's sado-masochism.

The entire premise of the hacker movement is that "lowly juniors" can easily overthrow those with "proper authority" and Manning knows full well that the entire story of WikiLeaks -- and Snowden -- is just that.

It's a spectacle.

And I believe that knowing that it would play out this way, Julian Assange, and his co-conspirators Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum timed this Snowden thing to distract from Bradley Manning's trial -- which could only play out as a pathetic loser's loss before the whole world.

The public sympathy for him just never gelled the way they wished. He just never got adopted by the mainstream liberals as much as they hoped. He just never made a coherent hero because it seemed like he was psychologically troubled, had embraced a radical belief system to find a place for himself and cohorts, and then sullenly ripped out hundreds of thousands of files and exposed them out of spite and nihilism, not out of some conscious plan to leak for reasons of conscience.

The lawyer's effort to show him as "naive" and "misguided" but "sincere" just doesn't cut it for those of us who know this kind of Internet type. Instead, they are narcissistic, arrogant, disdainful, furious, destructive, nihilist. They don't care about other people and what happens to them.

The tell-tale symptom of this for me was -- again -- Manning's failure to publish the story of the Iraqi printing press -- and Assange's dismissal of the story. If that story of alleged injustice was supposed to explain Manning's treason, it should have been pivotol, like certain "Pentagon Papers" were for Ellsberg. But in stead, it was deep-sixed -- maybe because it would have in fact shown that the Iraq War was far less of an anti-American morality tale than Assange wanted to pretend it was.

I think Assange and Greenwald in particular, who had long been pushing the anti-American WikiLeaks cause, wanted to make sure that all the attention of the world went to the evil NSA that supposedly spies on people, and not to this sullen youth who dumped all these files into the wild and it didn't really achieve his supposed goals anyway. BTW, Obama pulled US troops out of Iraq, and each week now, there are car bombs and other terrorist attacks all over -- one week  recently it was 69 people killed, another week it was 20 -- as many as on the square in Egypt, without about 1/100th the attention... How can the WL gang explain that? Um, drawing to the theater, are we?

And I think some of the, well, uncooked aspects of this whole Snowden thing -- that graceless, awkward scramble to Russia, those hurriedly published slides that almost made the whole thing collapse over the fake "direct access" issue any newbie tekkie could explain was all wrong -- I think it has to do with the timing of the Manning trial, as well known as it was, coming on June 4th, then starting to spiral differently, with the issue of "aiding the enemy" hanging in the balance.

Why does nobody ever, ever notice that Manning's trial opening on June 3rd and Greenwald's first story about Snowden on June 6th come out just at the same time?!

Hackers have absolutely no solidarity with each other, and like hard little soldiers shed their comrades in a heartbeat when they cease to support the cause or betray it. They are like Stalin's shooters of men retreating from the front in World War II. So, they dumped Manning with nothing but a tear for his victimhood -- they could always come back and milk that later, and pressed on to Snowden.

In fact, if we comb through those first three days, we might see something that triggered Greenwald & co. to speed up their release of the NSA story....

Even if we take at face value the legend Snowden has spun about contacting first Greenwald in November or was it December? -- then Poitras in January -- then both of them in April -- they would have seen the value to their cause of his story and wanted to rush it out in time for Bradley Manning Trial Week.

There's the glaring fact of Snowden claiming not to have gotten this material until late March/early April when he went to work for Booze, Hamilton Allen -- and Jacob Appelbaum and Moxie Marlingspike were celebrating a birthday and holding a hackers' spring break in Hawaii where Snowden was also going on some sort of business trip (to Maui, 100 miles away from where he lived?)

Then Glenn claiming that it took "months" for him to sift through his cache to decide what to run -- but of course, it's more like "one month" or "a few weeks" because Glenn claims they started working with Snowden in earnest in April. He then had only about 30 days before the first article Glenn published. It just doesn't track.

And the servers of lavabit, the encrypting email service Snowden used to communicate with Poitras and Greenwald and where the details of this fable might be better studied, is now closed -- to withhold it from the feds, who demanded it, obviously.

As Toobin put it, ultimately, so well, in praising the hard work and dedication of the American Foreign Service, "I trust their judgement about what is a secret more than I do Bradley Manning."

 

 

I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was gonna help people, not hurt people. The last few years have been a learning experience. I look back at my decisions and wonder, ‘How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?’ - See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7541#sthash.WLpg90fc.XJLDlZer.dpuf

I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was gonna help people, not hurt people. The last few years have been a learning experience. I look back at my decisions and wonder, ‘How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?’ - See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7541#sthash.WLpg90fc.XJLDlZer.dpuf

I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was gonna help people, not hurt people. The last few years have been a learning experience. I look back at my decisions and wonder, ‘How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?’ - See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7541#sthash.WLpg90fc.XJLDlZer.dpuf

How the News Gets Tweeted So Differently! On Manning's Apology

Ryan Grim ‏@ryangrim 1h

Bradley Manning's apology was coerced by months of abusive treatment, says Julian Assange http://huff.to/16M3FDs

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 48m

Freedom in the Cloud: Assange, Manning & Snowden are the new heroes of the era of digitalized control | Slavoj Žižek http://inthesetimes.com/article/15451/freedom_in_the_cloud …

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 58m

Should Bradley #Manning have to apologize? | TYT http://current.com/shows/the-young-turks/videos/should-bradley-manning-have-to-apologize … Our statement: http://wikileaks.org/Response-to-today-s-Bradley.html …

streetwiseprof ‏@streetwiseprof 1h

Bradley Manning: Manning Up http://shar.es/yUmnr  via @streetwiseprof

  Ella Braigen ‏@EllaBraigen 1h

Haha,so expected that RT @wikihype: Conspiracies abound - #Manning was tortured and brainwashed! #assange#wikileakshttps://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/367794483993133057 …

