She gets much farther in the debunking of the WikiLeaks cult of
personality than many of her counterparts on the left in the United
States who are still mindlessly boosting it as part of some "national
conversation" blah blah that we all must be coerced into having by
destructive hackers...
But she repeats a number of these WikiLeaks memes that I think are
really for the birds -- and in fact, some more thoughtful "progressives"
in the US even get -- i.e. the notion that WikiLeaks "caused" or
"brought" about the Arab Spring. I find this arrant nonsense. Aside from
the fact that it discounts the very real analog acts of people like
Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set
himself on fire like an Arab Jan Palach, and all the demonstrators who
took such risks in really very analog ways, going to prison or being
killed, it just plain wildly exaggerates itself as some historical force
(as Marxists often do). You can attribute the Arab Spring to many
things -- I start with Kofi Annan's report on the failure of human
development in the Arab world -- which was devastating to the Arab
League which had put so much stake in having the UN cover its crimes in
the Israel/Palestine conflict. Then I got to the wheat shortage in
Russia -- or rather, the forest fires in Russia that caused the Kremlin
to decide to ban its exports to wheat -- which affected its subsidized
exports to Egypt. Then most people blame the US for subsidizing these
despotic regimes but also serving as the basis of the Internet
revolution facilitated by American IT companies that was used to spark
but not always sustain the revolutions.
I supported Assange before I ever met him. I knew of his work when he
was arrested on allegations of sexual assault in late 2010 and held in
solitary confinement and I decided to stand bail for him because I
believed that through WikiLeaks he was speaking truth to power and had
made many enemies. Although I had concerns about what was rumoured to be
a nonchalant attitude towards redactions in the documents he leaked, as
well as some doubts about the release of certain cables – for example,
the list of infrastructure sites vital to US national security – I felt
more passionately that democracy needs strong, free media.
Accountability and democratic choice, I deeply believe, are guaranteed
by rigorous scrutiny only. As Manning wrote, “without information you
cannot make informed decisions as a public”.
As editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Assange had created a transparency
mechanism to hold governments and corporations to account. I abhor lies
and WikiLeaks exposed the most dangerous lies of all – those told to us
by our elected governments. WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes,
torture and cover-ups. It showed that we were lied to about the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan; that the US military had deliberately hidden
information about systematic torture and civilian casualties, which were
much higher than reported. It revealed that Bush and Obama had
sanctioned the mass handover of Iraqi prisoners of war from US troops to
the Iraqi authorities, knowing they would be tortured.
There is so much here that needs refutation -- and I just don't have the time. No, not refutation that the American did bad things like start wars or turn people over for torture. But refutation that it took WikiLeaks for us to find that out, or that WikiLeaks was somehow instrumental in the American people's understanding of these wars.
But
let's start with "Collateral Murder" -- which is not murder, and
doesn't prove murder or intent in a tragic incident in which American
soldiers who had spent a day skirmishing with insurgents wind up killing
civilians because they think they are an armed group -- and indeed some
of them are carrying weapons, even though some are journalists carrying camera tripods.
This
is a piece of blatant, tendentious propaganda as I've explained in the
debate with Jacob Appelbaum. It's just not credible. Neither Reuters or
any major human rights groups has called it murder much less called it a
"war crime," even if they have called for an investigation of the
tragedy or have called it "excessive use of force".
I'm not aware of any systematic and credible, independent, non
"progressive" study of the war materials in WikiLeaks -- in fact, a lot
of it has been ignored even by anti-war boosters, because it's raw
material without context and without analysis.
Khan claims glibly -- without ever having done any of this close textual
analysis herself to my knowledge -- that this trove of material somehow
constitutes proof of American war crimes, American torture, etc.
Well, if this is the case -- once again, nobody needed WikiLeaks to supply this. And it is indeed deliberately exaggerated -- and needs much more honest handling of this material than they've given it.
A
real problem with the intelligentsia in Europe -- and particularly in
England, Germany, France and the Netherlands -- is that they see the US
in a caricature form, largely from TV serials or sensational news, and
imagine it's a country of rabid Confederate SUV drivers fatly shopping
at Wal-mart as they clutch their guns in bitterness.
As I explained to Amnesty back when they put out that ridiculous claim
that American prisoners were "like the GULAG," the US has a huge
industry of people actively -- ferociously -- fighting Guantanamo and
every conceivable prison abuse real or potential or imagined -- and with
great success, quite frankly, in getting cases reversed and laws
changed. If Guantanamo isn't closed, AI should look to its own fired
gender advisor and the Cageprisoners scandal first before imagining that
no one cases about stopping torture in America in Guantanamo.
There's
this sense in Khan's rant that America "needs" this "prying open" of
its government so that people can "see what's being done in their name"
(the WikiLeaks slogan) -- but of course, long before any of WikiLeaks or
Assange or Manning, lawyers and human rights activists were busy
exposing things like torture at Abu Ghraib -- that's how the world knows about it.
American civil society and independent media are intact, you know.
The idea that we can accept as a "democracy-builder" this narcissistic brute that she herself exposes as a fraud is pretty droll.
You
hardly need Manning telling you that you need information to make
"informed decisions" when you have a long history of people like Anthony
Lewis or Floyd Abrams or even Daniel Ellsberg, who himself never
understands why he really is worlds apart from the snivelling Manning.
And...the
"most dangerous lies of all" are those "told by our elected
governments"? Really, Jemima? More dangerous that the lies told by
unelected governments like Iran, or only corruptly-elected governments
like Russia? Truly? The truth can out in a democratic society with a
free media and free institutions like Congress and the judiciary. It
can't do that in Russia. And the implications for society of having
"democracy" achieved by coercion and secretive hacking with those who
allied themselves with the Kremlin are pretty repulsive.
I suspect we are seeing the WikiLeaks adventure end as it began -- in the Kremlin agitprop department.
Accordingly, a lot more critial review of WikiLeaks "revelations" is in order -- it
is not a good idea that was badly executed, any more than communism is.
The darknet is something I've raged against in the past -- not only because it harbours child pornographers, illegal drug dealers, credit-card thieves, etc. but because it's the playground of those pompous, arrogant unaccountable anarchist hackers who think none of those crimes matter as long as information gets to be free -- and they get to be licentious.
The darknet is usually associated with Tor -- but it's a lot more than Tor, as it has other competitors to Tor with chat anonymizer services like Crypto Cat.
The darknet has a surprising number of boosters among the next layer beyond the criminals and loons in the crypto kiddie IRC chat room -- it has people like Rebecca MacKinnon and Clay Shirky and of course Dave Winer singing its praises and demanding that it be brought into existence. They all see it as not only a haven for revolutionaries they golf-clap or cheer openly at home and abroad, they see it as the wave of the future -- that Wired State I warn against which they love because they see themselves as the elite who will run it.
If the FBI "cleanses" Tor by taking out some of the CP sites, they will privately be relieved, but they don't see Tor as a problem or the entire darknet concept as a problem.
