Wired State

Beyond Flip-Flops: Come on Journalists, Can't You Find Real Questions for Glenn Greenwald?

Greenwald with supporters at a lecture in the US in 2007. Photo by Gage Skidmore

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

When you see these kinds of puff pieces about Glenn Greenwald such as in Newsweek -- seeming last-ditch efforts by a crippled mainstream media trying to stay relevant -- you have to wonder: who will ever ask the real questions of Glenn Greenwald? We've heard so much about his life in paradise -- the shorts, the flip-flops, the casual laptop life, the walks along the beach, the adoring public, the Brazilian senators with their Snowden masks, the bold and daring takedown of the US government and gratitude of the Brazilian president who dissed America -- but when are we going to get the real story here? At least Peter Maass gave us the screeching monkeys! Who will take on Glenn Greenwald, really?

Oh, the answer is some normal guy on Twitter asking normal questions. He has like 147 followers, but he asks the right questions and you can tell because it makes Glenn crazy and he goes many rounds with this one normal guy on Twitter -- precisely because he isn't someone Glenn can discount as some neo-con or right-winger or sell-out like Pelosi, in his book.

Oh, and it's such a treasure to see NPR's reporter -- NPR! -- take on Greenwald and actually mainly win, although the crowd is so fatuously attached to Glenn (the way they get with Paul Krugman and other adversarial celebrities). And you wonder: why don't more people do it? Don't they have ideas? Are they afraid merely of Glenn's notorious nastiness?

Well, here are some questions -- not just 10, but each one contains many sub-questions.

1. Why don't you come home to America now? If opposition to gay marriage was a reason, now there are states with gay marriage legalized in the US. Is that the real reason? Do you instead fear arrest for your handling of the Snowden materials in ways that in fact may violate the law?

2. Tell us more about the specifics of your first contacts and ongoing relationship with Snowden. You have claimed variously that you are in "regular" or "daily" contact with Snowden. Which is it? How do you connect to him? Using what program? How do you know that isn't vulnerable to MITM attacks? How do you know it's really him each time? How do you know that your parole hasn't been intercepted and it's not just him at the keyboard or he is under pressure? Why can't Snowden appear in public or give interviews to journalists in Moscow more critical than WikiLeaks?

3. Let's go even deeper into the precise details of the Snowden affair and the relationship of EFF and FPF to his leaks. What was the date you first heard from Snowden in any form? When did you know his name and who he was?How did you contact him? On what program? With whose help? What were the first documents he supplied? Why did you decide to make the Verizon metadata story the first story? What relationship did Electronic Frontier Foundation and its litigation have to do with that selection of the first story? Say, are you the one who gave Snowden the EFF stickers? Did you pick those up at EFF directly or at FPF? Do you find any conflict of interest that you are on the board of FPF, yet the FPF is funding WikiLeaks and Snowden in ways that aren't clear. Does that include paying for your plane fare and hotel and other expenses related to covering the Snowden case?

4. Some have said you are contradicting yourself when you claim variously that Snowden gave all the files to you and/or hid them somewhere not on his person, although he presumably retains access, and yet you've also said speaking in the present tense that he has "the NSA's blueprints". Does he or does he not have either files on his person and/or access to his own files such that he could leak more of them at any time? Why did his father say he will leak more files? Do you discuss what to say about each file you use in a story? How much influence does he have over the selection and reporting on each file? What do you talk about every day on your encrypted chat?

5. What can you tell us about Jacob Appelbaum? When did he first make contact with Snowden? Has he or any of your other WikiLeaks colleagues and helpers, including Laura Poitras, made contact with Snowden in any form under any identity in person before May 2013 including in Hawaii in March-April 2013 or any other time? Are you still collaborating with Appelbaum, and if so, why has his byline not appeared on any more "reporting" about Snowden? Have you had an open break with him after he challenged you on the Tor story, claiming you were sitting on the story? Why were he and Laura Poitras allowed to do the first direct interview with Snowden, but then your story on his leaks went first? How did that sequencing come about?

5. You've made much of the fact that you've only leaked some of the hundreds of thousands of Snowden's files and that you are a judge of what is damaging or not. Why do you, an intensely radical critic of the US government and its policies, an "adversarial journalist" as you describe yourself, a good judge of what is damaging or not? Would you be willing to have an assessment of this damage made by more credible parties? And isn't it the case that the NSA, having suffered damage, is not going to make itself appear more vulnerable by telling the public where it has suffered? Doesn't that help the enemies of the US?

6. You claim that you don't report on Russia or China or other authoritarians in the world because you're American and you report on your own country. But the world is an interconnected place. If your work only myopically focuses on the US, how can you expect to get more general credibility around the world, particularly with the publics of the countries like Russia where the government does far more surveillance of citizens on the Internet than in the US? You've selectively covered the US and foreign countries like France or Germany in your claims of surveillance scandals, by tying it to key events such as summits or international meetings to gain maximum embarrassment for the US. Do you really think these countries don't spy on the US, too, including the head of state?

7. You claim that neither China or Russia have obtained Snowden's files? But either country's intelligence service could have seized or intercepted or copied them in China -- Snowden even went to the Russian consulate for two days. And even if by some miracle they didn't grab the files, how do you know they have not questioned him and obtained information? Even if he thinks they haven't -- again because of his own arrogant self-assessment of the situation which isn't credible on the face of it -- how do you know they haven't obtained information useful to them and damaging to the US? The absence of proof is not proof of absence.

8. What is the end state that you are seeking with the Snowden files? Is it reform or overthrow of the US government and replacement by some other kind of regime? Are you a good judge of what is reform versus revolution if you and your adversarial journalist networks would gain greater power? Do you see yourself as the Minister of Information or the Minister of Justice in the new regime?

9. Why do you think you will last more than 6 months with Pierre Omidyar? You haven't lasted with  other editors or colleagues, so why will this be any different? How is Omidyar going to be able to stave off libel lawsuits and government probes and indictments?  The market of "progressive" tilted news with entertainment and "news you can use" wraparound is already saturated with Huffpo and even The New Republic and a few others. Why do you think there's room for one more?  Are you afraid to be edited and challenged? You claim that you exercise the greatest of care to prevent damage and to "report out" the Snowden documents. And yet you appear to have left the Guardian because Rusbridger in fact engaged with GCHQ and conceded that some documents had to be destroyed. So if the left-leaning, even radical Guardian represents a filtration you can't stand on Snowden content, how is your work for Omidyar's new media outlet going to be any different than a WikiLeaks document dump?

10. Speaking of WikiLeaks, did you break with them finally? They stopped following you on Twitter. They've accused you of sitting on documents and filtrating them to serve establishment interests. Are you? Why did you even get involved with WikiLeaks at all on the Snowden case? Was it they who persuaded Snowden to go to Russia? What can you tell us about Sarah Harrison's role -- and say, what kind of Russian visa is she on, and who is her Russian sponsor, required for such long stays in Russia?

I could think of more, but that's a start. Join me in the comments!

 

 

Oh, No, Richard Cohen Has Become a WikiLeaks Zombie on Snowden

Tom Nichols has spared me blogging chores again -- perhaps I'll be able to retire!

He's asked all the right questions about Richard Cohen's about-face on his assessment of Snowden.

What a switch -- remember when he said Snowden would go down in history as a cross-dressing little Red Riding Hood?

What happened?!

Here are my answers:

You're asking all the right questions. I guess I thought part of the issue for Cohen was the steady drip  of peer pressure and hatred of all those associated with criticism of Snowden also being supportive of the Shutdown and against ObamaCare -- he's in a context in Washington where he wants to find like-minded peer support and this is a marker issue for doing that sort of binding.

But I see this story as an ominous indication of a Russian operative's careful preparation of the usual active measure with the usual agents of influence -- and now he's one of them -- and that most definitely has to be called out and the "anti anti" fears of McCarthyism banished, because there's just plain common sense and healthy skepticism here. He gets to blather away about Snowden as he wishes; and we get to question this in a liberal democratic society without fear or favour.

