Wired State

Does Snowden Matter?

Last time Snowden spoke in public, June 24th, Moscow, Sheremetyevo Airport. Photo by Tanya Lokshina.

That might seem to be a rather odd question for someone to ask who has just written nearly 5,000 words about a mere evening with a bunch of professors and students esoterically debating the Snowden leaks -- and could write 5,000 more on the after-party if it weren't off the record.

But I'm never reluctant to play the devil's advocate and ask if in fact there really is much of a story here any more.

Does this cartoon say it all for most Americans?

After all, it's been more than 90 days since Edward Snowden last spoke in public. The few times he spoke through others since then are suspect -- the strange speech he supposedly gave to Jacob Appelbaum to read when he was awarded the German whistleblower prize in which he says rhetorically"It is not I, it is not I, it is not I" three times cryptically as if he were Everyman and Everyleaker makes me wonder especially what really happened to him.

Yes, I realize that more may be coming that will stir up the pot again. Or that some of the players in the drama might get arrested or at least questioned. I realize that the tight-knit circle of EFF and friends in WikiLeaks and Anonymous think that because Snowden and Assange got Obama and other world leaders to say that Snowden "started an important conversation" or that he "raised some significant issues" that they "won". (In fact, I'd never advocate any government official saying silly stuff like that, because it only lets the anarchists win and needlessly strengthens them.)

But the fact is, just getting rhetoric isn't a win, and they know that. And that's why, as I explain, they are discouraged and frustrated -- and I certainly regard this as a good thing.

Doesn't the radical Jay Rosen's cry of anguish about the failure of Silicon Valley to cover this in its owned tech press say it all?

On a scale of 100, my level of satisfaction, as a consumer of the tech press, in its coverage of the Snowden reverb in Silicon Valley: six.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 29, 2013

 

Hendrik Hertzberg, in a New Yorker editorial early in the Snowden scandal on June 28 titled Some Dare Call it Treason, said he didn't believe Snowden was a traitor by the old Constitutional definition because he believed he had not given Aid and Comfort to our Enemies. Who but the coastal "progressive" elites could really believe that?

Hertzberg then said the classic New York liberal thing about the war on terrorism and in general America's enemies -- that unless we expose our secrecy even more thoroughly by proving that spying is effective (!), these skeptics won't be convinced:

That doesn’t mean, of course, that he hasn’t committed a crime or that no effort should be made to have him extradited and tried. It may be that his disclosures of N.S.A. surveillance and data-collection programs have done harm to national security and have made terrorist attacks more likely, though the Administration has not made a persuasive case that that is true. At this point, it’s hard to see what purpose is served by making him the object of a noisy, blustery, panicky global manhunt that risks damaging America’s ability to induce the Russian and Chinese autocrats to coöperate in more important matters.

In other words, Hertzberg seemed to be squarely within the liberal and leftist media's take on Snowden.

But interestingly enough, in an even earlier editorial, "Snoop Scoops" on June 24th, he said something actually a bit counterintuitive, given his "progressive" tone and actually said what I've been saying this whole time:

There are reasons to be concerned about intelligence-agency overreach, excessive secrecy, and lack of transparency. But there are also reasons to remain calm. From what we know so far about these N.S.A. programs—and that is a caveat that should condition virtually every statement and judgment about them, including those you are now reading—they have been conducted lawfully. The threat that they pose to civil liberties, such as it is, is abstract, conjectural, unspecified. In the roughly seven years the programs have been in place in roughly their present form, no citizen’s freedom of speech, expression, or association has been abridged by them in any identifiable way. No political critic of the Administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them. They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under “surveillance” as that word is commonly understood.

He then goes further and points out that nothing shown at that point indicated any content of phone calls:

“There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls,” the Times editorialized. True. But that’s a very big “except.” The bits that are collected consist of the time and the duration of the calls, along with the numbers and, potentially, the locations of the callers and the called. This “metadata” is digitally stored. But none of its individual components are ever seen by human eyes except in the comparatively tiny number of instances in which a computer algorithm flags one for further examination, in which case—at least, since 2008—a judicial warrant is legally required. “The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on ‘known or suspected terrorists’ without logging every call made,” the Times argued. True again—but circular, and beside the point. A primary (and legitimate) goal of the programs, after all, is to find and identify unknown, unsuspected terrorists, either after or, preferably, in advance of an actual attack.

Nothing has changed since then -- none of the revelations show access to the body of texts and the content of calls and unlawful perusal of these without a warrant in cases of suspicion of crime. The "suspicionless" dredges that the activists are also talking about, if/when they take place appear to be tied to intelligence targets that are legitimate. They have never shown a case that isn't. Even

This is the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg who says it -- again!

No political critic of the Administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them. They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under “surveillance” as that word is commonly understood.

Not even John Smith or Jane Doe have been shown to have been accidentally and wrongfully put under surveillance -- or even Quinn Norton.

However, Hendrik Hertzberg isn't me, he's a New Yorker "progressive". So he adds:

The critics have been hard put to point to any tangible harm that has been done to any particular citizen. But that does not mean that no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and a democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity.

This seems to me to be hyperbolic and romantic -- and if anything the reverse is true -- Snowden and his G9 team of Greenwald, Poitras, Appelbaum and now even Jeremy Scahill are the ones causing collective and civic harm precisely by themselves attacking the architecture of trust in what is indeed an open society and democratic polity.

The trouble is - as those radical civil libertarians and crypterians at NYU complained -- the public, by and large, doesn't care. The vote in the Congress to curb the NSA failed. Maybe more legislation or reform of process is coming, but it isn't commanding a huge attention.

David Rieff wrote about this even weeks ago, Why Nobody Cares -- theorizing that maybe the lack of angst is because "massive surveillance" (not a phenomenon I believe in) wasn't a surprise:

Despite anger at Snowden and apocalyptic claims by government officials that he had gravely undermined their ability to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, it turned out that the "secret" he revealed appeared to be one of the most broadly shared secrets in the world. The White House knew, members of the Senate and House intelligence committees knew, and major U.S. allies like Britain and Germany not only knew but in some cases collaborated in the effort. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft may not have known everything, but unquestionably they knew something. The only group that did not know about PRISM was the general public.

But even after these revelations, writes Rieff, there just wasn't the backlash hoped for by activists:

And yet, apart from some voices from the antiwar left and the libertarian right (on foreign policy there is considerable overlap between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement), the reaction from this deceived public for the most part has been strangely muted. It is not just the somewhat contradictory nature of the polls taken this summer, which have shown the public almost evenly split on whether the seemingly unlimited scope of these surveillance programs was doing more harm than good. It is akso that, unlike on issues such as immigration and abortion, much of the public outrage presupposed by news coverage of the scandal does not, in reality, seem to exist.

Rieff gets in a good line describing the "guild" anger over Miranda's detention -- indeed, that's as far as it went, as non-journalists wondered why Greenwald was exploiting his husband as a mule and didn't share the sense of insiders that he should have journalistic immunity.

But...Strangely muted? Why strange? The reason is obvious: people do not think it is the infringement implied in general - they really don't care as they know deep down they're the ones to blame for so much private information spilled out in cyberspace.

More to the point, however, those who really think about this from a critical perspective -- even Hertzberg or perhaps especially Hertzberg are impressed that there's no there there. There are not cases.

Like Morozov, whom he admires, Rieff situates the problem we face as a function of techno-utopianism:

In an age dominated by various kinds of techno-utopianism -- the conviction that networking technologies inherently are politically and socially emancipatory and that massive data collection will unleash both efficiency in business and innovation in science -- the idea that Big Data might be your enemy and not your friend is antithetical to everything we have been encouraged to believe.

All together, techno-utopianism is looking a bit dented of late, particularly that variant of it that proclaimed social media to be at the heart of the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

So he seems to imply that if the public has grasped that technology didn't turn out to be as liberating as we had thought -- it didn't work in Iran, Egypt and lots of other places -- then maybe it isn't a surprise that it "enslaves" us in a Panopticon.

Rieff even cites Lanier -- he doesn't just read Morozov -- that "every time you post a tweet attacking the 1 percent, you enrich some member of the 1 percent."

Viewed from this perspective, is it the general public's comparative lack of indignation over the NSA surveillance scandal that is surprising, or is the real shocker that journalists, activists, and politicians feel so outraged? Yes, the U.S. government is indeed the Biggest Brother of them all, but most people go about their daily business being spied on and having their data mined by any number of small- and medium-sized brothers. Of course, someone who is outraged by the attempts to jail the leakers and prosecute and intimidate their journalist and activist colleagues would insist, and rightly so, that these sorts of things should not be permitted in a democracy. But the gap between the outrage of the chattering classes and the public's apathy -- or, more likely, resignation -- illuminates the essential difference between the elite's understanding of the world and everyone else's. To put it starkly, members of an elite tend to believe they can change things; most everyone else knows that, except in a few rare instances, they cannot. In an essential sense, the real question for members of the elite is not, why isn't the public outraged, but why are we?

Rieff posits that the public is inured to the Surveillance State by having to face so many automatted processes -- from phone banking to the TSA -- that this NSA scandal just doesn't excite. He seems to think that if someone isn't bothered by the NSA spying or outraged at the prosecution of leakers, that they must not be part of the intelligentsia -- or be beaten down beyond belief. It's like Orwell's 1984: "“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

But what if it's entirely something else?

What if most people in fact didn't think much of Snowden -- not the least because he defected to Russia after being rejected for defection by China (!)  - and because Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (Appelbaum is not known) have already alienated most people who aren't hard leftists or hard right-wing libertarians with all their other anti-American views?

What if even smart people in the liberal elite just weren't terribly impressed by the story because there is really no story?

Snowden hasn't spoken for three months now and the leaks coming out are technical, wonky and contrived. Hertzberg in fact explained this quite succinctly back on June 24. That happened to be the last day Snowden appeared in public and said something in person, as distinct from the two or three times since then that people representing him claimed he sent messages to them -- which didn't say much (and some were to unravel the scandal around his father and his lawyers, insisting that they didn't represent him).

Most people, even if they read the New York Times, don't read Empty Wheel (Marcy Wheeler) and don't watch Amy Goodman and don't listen to the ACLU or the EFF with any enthusiasm -- they are extremists, exotics.

The drama of Vladimir Putin showing up Obama over Syria, or the drama of the ObamaCare and government shutdown are far, far more compelling dramas for them.

The NSA, if it weren't in crouch and defense mode, and was moved more to counter-attack (most of the counter attacks have come from Michael Hayden, the former NSA official) might have taken the opportunity of the Kenyan terrorist attack to point out that tracking American jihadists to foreign lands and the recruitment of Americans by foreign terrorists are precisely the sort of things that NSA has to do, and do legitimately, and it was terribly hampered in doing this by Snowden's crippling actions.  It didn't.

The NSA didn't stop its surveillance and continues its work. Some of its people are involved in damage control and working with Congress, but it's not shut down. It will tighten up the hatches and check the hacker youths more carefully but it doesn't seem as if its core mission is compromised now or in the near future.

Even if Snowden's next revelations includes something very personal and very scandalous -- Scahill has already hinted it involves assassinations abroad involving NSA help -- it is unlikely to turn Americans against their government. No one, least of all Obama and his loyal supporters, are going to complain that Osama was assassinated -- and BTW, more HUMINT than SIGINT had to be used in that operation obviously.

I think we have to pay attention when those who essentially are on Snowden's side and believe he's a whistleblower -- like Hertzberg and Rieff in their different ways -- think forlornly that ultimately the hack didn't effect change.

"It doesn't matter" as comedian Loren Feldman often says about this or that tech scandal each week -- and who had little to say in fact about Snowden or Manning as compared to every other tech story."It doesn't matter."

Does it?

An Evening with the Snowden Apologists at NYU -- EFF, ACLU, Soros

Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick 2013

On September 26, I went to a program at the New York University Law School sponsored by the Open Society Foundation (Soros). Eventually the audio tape will be posted online and then I'll link it here and you can listen yourself. Meanwhile, I'll give you my overall impressions, including side conversations, which  is something you can't get just from a tape.

