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.
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?
There's also the question to ask as always whether the narrative is driven by Moscow's understanding of how to wreck the American state more devastatingly, or by Assange's old Marxist-Leninist notions of destroying the state - -and going for an easy one to get, the most liberal and vulnerable in its history.
Always and everywhere we must ask why Snowden has no cases. And to see if they plotted all this in ways they arn't telling us, to ask what he was doing in March 2012 and March 2013 when Appelbaum was also in Hawaii at the same time.
I've also explained that Snowden is not a whistleblower because he is not presenting the real-live, individual humans really harmed by this, but just yammering on about machines and what they can do, and what they might do, hypothetically.
So it's VERY INTERESTING that when Jay Cline looks at all of what he's looking at -- the documents and technical topics themselves from the technical CIO perspective -- which isn't the psycho-drama of hacker culture that I've been looking at from the traditional human rights perspective -- he still comes to EXACTLY the same conclusion (emphasis added) of what's missing in this picture:
Innocent Americans harmed. Snowden's case so far is only hitting things at the program level. He hasn't yet shown how a single named American has been harmed. Without showing how any group of Americans, such as libertarians or Muslims, is being targeted, it's less likely an advocacy group will form to press for legislative reforms. This is why I think he's buried this card toward the bottom of the files.
Interesting, eh?
My operating theory has always been that Snowden will never get to the cases because there aren't any. If he had them, say, an Islamic charity like already-existing cases, or an anti-war activist monitored, or a journalist like Rosen whose phone calls are monitored, surely he would have showed it. He didn't. So will he to "trump all"?
I don't think so. Or else, he'll come up with one of "their own," i.e. Poitras or Appelbaum, and then purport to whitewash them away with faux-exonerating information.
But I could be surprised.
Cline has another very, very astute hypothesis of what's missing from Snowden's stash:
No terrorist attacks averted. If another 9/11 has been prevented primarily because of these surveillance programs, Snowden's case is dead in the water. He'll lose at least half of the American public. The trump card he has left to play is if he somehow got his hands on an internal memo summarizing the successes and failures of these programs. He seems to be a smart-enough guy to know this is the ace to keep in the hole.
Right. That's been the theme of the "progressives" all along -- that waaaaah all this NSA watching, and they didn't stop the Tsarnaevs or the Navy Yard shooter. Leftists LOVE that sort of "gotcha" because they can look like patriotic red-blooded Americans who really believe in security but just want it to be effective, and gosh, it isn't so...let's weaken it! But the fact is, they don't want security because they minimize terror and crime for the sake of revolutionary upheaval to bring themselves to power in a new society, and they want the maximum space for licentiousness. The notion of a balance of rights among themselves -- let alone a balance of rights and security -- is never one they admit as valid.
So we might just get that -- no terrorism averted.
For what it's worth, I don't buy the nefarious Mike Masnick's claim (which he "put together" from Snowden leaks) that the NSA could be spoofing Google -- and therefore ruining that giant's brand.
I have to say that Google has been the dog that hasn't barked on Snowden. I'm not sure Google likes Snowden. They made a few peremptory disclaimers that they didn't allow direct access to their servers, but there hasn't been a lot of...anything from Google executives or even those rank and file Google engineers that clog up G+. Usually Google runs in a pack with EFF and company, and this time, well, I'm not sure... Where's that big white Google page with action to take on Snowden?
Cline also speculates that Snowden could leak (or rather, Greenwald could take files he already has from Snowden and leak) something about monitoring of GPS or cell phones' geolocation. Like we're all on one big giant Sims Online or Second Life map with the "map me" not turned off...
My guess is he won't do that because it would ding Google too hard. For all we know, Google is in hard talks behind the scenes with Glenn and co. telling them to watch what they say -- "this is why we can't have nice things," as the kids same on the MMORPGs.
I guess for now I will conclude that while these theories are brilliant and the analysis is brilliant, I don't think we'll see quite this stuff because:
a) Greenwald would have played this card before, especially before the Congressional vote on the NSA -- he would have had to in order to achieve his goals.
b) Snowden has no more stuff to leak, can't leak anything from Russia, and can't gain access again except...so maybe Snowden is the conduit through which the Russians will now leak their existing moles' stuff, and pretend Snowden got it, to put it all on him (and he may not realize they are about to set him up on this).
So my wild-assed guess is that "Snowden's next leak" is actually going to be the Kremlin's leak and it will be something like:
o Obama's communist past, Obama's college paper, Obama's Marxist/socialist ties, Obama's birth certificate - Putin will kick him when he's down
o some mole or traitor within the Democratic Party actually found to be working for the Russians and/or China and/or Iran
o US spying on Russia over something that the Kremlin can get everyone mad at...
Whatever it will be, there aren't that many more things to leak that capture the
imagination, the public is saturated and tired of leaking, and it's not
personalized enough -- Cablegates had a very long life because it dealt
with real countries and real figures in the real world, not algorithms
and mechanical processes.
There are many strange things about the Edward Snowden story of course -- why he ran off first to Hong Kong and then to Russia when he could have leaked everything calmly from Venezuela or Ecuador or even Brazil or Iceland. Something made him hurry and flee earlier than planned, it seemed.
And of course we know that he deliberately took the job at Booz, Allen Hamilton to access certain documents there more easiliy with his top-level view as an "information architect analyst".
Everything about this story has always seemed "off" to me.
Let's start with that wonky first story. Metadata in business phone records at Verizon? Huh? What the hell is that? If you're trying to win over the public with a story, would you really lead with *that*? It's so weird. And so not compelling. And so unrelated to the average Joe (and they've never gotten to the average Joe and his email and Facebook, although they've made some hypotheticals tangentially related to various other findings about collection of data).
Why would they start with *that*? I mean, that's not even the best they got. It's not because the hacker was in place, throwing stuff quickly hand over fist, like "Deep Throat" in his day. No, all the hacking was done already and the hacker fled -- and more hastily than planned.
So why that story? And why the PRISM story? And why this or that? (Look at the lists of hacked stuff).
It's always jogged my mind and I'm always looking for an answer when I read stories about Snowden.
Then quite by accident, I found a hypothesis: maybe Snowden was operating with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's litigation list, especially the failed cases they lost that left them with a sense of grievance.
