Wired State

Did Greenwald and Snowden Finally Come Up With Some Real Cases? Well, Not Quite

Christians and Muslims alike targeted and killed by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, a country under constant seige by terrorists. This is why the NSA keeps extremists under surveillance.

Readers of this blog know that my biggest critique of the fugitive  Snowden and his adversarial journalist friends Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and others -- along with their hacker helpers Jacob Appelbaum and others -- is that they never come up with concrete, specific cases.

They never have an individual name and face to put to their sweeping, hysterical claims.

They claim that there are millions of phone conversations or social media communications screened and even stored, with terrible implications for human rights, but they never come up with a single case of actual human rights violation.

They never get an individual file, a person whose rights are actually violated that you can point to, a name and a face -- as we could in the days of COINTELPRO, when US intelligence targeted individual activists for surveillance and persecuted them in various ways, including gathering dirt on them to discredit them or disrupting their personal relations.

But now, low and behold, on the eve of a long holiday when nobody is going to be paying attention in the US, Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post have posted a story claiming just that -- reportedly six Muslim leaders have been targeted by the NSA for discrediting by having their online porn reading habits or other private information that conflicts with their public pious reputations scooped up by the NSA.

Here's the thing, though. They won't tell us who the people are. The names are "redacted" although supposedly they know them.

They aren't telling us the names, they say, because the individuals aren't charged with any crimes, least of all terrorism, although they espouse jihadism. They think that because they aren't suspects in criminal investigations, such adverse information will harm them.

And perhaps that's the case, but unless and until they do in fact show us these names -- apparently of Muslims overseas -- none of us can judge whether Greenwald and co. are correct or whether in fact the NSA has a case for keeping such activity lawful.

Once again, it's one of those frustrating stories where enough of a skeleton or scaffolding is revealed to discredit the NSA, but not enough meat on the bones to really be persuasive and back up the claims of critics or give credence to the claim reform is needed.

This seems to be the first time the Huffington Post has been given an exclusive from the Snowden trove of stolen NSA documents. Huffpo, the quintessential lefty "progressive" newspaper which used to have the highest traffic of online publications (probably Buzzfeed beats it now), has written stories about Snowden and done some of its own analysis, but I don't think they've ever broken news before.

QUESTIONS TO RAISE -- WHY THIS PIECE, WHY NOW, AND WHY HIDE NAMES?

So naturally I have quite a few questions about this supported batch of cases that might be what I've long insisted is required to bolster the case for reform, including discontinuation of some needed forms of surveillance.

1. Why this story only now?! Cases have always been what has been missing -- and it isn't just me who says that, the New Yorker says this and lots of other people have wondered about it. Supposedly, all Snowden documents were turned over to Glenn and company in June in Hong Kong, and nothing new has been hacked or released that wasn't given before -- or hey, the terms of Snowden's refugee status given in Russia would ostensibly be violated (not that the Russians seem to be policing this at all, since Snowden's releases and daily -- we're told by Greenwald -- consultations with Glenn mean that essentially he is deliberately launching damaging actions against the US all the time. So why sit on this for six months?! Why were geeky stories on supposed subversion of algorithms at the NIST beating out *this* story on the schedule?!

2. Why Huffpo? This is a very big story, if true, and deserves the greater gravitas of the New York Times or the Washington Post, both of which have broken Snowden stories (and don't seem to have even referred to this one yet). Obviously, Greenwald doesn't work with the Guardian anymore, and it's not clear what kind of Snowden stories they will continue to have, if any, given that Rusbridger, the editor, is being questioned now by the British authorities for aiding and abetting espionage -- in ways that would be harder to do in the US. Was the purpose merely to get a wider readership because Huffpo has more traffic than the Times or Washpo? Even so, it's odd. (And I think the first time).

3. Say, since when are these kinds of journalists in the business of trying to protect public figures' reputations when they are charged with discrediting information of a sexual nature?! That never, ever stopped them from covering every sordid detail in the cases of the left fighting the left, as with the discrediting of John Edwards, or the cases of the left fighting the right, as in the case of the scrutiny of Sarah Palin's unwed pregnant daughter or Senator Sanford's affair, or in the case of the right fighting the left, with Anthony Weiner. We were not spared even pictures in some of these cases. So why is it that politicians in a democratic country, either religious conservatives or secular liberals must have all their sexscapades spilled out in the press, whether true or not (and the way you find out if they are true is in fact by publicizing them), but we can't even heard about some Muslim leaders who merely read porn but didn't take their unclean thoughts offline? Why this gingerly protectiveness?

4. Are these "progressive" journalists afraid if they do give the names, the public will basically conclude that the NSA was doing the right thing, because they will be rabid anti-American jihadists who will be implicated in incitement by some?

THE LIKELY REPERCUSSIONS

So let me point out a few prognoses of this story;

1. The names are likely to come out eventually. Someone will work at it. Won't they?

2. Meanwhile, they might not, which will then entitle every single Muslim activist to lay the victimology on thick and claim they, too, are targeted (because we just won't know who is or who isn't) and in any event, imply that they could be at any minute, even if they aren't on the list of "the six".

3. The chief function of NSA espionage really -- the chief priority -- is anti-terrorism. While fortunately (likely due to their work!) there have been few jihadist attacks on America since 9/11, there have been some -- Ft. Hood (which I refuse to categorize as "work-place violence" and the Boston bombing being two major ones that immediately come to mind. Meanwhile, the claims of the left that therefore there's nothing to worry about are utterly false, as all over the world, there have been awful terrorist attacks by extremist Islamists in other countries: Kenya, just recently with the attack on the mall, where Americans and other foreigners were killed; Nigeria; Russia; England; Spain; India; and of course Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan where large suicide bombings happen practically every week with no one caring in the West.

So the way to continue to discredit, paralyze and severely cripple the NSA's work against Islamist terror is to imply that they've gone overbroad in over-targeting Muslims who are innocent, who may espouse a brand of ideology that isn't exactly peace-loving liberalism, but which isn't a crime.

4. Some (whom I've been debating about this extensively offline) will point to these cases as "proof" that all NSA programs "violate all rights of terrorist suspects" by definition. I don't think we've seen any proof of this, and these six cases might amount to this, but we really can't tell when we don't hear the names. Are there only six? And can we be sure that the information was going to be used, but wasn't just gathered in the course of lawful profiling?

ZEALOUS ACLU LAWYER AND WILD CLAIMS

Jameel Jaffer, the crusading ACLU lawyer whose influence is all out of proportion on this issue and who is behind a lot of the main litigation related to protests against US intelligence after 9/11, makes the usually wildly overbroad and unfounded claims for this article:

Yet Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said these revelations give rise to serious concerns about abuse. "It's important to remember that the NSA’s surveillance activities are anything but narrowly focused -- the agency is collecting massive amounts of sensitive information about virtually everyone," he said.

"Wherever you are, the NSA's databases store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online," he added. "The NSA says this personal information won't be abused, but these documents show that the NSA probably defines 'abuse' very narrowly."

But this is crazy, as the NSA doesn't keep files on every person, and machine-scanning of data is not the keeping of a coherent, human-read and human-analyzed file, as I've often pointed out. We've never had a single story from Greenwald about a program "to scan for political views" and we haven't had a single one claiming a scan "for medical information' -- neither of these are in phone metadata fields, obviously. While the NSA may define abuse narrowly, Jaffer defines it so hysterically and wildly broadly that he is simply not credible. More people should confront him with this.

But few people  take Jaffe on -- Benjamin Wittes has on a few narrow legal points, and of course the right wing commentariat tries to find some kind of "Shariah law in America" type of hysteria around his persona as a Canadian Muslim who came to this country and pursued civil rights litigation, by his own admission, because he loves to argue. The case that conservatives point to is the anti-Muslim hate video that sparked the demonstrations in Cairo and elsewhere last 9/11 and even the terrorist attack on the American compound in Benghazi; they point out that only under intense pressure did the ACLU express "concern" about the suppression of this video and the seemingly opportunistic prosecution of its producer (i.e. behaving cautiously in ways they never did for Ku Klux Klan marches or the antisemitism of Palestinian activists on campuses.)

Jaffer appears to be a secular Muslim -- his family was from the Ismaili Muslims and was originally from Tanzania and emigrated to Canada, where he grew up and studied in prestigious schools before getting into Harvard. He was invited by Obama to the White House for Ramadan -- he would be the perfect liberal professional figure Obama would want to have at such an occasion meant to build bridges with an antagonistic community.

But Jaffer is the one who fought for Tariq Ramadan, the European writer who is usually described as having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist-funding charities, to be able to come to his country -- he had been banned.

If he really can't be tied to groups funding terrorism, I'm all for Tariq Ramadan not having a visa ban and being allowed to speak at universities (he was invited to Notre Dame, for example). But I'm also for having someone counter him -- for getting others to push back against his very cunning and duplicitious act. That's just the trouble -- few have the tenacity and historical scholarship and attention to take him on, as Paul Berman, for example, has done. And more of that is needed, but it just never happens -- in part because he is cloaked in victimhood that people fear to probe.

And that's exactly what prevents people from taking on Jameel -- that aura of fear of appearing to be anti-Muslim, or racist, or "Islamophobic". It means that people like this have very long runs without anybody ever calling them on the most obvious bullshit like "files kept on virtually everybody" including "medical data and political views."

