Peter Ludlow is poisoning young minds again (we call him Uri for "Urizenus Sklar," his avatar in Second Life and the Sims On Line where I met him 10 years ago. As I explained in the post about how Barrett Brown is not on trial for "journalism," Uri and others in the hackers' movement have been playing an elaborate "perception management" mainpulative game for years, trying to gas-light everybody and their sense of what is right and wrong, invoking special privileges for the Internet to distort the moral compass, and of course laughing all the way to the bank.
Brooks in fact got it right -- Snowden, like Manning and Swartz before him, arrogated to himself the power to decide the level of security and level of transparency in what is in fact the most transparent state in the world, and a vibrant liberal democratic society that addresses its wrong with the rule of law and a free media.
WE did not get to decide democratically, with deliberation and due process and VOTING.
In fact when there WAS a vote in Congress about NSA reforms, the bill LOST, even if the vote was close. And it was a *coerced* vote by the facts of Snowden's hack, not a normal process.
Ludlow and other hacker anarchists want to create an "autonomous realm" where anything goes but they are in power and they get to decide -- they hack and expose people, crash servers, block speech, ruin lives, harm businesses.
The broken moral compass is in their hands as they smash everything in revolutionary zeal.
Barrett Brown is not on trial for journalism and confessed to the crime of helping hackers readily.
Far from being whistleblowers, Assange, Manning, and Snowden are all revolutionary propagandists, anarchists who revel in the "propaganda of the deed" which in this case is exposing and dumping files.
For them, as with the Bolsheviks, the ends justify the means. But as with Soviet communism, if you use those means, you do not get any good end, you get oppression. That is where we are headed by enabling thugs on the Internets to decide things for us undemocratically, with force.
Ludlow portrays a caricature of corporate life as if were all stuck in 1950s large corporations with oppressive culture -- which we know from Mad Men is anything but the case, you know? In real life, there is much more give and take and normalcy and people don't live under an evil corporate yoke (this is just the Chomsky talking in Uri -- he imagines everyone lives in some evil corporation like that old 1984 Apple Commercial, and only he is running up and smashing the screen to save us all from Big Brother).
Swartz obviously took the same binary caricature of a view -- in reality, corporate and of course small business life is more complicated and fluid and free than they claim or think - and how would they know, as neither of them ever lasted working in an office or corporation.
What's outrageous here in Ludlow's ostensibly "moral" discussion about morality is his cunningly false portrayal of Chelsea Manning's turning point.
Ludlow takes at face value that Manning was moved to commit treason "for a good cause" after the Iraqi printing press incident and dwells in detail on the extent of Manning's desire to "whistleblow" engendered by this incident -- she even had the material translated to prove that it was "innocent".
And yet, in reality, Manning *didn't make a priority of publishing this incident, didn't try to publish it, and didn't bother with it*. IT HAS NEVER BEEN PUBLISHED!!! When you would think, given its role in this morality play, it would have been FIRST!
Other things preoccupied her, like the Vatican's child abuse cases or other sensations that she thought were more interesting. And at trial, it came out that Manning had asked Assange finally to publish the Iraqi printing press story *and he did not* saying it was "not interesting".
The Iraqi printing press files never got published and they didn't care -- that's how we know they are not real whistleblowers.
NEITHER of them made it a priority after claiming it was their turning point of conscience. That shows you what fake "whistleblowers" they are -- those Iraqis didn't matter to them, but instead a huge anarchist hack disabling the State Department and embarassing and crippling the US government mattered more.
I suspect also that they were concerned that if researched independently, we might all find out that this incident wasn't what Manning thought, whatever the nature of hte leaflets, as the individuals might have been involved in violence or terrorism. Let's bring it forward and see. Oh, Ludlow doesn't do that. Where is it?
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