Adrian Chen is one of those journalists who has to cheerlead Anonymous (even if he criticizes them a little and gets hacked by them, too) and WikiLeaks and hackers galore because otherwise, he couldn't get enough tidbits to report on them. I hate that. I see that every single journalist who reports on Anonymous is infected with the immorality of cheerleading for them in some way (*waves to Andy Greenberg*) because they need proximity to get stuff and that trumps their better ethics. That's why I think blogging, even if it is condemnatory and even hortatory, has to be an integral part of covering these monsters because otherwise, there's no moral compass.
His piece has graphic that makes it look like he, as a good journalist, is now going to shine the light of investigative scrutiny on the darknets -- but then he goes and whines that a lot of good...Polish alternative literary sites...or something...are taken down along with the CP.
All the comments saying things like "I don't care if they take down some of the other Tor sites to get rid of CP, so be it" -- are shaded grey, "in moderation".
Here's mine:
Oh,
come now, the darknet isn't the ne plus ultra. There's lots more than
child pornography on it — there's also hackers hawking stolen credit
cards, the crashing Bitcoin empire, illegal drugs — and of course, that
style of revolutionary hacker anarchy that is really antithetical to our
human rights.
The darknet is unaccountable and non-transparent, even as it forces
other people to be transparent — through coercive hacking and anarchist
collectives like WikiLeaks. I don't see why liberals or even
"progressives" should be cheering a "privacy for me, not for thee"
fortress. You know, even Jemima Khan of the New Statesman, a former
Assange supporter, has "gotten it" about Assange and WikiLeaks. Why does
it take American hipsters so long?
And not weeping with such sillyness for the darknet. Never trust a
burning man*. Since when does destructiveness get to masquerade as
innovation?
* * *
Dave Winer said at that PDF forum three years ago that "journalism was no longer possible" (!) because Amazon had refused to host WikiLeaks on its servers -- a decision I applaud, of course, and which shows the maturity of the Internet business emerging out of the Wild West phase, not some sell-out to the Man as this former Firesign Theater regular imagines (and I was a big fan of Firesign Theater, it's sad...)
He must be furious at how Bezos has now bought the Washington Post, ostensibly to keep making journalism possible, I suppose...although I think it's more about just buying a lobbying organ for Silicon Valley -- er, Seattle/Portlandia (Wyden is never enough).
The coincidental presence of the hacker and WikiLeaks promoter Jacob Appelbaum in Hawaii in April 2012 and April 2013 when Edward Snowden was also in Hawaii has been noted. Formally, Appelbaum said he first heard of Appelbaum around May 2013 and did an interview of him for Der Spiegel together with Laura Poitras published in May 2013. He makes it seem like he "didn't know his name" or "didn't know who it was" when evidently discussing this source with Laura Poitras, who says she first heard from Snowden in January 2013.
But to recruit and vet Snowden, organize the hack, discover the files, torrent the files out or download them to thumb-drives, then secure them somewhere in encrypted form -- and talk about all this in carefully encrypted e-mail -- takes time and effort. That's why some of us think that Assange and others from WikiLeaks, their hacker helpers and Snowden had to have been in touch long before this.
Snowden came to Hawaii in 2012 and was in Hawaii in April 2012 working for Dell. His girlfriend came to live with him a month later.
I've added a comment there pointing out that Appelbaum himself tweeted that he was in Hawaii on his birthday in April 2012. That's why it seemed so disingenuous when he created this elaborate cover story of his friends paying for a birthday trip to Hawaii in April 2013, his lifelong dream -- i.e., if he had just had the lifelong dream the year before, what's up?
There's more to surf on all this, and Streetwise and LibertyLynx came up with the Spring Break of Code, a coding retreat organized by Moxie Marlinspike, a prominent hacker and colleague of Appelbaum's who, like Appelbaum and Poitras, has been stopped and searched at the border when returning to the US from abroad because of his proximity to hacking stories and WikiLeaks. Also involved inthe SBOC was Claudine Corbett, a brainy female scientist also interested in hacking and encryption -- rare in this field -- with numerous talents who also hung out with the MIT hackers while there. She goes way back with Appelbaum; here they are lounging around at Burning Man.
Streetwise discusses whether all of these people are "in on it" -- "it" being a plot to recruit and help Snowden. Appelbaum mentions that he had "20 friends" with him -- one or some of whom paid for the trip -- and we know Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing, his long-time friend was also in Hawaii at the same time swimming with the sea turtles -- and other friends can be teased out of the retweets and the Instagrams. Corbett has an Instagram of Appelbaum standing in the exotic Hawaiian flora with the fog rising...perhaps Snowden will emerge any moment.
On the SBOC website, one receipient of the grant to come and code for a week "for the cause" (which is, roughly speaking, encrypting people with anarchist views who want to overthrow governments and create some utopian society with Bitcoins and whatnot) is a guy named Tyler who writes an interesting blog:
This is the sort of rabid stuff the young hackers write these days:
I know very well that each and every crisis of modernity is
concentrating, concatenating, and seating more deeply into everyday
life. I know the struggles of the world’s unseen and unheard are being
subsumed – appropriated – under and into the framework of a liberal
democracy, leaving those at the periphery still under the yoke of
capital. The Right further entrenches itself into political discourse,
both in the United States, and (more extremely) abroad (Finland, Greece,
… et al.). The Left is no less problematic: reiterating the petty
values of social democracy, negotiating the terms of our entrapment
within capitalism. Every season, new horrors fall from the clouds and
rise from the seas as industrial civilization demonstrates that
terraforming can also work in reverse. The world’s genetic library – the
most prime commons, if ever one existed – is rapidly contracting via
extinction, privatization, and engineering. The colossal failure of
ideology in the twentieth century has left the radicals of today no
other choice but to see themselves as “post-ideological”. This is a
deeply concerning conundrum, as ideology survives in post-ideology,
different only to the extent that it is less apparent. Yes, it seems
like we are living in end times – an entire era of Apocalypse – made only more insidious by our optimism in its shadow.
Oh, dear. Spoiled kids, raised on the Internet, like in a barn. Where's Dad?
But then he gives a clue as to who might be at the beach party:
Personally, I’ve tried to live according to that principle – right now,
I’m a high-school dropout sitting amongst current and former employees
of Twitter, an MIT-educated theoretical physicist, globe-trotting
journalists, renown mathematicians, and emerging prodigy developers.
The people who won the contest for the all-expense-paid coding retreat -- their bios are on the site -- don't fit all these descriptions. Former employees of Twitter? who is that? The guy who used to try to make it run on Ruby on Rails? The MIT theoretical physicist is probably Corbett, but who are the globe-trotting journalists. Laura Poitras? Glenn Greenwald doesn't seem to have been in Hawaii, and Spencer Ackerman told me he was last in Hawaii in 1997 or something, although he has relatives there...