Because....He's rung every single chime of the WikiLeaks/Kremlin propaganda narrative on this, which indeed shows he has been "worked on,"  probably by one or more of the four ex-officials as you indicate.

The chimes rung are:

1. "What did he  betray anything to except the American people" -- which you properly point out is very threadbare at this point with leaks on Germany or France or Mexico. Privacy concerns? Reform of policies? And that wasn't done in concert with NGOs and Congress because...why?

2. "His residency in Moscow was forced on him." This is utter baloney, because on June 11th, Putin offered Snowden to apply for asylum -- which coming from the president himself, in a situation where it is seldom granted, is as good as an engraved invitation (those pretending that an offer isn't the same thing as acceptance need to study Putin's cunning over the years a little more). Snowden could have leaked AFTER he safely went to Venezuela or Iceland or even Brazil -- and no, I don't think CIA agents would kidnap him there or even bounty-hunters, as the same security  he has in Moscow could be supplied. He did not have to go to Moscow; he chose to, and don't forget he went in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong *before* his American passport was pulled. So let's keep pushing back on that one -- it really is crazy how there is so much Stockholm syndrome around it.

3. "Clapper lied." Except, Clapper didn't lie. The government doesn't keep massive numbers of dossiers on people. It targets legitimate intelligence targets for reasons of law-enforcement and indeed the proper espionage of a liberal democratic state with illiberal enemies. If Clapper came back and corrected any misperception people had, this is in a context of hacking and coercion by Snowden where the NSA felt on the defensive. I do not fault Clapper, and I honestly have no reason to go easy on him as I have nothing to do with the government and wouldn't have a problem calling out his "lies" if they existed. But they really don't, and this is the one chime that has to be unrung to succeed in defeating this WikiLeaks conspiracy.

4. "Snowden started a worthwhile national conversation." No, he didn't. He started chaos and mayhem and destruction. There isn't any good result yet from this "debate" -- and obtaining change through hacking and making your country vulnerable to attack by enemies is hardly a way to reform the state. It's the anarchist's creed and it needs to be constantly repudiated. The society we get from these Bolsheviks achieving "change" like this is an authoritarian one we will definitely not want to live in, as they have no accountability.

5. "Neither the Russians or Chinese have his files." Really? Let's see now. Did he leave the four laptops he brought to Hong Kong in his hotel room, so the Chinese could get them, while he was at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong, or say, did he bring them along so the Russians could copy them? Which was it? Or hey, did he send out to Task Rabbit to let someone copy them for all the world's intelligence agencies while he was sleeping? Please. Let's not be children here. And none of these hostile powers need the laptops -- are you going to tell me that if he is in "daily" communication with Greenwald between Russia and Brazil, nobody has gotten in the middle of those conversations? Really, guys? None of this is credible, because thieves aren't credible about their robberies.

6. "Snowden is modest and selfless like John Brown or Gandhi" No, go back to your first instinct -- he's a narcissistic control freak who wants power and has gotten it with the help of similar toxic personas -- willing to use foreign enemies to do so. He never had to leak his identity or go to Moscow -- these were show-boating choices. His motivation for his turning against the US wasn't seeing something unconscionable, it was having a bug-finder's tiff over an application he found a flaw in that his supervisor wouldn't instantly fix to his little heart's desire. There are just too many holes in this story -- like the shifting time-lines of Poitras and Greenwald when they describe their first contact with him -- to make this something we should swallow.

It's too late for Richard Cohen -- he's now like a zombie on this question. The need to stay with the pack is a strong one with journalists. The climate at the Washpo now under Bezos is not one that criticizes hackers who "free" the Internet; it's one that embraces them.

But just keep pounding away at this. It can't last.

STOP HACKING US!

So a hodge-podge of hackers, anarchists, crypto kids, Occupy, Anonymous, ACLU operatives, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff, other Soros-funded non-profiter -- plus a bunch of libertarians, Ron Paulers, Von Mises gold buggers and God-knows-what-else are going to converge on Washington, DC for something called "Stop Watching Us" which is essentially an anti-NSA demonstration.

These are not people who are about "reform" and "making a Better World" within the system, they want to overthrow it. (And the ones claiming they aren't doing that are either stupid or lying and haven't realized who they have in their movement really running things, yet.)

All the usual suspects -- supreme cadre Eli Pariser and the loathsome Internet gatekeeper Anil Dash -- mainly the "progressives" to hard left, with a sprinkling of libertarians -- are listed as individual supporters of the action. Note that "journalists" Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum are on the list and of course  Glenn Greenwald is on the leader board!  Xeni Jardin, who arguably at least does real journalistic beat covering as distinct from the endless blogging of Greenwald is also on the list.

Not a single one of these people are in local or national politics. They are all radicals. Some of them have really loathsome ideologies -- I've written repeatedly about Anil Dash, who believes himself to be in charge of deciding who gets to keep their job in Silicon Valley and who doesn't, and who gets VC funding and who doesn't -- when he isn't busy policing speech and behaviour to fit the Better World utopianist ideal of political correctness. Gabriella Coleman -- can you imagine! She's not just a griefer-scholar, but a radical demonstration leader -- awful.

John Perry Barlow must be fuming -- he's not listed in the big names at the top of the marquee but put in the list below with the likes of Appelbaum, even though he's likely more famous the all of those people except Tim Berners-Lee - for whom we have to blame for the leaky boat of the Internet in the first place, as he welded into the Internet's architecture: communism (no respect for private property), lack of privacy (which goes along with no private property), and hatred of commerce (without which people don't respect such conduits and trash them).

A lot of the businesses supporting this anti-government rally are of the socialist kind like Upworthy and Ben & Jerry. But there's one business I thought was "real" -- Rackspace, where Robert Scoble is the start-up liaison and the most prolific social media presence. I always thought he and they were more moderate, and since I don't see him jawing that much about Snowden, that they weren't radicals. Yet they're in the list, possibly because they've decided that unless they position themselves with this gang, their cloud business could be hurt, i.e. they have to make customers feel they won't turn them over to the feds.

The letter is never something I could sign -- it calls on Congress to finish the hacking job Snowden undemocratically began by exposing even more. Stupid. It makes completely unverified and even false statements like these:

The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by an intelligence contractor showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments.

Nothing sane here, nothing explaining what really goes on, which is that legitimate activity against intelligence targets, i.e. terrorists, goes on with warrants and with checks and balances, and yes, with the cooperation of American businesses who do so because they are good corporate citizens.

Outwardly (although there's lots behind the scenes), the anti-government action is being coordinated by a quintessential cadre kid, Ben Doernberg, who in the summer ran something called "Restore the Fourth!" which is supposed to be "restoring" the Fourth Amendment that is supposedly "lost" with Snowden's hack. Well, yeah. It is. Because Snowden and his adversarial journo and hacker friends unreasonably searched and seized our national security and hijacked it, bringing enormous sabotage, embarassment misery, expense, damage on the US. And NO, the US is not going to "prove" this to these malcontents because to do so would harm further what little firepower they have left to fight enemies like Al Qaeda. Oh, and the Russian and Chinese. Oh, and spy on the French, who sell weapons to the Russians, and the Germans, who harbour all kinds of radicals in their midst -- including some of Snowden's helpers, like Jacob Appelbaum.

You may have guess how I feel about this demonstration which is: I'm totally against it and call on people not to go to it because it's destructive and stupid.

I'll be interested if these paid-for cadres are able to muster anything like "real people," however. My bet is even with the ACLU and others paying for the buses from New York (and various other rich folk will show up to buy people in from here and elsewhere), and even with lots of media interest and support in certain lefty and progressive quarters, and even with Twitter, it's just not going to do well.