ACLU Gets Grilled

Jaffer is also the lead litigator in the highly-watched ACLU v. Clapper case in Manhattan court right now, which has adjourned -- and it's not clear when it will re-open or where it will go.

The Verge, oddly enough, turned in a very thorough piece that actually covered some of the trouncing of Jaffer by the judge on Section 215, even if they likely take the other side and favor Jameel's own grilling.

The problem with antagonists like Jaffer, who see their job as always and everywhere to be in opposition, is that they never have to come up with their constructive vision of government or explain where they would positively and definitively draw the line for civil rights balance. And that's fine, I don't believe oppositions should be required to do that -- they should exist as they please.

Except Jaffer is supposedly not in the political opposition, but in a nonprofit law group dedicated to "the Constitution". And that's why I think there should be more pressure on him and his colleagues to spell out whether they support intelligence and information gathering or not -- they really do not seem to -- and where they'd draw the line on the balance of rights. They aren't trustworthy in this endeavour, of course, because of these wild exaggerations.

I was once in a meeting with Jaffer years ago, and he came across as soft-spoken but earnest, even zealous, and one of those people who seemed one-sided not necessarily out of any hard ideology (his parents were middle class business people, not socialists and he's too young to have been in DSA), but out of various personal experiences. He was involved in the noble work of helping numerous South Asian and other Muslim detainees after 9/11 who were swept up and kept for long periods on vague suspicions. That shaped his understanding of the issues. I remember discussing the torture of Central Asia (it was a meeting with various human rights groups working on a post 9/11 network about torture) and came away feeling he didn't find any of this worse than America's problems because it just wasn't in his range of view. This happens all the time, I'm used to it, and I never thought anything specific about it at the time. That is, at that time I thought what the ACLU and Jaffer were doing was perfectly fine and necessary and I even paid dues to the ACLU -- I never dreamed he would come to support a wanted felon who fled into the arms of the Kremlin after executing the greatest damage on our intelligence in hsitory. He wasn't so well known then, but even after he became prominent it did not seem to me that the ACLU would go so far hard to the left on Internet ideology. I completely refuse to support them now.

THE COMFORT LEVEL

I don't really understand how the ACLU became this wild about the Internet, but of course, they had a lot of help from agitation from EFF, which still thinks they don't do enough. But if I had to pin down what I think Jaffer's all about, it's this: the desire to find a comfort level in America which he doesn't feel exists for him personally and for other Muslims and other minorities. That desire to feel as if one isn't hounded, as if one fits in, was a powerful driving force for many waves of immigrants, whether Jewish or Irish or Polish or Korean or Indian or Hispanic. And I think that is a good thing -- the drive to create a society where people's pasts, and their religious backgrounds, and their races, don't make them stick out, don't subject them to harassment, don't make them suspicious.  I respect that; obviously it's necessary in a multi-ethnic diverse society. Indeed, if many crusading litigants from all ethnicities and races hadn't bothered to fight discrimination, we wouldn't have the tolerant -- and therefore free -- society we have today, more receptive to immigrants than any in the world.

ANTITHETICAL TO HUMAN RIGHTS

But here's the problem. Some ideologies and belief systems really are antithetical to all the liberal values of America that make you seek it instead of even Canada, let alone England (where Jameel also studied). That would be jihadism and Islamism, of course. You have to push back against them or they suppress your rights and take away your freedoms. And that's just what Jaffer doesn't do -- he fights to bring Tariq into the country, but doesn't ensure that he is on a diverse panel where people will argue against his notions. He'll complain about these six being targeted, and he may indeed have a civil rights case, but he'll be the last one to argue against their extremist beliefs such as suppressing the rights of women and gays and to free speech and choice of one's religion or no religion -- let alone their concessions to violent jihadists. He will not confront them, just as Amnesty didn't confront Cageprisoners. And then nobody will, as the cowardly or cowed "progressive" human rights movement fears to appear discriminatory. Then they leave it to the right to discredit themselves as overbroad in their attack, and the Ramadans of the world live another day to triumphantly spread their influence.

SHOULD EXTREMISTS BE PUT UNDER SURVEILLANCE?

So what about keeping people like these six under surveillance?

Oh, I'm all for that. I don't think public figures espousing extremist views that take away other people's rights and freedoms should get a hands-off attitude.

I'd be happier if this monitoring were done publicly and openly with open sources by non-governmental groups and therefore be part of the debate. I don't think the government is particularly good at it, although I respect that counter-terrorism requires it.

But here's the thing. Leftists are happy to have the Southern Poverty Law Center monitor any rabid right-wing  or extremist movements among conservatives, obviously white supremecists or anti-government militias and anti-gay hate groups and even those espousing a critique of "cultural Marxism"  (I don't allign with those people, BTW, although I oppose Marxism, because they tend to see everything as all related and all a conspiracy). But who monitors the left? There isn't anybody, except various conservative groups that groups like SPLC then discredit. Yet the job has to be done in society and it's a real gap.

Think about it. Who produces good scholarship and accessibly written materials on terrorism and extremism? I can think of Jamestown as one of the few to produce regular bulletins on groups like Al-Shabaab -- the liberal monitors like Intelwire's J. M. Berger is too busy having Twitter friendships with some of the terrorists to produce criticism of them. There are some universities with scholarship but it's cautious and tends toward the minimizing of terrorism in the belief that somewhere, some evil neo-cons are over-hyping it. (As if there was a danger, given the capitulations Obama has made to Russia, Syria and Iran.)

So yes, precisely because the media and Thinktankistan won't do this job, the FBI really does have to do this, because there simply have been too many cases where people with radical views have committed violent acts. They take their virtuality off-line into real life, so they must be monitored online and offline. I'm for the FBI monitoring Occupy, CODE Pink, Anonymous or any other group of the extreme right or left that not only advocates overthrow of the government but incites or even practices violence. When was the last time you saw anybody get up in a room where Medea Benjamin was bursting in with slogans and posters about evil American drones and confronted her about the Taliban's far, far worse crimes she never discusses? It's just never done, ever.

And yes, indeed, that means monitor more than anything "direct action," which these groups try to pretend is not violent, even though a) it is indeed coercive b) they often trigger violent responses in a craven bid to make themselves victims. I'm not for letting them get away with these tactics, ideologically or practically. I think credible social movements should reject these tactics and the exculpatory argumentation that goes with it. I think unless and until they do, no group that embraces direct action can expect anything but FBI surveillance -- and they should definitely get it.

I think it's more than fine for the FBI to monitor social media and open sources in the news and even have its people go into meetings and watch people.  I'm not at all certain that the current NYPD program that monitors mosques and Muslim communities is violating civil rights, but maybe it is. It would be better if there was a different kind of approach of community involvement and community liaison with police, but that's wishful thinking. The reality is, if you are in a community with people that espouse violent jihad -- think of the mosque attended by the Tsarnaev brothers and their mysterious mentor Misha -- then I'm sorry, you need to be watched and you're going to be watched. I like my legs attached to my body, and mourn for the people of Boston who no longer have theirs, as I mourn for the 3,000 people who lost their lives in my city. The NYPD program works. It's not the Russians in Dagestan, which doesn't work. Debate it all you like, litigate it all you like -- we live in a free society where this is possible, unlike Russia.

"LIKE" THE CALIPHATE

But then who will push back against the violent, oppressive ideology? Who, indeed? The other day, a Facebook friend published a comment to the effect that "like Zionism, the ideology of the caliphate draws Muslims together all over the world." Immediately, he got dozens of likes from various Muslims in his and my friendship list, some secular, some religious. They just loved this open expression of admiration of the caliphate, and even more, loved the moral equivalence that they saw with Zionism and even Judaism, which they were likely to have only negative views of. (In other words, what animated them was a triumphalism in being able to say, they felt, "We get to have Caliphatism the way you Jews have Zionism.")

So wait a minute, I said -- because nobody else would. It's not like Zionism. Because Zionism involves Jews going to one country, Israel, and supporting the identity of that one country. Meanwhile, the caliphate goes all over the world, encompassing numerous Muslim and non-Muslim countries with Muslim populations of all kinds. It's clear who is going to run Zionism -- Jews in Israel, with a liberal democratic state (ever harsh critics would have to concede it is certainly liberal by contrast to Iran or Saudi Arabia). But...Who would run the caliphate? It would make a big difference if it were Iran or Morocco.

My friend answered that it was only in a spiritual sense, not meant to be in reality. Well, wait, then, why invoke Zionism? Zionism is about a real country with a real government and an explicitly Jewish ethnic and religious identity in that country. That means it is not like the caliphate, if the caliphate is only spiritual, and in fact those invoking the caliphate want more -- they want theocratic governments.

With Christians, the "kingdom of heaven" is something that Christians are mandated by the religious precept itself not to establish or expect on earth, as it is "within". The Pope in the Vatican might command the obedience of Catholics all over the world, but he doesn't have an army. If the caliphate were like the Pope and the Vatican, mainly a spiritual form of allegiance, perhaps it might have more supporters. But too many factions are for establishing it by force, and making unbelievers convert or leave. I'm quite certain I don't want a caliphate telling me what to do or wear or who I can talk to or what I can read. And neither do you -- and yet you aren't the one who pushed back on that Facebook comment, are you!

WHO ARE THESE GUYS?