A journalist visiting Open Whisper Systems’ Spring Break of Code
commented that she expected more philosophy, politics, and conversation.
After all this group is composed of people who are not only
technologists, but also open source evangelists, activists, and
humanists.
But that could be Xeni Jardin who also wrote of being in Hawaii at the same time, or anybody else in the list who happens to be a journalist -- which in their world, could mean "blogger." But probably not Quinn Norton, because she doesn't get along with Appelbaum, and while she runs with the same MIT hacker/open source/crypto/WikiLeaks crowd, I don't see any evidence she was there.
Anyone is welcome to go mine all this endlessly and built NodexL graphs like Katy Pearce to their heart's content.
The thing is, I think what Appelbaum has done here is created a kind of Tor-like obfuscation, or a sort of jungle print, in which lots of people are doing lots of things and then they all have alibis. The SBOC may have been conceived right at the time Laura Poitras said she first heard from Snowden, but that could be a coincidence. Or it could be the effort to make a cover of an innocent idealistic activity that would serve as a cover for the contact with Snowden.
But really, the problem is that while we know Snowden was in Hawaii, he can't be confirmed as placed in Maui, about 90-100 miles away, via boat or via a short and cheap plane ride, at the SBOC or Jacob's birthday party.
Well, there are some tantalizing clues left by the also-wiped narcissistic blog of Snowden's girlfriend. Lindsay.
While she took down her blog, some of it is still in Google cache, and some of the photos survive still in her Instagram and Flickr accounts. I didn't see any photos of Maui in there matching the dates in question, but there is this, in Google cache, from the now-deleted blog:
Rear Portrait | L's Journey | Page 3 www.lsjourney.com/category/rear-portrait/page/3/ Posted on September 21, 2012 by lsjourney .... I'm not sure I can really consider my trip to Maui, and the fun that occurred on Oahu afterward, as a vacation.
The date isn't right, but maybe she wrote it later while making the album. Or maybe that date fits with another item on the page that is just truncated here in Google's cache. The fact is, she did make a trip to Maui -- not unusual if you live in Honolulu and like to make photographs for a hobby or even profession.
Yet it was a trip that she didn't consider as a vacation -- maybe because she went with her bf Edward, and had his nose in the laptop the whole time...
There's another interesting ghost of a clue in Instagram search that now no longer hooks up to anything:
coral jj | Search.Stagram - Discover Instagram Photos (beta) search.stagram.com/tag/coral%20jj That #coral at the bottom of the #ocean in #maui is sharp! ... #coral #stripes and a #blazer help too #jj #photooftheday @photooftheday #lsjourney #hintofpink.
Those hashtags include #lsjourney, which is the name of her blog. But again, this may not fit with any entry she made, as search phrases can render in Google cache that are attached to other things on that Instagram page with those tags, i.e. somebody else's photo of Maui (which is what it looks like).
Flight was the theme of my weekend. Okay, who am I kidding? Flight is
the theme of nearly all my recent days. Maybe I just have hollow bones! E
flew off Saturday evening giving me six hours to kill before I had to
pick up DucatiD from the airport. Luckily Hawaii has good food and
friends to pass the time. With E soaring through the sky and friends
dropped off, I snuggled to sleep in my empty home. Only to start Sunday
circus with another airport pickup — taxi license in my future? Chisel
arrived home in perfect time for silks and acro in the park. I commend
him for being alert and willing enough to play after traveling all day.
We ran the sun down and had our usual fruit-filled dinner while being
serenaded by our new favorite local guitarist Greencard. One final
pitstop on the weekend’s run around schedule, was dropping Chisel off at
his vacant home. Where we found his jeep had a flat tire. In true duo
fashion we tackled the tire task. And as I was putting the final
tightening touch on the lug nuts, I slipped and punched Chisel’s jeep
with my face. My clumsy super power always shows up at the most
appropriate times. I can now check off jeep face-punching from my to-do
list. Thankfully the resulting black eye is faint enough that I don’t
look too abused. Nothing a little sunshine and arnica won’t solve.
Spring has sprung in its jumbling-of-life manner. Everyone has been
coming or going lately. Perhaps it’s my time to mix things up and be
chauffeured next week. My time to soar away.
So...Edward flew off somewhere on April 1st; Appelbaum's birthday beach bash was on or around April 3rd, his 30th birthday.
This entry sounds like LS was pressed into service picking up and dropping off a lot of people -- I don't know who all the references relate to, but maybe they are the "20 friends".
But this is April 2013, where he's flying...somewhere. Maybe just 90 miles away to Maui?
The next entry, showing LS posing half-naked with a stuffed turtle, also speaks of how she is alone:
Just me and turtle for the next week or two. If you don’t have a house
turtle I highly recommend procuring one. They are comforting and make a
house feel like a home. And I will surely need his snuggle powers this
month with all that is going down. April is turning into spring cleaning
on crack — houses, travel, relationships — and the month hasn’t even
begun! E is leaving tomorrow for two weeks of business on the mainland.
If you know of any fun slumber parties going down over the next two
weeks count me in! There may be a ticket to the east coast with my name
on it somewhere in those two weeks or potentially later in April/early
May (you know I’m a last minute decider). On top of mainland adventures
there is this pesky task of moving. We just happen to be moving two
streets away from our current house. Which is convenient, but of course I
would prefer a hillside abode in the city. So now I have to coordinate
the next month. Rendezvous with E on the east coast and make it back in
time to move; pack the house and forego seeing E for a month; plan my
east coast visit to fall around the time of family/friends’ travel
plans; forget it all and head for antarctica — the options are endless.
And when the options are endless my indecisive nature completely shuts
down, leaving me at the mercy of random chance.
But that entry says he is going "to the mainland," which sounds like the States. Was this for training at BHA?
Could he have done both -- gone to Maui *and* gone to the mainland?
This week or two in late March/early April must be covered somewhere in all the news coverage of Snowden's work history, but I haven't seen it (i.e. it's not here).
Remember when everybody said Amazon would fail because it was just too costly to maintain all those servers with all those books advertised for sale and it just couldn't pay for itself? Remember when it went for years without a profit? (And when people said the entire Internet would fail.) People just wouldn't send payments over the Internet or shop that way, and it will go broke, they said. Then there was the dot.com bubble birst.
Of course, thanks to Amazon (and e-Bay and a few of those other early Internet merchants), we have a normal Internet now instead of a giant collective farm herding us into communes guided by "thought leaders". Good! To be sure, with each passing year, Amazon seems to be grabbing a bigger and bigger cut in fees from your used book sales...I believe the plan is to make the value of the hard-cover book so low -- lower than paper back -- that it will cost more to ship it by the old USPS than its worth, and people will move to Kindles. Already, you can see many books available for one cent...
Even so, this is not an instant process nor one that can invade every aspect of life.
THE INTERNET IS A BIG TELEPHONE ATTACHED TO A BUNCH OF TRUCKS
While the Internet is properly described as a "series of tubes," I've always thought it was practical to explain that the Internet is really just a big telephone hooked up to a bunch of trucks.