I sense that it's a football weekend, college kids won't care, it's too cold to hang out doors, the Shutdown is over and people have to catch up on their work -- and with any luck at all, it will rain.

I think it will be something like Jon Stewart's rally for sanity or whatever it was called -- supposed to be an antidote to the Tea Party, but itself a flop. I think that the reason the Fifth Estate is flopping in the box office is not because Assange's propaganda against it or for his hacking accomplice enterprises are so successful -- but because they are not. People don't care. It's just too boring. Remember we only counted 27,000 Cryptocat kids around the world, yesterday. Lavabit had only something like 4,000 custeroms, including Edward Snowden and his alts. So meh.

I live in hope -- the Wired State is not yet upon us (because to me, the NSA is not the Wired State, although parts of it may ally with it, and that's what made the wikification of government possible and Manning and Snowden possible.)

The other goods new is that Tom Watson, who has now described himself cleanly as a "social democrat" (socialist) underneath that tag "progressive" they always fakely use, has denounced the organizers' making common cause with the Libertarian goons. Good! A disunited rally is a rally that can't become more of a threat to liberal democracy.

And really, if technocommunism bothers you, even the Lite form that produces Tom Watson, social democrat, who is against DDoSing and writes for the Capitalist Tool Forbes (which is more of a social democrat now, too) -- wait until you see the loons on the libertarian right -- they're like Intlibber Brautigan in Second Life. They're the kind of people who say government should move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and only take care of roads -- oh, and maybe some missiles to fend off the Russians, but maybe not even that. They are pro-gun but also tend toward other creepy things as we've seen with some of Glenn Greenwald's far-right pals and the folks Julian Assange hooked up with when he ran for election.

I don't like Libertarians, and some of them are blamed for the Shutdown, but ultimately I blame Obama and the hard left for the Shutdown. Obama refused to trim Obamacare and brought this on. And no, I don't accept this silly meme that "it's the law" -- or "you have to pay for what you funded". Just because it's law doesn't mean it will get funded 100% when expenses are greater than income in an ongoing recession. The Farm Bill didn't get funded. And you can't always pay for what you planned to fund, either. Things have to be cut. The refusal to do this and the willingness to keep putting out paper is disastrous. Anyone can tell that if they are normal and not out of touch with reality. This is not "Tea Party"; it's normalcy. That's why there wasn't the outrage about the Shutdown, even from those who don't like Ted Cruz or find others on the Hill to be caricatures. Because Obama caused this from the get-go by swinging to hard to the left for the country's good, which only induced backlash.

Which brings me back to Ben Doernberg. Like all the Saul-Alinsky (Leninist) progs, young Ben claims he is "organizing the grassroots". Because he's so young, like 20 or 21, he may really believe this fiction. But it's an ancient DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) fiction from the 1980s before he was born. Pick single issues. Pick populist issues. Then run campaigns around them, and gradually ease in the full-blown socialist agenda. Soften people up for the socialist shill with their single issues. Use them as cover. Stealth socialism. I really hate it. If you're going to be a socialist, why, say you're a "social democrat" like Tom Watson, I say.

Ben thinks he is organizing "real people" and the "roots" -- but they are the grass tops. The cadres. The nonprofiters. The people in paid-for organizations with organizers' salaries or the children of affluent parents who can pay for their kids to hang out in movements like Occupy. Most Americans are NOT overwrought about the 4th Amendment somehow being "shaken".  They got used to being spied on by Google, you know? And the news that the NSA takes too from the big firehose of the Internet doesn't really bother them that much. They keep doing their thing. Their are cameras in buses and at intersections. You wish they were on every one when you have an accident, believe me.

Ben of course is in touch with Occupy, which he covered. So he wasn't born yesterday and didn't spring from a cornfield. He became well known for Storifying Occupy right at the right moment when some lazy editor needed copy and didn't want to have to waste staff running down to Zucotti and covering the mess down there. So Ben's Storify, with its cool graphics and edgy social media look with its embedded tweets appeared just at the needed time. But Ben had an instinct for what sells at a time like this. Obviously *my* storifies exposing the nastiness of Evgeny Morozov or Katrin vanden Heuvel on the left aren't going to be picked up by anybody because the media is primarily liberal/leftist and the battles too arcance even for the right to pick up normally.

Some kids are good in the school play and have a talent, however, and that's Ben. He will go far. He could be another Van Jones or Alec Ross or something. I suspect he will not become more radical as he gets older, but less, and try to get into party/election politics because sectarian politics in little leftist sects like Moveon or EFF or whatever is just too frustrating and wearing. Ben wants to get to power, not sit Storifying for the rest of his life.

But I'm here to explain that Ben is not rounding up the grass-roots. It's Occupy, it's EFF, it's the usual suspects. Perhaps he will pick up some random youths sitting in cafes drinking pumpkin lattes or playing WoW or whatever it is they do and get them on the bus. But as I said, would you want to go on a boring bus ride to DC and then stand in the damp leaves bitching about the government watching you, when -- so what, you knew that?

And really, try to think about it some more. The hackers are really the bigger problem because no one elected them, they have far too much power to undermine our liberal state without our participation, and they are destructive and nasty. You do not want them running your life. Ben will realize this, soon. Unless, of course, he becomes one of them and applies his youthful energy into building the Wired State, in which case, our real freedoms are in danger.

Ben began arguing with me on Twitter, and then started one of those silly lefty gambits of pretending to "engage," then pouting that his target didn't "play" and engage "the way they were supposed to" for his little power trip to work. This is such an old, old story I don't bother to even Storify it anymore LOL.

Then Ben writes a hurt faux polite email to try to "engage" some more:

Ben Doernberg

To Me

Oct 9

Hi Catherine,

Just wanted to say quickly; I really do find it valuable to read your blog posts, as you're clearly doing excellent detective work and critically analyzing a lot of issues I care deeply about. We may disagree on most issues, but I have no desire to avoid being exposed to others points of view.

If you go back and read the timeline of our Twitter conversation, I felt like I was on the defensive the whole time, which is what I meant by "I'm not interested in fighting." I'd be happy to explain why I don't think I'm being undemocratic by planning a permitted protest in the nation's capitol, or talk about my own issues with Anonymous' tactics. From the way you were wording your tweets, it didn't seem like you were interested in having those conversations, but rather wanted to provoke me. I could be wrong about that, that's how it seemed to me.

Happy to discuss further or meet up for coffee or a drink some time in NYC.

Ben

Answer:

No, Ben. I don't need to sit down and have a cup of coffee and be "brought round" to your "progressive" way of thinking. Not interested.

And I saw what you did there. You turned on your self victim-hood (to try to get an edge with more sympathy) by transforming my comment about the undemocratic nature of hacking and Snowden's and WikiLeak's campaign, converting it somehow to your act of demonstration being undemocratic.

Nonsense. I didn't say anything of the sort. Demonstrations aren't undemocratic; they are the practice of democracy. Peaceful assemblies expressing opinions is obviously the heart of democracy.

But hacking isn't. THAT is what I said was undemocratic, because it is. WikiLeaks' enabling of hacking and anarchist unaccountability and harm to people -- that's all not democratic. Snowden is antithetical to democracy and human rights because none of us get to choose to have our nation undermined and harmed in relations with both friends and enemies; it was coercively imposed on us against our will.

Your ilk keep mounting this fake notion of "the national conversation" -- which is an old socialist sectarian term from the 1980s or even earlier. It means provoking a topic socialists can exploit as a lever to wedge in the rest of their radical agenda. This is an old, old story. It is never about "conversation". It is about taking power.

I am absolutely positive if you put this proposition to a vote, it would lose by a landslide:

Members of Congress, would you like to have our national security severely damaged and reputation undermined, our nation split even more, our secret files spilled out for the view of our enemies from China to Al Qaeda, the trust of our allies ruined, the anger and ridicule of the world, damage to Internet businesses, roiling of international meetings with anti-American resolutions, distraction from real Internet freedom and governance issues everywhere?