Huffpo tells us:

None of the six individuals targeted by the NSA is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots. The agency believes they all currently reside outside the United States. It identifies one of them, however, as a "U.S. person," which means he is either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. A U.S. person is entitled to greater legal protections against NSA surveillance than foreigners are.

But you can't wait until you have obvious, open proof that someone is involved in a terror plot befor you start putting them under surveillance -- that will be too late. As indeed it was for the Tsarnaevs (which I view as a problem not of the FBI dropping the ball, but the Russians criminally never passing it -- Tamerlan was in Dagestan for nine long months, meeting with three people who were all assassinated by Russian forces during that time, and they couldn't tell us THAT?!)

ARE DIRTY TRICKS EXCUSABLE BECAUSE THEY'RE BETTER THAN DRONES?

There's an argument to be made that because these suspects might become dangerous that any lawful means should be used to diminish their risk:

Stewart Baker, a one-time general counsel for the NSA and a top Homeland Security official in the Bush administration, said that the idea of using potentially embarrassing information to undermine targets is a sound one. "If people are engaged in trying to recruit folks to kill Americans and we can discredit them, we ought to," said Baker. "On the whole, it's fairer and maybe more humane" than bombing a target, he said, describing the tactic as "dropping the truth on them."

I'd be for discrediting them with open, public sources through polemics, and polemicizing with their bad ideology -- we just don't have the universities and nonprofit think-tanks doing anywhere near enough of this! -- but I'm not for scanning their private email and Google searches to accomplish this. And I don't see how this program, if it involves delving into recognizably private information as opposed to metadata, could be constitutionally lawful.

Baker implies this is legal, but I'd like to find out whether he means the content of an email, or the meta data, and the search histories (which in some cases appear to be part of meta-data -- I'd like more clarity on that, too).

So IF the NSA has spied on these six people's internal communications to find out their "discrediting" information, that does appear to be a civil rights case.

Of course, like the HBGary story, what we have here is a gathering of information with intent, but we don't have any proof whatsoever that the plan was carried through. Where is the Muslim leader who was discredited with porn? There doesn't seem to be one. And Huffpo is coy about telling us how far along this plan was actually going toward fruition.

Then the names should be revealed and the cases litigated to see if they are cases. Truly, that has to be how it is. Otherwise, it remains shadowy and speculative and grounds for antagonistic speculation. Curiously, even though even worse was done with COINTELPRO, i.e. not just monitoring but interfering with personal relationships with spreading of disinformation and gossip, we were told the identities then. So we should be now, too. It should be litigated and those responsible sanctioned. We should determine if the monitoring of search terms and specific gathering of pornography information is a legalized practice or not. It may not be. It may have been tailored for these particular six.

If you don't think these identities should be revealed through litigation because that would essentially effect the discrediting intended by the NSA ostensibly in gathering it, then you'll have to concede that there is no case here.

Ultimately, I have to wonder what the game plan here was. The NSA was going to ensure that the press, especially in oppressive countries where this is easier to do, like Pakistan, was going to leak the porn-reading habits of these people? They were just going to try to use it privately, possibly through interrogations or direct contact where they would attempt blackmail? Is there evidence they followed through?

But wouldn't it be more effective to leak their associations with extremists? Says Huffpo:

In particular, “only seven (1 percent) of the contacts in the study of the three English-speaking radicalizers were characterized in SIGINT as affiliated with an extremist group or a Pakistani militant group. An earlier communications profile of [one of the targets] reveals that 3 of the 213 distinct individuals he was in contact with between 4 August and 2 November 2010 were known or suspected of being associated with terrorism," the document reads.

The document contends that the three Arabic-speaking targets have more contacts with affiliates of extremist groups, but does not suggest they themselves are involved in any terror plots.

The concept of leaking porn habits doesn't strike me as very effective, because most people reading it will have looked at porn themselves and won't find it so terribly shocking, or if they do, will be more impressed by the NSA finding it out and exploiting it than the actual clash with their religious beliefs. Therefore it's not a very effective program and one that seems to violate civil rights.

I'd much rather see more HUMINT at work -- much more staff dedicatd to it -- and much more counterintelligence of the polemical kind in debates. Otherwise I think we will lose the battle.

Finally, I'll say this: very few of the people debating this and invoking civil rights abuses and drones and America's war victims will think of the devastating terrorist attacks really going on in the world with tens of thousands of victims particularly in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. It's as if they don't exist, like the victims of Stalin and Lenin. They are off-screen. They don't count. But the US intelligence community knows about this and knows that it has to be fought abroad and at home, and they are doing their jobs -- jobs they have been authorized to do by Congress.

 If you think they are breaking the Constitution, you need a valid case to prove it in a court of law.

This isn't one yet.

No, Snowden Was Never "Forced" to Flee to Russia and WikiLeaks and He Chose to Go to Moscow

Updated 1/24/2014; 5/01/2014 and 5/31 with some additional links and background and a few corrections, following  publication of Luke Harding's and Glenn Greenwald's books.

I often find that people arguing on Twitter on behalf of Snowden use as one of their key arguments  the notion that he was "driven" into the arms of the Russians by the US revoking his passport.

Over and over again, as an argument against finding anything suspicious in his sojourn in Russia and possible cooperation with Russian intelligence, supporters invoke the idea that "he had no choice" because the US government ostensibly "blocked all his exits".

Today, WikiLeaks changed their narrative to admit that they advised Snowden to go to Russia where he would be "safe" (although not for the first time -- Assange has made this point before as Michael Kelley has pointed out).

Germany blocks #Snowden - why we advised #Snowden to take Russia. Not safe elsewhere: http://t.co/3U13BxOfbL donate: http://t.co/8gclJO08ey

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 1, 2014

@Wilson__Valdez Same thing Assange told Rolling Stone: "he would be physically safest in Russia." @Gus_802 @catfitz @bobcesca_go @bungdan

— Michael B. Kelley (@MichaelKelleyBI) May 1, 2014

 

In researching this story as it unfolds, I have to say that this is the weakest argument on Snowden's behalf on two legs, but most people never really bore down into the details to see why it ever got legs in the first place.

First, let's look at the complete timeline of events -- the accurate and actual timeline, and not the one that most people cherry-pick selectively or remember selectively:

May 1    Snowden and his girlfriend leave their rented house in Hawaii because the lease is up. The landlord confirms this to media.

May 1-19    Snowden goes to another rental house -- or so we're told from some news sources. At some point his girlfriend conveniently goes away on a trip, and Snowden is missing -- i.e. he is not placed anywhere reliably although likely he remains in Hawaii. At some point he tells his new employee of only about two months, Booz, Allen Hamilton that he needs to take unscheduled leave to treat his epilepsy. But he doesn't go to any hospital and his location during these long three weeks is not confirmed. Did he stay in the rental house? Did he go anywhere else during this period?

May 17  Snowden has his last day of work at Booz, Allen where he steals his last set of documents. Why doesn't he leave to go abroad on this day? What does he do on May 17 and 18 while his girlfriend is away on a trip evidently?

May 19 or 20    Snowden flies to Hong Kong, by his account. (The difference may be explained by the time difference.) He checks into the Mira Hotel, according to news reports -- but this is not confirmed. He is in touch with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras by their admission and likely Jacob Appelbaum about his stolen files. He insists Poitras and Greenwald come to Hong Kong.

May 30  A close friend of Appelbaum's sends a tweet about a Rubik Cube's party. She is one of the people attending the Spring Break of Code in Hawaii at the time both Appelbaum and Snowden were also known to be in Hawaii. Were they in touch earlier than they said?

May 31   Greenwald and Poitras (and Appelbaum?) travel to Hong Kong on this date (according to Greenwald's interview with Haaretz) or June 1 according to Guardian later. Which is it? They make contact with Snowden June 3rd using an agreed sign of recognition-- he is to be carrying a Rubik's Cube. Poitras films Greenwald, and also makes a written interview with him, both of which she later publishes with Appelbaum sharing the by-line.

June 3 According to Luke Harding, this is the date in fact when Greenwald and Poitras met with Snowden at the Mira Hotel. What were they doing for the other days if they in fact arrived earlier in Hong Kong? Which is correct? Greenwald himself then gives this date in his book, not June 1st, as the Guardian originally reported. Why the discredpancy?

June 5  Greenwald's first story about Verizon and meta-data appears in The Guardian.

June 8 Greenwald publishes his second story about "Boundless Informant".

June 9   Snowden decides to go public.

June 10 Snowden checks out of his Hong Kong hotel.

June 10 or?  Sarah Harrison leaves Melbourne, where she was on WikiLeaks business, at Assange's behest, to fly to Hong Kong to help Snowden because Greenwald and Poitras have ostensibly abandoned hm.

June 11 Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, offers Snowden to apply for asylum. Russia doesn't have many refugees and an invitation at the presidential level is as good as a granting of asylum because it's a political decision in this sort of case.

June 12 Lana Lam of the South China Morning Post publishes the first interview with Snowden outside the Guardian; he explains that he deliberately got employment at Booz, Allen in order to hack more documents better.

June 13 US opens up a criminal case on charges of espionage against Snowden and warn countries not to accept him.

June 14 The Home Office instructs airlines not to allow Snowden to board any flights to the UK.

June 15 -- British authorities bar his overflight and Iceland says it can only consider his application if he comes to their country.

June 16 -- Hong Kong authorities say they would review US extradition request re: Snowden.

June 20 -- US sends extradition request to Hong Kong.