Yes, there are pictures and movies and text on this big telephone, and that makes it "special,"and people will go on living in that "cyberspace" that Evgeny Morozov says doesn't exist, consuming content and chatting on the Internet that Morozov also says doesn't really exist as a human artifact -- so much so that he is as scared of it as a ghost, and keeps it locked up for a good portion of every day, with the screw driver he could use to open the safe thrown into the safe for good measure...
But when it comes time to explain "what is it that the Internet does," you have to concede that what it does is make it easier for you to browse books (or vacuum cleaners) online on Amazon.com, read some reviews, flip through some of the pages, then order it either new from one of the big box warehouses or from some people in another state who send it to you via the US Post Office.
Either way you slice it, it will come to you via a truck -- trucks move more than 2/3 of America's freight. Without those trucks, the Internet wouldn't mean anything to you. Most people don't get a date or a quick sexual encounter via the Internet, and the movies they watch or the games they play or the chat they have about their cats aren't terribly fulfilling. The Internet delivers when it delivers -- when you get some bargain -- like a peacock purse from Kings Way constantly thrust in your face by Facebook. No. I didn't mean that. Because I would never, ever buy that peacock purse thrust at me by Facebook. However, my daughter did find this cool canvas tote with a drawing of Medusa on it at etsy.com
If you have family members who drive trucks, or who drive around fixing server farms for big news companies, or even just printers of Catholic Church bulletins, you would understand this basic truth about the Internet and about how other things work and why they never seem to "go on" the Internet.
SPECIAL DELIVERY
So when we're told that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for its "delivery system," I might almost believe it, although I have to wonder if the system that involves 11 year old boys throwing the Washington Post on porches in suburbia, which hooks up to stay-at-home moms driving to get bundles of papers, and union trucks delivering those bundles can also handle vacuum-cleaners. Well, maybe books.
I think some church bulletin printers can stay in business because there are still pizza parlours, funeral parlours, lawyers, clothing stores and beauticians who find it profitable to place ads in them. Someone might invent an app to replace the church bulletin, but most people like the process of first getting the folded paper from their fellow parishioner and chatting after the service, then taking it home and affixing it to the refrigerator with a magnet where they might say one of the prayers, remember the holy days, and use the pizza coupon or call the lawyer.Have you ever tried to throw away a church bulletin? Your conscience will twinge, and you will read that homily you skipped and curse yourself for missing the deadline on the sub sandwich offer.
But it's about systems for storage and forwarding -- connection.
SERVER FARMS
First, there's former Amazon employee and current Googler Steve Yegge's
notion that Bezos has this fabulous far-reaching futurist top-down view
of everything that makes him brilliant. (Yes, he was an early investor
in Second Life.)
Here's the thing that Yegge says that's important in terms of the Wired State -- servers and data:
You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure
they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be
transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they
have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce,
and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o'
other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the
backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal
favorite of the bunch.
WASHINGTON HOOK-UP
Maybe when you buy the Washington Post you buy the center of all the relational data of lobbying and politics in people's heads who work there... You literally buy the connections to power...
Fast explains then that we're not talking about the newspapers rolled up going on the porch:
When you look at these as capital investments in the context Yegge
offers, you can start to think of the newspaper as a computing
infrastructure for distributing information. The Washington Post has one of the best APIs
of any newspaper; it’s a distribution mechanism for short-form content.
(Although reportedly the team that developed the API was not sold to Bezos
as part of the deal.) Purpose-built distribution networks for different
kinds of content are beginning to solidify into infrastructure, just as
e-commerce did 10 years ago. And if we’ve learned anything about Bezos,
it’s that he loves to own his own infrastructure and leverage it into
new kinds of business we can’t even imagine right now
Well, watch this space.
I personally don't think Citizen Bezos bought this bauble (for one percent of his $25 billion personal net worth) for merely tinkering with "short form" (news apps) or "long form" (books) content and "delivery systems" in the sense Fast is describing it. Come now, there are better APIs in the world than the Washington Post's -- oh, Amazon has them lol.
I think it more about the quest for political power that Silicon Valley has long wanted -- they're not content to just make the gadgets that other people who are in power are using to get and stay in power, they're not content to just connect everybody else, they want to be integrated as part of the process. So it's not just the president's Blackberry (and maybe he, too, converted to a smart-phone by now), not just the president's dinner with the Valley tycoons, not just the help Obama enlisted from Google, Facebook and other engineers to win the election, but being in the institutions themselves.
THAT OTHER SILICON VALLEY BAUBLE HATES ON BEZOS
The New Republic -- itself an example of Silicon Valley gobbling up a venerable East Coast establishment -- to my enduring sorrow -- is hating on Bezos doing exactly the same thing they did.
Is this the technocommunist fighting the technolibertarian? I think so -- there has always been a struggle for the soul of Silicon Valley between those who want to steal from the middle-class and give to the poor (e-Bay) or make the middle and lower class work for free to provide content and feed a new oligarch class (Facebook and Twitter) and those who sell widgets and make money the old-fashioned way (Apple) and those trying to combine all of these things (Google).
The TNR piece by Mark Tracy on Bezos "murky politics" translates to the technocommunist's aversion for people who don't want excessive taxation of the rich and his lament that Bezos is "no George Soros or Sheldon Adelson". Even so, Tracy thinks that as corporate-oriented as he is, Bezos might take aim at the "conservative" (i.e. not cravenly "progressive") elements of Washpo:
Bezos has also announced there will be no layoffs from the Post’s staff of 2,000. If I were a Post
employee who does not believe Bezos when he claims he will not meddle, I
would probably be most scared if I were one of the editorial staffers
who have fostered a distinctly conservative editorial page whose columnists include Obama administration “critic-in-chief” Charles Krauthammer; Bush administration staffers Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen; false-balance-peddlinghawk Fred Hiatt (also the page’s editor); former New Republic editor Charles Lane, who consistently (and I speak only for myself) takes vintage “even the liberal New Republic” contrarianism about three steps too far; racial profiling enthusiasts Richard Cohen and Kathleen Parker; and serial climate-change-denialist George F. Will. Them I imagine Bezos not jibing with.
If Bezos gets rid of these people -- then, see what I mean about how we need a new magazine. Tracy forgot to bas Jennifer Ruben, the in-house neo-con.
Bezos can be expected to hew to the line of the other Silicon Valley "thought influencers" who argue for net neutrality or more visas for engineers or good relations with China, where the manufacturing base of Silicon Valley is located.
But one very important thing that Bezos decided, which puts him in the company of those non-progs that Tracy and other TNR writers so loathe is that he removed WikiLeaks from his servers. Good! That was absolutely the right thing to do. When Sen. Lieberman asked publicly why Amazon was storing the stolen classified cables that Bradley Manning had hacked with Julian Assange's connivance, and invoked Amazon's own terms of service, which prohibit uploading content that is not your own and distributing it, Bezos to his credit instantly got it and blocked Wikileaks from his speedy server services -- a decision he has maintained to this day and which I hope he never goes back on.