See, no one would sign up for that willingly, ever. But that's what was forced on us by WikiLeaks, and that's why its members should be arrested and charged with appropriate offenses for the damage and threat to national security and secrecy which they have caused.

They shouldn't be worshipped and emulated and serve as the galvanizers of protests against the NSA in government.

It doesn't matter if you "have issues" with Anonymous' tactics -- you haven't forthrightly denounced them, called for an end to the DDoS as a tactic, and barred them from your demonstration. You'd be happy to have them fill out your ranks, just like the Libertarians, and if you can round up drunks and bums like Occupy did to fill up the place, you'll do that too.

It doesn't matter even if you denounced Anonymous and its tactics and even obeyed Tom Watson's own version of broader sectarianism -- but still sectarianism in the Democratic Party. I will never march with you, ever.

STOP HACKING US!

The Good News of the Ads and the Bad News of the News

I've said repeatedly that the tech press is just a wrapper for the gadgets, to sell them better. And doesn't that sound like something a technocommunist might say, somebody who is just about to use the phrase "neoliberal" and "rent-seeking" in the next sentence?

But no, it's just a statement of what is the case. And I don't mind if the tech press exists merely to sell gadgets. The tech web sites are businesses. Businesses can do what they want and seek value and sell things as they wish. It's still a free country with a free market. If they seem craven then journalistically and don't tell the truth about the gadgets, okay, but then that's what a few critical blogs and maverick sites are for...if they exist...and I don't know if they exist any more. Some of the writers at TechCrunch like Alexia Tsotsis will strike a pose and get all critical of their industry now and then and worry about poor people -- but it probably just helps sell the comfort-inducing gadgets better...

I think Loren Feldman got it right when he said that when AOL bought TechCrunch, it began to be impossible to do independent blogging on tech anymore, i.e. it was a debilitating example. Of course he disproves this himself with his blog, but I take the point. TC was more independent in its reporting when it was just Arrington running it.

And I don't have to try hard to prove this when you get something like "Googlicious" (couldn't you just barf at the name!) coming to CNET to be about "all things Google" run by a guy who seems like a relative of Torley in Second Life -- the same kind of artificial pumped up enthusiasm about tech.

To be sure, "Apple Byte," the show that existed before "Googlicious" (barf) is going to remain in place. Yuck! Of course, it probably will get views because people want to read about new gadgets and they don't care if it is fluff.

So then I got to thinking. How is Chris going to keep The New Republic alive? What ads can he wrap around THAT stuff -- the progressive, pro-Obama stuff that comes out of TNR?

And the answer is -- and this is funny -- old companies like Northrop Grumman which are stalwarts of the military industrial complex (they are a leading manufacturer of drones) and of course even involved in cybersecurity these days. So it's kinda funny to see their add opposite some article loving up Obama or praising Snowden. I don't recall Grumman being there before, maybe it was, or maybe the new management landed it. It's funny.

Which got me to thinking about something Pierre Omidyar was quoted as saying today by Carr:

Advertisers don’t want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it’s extremely difficult to do that

Hmm. Well, except you could argue Grumman has done that, in a way Although frankly, I don't recall an investigative story in TNR lately, of the kind they did on Gov. Perry or Mitt Romney, which were so very thorough -- oh, and at the end of the day, weren't so much investigative as they were about oppo research to help Obama.

I couldn't help thinking of what Marshall McLuhan taught: "The bad news of the news helps sell the good news of the ads."

So the Vietnam War's bad news helps sell cigarettes or perfume or whiskey, which were the things that tended to be more advertised in magazines and newspapers in those days.

It's funny, TNR hasn't done a lot on Snowden.  Certainly nothing first hand. I think because on the whole, Silicon Valley as an institution didn't really care for Snowden hugely, as it hurt their social media platforms' reputation and the their cloud business overseas (supposedly, although this is so far all speculation and not data) -- as foreigners were supposedly concerned about US-based services on servers the NSA could get at.

I'm sure McLuhan meant to say something very penetrating and anti-establishment with his witty saying, which I remember hearing him say in person (because I went to his classes at St. Michael's in the 1970s). But I have to say, I don't find it some earth-shattering horrible neo-liberal bad thing. People like contrasts, and a little vinegar to go with their chips, or something.... Doesn't the product seem sweeter if it is next to bad news?

Except, food and beverage products aren't the things you see on those pages anymore. You see Northrop Grumman. Or you see car insurance .

You know, I clicked all the way through on that Northrop Grumman ad on TNR which was pretty snazzy and had one of those flashy films with smart talking heads. Except...they mouthed inanities as they always do on these ads. You see the same kind of ads for companies like this on CNET or TechCrunch.

I'm trying to think what the purpose of an ad like that is. Most of the intellectual readers of TNR are not in purchasing departments or in a position to requisition cybersecurity services. Well, maybe some in the government are, and maybe they hope to reach those people. Or maybe they just do it as a public image thing. Before, if someone said, "What do you know about Northrop Grumman?" I would have said, "Um, do they make airplanes or something?" Now I know they do cybersecurity -- and I hope, in such a way to keep out the next Edward Snowden.

Related articles

The Silicon Valley Elitists -- Do They Rule Our World?

New New Media: Pierre Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald Will Not Get Along and It Will Fail

New gadgets and apps on display at San Francisco tech show

"To be led differently": Neoliberalism, road construction, and NGO counter-conducts in Peru (2013)

Crypto Kids Try to Beat NSA

So here hacker Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora), the quintessential crypto kid who now has a gig at New America Foundation, gets in the New York Times as a hero-coder.

The Times invokes The Circle, which I haven't read yet (and I hear parts of it are based on Second Life so I should), and all the Snowden stuff, and says:

Nadim Kobeissi, a security adviser in Montreal who works on an encrypted-message service called Cryptocat, said the security and hacker circles of which he is a part have long suspected that the government is listening in on online conversations and exchanges but “have never been able to prove it.” He added: “It’s been a worst-case-scenario prediction that all turned out to be true, to a worrying extent.”

However, when people get in the Twitter mindshare and the Times and seem to have very influential and wealthy backers, it's important to take a reality check. Here's one:

Most of these services are still relatively small. For example, Cryptocat, the encrypted-message service, typically sees peaks of around 20,000 simultaneous users. In recent months, that number has grown to 27,000. But it’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, that mainstream social networking tools and services can claim.

You know, there may be 1.7 million phone jailbreakers, i.e. a rough estimate of the number of dangerous geeks there are out there LOL. But there are only 27,000 Crypto kids. Be grateful!

So, yeah, that. Most people do not feel a burning need to encrypt their email. It's a cumbersome process and in some places it will draw more attention to you for the mere fact that you're encrypting. And I suspect the lack of sign-ups for Cryptocat is because this is a niche enterprise. Most people are not radical revolutionaries trying to overthrow the state and requiring encryption services.

And in case you missed the point that people like Nadim are not just interested in encryption as some kind of public service, here he spells out his radical agenda:

Tools like Cryptocat, he said, are just the impetus for a larger discussion. “It’s not an answer by itself,” he said. “It is a combination of privacy and technology, democratic movement and political discussion that it is not acceptable to use the Internet as a surveillance medium.”

Well, except the Internet, like telephones and phones and mails and lots of stuff, *can* be used as a surveillance medium when the targets are legitimate law-enforcement targets. Revolutionaries who want to seize power never concede that. Well, some of them are among the criminals, the pirates, the drug dealers and so on.

My comment:

But wait. Nadim Kobeissi has not in fact proved that the government is listening in on conversations of people that are not legitimate law-enforcement and intelligence targets. That's just it. We have yet to get a single bona fide solid case from Edward Snowden's hacks. Kaepora here is merely affirming this as a belief, but he has not made the findings to back it up. As much as the adversarial journalists and their hacker friends have claimed there is a mass surveillance state, they have only shown the hypothetical potentials of machines, not the actualities of cases.