Blogs of War ‏@BlogsofWar 1h

WikiLeaks: Manning's apology was forced http://ow.ly/2z6tVz

Miriam Elder ‏@MiriamElder 5h

Quite a statement from Bradley Manning at his sentencing hearing today.... http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/bradley-manning-apologizes-for-hurting-united-states-in-cour … by @ellievhall

New York Times World ‏@nytimesworld 26m

Manning, Facing Prison for Leaks, Apologizes at Court-Martial Trial http://nyti.ms/18wcQZS

AJELive ‏@AJELive 1h

Bradley #Manning tells court: "I am sorry that my actions hurt people. I'm sorry that they hurt the US" | http://aje.me/16cVhxJ  #WikiLeaks

RT America ‏@RT_America 1h

The only currency this military court will take is #BradleyManning's humiliation." -- WikiLeaks statement http://on.rt.com/m3rvkh

alan rusbridger ‏@arusbridger 4h

"i believed I was going to help people not hurt them" Manning apologises for unintended consequences http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/bradley-manning-sorry-leaks-hurt-united-states …

Gawker ‏@Gawker 6h

Bradley Manning apologized in court today, telling the judge: "I'm sorry I hurt the United States." http://gaw.kr/3XvWXV7

CNN ‏@CNN 6h

Bradley Manning apologizes: "I'm sorry that I hurt the United States": http://on.cnn.com/1eKv3EE

Mashable ‏@mashable 6h

Bradley Manning: 'I'm Sorry' http://on.mash.to/14zbKbz

Mother Jones ‏@MotherJones 6h

Bradley #Manning: “In retrospect I should have worked more aggressively inside the system” http://gu.com/p/3t375/tw  via @guardian

RT America ‏@RT_America 7h  

MANNING: "How on Earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over those w/ proper authority?"

M Cetera 「エム」 ‏@m_cetera 7h

I feel awful. Bradley #Manning should NOT be apologizing for his actions. He is a whistleblower. #freebrad

Glyn Moody ‏@glynmoody 13 Aug

#Snowden, #Manning not whistleblowers: Australian attorney-general - http://zd.net/16IO0Vo  the man is clearly a fool (v @Asher_Wolf)

HuffPost Politics ‏@HuffPostPol 8h

Bradley Manning speaks out: "I'm sorry" http://huff.to/1eKlc1E

"That Mass Out There"

Gen. Alexander giving a keynote speech at BlackHat, the hackers' conference this month, where he was heckled.

Michael Hayden, former head of both the CIA and the NSA, obviously knows a lot about the issues of espionage and secrecy and what the threats are to our country.

Here's what he had to say in a Quartz interview with Josh Meyer:

What cyber threats do you find most concerning?

You’ve got three levels of threats; the shorthand is steal, disrupt and destroy. You’ve also got three levels of actors. You’ve got nation states, you’ve got criminal elements and then you’ve got that mass out there; activists, nihilists, anarchists, Anonymous, Lulzsec and so on. And blessedly the order I gave them to you—states, criminals the rest – is pretty much a ranking of their capability. And what we’re seeing is that all the boats in the harbor are going up, and so capabilities we now associate with criminal gangs or mid-range nation states will over time become available to this third group.

As tough as attribution is, nation states still have to believe that they are responsible for their actions. There can be sanctions and retaliations. Criminal groups, they’re after the money, and they’re in kind of a symbiotic relationship with their targets and even in nature, the parasite would be unwise to kill the host. But the third group, they have sometimes unreasonable, unmeetable, undefinable demands. In one, three or five years, you’ve got a group out there that’s opposed to capitalism, let’s say. And if they start to get some of these advanced capabilities, the very destructive attack for ideological purposes is going to be more possible and more likely. So my line to folks is, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

(Emphasis added)

I'm sure this quotation drives the left and the "progressives" mad -- it makes it seem like "activists" are equated with criminals and protesting capitalism is equated with terror.

But I guess what he means is frankly where the real threat is very specifically coming from. The thing to focus on here isn't the edge-casing about some activist who is an innocent innovator, but to look frankly at that very destructive attack for ideological purposes from this group opposed to capitalism -- and that is the hackers, nihilists, Anonymous, Lulzsec -- and he's absolutely right. They are the technocommunists. This is what you have to worry about. No, history doesn't repeat with farce here, it just repeats.

Glenn Greenwald whined today that the press, each time it writes about Hayden, has to note that he is now (presumably) high-paid consultant for the Chertoff Group.

Supposedly if we read through that link, we're supposed to...what...come away with the impression that the dirty business of consulting for, oh, Stratfor or somebody on things like cybersecurity and response to attacks is...like the dirty business of enabling hackers and writing about their onslaught on American liberal democracy?

Somehow, I'm just not impressed that Chertoff is the problem here. Maybe because I don't believe in anything about Snowden, WikiLeaks, and Greenwald except that it's a fraud -- that began, as it is ending, in Moscow.

When General Alexander rightly talked about the threat of Anonymous, naturally  it drew a backlash of minimization and even ridicule from the usual suspects that always control the narrative.

I remember how happy @StevenLevy was to tweet during Hurricane Sandy that the stock market exchange on Wall Street was under water (it was never true).

And I remember how many people blasted me some years ago when I reprinted the story -- later refuted -- of a hacker getting into a water system (and continued to keep asking questions about it even after the company itself claimed later that it was just a Russian programmer they had who logged on from Russia).

Now it's absolutely accepted to talk about hackers breaking into water and power systems and even honeypots are made to test them.

When I saw the sheer vitriolic hate that some of the Occupy Wall Street cadres had for capitalism and institutions, and their greedy zeal for destroying them -- I'll never forget that self-professed communist professor from Genneseo saying flatly "we're going to come and take your stuff" -- I felt this threat might be rather close. Fortunately, Occupy Wall Street mainly sunk of its own radical, extreme and idiotic weight. Good. For now.