Perhaps we might even make a pillar of the community out of one of these Internet moguls yet.
EVIL BOX WAREHOUSES AND BRAND
Alec MacGillis, TNR senior editor, who once tried to spin Obama's socialism away as merely a kind of liberalism, speaks of the "shock and dolor" involved in Bezos' purchase. Oh, there's those evil box warehouses without the AC where ambulances stand by at the door to carry away fainting employees and where robots can't quite do the low-paid jobs yet but might soon. Oh, there's all this evil capitalist stuff.
Chris Hughes, who did the same thing to TNR -- and made himself editor which at least Bezos isn't going to do -- tries to spin this as "buying a brand". Ugh. Can't these people think in terms of anything but brands? There's no more uglier form of capitalism than technocommunism, you know? Because for them, brand is partiynost', party discipline...
The purchase does not include Foreign Policy -- not to be confused with Foreign Affairs -- which is that edgy hipster IR lounge for neo Real Politickers (which I happened to stop reading for 6 weeks and didn't miss it, and even The Cable and Democracy Lab don't hold me as they once did -- we need a new magazine.) Does that mean it is going to die and Blake Hounsell will have to stop tweeting? (Oh, wait, I am SO out of date. Blake is now at Politico, not FP. But...why can't Bezos buy Politico, too?)
OUR VERY INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE
James Fallow -- whose own magazine somehow got taken over by the Silicon Valley scientism virus even if a tycoon didn't buy it out I don't think is spouting nonsense.
For now I mean only to say: this is a moment that genuinely surprised
me. I think I'll remember where I was when I first heard the news -- via
Twitter! -- and I am sure it will be one of those
episode-that-encapsulates-an-era occurrences. Newsweek's demise, a long time coming, was a minor temblor by comparison; this is a genuine earthquake.
* * *
So let us hope that this is what the sale signifies: the beginning of a
phase in which this Gilded Age's major beneficiaries re-invest in the
infrastructure of our public intelligence. We hope it marks a beginning,
because we know it marks an end.
Yeesh. Yes, the Atlantic is now filled with open source loons like Alex Madrigal, and gaggles of young fangirlz gushing love for every single arrested hacker anarchist, as well as a stable of Realist and even pro-Kremlin authors on the foreign policy left over from FP.
If a denuded Washington Post now stuffed with "short content' online Amazon style is supposed to be our intellectual infrastructure, make me a new Internet please.
Pretty soon, like Roland LeGrande, my Second Life friend, they will be talking about Journalism-as-a-Service (JaaS, per Jeff Jarvis) just like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
I love this Washington Post article for the title alone -- Who is Jeff Bezos?
A possible downside, Friedlich said, is that “there is unquestionably
some element here of a highly successful guy buying a seat at the table.
Chris Hughes at The New Republic, John Henry in Boston, Jeff Bezos in Washington. Citizen Kane 2.0.”
Bezos provided a whopping $11 million to start the online virtual world of Second Life, where I still remain active with a small rentals business. I don't know if he saw it, as I do, as a kind of proving group for the whole web 2.0 movement, where many phenomena, good and bad, were tried first in this petri dish before expanding to the larger Internet. People think of Second Life as having failed years ago after its peak in 2007-2008 when a lot of marketing companies invaded it, but in fact it's going strong and I think represents the future of the Internet with payment systems and auction houses and oneline marketplaces for user-generated content in digital creations and services. I think most people have no idea that this world of some one million people with about 70,000 concurrency spread over even a smaller number of server clusters than it used to be (now 26,000 I believe, down from 30,000) actually turns a profit ($75 million a year) not only for its owners, but its users (who trade about $400 million every year).
That's incredible, on an Internet filled with technocommunism and "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Eventually, we will come out of this era of sterile collectivism, which is why Rod Humble has bought Desura.
Bezos also invested in another start-up of Second Life inventor Philip Rosedale, called Coffee & Power. It was sort of a job-space sharing and errands trading interface that eventually died when it couldn't get past the latte drinkers and coders in San Francisco to people who could really spend money on it -- and it was facing competition from similar jobs and errands boards. Rosedale has now moved on to make a better virtual world with another start-up called Hi Fidelity.
P.S. See below about how the cool kids are explaining to us that a) Amazon is not in Silicon Valley (snort) and that b) the Iceberg is buying the Titanic, yuck yuck.
And for good measure, note that Anonymous turns out to be misogynist and talking about "feminazis" -- surprise, surprise, for all those progs who thought Anonymous was just a fabulous tool to raise their women's rights issues around Steubenville.
Anonymous vicious attacked Israel recently, and even the lefty Atlantic had to say, cynically, "the always-classy Anonymous attacked Israel on Holocaust Day" -- which of course was deliberate.
Anonymous always likes to pretend that it's just a loose coalition of hackers, anyone can join for any reason, there is no leader, blah blah.
But not when there are accounts with names like Anonymous Operations and @Anon_Central with 170,000 followers. Of course the "ops" at Anonymous are heavily controlled by the deeply-concealed real leaders of Anonymous who approve ops that might get started "spontaneously" (often with a lot of nudging) and which may "go nowhere" or make their way up the ranks to huge visibility, depending on whether the top cadres of the real echeloned Anonymous cult movement clears it or not -- by which I mean not only retweeting, sometimes with armies of bots -- but killing off the people who propose the ops, sometimes by doxing them and hounding them off Twitter (as ultimately happened with #JusticeSec and #KnightSec around Steubenville, in case you weren't paying attention).
The early forms of Anonymous and 4chan we saw in Second Life were always antisemitic, grossly so, screaming antisemitic slogans, peppering sims with self-replicating textured blocks showing a Jewish man in a yarmulke crying, and combining it with their other slogans of "Pools Closed Due to AIDS" and all the other nonsense. The 4chan idiot who kept hounding me for years would join the open group "Jews in Second Life" and go hopping around naked with the title "Jew in SL" floating over his head and then grief people by prim littering and knocking them with giant dongs and then ultimately crashing the sims. The idea was to get people to hate the group by associating it (falsely) with griefing.
The ideology of antisemitism goes with the ideologies of far right and far left that the leaders of Anonymous in fact embraces.
At any time, any Anon could come forward and say, "Oh, but we repudiate that" or "we condemn that" or "Anon_Central, despite its name, doesn't represent us".
But they don't. That's why whenever you see things like the Anonymous-supported WikiLeaks claiming that obsessively anti-Israel pro-Kremlin provocateur Israel Shamir "doesn't work for us," you have to say, "But do you really disassociate yourselves from him and denounce the kinds of things he is saying and doing?" And the answer is: No.