Related articles

Seeking Online Refuge From Spying Eyes

Government Surveillance Receives Outrage from International Community

Activists erect high-tech barriers to U.S. snooping

Technical Resistance to NSA Spying Accelerates

Should the Navy Appear on the Same Platform with WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum in Berlin?

Lavabits Tap Dances Around the Law, Enables Espionage

Did You Know Anonymous Hacker Indicted for Operation Payback Works at Twitter?

Shocking, eh, when they are about to have their IPO?

Here's the indictment of the 13 Anonymous goons.

Ryan Russell Gubele works as an engineer at Twitter and remains there, from all indications.

Twitter management needs to take care of this great image and reality problem right away. They should suspend this hacker pending trial and not have him near their servers unless he is acquitted.

I don't think that any decent business can allow vigilantes to work for them who attack other businesses for radical political reasons. No public account or company back end is safe then when somebody like that has log-on privileges.

We learn this from Matthew Keys, himself indicted on charges of collusion with Anonymous in hacking his formal employer's website, the LA Times, and also taking emails from a Fox News affiliate.

I was just noticing that there doesn't seem to be a decent list of all arrested Anonymous/LulzSec etc. hackers even on Wikipedia which isn't full and isn't neatly listed, so I'll have to make one. Anonymous likes to play down this news, as then it hurts their recruiting efforts.

Operation Payback was when Anonymous -- spurred on by WikiLeaks and John Perry Barlow and other "Internet freedom fighters" -- attacked the servers of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and others because they refused to allow funds to be received and forwarded for the WikiLeaks operation -- which after all, is an operation that deliberately incites -- and aids -- hacking and abets the theft of classified files. Why should any business with a terms of service forbidding the storing and forwarding of stolen content allow such payments to be processed? It shouldn't, and the spurious claims of "a chill on free speech" have no merit.

Anonymous has been obscured by the greater antics of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum, and their envy is visible -- they never really got behind this crew with the robustness you'd think, given the destructiveness of the cause, because a) they didn't run it and b) there was too much cooperation with mainstream media.

The Lost Boys are trying to get themselves back in the news again with another Steubenville-type stunt, Maryville, another small-town tragedy of a young girl raped by the relative of a prominent politician on the football team whose reputation is ruined and who is forced to move out of town.

There's the same witless praise from some liberal media for these "hacktivists," but at least Adrian Chen at Gawker got it, and said he was skeptical. Lee Stranahan of Breitbart, who was heckled mercilessly by Anonymous and had his entire personal life spilled over Twitter and blogs by these goons, said that nothing Anonymous ever did in Maryville could make up for Steubenville. Agreed. They do not take on these cases out of genuine concern for victims or the desire to uphold the rule of law and women's rights and due process. Such things are anaethema to them as hacknarchists.

What they are far more interested in doing is disrupting judicial institutions they find flawed and replacing them with revolutionary justice.

 

 

Related articles

Twitter engineer indicted with others in alleged Operation Payback cyber attacks

Anonymous Hacker Charged in Operation Payback Works for Twitter

US indicts 13 suspected Anonymous members for Operation Payback

Several IT workers among "Operation Payback" indicted suspects

Anonymous members arraigned in 'Operation Payback' case

Why Do the Special Snowflakes Have to Have Special Lawyers and Special Laws?

Wendy and the Lost Boys: Gabriella Coleman, Anonymous Fangurl

Reuters Social Media Editor Indicted For Allegedly Conspiring With Anonymous

Ken Roth is All Wrong About NSA Reform

Former LulzSec member Jake Davis aka Topiary: hackers should be helped to find an outlet for their creativity

Snowden and the "Treason Convention" -- Right By His Side

Silent movie made by WikiLeaks. There's the four from the "Treason Convention" from L to R in the foreground; on the opposite side is  Snowden and Sarah Harrison to his right -- and then Kucherena and his interpreter to his right. So who is the woman next to Sarah with the black hair whose face is obscured? Poitras? Or? That American in Moscow helping? And who is the WikiLeaks cameraman? Dmitry Velikovsky?

This was just nauseating -- My Visit With Edward Snowden by Jessylyn Radeck in the Nation.

Radeck is one of the self-described "Treason Convention" -- the four former US officials from the FBI, CIA and NSA (!) who travelled to Moscow to take part in a very scripted and choreographed meeting with Edward Snowden, the fugitive hacker of the NSA.

You know, I am still trying to wrap my mind around these four people and their antics -- I hardly know what to think about our intelligence services that have such people in them -- except I have seen people like this occasionally in the State Department or US embassies abroad, and I know it's a "type" -- like the "adversarial journalists," as Greenwald now calls his anti-American clan, so there are "adversarial agents" who seem to acquire a chip on their shoulder or even to go to crazy town with the 911 truthers and such.

Fortunately, I can take the rest of the day off and I don't have to blog about this, because it's already been done 10 times better than I could do it at the blog The War Wroom by Tom Nichols, who is a professor at the US Naval War College.

I'm so glad there are others to do these public services!

Tom adds to my list of rebuttals for Snowden's "the US closed off all my exits so I just had to go to Russia" cover story, this:

So why didn’t he just get on the regular Aeroflot flight to Havana? No one can possibly think that the United States would have interfered, militarily or otherwise, with a Russian flag carrier, anywhere. The U.S. wants Snowden arrested, but Washington wasn’t going to start World War III over this guy. If Ed had wanted to go to Cuba, he could have gone to Cuba.

Remember how several journalists even though that? I think some of them even boarded the flight and went all the way to Havana, peering at everybody who might be in disguise? And Snowden wasn't on board.

I think Snowden indeed could have gone to Havana, and then switched to some other Latin American destination from there -- and there's again, the question of why this didn't happen during the three weeks in May before he left for Hong Kong and blew his own cover.

My only disagreement with Tom's otherwise perfect piece -- which shreds each line of Jessylyn's air-headed apologia for Snowy is related to this:

The more likely reality is that Snowden was told by his Russian handlers — professionals who are a lot better at this than a dysfunctional high-school dropout — that there was no way to guarantee his safety or freedom outside of Russia.

And they’re right: I doubt Snowden would have lasted long on the streets of Caracas or Havana. Either he’d have ended up in American custody, or he’d have been at the mercy of any number of people from any number of countries or organizations who would likely be glad to test Snowden’s own theory that his secrets can’t be tortured out of him.

The handlers in the Russian Embassy in Hong Kong -- and there may have been Russian handlers long before all that, starting in 2009 in Geneva, for example -- may indeed have said something like that so they could get Snowden to come to Russia. Far from seeing him as a liability, surely they saw him as an assest to play in their endless game of payback time for Magnitsky and everything else they hate that America has done.

But it's funny for Tom to have bolstered the Russians' own case for them by claiming that Russia is the only place where you can be safe from American kidnapping. Really?

As for the next paragraph, about how Snowden wouldn't have been safe in Havana or Caracas, I'm afraid that helps not only Snowden but the Russians make their case for "Moscow the Impenetrable" as well.

I don't think it's the case, in fact.

The US intelligence agencies, having been embarrassed terribly by the Snowden affair -- following WikiLeaks and Manning -- would hardly want to add insult to injury and be seen grabbing Snowden and forcing him back on a plane to the US into certain jail -- that would cause an uproar. Can you IMAGINE the uproar? Surely Tom can imagine the uproar!

Jacob Appelbaum gets questioned and gets his cell phone fluttered at the border and he makes it seems as if he has been the worst victim of torture and has to remain in exile in Germany, because he can't go back to the States for "fear of reprisals". This plays into that whole paranoid meme of theirs.

I don't think the US would in fact grab him although they might try to talk to him and make a deal.