From my experience earlier in the last decade in Second Life with its many copyright and copybot issues and EFF's scornful take on them, I tended to think of EFF as litigating endlessly to erode copyright and exonerate pirates, but in fact they have done a lot of work on privacy and even on the NSA.
Yes, they've litigated against the NSA on the Verizon metadata issue and other telecom information collection practices -- in 2009, long before Snowden surfaced. Funny coincidence, eh?
It isn't so funny if you construct a hypothesis: that this is the work of John Perry Barlow, one of the most destructive individuals I've ever had the misfortune to meet and even debate, wanted to do more than just defeat legislation or win individual court cases, but started to develop a desire to really take down the system substantially and replace it with his ethics-free vision of an Autonomous Realm in Cyberspace (remember his manifesto? What a grudge he had over it?)
Barlow is co-founder of EFF and is also on the board of the Free Press Foundation, a much newer organization founded specifically to fund-raise for "investigative journalism" and impact litigation on the cyber issues -- and essentially pay for the Snowden caper. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are also on the board. They worked obviously to create the organization and its mission and get its funding long before it was announced in December 2012, which is coincidentally when Snowden contacted Poitras with his hacked files from the NSA, and when Jacob Appelbaum openly recruited US computer coders who were government employees in the intelligence agencies to "leave the dark side" and come over to the "light side" (i.e. actually the dark side of him and his cronies in the crypto parties and Chaos Computer Club and the darknets).
Funny, that.
They raised the money to fund WikiLeaks -- which is most likely how Snowden's flights to Hong Kong and Moscow (along with the lovely Sarah's) and his stays in hotels were paid for -- or at least coordinated with various helpful individuals who like what WikiLeaks does.
Of course, that makes it a little, well, self-serving to pay for the guy who hacked stuff and the gal who filmed him, then award them for their hacking expertise against the security state -- as EFF did in giving them "pioneer" awards tonight. But who cares? These people are all intertwined and cover each other and celebrate themselves. Who is to watch or stop them? Certainly not their boards, which all overlap.
My hypothesis has always been that these people met before they said they did, and that they tacitly or even explicitly gave wish lists or guided the hacking of Snowden, especially when he went to work for Booz Allen to get the best of his trove. I think they could have met at the Spring Break of Code in Hawaii in March 2013 in person -- which is why I think we hear some people talking about Snowden "speaking in public" -- when...he's never done that, ever, except very briefly in the Moscow airport and in the staged and edited film Poitras made.
They may have even met before that, as both Appelbaum and Snowden were in Hawaii in 2012 at the same time. Naturally, with the IRC channels, they don't have to meet, but for a sensitive operation like this, real-world meets are hugely important. Laura spins a story about meeting Edward in a cafe where he signals to them that it's him by holding a Rubik's cube. Maybe that story is Aesopian; maybe it occurred at another time, who knows.
But when I see that list of subjects EFF litigated on, and the list of Snowden's leaked documents as brought to us by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, well, they kinda match.
Now, there are other explanations for this beside a sinister one -- perhaps they'll say that they are the litigations that "anybody" would do if they are fighting that "security state" they believe exists (so secure that...a disgruntled 20-something private on her way to dishonorable discharge can hack hundreds of thousands of documents and bring the State Department to its knees and a narcissistic ideologue who didn't graduate from high school and was a new contractor could bring the intelligence community to its knees).
So thinking about that funny early story from Snowden and some of the other odd stories...What if these litigators and their "hacktivists" swarms were in such a bubble, that they actually thought the Verizon metadata story was some "big deal"? Then they'd get a hacker with the access Snowden had to get *that* document because it was so important to them, and they had a grudge because they lost the case. And so on down the line of other cases, like trying to get Google to have privacy safeguards and so on.
They wouldn't even realize that for the wider public, these stories aren't convincing or even comprehensible. After all, there isn't any major public panic to leave social media -- most people didn't budge from their emails or Facebook, and only a tiny percentage began to use PGP or Tor.
Of course, we all know that these people in EFF and related propaganda operations are not dummies and while zealots and arrogant extremists, aren't stupid or careless. That's why in the 1990s, they could succeed in minimizing the criminalization of phreakers, and stopping Clipper Ship, the effort to institutionalize back doors in the software and early Internet industries consciously, under the Clinton Administration, which they defeated (and it might have been better if it had been allowed to proceed in organized fashion, in fact, just like it might have been better if CISPA had passed.)
So they know the game - they have to pretend that journalists, not hackers, are the ones at stake here -- that's why they put so much emphasis on the phreakers writing newsletters or designing games and having creative intellectual property seized by the feds although they also dangerously undermined the security of telephone companies especially their ability to deal with national emergencies.
They've now perfected that art, converting Appelbaum, an under-educated hacker controversial even among his chums in the crypto world into a "journalist" and of course bringing in Poitras, who used to be a cook before she got into anti-government filming.
So John Perry Barlow or his staff or his cut-aways are all likely careful not to look like they directed Snowden, or told Snowden what to hack, or gave him wish lists, or held his hand as he hacked, or let him know in a "wink wink know what I mean say to more" kind of way what was needed.
Or maybe they weren't. Maybe they slipped. Maybe that's how federal investigators might bring them down, and maybe that's why Greenwald, Poitras, and Appelbaum all stay abroad nowadays, making themselves out to be victims of the security state -- they're afraid that if they came home, they'd be arrested -- and more to the point, they're afraid that their claim that they're only journalists, and just recording "a first draft of history" will crumble if they are shown to be colluding, conspiring, plotting -- making wish lists, or coordinating litigation lists with documents sought.
If you lost a case against the NSA, wouldn't you just die to have their internal memos and strategies about this, and the real details of their programs so you can try another round of gotcha in your litigation? Would you be so eager for this that you could get careless and put in a request to Snowden that could be your undoing? Does some investigator know that already?
I'm sketching this out broadly now merely as a line of inquiry that has to be pursued, mindful that they already have tight alibis and that even raising the issue means they hide any evidence that might be there. Maybe there's a Hawaiian bus boy in a restaurant, like the one who brought down Romney's campaign with the help of Jimmy Carter's grandson and David Corn of Mother Jones, who can positively identify Edward Snowden meeting with Jacob Appelbaum - and he's saved the napkin showing the jots of the wish list (LOL). But I doubt it. Life isn't fair, and then we die.