When I saw the attack on the justice system -- because that's really what it was, an active measure aimed against the American justice system as an institution to make people lose faith in it -- that Anonymous pulled in Steubenville, even as Anonymous was attacking MIT and the US Sentencing Commission over Swartz, I really felt as if the battering was going to have an effect. Fortunately, that crisis passed, too, with justice served to the rape victim -- and not by Anonymous -- and with one Anonymous arrested.

What is the way to deal with these threats? I'm not privy to the counsels of Gen. Alexander or Gen. Hayden, but I don't mind if they or their successors go on seeing this as a war and fighting it -- it is, and our freedom is at stake. I don't believe that fighting it worsens it or that some crazy accommodation has to be made to the cyberwarriors Russia and China.

More practically, however, I think a simple thing has to be done: a think-tank has to appear in Washington that begins to critically push back against all the hard-left, "progressive," technocommunist solutions being propagated -- and the technoliberarian propaganda and noise around these Internet subjects as well -- and carve out a profile of Internet liberalism that balances freedom and the security needed to preserve the very possibility of freedom.

There is no such think-tank or NGO today. Instead, you have all the Soros-funded groups like New America Foundation or Electronic Frontier Foundation gabbling on about how information wants to be free. You have outright lobbying offices for Silicon Valley, from Facebook and Twitter, which promulgate these views, and then their virtual fronts like the Sunlight Foundation. You have radical groups like Foundation for the Free Press, Save the Internet Foundation, etc. which are really all variations of John Perry Barlow and friends. You then have the libertarian side of this movement which is barely distinguishable on many issues, like Tech Freedom and Tech Liberation Front and the Volokh Conspiracy.

Tech Liberation Front provides a refreshing pushback to Susan Crawford's collectivism and even blatant technocommunism by constantly making fact-based arguments about the realities of broadband and the market. But then they go off opposing SOPA or CISPA because of their libertarian ethos.

What is needed is a group that is not paid for by the tech industry or Soros (although he wouldn't pay for it and likely they wouldn't either) but which establishes that the Internet is a normal area of human activity like any other that should be brought under the rule of law -- as if it were not some special autonomous realm and proto-world government. It should go about making absolutely clear that "that mass out there" is not what we want in the way of society or government or culture.

This group would have to do the usual Washington things -- commissioning white papers, holding panels and seminars and big conferences and nurturing fellows. It's too bad there is absolutely no hope of such a thing coming into existence unless I wish the lottery LOL.

But the problem is, again and again, when things like the Snowden issue come up, there is the official government position, which might be terse silence or a few feel-goods or actual capitulation to the awful hackers' movements (SOPA and CISPA) with pledges to veto legislation that a lot of democratically-elected people also diligently worked on.

So what is needed is a separate, independent think-tank that supports the basics of US government policy -- the Internet freedom program involving assistance overseas particularly for circumvention; study and strategic countering of the criminal sides of that very darknet of circumventionists; opposition to encryption of all communications -- and then also pushes for cybersecurity law that would apply the same legal principles of any other area of human relations and law.

Instead of Ron Wyden and Mark Udall and Mike Myasnick and Berin Szoka and Evgeny Morozov being the only voices ever heard every time there is a policy issue like net neutrality or Aaron Swartz's prosecution or the CFAA or CISPA or Snowden, you would have X, Y, and Z that would bring a more critical and balanced perspective to the national stage.

Who would be in this think-tank? It's hard to think of any prominent dissenters to these perspectives except Jaron Lanier. That is, Morozov is so often taken as the dissenter that people don't get it about him -- he'd be just as liable to oppose SOPA or change CFAA in the radical ways that EFF wants -- like giving a special exemption to hackers that are "especially creative" in their hacks, in recognition of their genius -- and letting them off from prison when they hack, or giving special dispensation to "tinkerers" and "inventors" if they violate IP because they're "innovative". I'm not kidding. That is the sort of myopic, self-interested sort of thing they recommend.

Would it be possible to have some prestigious figure like Gen. Michael Hayden in such a think-tank?  Perhaps.

But when Gen. Alexander retires in 2014, what he might do, instead of disappearing into some quiet outfit like the Chertoff Group or some other Beltway bandit, should start a very public, very public-service non-profit that works for sound and sane Internet policy -- given that he has the liberal credentials of having served under the Obama Administration.

This lobbying group would obviously have to be a mixture of civilian and military.  It really is hard to think up names for such a venture precisely because has been so captured by radicals, but somehow, a start has to be made.

 

 

 

 

Ambassador Power and Ambassador Power

Samantha Power in 2008 at Stacy's book store in San Francisco reading her book. Photo by Steve Rhodes.

Amb. Samantha Power, the new US ambassador to the UN, isn't the first ambassador of the Wired State -- Amb. Susan Rice was very active and substantive on Twitter, and of course there are many other talkative envoys on Twitter, including our own (in the Russian field) @mcfaul out of Moscow.

Apparently Amb. Power is new to the whole Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/hashtag thing. So advice from someone who was an early adapter since 2007: if you are in public office, don't tweet more than one or two really pithy highly retweetable *substantive* thoughts of your own a day, and let an intern spend the rest of the day, once or twice an hour tweeting links to speeches, resolutions, or interesting news articles. Know your own value and the dignity of office. Be mindful of the fact that the main intellectual life of America's intelligentsia, such as it is, is taking place now on Twitter on a few thousand accounts, mainly of old media news editors and journalists, and don't let them bully you, get to you, trap you, or literalize you to death. Just keep moving and live to tweet another day.  Don't do hashtags yourself like #WhatMatters like some lame and desperate beverage company because you won't get the traction or the volume or the trending topic when you do that. You also run the risk on the free-for-all that is Twitter that "the masses" (which usually consists of pretty skilled cadres, some from malevolent governments) will tell you to do things that you can't or shouldn't do, like withdraw aid from Israel or invade Syria.