As for the theory that there might be other opportunistic bounty  hunters who would grab him to then sell him back to the US or the highest bidder, well, I suppose that's always possible, but say, could you name even one example of that for me? I just don't recall any other case like that. Let's be realistic.

I think Snowden went to Russia not merely because it was "safe" from American grabbing, but because Julian Assange and Sarah Harrison -- with whom he hooked up logistically and morally -- had long-time ties and a logistical base there with real support from persons who appear to be close to Russian intelligence.

You don't stage a movie like Mediastan without such ties as I've explained in critiquing the movie and explaining the Russian journalists involved in it (for extra bonus, read the comments and see none other than Wahlstrom himself show up to complain about a mistake I made in the blog, but also to disclaim his involvement in a series of antisemitic articles, which of course is lame as it they were amply on the record and widely reported at the time and since.)

Snowden is in Russia because he made the decision -- after the Russians helped him to think about it more starkly in the consulate in Hong Kong -- that the Chinese would likely send him back or that Hong Kong was open enough, that the CIA could get to him more easily. He needed a place with friends -- and may have become emotionally tied to Harrison with the gosling complex that any defector can develop to whatever Mother Goose takes care of him.

So he went to Russia perhaps misled by the Russians or Harrison that they'd help him get to Latin America incognito -- but then maybe they betrayed him. Or maybe it got messed up somehow. Or maybe they were told to "wait."

We may never know.

Related articles

Snowden: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself."

Snowdens' Ideas Are Really Terrible

Snowden claims his secret files never entered Russia

Cuba's Justice Minister says the government fights prostitution

Should the Navy Appear on the Same Platform with WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum in Berlin?

Evgeny Morozov Comes Clean on His Technocommunism!

And speaking of neo-liberalism, before I forget, here's Evgeny Morozov in the German press again (I bet he will move to Germany before long).

Remember Evgeny Morozov? Before Snowden, he was everywhere, remember? Then he was laughed at for locking up his Internet router along with the screwdriver in a box to limit distractions while he Thought Big Thoughts and worked on his PhD and his next book. He keeps up a steady Twitter stream, but he doesn't seem to be discussed as much as he was. He had that perfectly hateful piece in Der Spiegel, and now this:

However, acknowledging that a world saturated with modern technologies is not automatically hostile to progressive and democratic ideals should not blind us to the fact that, due to the present historical situation, we are ill-equipped to unlock their emancipatory potential. In fact, the opposite is true: as long as the global political and economic regime is characterized by the dismantlement of the welfare state, the decline of the very idea of public goods, the triumph of tinkering over structural reform, the victory of psychology over philosophy as the favorite discipline of our technocratic classes, we shouldn't expect technology to perform much of an emancipatory function.

So, what is it that we – and by “we” I mean progressive critics who have little patience for the romanticism and conservatism of technology-bashers – talk about when we talk about technology? Certainly, it's not the dialectics of innovation, progress, or enlightenment, as Silicon Valley would prefer to have it. No, for the true and democratically minded critic, “technology” is just a slick, depoliticized euphemism for the neoliberal regime itself. To attack technology today is not to attack the Enlightenment – no, it is to attack neoliberalism itself.

Oh, dear.

It really is a very stark revelation of what his real beliefs are. Finally after all that complicated erudite talk about the techno-utopians and all his complicated jokes in French, he comes clean and just explains that he opposes neo-liberalism. You know, normal capitalism.

Whenever I hear someone use that term, I know they have had a Marxist professor or two in their life or somehow imbibed the socialist view of the world. It's always said with a knowing sneer, as if the speaker is far above the grubby capitalist system being described, and can "call out" the "real nature" of this "rent-seeking" sort of economy blah blah.

I explained back here in the discussion of AirBnB how these new social sharing businesses are really about collectivizing property.

I wonder what Tom Slee and David Golumbia, Canadians who tend toward social democracy as their worldview, think of Evgeny's more candid statement now.

I think it's full of crap.

Take this completely ridiculous, nonsensical description of where Evgeny thinks health is going, due to appification:

Under this new regime, our smartphones enable us to track our health – along with our sleeping, eating, and exercising patterns. The apps can tell us how to fix ourselves better than most doctors. But the social costs of such an approach, while still invisible, are not trivial : the app-ification of problem solving reduces health from a political and public issue – a project where clashing visions for improving the world have to compete for endorsement by engaged citizens – to a purely privatized project, where citizens morph into anonymous participants in the marketplace, invited to fix their bodies on their own terms and with their own resources.

Has Evgeny been in a hospital lately? Unfortunately, with my son's accident, I spent the last months constantly in the hospital day and night, and got to see a lot of hospitals and a lot of public health.

We don't have insurance, and it's been a nightmare, but not as much of one as we are led to believe. To be sure, I've had to raise money to pay for private physical therapy (think Hank in "Breaking Bad"!) So hit the tip jar on this page if you'd like to help! But there are also a lot of things that eventually Medicaid and MetroPlus will help with -- and not even ObamaCare, which wasn't in effect.

And public health, for all its big faults, works, more or less, and we should be grateful for it especially in big cities (if my son's crash had happened in a little town in New York State, let alone in some foreign country, he'd be dead or severely disabled now.)

Just because people like me criticize socialism or criticize ObamaCare doesn't mean we somehow oppose public health like Randians or something. There can be a balance. There can be less punitive policies (the taxation) and more spending cuts.  I could say a great deal about this from personal experience -- but Evgeny is not speaking from that.

Health care isn't appified -- doctors struggle with desk top computers, not even i-Pads, in most settings. Even where it is appified, it doesn't work, it stalls, they get frustrated. (And I wish I could catch my app "Map My Walk" in the act of what it often does as I'm out walking and recording my miles -- pitching me a McDonald's ad lol.)

And even if people become more involved in individualized health tracking, they still need a public health care system -- and guess what, they have one. Nothing like the scary scenario Morozov depicts is close to happening (and by the way, Lanier also depicts in reverse, more optimistically, with nanobots coming to operate on you if you have a casino coupon). Not only does Sergei Brin manage his Parkinson's with real doctors in real hospitals, not apps, despite all the protests, the ObamaCare program was passed in Congress. Some dystopia with every man for himself, eh?

P.S. Enormous amounts of idiocy about "neoliberalism" is written in the world (see below!)

 

Related articles

Evgeny Morozov: Controversy and Boundaries

Mandarin progressives

Internet-Centrism 1 (of 3): Evgeny Morozov and The Net Delusion

Evgeny Morozov's "How to Stop a Sharknado"

Why British NeoLiberals Need the Underclass

Does Snowden Matter?

How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it | Nancy Fraser

NGOs: in the Service of Imperialism by James Petras - Review

Neo-liberalism and Dan O'Brien? Call off the search party!

The Silicon Valley Elitists -- Do They Rule Our World?

It seems that time again when there's a willingness to look at the horrid elitism of Silicon Valley.

Usually Silicon Valley's rich and famous are never targeted by mass culture because they are too hipster and too secretive and too interwoven with the social media platforms. Even to make a collage with Sergei Brin's face inside Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly Game is to commit a blasphemy (maybe I can't find the old one I made of Larry Page on a blog because it has been Google-bombed to get rid of any footprint...)

So now there's this -- Silicon Valley's Dysfunctional Fetish -- but that's a really misleading headline because it's not just that SV likes to laugh at other's misfortune, they really do think they are a superior breed.

And surprise, surprise, there's Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook biggie who now invests in every single thing you use on the Internet,  who I remember tweeting about from TechCrunch last spring when he gave an interview on the stage, and talked about how everyone should learn to code and if they didn't, they were chumps. No way! (I tweeted with the hashtag and Arrington instantly started following me, and I figured I might be blocked or something. Evidently not.)