Some reports indicate that outright antisemitic attacks in real life are falling, although they still remain the highest form of hate crime in America, according to the FBI. Yet if there are less cases of graffiti and hate speech and cemeteries disturbed, it has moved online where it replicates more easily and is so countless that it doesn't really figure in reporting. Every time some people try to object, others are sure to demand space for "legitimate criticism of Israel" -- although such malicious obsessiveness about the Israel/Palestine conflict is like no other on earth, including quite a few with many, many more victims -- starting with Syria and continuing on through Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia's North Caucasus.
In any event, what you can read here goes beyond anything that anyone would remotely call "legitimate criticism of Israel". It's vile antisemitism as it has always shown its ugly face, allied with communism, allied with "progressivism" and the left.
The Navy released this open-source software into the wild because they thought the best way for themselves to hide in their main purpose with it then -- reading and commenting on various websites -- was to hide themselves in the thicket of other people doing other things.
That this thicket wound up containing a hodge-podge of everything from hackers to child pornography distributors to illegal drug sellers to activists fighting the Egyptian or Iranian regime didn't matter to them because they had the same ethics-free approach to their tasks of the Internet as their fellow hackers in the civilian sector.
Some of those coders have left the Navy and some are still in it but not talking. Today, Jacob Appelbaum, the notorious bad boy of the crypto circuit and WikiLeaks promoter, is still the leader of it, although he -- and the software -- have fallen on hard times. Maybe it's time for new leadership -- and as one wit put it, Tor has been cleansed now, maybe it's a good time to start over.
Appelbaum is holed up in Berlin, telling his hacker friends and his semi-public talks, widely viewed on Youtube, that he is "forced" to stay there because he fears returning to America. He fears that analysts have now begun to analyze his digital trail, given his close association with the former NSA contractor and defector Edward Snowden, and are closing in on him.
But the loss of half of Tor's nodes and its immersion yet again in a large scandal related to child pornography could be another reason.
Of course, the Tor-ids are trying to spin this mightily. They've now succeeded in shifting the narrative to -- guess what! -- the NSA.
It seems the malicious script that they claim the FBI has injected into the users' browsers which is collecting the supposedly-anonymous users' online digital fingerprints is "phoning home" to the NSA.
Well, not exactly, as Darknet reported and then later Sean Gallagher finally corrects in an update. Hey, Sean (remember him?) is a little better than most of the tech press in that he first publishes the sensational traffic that plays into the geek party line and gets the stampede of traffic, then corrects it with more subtle points in an update or a second or even third story. Of course, he's not above making the most wild claims, as he did about me merely because I tried to get him to be a real journalist (I had high hopes then) and get to the bottom of my Mitt Romney's GOTV program called ORCA was such a fail-whale.
In any event, Jacob Appelbaum is being nearly mute about the mechanics of all this and is astoundingly unconcerned about his customers -- always the case with open source software where customer service is the last anything thinks about in "the community". You're supposed to fix it yourself.
Even when activists whose lives are at stake in dangerous countries, he defends his shoddy product. (And BTW, I'm not a big believer in making your social movement for change either dependent on the Internet or dependent on anonymity, and I'm defintely not for making it dependent on a bunch of arrogant coders.)
Tor began campaigning for more and more users lately, maybe, because like the Navy, they had more and more stuff they wanted to hide in the thicket, and wanted more and more people to snoop on -- as WikiLeaks snooped on activist movements when they first got them to use Tor.
So...all Jacob can say was "download our patch" to fix the embarrassingly flawed Tor Browser Bundle -- and then snort that the real problem was people who used Windows (!) and the java script that was vulnerable in the Mozilla browser to which the Tor program was attached. Solution: "disabled Javascript" advises the big guy.
Sigh.
So they went out to get more ordinary people who trusted them from the "word on the street," and now they're telling them to go fuck themselves if they use Windows, Mozilla, Java Script, ordinary people stuff instead of Google's Chrome or whatever Linux exotica that the nerds use.
These people are just outrageous in their utter lack of a moral compass. They invent new moral compasses daily that flutter like they're standing over the Sedona Vortex.
Rumor has it that the Tor network is a CIA honeypot, that all relays are
malicious, and that only bad people use Tor to do bad things online.
How much of this is true? How much can we say about the safety of the
network?
The safety of the Tor network has been a much discussed topic ever since
the onion routing network was deployed in September 2002. This talk
aims to answer the following questions: (1) How much diversity does the
network really have?, (2) Who runs the relays in the Tor network?, and
(3) What is being done about malicious relays?
Runa A. Sandvik
(@runasand) is a developer for the Tor Project. Her work for the Tor
Project includes forensic analysis of the Tor Browser Bundle and QA
testing of new releases, as well as project management, user support,
frequent traveling, and training. Runa has worked for the Tor Project
since 2009 and has given talks to a number of different audiences,
including activists, law enforcement, and university students.
Ouch.
If this were a corporation, Runa, in charge of QA, might be fired. But since it's open source anarchy, Runa will be given lots of hugs because mean boys will likely tweet nasty things to her after they find out they have been hosed by this FBI caper.
That is, if it was really an FBI caper, and not some enemy of Tor, or some internal dissident of Tor, or some other thing nobody can figure out.
It does look like the FBI put purple dye -- on some, but not all -- of Tor users because they probably got fed up with all its criminality. Tor has been used for everything from WikiLeaks to the child pornography ring broken up in Ireland.
I had to golf clap here with that defeat of hacker indifference and malign neglect to crime, because I find Tor reprehensible in every way and have for years, because of the culture of unaccountability and disregard for people, the arrogance, the revolutionary zeal decoupled from reality or real human rights -- the works.
But I'm generally not for using the methods of hackers against them. And I'm also mindful where all of this came from -- military hackers in the first place.
That is, it would be great if we had a Helsinki Accords in cyberspace -- but of course, that would involve pretending not only that Russia acted in good faith, but that people like Jacob Appelbaum acted in good faith, and that pretense would be huge...
Even so, ultimately, I think the solution to these hackers is not solved by hacking back. They will just spawn more hacker kidlets and hack moar. There's a different sort of ethical and culture task at hand that has to do with the larger society seeking a great accountability from hackers by rejecting their unfounded demand for anonymity. The entire class of computer professionals need to stop enabling and winking and nodding with their hacker bros, but condemn and discourage and disable them.It shouldn't be the NSA fearing that now they will have trouble recruiting hackers from "the community" to do their black-hat testing; it should be hackers fearing that no one will ever trust them again even to simulate evil.
There really should be an informed and vigorous debate on why we "need" a darknet. We don't. Autonomous realms like this on the Internet, as in real life, never end well.
I heard quite a remarkable story from a friend who goes by the name PhilipinNYC who posts on Talking Point Memo.
You know that cover of the New Yorker for August 5, with the failed, scandal-ridden mayor candidate Anthony Weiner astride the Empire State Building, the top of which serves as a phallic symbol? The artist is John Cuneo.