Here was the program:

“Surveillance, Privacy, and Freedom of Expression”
Philip Alston at NYU Law School
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice

     Frank LaRue, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. 

·         Robert Litt, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

·         Katitza Rodriguez, International Rights Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

·         Philip Alston (Moderator), Co-Chair, NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

In the end, Robert Litt didn't come, and I never did hear the reason why -- if it was explained possibly in the first minute of the presentations (I was a few minutes late), I missed it and no one referred to it.

Mr. Litt need not have worried if he stayed away for fear of heckling -- there were some in this crowd who were more skeptical of Snowden and his works than I would have thought, and somebody should have come to stand up to the lunacy of the paranoid academics.

ARE THE CRYPTO KIDS LOSING?

Even by their own admission, the panel was one-sided -- and given that most of the questions tended to run to statements amounting to "isn't it worse even than you're saying, and how do we know" or "what can we do to hide"  - it was obviously a tough venue. Even so, there were questions of dissent, including mine.

And what was most important is my take-home: the Snowden-lovers and advocates of radical transparency for governments and absolute encryption for anarchist hackers are worried that they have not attracted the American public in large numbers to their cause, and they are worried they are losing.

They are disappointed that Americans don't seem to care they are being watched. They are frustrated that the mainstream press has largely lost interest and they don't know what to do -- they are jumping over their own knees.

Prof. Philip Alston opened the meeting with plenty of jokes about how we should keep our cell phones on so the NSA could listen, and that the meeting was being recorded by NYU and OSF -- but also likely by the NSA -- and of course many questions also chimed in with this theme that we all live in a giant Panopticon.

A little funny-looking fuzzy caterpillar seeming to have emerged with a piece of its chrysalis was crawling along the table in the audience -- and it seemed to be emblematic of the sense that something was secretly moving around and maybe going to burrow in somewhere...

Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick 2013

Surprisingly (or perhaps not), Philip Alston, who is a long-time "progressive" and social rights advocate at the UN joining every anti-American cause, condemned the New York Times for only running a few editorials and not caring enough-- despite the fact that the Times has been utterly captured by Laura Poitras as we can easily see from their blessing of her tendentious take on the NSA in an op-ed video; Peter Maass' breathless profile of her; and today's piece co-written with Risen.

Alston yawned demonstratively to illustrate how the Times and the ACLU weren't interested (?!) -- and then even called out the ACLU for not doing enough, although of course they've lawfared around this like crazy with class-action suits and put out various campaigns on the subject.

Gosh, could they be forgiven for covering Syria or the stop-and-frisk issues instead of abstract geek stuff about how we might be spied on but aren't really, because they can't prove it!

DOESN'T TOR ENABLE CRIMINALS?

One young fellow from PEN American Center, the writers and translators organization that defends freedom of speech -- to my surprise asked the very question about Tor that I would ask -- isn't it a cover for child pornographers and doesn't that raise issues about the circumvention and encryption movement if they are willing to let criminals benefit from their software?

PEN is obviously under pressure from some radical members -- the same who complained about the fact that the new director, Suzanne Nossel, came from the Obama administration -- to "do something" regarding Snowden's supposed revelations. So recently they put out stuff, to my dismay. I doubt this was put as a vote to the entire membership.

LA RUE ADVOCATES FOR ABSOLUTE ENCRYPTION

Several NYU audience members asked if it really was appropriate to have absolute encryption that ultimately the government could not break through to legitimately track actual criminals.

And to my horror, Frank La Rue came out definitively for absolute encryption, and insisted that people encrypt themselves to the maximum and prevent governments from decrypting them or maintaining backdoors in software or even having warrants to pursue criminals. That was really wild -- surely he could have conceded that much, and if he gets pushback on this, he may walk that back (and he won't get pushback on it except from me most likely, given that he is surrounded by absolutely adoring fans, and likely discredits the US government's critique of him by merely invoking "wars" or "drones" unrelated to his mandate). But he explained that the needs of human rights defenders to protect individuals' human rights outweights the rationale of the state to access encrypted communications.

Communism as Victim, Radical Revolution as Blessed in Latin America

La Rue is from Guatamala, where the human rights movement has been strong and where unspeakable horrors were committed against leftist activists and indigenous peoples in the 1980s and some of which lingered years later. I totally understand where he is coming from, having seen the witnesses to these horrors during my time at Human Rights Watch for 10 years (1980-1990).

I think the modern human rights movement coming out of these roots protective of victimized revolutionaries, however, tends to lack any understanding of what is wrong with revolution, what is wrong with clandestine movements, what is wrong with conspiracy -- all of which were hallmarks of communist/radical socialist governments that came to power in Eurasia, Asia and Africa and were ultimately overthrown, and also hallmarks of revolutionary movements that didn't come to power with few exceptions (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela) and were victimized by conservative governments in Latin America.

In South America in the 1970s and 1980s, there were massive abuses of human rights by right-wing governments -- mainly victimizing leftist and communist activists and their relatives. The problem was that this reality then enabled the left in North America to get away without critiquing communism and leftism itself then. They didn't care that communism had caused in its day millions of people to be jailed and killed in the Soviet Union and its allies -- and continued its repressive reign well into the 1990s. It was if all that suffering and the proof of the horror and futility of the communist ideology in another part of the world were bracketed out, made invisible, relegated to history, and some purity of purpose far from these horrors was ascribed to the movements in Latin America because they had bad governments.

We could never question communism and its crimes anywhere, even given oppressive states like Cuba, because the communists were victims -- it was victimology at its finest. This created a paradigm of the Latin American activist as always good, always better than his government, and never required to explain why he made common cause with oppressive governments overseas or in fact had a revolutionary ideology antithetical to human rights (and when the Sandinistas came to power that was immediately obvious from suppression of the media and assembly, and remains obvious today in Cuba and Venezuela).

Human rights lawyers and activists who may or may not have been communists tended not to confront their communist/socialist clients over their ideologies antithetical to a liberal society and human rights per se -- simply because they were victims and thus tended not to question the revolutionary and ideological approach to justice as distinct from the universalist human rights approach.

Thus you got apologists for the Sandinistas, who killed and oppressed people and were finally thrown out and to this day, the after-effects of white-washing them are still felt in something like Bill DeBlasio's campaign for mayor in New York, where he is unapologetic about visiting Nicaragua and "helping poor people" and remains uncritical of the Sandinistas -- and the liberal media can bless that and portray anyone who questions what that meant politically for us and Latin America as mere conservatives or McCarthyites or red baiters. Atrocious.

The human rights movement that grew out of these atrocities was very strong, rooted in institutions like the "liberation theology" elements of the Catholic Church and the labor unions, and justifiably very proud of itself for overthrowing dictators like Pinochet and standing up to the United States -- and rightly so. The Truth Commissions process that they began is always held up as emblematic for any society trying to make the transition to justice.

And being such clear-cut victims of torture and such pure champions of good -- and able to bracket out any discussion of the horrors of communism elsewhere in the world as merely propaganda by their oppressive governments, and able to amplify any real or perceived wrong by the US -- some of the civic activists in Latin America are incredibly self-righteous and insular, hateful of America, admiring of Russia which they see as somehow "progressive" through the Cuban/Soviet lens and the biggest believers in that superior supra-sovereign transnational "international community" which mainly consists of...them and their colleagues in NGOs and multilaterals like the UN which they'd like to have more control and power.

If you wonder why Glenn Greenwald emigrated to Brazil, it's not only because of his husband -- it's because his views of the world match up perfectly with the environment there.

So that explains why Frank La Rue can tell an audience that regardless of the very real problem of criminals taking advantage of encryption in schemes like Tor, ultimately the balance has to be weighed in favour of human rights activists who will need encryption to perform their important and unimpeachable work. That's how it is, see. Human rights and other types of civic activists in a transnational network trump all, and trump any legitimate, even very liberal and democratic government, which is by necessity always (in the view of these types) going to tend toward evil and bad faith if they have "too much power". They do this because governments are suspect, activists are good -- and should never be questioned as it is self-evident.

There is absolutely no mechanism of accountability to be deployed on these people themselves  -- and just like the communists who indeed were wrongfully thrown into the sea in rightfully condemned atrocities -- as victims, as champions of justice, they believe they should never be confronted with the illiberalisms and radical propositions antithetical to human rights which they represent. That maximum encryption can't be right if it enables the abuse of children's rights by child pornogrphaers or the abuse of women's rights by stalkers and rapists or the abuse of health rights by drug dealers or even the abuse of the right to life by terrorists just doesn't fit into the supposed rights paradigms of such activists -- which needs revolutionary freedom more than other people's rights.

But ultimately, human rights -- and the goods and influence offered by the international human rights movement -- was a way for activists to leave behind discredited communist revolution, which ultimately did not prevail in their countries as planned by revolutionaries, and embark on a discourse not with outdated Marxist lexicon but one of rights that still embodied the same social justice principles.

TRANS-NATIONAL ELITE FREES THE INTERNET

Soros -- one of the greatest funders of this trans-national self-righteous elite -- is of course not going to challenge these views in any way -- even in the name of a competition of ideas or a pluralistic open society -- and will only champion them. Indeed, Soros has really long ago abandoned the idea of an open society in the sense of pluralism and competition, and himself has heavily put a thumb on the scale with billions to stack the public discourse in favour of "scientifically correct" versions of "progressivism." That's very dangerous because several things happen -- a) the "progressive" project fails -- and deservedly fails because it is too extreme and unpopular b) the "progressive" project, rigidly ideologically and absolutely sure of its infallibility never modifies and brings whatever good it represents to a larger societal proposition where it is compromised but still effective.

Why would you keep hanging around and debating, oh, climate change or national security policy with people you thought were yahoos and unscientific crazies, when the science had already shown you were right and now it was merely a question of amplification and even coercive imposition?

WILL THE UN BLESS ABSOLUTE ENCRYPTION?

To be sure, Frank La Rue has no standing for this personal position on encryption in any UN document or interpretation of a document in a general comment anywhere, and the countries of the UN are hardly going to turn absolute encryption into a right any times soon, if ever.

Every single freedom-of-expression article or comment or jurisprudence always adds on to this right variations of the concept "except as necessary for public order and morals in a democratic society" - fully mindful of the fact that exceptions should not play into the hands of tyrants who use concepts of "public order" over-broadly or capriciously. There isn't a single article or interpretation that says that rights can be maximized beyond legitimate crime-fighting.

That's why the language drafted by staff at Soros and its grantees at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, etc. that has now been picked up by Frank La Rue, the Secretary General and the High Commissioner for Human Rights states that surveillance "may" be used for fighting terrorism or crime -- but implies that if it is used, it is perhaps suspect or shouldn't be used and other unspecified means should be used first. It's pretty awful -- and I suppose the only saving grace is that what these "progressives" say at the UN generally tends not to get far beyond them to actually influence states' policies, although it begins to have a corrosive effect.

NO REGULATORY BODY FOR THE INTERNET

Frank is mindful of the attempts by the ITU to take over the Internet, the ineffectiveness of other bodies to stop it, and the problems of the "bad-minded countries" -- which now includes -- or is even led by -- the US itself, in the eyes of these radicals. He favours the "multi-stakeholder approach" -- in my view, a flawed concept that enables both Big IT and radical NGOs undemocratically to take over the Internet. But for him, the "multi-stakeholder approach" is how the trans-national network of "progressive" elites, its fingers heavily on the scales, manages to take over, so naturally love it.

Even so, La Rue is unwilling to concede ANY body to rule over the Internet (which in fact means tacitly letting multistakeholders rule it) --  even those filled with like-minded "progressives" like the IETF or the IEEE -- oh, there are probably too many capitalist corporations influencing them in the end for his taste - -he railed against private corporations for violating privacy as well, although they are non-state actors that did not sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which governs his mandate.

STATE DEPARTMENT DOESN'T BUY IT

La Rue mentioned that he had had a "high level and professional" discussion at the State Department, but that the lawyers constantly contradicted him. I happen to know this wasn't the high level he imagined, and while professional, I'm not sure those involved were sufficiently aware of what they needed to push back hard on -- like this ridicularity of maximum encryption.