June 20 Snowden arrives at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong -- or at the apartment of a Russian diplomat -- or at some safe house where he makes contact with Russians -- with a ticket to Cuba via Moscow already in hand. He stays overnight.

June 21  Snowden celebrates his 30th birthday in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong, according to Kommersant, the Russian business daily.

June 21 Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica reports State Department as revoking Snowden's passport on Friday, June 21.

June 23 Snowden departs Hong Kong for Moscow.

June 23 Public statement is made about the revocation of his passport which has already occurred earlier.

June 24 Journalists get on a flight to Cuba based on reports that Snowden is on it; he isn't.

Snowden then goes on to ostensibly stay six weeks at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, although according to Russian media, he was met on the tarmac 23 June by the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan diplomats who wisked him away to one of their residences. Ultimately he is granted asylum just as Putin had indicated he would be back on June 11.

So once you see the time-table laid out, you have a number of questions you have to ask (if you didn't ask them before back in 2009 when Snowden was in Geneva, had his first clash with his bosses and his first adverse performance notice while working at the CIA.)

Number one: why didn't Snowden immediately flee to Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador or even Brazil, where Greenwald is based, immediately, starting May 1st or May 17 or whatever date he told his bosses he was going on unscheduled medical leave -- when he in fact decided to leave his job under a pretext and make the final break from his life as an NSA contractor?

At any time he could have simply fled to Latin America to any of those countries. He had just as much ease of doing this as he had in flying to Hong Kong three weeks later. He could have immediately fled to Cuba BEFORE revealing his identity even after meeting Greenwald and Poitras.

Any time during May or June he could have made this flight to any of these Latin American countries, particularly BEFORE he revealed his identity.

So why didn't he?

Claims that this would have triggered more alarms at his workplace or from NSA that kept employees routinely under surveillance don't wash -- a trip to Hong Kong suddenly is just as suspicious as a trip to Venezuela.

Claims that he "wasn't safe" in Latin America from supposed CIA abduction or extradition from governments supposedly too weak to withstand pressure just doesn't wash --after he revealed his identity, ostensibly to prevent just such a clandestine or overt development. The CIA isn't going to kidnap such a very public figure at that point and then look even more guilty of the crimes supposedly US intelligence is committing. Ecuador, which accepted Assange into their Embassy in London, is not going to just give up Snowden. Just not going to happen. Nor in the even more highly anti-American countries Cuba and Venezuela. Even Brazil, given the Rouseff claims and Greenwald's considerable clout, would be safe enough.

But there are more questions, obviously.

What did Snowden do during those three weeks in May? Was he busy shoveling 200,000 documents into cyber vaults with Appelbaum's help? Or what, exactly? Was he talking to the Chinese or the Russians? Was WikiLeaks, and then "helping" him -- without explaining they were talking to the Chinese and the Russians?

And once he got to Hong Kong and gave away the store, and was told that his hopes were dashed, that "China, which isn't our enemy" (as he claimed in his interview with Poitras) wasn't going to risk taking him for their own pragmatic reasons -- why didn't he immediately, on June 6 or even June 10th flee before the US had an extradition request out?

Because it didn't have the extradition request sent until June 20.

That's nearly two weeks when he could have fled somewhere, but didn't.

Where did Snowden go on June 10? Did his Hong Kong lawyers put him up? Did he in fact go to the Russian consulate then -- which accounts for why Putin issued this generous invitation to apply for asylum on June 11? Otherwise, why did Putin -- at his level! -- get involved so quickly? Putin claimed later he didn't "need" to "sheer this hairless pig".  So why even bother? Why does no one ever ask that question?

When the facts came out in the Russian media that Snowden had been in the Russian consulate on June 20-21, Putin himself confirmed this, admitting that it hadn't been mentioned before. This caused a funny thing to happen -- Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden's lawyer who helped him with his asylum claim and who has close ties to the FSB, had at first lied and said that Snowden wasn't in the consulate to the media. Imagine how he must have felt when Putin himself contradicted him.

Does this show disarray in the Russian government or a war within Russian intelligence about what to do with Snowden? Or just the usual Russkaya khalatnost'? (incompetence and negligence).

Then there's this question to ask: when did Snowden buy his ticket, exactly?

According to Kommersant's source, he arrived with the ticket to Cuba already in hand in the Russian consulate on June 20, before the US revoked his passport, on the day that the US issued the extradition request (but had not yet revoked his passport).

Obviously, he couldn't have bought the ticket after this, with no valid passport; with the clock ticking on the extradition, and his Hong Kong lawyers telling him that China would not offer his asylum. Likely,  he had to buy it before -- on June 19th or earlier.

Why? Because you cannot buy a ticket board a plane to Cuba via Moscow without showing your passport. He likely knew or was informed by his Hong Kong lawyers that once the extradition request went out and Hong Kong had already told him that a) they would not give him asylum b) they had no objection if he left (according to Kommersant), then he would realize he had to get on a plane soon -- and without a passport, he would be blocked soon.

Russians and indeed most countries -- and hence most airlines! -- will insist on a show of a passport to get a visa and you must indicate your flights and travel plans on the visa application purchase a ticket -- and in the case of Russia, and Cuba, for Americans, you have to show a valid visa along with your passport to board the plane.  These are not countries where Americans can just pick up visas at the airport by paying a fee. They have to get those visas way in advance.

While Snowden could get by without a visa to Russia, if he were only supposedly transiting Russia to Cuba, he would still need a Cuban visa.

Note: updated to make it clear that a) if he used a travel agent (unlikely, as he wouldn't want to attract attention), *that agency* could have asked for his passport to buy his ticket and apply for his visa all at once. But he likely did *not* use a travel agency, ordered the ticket online, but still had to get a visa for Cub -- or some intercession from Russia.

Usually two weeks or more is what it takes; express visas still take 5 days often. So did Snowden in fact visit the Russian consulate BEFORE the 20th to get a visa? Or the Cuban consulate to get a visa? How was this done? When?

It's here that your typical Anonymous Twitter arguer claims that the US "bullied" Cuba into not accepting Snowden.  The State Department asked Cuba not to accept him -- but since when does Cuba do what the State Department tells them?!

And here we have Fidel Castro himself in an oped piece in the Guadian telling us that it's not true, Cuba most certainly did not buckle to this request.

So...why didn't Snowden go to Cuba on June 24th? Is Castro lying? Was Snowden going to stay in Russia the whole time anyway, and this was a distraction?

There's another date to pin down here, and that's the date the US actually revoked the passport. The announcement was made on June 23rd, but it was likely done on June 22nd; indeed Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica report it as revoked on the 22nd. It might have been made earlier, but not THAT much earlier because Snowden bought his ticket. Note:

“Such a revocation does not affect citizenship status,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson told Ars.

As explained, you cannot, as an American, buy a ticket to Havana or Moscow without showing a passport and a visa.

While it's possible "the system" didn't get the news flash that the passport was pulled right away, for something like this, you might think that all the red buttons would have been punched.  So that means it's most likely that Snowden bought the ticket with the passport still valid, before it was pulled, on the 20th or possibly even earlier, after the extradition notice was issued and his lawyers informed him that it was not likely it would be disobeyed. Why did he then delay his departure -- with the clock ticking? What deal was he trying to get...with which country? China or Russia?

He would have been able to buy the ticket a still-valid passport -- not pulled, and therefore not forcing him into any particular travel arrangement -- on the 20th.

You know, instead of sitting and partying with the Russians for two days, Snowden could have used the two days before his passport was revoked to go somewhere else -- anywhere else -- particularly Latin America.

See, it's this detail about how Russia and its old pupil Cuba work when it comes to controlling foreigners travelling to their countries that so stands out for us Russia-watchers.

That's why we can't believe that Snowden "decided on the fly" to go to Russia or stay in Russia after he got there.

He had to have gotten a visa; more to the point, so would Sarah Harrison, his WikiLeaks compansion and minder -- and perhaps she already had a multiple-entry visa to Russia due to her work on Mediastan for Wikileaks, or easily arranged an invitation, which is required by Russian law for foreigners to have longer stays.

The visit to the consulate on the 20th with the ticket already in hand might have been used to pick up a visa, but usually the way things work, that would have had to have been done before the purchase.

My bet is that with WikiLeaks help, Snowden dealt with the consulate much earlier -- but maybe hadn't gone in person, maybe Sarah Harrison did all the menial work of filling out applications, attaching photos and taking them over to the Russians. When did she arrive in Hong Kong? We only know from her statement covered in the Daily Mail that she went "in June". When? She isn't in the film or mentioned in the stories, but she is there, in the background performing these kinds of tasks obviously.

I think it's quite possible that even as early as May, again, there could have been chats with the Russians via Assange and Harrison or others  about Snowden coming to Russia.

Don't forget, WikiLeaks has quite a base of operations in Russia, as I establish here and here. When they released the film Mediastan recently, which they had working on for years, we realize that not only do they have Israel Shamir, the notorious pro-Kremlin provocateur and antisemite who has definitely performed work for WikiLeaks and represented its interests despite WikiLeaks denials  -- and whose idea it was to organize the airport meeting with Snowden -- but also his son Johannes Walstrohm, also a disgraced journalist and antisemite working for WikiLeaks directly -- about whom WL doesn't make any denials but instead credits him as the producer of their video Mediastan.