Weiner's got an i-phone in one hand and a glazed look in his eye and something in his right hand...you have to peer at it, but it's the slim top of the Empire State building -- the radio tower part -- snapped off. And the way it's drawn, it looks like a hypodermic needle.
So the message -- and it takes awhile to get it if you don't figure out right away that the snapped-off tower is a hypodermic needle -- is that Weiner suffers from sex addition over the Internet because he couldn't stop himself from sexting with young women even though it was costing him his career.
He had amazingly made a come-back that possibly he might have pulled off, given how cynical New Yorkers can be (and how much money was invested in his campaign chest already), but astoundingly, the news got out that he hadn't quit when he said he did. I guess he's cooked.
All well and good -- it's a great cover that really picks up the zeitgeist. Like a lot of good New Yorker art it has funny and serious elements -- that Empire-Building-as-phallic symbol, of course, and those police helicopters zooming in on him like he's King Kong. The funny bits contrast with that queasy feeling you get from thinking about someone being sex-addicted via their i-phone and unable to stop even if they were losing a chance at running the media capital of the world. Instead, Weiner had become the story...
Well, apparently, Apple found out about this art work in the making -- God knows how -- and acording to PhilipinNYC, hours before the magazine went to press, had their lawyers call the New Yorker's editors to complain about this widely-visible artistic setting for their product.
!!!
They didn't like the idea of their product being featured as something differing little a hypodermic needle -- although I think most people would have to admit that "addiction" is how they might describe their own constant handling and checking of their i-phone, even if they don't take pictures of their bits and tweet them around.
(You weren't going to mistake that syringe for a stylus on some old-fashioned Blackberry; although the smart phone could have been any brand...in fact it did look unmistakeably like an i-phone.)
This seems like an incredibly inappropriate thing for Apple to be doing, but they seem to be in crisis lately.
In any event, the New Yorker told Apple to fuck off, they were exercising their First Amendment right to put any damn cartoon they wanted to on the cover of their magazine.
In
one hand Mr. Weiner is holding a cell phone, in the other he is holding
the building's antenna, broken off of its perch. In his hand the
antenna looks like a syringe, making clear that the root of the whole
sad sexting story is Mr. Weiner's sex addiction.
I have learned that in the final hours before going to press the New Yorker was contacted by Apple Computer. Yes, Apple.
Apple
found the image problematic. This generated a flurry attorney action.
In the end the New Yorker told Apple that its cover was none of the
computer maker's damn business, and the cover ran.
My friend thinks this is about Silicon Valley becoming the new Spanish Inquisition, "Goodbye Rome, Hello Cupertino," he quips.
But, it's actually more complex than that. This is about a whole campaign that has gone on for the last 10-15 years -- a march through the institutions, if you will, or a demolition of the institutions -- of Silicon Valley against the East Coast establishment media. The need to control the media to control the politics, and they are no longer content to make the gadgets for power-holders, they want to hold power themselves. They want their agenda -- whether it's anti-CISPA, kill the NSA, impose net neutrality, good relations with China and Russia so they can keep supplying their companies with cheap labour overseas and migrant programmers who come here -- and so on.
The demolition of the old East Coast old boys' network of media establishments seems nearly complete -- the New York Times sold the Boston Globe but then we don't know what its next move might be to ensure its future.
Remember, Craigslist essentially destroyed an important part of the New York Times and other newspapers' revenue stream by offering free classified ads for everyone but charging for prostitutes' ads -- which the good newspapers wouldn't run. The Internet completely eroded the old newspaper media as we all know by moving news online where it could be easily copied and disseminated.
When you go back and look at that famous Youtube video of the 1981 TV newscast about the first newspaper printing out over the early Internet, you realize what's going on -- the coders had to make their own considerable costs as programmers, and the equipments' considerable cost, and the lines' considerable cost, go away somehow to get the whole Internet off the ground. Their costs had to be diguised or had to disappear. So the pressure then went on the content -- the newspaper itself. That had to be offered free, as a loss-leader to get people to start buying desktop computers (costly) and using them to download or read newspapers and other content. Voila...
That's not usually done -- but it shows you the mad desire for control these people have. Ever since, it has not only lurched to the "progressive" left even further, it has taken obvious positions for net neutrality, against SOPA, sympathetic to Google issues and so on. No harsh critique of Edward Snowden there, just mild stuff from Julia Ioffe.
This was one of the major disappointments of my life -- the New Republic
was always my intellectual home for decades, and now I am driven away.
Then of course we learned today that Citizen Bezos has bought out The Washington Post for only $250 million, a quarter of what Facebook paid for Instagram, the Instagram that Carlos Danger might have used to tart up his sexting.
I wonder why Pando Daily didn't get this story...why no one is following up...why the Apple-haters that are out in greater force now haven't retweeted it...and I guess it's because some stories just get a lot of help getting buried. I quizzed PhilipinNYC about the source and he would only say that the source was definitely unhappy about his leak to TPM...
I'm not surprised to see that Alex Howard, Zeynep Tufekci and the others in the Internet guru gaggle are once again stumping for selective Twitter censorship -- because once again, the situation we all face, who are far less cool and PC, is in the news because somebody more famous and more PC is hurt by Twitter.
It's funny that it took a politically-correct story of women being harassed even with rape and bomb threats (!) for wanting to put women's pictures on currency or other feminist causes to get Twitter to "do something".
Other things like the use of an antisemitic hashtag in France don't get the juices flowing for the devs in quite the same way.
Or the outrageous of swarms of Anonymous accounts during the Steubenville rape trial who harassed critical journalists and bloggers questioning their vigilantism. That wasn't popular for the "progressive" devs who think Anonymous is a lovely social movement that raises awareness.
Sometimes Twitter is good with abuse reports. When I've had accounts impersonate me not in a parody way (like @grumpcatfitz), but a
stalking way like @ca_fitzpatrick, now deleted, using a version of my name and picture and retweeting my
tweets only mangled, I've gotten them removed by faxing my license and a
letter.
I spent months fending off the most vicious, nasty, misogynist attacks on me by Anonymous in the KnightSec op around Steubenville; I was repeatedly doxed, showered with the most vile obscenities, and had films personally threatening me on Youtube (since removed). I had people threatening me violent attacks and claiming they were coming to my house personally to harass me. (Lee Stranahan of Breitbart, who also covered the Anonymous vigilantism in Steubenville, had even more nastiness because he has a high profile.)
None of this "stuck" for the moderators at Twitter -- at the most, if somebody used the @ sign at me too many times, like a spammer, that might get them suspended. The really obscene freak would be deleted from time to time -- but that was more likely for alt abuse, as he had been banned before originally. But people who doxed me and threatened to come to my home could do so with impunity because Twitter mods just don't care to rein in Anonymous and its spinoffs, and just don't think doxing is a thing.