State's lawyers did push back on his antagonism to secret courts to deal with intelligence matters -- he denounced Sweden's new FISA-like court, after first denouncing them for not having any court of this type at all, and then adding it - he corrected his out-of-date report, but then doubled down on attacking the secret nature of these courts.

Again, there is nothing in UN writ that establishes that counterintelligence work can't be done in secret or that law-enforcement of any kind has to constantly open his hand up to criminal suspects in the course of its work. Yet in the UN context, just as there is no treaty that affirms the right to capitalism and protects private property as a principle for a social system (as distinct as for an individual right), there is no affirmation of what a state's legitimate pursuit of crime is. Therefore in that context, it's easy to dream up trans-sovereign notions like the Ruggie Business Principles and push them over as "international" to curb capitalist corporations -- and find a lot of enthusiasm in the socialist-minded Group of 77.

In the same way, it's easy to dream up notions of privacy or surveillance -- as the Access and EFF have done with a 100 other NGOs but no states -- and then invoke them as supranational and needed to be imposed on states in this or that interpretatation. This is the NGO game at the UN, and I get it, and sometimes it's a worthy game, i.e. such as with the Guiding Principles on Internally Displaced Persons.

Mainly, Frank La Rue wanted to talk about his crusade for the Right to Truth -- another project of his separate to the fight for privacy and encryption -- and yes, it is fraught with problems which I'll return to some other day.

THE CALIFORNIA IDEOLOGY IN ACTION: EFF'S LITIGATION AND SNOWDEN'S DOX

The Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Katiza Rodriguez is a Peruvian digital rights activist who has long worked in the field and now represents EFF's international programs.

In my view, this is the kind of person who no doubt does good and important work in her context opposing a conservative government, but who is used by the old technolibertarians/technocommunists who were the founders of EFF like John Gillmore and John Perry Barlow (Mitch Kapor has left them) to give themselves more rights credibility and regional/international/global south than they have themselves.

In fact, I think it's part of a whole stealth "march through the institutions" that these dire wolves have cunningly devised to get themselves out of the criminal taint of hackerdom into the more pure realm of the law and halo'd human rights movement. They've made a very concerted effort at getting their people in more liberal and better known (on the East Coast anyway) institutions like Committee to Protect Journalists and gotten them into lobbying organizations like New America Foundation (which is now getting overrun with the crypto kids).

They went through this whole fandago of devising and deploying Rights Con (aptly named!) to take advantage of the ebay millionaire's wife, Elaine Donahoe, an Obama bundler, who got into the position of US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, and then use that perch to push "Internet freedom" as they understand it -- which as we're coming to see means freedom from government and even freedom from criminal prosecution (absolute encryption, and of course piracy, Bitcoin, etc.).

This is all in keeping with the libertarian utopian notion that these men had in the California Ideology to create an autonomous Internet free of any constraint where they could be as licentious as possible and steal copies and make business models from other people's content, and also penetrate government and corporate security at will in a grab for power for themselves and their vision of society.

Rodriguez gave a sanitized version of EFF's history, claiming that it was founded to fight for Internet freedom. That's not really the case; it was founded to use the ACLU litigation model to try to exonerate and de-criminalize phreakers and hackers who had stolen security documents from phone companies, including their plans for dealing with public emergencies, all described in the very self-serving and tendentious book about them by Bruce Sterling.

I've been debating John Perry Barlow for years, and I know his absolutist notion of permission for piracy, his copyleftism, his belief in the superiority of morals rooted only in himself and his friends, and his antagonism to the rule of law, especially over himself, his friends, and the Internet (remember his infantile manifesto for cyberspace). While EFF activists tend to deflect criticism about Barlow by saying he's not really in charge directly of programs anymore, the reality is that his essential Internet sanitizing of criminality -- the flouting of the rule of law over the Internet -- permeates everything that EFF does.

And as I've pointed out, their lost cases -- the litigation they tried on topics like Verizon metadata, in lawfaring their notion of Internet freedom, is exactly the list Snowden used to hack with.

I don't think this is an accident, as the Snowden expedition run by WikiLeaks, paid for by the Fund for Free Press is very much intertwined with the leadership of EFF -- and I will return to this subject.

Most of what Rodriguez said was also designed to play into the paradigm of the oppressive Latin American government and the good activists fighting it -- and who could disagree? (Oh, except those progressive Brazilians, Venezuelans and Cubans, of course). That hackers supported by EFF are mainly directed at the United States of America, and not at Latin American governments, doesn't faze her, because no doubt in her worldview, Washington is the seat of evil that helps prop up the authoritarian governments in the region -- oh, except Cuba and Venezuela which are models for all "progressive" peoples.

Rodriguez said she particularly appreciated La Rue's work and the UN bodies supporting Internet rights because it amplified their own cause and made it thus seem stronger than it was in reality by internationalizing it. This is an old NGO trick and one I am happy to play myself as we all are in trying to tackle the problems of oppressive governments. The unfortunate reality, however is that this particular gang has nothing to bring itself to accountability like the governments they wish to confront. And increasingly it's clear to me that what they mean by freedom is not what we had always meant by rights, and that the absolutism of their vision will likely discredit Open Society Foundations in the end -- or maybe not, if OSF is absolutely certain of its own righteousness, which it is -- although I publicly have my doubts about this.

YOU HAVE NO CASE

I raised my hand and asked about the problem of there being no cases, no human face, no proof, no justiciable cases -- which Alston had to understand as he has spent his life fending off complaints about the lack of justiciability of economic rights. I said the lack of traction was because there were no individual cases, and I suspected there weren't any. All that was being discussed was the hypothetical of machine capacity and how it might be used or not by a government with good faith or not.

But it was indicative of the mindset of this crowd that Alston immediately reworded my question to be merely one about how "the movement" could be more effective with its cyber cause by "putting a human face on it."

The ACLU representative had a good excuse for the lack of cases -- why, the NSA is so secret, we just don't know. Why, that's classified information and that's why we don't know it. Why, these courts are so secret we just don't know about them.

Well, wait a minute, guys. Edward Snowden hacked a whole bunch of stuff that used to be really secret. So he didn't hack stuff that could have shown there really were individual cases? Really?  And among what Snowden exposed was precisely the information about the wars of the FISA court -- and we really haven't seen a single FISA ruling or concern expressed about individual cases, as opposed to various machine capacities for dredging this or that.

The ACLU guy added that in the old days of COINTELPRO, yes, there were cases like the surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr., and this personalized the problem. But now it is so pervasive and so blanket that it is hard to personalize as such.

And this spoke to some of the points of the people asking questions, which is that privacy itself is now a different concept than it was before the Internet.

I found the ACLU answers utterly lame -- I think there are no cases because there just aren't cases. That the NSA doesn't do the wrong intended. The fact that on Twitter even as I spoke there was a news flash that 9 people were improperly put under surveillance in LOVEINT, which somebody then later raised to me, doesn't mean a thing. Those are cases of employee behaviour in violation of work rules; they don't indicate a systemic flaw that enables the system to persecute people as the state, as opposed to an idiosyncratic individual with this or that burning personal need to spy on an ex-boyfriend or whatever.

OFFLINE AND ONLINE

Several people expressed the opinion that it was hard to get Americans to care about their communications being monitored when they themselves were responsible for putting so much online. And one young man pointed out that the person online wasn't the same as the physical person in the real world, that logging on, one loses rights because one isn't a full person. This is a variation of Clay Shirky's idea that the individual merely becomes a function of a socialized collective -- and Beth Noveck essentially says the same thing about individuals and groups online -- which is why I've always found them anathema to human rights and democracy online. This notional idea of the fractured individual becomes possible merely because of the immersiveness of the virtual reality of the Internet, but it really needs to be shed in favour of a plain-villa notion of offline rights of the individual applying online as well because online is only a tool, and offline prosecution of crime -- like theft or terrorism -- applies online as well because nothing in cyberspace magically cleanses human nature.

I caught up with an old acquaintance who is a professor who follows these issues and he pointed out that he was concerned about this "offline applies online" -- which I could add was promoted by EFF and company, promulgated by Donohoe and incorporated into the US resolution on Internet freedom (which I was very critical of last year because it incorporated too much hidden socialism in the "development" invocations). For this professor, I believe it was because it was not really about law and rights -- and I pointed out that EFF is very selective about what they port online from offline -- notably, that old fashion walking the beat that police use to prevent and prosecute crime isn't allowed in their Unicorn Realm.

He also expressed concern about the very notion of "Internet freedom" -- perhaps Evgeny Morozov would join him there, since even the Internet as a social construct falls under Morozov's axe. I pointed out that we never talked about "typewriter freedom" or "telephone freedom" or "fax freedom" but saw these as tools embodying the freedom of expression. The only reason why the EFF gang needs to add on stuff to FoEx is because they want a different society achieved by revolutionary means disguised as "rights" -- and they've merely figured out like generations of radicals before them that cloaking things as rights and litigating them as if they were constitutionally-guaranteed or trying to legislate them are all great ways to disguise the fact that your revolution is antithetical to the rule of law -- which you won't apply to yourselves.

Quite a few people came up to me and said they liked my question and shared my concern. But some of these people merely worried while "the movement" was failing and how they could "get traction with the public".

Hmm, maybe by not fleeing to Russia, I suggested -- no one has ever explained why these comrades couldn't have started in Venezuela with the leaks -- or even Brazil, as we see how friendly the government is to the Greenwald enterprise now.

GUERILLA MANIFESTO

One young woman came up and said she liked my question, but I tried to explain to her that in fact she really didn't if she supported the gang. I mentioned that even the case Snowden mentioned of the "suspected hacker's girlfriend" was never explicated. I said I thought it was Quinn Norton, and explained how I thought she had lied about Swartz authorizing the guerilla manifesto to protect her boyfriend and that she didn't know the basics even how to get through questioning. And this, of course, is a function of her revolutionary approach, supporting revolutionary methods -- had Swartz and she pursued only lawful methods and respected the law and used non-coercive methods, then if they wound up in the hands of law-enforcement, they could get through questioning more honestly. This young woman said she knew Quinn and she knew Jake (Appelbaum), which is probably why she came up to me -- to gather intel to report back on them. Good! She neither confirmed or denied that the "suspected hacker's girlfriend" was Quinn.

I think they need public questioning about their lack of accountability. If Appelbaum really thinks he is going to be arrested -- and arrested unfairly -- he should return and face the music and exonerate himself with all those good lawyers at EFF and the ACLU who will stand behind him just like they stood behind Aaron Swartz, right?

Right?

 

So the NSA Gathers Info from the Social Graph -- So What?

So I already explained the history of the social graph, its misuses and exploitations especially in malicious reputational damaging. Of course, there's an easy way to prevent this -- don't join Facebook, don't blabber on Twitter, or use alts and proxies.

But let's imagine the balloons in the hands of the NSA. I truly would rather have them in the hands of the NSA than Will Wright or Jacob Appelbaum, to be honest.

None other than James Risen, who himself is being put under surveillance by the government for his stories, and who wrote about the NSA in 2006 famously, and the notorious Laura Poitras, partner-in-crime in the Snowden escapade with Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum, have now delivered the "Snowden's Next Leak" about which some have speculated.

And of course, it is about trying to get more ordinary Americans to worry more (because they aren't going to worry about alleged manipulation by the NSA of encryption algorithms for the industry or even about Verizon phone metadata).

Yet because at least James Risen is a "real journalist" working for the mainstream New York Times, the story is forced to contain caveats in it -- and that undoes any activist point that Poitras was trying to make.

First, the story states clearly that the social graph is examined when the government needs to go after a criminal suspect -- after all, the operation of intelligence is used on foreign countries that engage in enemy actions or are enemies; suspects in terrorism, money-laundering, piracy, credit-card theft, child pornography, illegal drug sales and so on:

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011.

Intelligence targets. Not everybody. Not you and your cat pictures. Intelligence targets.

Each time this story is told, the activist writers behave as if the government behaves like one of their own malevolent, cynical, nihilist and hysterically hypothetical hackers -- you know, like Edward Snowden. They act as if they sit on top of a pile of data and mine it at random or with provocative key words or "just because they feel like it" or they plug in dissident names like Michael Moore or Glenn Greenwald to spy on their every move over their writings (and not over their appearing to collude with a major-league hacker).