Make your own substantive and pithy tweet be the thing that brings you the eyeballs and let the retweeting be organic rather than trying to force a dumb hashtag.

Do not hire Twitter or social media gurus -- they are a waste of time and money and also just various political groupings jockeying for power under the guise of consulting.

Twitter is best when it is about thought-casting, not broad-casting or life-casting. It's not a radio show because anyone can talk back without being selected for the phone-in show. It's not interesting if you tell us who you had lunch with and don't tell us what you talked about. So draw yourself up to your full height and try to say something for the historical annals that is meaningful as best you can.

I'm a big believer in making these government Twitter accounts really service-oriented public property and not putting personal names on them -- when @alecjross left the State Department, he took some 300,000 followers with him, many of whom he could DM because he followed them back, which mean the State Department essentially no longer had a mailing list. That's wrong. (It's like Obama For American converting to Organizing for Action and taking all the campaign lists away from the Democratic Party). By contrast, Susan Rice had a generic ambassador account.

But @ambassadorpower has decided to make what is unquestionably the coolest Twitter handle this year, and it should win prizes for its hipster double entendre -- but you don't win prizes if you have 50,000 followers instead of 20,000 if most of them are SEO gurus, bots, and porn stars.  Follow more people back -- a ratio of a tiny number of followees to followers lets us know you are broadcasting, not thoughtcasting.

Basically, you have to go into the whole social media with a really robust sense that everything that Alec Ross and Jared Cohen tried to convince everybody about at the State Department when they horsed them into Twitter was all wrong. Both of them are no longer there for good reason. Ross, Cohen and his co-author Eric Schmidt of Google all have a radical ideology of connectivity as  magnificent "better world" instrument. It's essentially preposterous and just about every thing that Ross ever talked about as "empowered" or "bettered" by social media flopped, particularly in the Arab World. Basically, Twitter is merely a (limited) communications tool, and if it is a tool for *service* in public office, it should be about *service* and not building up followers for the next gig.

FIRST SPEECH AT THE FOURTH ESTATE

@ambassadorpower has already given her first speech -- outside the UN, at the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, which you can read here.

And interestingly, besides the cool "OMG" she opens with in talking to these young people, she rehabilitates and blesses the hugely controversial Kony video:

And that rings even more true today. Today ordinary citizens don’t just advocate for change and action, they force change and they take action themselves. Invisible Children doesn’t just lobby policymakers to go after the LRA—they do that and they do it well—but they also design fliers that tell LRA fighters how they might defect, and they distributes them—more than 400,000 fliers so far—into LRA-affected areas in DRC and the Central African Republic. Invisible Children has also built six locally-run FM radio stations in areas of high LRA activity. These stations now reach an audience covering more than 29,000 square miles.

And if you’ve ever doubted your activism matters, just think that the Kony video you made go viral, was sent by high school kids in Massachusetts to their Senator who joined with his colleagues to write a law that President Obama signed to create a rewards program to apprehend Kony and his thugs. And a few months ago that Senator from Massachusetts, now Secretary of State John Kerry, announced that thanks to that law—thanks to you—the State Department was offering the first cash rewards to bring the LRA killers to justice. That’s you. You.

I don't know if Amb. Power knows that the creator of the Kony video went crazy -- he was found raving and stark-naked after pounding car hoods on the street -- and had to be put in a mental hospital for some time.

I really didn't like the anti-Kony sentiment as I blogged at the time -- I pointed out that all of us who raised the Lord's Resistance Army carefully in mannered and self-limiting UN meetings for years in fact didn't accomplish as much as those kids posting and re-posting the viral video and getting Obama to put in advisers.

Except...those advisers didn't accomplish anything yet and Kony is still on the run, I believe mainly in the Central African Republic -- that hell-mouth of Africa which is so poor that apparently it has had to sell ambassadorships to fugitive Kazakh government officials so they could try to claim immunity from prosecution.

But no matter -- I don't think ultimately the Kony video -- despite all the sneering of the Twitterati about it -- was the worst thing and it helped "raise awareness".

More troubling in this speech is this kind of feel-good paragraph that is meant to inspire, but misleads:

This new kind of activism is visible so many places, on so many of today’s most critical issues. An army of citizen activists police the conduct of the recent Kenyan elections, using the tools of the web to monitor hate speech and document fraud in an effort to prevent a repeat of significant violence. In a region—the Arab world—that barely knew democracy as recently as three years ago, we see tens of millions of people moving governments, and, at times, removing them, driven by that universal desire to have their voices heard. At a time of economic uncertainty, we see tens of thousands taking to the streets in Russia and beyond, because they are no longer willing to turn a blind eye to corruption or to accept the growing inequalities in their own societies.

Shouldn't these kids get a more realistic picture of the real challenges on the day after the activism? Facing the backlash from authoritarian governments, for instance.

Kenya averted the kind of election it had in the past with these most recent elections as ICG points out but wait -- that new president and deputy president were indicted by the ICC for their role in the 2007 violence. What next?!

In Egypt, they removed governments twice now, and now more than 100 people were shot dead in the square protesting the abusive military that took over from the abusive Islamists. Yes, voices are being heard, especially on Twitter. Now what?

Russians aren't taking to the streets in such large numbers because some key leaders have been arrested and falsely charged. There've been a number of show trials, such as that of Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner sentenced to five years of prison, but let out while he appeals in order to run in a very stage-managed Moscow mayor election. Lesser known people continue to be beaten and jailed and of course there's the Snowden defection -- which is why Obama cancelled the summit, even as regretably, he's going to legitimize Putin by attending the G20 in St. Petersburg.