In addition, they have Russian Reporter and other film-makers, journalists, and assorted helpers in Russia, quite a crew to help out something like the care and feeding-- and the recruitment and tasking, too? -- of Edward Snowden.

So this is a story not only with just too many coincidences -- as John Schindler points out on his blog -- but too many holes and too many questions.

Snowden could have fled anywhere in the world before his identity was publicized; it was his call. He had weeks to make this decision, even if something spooked him into fleeing earlier than planned, i.e. a fear that someone at his job had already caught him. He could have gone to Latin American at any time during the weeks he hung out in Hong Kong, with a valid passport, and long before the US issued their extradition request -- which wasn't until June 20th -- a month after he arrived in Hong Kong!

So the idea that he was "forced"to go to Russia because "he had no choices" is as big a lie as any told in this entire caper, and it should help to unravel the entire false narrative.

 

Look Who's Knee-Capping Whom Now!

I couldn't help thinking, when I saw Colum Lynch's follow up story to the piece on the German- and Brazilian-sponsored UN resolution against the NSA (that's really what it's about) with the provocative title "The US to Back Privacy Resolution it Knee-capped" -- well, look who's knee-capping whom now!

As much as the international jet-set wants to get the leader of the democratic West out of the norm-setting business and leave it vulnerable to autocratic thugs in furtherance of their own political agenda, they failed.

Remember when Andrew McGloughlin, the Google lobbyist (who has held a wide variety of positions since leaving Google but continues to represent the Google business model) talked about the need to "knee-cap" the ITU?

NGOs lost that struggle, as did the US, because the might of the Arab League and the post-Communist states is greater than the West. (They should appreciate that more than they do and undermine the West less.)

I thought that command of Andrew's was rather thuggish -- and overly optimistic, given the realities of the real knee-cappers and thugs of the world, which are Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Cuba, Sudan, etc. -- and not the Western democracies. Oh, and not Google, either.

I'm not a fan of the use of the word "knee-cap" as you might imagine -- I think it's worth saving that word to describe the really outrageous practice of the Irish Republican Army and other terrorists and thugs, you know?

In any event, what happened here, really?

The US pushed back on a very one-sided and hypocritical resolution as I explained. Good!

The Germans and Brazilians were never bothered by outrageous and extensive surveillance from Russia, China, Iran and other thug nations when they massively controlled their citizens -- much less never bothered by Google or Amazon or any company massively sucking up data from their citizens in their transnational corporations.

As I explained, Germany didn't fix that "overreach" problem of the NSA, their long-time partner in spying on the very dangerous world we live in, by shutting down amazon.de or other sites that have helped them make Internet business billions because they can reach economies of scale and efficiency on their servers in the cloud.

No, we didn't see that solution, did we.  China might be threatening Cisco's business, even though it did business with China when all these Internet freedom fighters bitched; but you don't see Germany doing more than mumbling about making everybody put servers in their country. Hell, they themselves don't even want to have keep everything on servers in their country, that's not how cheap cloud computing works.

Instead, we see the amplification of anti-Americanism where it is easiest, and the US is a soft target -- at the UN.

By "knee-capping," Lynch -- who has basically taken the Human Rights Watch position as he often does -- means that the original draft with the claim "violations" of privacy has been softened to "negative impact". Good!

And rightly so, because no one has proven in a domestic -- let alone international -- court of law that collection of meta data is in fact a violation of privacy -- as I argue at the end of this post, it isn't.

Neither Human Rights Watch or the UN Human Rights Committee have ever researched, found, and then analyzed such a case. Let them. Let Merkel bring her case to the UN HRC and see how it fares.

The other issue at stake is "extra-terrestiality". Some find this to be co-terminous with "universality' but it is not.

There's a simple reason for this: no right is absolute, because it is defined by the extent to which absolutism might then encroach on another right (Art. 30 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, oft overlooked).

There is a legitimacy in a liberal democratic state to investigating and prosecuting crime -- surveillance is part of that. That's ok.

Frank La Rue and others copying his Soros-drafted language in his reports -- like Navi Pillay and even Ban Ki-Moon -- claim that states only "may" have a legitimate pursuit of law-enforcement. Not "do" -- which is of course what the UDHR and ICCPR and other documents affirm.

As I know from questioning La Rue personally and hearing him speak on this subject, he, like Bruce Schneier, is for absolute encryption of non-state actors, and thinks even law-enforcement shouldn't have routine access to online communications in any form even with a warrant. That is, he is vague about what proper warrant he might ultimately accept, and leaves aside the problem of non-state actors using uncrackable code that their managers, like Lavabits' Ladar Levison, will not cooperate with even warrant-holding officers to open up.

That vagueness is deliberate, because all of this is in service of ultimately de-legitimizing capitalist democratic governments in a revolutionary idealism advocating implicitly the overthrowing governments in the name of radical collectivist social change.  (Technocommunism is the word I often use to describe this ideology, although its adherents often plead that they are merely "progressives" or merely "social democrats.")

People like Frank La Rue cloak their language in the mantle of "human rights" and "state accountability" and that's all grand, except that when you do peer at the fine print and do confront him, he concedes that he is for placing the non-state actor -- that agent of revolutionary change -- above a legitimate democratic state elected by those same non-state actors -- which is a heavily ideological leftist position at the end of the day. This isn't about the sanctity of individual rights; it's about assigning a special historical "change" role to only certain like-minded non-state actors like human rights and political activists to change states they don't like without due process.

Stepping through these arguments requires subtlety and most people get impatient with it, or simply call it witch-hunting. It's not about witch-hunting; it's about confronting ideological influencers with the actual logic and reality of their positions -- which are cloaked in human rights, but are ultimately antithetical to human rights -- which is why I bother.

In any event, the adherents of "Internet Freedom" pushing for punishment of the NSA's legitimate espionage activities, while blind to the illegitmate activities of Russia and China (let alone Google!) are for an extra-terrestrial internationalist application of a non-existent "right to privacy" in ways that they are never, ever for the application of extra-terrestrial rights that in fact all the parties to an agreement already have.

When it comes to the TPP agreement, for example, and intellectual property rights -- against piracy and protecting of copyright -- none of these NGOs are supportive of the concept of "extra-terrestrial" application of rights -- they want to remove intellectual property completely from the agreement!

That's why they are so obviously hypocritical and in fact politicized and lawless in their gambit here.

The "right to privacy" -- absolute encryption -- is "good" because they need it to further their political goals. Let that be extra-terrestrial even though there isn't any absolute right to privacy against states, and the role of states in protecting public order against crime is fundamental to international and domestic law.

But when it comes to intellectual property -- the encryption of which is sneered at by geeks as unworkable -- then we can't have that internationally, as that would get in the way of Internet anarchists and collectivists and their bid for control.

These contradictions are seldom noted, and least of all by the State Department. I wish they would formulate and articulate this contradiction more than they do -- the same forces undermining private property and intellectual property based on the notion of an individual or a corporation's ultimate right to privacy -- the protection of their property and their inventions! -- are suddenly absolutist when it comes to claiming privacy even from legitimate law-enforcement because it hinders their political bid for power on the Internet.

 

Well, Just How *Are* You Going to Prevent or Prosecute Terrorism Then, Conor Friedensdorf?

I've always said "Open Source=Closed Society of Coders" -- and it was more right than I knew. They always twist and corrupt the meaning of an open society -- which also has to do with laws of fairness and due process and justice that keep it open for all -- and turn it into a realm wherea anarchist hackers enjoy freedom of absolute encryption even from legitimat law-enforcement, even with warrants, and can decide to disable or destroy the rights of others, dependent on their servers, at will.

Here's Conor Friedensdorf trying to be an erudite hipster and quoting Karl Popper, as many "progressives" with no notion of pluralism in a real open society have done before him -- including George Soros himself, who counts Popper among his greatest influencers and has moved toward a very closed nature of his trademarked Open Society.

How an Unfalsifiable Counterterrorism Strategy Makes Us Less Safe

Like many progs. Conor Friedersdorf thinks that if he can't see everything the NSA is doing in its spy program, it must not be accountable.

I think like a lot of journalists, he wouldn't have the attention span to keep on it even if it were sent to his email box weekly, but the reality, the NSA has lots of checks and balances within it and outside it in Congress and the courts.

But because progs like Conor ultimately believe in executive power and not in checks and balances, especially on themselves and their own ideologues, they keep banging on the NSA itself, rather than Congress or the public, because their political vision really does involve just forcing through to power their chosen executive, and then, through molding and influencing various executive agencies, running the state as the avant garde of the revolutionary justice movement.

That's why I consider people like this as little better than Bolsheviks -- they don't really want pluralism, or political challenge from the left or right as part of a democracy, or rules that pertain equally to all political forces, they just want to scientifically declare themselves "right," ram through to power, then "fix" all the agencies to run by their notions. This is of course eminently "progressives" and anyone who challenges it must not only be #tcot and #Benghazi obsessed but #deathpanels.

In fact, Michael Hayden makes a valuable case for keeping surveillance programs as they are, particularly on that telephone metadata hoovering that progs hate so much (as do libertarians) -- you know, in the interest of all of us keeping our freedoms from terrorists:

Congress is almost certain to rein in the NSA at exactly the moment when its mass surveillance operations are most vital, Michael Hirsh argues in National Journal. The decimation of Al Qaeda's core in Pakistan "only set the stage for a rebirth of al-Qaida as a global threat," he writes, one that will focus on carrying out smaller, more frequent attacks, rather than an elaborate plot like the one carried out on September 11, 2001. He approvingly quotes one analyst claiming that "Al-Qaeda is far more a problem a dozen years after 9/11 than it was back then."