They never concede that the government starts with the need to track proven enemy countries, and proven enemy actors like Al Qaeda.

They never, ever concede that the NSA's activity therefore is legitimate and lawful because those enemies are seriously bent on harming the United States.

Risen is also forced to admit that the social media information is in the public domain. So yes, the government, like the press, like nonprofits, like political campaigns, like researchers, like bloggers, gets to gather it and analyze it. And yes, they combine this with their own internal data they already gather because they are governments and that's okay -- i.e. tax data:

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

Yet as before, they are still hysterically finding fault, because they don't trust the government, don't think it's legitimate and think it can only do wrong when it has these powers and this information.

Once again, they have not provided a single, concrete individual case with a human face showing wrongful surveillance, let alone wrongful arrest or even sentencing. None:

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.

The difference between this article and any shrill scribing activity by Poitras and Appelbaum of whatever Snowden spews is that Risen at least tried to behave like a real journalist. He found other sources -- former NSA officials who I trust are not merely Thomas Drake and William Binney (who would mention their names) -- to try to corroborate the information.

Gosh, even former officials declined to say something for which they had no proof and were merely pushed into trying to speculate about by activist journalists.

Risen is at least able to explain honestly that even if something has been wrongfully collected here -- and his own article doesn't explain if that was done or how -- it hasn't been shown to be used wrongfully.

So I realize that even though Marcy Wheeler is probably having ten cats about this (I'll have to go see), there isn't a story here.

The NSA does what it is paid to do and hired to do by the American people. It has not been shown to do anything wrong, and even if this is implied as a capacity that might be misused, it has not been proven to harm individual people with wrong-doing.

What these authors seem more afraid of is the power of the social graph itself -- for which we have a generation of coders and social media platform providers who started experimenting with the power of this graph in games and worlds and moved on to social media, where you are recommended as a friend the current wife of your ex-husband because Facebook doesn't know everything, or whether you are presented a relative as a business contact on LinkedIn, because LI has raided your email address book and spewed around suggestions to you, or whether you are offered books you'd hate merely because you looked up a book you disliked to quote it in a blog.

Translated into NSA terms, if you deliver pizza to terrorists, or you are a friend of a friend of a spy (like I could find about a half dozen people one or two degrees of separation from Anna Chapman in my various friendship or business networks), you could be watched. Good! Friends don't let friends commit terrorism...

Orin Kerr is here to tell us why he doesn't want the government to have this capacity to track people in crime stopping, and would cut them off from this capacity if it were up to him and his ideological friends in power:

“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

Oh. You mean you people who want "offline freedoms to apply online" don't want offline criminal justice methods to apply online to address the criminalization that comes with licentiousness? Only some things get to go from offline to online, and criminal prosecution isn't among them?

Why is it okay -- and necessary -- for a plainclothes police officer to track gang members in real life around a basketball court in a park, but the NSA can't look up the same people's Facebooks?

If you wonder how the tech press spreads FUD about the NSA, and hysteria about all things hypothetical from "G9" -- just read AllThingsD in which no qualifications are mentioned that the data being mined is public and legitimately gathered from government sources, and that not "all Americans" but intelligence targets capable of hostile acts or suspected of crime are what is tracked.

Ultimately, Risen and Poitras come up with nothing. Here is what they are compelled to say (in the Times, because it's a real newspaper):

In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists.

Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.

They can go on and on -- and do so -- about millions of dollars in budgets and millions of pieces of data collected, but they haven't come up with any cases of wrongdoing.

They conclude reiterating concerns about the volume of data collected, the buffering of data that is then kept for search later but they do not come up with a single case of someone harmed by any wrongdoing.

How can that be in a system that supposedly does so much that is disturbing?

Why I Don't Support ObamaCare and James Fallow's Extraordinary Delusion

Propaganda poster circulated by whitehouse.gov this month.

I voted for Obama in 2008 for a variety of reasons, one of which was I actually believed in his health care proposal because I didn't have health insurance and I was going broke with medical expenses for myself and family members.

I didn't vote for Obama in 2012, and voted for Romney instead, for a number of reasons, among which is that I ceased to believe in the health care program.

Let me explain why.

I thought originally that ObamaCare, whatever its socialist ideological problems, would basically do what state public insurance programs like Child Health Care Plus and Family Health Care Plus are able to do in New York State.

Because I work, I was not eligible for the state health insurance, but because I'm a single mother with low income, my children are eligible for Child Health Care Plus, and I can pay a low premium of around $100 a month, plus co-pays and with high deductibles, and more or less prevent at least horrendous costs from their emergencies -- which involve a notorious punishing $1000 ER fee just to walk in the door in New York City. (The people who feel the pain of this whopping fee are not people with insurance -- their companies pay it without complaint; the homeless or indigent don't feel it because they never have any intention of paying their bills anyway. It's law-abiding people who pay bills, with stable addresses so debt collectors can easily harass them, who wind up paying the cost for the uninsured, including themselves, to use ERs as clinics or even just as ERs.)

So I figured that ObamaCare would be something like this, only for adults, and with a higher threshold of means-testing. I never dreamed it would have fines if you didn't join, or that it would have subsidies to state exchanges, rather than clear-cut means-testing.

Of course, I've always wondered why those who want socialized health care don't have states just do this, and have the federal government assist some poorer states and some poorer populations in increasing coverage and creating more free or low-cost prevention programs like a standard package of testing for everybody -- say, one strep throat test, one Pap smear, one mammogram, one prostate test per year for everybody depending on age or sex -- but not taking on the burden of universal coverage. And to be sure, this is being administered through state exchanges, but the premiums do not at all seem to be the mere $100 that Obama Truth Team propagandists claim but more like $200 or even $300 for the same family sizes and income. I just don't see the reality of the $100 premium anywhere, even in the most sympathetic press.

The notion of just how you're going to get subsidized - what the process will involve, what paperwork you might have to submit, etc. was very hazy -- but I knew that's just exactly where all the troubles are for the average person getting state-subsidized insurance.

And the question of the high deductibles we already see in insurance programs for the poor that almost make them not worth it for some is now being looked at more closely with ObamaCare.

With good reason, these companies providing this state insurance do not make it easy, create many hurdles, and are arbitrary in the direction of trying to shake you off. That's because it's just too great a cost for any company to bear and not go broke, and so they use every trick in the book to keep people undercompensated or off the program entirely -- especially in anticipation of ObamaCare.

Example: even though I provided my children's passports and Social Security cards and they were proven to be citizens when they joined the program years ago, and had been renewed each year when I re-qualified with new applications without any demand to re-show passports and SS cards already copied and on file, suddenly I was hit at the 11th hour before the deadline to supply proof of my daughter's citizenship after she had been on it for 10 years.

Or even when I already supplied my income tax, already supplied a letter from the employer, I was still hit with yet another form for the employer to sign -- and when the employer submitted it without specifying a salary was monthly -- which was already specified in the cover letter initially supplied AND visible in the totals on the 1099 also sent with the income tax -- it was declared invalid after the deadline passed and then made the whole application invalid.

You would think that if ObamaCare managed fines through the IRS, it would also end this burdensom process of forcing people to show income letters, paycheck stubs, returns, forms, etc. if they simply checked off a box that they had an income tax return and a Social Security Number - then they would be issued the subsidy accordingly. But that's never how it's done.

I also assumed that Obama would be serious about tackling the huge cost of medical expenses with more preventive care, more "standard package" options and delivery of them more efficiently -- for example, in NYC, many high schools have nurse's offices that are essentially branch medical clinics tied to hospitals, with doctors available in them and can administer vaccines. Since the school system requires the vaccines, and the government is paying for health care, why not offer it as a feature of the school system everywhere, and pay the $1000 that it costs to vaccinate a young teen? (Yes, that's the bill I got -- $1000 for a routine set of vaccinations -- and that's likely inflated).

Obviously a big medical cost comes from malpractice insurance -- my OBY/GYNs were nearly driven out of business by these huge costs. They are huge -- and those trying to prove they aren't simply won't think in terms of an individual local practice and what it means to less wealthy urban doctors in particular, and insist on looking at this problem only system wide and trying to minimize it.

The Trial Attorneys of America and other lawyers' lobbying groups and individual law firms are Obama's largest campaign contributors. Naturally they don't want to see this cash cow tackled and Obama won't touch it.

I'm quite aware that as the ObamaCare debate dragged on, there were other hard facts that Obama couldn't address -- big employers moving employees to part-time or contract status to avoid the burden; small companies worried about going out of business if they had to pay for the costs -- and of course the completely ideological and politicized insistence that ObamaCare pay for birth control and abortion-inducing medications, which was unnecessary and needlessly alienated the Catholic Church -- which rightfully questioned why the First Amendment had to be violated in order to put in a health care plan -- given that Planned Parenthood, also funded by the government, exists to provide birth control and abortions for free or low cost for the poor.

But most of all what I have hated about ObamaCare is the inability of Obama himself and his acoltyes and fanboys to compromise.

Government is about compromise. Like many people, I assumed Obama would be forced into the reality of having to compromise once he came to office -- instead, he swung harder to the left, fell more under pressure from the hard left, and has rigidly clung to his socialist orthodoxy. Yes, socialist, and don't pretend it's not, when I went to the same socialist meetings as Obama did in the 1980s in New York City and I know exactly what stealth socialism under "community organizing" is all about.

Obama's unwillingness to get rid of some of the most costly and onerous sides of his plan, his unwillingness to reach a deal over this, is what is most worrisome of all.

What the "progressives" have done with this is enter a realm of ideological shrillness and brittle rigidity the likes of which I've never seen. They claim this rigid sectarianism is the feature only of the Tea Party and figures like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz; they are oblivious to their own rigid ideological insistence that the world contort to fit the socialist view Obama had in his youth and has stealthily tried to impose since he came in office, under cover of supposedly single issues like "health" or "education".

James Fallows provides a horribly emblematic example of this writing in the Atlantic (which has gone all technocommunist in recent years, one of my great sorrows). He writes:

We're used to thinking that the most important disagreements are between the major parties, not within one party; and that disagreements over policies, goals, tactics can be addressed by negotiation or compromise.

Right. So why can't Obama compromise, James? Obama. He's the one who was only elected by half the people; he's the one who does not have even less than half of the country's approval now. Why can't HE compromise?!

I don't care how stupid, insane, clownish or discredited the GOP is and figures like Ted Cruz for whom I have no use and will never vote for.

Why can't Obama change? Why?

Fallows pretends that this fight is only within the Republican Party, between Tea Party types and the more "normal" conservatives. He claims the Obama bots are only bystanders:

This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.** Outsiders to this struggle -- the president and his administration, Democratic legislators as a group, voters or "opinion leaders" outside the generally safe districts that elected the new House majority -- have essentially no leverage over the outcome.

Um, outsiders? But ObamaCare was pushed through and still exists as an imposition despite numerous attempts to defund it and make it less of a monster in the House. Er, leverage? Politics is a process of compromise. It's not about one half of the country bludgeoning the other half into doing something they don't want or need and we all can't afford.

And indeed, in the House, we see more clearly the attitude of most of the country to having to take on the burden of a complex and costly health care program that doesn't just reasonably subsidize at least more of the poor, but tries to lure the healthy and wealthy into giving up more of their wealth to sustain an uncurbed monster with no cost control, and then punishes the poor who refuse to go along with this ruse by making them pay fines. The means-testing and application process have always been kept deliberately vague.

Yet instead of accepting that elected representatives of his fellow Americans who don't believe in socialism as he does as a "progressive," and instead of conceding that when you have half the country only voting for a president, and less than half supporting this particular program you have to compromise, James Fallows comes up with this APPALLING formulation that the problem is journalists who won't do as he say, and become scribes and propagandists for his "progressive" cause and take on reality:

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a "standoff," a "showdown," a "failure of leadership," a sign of "partisan gridlock," or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement,represents a failure of journalism*** and an inability to see or describe what is going on.

No. It represents free press that is reporting that Obama and the Democrats aren't willing to compromise either. It's not true that no compromise is acceptible as Fallows claims -- compromises have never really been tried. Hard-core socialist ideological militancy is the problem here.