Still...my sense is that the entire Snowden narrative has its holes and its vulneraiblities and eventually these will crack and the truth will spill out.
I keep coming back to this:
How can you have a "whistleblower" without cases? Without individuals actually harmed, as they were in the days of COINTELPRO? How can you have "whistleblowing" without concrete facts of violations -- and not just hypotheticals?
So over and over again, I've asked for the cases. Where are the people who are innocents, but wrongly surveilled? Or perhaps criminals in the end, but their due process rights nevertheless harmed? Or perhaps even people wrongfully arrested? And all they've come up with is either to claim that out of the 2700 or so mainly technical errors there might be people harmed -- but we don't have names or circumstances -- despite stealing these secret documents that claims the NSA peruses
I mean, at one level, Edward Snowden's hack isn't even as good a hack as a common script kidde in 4chan or Anonymous might have mounted. When the skiddies wanted to get Sarah Palin's email to embarrass her and show her they could do it, they got it and exposed it. When more malevolent hackers in LulzSec wanted to "take down the security state," they went after the contractor HBGary and got Stratfor's private emails that at least had some stuff they would up conspiracy theories around. Nothing really seemed to come of these, despite WikiLeaks claim that they are "sensational," but my point here is this: Edward Snowden doesn't have anybody's emails. He didn't hack the NSA and find a program of wrong-doing and evil, and then prove that it was doing wrong by fishing out somebody's stuff -- somebody wrongfully tailed or tapped or even detained.
He didn't find a Gen. Petraeus kind of story. Instead, it's all "plumbing" as Michael Hayden explained it.
Where's the beef?
The only thing he's mentioned is the "suspected hacker's girlfriend" whose phone was allegedly tapped while she was in Europe. A friend of Jacob Appelbaum's? Quinn Norton, former girlfriend of Aaron Swartz? No one ever answers me. But if we had that name, we could then get the goods. *Did* they tap her? And maybe they had good and lawful reason to? Is that why he won't tell us?
So yesterday, all the Twitterers were abuzz over FOIA files on FISA cases obtained by EFF, and frantically discussing the phone metadata issue again.
So I asked @emptywheel if she found any cases. First, she retweeted my query, which is what she does every time I ask that. It's her way of thinking she's gotten rid of me by seeming to concede a point. All she's really doing, however, is getting her more rabid followers to attack me because she doesn't want to bother.
Finally she did answer but only to rave and rant and claim I hadn't read the documents.
But the reason I asked is because I did read her blog summary and points about them, and glanced at them -- nobody could sit and read hundreds of pages all at once. Indeed, I had trouble even getting these documents to load. I argued with Jonathan Stray about them too, and he insisted there were 2000 plus cases mentioned.
But wait, the narrative shifted here. It's not that anybody found 2000 cases of innocent people with warrantless and/or suspicionless searches in leaked NSA documents; what they have is EFF's claims of such things that they've litigated about. And that's different -- that's whats they say, not a "gotcha" found with the document (as far as I can tell).
I'm quite happy to say I could be wrong in understanding these issues -- they are complex with a lot of moving parts and I don't have all day to study them, I have work and family obligations. But then if you are sincere and operating in good faith, what you say to a questioner like me, then is, but here's the case: it's X or Y. Or you say, truthfully, no, we didn't really find a smoking gun case in the trove of NSA stuff, but we believe we will eventually given the system's flaws. Or you say, but this metadata really does invade privacy and here's how (I don't buy that, and will return to that point in another post).
Instead, I get screeching from someone who is actually quite intelligent and does diligent work, and I get called a "Stasi" -- i.e. that I'd just love to have a state like the old East Germany. (Note that "Stasi" is now the preferred term to describe what the NSA does, supposedly. The left once again slides away from condeming such practices by calling them "KGB" -- they never, ever do that. It's like they call certain police state practices "Maoist" or even "fascist," but save for progressivism the Soviet Union itself.)
No time to put in links now, but if anyone needs them, ask.
If it's one thing that Bolshevik-style movements of secrecy and thuggery and radicalism hate, it's when their crimes are documented and exposed. They will do anything to lie their way out of them. They hate free-wheeling, open, critical discussion about themselves, they want to control and manage every perception and every comment, and they endlessly insist that critics "have it right" or "better get their facts straight" -- usually by harping on petty or meaningless errors or exaggerating figures' statements out of context.
That's why Julian Assange, founder of the anarchist collective WikiLeaks, is now in overdrive trying to stop the public from examining him critically as a public figure and trying to discredit a film about him about to appear next month which he finds unflattering -- even though its producer shares his cause to some extent.
And that means of course essentially doxing -- in this case, exposing the script, which is an item of intellectual property that was not released to the public by its author and owner -- through coercive and exploitative hacking to launch another political provocation to distract from WikiLeaks' crimes.
Andy Greenberg picks up the story and instead of picking on Assange's list of lies, he picks on the claims of the producer, Bill Condon, that Assange got a "very, very early" version of the script and is out of syn -- and instead claims that the script doesn't really differ. This will be endlessly parsed when the film actually comes out and more eyes can get on this than those of journalists like Greenberg forced to be chummy with WL to "get the story".
Meanwhile, I want to touch on what I think is the biggest lie in the Big Lie -- which is that people weren't harmed by WikiLeaks.
Of course people are harmed by WikiLeaks, despite the utter nonsense constantly shrieked about this by cheerleaders like Manning's fangirl-in-chief Alexa O'Brien.
It's just that they're not going to line up and publicize their harm to paint targets on their back for more harm, duh.
Most of the people harmed are trying to resume their lives quietly, move to other countries or jobs, or have even gone into hiding -- if they aren't dead. And no, we don't know if they are all dead or not and WikiLeaks would not be a credible source on this, given their propensity to hide themselves and their tracks on every occasion.
Saying there is no harm to the US or its network of sources is an outrageously false claim for anyone who knows any of the cables, the countries, and the incidents involved.
I do -- I wrote about the cables from Central Asia -- and I'm here to say that most definitely there was concrete harm to individuals, I know the cases, and no, they will not be publicized because to do so would bring serious and grave threat to people already in trouble.
Eventually, some of these cases will be published when people are out of harm's way or more research can be done, and WikiLeaks will be revealed for the lying thugs they always are.