Unfortunately, Russia's domestic behaviour  is off-limits at the UN Security Council -- which nowadays includes rounding up and beating migrants and deporting refugees and beating and persecuting gays and minorities along with corruption at the Sochi Olymipcs and long-term cases like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Pussy riot.

But there's Syria -- a mass crime against humanity in which 100,000 have been massacred and tens of thousands have fled to neighbouring countries.  Russia must be made to take exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully paid-up, worldwide ownership for backing and arming the Assad regime. This is the main account over which Ambassador Power has to use her ambassador power to affect in the next few years before she leaves to write her next book. And it will be nearly impossible not only because of the veto, but because of the rampant anti-Americanism at the UN.

Amb. Power should try to deal with this -- Amb. Rice was very successful in disregarding the antagonistic anti-American atmospherics and repeatedly calling out Russian perfidy again and again. But it really is important to try to win over India, Pakistan, Rwanda and the other elected 10 on the SC because they are all disgruntled about Libya, completely turned off to humanitarian intervention, completely sour on the US over the NSA spy stuff -- and just needed to whip up domestic sentiment to distract from their own crimes by endlessly inciting hatred of America.

Snowden is Not a Whistleblower

Bob Cesca is one of the few journalists consistently providing a critique of the entire Snowden Show on the Daily Banter. Here's what he says in discussing the issue of real and fake whistleblowers
 -- he describes some workers who found that some of their colleagues were listening in on soldiers' phone calls with their girlfriends, especially if they were cybering, and they blew the whistle on this invasion of privacy:

This pair of former analysts were real-life whistleblowers. They witnessed serious abuses within the system and came forward to Swanson, Bamford and ABC News, respectively. They didn’t barf up volumes of top secret documents onto the internet. They didn’t flee the country. They didn’t speak to overseas reporters about secret operations against China and the EU having zero to do with spying on Americans. Their claims were restricted solely to the abuses they witnessed firsthand. Surely they embarrassed the government and NSA, but if President Obama was truly fighting a “war on whistleblowers” (he’s not), he could’ve prosecuted them upon taking office several months later. But he didn’t. To date Faulk and Kinne are living their lives, free from prosecution because the information they revealed was direct and narrowly confined.

My emphasis added. They didn't hack files and barf them up. They stuck to the story that had originally outraged them.

That's exactly what Bradly Manning and Julian Assange didn't do, and why I rapidly concluded they were not human rights activists. Manning claimed he decided to commit his treasonous hack over what he saw as mistreatment of Iraqis running a printing press, but he never published the story in any form, never released any files from the incident, nor did Assange, who decided it "wasn't interesting". Or how about this: would be checked, and found not to be as Manning claimed. That's what I suspect.

This aspect of the fraudulent nature of these anarchists is never called out, but I call it out as I think it is emblematic.

We see the same thing with Snowden.

He has produced only two specific cases of wrong-doing in his volumes of sweeping generalizations.

One is the story of the "suspected hacker's girlfriend" who has had her phone abroad snooped -- and he doesn't tell us who this is. If he did, we might check the facts, and the NSA might tell us if in fact she was snooped. If she wasn't, or if in fact she was properly snooped because she was aiding and abetting felonious hacking (like that of Aaron Swartz), then we might put paid to his claims. That's why he doesn't tell us.

The other is that story about the banker who was supposedly recruited to the CIA by being caught at drunk driving. It'd be great to actually come up with this guy and inspect the bona fides of this this claim. I suspect it is not as Snowden claims.

So instead, broad, sweeping claims about data being slurped up, and no concrete cases.

 

Related articles

The Real-Life Stories of Legitimate NSA Whistleblowers (Snowden Isn't One of Them)

Whistleblowers or dissidents? Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning

Human Rights Watch Loses its Way in Moscow

Obama's Former Adviser Ridicules Statement That NSA Doesn't Spy On Americans

Judge casts doubt on damage caused by whistleblower Bradley Manning's leaks of secret US data

Anonymous Infiltrates the Armed Forces

So Anonymous is claiming that they have infiltrated the US military now and is threatening more leaks like Manning and Snowden.

And people laughed at me the other day when I saw the Bronies patch in the US Air Force, and I tweeted, oh, no, 4chan is in the military now.

How do I know that? Because like a lot of things, I saw it first in Second Life more than a year ago. The Woodbury University/4chan characters, after they were perma-banned yet again and had their servers confiscated for violating the TOS and harassing others and crashing sims, re-spawned as members of the Bronies fan club and then took it over, then used that cover to grief some more.

I thought that the news that the Bronies were overtaken by 4chan was common knowledge as it spread further around the web. Guess not in the Air Force, as they didn't stamp it out but instead indulged it -- and of course the meme is perfect for just that very thing, oh, waaaa how can you b& our pwecious pwnies they're so cute. Then look who is pwned in the end.

I got into a debate about this with one of those anonymous people on Twitter with a female avatar who distinctly feels like a male and who knows lots about coding and the armed forces, maybe somebody who is former or current military, maybe put on there as a persona to vacuum up chat and ID links or incite discussion, who knows. There are so many of those types. This person first denied there could be any 4chan relationship, I sent the links and then they simply didn't care. It didn't matter. Anonymous culture didn't bother them. Because they were already part of that culture in some way as you can see from their TL.

This persona pointed out to me that MIL uses hackers -- MIL being the Internet domain name for the military of course. This is something I've always frowned on -- they're asking for a peck of trouble with that one, in my book. Haven't they been taught anything by Manning and Snowden? And others we haven't heard about? There were these weepy articles after Snowden's defection to Moscow about how it would be harder for hackers now to work with the NSA because they wouldn't trust it.