It's scary that legitimate coverage of this as a stand-off -- which it is because Obama will not compromise and thinks he can impose sharp socialism by indeed digging in his heels and waiting out Republicans by causing pain with government shut-down -- would somehow be a "failure". James Fallow is a failure -- a failure of intellectual freedom, indeed a failure of intellectual  honestly.

Most Americans feel like they won't miss the government much, even if it does shut down for 10 days or 30 days. Fallows scurries to find emotional examples of ill effects -- like failure to deliver flood assistance in Colorado to try to make the case that it will matter. I think most people think that the shut-down won't happen, and that it's brinkmanship.

So the reality of what should happen when the GOP is forced into such brinkmanship is that Obama should compromise. We have a two-party system -- it's really four parties these days with one in power (the Democratic Socialists of America) with significant Congressional forces like Elizabeth Warren or Ron Wydell adding to the presidential stealth socialism; one (the Democrat Party) unable to curb its minority leftist extremists who are really in a separate, unelected party; and two not in power except in the House, with the fourth, or Tea Party, able to deploy some individual GOP members in its favour. I think we'd all benefit from a multi-party system that would force DSA socialists to get elected and not use stealth methods, and ditto the Tea Party.

But compromise is what has to happen, and that means offers have to come from Obama on what he could de-fund out of his over-costly program. It has to be a significant unilateral move now, and an end to grand-standing on his part. The socialist journalists who keep crying that there is no truth, or that there is a lie only discredit themselves and should themselves run for office as the propagandists of the party they support.

 

 

Tracking the Social Graph Online: How it Began in Worlds and Games

Sims Online cooking skills lot in 2008. Photo By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

The "social graph" -- the exposure of the network of connections of human beings, combined with other data, and the implications involved -- first was created and followed in online virtual worlds and MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role-play games). The same coders and engineers who perfected these in games and worlds went on to social media where they perfected them further, ultimately for use in elections (Obama was the first candidate to win using the drilling of social network data). Now the notion of the social graph has hit the headlines in relationship to the NSA Snowden scandals (and perhaps a related concept, the social gesture, i.e. every little thing you do online, will be next).

I first encountered the social graph in the hands of Will Wright, designer of The Sims Online, an outgrowth of the hugely popular Sims game moved to real-time interaction by real humans online. The humans obviously weren't automated like the Sims offline game, but they were automatized by having only a limited repertoire of automatic actions they could perform, and a rote set of chores and tasks they had to complete in order to stay functioning -- the diamonds above their heads had to be "kept green" and "out of the red" by having the Sim play pool, socialize, sleep, go to the bathroom, eat, dance, work, etc. Interestingly, even within the confines of this open-ended but regimented game, people devised all kinds of creative ways to do two things people like to do most: a) make money b) have sex.

Will Wright had various collectivized collaborationist "better world" notions he forced on the population, i.e. creating "group jobs" that would force people to socialize and collaborate to complete tasks. These were quickly sabotaged. Either people just built bots and made alts to run through the chores at top speed and generate "simoleons" as the world's cash was known (which had a real black market value on e-bay and gaming exchanges), or they would devise extra rules, like making bets on the outcome of pizza options, or they would optimize the aspects of the game in superior ways to try to beat their adverse disruptions -- i.e. placing toilets next to wood-working benches for the Sim to toilet while he worked as it really didn't matter if he ran across the screen to a sheltered toilet -- he was an imaginary character and there was no need for him to experience shame if that was actually reducing his income generation by taking up precious time and steps and reducing his maximum output.

If anything, it was funny to see how most people -- even with robot routines imposed on them - kept to their offline culture -- they insisted on toilets removed from workplaces and eating areas and insisted on doors and walls; they didn't want gambling and cheating because that "ruined the fun," and they chose esthetic beauty of their homes and stores rather than maximized job production or Sim recovery. It is very hard to eradicate human culture and spirit.

One of the aspects Will Wright built into the game which caused universal havoc was "Friendship Balloons". This was my first experience of the social graph -- unfortunately, I don't seem to have any screenshots left and I can't find any online today although surely someone has one, given their huge importance to this virtual world.

Everyone had a "balloon graph" or social graph that showed visually who they were friends with, how good and close their friendship was, and who their enemies were. So each time I met someone, I could choose an option to hand them a balloon, and we would be linked by "friendship". Our balloons would start out bright green in colour, but if we didn't keep visiting each others' homes, and didn't keep interacting, say, by dancing the jitterbug or at least chatting and shaking each others' hands once in awhile, the green would fade, the once-bright balloon would fall to the bottom of the graph, and then even disappear beneath pages and pages of such balloon stories.

By the same token, if someone came and slapped me or "gloved me" as the game mechanics showed, i.e. throwing down a gauntlet, then our relationship would be recorded as red. Someone would have to come back again and "piledrive" or otherwise use negative attacks on me to keep the red in -- otherwise, it, too, would fade.

The balloons picked up not only people you actually friended with the balloon gesture, it picked up other metadata -- other people who simply happened to be at the same job location or club location as you. So if you walked into a bar, all the other people would "show up in your balloons" and show up faintly as green -- if you didn't interact with them in any way, they would fade and drop down in the pages and ultimately disappear.

Naturally this system was gamed and led to horrible consequences for its players -- and even attracted the attention of real-life media.

The game designer himself -- Will Wright on his alts -- was the first one to pollute it by buying friendship -- he paid 100 simoleons to people to friend him, so he could gather more balloons and move up the friendship list -- there were leaderboards as in all games. We could also tell that he had friended -- or accepted 100 from -- Mia Wallace, the most notorious mafia queen who ran the Sim Shadow Government which ultimately took over and ruined the Sims Online for many people with its corruption and terror -- I've always thought Will Wright deliberately allowed evil to enter his world "to see what would happen" and to see how the human spirit would attempt to overcome it (which it did, but just not sufficiently, in part because of constraints in TSO's own rules, chief of which was suppression of press freedom -- because the game company felt it couldn't check rumours and police libel, you were not allowed to report the bad behaviour of any other individual or group on the forums, and that meant no one could ever warn other players or rally against the Shadow Government.)

Besides buying friendship, what happened is that virtual wives soon discovered their virtual husbands were cheating on them -- they would see a suspiciously green balloon at the top of their boyfriend's pages -- was he dancing the jitterbug just a little too often with that certain Sim?

Another negative side effect was that people came deliberately to slap you to "red up your balloons" -- and it would spoil your reputation because people thought perhaps you got into bar fights or didn't cooperate sufficiently on group job objects and were "trouble". Some people automatically ejected from their establishments anyone who entered with a lot of red balloons in their pack.

People would endlessly study these balloon graphs --and I mean endlessly -- you could tell at a glance who was a friend or foe of whom by red or green status. They would see who were the most green; they would be jealous over literal greenness if a special friend didn't "keep them in their balloons". They would deliberately go over and try to socialize to keep certain popular people "at the top of their balloons". They would avoid others and push them down the pages out of sight.

Of course, all of this had the extra added headache or pleasure, depending on how you looked at it, of "mapping" and the option to "map" or "not map" a friend and give out those permissions. So you could open up the world's master map, and spot where your friends were, and teleport to them to keep green -- or they could block you, so you couldn't find them and keep up that green -- and would have to guess where they might be -- perhaps by checking their balloons and see who was in their inner, greenest circle -- and then guess where that person might be and teleport there. People naturally developed all kinds of mapping strategems -- knowing that people had to keep up their jitterbug and piledriving skills, they would go to the skill lots where these skills had to be kept up by interacting with various objects, and then head there.

As all MMORPG players know, there are always a set of concerted players who want to nerf or dumb down or disable the negative features of games -- so it wasn't long before people began to lobby to get rid of the "red balloons" idea as it harmed their reputations and some were deliberately going around gloving others to make them look bad.

By the time we migrated to Second Life or There or other open-ended social worlds, the balloons had been replaced by friendship cards, but these were not made visible. So it wasn't long before some bright young coder thought it would be great to design what he called the SL Wristwatch which would track all the people near you within 96 meters, track how often you were in each other's proximity, and then post this online so that people essentially could make the same kind of TSO balloons in rough fashion.

But very soon people began to howl. The online edition of these early social graphs that existed before Twitter was born, before Facebook was widely used and popular -- in 2004-2005 -- showed up people that other people didn't want their friends to know about. The same problem developed -- a sim wife would find that her sim husband was shown 96m near his old girlfriend or near some other woman and that became suspicious.

Or enemies or griefers who wanted to discredit others would keep showing up in their 96m range to make it look like they were friends, constantly showing their proximity.

This proximity data would be used to find out where the most people were and where they went hte most; who was the most popular; who was related to them, and of course led to friendship and influence seeking behaviour. But it was fairly rapidly shut down -- just like years later GirlsNearMe was shut down for the same privacy-exposing behaviour.

Then the next scandal involved another "improvement" on this proximity data -- now the IP addresses of every one coming to the sim were collected, and this led not only to showing who was with who, but it also outed alts -- people with the exact same IP address (and yes, many are in fact dynamic, or fluctuate within a close enough range) but who had different alt accounts would be outed.Also their habits would be on display -- if they went to a gay club or shopped at a BDSM mall.

So there was an enormous outcry over this privacy-stripping function -- even in a virtual world where most people were anonymous -- or thought they were. And this function was banned.

Activists in worlds and games who tried to stop greedy coders from scraping enormous amounts of data and displaying it in order to change behaviours -- all as ultimately a marketing test -- were strong enough to stop some of the geek game-god practices but didn't have enough social cohesion and sophistication and power to be able to stop them more broadly as they moved from games to social networks.

No one complained when Barack Obama drilled the social graphs everywhere to construct polling data and organize massive Get Out the Vote phone calls based on issues or demographics -- Obama for America grabbed all that right off the top, mixed it and drilled it and won, then morphed into Organizing for Action, and took all that data with them, and few complained that a Democratic Party candidate had now taken with him for his private use in a nonprofit the people's data gathered in a national election.

Those to the hard left or hard right of even "progressive" Obama only complained when the NSA, an institution with far more checks and balances and compliance with the rule of law than game or virtual world companies or social media compaines or OFA did this lawfully in pursuit of criminals.

No one complained when the chief of police in Steubenville gathered social media and cell phone data, texts and photographs, and used it to prosecute two young men who had raped a girl at a party. If anything, Anonymous, which used brutal vigilante tactics to out many others in the social graph with these men and this girl, falsely accusing innocent people and permanently ruining the lives even of those who were rightly disciplined or prosecuted with this case, was applauded by feminists for "getting" those football team members with "rape culture". The kind of "rape culture" that coders routinely disdainfully indulge in when a company or government is hacked, and they blame the victim for wearing too short a skirt, i.e. failing to salt or hash data base tables.

Today, when anthropologist Katy Pearce routinely collects openly-available Twitter accounts and elaborately tracks who has tweeted to whom about what in Nodex and other programs, nobody complains except me. She can claim to out government informants or pro-government supporters with these methods by seeing what they say and to whom, although I've cautioned, being even more a supporter of independent (as distinct from GONGO-ized) civil society than she is in Azerbaijan, that people sitting on the fence, or ordinary people still shaping their opinion, or people who just might not like the opposition for various reasons, can be mistaken in these methods for "pro-government" and in fact alienated and not won over by the movement. There are also many alts and bots polluting the information but you can't always tell the difference.

 

In Whose Hands Do You Want Your Internet Communications?

Hearing on FISA review, September 26, 2013. C-SPAN.

NSA chief Gen. Alexander slams "sensational reporting" here -- and I couldn't agree more. Why aren't there more journalists questioning this narrative and doing more investigation of the principles involved in making the claims against the NSA?

Once again Mike Masnick is printing tendentious bullshit.

Like Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler and others of these "progressive" or libertarian writers, he is in such a bubble of antagonism that he can never see any nuances or turn off the hate and snark machine. You never feel as if there is intelligence there on Tech Dirt, just reptilian cunning.

One of the favourite things of the snarky geeks to do is pretend that the government or some politician has done something "illegal" or "the same thing" as some figure like Snowden or Manning whom they are targeting or prosecuting -- as if to say, "See, they get away with it because they are privileged elites, but the hackers can't" blah blah.