And Andy himself knows better, as he has sections in his book in which he describes in detail how the outing of some of the sources caused harm to people. The problem is they are in places like Bulgaria which nobody cares about. In fact, one of the biggest messages of Andy's book, that I think he himself doesn't even realize or wanted to say, is that WikiLeaks is not really about leaking. It's not really about content or cables or torture allegations. That is all secondary, merely fodder for the anarchist propaganda for its ostensible shame value.
Rather, WikiLeaks is about a war for encryption on the Internet, a war over who will get to have strong encryption and how free from governments. It's a war over the nature of the Internet, it's about property and power.
Those people who took the "leaks" concept really seriously like BalkanLeaks in fact are chumps in a way, because they joined a movement out of sincerity and good faith without realizing that the people who made this movement were only exploiting the Somalians or the Kenyans or the Chinese or the Bulgarians who brought them their heart-breaking stories. WikiLeaks is not about leaking. It's about who gets to encrypt files period. Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum don't care about some politicians building apartment buildings and ruining the environment and fixing elections -- that's not what they're about. The only place where Greenberg actually reports on the "leak" movement is where it is really functioning -- in Bulgaria and a few other places like that.
Cablegate was never about leaking for the sake of reform as it never uncovered any wrongdoing; the claims regarding the previous leaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also have not led to any serious work whatsoever anywhere preparing anything remotely like an indictment for war crimes. "Collateral Murder," the propaganda film, would not be such evidence and isn't portryaing a war crime but a tragic case of mistaken identity. You realize the enormity of this reality when you look at these much-less publicized cases of people REALLY doing leaks work in Bulgaria that Greenberg unwittingly explicates for you.
When Andy's new book comes out soon and I get a chance to re-read it, I'll locate those sections and note them here.
Here's my comment on Forbes today:
Basically what this is about is the hacker thugs at WikiLeaks, starting with the thug-in-chief Assange, are telling us that no one can comment on them, make a movie about them, write a book about them, have any discussion about them, without them reserving the "right" to use coercion and force and theft to respond to any criticism they don't like.
So while they insist on maximum privacy for themselves with strong encryption, they believe they are entitled to steal drafts of scripts. You don't address that, Andy, and instead chime in with the thugs by implying that there isn't much difference between the earlier draft as the producer himself said.
The entire propagandistic line that there is "no harm" in WikiLeaks is trotted out here again and should surely get a take-down instead of no comment.
First, the quotes of officials claiming there is no harm are cherry picked and even insignificant to the core issue: that there is still a grand jury that is still to produce an indictment -- or maybe not -- or a policy pronouncement about this still to come.
You yourself in your book show how people were harmed -- in Eastern Europe, for example.
I myself know of cases of real harm and keep pointing out the obvious about this: that such victims are NOT going to come forward and list themselves for Assange so that he can harass and bully and harm them further with doxing, server crashes and everything else these thugs bring us.
Some of these cases are now classified and with good reason, given the "treatment" they'd get from the likes of WikiLeaks.
None of the statements supplied here constitute proof of no harm, or belief by the US government that no damage was done.
WikiLeaks duplicitiously claims that they uncovered hidden cases of torture. But torture was discovered by US human rights organizations and lawyers long before WikiLeaks came on the scene and continues to be addressed by public and credible organizations who don't hide identities, hide information, or hide in embassies evading questioning on criminal charges. Let's drop this specious claim completely because it has no credibility.
WikiLeaks also didn't bring about the Arab Spring. Whatever it's imagined role, real movements of people in these countries and their sacrifices and activism are what the Arab Spring was about, not about a bunch of geeks leaking stuff over the Internet.
This Twit-fight among the geeks related to Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks representative and Edward Snowden's main technical helper, is interesting to follow. It illustrates a number of points -- that Appelbaum is experiencing more and more questioning and pressure from his fellow geeks, even those who are alligned politically with him against the US government and are for radical cyber revolution and extreme encryption and Internet licentiousness. They're questioning his handling of this affair or the "lessons learned" from his revelations, and the larger issue of Tor (here and elsewhere in related discussions).
Vinay Gupta raises the question I've asked for years about why the government hasn't pulled the plug on these miscreants and outright thugs at Tor, but perhaps it's about watching them.
The issue of the undermining of trust in standards at the IETF that the NSA had a hand in making, and other industry standards as I mentioned earlier has come under questioning in the Snowden affair and Greenwald and Appelbaum have not come up with more information to satisfy those who seem like greater experts such as Matthew Green -- who confirmed to me directly on Twitter today that the NSA never directly contacted Johns Hopkins and that while in fact he feared that he might be fired but it was over his own institution's precautions. In the end it was sorted.
It's funny that Jake cites this really slight, weak, tendentious and outright crazy book he wrote with Assange called Cypherpunks. I finally got it and I'm reading it, and it really is thin gruel even in its own terms. Assange basically openly and stupidly calls for radical revolution and overthrowing of governments to get his way, that perfectly encrypted society which he thinks crazily is Nature's way.
I see my old pal Smári here. Why do I say "pal" although he is antithetical to my beliefs? Because when I went to the Dublin OSCE side conference sponsored by Ireland last year, the first person I ran into very early in the morning coming straight from an overnight flight, getting some tea, was him. I looked at him and thought he was Irish (he's part Icelandic, part Irish) and thought he might be a kindred spirit. I went up to him and told him some meme, perhaps it was "You mad bro" or something and said "Let's overthrow this conference." He agreed it needed overthrowing, but then it turned out (as I found out in the evening) we had completely different reasons for wanting to overthrow it, he because in general he's an anarchist wanting to overthrow normal governments and install that sort of radical leftist Icelandic vision of society, and me because I didn't want the loopy moderators of the conference to let people like him take over, as well as WikiLeaks types like Jonsdottir, and wanted more access for dissenters like me who were actually for a moderate vision that put the focus on Internet freedom on basic civil rights in places that didn't have them, not politicized issues like "net neutrality".
Smári argued very fiercely about copyright and net neutrality and all those issues. He noted that he was stopped by the FBI and questioned while in the US and he resented this, but given what he's been doing -- helping WikiLeaks and the crypto kids and wanting to overthrow the existing order, it's no surprise. Needless to say, I didn't persuade Smári about anything or visa versa. it's sad that bright young minds are wasted on this silly and even sinister movement, however.