Palihapitiya: We're in this really interesting shift. The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we've known it now for probably four or five years. But it's becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it's no longer in Washington, it's no longer in LA. It's in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and when there's no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero

Of course, this speaks not only to the idea, long held by the geek overlords that the finance industry and the old dying manufacturing industries of the East Coast "don't add value" -- and their apps to send pictures of your cat do - but it's more about the Shutdown, which fulfilled their notions of the "broken Congress" that has to be "circumvented" -- as they said during the anti-SOPA crusade.

As we know, technocollectivist Beth Noveck, who for a time served as a deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology (!) openly said she wanted to "blow up Congress".

Geeks always go around saying Congress people are stupid, they don't get tech, blah blah. Long ago when Scoble went to visit Congress and get them all using Twitter, the invasion started. Not a theory I buy.

In part, the elitists can think as they do because they've hidden all their manufacturing and back end overseas, in China, India, Russia so they don't have to think about their working conditions and standards of living. Occasionally, someone will be seized with guilt over suicides at an Apple factory, but not really. The really don't have to think about "how the other half lives" in their industry because it's all invisible.  They seldom have to think about the working stiffs in their own country because they take company buses to work, they have company masseurs and company chefs and never have to come out of the bubble.

Some might call this technolibertarianism, and even Randianism, but I think it's more complex -- it's "communism for thee, capitalism for thee". (Note Stowe Boyd below whining about "neo-liberalism" in Silicon Valley. For every technolibertarian, there is indeed a technocommunist to bait him.)

I'm not surprised that this story involved Jason Calicanis. I remember when Jason blamed people whose houses were foreclosed on as being in over their heads -- it was all their fault. I distinctly remember when he said that; I distinctly remember when we all argued about this on 2008 in Twitter.

At the time, my brother and I were dealing with my mother's foreclosed home -- and the case didn't fit his prejudice. All that happened to her was that she died before being able to make her latest mortgage payment. Before that, she had paid for the payments out of a teacher's pension and my father's insurance money after he died. The condo she lived in was one that my parents had saved up for their entire life for their retirement. But Wells Fargo seized it rapidly after her death for some reason, not being willing to accept my brother's check for the mortgage. There was a long drawn out case with lawyers and fees and finally a re-mortgaging -- but then oops, it couldn't be rented out, even at half the price of the mortgage, because in the recession housing collapse, there were still developers building new condos and letting them go for less. It was impossible to sell this white elephant for any amount. My brother lived in it and commuted 90 miles every day and then finally gave up. In the end, the bank took it again. Sad. But not anyone's fault for "living beyond their means". Oh, yeah, none of us had an extra $2000 a month to spend on a house we hadn't planned on paying for, that's all.

Sure, there were people who lived beyond their means.  But that took bankers giving them the NINJA loans (no income, no job applicants) -- and part of this was a desire to lift the poor and particularly minorities to a better place, which was encouraged by programs under Clinton and encouraged by Fanny Mae and other lenders. It was supposed to be a good idea.

When I re-argued all this with Calacanis again the other day, he insisted that he said both at the time -- yes, people lived beyond their means and yes, there were greedy and predatory lenders. Except I don' recall him saying the second things at the time and the fact that he still blames the victims lets us know that is his mindset.

Today there's yet another story like this, some good reporting by Alexia Tsotsis, who lives the life of the rich and famous herself (her boyfriend is the Instagram billionaire) but who is always stumping for the little guy (because they all, even when they do it well, want socialism for the masses and capitalism/riches for themselves.) A Better World!

A Twitter exec is shown banging on BART workers on strike.

See, this is also about hate-on-Twitter month because instead of staying with the socialist collectivist plan of always just making everything for free and having coders live on Ramen and entrepreneurs renew VC cash or be passed around to Big IT buyers, they decided to go IPO. That took them out of the technocommunist realm into the technolibertarian round.

So this suit is complaining about strikers and wishing a Doberman to attack them....er no, not them, whoever is "causing" the strike. Hmm, that was some fancy footwork...

So do the Silicon Valley overlords rule our world? In some ways they rule the mindshare with things like Twitter or Facebook. But their lobbying so far has only been about things directly related to their California Business Model (anti-SOPA) and then only about immigration, since they want more Indian and other programmers to be able to come to the US and be paid less than Americans already here...or something. They don't seem to have a grander vision than that.

There's also this -- remember when we were counting how many jobs all these new Big IT things make up -- Google, Facebook etc? It was like half a  million. A ridiculously small amount. SV is not a job generator; only very highly skilled people for the most part get jobs there and there aren't that many anyway. I bet fracking in North Dakota or health car ein New York have higher rate of job generation now than the app factories.  Most people employed in the USA have jobs outside this sector, not in it, even if they rely on it or are tangentially involved. Yes, everything is coded. But not everybody codes.

Related articles

The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley's Dysfunction Fetish

Chamath Palihapitiya and the Neo-Libertarians of Silicon Valley

Why Silicon Valley needs Washington DC

Why does America 'hate' Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley's startup founder problem

What You Can Get For Only $759 In NYC

Top 5 jobs in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley loves a shutdown

Snowden: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself."

RT @kurtopsahl Picture of Edward Snowden with @EFF sticker on his laptop. pic.twitter.com/ldR8kHt4TS

— John Perry Barlow (@JPBarlow) June 9, 2013

 

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Much pouncing is being done now on Twitter as various Snowden-watchers decide that he has contradicted himself and they can make much of this.

I'm as critical of Snowden as the next person -- indeed, likely more critical, because I see him not just as a fugitive and a felon and a traitor; I think he represents a virulent strain of a class of hackers really destructive to liberal democracy and antithetical to human rights who have shockingly come to power without much resistance.

And I think his entire story about "zero" chance that his files -- or any intelligence -- were  taken by the Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies simply isn't credible. Obviously you don't ask a thief whether a crime was committed, nor do you take a thief's assessment for how much damage was done.

It reminds me of what Philip Shishkin said about Mao: "if you commit mass murder, your thoughts on education become irrelevant."

The entire laptop fandango -- complete with their provocative stickers from Electronic Frontier Foundation and Tor Project and the tap-dancing that EFF did around this in June and again in October --  strikes me as disingenuous and duplicitious.

I was reminded of all this anew when dealing with a scammer in in Second Life yesterday who put invisiprims around my rental boxes so that either unwitting customers or his friends would pay into that prim and not me. When I caught him, he said the usual angry denunciations that these types always do -- it was all my fault, who dare I, etc. etc. Then when I pointed out the prim, he began strenuously objecting. Why, all I knew was that one prim owned by him was on the parcel, I didn't know what it did. When I showed the screenshot, then he kept bluffing, but that object doesn't even have a script - as if you need a script to pay into a prim set to "buy," duh. And so on -- obfuscation, denial, distraction, counter-charges --- the works. I am SOOOO familiar with this geeky gambit not only from SL, but from every other platform I've been involved with from Twitter to Scoop.it. Literalisms. Defensive dodges. Irrelevancies.

So I'm quite sure that what we're getting from Snowden -- who has very compelling manufactured his own virtual world and lives in it -- is just this kind of dodgy, literalist, geeky prevarication.

Yes, literally, those files may not have been on the laptops -- I have always said they could be decoys (based on my own experience greeting several defectors from the Soviet Union at the airport) or three-card monte sorts of devices to juggle comms, some of them the "innocent" layers of the "rubber hose" or Tor program or who-knows-what.

The laptops likely contain the path to the files, but not the files themselves. We are told by Greenwald at least in one interview (in another, it's not so clear) that he speaks to Snowden "every day". So that means from Russia, Snowden is communicating -- and I'm betting he isn't in an Internet cafe. And we're supposed to believe that no intelligence agency anywhere hasn't gotten in the middle of such regular chats?!