I would periodically try to reason with the customer service people to no avail. It was my belief that if people were threatening to come to my home to harass me AND knew my home address; if they were constantly doxing me and linking to reams of stuff like the addresses of me and my relatives, some culled from online, some purloined through various triangulations and pestering - that they should have their accounts suspended or at least those tweets deleted. After all, Pastebin honours all requests to remove the doxes as fast as they are made and re-made -- it's really automated at this point.
I totally get it that free expression is a great thing and I uphold it. I draw the line at incitement of violence, and doxing because doxing exposes people to harm. It's no good saying "it's out there" or "it can be obtained" or "you put it there yourself". Few people concentrate all their personal data into one easy package for stalkers -- and they don't get to opt out of privacy-outing data-scraping sites like Spokeo. Few people put their direct phone line online or their personal email -- if someone gets that by persistent sleuthing and even calling around people with your name listed in the phone service until they hit you, that's harassment. The literalism and word-salading on this doesn't make it less so.
And automation is one thing that in a way saves us all from net nannies. These services like Twitter are so big and huge that they can't get to all the reports and they dump a lot of them for lack of matches to a set of criteria they have.
Basically, I think that the solution we should all have to everything we are unhappy about on Twitter is to block people we find annoying and not look at them. That way we can't show up in their feed -- unless we or they do vanity searches in the search box, as distinct from clicking on CONNECT to see people you want to see.
If you do vanity searches, and you see @ communications you don't like, it's your problem. Don't do vanity searches or ignore those people. You can be a wuss and report them for @ abuse, but that only feeds the entire misguided Twitter approach to all this by making it seems as if this is a legitimate thing to oppose.
Because all of us must retain the right to refer to others on Twitter by their Twitter names, and address them critically if we wish, especially if they are government officials and public figures and people of influence with clout. This is the right to assemble and seek redress of grievances from government, which I think has to extend to those in power increasingly which are other public actors.
In the early days of Twitter, I had a huge fight with Steve Gillmor about "block track" -- he wanted people to have the ability to block people they didn't like from appearing in their vanity searches. Track was a command in those days that now isn't used. I opposed this because I felt it increased the siloization of those big thought leaders like himself and Scoble, and let them get away with being radio stars and using Twitter like talk radio with only a few people able to call in. Twitter was not supposed to be that. Gillmor had me on his talk show and then shut off the microphone the minute I said something he didn't like. These people are AWFUL. They weld into the Internet and its culture the horrid intolerance they have for dissent as Silicon Valley technocommunists and technolibertarians (both are equally bad in this regard by merely dubbing as "trolling" anything they want to censor and thereby delegitimizing it as something akin to spam).
But I do think that when you have massive movements of harassment -- like the antisemitic hashtags in France, which aren't just a few objectionable tweets but hordes of people finding and amplifying each other with hate insignia -- and when you have hordes of Anonymous heckling you and doxing you and linking to that doxing to harm your privacy and incite harassment of you in private life, I think Twitter should act. It doesn't. It does when it feels like it when the news heat is turned up on it or when it finds a cause to its own personal liking.
So now all of a sudden we have the Twitter abuse report button to report individual tweets, not just accounts. If you have ever tried to do an AR on Twitter, it's quite cumbersome and annoying, requiring many screens and answering questions in ways that don't "fit" using boxes that have to be filled out in a certain way -- or else.
Certain things just don't fit. For example one of the Anon's heckling me was -- outrageously -- using the picture of a dead man in America whose common name he had adopted -- and he claimed to be in Liverpool and helping a gay rights center. Imagine how terrible that young man's relatives would feel if they saw their dead relative's picture on a complete stranger, and one heckling other people. I couldn't be sure he even was what he said he was. He had a LGBT center following him so I im'd them and say, hey, that guy's using a dead stranger's picture, that's awful. They said "thanks for letting us know". Meanwhile, trying to send this in as an AR to Twitter was fruitless. They replied that they couldn't do anything about it. It was free expression. I think nothing less than lawyers FEDEXing real letters to Twitter about the misuse of their dead relative's picture would work. Me as good citizen doing this doesn't work because it's not my account or my relative.
Tufekci thinks that what we need for these automatic situations and the inability sometimes to tell what is frivolous or malevolent means we need MORE HUMANS. I'm not at all sure that's a good thing. Automation in a way saves us from the hordes of people like herself who block and report people over nothing -- like Cory Doctorow not only blocked me, but tried to get me removed from Twitter merely because I criticized him and called him out for his repeated claims that people can give away their books and still get paid as he does (because he makes a living from lecture and consulting fees, not book sales). He then got his tech-thug friend Charles Arthur of the Guardian involved, and these two copyleftists filed a false report on me to Typepad claiming that pictures I had of Doctorow on my site, taking of *his avatar* in SL at *a public meeting* about his book release -- therefore a legitimate journalist activity -- meant that I was stalking and/or violating copyright and they should be removed. They were (you can see the empty album). I never bothered to challenge this, too difficult and expensive.
MORE HUMANS merely means more arbitrary adjudication and giving more power to these nerds they hire to do social media censorship who really have no grounding in law or human rights or for that matter, basic common sense and reality. Links to doxing should not be acceptable, which you can see with one click on the link; links to dead man's pictures should not be acceptable which you can see with one click on the obituary. But someone, even though we do have HUMANS on this already -- they answer you individually, in real time, with names -- it doesn't help.
The customer service state -- as it has been aptly called -- is expensive and a kind of Xenon's paradox proposition -- it's an endless tide of rising expectations as people get an appetite for making platform devs do their governance for them instead of using real-life law or even the common sense that communities can develop in handling situations like this.
The reality is, I don't see anything changing here. By making it easier for the script kiddies to push their stubby little fingers on the AR button and hold it over and over again -- an abuse of its own -- they are just going to flood the system as we've seen in every other social media or online community situation.
The serious cases will get drowned out. Getting attention to serious cases will still take old media or new media attention in other quarters -- just as it did from the very dawn of Twitter when the community leader of a competing platform whined over heckling and got the devs to function -- without first telling everybody that she was from a competing service.
Each time this issue services, Tufekci claims that authoritarian governments -- Turkey is the obvious example for her -- are deliberately filing false reports on activists. I actually think there's a lot less of this than she thinks, or we would see more activists shut down. Most of them seem to do just fine, especially on their anonymous accounts, you know? Which I think makes them far less accountable when they are running revolutions in the square.
But just because these governments file false reports doesn't mean we should take away the ability to file ARs or try to devise a set of complex protocols to defeat them.
What I hope Twitter will evolve into doing is to be more transparent and more effective in this entire endeavour. They should publish the number of accounts they ban, and by country, and by reason. If a pattern develops, say, in Turkey, that too many people are banned for critical speech for no reason, they might act. Except...they can't, because Twitter has a policy now of "sovereignty of censorship" whereby each country gets to censor Twitter and ask Twitter Central to help them do that. Did Zeynep forget that? She was a big booster of it at the time...
Kenneth Roth
@KenRoth
Andrea Prasow
@andreaprasow
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