Conor doesn't find this "falsifiable" (sign) so he resists it:

This style of argument should not be allowed to carry the day in America, because if it does, the national security state will cease to be rigorous or accountable in any way. In Hirsh's telling, America's national security elites have presided over policies that coincided with the rise of a more dangerous Al Qaeda. But the answer is not to fire the people in charge for failing to competently reduce the terrorism threat. Rather, it's to empower them to pursue existing policy more vigorously. 

Well, why? Because a journalist says so who doesn't like the idea? Aside from the fourth estate -- and the fifth estate, the illegal hackers like Snowden -- you know, we do have Congress and the courts, and they are handling this by...first of all rejecting frivolous lawfaring suits from the ACLU on this (so far, although this may change) and second of all by drafting various competing legislative initiatives, none of which Conor likes, although the representatives of his fellow Americans, including his own congress people, are going to pass one or the other without him.

Then Conor pulls the Tsarnaev argument which is always so lame, because he neglects to explain why more wasn't done with those two thugs -- because their civil rights would have been violated:

We're supposed to accept the proposition that "NSA surveillance may well be the only thing that can stop the next terrorist from blowing apart innocent Americans, as happened in Boston." But NSA surveillance was operational long before the Boston bombing, and did nothing to stop it from happening. In addition, long before the bombing happened, Russian authorities warned the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev should be considered a terrorism threat. Authorities hardly needed a comprehensive haystack to find that particular needle.

This is faulty analysis, because the real problem with the Tsarnaevs is Russian intelligence -- with which we were supposedly cooperating more closely than we do now -- was supposedly informing us. Except...when were the Russians going to tell us that they assassinated at least one if not two or even three of Tamerlan's associates while he was in Dagestan! Hello! That's pretty important information and we didn't have it! The Russians let him go! It's my belief they deliberately let nature take its course.

But progs like Conor are always disingenuous when they play the Tsarnaev card in an argument because they'd be the last ones for putting Youtube jihad lovers on heavy surveillance lists merely because they enjoy watching the World Trade Center blow up over and over and spouting crazy with their extremist friends.

Instead of saying, "It appears that a troubling existential problem is created by the realization that we might have to violate the privacy rights of some suspects for the sake of controlling terrorism" -- which would be the honest, obvious thing to say -- they say "the failure to stop the Tsarnaevs even though they had Islamist Youtubes and some strange statements about explosives on their Twitter lets us know that surveillance doesn't work."

They're afraid to say that it might work all to well if it weren't crippled -- like it does in Russia, where within two weeks of the Volgograd bus bombing said to be committed by a female suicide bomber, her husband, said to be the mastermind of this and other bombings, was dead at the hands of Russian troops without any trial or defense, and certainly no ACLU claiming he was merely "Interneting while Muslim."

Is there a way between these two extremes -- the brutal rights-free Russian method that has only led to more terrorism, and the licentious realm that Conor and other progs envision which will also enable terrorism? Of course there is, and we have it now -- likely with not a lot of adjustment, it just requires patient explication and argumentation -- of the sort we get precious little of, from adversarial journalists worshipping Snowden.

Aside from the plethora of idiots that always show up for these debates online, the discussion there has some interesting debate about cell phone data possibly being drawn from cell towers in this investigation, which may have helped identify the Boston bombers -- not to mention that surveillance video from stores, meant only to cope with shop-lifting, were vital in finally apprehending the suspects -- opening up the entire question of whether video surveillance on streets is warranted. As one commenter named "m w" put it starkly:

CF opposed the collection of cell phone and other aggregated data as a violation of privacy. He also opposes video surveillance. Do you? Getting the name of the cell used between bombings led to the identity of the bomber in the picture at the scene.

Rand Paul and CF wanted a change in law that would bar any release of data other than individual data by court order. That would have made correlational analysis of the aggregate data impossible. Do you? You see how that relates to the issue of collection of aggregate data by NSA?

My comment:

You're really abusing Popper here -- and he'd roll in his grave if he knew that you were using his works literarally to justify a closed society of powerful hacker elites who encrypt themselves and gain criminal unaccountability.

No thank you.

So really, there are so many falsehoods in your very story, starting with the idea that all truths must be literally falsifiable to be truths. That is taking Popper too far. The existence of God, for example, is not something that is "falsifiable"; Snowden very likely has helped Russian intelligence and may have all along -- falsifiability or not does nothing to prove or disprove this, just common sense and history works.

As for the notion that the Russians warned us about Tsarnaev -- nonsense. They gave a very, very misleading and very partial warning. In fact, they were tracking Tsarnaev in Dagestan as he met with known jihadists that Russian forces *assassinated* the summer Tamerlan was in Dagestan. When were they going to tell us that?! They didn't! Not only did they let him leave the country, they never even demanded that he pick up his new passport to replace one "lost" and allowed him to travel on a Kyrgyzstan passport although he no longer had residence there but had a US green card. The Russians were definitely up to no good here, and the notion that the FBI dropped the ball is false. What really happened is the Russians hid it.

Regardless, the failure of one case to be caught in time doesn't mean this program is worthless. Jamshid Muhtorov was properly arrested on the basis of FISA intelligence (the Uzbek terrorism suspect). Now that trial will become a test case. Maybe his case will be dismissed over a decision that this evidence was somehow unlawful but likely not. He was intercepted before going to help a jihad group in Turkey that kills our soldiers in Afghanistan. There are other cases like that pending.

What is it with you minimizers of terrorism?! It's not like your personal freedoms are harmed by the existence of these working and lawful laws and procedures.

Snowden and Greenwald and company have yet to come up with a single COINTELPRO style case of anyone actually followed unlawfully, much less arrested unlawfully.

As for complaints about secrecy -- hey, Snowden hacked an enormous amount and you learned way more than you were supposed to, but it's never enough, is it? What threshold DO you recognize as legitimate?!

And lawyers of clients like Muhtorov have always been free to challenge the arrests of their clients on classified intelligence.

**

And I added this:

You're outlining the differences, yes, but I still think you need to go back to "metadata" and "collection" and define these terms. You think they already mean "seizure". But they don't. Metadata is not personal communications, but -- as the term indicates -- information generated by machines in the course of moving that communication of yours from point A to point B. The law has never determined -- and would have no grounds to determine -- that your phone number or zip code are some object is protected by the 4th amendment.

Furthermore, when a machine -- as distinct from the human eye -- scans your data, it isn't seeing it or seizing it in any meaningful way. It's merely holding it, waiting for a match. WHEN it matches, THEN a warrant may be sought. You don't say that a cop on a bat looking down every alley or into every coffee shop "needs a warrant" or "is engaged in unreasonable search and seizure" as he walks a beat.

Grabbing metadata that may be matched later to a suspect's phone when there is probable cause is the same as walking that beat, and gathering by electronic means what used to be gathered by organic means as a matter of course.

Analogies of online to offline aren't perfect, but people like you always seem to want to award online some sort of magic properties of freedom from law enforcement they could never get away with if the issue were in real life.

If a cop walks along a street and steps into a bar or coffee shop when he spots a man wearing a knit cap and carrying a knapsack that matches a victim's description, the fact that he had to scan lots of other bars or coffee shops on the way to reaching that suspect isn't somehow held against him. They are looked at and discounted mechanically, as "not matching" even by the human eye -- so much more by the machine eye.

Yet online anarchists want to insist that no one can ever scan to make a match mechanically and insist on absolute encryption.

Why Barrett Brown is Indeed a Hacker (and Why Hackers Don't Get to Define Who Is)

I've written at length about  Barrett Brown, who was justly arrested -- and not for any "journalism" -- and is awaiting trial on charges of assisting the hack of Stratfor.

Even the Guardian -- which is chock-full of geeks on the masthead like James Ball, formerly of WikiLeaks -- and has regular articles from cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier, absolute encryption advocate -- describes what Barrett Brown has done as participating in a hack even as it tries to exonerate him because he exposed efforts by security firms to fight against hackers:

He was regularly quoted by the media as an expert on Anonymous, the loose affiliation of hackers that caused headaches for the US government and several corporate giants, and was frequently referred to as the group's spokesperson, though he says the connection was overblown.

In 2011, through the research site he set up called Project PM, he investigated thousands of emails that had been hacked by Anonymous from the computer system of a private security firm, HB Gary Federal. His work helped to reveal that the firm had proposed a dark arts effort to besmirch the reputations of WikiLeaks supporters and prominent liberal journalists and activists including the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald.

In 2012, Brown similarly pored over millions of emails hacked by Anonymous from the private intelligence company Stratfor. It was during his work on the Stratfor hack that Brown committed his most serious offence, according to US prosecutors – he posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents that had been released online.

But however some literalist may parse even the Guardian and claim that Brown is somehow a pristine step or two away from actual dirty hacking, it always pays to read the indictment and ignore most of what geeks rant on Twitter.

Barrett Brown is charged with "Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features" (18USC pars 1028 (a)(2), (b)(1)B), and (c)(3)(A) and Aid and Abet (18 USC par. 2) and also of course threatening an officer of the law and his family.