But there are other options:

o He may have memorized certain files or blue prints.

o He may have palmed them off on Sarah Harrison so that he can genuinely claim he doesn't have them.

o He may have actually handed them to the Russians in Hong Kong in their consulate when he spent two days there, or they may have gotten them then. Notice he never talks about that or explains where his laptops were during those crucial hours. If in his hotel room, they were vulnerable to the Chinese. If with him, they were vulnerable to the Russians, especially if they gave him one of those drugs where you are in a twilight state and don't remember what happened to you.

o Maybe the Russians didn't literally copy the files -- so they all could keep that alibi going! -- but just swapped out the laptop and gave him an identical empty one -- complete with an EFF sticker, har har!

o He may have sent them all to some vault somewhere, maybe with WikiLeaks help.

o He may have given all of them to journalists who kept one "clean" set of files in an archive they all could touch, but read-only, and the rest in the possession of journalists encrypted that he couldn't touch.

Any and all of these variants are possible. It's both possible to take Snowden literally -- and realize then that he's not telling you everything behind the literalism -- or take him literally and realize simply he's lying.

Streetwise Professor was struck by the contradiction in James Risen's piece that makes it seem as if on the one hand, Snowden claimed to vet all documents but on the other hand, claimed to leave it to the judgement of journalists because he thought that would be more impartial or something. This is based on a Q&A with Edward largely involving the Guardian's own journalists, and a situation where once again, we don't know if we have "the True HOOHAH" -- as Snowden grandly called his online persona -- or an FSB agent at the other end of the line (or Sarah or who-knows-what).

Streetwise quotes this telling paragraph, where Snowden grandiosely tells us how he is better than Manning:

I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.

But you have to go to the next paragraph in the very same Guardian piece to see how he squares this circle with his other claim to have given journalists discretion:

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

So that's entirely in keeping with what he says to Risen:

Mr. Snowden said that the impact of his decision to disclose information about the N.S.A. had been bigger than he had anticipated. He added that he did not control what the journalists who had the documents wrote about. He said that he handed over the documents to them because he wanted his own bias “divorced from the decision-making of publication,” and that “technical solutions were in place to ensure the work of the journalists couldn’t be interfered with

I really don't see a successful "gotcha" here although I'm happy to see more evidence. Streetwise tweeted that I merely suffer from "Not Invented Here" syndrome, i.e. I'm picking the notion apart because I didn't think of it. But I didn't discover the Hawaiian hacker convergence, either, but once it was presented, I could find it plausible and even dig up my own set of facts that added to the hypothesis.

Another contradiction we're seeing now discussed on Twitter now was discovered by Jeremy Duns.  And this has to due with Duns' theory, which others have found compelling, that in fact Greenwald claimed Snowden had "the NSA blueprint" with him (read here), and that seemingly flies in the face of his statement elsewhere backing up of Snowden's insistence that he has no files, and therefore Russian intelligence has "zero" from him.

I think here, too, there isn't much of a contradiction. Greenwald was obviously talking in a general kind of way about what Snowden "had" -- which doesn't mean literally with him in his possession as it has likely been spirited away.

There's also the question of the "dead man's switch" and how that works -- which Greenwald won't divulge details about.

I have to say that the fact that Greenwald not only invokes the dead man's switch, but knows its mechanism and won't tell you adds to the strikes against his claims to be an ethical journalist. Instead, he's a political blackmailer.

We saw this when he threatened to report more leaks about the UK after his husband David Miranda was arrested at the airport with files. He then did make good on those threats later and report even more on the GCH!, but not before first claiming  that Reuters got the "threat" story all wrong, and didn't understand the Portugese, and blah blah blah. Sorry, but when you say "you'll be sorry" in any language - or anything of the sort -- that's a threat; this was a threat. He keeps insisting on special dispensations and readings of context -- he wants to have his cake and eat it, too.

And it's in keeping with the entire tenor of Greenwald on this story. Take a look at what he said to Ken Auleta in the puff piece in the New Yorker about the Guardian:

The Guardian did seek comment from government officials about the revelations. But Greenwald, outraged by the content of the material, pushed to publish quickly. “I was getting really frustrated,” he told me. “I was putting a lot of pressure on them and insinuating that I was going to go publish elsewhere.” He helped produce five stories that ran on five consecutive days in June. “I wanted people in Washington to have fear in their hearts over how this journalism was going to be done, over the unpredictability of it,” he said. “Of the fact that we were going to be completely unrestrained by the unwritten rules of American journalism. The only reason we stopped after five days was that even our allies were saying, ‘Look, this is too much information. We can’t keep up with what you’re publishing.’ ”

Really, Glenn? Fear in their hearts? That's journalism? And not revenge?

Now Greenwald is using the term "adversarial journalism" -- notably in his recent interview with Anderson Cooper. But is journalism like democracy -- when you have to put an adjective in front of it, it already isn't what it is?

There's another contradiction I'm finding her. Snowden was a systems analyst, and an infrastructure analyst. So I presume that this job description means dealing with assessment of the system from the top down (which is regrettably gave him so much access) and doing pen testing (which gave him the plausible deniability that he wasn't hacking but testing). But that's checking the system for vulnerability to hostile attacks. I don't know that this was his job description, and maybe the NSA won't say because it would divulge too much about how they do things.

Here are the job titles he himself gives in his interview with Greenwald and Poitras:

o infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii for BHA
o systems engineer
o systems administrator
o senior advisor for the CIA
o solutions consultant
o telecommunications informations systems officer

But I think we can agree that his job was about the internal workings of the NSA. It wasn't about making attacks on the enemy, i.e. China. These are very different roles -- offense and defense. That's not to say that both might not be combined in one job, but I think that when Snowden says in his interview with Poitras that China isn't really the enemy, he's speaking from a place of profound geekky arrogance based on his own thinking, not from seeing the real damage the Chinese were doing, and how to fight them. That he could casually leak stuff in China that would help them technically AND politically on the eve of Obama's summit with the Chinese lets us know that he has geopolitical motives, not motives only related to Americans' privacy, and that he is hardly the best judge of what is damaging!

Yet Greenwald tells Anderson Cooper now that Snowden is "highly credible" about what is or isn't damaging to the US and what the Chinese may or may not be able to steal or decrypt from him because he was "a highly sophisticated cyber operative trained to penetrate" their defenses.

Oh? He was? How do we know that? That is, Snowden may have told Glenn, but we haven't had this before, AFAIK. I'd like a second opinion on all this. Can one geek make that determination anyway?

Let's say that the Chinese offered to, oh, drop a percentage of our debt, if we gave them X or Y files. Wouldn't you want different departments in the NSA, offense and defense, so to speak, to be assessing this? Wouldn't you want an issue like "this information, if given to the Chinese, won't harm our country" to be decided even at the level of Gen. Alexander? Wouldn't you want the Senate Foreign Intelligence people to approve? Maybe the POTUS? I'm just not accepting on the face of it that one felonious hacker and his adversarial journalist friend can decide this for all of us.

 

Mr. Snowden said that the impact of his decision to disclose information about the N.S.A. had been bigger than he had anticipated. He added that he did not control what the journalists who had the documents wrote about. He said that he handed over the documents to them because he wanted his own bias “divorced from the decision-making of publication,” and that “technical solutions were in place to ensure the work of the journalists couldn’t be interfered with.” - See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpuf

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpuf

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpufv

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/#sthash.JkpoVl6U.dpuf

Related articles

Should the Navy Appear on the Same Platform with WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum in Berlin?

Petting the Phoenix: Could Other Geeks Be the Undoing of Edward Snowden?

Is There Really a Family Feud at WikiLeaks and Will It Matter?

NSA news of the week: Snowden speaks while British PM calls for investigation of the Guardian

Snowden's Fellow Travellers in Moscow

Did Edward Snowden Hack to Order?

Tor is Not a Tool, It's a Political Faction

Egotistical Giraffes: Is Jacob Appelbaum Going to Get Thrown Under the Bus by Greenwald?