Their absolute favourite is to try to witch-hunt and then call-out with malicious glee some political leader who seems to be violating secrecy while themselves complaining about hackers. Much of the time this is sheer ridicularity.

DID FEINSTEIN LEAK LIKE SNOWDEN? OF COURSE NOT

This story about Dianne Feinstein is so typical claiming she "accidently gave away" the story that NSA taps the Internet backbone. But scrape away all the geeky rant here and look at what the NSA even in its redacted form, wrote, as referenced in this story:

Back in August, when the FISA courtdeclassified its ruling about NSA violations, the third footnote, though heavily redacted, did briefly discuss this "upstream" capability:

The term "upstream collection" refers to NSA's interception of Internet communications as they transit [redacted] rather than to acquisitions directly from Internet service providers such as [redacted]

Then look at what Feinstein said in Congress (covered on C-SPAN) per Kevin Bankston

Upstream collection... occurs when NSA obtains internet communications, such as e-mails, from certain US companies that operate the Internet background, i.e., the companies that own and operate the domestic telecommunications lines over which internet traffic flows

So what's the big deal?

Either the NSA gets the communications from the companies "directly," i.e. they go to them and give a request to get it and deal with them directly although they don't get it by jacking directly into their servers or they get it from the backbone -- again from companies by going to them with requests.

BACKBONE IN BACKGROUND ISN'T SURFACED

Even if there is some notion here that the NSA is tapping directly into the backbone to get overseas Internet traffic -- and there isn't in actually that crude way -- you have to say: so what?

They are tapping in order to find certain things for which they have "probable cause" to put under surveillance between they are trying to monitor and stop terrorism and other crimes. Good!

There is no evidence that they take the entire firehose of the entire Internet into their hands and dredge it arbitrarily leading to actual civil rights violations. IF a machine does this and collects certain data, it's to a grid that fits a certain mandate that is in fact overseen by internal reviews and the FISA courts.

Naturally, there are the mandatory guffaws from the geeks because Feinstein said "backround" instead of "backbone". Since "Internet backbone" is not some special technical phrase but used widely, it's obvious she simply misspoke, but no, we have to turn it into a "teachable moment" when we insist that Congress is "too stupid" to legislate about technology (a notion I resolutely reject, as there are plenty of experts available and the principles of law involved are basic and not rocket science; usually what hackers mean when they say this is that this or that congress person isn't doing what they want or isn't like their famous extremist Ron Wydall.)

But I don't see that Feinstein is "leaking" anything or that in fact there is some smoking gun or some scandal. The NSA spies. Good, that's what it's supposed to do! It spies by dredging communications pipelines in some fashion to track terrorism, crime, etc. Good!

The challenge them to the civil liberties gang and hacker hysterics is to find actual concrete cases where the NSA somehow actually wrongfully put someone under surveillance for no good reason, or even gave information that got someone arrested unlawfully in the end. Bring it. Not seeing it.

WITTES PUSHES BACK

Fortunately, there's Benjamin Wittes of the Lawfare blog and Brookings Institution to push back on all this Greenwald and Masnick Snowden hysteria. He has produced many good articles challenging the hacker take on this with careful review of the legal principles and facts as they are known so far.

Read his lastest post, for example, related to this hearing. Wittes counters most of the bad argumentation on this from all over with these sorts of eloquent statements:

I have gone through the declassified documents very carefully, and these disclosures to my mind show no evidence of any intentional spying on Americans or abuse of civil liberties.  They show a remarkably low rate of the sort of errors that any complex system of technical collection will inevitably produce. They show robust compliance procedures—as DeLong’s quip in the aisle yesterday accurately reflects.  They show earnest and serious efforts to keep the Congress informed, notwithstanding some members’ protestations that they were shocked to learn that NSA—having repeatedly informed Congress that it was engaged in bulk metadata collection—was actually telling the truth. And they show a remarkable dialog with the FISC about the parameters of the agency’s legal authority and a real commitment both to keeping the court informed of activity and to complying with the FISC’s judgment. The FISC, meanwhile, in these documents looks nothing like the rubber stamp that it’s portrayed to be in countless caricatures. It looks, rather, like a serious judicial institution of considerable energy.

To the extent that members of Congress agree with this analysis—and many members of the intelligence committee do—the principal task in the current environment is to defend the existing structures, publicly and energetically, as both Feinstein and Chambliss have done. It is not to race to correct imagined structural deficiencies in the system and thereby to appear to be reforming what one actually supports—and thereby contribute to the delegitimizing of those structures. To be sure, there are reforms that would be valuable in the way of increasing transparency, increasing accountability, codifying now-public standards, and even tightening those standards. But to my mind, we must pursue these reforms in the context of a defense of the basic oversight structures themselves. And the defense of these mechanisms necessarily involves a defense of some degree of limitations on transparency. In other words, the challenge of transparency here is a really subtle one: It is to inject transparency within the basic confines of an oversight system that is actually designed to protect secret

TRUST THEM, THEY'RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT

He then looks hard at the Big Data collection issue -- the firehose of data, the strict rules for the use of only parts of this data, and the internal legal restraints.

And he comes down with the perspective of trusting a liberal democratic state under the rule of law:

The first is law. Unless you believe that the intelligence community is a lawless enterprise that will not follow the rules, this puts a premium on the substantive content of the law Congress writes to govern this area. In other words, the reason it matters what the rules are is that we assume that the law actually will constrain NSA.

And then he doesn't just leave it as blind and dumb trust in one's government -- which leads the Marcy Wheelers of the world to call you a Stasi lover and other twitterers to call you Obama bots or Sheeple or worst -- he specifies why you can trust the government -- because there are checks and balances and consequences:

It is really important to distinguish between the technical capacity to do something and whether that thing is actually going to happen. The D.C. police could easily raid my house today.  They have the technical capacity to do it. Yet I have near-total confidence that it will not happen. The FBI could wiretap my phone. It certainly has the technical capacity to do so, yet I have a near-total confidence that it will not happen. The reason for my confidence is two-fold: the substantive law would not support either action, and there are robust compliance measures that mean that were lawless action were to take place, there would be accountability at many levels and I would have a remedy.

Yet the EFF and ACLU gang keep squawking that everything is secret, we "can't know what is done in our name" blah blah. Well, if you have elected officials and they monitor this, you have to trust them to some extent and the notion that Congress "wasn't informed" has been pretty well debunked at this point. This isn't being Sheeple, it's acknowledging that division of labour is what you have in a modern society -- and that intelligence activity cannot be transparent in the maximum way the hackers want it.

WELL, WHO WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE CONTROL YOUR PRIVACY?

And really, Wittes finally cuts it down to this proposition:

In the era of Big Data, the compliance regime is a big part of the whole ballgame. If you believe the compliance regime inadequate, after all, the government already has the data. But one thing we have learned an enormous amount about is the compliance procedures that NSA uses. They are remarkable. They are detailed. They produce data streams that are extremely telling—and, to my mind, deeply reassuring.

And here’s the rub: I believe that my liberty is more secure with NSA collecting this material subject to these rules and this compliance regime than it would be if NSA declined to do so.

Of course, Greenwald and the gang don't see it this way, and if it were up to them, this collection would be entirely shut-down, unless miraculously law-enforcement got data from some other technique that the hacker crowd is willing to approve (real-life trailing of suspects?) and then tasked a phone or Internet company -- with a warrant -- to look at specific records.

Here's how I see it even more starkly. We have a choice in whose hands and under what authorities the firehose of all communications are going to be, and how these communications are accessed. It can involve:

1. Governments, for better or worse, who possess the physical infrastructure and capacity to hold and tap the Internet and are under rules, laws and oversight internally and by Congress;

2. Private companies, that are directly interfacing with the public as they produce the content that affects privacy and who are not subject to outside oversight and often don't even have fair internal procedures;

3. Hackers who hacker data on a whim, at will, and themselves remain secret, and demand maximum encryption -- and who are subject to absolutely no accountability.

So what's it going to be? Which one of these or which combination? Shouldn't it be obvious why I'm for Door No. 1 -- because that's the option that really does have public oversight, unlike the others?

We more or less have no. 1 with parts of no. 2 now, but no. 3 whacking away at both and upsetting the status quo.

But...It's not like you get a *fourth* choice where companies, heeding the most extreme advice of extreme hackers, seal off your privacy from themselves (not when they need it for marketing and management of their platforms!), and don't ever enable government access in any way at any level (but...do they want to be good law-abiding corporate citizens or not?).

And it's not like you would get hackers content with leaving it at that, either.

THE HACKERS OFTEN DO RUN THINGS

Yet no company and no government is going to accept a regime where hackers run things -- in fact, what we have now is a regime where hackers run things and that's precisely the problem. Their damage is rampant and they are ubiquitous. Hackers are fighting hard to bring their Autonomous Unicorn Realm into being, but they are constrained not only by internal fighting or power struggles but capacity.

Corporations are basically the ones with the largest capacity now (Google). And for now, they are forced to be constrained by governments that take them to court (like the US is now on their grab of wi-fi streams which none of the Greenwalds and Appelbaums are complaining about at all, and aren't welcoming the court-case on this at all.)

ARE AMERICAN COMPANIES HURT BY SNOWDEN?

There's been a constant tech press refrain that Snowden's revelations are going to "hurt American business" -- Europeans, especially Germans are going to dump American services because their data "isn't safe". While there are German Internet/email companies running "made in Germany" sort of campaigns now, and Russia has really run with this concept big-time (and held meetings with Google about it as a result), I haven't heard of some big, huge dent in the services' business.

This piece on Facebook's "headaches" doesn't show that there is somehow a drop in Facebook usage as a result.

The claim that Facebook is "dying" is a special, recurring geek myth that has to do with software autocracy, coder culture and such, "progressive" politics that hate what Zuckerberg's lobbying arm is doing now -- and all this leads to the placing negative stories based on skewed spinning of the Pew and other polls about usage - and deserves a special post. Unfortunately, Socialbakers stopped publishing country data on usage so it's hard to know if there is a "Snowden drop"  yet -- but note that even in April before Snowden's revelation, the Guardian was claiming a drop.

And again -- regarding privacy, these companies are on the run anyway, and were before Snowden. In fact, long before Snowden, the EU privacy commissioners were constantly trying to sue Google or deal with Google politically. And some of that is bearing fruit now.

This case questioning gmail scraping in order to pitch ads is indicative of what we are seeing now.

WILL THE PROVIDERS GO AFTER SNOWDEN ON THEIR OWN?

I wonder if there is serious damage to FB or Google or Twitter that rather than fend off attacks in court or "manage perceptions" in governments, they might finally turn around and say, "Hey, we need to get Snowden -- and Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum."

Don't think their corporate board rooms don't have people discussing this, and don't have corporate security people who are examining this. These companies have CONSIDERABLE monitoring capacity of course -- if they want, they can pull Appelbaum's, etc. Google searches and such and use their VAST sleuthing and networking skills -- they are everywhere, all over the world, doing everything and knowing everybody -- to find out what's really up.

My bet is that if they come to suspect that this hack is either a sectarian hysterical hype by the extremists at the Chaos Computer Club, who aren't co-terminous with Google executives although they overlap with Google engineers OR that it is a sinister Russian active measures exploiting WikiLeaks wittingly or unwittingly, they will fight back in their own inimitable way -- planting stories in the tech press which they are masters at doing, planting Youtubes which they are masters at doing, planting Twitter hashtags which they are masters at doing.

If they think Snowden has taken food off their table, they will fight back harder than any government and eventually they will target him and the rest of the G9 crew -- unless of course they admire and love him - which I suspect some do - because ultimately he is about freeing the Internet for more use and more ad clicks and less resistance from firewalls.

I think in fact they will find that the privacy movement is not one that serves their interest, howver, even if they try to play the game of saying they will now provide more of it for their customers, because privacy mitigates against their ability to scrape and tape info for their purposes, too. They can go through somewhat faint motions as they are doing now of tasking the government to have "transparency" on their information requests, but they may find that doing this, and even finding there are only 37,000 of them out of gadzillions of transactions will undermine rather than bolster public confidence.