Brown's supporters spend a lot of time trying to prove he's a "journalist" and "not a hacker"; as that gambit has become rather threadbare when we see all the things he's done which I've outlined, they're now focusing on trying to prove that he "isn't a hacker," citing technical meanings of the word and their own idiosyncratic take on the law.

Of course they're wrong, because Barrett Brown is indeed a hacker.

First, a word on the special-snowflake status of the very word "hacker" -- for hackers.

Naturally, they want it to have only good connotations, and mean only positive things -- "making a computer work better" (or anything, for that matter; there's a site called "Lifehacker" that teaches you how to make Bunsen burners out of beer cans).

That "work better" can mean anything from speeding up performance or getting rid of annoyances to making sites inaccessible to "doing math in the browser" to get at other people's personal data lets us know how dishonest and corrupt hackers themselves are with this term.

They will never, ever accept that any unauthorized use of a computer -- doing to a computer what the owner doesn't want done to it and didn't intend to have done to it -- is "hacking".

That's because they want as capacious a meaning as possible of "good" for what they do that is in fact bad, to let themselves off the hook. In fact, this is what most of them mean by fighting for "Internet Freedom" -- innoculation against prosecution for harassment, piracy, illegal drug sales, even child pornography.

For them, Weev is not a hacker because technically, in the world of their own self-referential meaning, he didn't "touch a server," i.e. either steal or crack a password or log-on routine.

That he used cunning and brute force to compel a site to return to him lists of names and emails of customers by screwing around with serial numbers of devices he did not own doesn't count as "hacking" in their book.

When Aaron Swartz spoofed IDs and log-ons to gain unauthorized access to JSTOR's servers via MIT, that wasn't "hacking," in the eyes of these disingenuous extremists. Even when he directly jacked into MIT's LAN to access servers that kept tossing him off because he was using a script to grab numerous files rapidly, that "wasn't hacking" in their book because he in principle had access to JSTOR through his credentials at Harvard as a student (of all things, at the center for ethics) and could have logged in normally (but he didn't).

Once you find out the incredibly tendentious and dishonest lengths hackers will go to call things that are obviously hacking "not hacking" -- based on some highly technical definitions that in fact they aren't even consistent in applying in good faith -- you realize you cannot let them define it.

Like date rape or racism, there's a certain threshold where you have to allow the victim to define what the crime is -- and of course the law -- and not the perpetrators, who are always trying to get themselves off.

Meanwhile, the general public uses "hacking" in ways the little nerds find indiscriminate and "wrong," and use it to mean ANYTHING involving miscreants attacking their computer in any way.

Good! I've for the continued use of hacking to mean anything that is done to your computer that was not your intention. That means that someone who accesses your personal data online that is scattered around and uses it to social-engineer your password, or somebody who gets at your website's data by jamming on some vulnerability because you didn't "hash" or "salt" database tables is hacking, and is the problem, not you.

For example, when people's sites are attacked with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack so that it no longer functions and is "down," they say the site was "hacked." Precious geeks eager to keep the term available only for the most heinous of crimes (and not even always then) tell them with withering knowier-than-thou rectitude that they haven't been "hacked," because in fact, when some flaw in MYSQYL or whatever is accessed to enable numerous accesses of the site, overloading it, this isn't "a hack" because their password wasn't stolen by technical or human (social engineering) means or by a brute crack, but by a "lawful" procedure. On this basis, a lot of these assaults on computer systems are "written off" and even declared to be "civil disobedience"(which of course they are nothing like, due to their coerciveness and violation of other people's rights, as I explain here.)

I think a lot of people encountering hackers for the first time don't grasp several essential features about them that anyone in Second Life or any online community would have grasped years ago:

1. They lie -- they go to great lengths to cover up their tracks, deny their crimes, and distract from their crimes as part of the crime itself -- think "Eddie Haskell" or "Hannibal Lector".

2. They try to rewrite or overwrite (i.e. hack) reality to create a realm where their crimes  -- piracy, DDoS assault, even child pornography) are not really crimes, but merely essential, reasonable acts that should be normalized.

This connivance and tricksterism usually escape people looking at them superficially and seeing that they are driven by some sort of "Robin Hood" or "Gandhi" motivation -- supposedly -- although if Robin Hood took from the rich, he didn't kill them or gag them, and if Gandhi staged a demonstration, he didn't disable or silence his persecutors  either.

Anarchists are always and everywhere trying to get their crimes exonerated -- declared as not crimes at all -- so they can win. That means -- despite their ostensible belief system of "not having governments" -- taking power themselves. I'm not for letting them do that. I'm for the rule of law -- over them -- which of course, these outlaws don't concede.

When it comes to an intellectual gangster like Barrett Brown, however, the faux-indignant nerds really feel they have a case that he's "not-a-hacker," however because he didn't personally sit at a keyboard and log in to somebody else's site.

But this is nonsense for all the reasons I've outlined -- let's go over them again -- he's charged with "traffic in stolen authentication features" and "aiding and abettin" with good reason:

1. He enabled hackers by going into a private IRC chat rooms and pasting links for the hacker masses to access -- and they did access them. Enabling hackers is hacking too. If you drive a car for a bank robber, not only will the media call you "a bank robber" in the group of bank robbers robbing a bank, the law will call you one, too, because you "aided and abetted". Hackers especially want to break down this link so that they can create an entire free, untrammeled realm for adversarial journalists -- some of them with about two-and-a-half press credits like Jacob Appelbaum -- to escape charges of hacking, i.e. enabling unauthorized use of servers to get informall unlawfully. Again: enabling *is* hacking and the law treats it is such even if "hacking" isn't a technical term.

2. He took responsible for the Stratfor hack in a press interview. Hey, he didn't mind calling himself a "hacker" even if his dishonest little excusers want to get him off now.

3. He served as the spokesman for the hacking collective Anonymous whose trademark activity is hacking -- and even hacking that the little fastidious nerds have to concede is hacking.  Not only did he serve as spokesman, he used this position to threaten HBGary with worse repercussions involved in the hacking of them by Anonymous. That is aiding and abetting.

4. He ordered others to hack very explicitly, staying on line and staying in touch with them as they carried out hacks of websites where he wanted to get revenge. To be sure, an obvious case of this -- the hacking of Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs and Robert McCain at The Other McCain -- is not put in the indictment, and Brown may never face charges for this unless Johnson attempts to take him to court. But it's on the record as part of his online reputation and shows he very deservedly is called a hacker -- you don't get to devise, instigate, supervise, and victory-dance over a hack and not be called a hacker yourself -- like you're some hands-free safe-cracker who gets your  assistant to do all the work in a jewelry heist as you stand over them giving tips. The law wouldn't excuse you from robbery charges and it is no different when you're online.

5. He partakes of all the hacker culture. It's a pretty safe bet that if you use various kinds of software, and you go and chat on the IRC channels, you are part of hacker culture. A lot of people are in hacker culture and never actually hack anything. But they subscribe to hacker culture. A key feature of hacker culture is the overriding sense of righteousness and superiority telling other people that what Barrett Brown does is not hacking.

That's how you know someone is in hacker culture, and no longer subscribing to the rule of organic law.

It doesn't matter if Brown himself didn't use the credit cards. So what? He took responsible for the hack and helped others hack. Duh.

BTW, I see that Barrett Brown's mother (see below), who is also a participant of sorts in hacker culture although she may never have gone in an IRC channel much less clicked on a link to stolen credit cards -- because she tried to hide her son's laptops.

This isn't a huge crime, especially as they were easily found, but I don't know why the judge had to undermine the law herself and start babbling nonsense about "as a parent I can understand you" or "I know you meant the best," etc.

No, that's arrant bullshit. One of the reason's Barrett Brown is the way he is -- a heroin and suboxone addict, a threatener of violence to law-enforcers, an orchestrator of hacks of sites he doesn't like, and all around conspiracy nut and loon -- is because of his parents. They need to take some responsibility. The fact that he was living with his mom and getting high and living the hacker's life at his age at the time of arrest lets us know that she didn't set boundaries (dad is missing from the picture, as he is for so many of these hackers).

If God forbid my children were charged with a crime, it would never occur to me to start running and trying to hide their laptops. That's just wrong and you achieve nothing by it. Of course you cocoperate with authorities. That so many people think you shouldn't is the problem, not the police, doing their jobs.

Now, a chat log isn't an indictment (although hackers themselves are the very first ones to treat them as such). A lawful indictment as we have in Brown's case showing ample reason for his arrest on these charges also isn't a sentence.

So we'll see what happens in a court of law, and whether his lawyers -- and a jury inevitably influenced by media overwhelmingly positive of Brown and a hacker contingent bent on exonerating their own criminality -- do the right thing.

Otherwise all of us become less free, and at the mercy of hackers who believe they can take our rights away with impunity at any time.

 

 

 

Related articles

Damaging the Democratic Discourse: Hammond Deserves to Be Arrested

Jailed activist Barrett Brown's mother given probation for helping son

Mother of Anonymous affilliate Barrett Brown faces sentencing

Barrett Brown's Mother Sentenced

"Hurray for Anarchy"? No, Ten Years in Prison for Anarchy

The War On Hackers

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

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

Germany, Brazil, and the Hypocrisy and One-Sidedness of UN Privacy Resolutions

Colum Lynch -- a respected columnist and one of the few journalists to cover the UN and make it interesting -- has a scare headline posted today at Foreign Policy in The Cable:

Exclusive Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere

Oh, my.