The gist of this argument is about what the crypto kids can keep using -- can they use PGP? it is compromised? Snowden told them it was still okay to use, and he should know, right? Of course, it's been pointed out by some that Snowden only knows what he knows, on the basis of his job, and that wasn't everything and he didn't go everywhere and see everything.
As for Khaled_Z (Philip Khaled Breenan) who is telling them all to get a room, etc. -- he's that very same Khaled_Z about whom at least three or more Anonymous hecklers came to tell me personally and repeatedly the other night demonstratively that he is their "teacher" -- and they were heckling me about my blog on Barrett Brown, not about Jake/Snowden as I recall. Funny coincidence, eh?
It is also important to note that Khaled_Z is one of those professor types who also not only foments revolution but is for a clean shot and advocates having the hackers take out banks. Ugh. I hope this isn't a signal to the foot-soldiers like John Perry Barlow's signal to the foot-soldiers when they were taking out Master Card. I hope the right people are keeping an eye on this sort of thing. But of course it was served up to me deliberately so could be a distraction. Even so, he seems like the sort of figure who spells trouble -- conspiracy theories, hatreds, crisis over 20 years deemed wasted in a meaningless career, etc.
Vinay Gupta is one of those guys out on the playa in a hexayurt, at the Farm, in the Free Software movement, etc. A known quantity. In this conversation you can see he's a legend in his own mind, but also at odds with the great guru Jake -- and it turns out Smári takes Jake's side. All interesting.
So he's bringing that, um, world perspective on that American who is entangled with his cyber-industrial miltiary massive surveillance state, or whatever the kids are calling normal governments of liberal societies with hostile authoritarian enemies wihch the kids never seem to look at and grasp.
What stood out for me as a socio-psychological factor here in this geek-speak was Jake speaking of "what Snowden said in public"
Gupta talks about "what Snowden revealed" but says he doesn't know everything.
But...Snowden has never spoken in public about the specifics of crypto -- that is, in the for-public consumption of Snowden we've been given. We've only seen Snowden speak in a prefabricated film made and edited by Laura Poitras where he speaks mainly in general terms about PRISM, collection of data and such, and then in some interviews from Hong Kong which were also general, and then at his very brief and unsubstantial press conference in Moscow at Sheremetyevo.
So when did Snowden "say something in public" -- a funny locution that doesn't mean what he's *written* or what is in a document he's leaked, but what he said live.
And saying he "revealed" something sounds like him explicating a document in person, live, not just sending a leaked document to Glenn Greenwald.
So it's my hypothesis that Snowden spoke to a group of people in public, that is, not in a small meeting but in a fairly large group, perhaps 20 or 30 or 50 -- say, in Hawaii, say in Spring Break for Coders in March 2013, where I think he was present. Or perhaps in December 2012 at Chaos Computer Club's annual conference. Or somewhere...
Somewhere where some of these people were, too, and that's why they speak of him as a guru who has said something "in public" and "revealed" something.
(And it's also possible there's another meaning: that there are the "private" stashes of Snowden that only those inducted into the cult know, and we don't know because they aren't in the Guardian, etc.
I don't doubt for a MINUTE that there is a private Snowden stash, like blue-line TASS not for our eyes...
Note the casual discussion -- that thuggish casual blackmailing -- by some of the need to attack the NSA back *right now* and attack banks, and do this, and do that, and make a brand-new crypto system to defeat everyone else. Or maybe organize massive boycott of American products (except they love their i-phones too much...)
And keep in mind that these secretive people are doing this in the open on Twitter also to mislead or confuse or threaten or "send messages".
It's been nearly three years since the WikiLeaks grand jury opened -- well, when will it end?
It's funny how it never reaches closure -- evidently because it's hard to parse the 1917 Espionage Act and apply it to foreigners especially, and yet WikiLeaks' Julian Assange was instrumental -- vital -- in setting up another huge assault on our national security and credibility with the Edward Snowden defection.
The authorities know full well that there are Supreme Court decisions (i.e. on the Pentagon Papers) that mandate that journalists reporting on leaks themselves can't answer for this crime. And Glenn Greenwald and company know this, too, which is why they are scrurrying to turn everyone involved in the theft, delivery, encryption, storage and distribution of these secret files into a "journalist," even Greenwald's husband David Miranda, who served as a mule for the files and was stopped in London's Heathrow Airport after picking them up from Laura Poitras and/or Jacob Appelbaum -- who remain in Germany precisely because they're worried about this grand jury, and have been stopped at borders and searched and had gadgets confiscated precisely because of their relationship to it.
That relationship is not strictly one of reporting, given that Appelbaum in particular, a Tor developer, appears to have assisted WikiLeaks and Snowden in more than just "reporting". That's my conviction.
You can read all about this grand jury on the website of Alexa O'Brien, one of the main fans of Chelsea Manning and chronicler of her trial. No, I don't call her a journalist because she isn't a journalist -- not only are her blogs tendentious and biased; once I saw a video of her debating Eli Lake that clinched it for me -- she was nearly hysterical in trying to minimize and ultimately remove any concerns of harm done by WikiLeaks, claiming there was no people killed in Afghanistan just because no official report exists of any.
There's this compilation which tries to make the case for something "nefarious" to be in the Stratfor leaked emails which talks about the sealed indictment and the grand jury. I don't think analysts kicking around hypotheticals and trying to piece together what a secretive government is doing constitute conspirators up to no good. Stratfor has no relationship to the grand jury and WikiLeaks hasn't been able to show any.
Then there's the law-farers at EFF, of course, who make much of the fact that some members of congress want to prosecute Assange and others related to WikiLeaks. And why not? It was an assault on a liberal democratic state that brought no demonstrable good but only harm.
A wired story about a year ago on the ongoing probe -- remember three WikiLeaks people had their email and social media requested by the feds -- and Twitter resisted this and finally lost the case. Jacob Appelbaum was one.
So...come on, guys. Why is it taking so long? Do you realize that because you were unable to have a court case and trial showing right from wrong and law from crime that the Snowden case happened? You're part of enabling the Snowden case to happen.
I realize it's hard. Can't ding those journalists! But you see now they are getting more and more activist, more and more thuggish, more and more cunning and duplicitous. Where will it end?
Then I saw How the US Government Inadvertently Created WikiLeaks on Pando Daily describing Julian Assange's one-time relationship with the US government, where it turns out he had a grant from DARPA and the NSA (yes, that NSA) to do encryption -- in fact his rubberhouse code.