Huh? Could the little darlings in fact not be trusted by NSA in the first place?!

I pointed out that MIL made Tor, Tor brought headaches now (WikiLeaks, Anonymous mayhem, not to mention nests of child pornographers!), what, no regrets?

"Of course regrets," tweets the character. "Of course there will always be those."

Snerk. Like lyrics in the Frank Sinatra song, "I Did it My Way" -- "regrets, I've had a few." Sigh.

While I think the situation is probably bad, I also think this Buzzfeed articles is mainly bluff and psywar, and I hardly expect BuzzFeed to tell the difference as they haven't dug terribly deep on this, preferring to get the page hits by publishing the sensational claims basically unexamined. It would have been nice to hear from some army officials, especially at the bases mentioned, about these claims.

But....it's not surprising given that the culture of the hacker  has spread everywhere among cynical nihilist youth, and the armed forces have not done much to deter it or punish it. Maybe they think it helps create a fighting spirit, who knows.

There's also the problem of how geeks in and out of government or military service or private corporations are all part of the same tribe whose loyalty is to each other, not to the institutions where they serve.

Note that the Anonymous dude here makes the same claim they always do -- duplicitously -- that they are not a top-down organization, and the army thinks they are. But of course they are a top-down organization, escheloned, highly-disciplined through internal obedience and even terror, I've witnessed this many, many times -- recently when I was harassed around the Steubenville story.  Remember how that awful story of my severe harassment ended, where I was doxed and intimidated with threatening videos on Youtube and sent messages that people were coming to my home, etc? Some higher-up -- some archangel -- disciplined those who had begun an operation to harass me called #OpCatzhunt or something like htat. Those people then themselves got the treatment of doxing (they are a nice bunch, these people). They were driven off Twitter. Their pages disappeared. Their operations disappeared. They became non-persons. This is not amusing.

What can you do about this? I used to joke that they would have to breed geeks from birth on a mountain somewhere to keep them from becoming tainted by hacker culture.

A problem with that is that with the enormous volume of knowledge -- rather, lore -- that needs to be known about how to work Internet technology, a lot of learning happens through peer-to-peer sharing, informal talks, socializing in chat rooms and so on -- learn as you do. I have seen even decent, Christian family men types who read the Bible be sabotaged by this culture when they immerse in it. You would have to devise some good innoculation to start; this begins by a fearless inventory of the phenomenon and not pretending there's anything "innovative" about it.

The open source culture in particular creates this environment of rapid collective learning that always creates then collectived nihilist minds -- and it becomes very hard to change the nature of the culture, because the culture has already been welded into the tools, and the tools keep replicating the culture. I can't over-emphasize this. Internet tools and codes and widgets are not neutral. They contain in them many ways of thinking, decision trees, modes (like being able to vote "yes" but not "no") and it is hard to undo this hardened culture already.

There's also these kind of beings online that have come into existence -- collectivized minds that function as little cells -- impervious, except when they aren't. This is hard to describe, but I'll try.

The first time I came across this phenomenon was in Second Life, maybe where it is easier to visualize. This was about eight or nine years ago. I landed on a sim, and found about 6 or 8 avatars doing various things -- perhaps blowing up stuff or putting objects on physics. It was a science fiction sim, I was just out exploring, and flying around.

These people had all been together a long time and finished each other's sentences. They were a collective. But more than a Soviet-style collective, which I've had lots of experience with. They were like a mind-meld. They would perform various roles simultaneously. Of course, it was easy for them, being like this, to immediately make a gang to heckle me. That's par for the course. But you could also see how inseparable these avatars were, how they spent all day online with each other.

It's hard to describe if you haven't seen it, but I would run across these cells all the time in Second Life, particularly the open-source sand-boxing nerds. For example, once I had some contest or something with a free month's rent. And these Anonymous types (at that time from 4chan and somethingawful.com) who had an anti-Scientology group long before the famous Anonymous real-life demonstrations against Scientology invaded this contest and won it, then swarmed ilke a hive over the property and built or created all kinds of nuisance grief stuff and devised ways to ridicule and heckle me. Again, there was that sense that these creatures finished each other's sentences and all reasoned as one. They could do this through not only the ability to create a closed group and text in it rapidly as a group, or IM each other, or use Jabber or even Yahoo outside of SL as a chat interface; they also had bunches of memes and phrases and inside jokes that created cohesion to their little subcultural unit. Anticultural unit, would be more like it. I think some of the anti-Scientology stuff was prototyped in SL (and I have no use for Scientology, more on that later).

So once these cells get created and stick together, I don't think anything -- army, government, even prison could break them up. Because they cohere not just in some one place like Second Life. They're also in dozens of other places. They might have a guild in World of Warcraft. They might have their IRC channel. They might all chat on Plurk even, although that's more of a girl thing. I see how much they swarm on Twitter and how much Twitter, sadly, has made this whole awful movement metast

So what could you do about this?

What could you do if you were the NSA or the army? I see the NSA was reducing 90% of their systems analysts and automating their work. That's funny -- solving the problem of the soul-less nihilists with no moral compasses by putting in robots to replace them? I think the problem is more about all these contractors and sub-contractors. They've got to go. There are too many of them. It is all too attenuated. Outsourcing tech is among the many poor decisions that cost Romney the elections. It's all too strained and there isn't quality control and discipline. There aren't loyal staff.

That won't be enough to fix the nihilism problem, but what can you do?

I hardly think that you could intern all the suspect geeks as the government did the Japanese people after Pearl Harbour! Even though Jimmy Carter apologized years later and providing $20,000 to each person as compensation, that's hardly enough, given the realities of what it means to intern classes of people on a mass basis like this, purely on ethnic or other grounds.