 

Are The Robots Coming?

French President Francois Hollande cradles a baby robot. Photo credit unknown.

This photo is making the rounds of Facebook and G+ and is supposed to illustrate how the Socialist president is going to re-animate French industry by producing robots and driverless cars and such. Okay, hope that works out!

Meanwhile, the Germans are also working intensively on robots as well, as we can see from JAMES, whose name is spelled from Joint Action in Multimodal Embodied Systems.

Here he looks like Garfield the cat's shrunken head put on some kind of Toy Story muscle airmen or something:

Here he looks a little more upbeat. Then in this news story he has an improved look more like a winking British butler.

But I don't think he's in danger of replacing humans just yet because he's terribly slow and doesn't really keep up with the small talk.

You realize in these choppy robot motions just how hard it is to get robots working and doing things and have them cope in an environment with multiple people talking at them etc.

Second Life is filled with artificial intelligence experiments and I have some of them myself. I have both the brains in a jar and the parrot that is based on ALICE or some offshoot of one of those types of artificial brain languages, and you can ask it questions and it gives funny answers. I ask if it is knows where the central asset server is, and half the time the parrot, who I have dubbed "CEO of the Metaverse," says he lost it. You ask these AIs if they will kill humans, and they aren't sure. They answer with your own question back at you in some cases.

Every time I log in on the Iris server where I have the Moth Temple build and tutorials, I find a whole bunch of bots clogging up the infohub. I have to try to get the server reset to shake them loose, or try to figure out who their bot-handlers are and get them to come wrangle them, as they just bob around like idiots. Some newbies wind up talking to them and not realizing they aren't real.

Some of them are club bots or mall bots that say Welcome to X and tell you about their establishments, some are sex bots. Some are just weird role-play bots that are dressed up as cowboys or Goreans.

Here's how you tell the bots from the real people. Wade into the midst and say, "Anybody want to earn $100 for a survey?" The real people obviously want to and answer, the bots don't care.

There are bots set up to go around to the money trees in Second Life, which people put out to attract visitors to their malls and clubs and give them a little "start-up" money. I have one of these in my mall in Ross. I find there is almost no correlation between the people who shake the money tree and the people who buy products or rent. But if you don't put a money tree in your SL mall you don't have that "lived-in look".

Some people have designed bots that search the Search Places list or classifieds for ads that show the phrase "money tree," land by them, pluck them, wait their intervals, pluck some more, etc. So the money-tree coder now have a way of defeating this which is clever, ask me and I'll tell you unless you are a bot-wrangler.

I think we're aways away from having robots -- as distinct from automation, computerization, etc. -- take over for humans in the service industry. I can't imagine that the cost of manufacturing, deploying, and managing bots in hospitals will really ever be justified by contrast to minimum-wage humans or even double-minimum wage humans who are currently deployed in hospitals now as the first line of defense monitoring the machines in intensive care, for example. These people sit for 8 hours a stretch consciously writing down everything the patient does every 10 or 15 minutes, but they literally have nothing to do except maybe straighten a pillow or go over and sometimes press reset on the machine when it goes offline. The serious stuff like ventilation and IVs are run by machines with alarms that bring more costly professionals running to do various things.

There are now machines that do things like lift patients' legs or arms to keep them from getting bed sores or to try to begin exercising them so they don't get weak, but I've never seen a machine that manages bed pans, and I suppose that's how we can be sure there will be humans with us when we are born and when we die (if in a hospital) probably for some time to come.

Robots tend to bore me. I know Will Wright is fascinated with them. To me, they seem like SO much work and they are so limited socially -- they really have no soul...

Missing on Terrorism in Kenya: The Human Rights Movement and Religious Left Have No Moral Compass

Declan Gavin's perfectly knowledgeable piece in Foreign Policy is perfectly in tune with the typical human rights organization's approach to terrorism, and indeed to the "progressive" views about the challenge of terrorism.

That's why I cite it here for my long-standing point about the lack of heart in the human rights movement -- because he is absolutely typical and also happens to be a Global Human Rights Fellow along with being an Africa researcher.

Every line in his article is the kind of line you find in a typical Human Rights Watch report or a press release or campaign from Human Rights First. And every line is true, in its way.

But...the blood isn't even washed from the floors of the smoking Westgate Mall, attacked by Al-Shabaab terrorists who killed 68 people and injured 150 more in this Al Qaeda affiliate's worst act of terrorism, yet Gavin like so many other leftist do-gooders is already cautioning the Kenyan government not to "overreact." In other words, like so many activists and "progressive" analysts he goes out of his way to blame only harsh policies for terrorism thereby taking the spotlight off the terrorists and their atrocities themselves.

There isn't even a tear shed for people just like him -- a highly-educated couple doing humanitarian work in Kenya -- a woman who was eight months pregnant, and her husband, were murdered in the attack:

A 33-year-old pregnant staffer for the Clinton Global Initiative and her boyfriend were among those killed in the Kenya mall shooting, former President Bill Clinton said.

Elif Yavuz, a senior vaccines researcher based in Tanzania, had been expecting a baby with Ross Langdon, an award-winning architect, who was also killed in the rampage.

Gavin provides a full, well-briefed argumentation rooted in a competent knowledge of Kenya's history to paint a picture of terror growing out of the unhappy childhoods of people caught up by state authoritarianism and its crackdowns on insurgents.

But analysts like this and human rights advocates with the same perspective cannot explain why Somalis who grew up in the US or found refuge here and didn't face anything remotely similar to those kind of brutal policies against terrorists and separatists in Africa still felt the call to jihad in their homeland. They can't explain what factors account for why even victims of human rights abuses with recognizable grievances don't chose peaceful resistance, and they won't examine any of their beliefs -- cultural, religious, political, much less find fault with them.

They can't bite the bullet of the difficult choices that ensue if states are not going to use brutal physical filtration and sweeping tactics against civilians -- that more spying and dragneting of communications may be needed to find the links to known terrorists.

The problem of how to really fight tactics if you really pull back and use all these Human Rights Watch-approved methods for control of unrest just isn't ever spelled out. (I've never met a government in the world that was approved by HRW for its perfect terrorism-fighting methods AND actually combatted terrorism, too.)

Maybe if these "root causes" were really the local things they seem it might work -- but Al-Shabaab has had Al Qaeda support for years and as we can learn elsewhere, is well resourced from running the contrabrand trade.

The terrorist attack was demonstratively international in nature, as the mall was owned by Israelis and frequented by foreigners -- and American jihadists -- Somalis who had settled in the US -- were part of the attack force. Al-Shabaab's demand was ostensibly the removal of Kenyan troops from Somalia -- yet there's a vicious circle here because the troops are there because of Al-Shabaab's terrorism.  But this "propaganda of the deed" was very much global in its message -- striking Israel, the West, capitalism, free commerce, foreigners of any type -- cosmopolitanism -- in this extreme collectivist, parochial and even pastoral vision of the terrorists.

But we're supposed to view this as a "root cause" situation rooted only in resource scarcity or vestiges of colonialism -- and of course the past brutal reign of Daniel Arap Moi.

To be sure, everything about his reign was a human rights wrong and there is nothing redeeming there, given the atrocities he himself committed over the decades for which there was never justice.

Yes, I realize there is a supposed civic process going on (although it's in English, on Google docs, and with Twitter, and that means that it's perhaps not as authentic and grassroots as assumed) that is raising important questions with the government that has not been forthcoming with information.

Yes, we need to know if there are hostages and the names of the victims -- but even more capable governments with more resources struggle with these kinds of details as we saw with the Washington Navy Yard and other mass killings in our own country.

And the "civic process" that rushes to blame the Jewish owners of the mall for supposedly lax security or renting to the terrorists -- a fact not confirmed -- isn't necessarily going to stay a "civic process". And the "civic process" isn't mature if it can't concede even of a flawed government that keeping certain information secret may be operationally necessary and isn't a sign of incompetence or bad faith.

Yes, I realize that most people will focus on Kenyatta and the government forces as they are ostensibly in power, but I wish just for once, just for one day, people would talk to the terrorists and tell them what they think and ask them questions!

Yet just with every other act of this nature from Israel to Russia to Nigeria, the human rightsniks can't seem to find a way to say "and terrorists, too, violate human rights and they need to stop".

They don't say this in much the same way that WikiLeaks punks on Twitter explain why they never leak anything from Russia -- it's because they claim that "it's already understood" that the Russian government is bad, and you don't need to keep piling on. Meanwhile you "expect better" from the US which is a democracy.

In fact, the WikiLeakers feel there's something "progressive" about the Kremlin -- which gave their hero a talk show on their propaganda TV -- and those failing ever to condemn terrorists along with brutal governments that chase them also feel there's something "progressive" or "necessary" about violent jihad due to "poverty" or "resource allocation". And they want to direct their critiques to governments that can be responsive -- terrorists aren't susceptible to moral pressures.

Trust me, the greatest believers in "American exceptionalism" are the "progressives" and anarchists at WikiLeaks and Anonymous who think if only they brutally re-make America, everything will be find all over the world.

And the most moral people in the world about governments, especially Western governments, especially the US, can't seem to extend and apply this morality to a judgement of terrorism on a regular and consistent basis.

That is, human rights groups think it's a truism and already obvious who terrible terrorism is, so they don't have to merely reiterate it. They have so many more ideas for how governments should very, very carefully parse the terrorists from their substrate and being oh-so-careful not to crack the eggs of civil rights in the process.

And that's all fine, but increasingly, the moral gap yawns. Why can't we condemn terrorism and why don't we have better ideas of how to stop it -- ideas that might convince even the most hard-hearted security state?

My God, 80 people killed in Pakistan or 70 in Kenya -- and you really have nothing to say about this act itself?! Beyond the pro forma formulas condemning "this cowardly act" -- the favourite saying of liberals who surely don't imagine that they've shamed the manhood of men who in fact are as bold as the little arm-choppers described in Apocalypse Now and fear not.

You wish these analysts and these groups had a way at least to give solidarity to -- or even just attention to -- the people who try to stand up to this mass murder.

After the Westgate attack, taking great risk themselves, 160 Somali Islamic scholars issued a fatwah against Al-Shabaab, saying it "had no place in Islam".

It was the first statement of its kind.

Could we get some human rights and peace groups showing a little solidarity with this? Could we get them applauding it and urging protection of these people from harm?

Why is it that the Protestant churches so quick to denounce Israel can't get behind this important religious statement from their counterparts there in Africa? Why can't the social action Catholic groups? Why can't those peace-making Quakers? Why can't CODE PINK? Human Rights Watch used to be very careful about not issuing approvals of various non-state actors that maybe didn't quite line up with the orthodox human rights position, but if they can embrace Edward Snowden, who really has nothing to do with human rights but is an anarchist hacker, why can't they applaud these Islamic scholars?

Good Lord, they need support with that kind of perspective in an area of the world where most people feel silence is the best policy about terrorists. And Amnesty International -- they've made common cause with CagePrisoners on legitimate human rights issues at Guantanamo, but without distinguishing their ostensible parting of the ways on issues like women's rights. Why can't they embrace these brave Islamic scholars today on this issue?

 

Malinowski Sails Through Senate Confirmation Hearing with No Hard Questions and Soft Answers

Tom Malinowski had his confirmation hearing yesterday in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a session chaired by Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and where Mark Rubio (R-FL) and John McCain (R-AR) asked questions.

As suspected, no one asked him the one question I wanted to hear asked of him: his views on Edward Snowden. Given that the organization he represented for many years as Advocacy Director in Washington, DC decided that Snowden represents "a human rights activist" and a "whistleblower," how would he represent the Administration's perspective that he is not a human rights activist or a hero and is a wanted felon who has defected to Russia?

In his written testimony, Malinowski deployed the technique of shamelessly flattering Boxer and McCain (it really gushes way beyond even the usual level of Washington flattery) and then asking rhetorical questions to sort of punch the ticket on issues, but not really articulate a view or recommend a policy -- and of course confirmation hearings are not where people do those things so they can be sure to pass.