That lovely-sounding name was just what it sounds like -- how to make encryption that wouldn't induce the authorities to torture you to get the key out of you, but would enable the peel-off of one innocent layer and revelation of enough files to keep them happy and not torture you.
Except...as everyone figured out (including the bad guys watching), no one would believe you only had one layer once that notion leaked out. So then there was the self-destroying code that would delete its key and disappear and you could honestly say you couldn't get at it anymore....unless they didn't believe you then, either.
I don't recall the fact of the US government supporting Assange with a grant before ever coming out. But I'm not a really close student of WikiLeaks as some are.
But as the Pando article by Zatko says, it could account for his vendetta -- and the USG's reluctance to pursue him for fear of revealing more about secret programs or something. What happened is they classified research he thought should have been open, i.e. available for him to keep calling his own and working for -- he didn't accept the "work for hire" concept:
Julian told me his graduate work had been funded by a US government grant, specifically NSA and DARPA money, which was supposed to be used for fundamental security research. It was a time when the Bush Administration and Department of Defense were seen to be classifying a great deal of fundamental research and pulling back on university funds. These universities were getting the message that they could no longer work on the research they had been conducting, and what they had already done was classified. In a Joseph Heller-like twist, they weren’t even allowed to know what it was they had already discovered.
According to Julian, the US government cast such a wide net that even general scientific research, whose output had always been published openly, was swept up in America’s secrecy nets. As you can imagine this did not sit well with Julian, because his work had also been funded by one of these fundamental research funding lines and yanked.
So here you have a non-US citizen at a foreign university doing graduate work studies, and the United States government came barreling in and not only snuffed out the funding and killed his studies, it also barred him from knowing what it was he had been funded to research.
Gosh, that sounds like Richard Stallman, eh? Remember, he sells code to a company then can't get it back because it's close and proprietary, and that sets up a lifetime of trying to rip open code everywhere because "information wants to be free". Mitch Kapor also suffered from that same grudge, although he made his first millions first, and had patent lawsuits, before he began fighting for open source software...
I had seen reference to Zatko in a conspiratorial book called Deconstructing WikiLeaks with an indication that Appelbaum was in touch with him. And also Andy Greenberg's book, where he describes the debates about rubberhose between Assange and Mudge (Zatko's nickname when he was a hacker in the wild), who later works for the government. There's this sort of nostalgic bit where they are all hackers together, going to the Chaos Computer Club camps, hanging out, making a loft to code in and be crazy in, but then some of them go don suits and dies and work for th Man in the end...
Here's his bio:
Peiter Zatko (.mudge) is a researcher at Google for Motorola Mobility’s Advanced Technology & Projects (ATAP) group. Formerly, he was a founder of The L0pht, a hacker group whose members testified before Congress, a division scientist at government contractor BBN, and program manager at DARPA. Follow him on Twitter: @dotmudge.
Ah, Google now. No longer at the USG. And in case you're wondering which side he's on with the whole NSA thing, he writes of Assange's response when he was told he couldn't keep his code open:
It was at that moment Julian told me, that he decided he would devote himself to exposing organizations that attempted to keep secrets and withhold information in an effort keep the masses ignorant and disadvantaged.
I'll tell you where I feel ignorant and disadvantaged -- not about the claims of Snowden, but where Snowden is now -- and why this grand jury has not issued an indictment.
Once again, the fear, the lock-downs, the shelters-in-place, the sirens, the helicopters -- even with people dangling in a cage over roof-tops. Then Google and Facebook and Twitter searches to find pictures and past and explanations, then candlelight vigils and grim lists and crying relatives and grave presidential pronouncements.
It is all so familiar and predictable now that it is almost like reciting a set of prayers or going to a religious ritual.
Of course, we've learned our lesson from the net-nannies of social media -- we must never, ever ask questions, especially in the first 24 hours. We must never make assumptions or find the wrong people on social media.
So we can never ask if it is a terrorist attack, and instead, we have to rush to explain it away as workplace violence or merely somebody with a grudge.
The shooter turns out to be black -- but nothing to see there, move along, but do note that all those theories that "white crime" means mass school shootings and blacks never commit these types of mass shootings go out the window.
Once again we're instructed that it's all prejudices -- if the shooter is white, we say mentally ill, if black, we say angry, if Muslim, we say terrorist, if Asian, we say cryptic. Ismail Ax!
Once again, the shooter himself is shot dead and so we can't really find out. Once again, there's a second shooter -- and then there isn't.
There's been so many of these, and so well-spaced and seeming to come after other weakenings of the country and society or times of turmoil (like presidential elections or Snowden) that you wonder if there is a foreign enemy that has acquired a secret weapon that can ferrett out via Internet searches persons who are "off" or "ready to explode," and then send microwaves of mind-suggestions to them to turn them into robotic mass killers to create these devastating incidents.
Yeah, that's a loony conspiracy theory, and of course it's impossible.
So it's likely just that strange amalgam that comes up each time -- first, the access to guns -- say, that's the most important! Second, mental illness that no one seems to ever be able to do anything about, or perhaps a form of autism that we're supposed to know is never violent. Then it spills out later -- violent TV and violent video games (which we're supposed to pretend have absolutely no effect on anybody because, why, everyone would be a killer then), or drugs (which we're supposed to be for legalizing).
Seattle police released details late Monday of another shooting incident from 2004 in which Alexis shot the rear tires of a vehicle owned by a construction worker doing work in his neighborhood. Alexis told police he had an anger-fueled "blackout" but added that he felt he had been "mocked" by the workers and "disrespected" by the workers.
Alexis also told police he was present during "the tragic events of September 11, 2001" and described "how those events had disturbed him." Detectives later spoke with Alexis' father in New York, who told police Alexis had anger-management problems associated with PTSD, and that he had been an active participant in rescue attempts on 9/11.
He also double-talked his way out of an incident where he shot at the ceiling through a neighbour's ceiling -- a neighbour about whom he'd complained before -- but then said it was an accident cleaning his gun. So each time, he was excused, and went on being mentally ill or angry or bearing a mysterious grudge and of course keeping his gun access and possession. And there we have it. You can look for Iranian secret zap weapons over wireless, but you can also just look at our typical homegrown circumstances that always seem to come together the same way again and again.