I can just see hacker internment camp though, can't you? They arrive with no change of their Goatse t-shirts and never shave their scraggly beards, and since they lack outdoor skills and they've been deprived of the Internet, they crouch on their bunks solving Sudoku puzzles and playing Dungeons and Dragons on paper while some of them desperately try to rig a ham radio out of car parts and tin cans. They are fed spam and government-issue peanut butter but their families are allowed to bring them Red Bull and Ring Dings on visits.

No, not a solution because I think it might involve jailing 7 million people, right? Isn't that how many people have jail-broken their phones?

A much more humane solution and of course far more effective than trying to strain the fish out of the sea of the Internet where they are interdependent is to have computer professional societies and Internet businesses like Google lead the way with ETHICS. To denounce the DdoS in any form for any reason. To condemn unauthorized use of other people's computers for any reason or no reason. To establish that you inform companies of vulnerabilities privately and help them patch them rather then hack them and publicize it. To establish that hacking secret government files is wrong and a crime, and that you lobby the government over policies you don't like peacefully.

But I don't expect either the societies or the companies to do a thing about ETHICS in this way -- they are ethics-free if not sinister in their malicious criminality themselves -- all the Big IT companies have a symbiosis feeding off the hacker open source culture for free R&D and free coding labour.

 

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Adrian Chen Takes on the Darknet...But Not Really

There Are a Lot of Anonymous Members in the Army, Active-Duty Captain Reveals

Yes, Anonymous is Antisemitic

Obama Admin's War on Hackers Backfires: Now Top Hackers Won't Work w Govt

Meet the Air Force's brony squadron

Why a former NSA chief just made a big mistake by dissing hackers

The Hacker Culture

Defcon de-invites the spooks

Those Invoking the Sacrifice of Freedom or Security Don't Get it About Either

Physically Fit, a political cartoon by Henry Glintenkamp 1917

Each week, I get hundreds and hundreds of hits just on this one article alone -- other articles that get as much or more views either involve the unaccountable Jacob Appelbaum or how to get blue tint out of your screen.

But I've found the appetite for smugly telling your fellow Internet arguer that those who sacrifice freedom for security will get neither is absolutely ENDLESS.

Each person who pulls it out in a twit-fight seems to think they alone have wittily discovered it.

And I think there's a growing cohort of people wanting to question this quote, to see if it is true, and what it means, hence the traffic to that debate.

Many of the people invoking this quote on the "progressive" side of the aisle seem to have no clue that Benjamin Franklin was not only for owning guns -- he was for using them on Native Americans if need be.

And many of the libertarians trying to invoke this quote ahistorically as well don't seem to have a grasp of Franklin's notion of a society that is free precisely because it has security from the marauders and Kings' soldiers and natives that threaten it -- and that his quotation was more about the best way to gain security regarding the colonial overlords and the new colonies, not some abstract pitting of safety aganist speaking one's mind.

Ben Franklin with his quaint kite trying to catch a lighting bolt is worlds and worlds apart from the Internet set.

He would never even been able to imagine some young buck stealing all the secret correspondence of the government -- and running to an enemy power with it. The sheer speed of the event would be beyond his ken. He would most definitely not think this was just some important "national conversation" to have -- something to attach to the correspondence sent around the colonies or put in the Farmer's Almanac. He would have been terrified at the implications of this world, I think, as inventive as he was.

I really get so sick and tired of this quote being wielded and I laugh out loud every day I check the overview of my blog and see the droves of people keen to debate this even more ferociously (as you can see in the comments there).

Not a single person viciously slamming others with this quote ever seem to conceive of the balance aspect of it that in fact drove Ben Franklin to make his remarks in his context -- a balance utterly missing from the freaks who think it's more than fine to steal millions of classified files and dump them everywhere just because they can.

That was why it was nice to get a new quotation for a change in this endless debate in which so many technocommunists meet their bedfellows among the technolibertarians and smash the moderate middle.

Here's "Gary in VA" commenting in The New York Times, quoting Learned Hand, and asking the same question I've been asking about where the cases are in the Snowden affair:

I have yet to see even one instance where tangible harm occurred due to loss of "privacy" in the N.S.A. effort. If we now live in a "police state," please tell me who the police are unlawfully arresting.

What I do think about is the image of the child blown up by terrorists at the Boston Marathon. His right to life should trump your right to "privacy."

Years ago a federal judge named Learned Hand wrote something I wish my libertarian/anarchist friends would consider:

"And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few - as we have learned to our sorrow."

    Aug. 9, 2013 at 12:33 a.m.

An important thing to remember about Learned Hand was that he was no conservative -- and in fact, ruled to protect freedom of the press as the US entered World War I, when the government wanted to ban a revolutionary magazine:

Hand made his most memorable decision of the war in 1917 in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten.^[81] After the country joined the war, Congress had enacted an Espionage Act that made it a federal crime to hinder the war effort. The first test of the new law came two weeks later when the postmaster of New York City refused to deliver the August issue of The Masses, a self-described "revolutionary journal". The edition contained drawings, cartoons, and articles criticizing the government's decision to go to war.^[82]

The publishing company sought an injunction to prevent the ban, and the case came before Judge Hand.^[83] In July 1917, he ruled that the journal should not be barred from distribution through the mail. Though The Masses supported those who refused to serve in the forces, its text did not, in Hand's view, tell readers that they must violate the law. Hand argued that suspect material should be judged on what he called an "incitement test": only if its language directly urged readers to violate the law was it seditious—otherwise freedom of speech should be protected.^[84] This focus on the words themselves, rather than on their effect, was novel and daring; but Hand's decision was promptly stayed, and later overturned on appeal.^[85]

Later, his distinction regarding "imminence" or immediacy found its way into law as Brandenberg v. Ohio. This Supreme Court protection of speech, is, of course, the thin membrane behind which Julian Assange or Bradley Manning might hide if only the free speech aspect of their actions is regarded (and of course, that's not all there is to their cases, and they are not free-speech heros or journalists).