I discussed the trouble with Malinowski here and his critiqued his past writings here. He's been careful to scrub any Internet presence and refrain from saying anything about anything, even being Advocacy Director, just to get through this process. He had McCain and Cardin's endorsement going in, so there was never going to be a problem, except for possibly someone like Rubio, but Rubio didn't go deep enough to understand the more subtle problems with HRW's key voice and presence in DC, and just went with pushing his own issue of religious freedom for Christians in oppressive countries -- not a subject HRW cares much about, but which it has done just enough about to avoid criticism.

To win over Republicans that he perhaps stereotyped as Captive Nations types, Tomasz played his own ethnic card in describing America's civil rights history:

That’s the America I grew up admiring, as an immigrant from Poland who’d seen how powerless people behind the Iron Curtain drew strength from having the world’s most powerful country on their side.

But unlike outspoke Poles in Solidarity or conservative figures like Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, Malinowski wasn't critical of Russia and merely made bland statements about problems there instead of answering the specific questions put to him about "what is to be done".

This sort of touching of certain markers that people might be looking for without really coming down hard on how he'd take action on them is the sort of limpness for which the human rights office at State is known under Obama -- who very much sets the tone.

In Washington, Obama is known for having very strong views and very strong policy directives for how to be weak on human rights abroad -- dialogue is all. Malinowski worked hard to get this position and is not going to colour outside the lines.

Malinowski earnestly assured the members that Russia would be "one of my main priorities" and that the organization he worked in for years -- HRW -- had an office in Moscow where "we have it easier than Russian activists who face the potential of prison" -- but he never indicated he might do anything different than his past passive predecessors in this job and in Moscow who didn't even protest the expulsion of the USAID and have done little even to rhetorically resist the crackdown on the NGOs.  (No doubt they even have a strategic theory to go with this, that they don't want to aggrandize or worsen the backlash -- which is silly because it's bad enough and the Russians are emboldened when they see there is no pushback.)

You would think the emotional issue of the Russian adoptees stranded now and unable to go to the American families who had started the process might have come up at this hearing, but the old issues of freedom of movement and family reiunification, staples in the Cold War era, just don't seem to play anymore and few care about them on the Hill in the same way -- and when they do (one congresswoman aptly called Pavel Astakhov, the pro-Putin provocateur and child ombudsman, "an ass") -- this only got reprimands for being out of date.

Malinowski intoned that the "eyes of the world will be on Sochi" and that implied issues of gay athletes and intolerance might come into play, but he had no proposal to make and wasn't handed a good question to give him an opportunity to endorse something even short of a boycott -- like not having heads of states or even foreign secretaries grace this overpriced and overhyped event accompanied by many actual human rights abuses, and instead sending -- well, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, for example, to "send a message".

All Malinowski could say was that he was for "consistently publicly and privately" raising issues like LGBT rights and other issues with Russia.  So I guess we can expect the same limp response to further Russian outrages with quiet dialogue, punctuated by buried terse statements hidden in the back pages of state.gov.

To be sure, Malinowski said  that he was "a strong supporter of Magnitsky Act, which targets those responsible for worse abuses". Then -- in one of his really bad geopolitical notions that rivulate all his writing mistaking perestroika liberals for real reforms -- he claims that support of Magnitsky "aligns us with the Russian people in their concern about the nexus between corruption and abuse of power."

Well, actually, no. It doesn't. Because most of the Russian people do not really align with the American idea of the rule of law, and precedent-setting law (and in a common-law system there are obvious limitations to these notions). They want to get rid of corruption, but some of them don't want to do that if it means also losing their own power or their own way of cutting corners. Most Russians don't know what Magnitsky is, and if they thought it was only about one case and didn't really target visible wealthy kingpins they'd like to take-down, but obscure bureaucrats, they wouldn't see the point.

You don't pin your argumentation for the Magnitsky case on such rickety notions of pretending the Russian people are already liberal democrats appreciating the value of impact litigation style public interest cases, which is essentially what Magnitsky is. You do it because it's in keeping with universal human rights principles and even Russia's own ostensible claim to crack down on corruption.

But we know the official line -- Magnitsky is guilty, not the Magnitsky Listers. And that's what most Putin supporters would go with, and pretending we have a secret giant lobby for these notions in Russia is part of the whole flawed and misguided picture Malinowski has of this country -- and in this, he actually reflects the second of two schools of thought in Eastern Europe for coping with the bad tsar. One is to attack the bad tsar directly, to spark uprisings, to rebel, or to go into the underground and fight as best as one can. The second is to accommodate the bad tsar, find some sort of deal with him by which one's own community will be allowed to survive, and then stay out of his way. The first method doesn't see the tsar as someone you reason with. The second does -- and even imagines that if only there weren't that bad tsar, or maybe his bad advisors, people would be free and things would be better.

There's a third way long tried by Soviet zakonniki (legal defenders) - to force the bad tsar at least to abide by his own better decrees by publicly shaming him -- but this way always runs the risk of sliding into accommodation, and does in the Putin era in particular.

On Syria, those who are looking for any port in the storm of the Administration's contradictory and weak and even dangerous policy vacillations will see Malinowski's statement in this hearing as "a good thing" -- although as I noted before, nothing about Syria will be decided in this office.

Malinowski stated that if a resolution is passed in the UN Security Council for Syria to turn over its chemical weapons, this would be a "step forward" as it would "take them off the table" and be a "good thing for people" although it "would not solve the vast majority of our problems".

It wouldn't stop the killing by bombs or ease any suffering or the burden on neighbouring states of 2 million refugees and growing, and there would still be an opportunity of Al Qaeda "to exploit this horrible, cruel situation," he added.

Malinowski conceded there is a "lot more we have to do" beyond this putative resolution stopping chemical weapons and this would be to provide support to "the  moderate opposition -- virtually at war with Al Qaeda".

Here he is most definitely taking off his HRW hat, as HRW doesn't give out advice about arming rebels, but he's also playing up to Administration notions of the array of forces of rebels and implying that the moderates are holding down their fort better than they are. He spoke of interdicting the flow of arms to the regime -- but hey, that means not just regional players but Russia, the real arms dealer to Damascus. What's his plan for *that*?

Interestingly -- and this will endear him to some -- Malinowski says that the only reason that the Syrians pursued a negotiated settlement was because Obama maintained "the credible threat" of force."

"That's the only reason we got the chemical weapons accord. It does need to remain on the table with I hope the support of the US Congress."

So basically, Malinowski here is consistent with his neo-liberal "responsibility to protect" notion of "humanitarian intervention" -- using force for good in the way Clinton did in the former Yugoslavia -- or one could add, in the way Blair believed he did in Iraq.

But I don't think Malinowski would concede that the threat of the use of force was primarily effective on Russia -- when Russia saw Obama really was at least feigning to go outside of the Security Council and act unilaterally, precisely because Russia kept blocking action and pretending "international consensus" means permission from Moscow. That's because I think essentially, Malinowski does not believe that the only thing Russia understands is force -- or at least forceful positions. He was four-square for the reset and backed Obama all the way in the dialogue approach to the worsening state of human rights caused by Putin for the last four years.

Malinowski could do something very important in this job, as important as Jimmy Carter did in 1980 in boycotting the Moscow Olympics over the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

He could urge Obama not to go to Sochi because it is beneath the dignity of office to engage in such a Potemkin Village covering so many abuses, starting with mass murder in Syria  -- and because it's not safe. This is the idea of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov -- he knows that most people won't get behind an outright boycott because athletes would be disappointed and many people are under Putin's "diplomacy" spell.

But just as some stayed away from the Durban World Conference on Racism when it degenerated into antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred and some countries walked out, so Obama could stay home from Sochi.

 

Is Edward Snowden to Blame for the Terrorist Attack in Kenya?

I think he is.

And I think it's a completely legitimate question to ask.

This article -- The Effects of the Snowden Leak Aren't What He Intended -- asks the serious question about damages to the NSA caused by these leaks.

Yes, as even the lefty NPR concedes, Edward Snowden caused enormous damage to the NSA's ability to track terrorists through electronic communications. The NSA's work is perfectly legitimate in tracking known terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab in Somalia -- among the most deadly in the world, despite having been "beaten" and "driven out of their stronghold" as the experts have assured us.

EITHER the terrorists got so much information about how the NSA does its tracking from Snowden's leaks and moved to even more encrypted or secret means or even non-electronic means like couriers OR the NSA has been so preoccupied with lock-down and clean-up after this enormous Snowden damage that it was unable to keep tabs on these American jihadists. Awful.

If you don't want to hear this from me -- a long time and strenous critic of the anarchist hacking movement and all its criminality -- hear it from NPR, the lefty "progressive" radio station.

That is, this article was written before the tragic terrorist assault on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, in which at least 68 people were killed, hundreds injured and some still remain hostage.

But the premises articulated are now HUGELY relevant.

My comment (in moderation):

This article  was written before the tragic Westgate Mall terrorist attack in Kenya. A number of the terrorists from the United States. They deliberately traveled to Africa to join Al-Shabaab. Yet they couldn't be tracked and stopped.

The NSA is a necessary and legitimate agency working under the law to track things like this. None of the revelations of Glenn Greenwald and others from Snowden have produced a single actual case of a violation of human rights or any evidence whatsoever that the NSA should not continue pursuing this legitimate mission.

They are not whistleblowers, but activists bent on an anarchist assault on America -- because they can. Revelations about this or that machine capacity is not a case. Arguments from FISA courts or internal debates only illustrate that the system works, not that it is corrupt. Those violations that are found are errors or are not indicative of a policy (like LOVEINT, which is about employee misbehaviour). Issues like the artificial constructs the DEA is forced to make in using NSA intel aren't cases or examples of violations either -- they are indicative of the interconnected world we live in, the very real hostile forces we face, from drug lords to terrorists, and the need to watch them effectively while preserving civil rights.

The press needs to be less giddy about Snowden and chasing the cool kids on this, they need to ask where the actual human cases of abuse are.

In the end, Snowden disrupted or even seriously crippled the ability of the NSA to do things like follow Al-Shabaab terrorists home grown in the US.

So we must seriously ask whether we have to thank Snowden for Westgate. His choice of residence also begs the question, as WikiLeaks has long been documented to collaborate with the Kremlin.

* * *

Now, isn't it possible that even if there had been no Edward Snowden, the US might have missed this one? After all, Al Shabaab has struck before.

Sure. But it did happen after Edward Snowden's leaks and for ever more, I will keep asking the question.

NPR did get one thing very wrong in this piece, however: that Snowden's effects were "unintended". Snowden worked very deliberately and likely for a longer time than we've been led to believe with hackers helping WikiLeaks -- itself essentially a hackers' organization which does indeed incite and help and reward the hacking of others even if itself pretends to keep a distance from actual coercive unauthorized use of computers -- which is what hacking is, it's not what hackers themselves claim, which is always innocent or so technical that only a tiny handful of criminals actually commit it as they define it.

Hacking is social hacking, it's taking part with Moscow in "active measures" to influence public opinion, it's any use of a system in ways the owners and operators did not intend. There are actually nerds to claim Snowden is "not a hacker" because he "had authorized use". Bullshit. He did not have authorization *to leak files to the public and to the enemy* duh.

Anyone who simply reads Assange's writings -- and you can read the essence of his thinking in his book published with Jacob Appelbaum called Cypherpunks -- will instantly grasp that he wishes to overthrow not only governments, but the Internet itself, as he sees it as too dependent on "neoliberal" (i.e. capitalist) structures like businesses and banks.

And they will realize if they simply read what he writes that far from reforming the US government, or making the NSA merely refine its civil liberties practices, Assange and his comrades want to destroy these institutions of a liberal democracy society and replace it with revolutionary huntas run by hackers. They do mean harm and therefore the results are not accidental.

Related articles

Why is Foust Distracting Us with Stories of Snowden's Zillions of Docs?

Another Scenario for Snowden's Documents at The Independent

Did Edward Snowden Hack to Order?

Edward Snowden Cache: British Spy Agency GCHQ Hacked Belgian Telecoms Firm

Edward Snowden's Story to Be Turned into a Movie

Snowden Masked Pilfering of NSA Secrets By 'Doing His Job'

NSA reveals how Snowden accessed secret Prism files