Even so, there might be terrorism, or some radical act of sabotage with some kind of political agenda here, and it has to be investigated. Maybe there isn't, when we're told within 24 hours about the workplace anger narrative and told over and over and over by pundits and thought influencers and experts to shut up, and not make assumptions.
So here comes J.M. Berger, the expert on terrorism, to explain it all to us. First, he implicitly tells people not to make judgements early on, especially on Twitter or from tweets, by approvingly noting those who counsel caution. Then he proceeds to indulge in just this himself.
He says CNN says it is merely that the shooter wasn't paid. Then he makes a macabre MT comment about the other incident today, when somebody lobbed a firecracker over the White House wall. Funny two things like that happening the same day.
Yes, J.M. quips "Hope it was worth it" about this person's "cause" involved in throwing that firecracker, which obviously led to his arrest.
As if any cause would be worth it, or worthy of any type of praise, even ironical, if it involved throwing a firecracker at the White House. On a day when 12 people were shot dead in the Navy Yard.
There are worse things.
There's J.M. Berger's Omar and Me. Yes, it's as bad as you might think -- or worse. I almost couldn't look. Before I looked, I had very vivid in my mind the briefings that UN security officers give to humanitarian groups about terrorist groups, where they show you their video messages where they tell you in very clear terms, with sprightly music and song sometimes, that they want to kill you, a humanitarian worker -- because they tell you in no uncertain terms that their job is to kill white, Western, Christian, Jewish infidels -- in as large numbers as possible.
I made the statement some weeks ago that J.M. Berger minimizes terrorism. That has been my consistent experience with him over and over again, watching his comments on Central Asia, the Tsarnaev Brothers and the Boston bombing and so on. Oh, I totally get that he is a world-renowned expert on terrorism with publications and a think-tank position and lots of Twitter followers and a person of stature. That's all a given. I get all that. I just won't go along with it, however. I think he consistently minimizes terror. He dismissed the Navy Yard shooting instantly, before we really had enough information by retweeting CNN's workplace violence narrative. Please don't tell me RT doesn't equal endorsement -- of course it does.
And then..."Omar and Me" is hugely troubling. Basically what happens here is that Berger befriends a terrorist -- a spokesman and propagandist for Al Shabab, one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world, which has ruined Somalia and killed our colleagues in the humanitarian field and of course numerous civilians.
It's like a bigger and more sinister version of those rushing to turn Barrett Brown into a journalist although he is mainly a hacker saboteur and destroyer of other people's servers he doesn't like. J.M. Berger decides that merely propagandizing for a terrorist group isn't the same thing as being a terrorist and that befriending him is a legitimate intellectual and scholarly and even civic activity. I disagree, and so do the US courts, since they put a translator of Al Qaeda who put up pages praising them in jail for abetting terrorism, despite all the civil libertarians who complained.
It's not just the role confusion, however, it's the way J.M. Berger purports to speak for all of us, as some sort of enlightened intellectual advance-guard, some elite in the capital that can decide just how much terror is needed to pass or not pass as a liberation struggle:
Our conversations turned more ideological, pushing and pulling over terrorism and the intentional targeting of civilians, the significance of the Arab Spring, and Omar's belief that the United States was oppressing Muslims around the world. We sparred over whether America had a national security interest in the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, one of his pet obsessions. He argued that the United States feared the caliphate; I argued that we wouldn't much care as long as terrorism wasn't the method for its establishment. Just when the conversation would start to get interesting, he would pull back.
No, J.M. No. We do care. Few of us want a caliphate that would take away all our rights. It's hard to think of how a caliphate would be installed in a blanket way without the use of force so it's naive to think it won't be. If for some reason this was achieved through stealth and deception and elections but not actual terrorist attacks, many would still fight against it intensely -- the idea that we "wouldn't care much" and have all pre-capitulated to a theocratic society is just scary -- and you can see how the right-wing bloggers go crazy with this kind of red meat.
Maybe J.M. Berger means well -- he's all understanding and empathetic to this terrorist speaking on behalf of despicable human beings committing atrocities (all of which remain off-stage vaguely in the distance through Berger's lengthy description of his lovely conversations). But I actually think he doesn't mean well at all. I actually think this kind of intellectual depravity and slide into moral degradation is what happens when people want power for their class or tribe. I think like others in this particular punditocracy, he wants to slay real or imagined neo-con or conservative or even just liberal thinkers, journalists or politicians he sees as opponents for media influence or grants or the ear of Congress. I think this group works to stay in power by portraying others more critical or troubled by terrorism as causing the very thing they loathe or in any event being ineffective at fighting it - and it wasn't so bad to start with.
There's the supreme vanity of the scholarly expert at play here, too -- that demanding the right (despite the social and moral taboos) to get close even to a loathsome subject so as to be able to understand it and explain it -- and then, of course, become the go-to guy about X or Y brand of terrorist movement. I'm sure there will be a wave of adulation and envy over J.M. "Omar and Me" because he got this story -- and lucky for him and all his admirers, Omar's dead now, so we don't have to see how the real end of the story might turn out, with Omar participating in some horrid atrocity even as he is DMing thinky pearls of wisdom to J.M. on Twitter.
I don't think there was a terrible lot to learn from Omar -- just like Orwell might say there isn't a lot to learn from befriending yet another communist or fascist up close and personal. Isn't it all pretty clear? Is "dialogue" about unhappy childhoods and economic beefs going to woo these terrorists out from terror to deals that American think-tank elitists arrange for them to come to safety and serve ever more as an interesting exhibition? No, it seems not.
J.M. didn't even seem to want to learn what Omar had to tell him -- that he found that Boston thing pretty odd. How could there be terrorism with no message? he asked. Good question! That should be a red flag to ask more questions about whether in fact it was an "authentic" terrorist act, or something else that had to do with Putin or Kadyrov either scripting the propaganda of the deed (there's the line Putin left out of his infamous op-ed piece) or letting nature take its course out of spite.
Instead, he hurried to explain to Omar that these terrorists were homegrown.