Hand went on to fight red-baiting, protecting socialist dissent, and so on. That's why his quote here about security is so important -- he was a very vigorous free speech combatant.

 

The Night Telegraph Editor

Jack Binnes, wireless operator, 1909 from US government archives.

Bob Greene at the Wall Street Journal has a sort of curmudgeonly grouse about boys of summer in our time staring at their gadget screens -- instead of keeping their ear to radios.

I found this a touching image, even so:

The news will find you when it needs to.

Today, though, we can't seem to stop ourselves from incessantly searching for it, stalking it. All those screens that have come to dominate our lives—it is as if we have assigned ourselves to be night-telegraph editors on some mythical newspaper, nervously surveying the wires full-time, fretting that being a few minutes or even a few seconds late discovering the latest smidgen of information will put us at a disadvantage. Genuine news, entertainment news, news of our acquaintances that they post obsessively online: Because the news of the wider world, and of our considerably narrower personal worlds, is so ceaselessly available to us, we seem unable or unwilling to look away.

I couldn't help thinking that the engrossment in the little screens in fact does enable us to look away from situations like Syria.

But yes, we are all busy breathlessly editing our own mythical newspapers, with our green caps screwed on our heads to keep out the glare of the lamp.

I was struck by the imagine of that night telegraph-editor. If you do a search of that phrase, all you find are obituaries of old newsmen now.

You can find pictures then of telegraph operators, which is a step removed from telegraph editor.

That got me to thinking further of my great-grandfather on my mother's side. For some reason I never understood, he picked up stakes at his Columbus, Ohio farm and came to New York City when the stock market was crashing on Wall Street, bringing his large family. Maybe he already though the Great Recession was going to come to his farm. He got a job, probably through some Irish friend or something, as a telegraph operator on Wall Street and supported his family -- I think they lived in New Jersey. Maybe he looked something like this young fellow in the picture, but that was 20 years before the crash. In any event, stocks may crash but they would still need telegraph operators to report it all, it was probably a secure job to be in.

Then I started reading about the early days of radio and Wall Street and found this:

The Work of Wall Street, Sereno S. Pratt, 1909, pages 133-139:
CHAPTER  X
TOOLS  OF  WALL  STREET
    "OUR current political economy," wrote Walter Bagehot thirty years ago, "does not sufficiently take account of time as an element in trade operations." It can not be said, however, that Wall Street does not take account of time. Speed with accuracy, promptness in all things--this is the cornerstone of modern finance. Most of the tools of Wall Street are time-savers. The six most important are:

    The stock indicator.
    The telegraph.
    The cable.
    The telephone.
    The news slips.
    The market reports.

The issue of speed of news affecting stock transactions is back, of course, if it never left, as the hyper-speed of the Internet and computers has affected the market.

The rest of the history there is fascinating, including the bit about lawsuits involving competitors trying to publish the stock ticker information jealously guarded by the company the stock market owned itself -- and the eventual settlement with both news to subscribers and publication for the general public. The business newspaper in part evolved as the wrapping around the stock ticker in a way.

New York Times telegraph room. Photo by Marjory Collins. Copy boys are chatting in the background and in the back room you can see the wire service tickers as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barrett Brown Gets His Trial Postponed and Hacker-Enabling Journalists Get a Muzzle

Barrett Browning is not going to get as speedy a trial as some had hoped. But not his lawyers, who are deliberately trying to delay and postpone, citing all kinds of things -- because among other things they can have most of the sentence then disappear in pre-trial time served.

Dallas News reports about the judge's stay on Brown and his lawyers further contacting the media.

Gosh, that sounds like some sort of evil suppression of free media, no? I mean, slamming journalists for doing their jobs, like Russia and the Central Asian regimes do, barring reporters from "divulging the secrecy of the investigation" pre-trial -- and thereby banning legitimate discussion of crimes or state claims of crimes.

But I'm not sure this is going to pass the sniff test as a First Amendment case and I don't see anybody rushing to make it into one.

That's because the lawyers and support committees are deliberately whipping up a media circus which really does then bring into question the ability of the trial to be impartial.

Brown's attorneys are scrambling to make it seem like their client and they aren't the ones getting the story in the media, but that's pretty threadbare.

Not surprisingly, although the court document doesn't mention him by name, one of the articles the judge has found tendentious and prejudicial is the article by Glenn Greenwald -- while in jail, Barrett Browning called up GG and gave him an interview. Not surprisingly, Greenwald tried to make it out that this indicted felon was some sort of persecuted dissident.

It's like the free-for-all that Prof. Peter Ludlow has indulged in trying to exonerate this creep at the Nation.

The idea that you can be in pre-trial detention and get to whip up a media barrage in your defense by getting the hacker-enabling journos like Greenwald and non-journalist linguistic-professor propagagndists like Ludlow to make noise sort of obviates the whole point of jail, you know?

And jail is where Barrett Brown needs to be given the charges against him, which, of course are not yet proven in a court of law.

Is Barrett Brown  a journalist because he started some drug-fueled paranoia-induced database of "facts" on security firms and made a lot of incoherent Youtubes? No, he's just a hacker who blogs a lot. Should bloggers, too, be protected for their journalism, in whatever form it takes?

No, not if it takes the form of linking to pages with stolen credit card numbers and bragging about it, threatening federal agents, obstructing justice -- oh, and hacking into other people's servers to "spill their secrets".

Hacking isn't just lazy journalism; it's crime.

 

 

Related articles

The Strange Story of Barrett Brown and Peter Ludlow

Jailed Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms

6/21/13 Peter Ludlow

The Strange Case of Barrett Brown by Peter Ludlow