One of the things J.M. wants to do is be "balanced" and "respectful" -- and he hastens to tell his jihadist subjects that he covers other types of American extremism, too (that's why he needs the Tsarnaevs to be homegrown bombers without serious overseas ties, and why he needs to cover other kinds of right-wing terrorism on American soil, the better to be persuasive in getting the Al Qaeda story). He also wants to make sure no one will ever criticize him for Islamophobia. Hence, this conversation -- which shows in the end, in fact, that it's pointless to play these politically-correct games, extremists determined to commit violence are not persuaded:
I sent him samples of interviews
I had done with jihadists and conservative Muslim clerics in the past to show
him that I treated my subjects respectfully. In response to a question, I told
him I don't write solely about Muslims; I was interested in all types of American
extremism. Abu M agreed to consider my request, probing my intentions in the
meantime. He said my respectful tone in the interviews was not consistent with
the mocking comments I had posted about his autobiography.
I get it that J.M. has a right to this approach and that it is in demand and has more credentials than anything I might say. Even so, I'm going to insist also on the right to express revulsion at this -- and beg for a "team B" to study these same set of facts with a different lens.
As always the case -- I remember the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, and the current one, Navi Pillay using this term -- Obama deemed the shooting "cowardly".
It's as if liberal adults can rise up and try to shame the shooter by pointing out that far from being a big man who has scared everyone, he is a cowardly mouse who had to use terrorism to address his grievances and not behave like a real man.
I find that whacky. Terrorists -- and mass shooters, ideological or political or even just deranged -- have powerful will and determination and don't suffer from any lack of courage or failure of nerve. They are not cowardly but in fact incredibly bold. That's how they're able to kill people and we're not able to stop them.
I think to understand the nature of horror and moral terror like this, you do have to go back to the version of Joseph Konrad's Heart of Darkness portrayed by Marlon Brandon in Apocalypse Now. Like a diamond bullet, we should realize that somebody has men like this -- somebody does have ten divisions of men like this. It's just a question of finding out who, mindful that it may be among ourselves, and maybe some in our society do have such a life-or-death cause.
I don’t think the CFAA needs reform, because there isn’t a single
case where it has been applied that anyone can really claim it was
applied in an overbroad or unjust fashion. Aaron Swartz’s case would not
be that example.
Hackers deliberately obfuscate this matter by engaging in a number of
duplicitous rhetorical pranks every time one of these cases comes up:
a) they hysterically trumped the theoretical maximum sentences and
create scary headlines about young nerds going to jail for 20 or 50 or
even 100 years (as they are doing now with Barrett Brown). Nonsense.
Stop using your pocket calculators and look at other cases and
precedents. Not a single hacker in America has ever gotten more than 20
years — in order to get 20 years like Albert Gonzalez, you have to steal
credit cards and help yourself to millions of dollars. Most cases in
fact work like this: the defendant is given a mental health excuse; he
is let off with a suspended sentence or time served; he turns informant
for the authorities and is let off; or he gets from 6 months to 1-2
years. That’s it. Seldom does the application of the CFAA vary from
this application.
b) they claim that everything their tribe does must be exonerated in
the quest for freedom or innovation, minimizing the criminality of
hacking and scoffing at the victims’ complaints. But hacking should be
defined by victims, and not by perpetrators, under the law, like all
crimes. Somebody who has lost millions of dollars in damages — like Sony
— or even jus tens of thousands of damages — like MIT — should not be
bullied by copyleftists into dropping their concerns for the greater
glory of licentiousness for self-selected groups of nerds.
c) in particular they apply a highly sectarian and contrived notion
of “unauthorized” which just doesn’t square with common sense or legal
precedent. Judges fortunately don’t fall for this double-talk — they
didn’t in Weev’s case, where he claimed he was just “doing math in the
browser” and they didn’t in Google’s recent privacy case, where Google
engineers first lied and said they hadn’t done anything, then said it
was only one rogue engineer, then said they took public information
which was like “radio waves” — and the judge didn’t buy any of it. Good!
You mentioned binary thinking – and that is exactly the problem here.
Coders tend to see law as a static, rigid self-executing mechanical
thing, and imagine it will be applied in the worst way with the worst
sentence as a result. They don’t seem to have any feel for the notion of
precedent, and how a dynamic court situation doesn’t just have a
prosecutor or magistrate as in a civil law system (“code as law” is just
such a magisterial system) but in our *adversarial* system has a judge,
a jury, precedents to consider, and the actual acts of the defendant to
be reviewed. Someone like Barrett Brown who hasn’t himself made use of
stolen credit cards is not going to get 100 years.
I reject the idea that this area of human affairs is so complicated
that we can only allow the perpetrators of hacks to do all the driving
for us. While you want to find good lawyers for hackers, I hope we
continue to have good judges who apply organic rule of law over nihilist
code-as-law pranksters looking to troll at every turn and hide their
crimes. That’s what’s important for a free and liberal society in which
government, business and individuals don’t have to have their files
stolen or their servers crashed if some set of extremist radicals don’t
like them.
As for Matthew Keys, most news stories are only telling part of the story on him. He is also charged with stealing emails:
It helps to read the indictments above all, because most of the time
the tech press rushing to defend their own don’t bother to do this.
On Sarah's article:
Everything about this post is deliberately tendentious.
There is nothing special about computers or the Internet; they are human means of communication much like every other one in place for centuries, and the same laws of torts and property apply with the same principles. It's only radical hackers who want to pretend the Internet is different to minimize criminality and enable copyright-free regimes and laissez-faire for hackers who violate the rights of others they don't like politically.
The author fails to mention that both Weev and Matthew Keys are charged wiht stealing people's emails. There are real damages in these cases that don't seem to be validated. Once again, hacking is being defined here by its perpetrators rather than its victims under the law. No case of application of CFAA -- least of all Swartz's -- has ever been shown to be unfair. Swartz was offered a plea bargain of a mere 6 months -- but he did have to plead guilty to the crime he did in fact commit, which was indeed unauthorized access -- which owners, not hackers get to define -- and disabling of JSTOR for an extended period while his enormous theft of 1.7 million files using circumvention scripts over a period of time was finally cleaned up. It is not up to guerilla hackers to determine whether universities can have pay walls or membership walls on their content and services; it's up to that private institution.
The supportive line that CJR keeps taking on hackers is odd; perhaps Columbia was never hacked? It's as if in the panicked rush to new media, fleeing the old, this criminality has to be embraced. But it doesn't, and in fact hackers are antithetical to free speech when they steal files, erode privacy, and crash servers.
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