My response:

I keep thinking how Brazil and Germany were never motivated to mount a resolution like this when the Russian opposition's cell phone conversations or the Belarusian opposition's cell phone and Internet conversations were put online by the secret police and a hundred other things like that even inluding the open Russian plan to capture all metadata during the Olympics to oppose terrorism but also any anti-Kremlin protest. None of that moved these diplomats before because they know the UN, and didn't want to go up against Russia or China.

The US is a softer target.

So hence this resolution, really opposing the US and nothing else.  By invoking it as a backlash against Snowden, they can get even Russia and China to tacitly agree because those authoritarians know that like all UN rights agreements, they have absolutely no intention of implementing them. And few countries -- least of all Germany or Brazil -- will ever have the guts to hold them to account around it, even though their privacy disruption is far worse.

Then there's the fact that the claims Snowden has made about the NSA have never been validated with actual cases and court decisions.

What I've been saying about the "Snowden revelations" and in particular the case of the alleged bugging of the Brazilian president's telephone conversations is that Rouseff should bring her case to the Human Rights Committee, the treaty body of the UN that actually already has plenty of privacy language to work with in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

She doesn't need a new resolution. Let her bring an actual case -- something that has been non-existent throughout the Snowden saga anywhere, in any venue (there is already one failed court case against the NSA run by the ACLU, which is having another run at it). And see if it could even be adjudicated! Merkel, too. Or, if they are concerned about never having had interstate complaints on the ICCPR (although there's no reason not to try one), let individual citizens of Germany or Brazil brings cases where they prove their privacy was eroded.

I wonder even with the tendentious review this might get in the HRC, if they could make their cases, given that...the content of their talks has never been revealed nor has it been confirmed that their calls were eavesdropped on in real time. No one has ever come up with a single case of an individual who can show his personal privacy was deliberately violated such as to harm his rights.

I'd love to be there when the HRC examines a case involving an indignant complaint that somebody listened in on...a Brazilian oil company -- the kind of oil company that NGOs usually scream about as a terrible violator of indigenous rights and environmental rights. Imagine, the HRC, at the UN, admitting that oil companies, of all things, have privacy rights. Go ahead, I'll wait, as they say...

As for the "global privacy right" -- I am hoping this isn't going to turn into a "global blasphemy law" which it could all too well become in the hands of certain UN members. As I wrote, be careful what you wish for, Germany...when you re-open freedom of expression language for negotiation at the UN.

No one would want extra-territorial *anything* nor making the US compelled to uphold it if it weren't for this anti-US campaign triggered by WikiLeaks and Snowden's hacker and activist-journalist friends. As we know, if they made an extra-territorial push for an end to reprisals for human rights advocates, as states at the Human Rights Council attempted to do yesterday, that would be killed by South Africa -- yes, South Africa! -- because they were mad at the ICC's "excessive attention" to Africa's mass murderers -- the ICC has tended to prosecute African tyrants rather than tyrants from elsewhere around the world. Maybe the others are harder to reach, i.e. like, oh, Russia, over its mass murder of Chechens and Dagestanis -- Russia, where Germany has vested business interests and a friendly foreign policy, or Iran, where a decided international lobby antagonistic to Israel wants to friend up this tyrant on the basis of promises, not performance.

(No, those countries haven't ratified the ICC statute, but then neither did some of the African states -- they got Security Council referrals that would be impossible on other regions of the world given the Russian and Chinese vetoes.)

Look, if you think this resolution is really in good faith, and really about privacy, you don't know how the UN works.

Germany has many other more effective ways of displaying its wrath, if it thinks its complaints about the encroachment by its long-time partner, the NSA, are founded. For example, yesterday we learned of the billions Germany has harvested in  Internet business - they had a banner year in sales. A good chunk of their revenue comes from amazon.de -- hey, an American company, with servers located in America, whose innovation and cost reductions due to scale they can utilize to make profits. You don't notice Germany shutting down amazon.de or demanding that Amazon suddenly place all servers with German data on German territory under German control -- or it may come to that, and even Jeff Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post and considerable lobbying clout may not stop it.

But nary a word, because that's business, and that's money, and Germany and the US are heavily intertwined there.

Instead, what we get is this ding at the UN, which "doesn't matter" in a sense that it is just rhetoric," even though people like Dianna PoKempner, who has decided to make Human Right Watch's crusade against the NSA an aggressive personal project, think this is "soft power" that NGOs can manipulate via international fora to get their way. That's because they might fail at more more mundane work through democratic institutions at home with factions that oppose their anti-Western positions and leniency  with tyrants like Russia and China.

BTW, I'm one of the human rights advocates who learned about these private negotiations before Lynch's article, but it didn't seem appropriate to leak the negotiating position of the US. Nowadays, there's a determined lobbying clique of NGOs starting with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, and other radical Internet activists who don't believe in private negotiations by states -- in fact, they don't much believe in states, period. They whined and whined about the secret negotiations of the TPP -- even after hackers got ahold of the secret documents somehow, we're not told -- either a bad-minded state party or leftist political party faction in a state leaked it, or it was actually hacked, we don't know.

But negotiations should be secret because that's how states can reach accommodations and compromises. The time to get your country to have a position you can support is before the international conference, at home, through the democratic process.

International negotiations, particularly those involving undemocratic states or states with very different positions, have to be done in secret to reach agreement. That's an axiom of international diplomacy that works -- and it works on the Disability Rights Treaty as much as the TPP.

It's ok to have secret negotiations in a hostile world where there are numerous enemies to basic universal human rights and values. The animus driving this issue about "secrecy" isn't really based on any value of transparency because it's more about anarchy -- these radicals do not accept that elected, legitimate liberal states like the US and Germany or even for that matter Brazil, whose record as a demoracy is not as good, should be able to negotiate in good faith on behalf of their citizens -- because they are elected.

The elected part bothers the anarchists because it goes against their brutal, nihilist grab for power themselves (anarchists who always oppose governments and try to make you think they are against big government and just for lovely little local collectives always forget to tell you the PS to the memo -- that in overthrowing others, they get in power, and are far less accountable or transparent themselves because they don't believe in voting or due process or democratic procedure -- they are all about coercive, collectivizing takeovers and pretend "consensus".)

At the UN, the leftist forces in Germany and Brazil in particular  -- where parliamentarians wear Snowden masks and Glenn Greenwald has safe haven -- have succeed in pushing the Snowden backlash into the complicated and dull procedures of UN committees.

This is actually a process that long preceded Snowden, as this same concerted claque that pushes the extreme "Internet freedom" agenda at the UN -- against copyright, against intellectual property, against trade, against sovereignty of states, against any criminal oversight of the Internet to oppose terrorism and crime -- has been very busy already trying to undermine what they see as an "unacceptable' historical US control over the Internet and force through various measures.

When Elaine Donahoe, the ebay president's wife, an Obama campaigner and fund-raiser, was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the UN Human Rights Council, these radical NGOs leveraged the obvious interest in Silicon Valley in defeating pro-copyright and anti-piracy legislation (SOPA and PIPA) and under the guise of "Internt Freedom," got various measures put in -- here's the background on the "Internet Freedom" resolution. This let in dangerous wording that in fact brings in more state control under the invocation of the concept of "development" (i.e. in the technocommunist model, by states, or in the technolibertarian model, also by states they capture).

If this wife-turned-ambassador was getting her appointment in the Bush era, as a Bush fund-raiser, and her husband was the head of some less beloved Silicon Valley corporation, imagine the furor of the NGOs that business was using international fora to get its way in the marketplace. Not so when it's ebay -- as we're seeing about ebay founder Pierre Omidyar's support of Greenwald and others in a new radical media project.

There's a lot more boring background to this at the UN that few people have been paying attention to, which basically involves this same gang, with mainly Soros and other "progressive" funding, going to the UN to get language favourable to their ideological positions into various resolutions and mandates -- mainly because no one else bothers to show up and give some pushback to their blatantly sectarian maneuvers.

They have been particularly active at the international bodies that have aspirations to control the Internet -- the International Telecommunications Organization and the Internet Governance Forum. Brazil has pushed the latter heavily, just hosting the meeting, to get its own brand of socialist control over Internet affairs -- gathering all the usual anti-American fans in the process.

The IGF feigns support of what they call the "multi-stakeholder approach" -- as long as the stakeholder are things they like and control -- and it's important to note that ALL these NGOs are UTTER HYPOCRITES because FOR YEARS they've been in the Global Network Initiative with the likes of Google and even Facebook claiming to promote Internet rights. They were never, ever bothered by Google's massive data-vacuuming and Facebook's privacy-busting all those years. Instead, they sat by quietly while the GNI secretariat was mainly silent about things like the Internet being entirely shut down in whole countries or Internet journalists being jailed -- real freedom issues. Instead, they pushed for things like the right to keep a Youtube of a disabled boy being humiliated and bullied online in Italy despite a court action -- in the name of "freedom of expression" -- which was really a business issue for Google to keep their California Business Model intact (let everyon upload freely, chase over copyright or legal issues later, after the ad revenue is scoopd up). You don't hear so much about GNI anymore... in fact, EFF dramatically left it, funny...

This gang has promoted Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, through various Soros-funded evenings like this one at NYU, and its his decidedly anti-American antagonism which has driven the Internet resolutions at the UN seeking a) absolute encryption for non-state actors, regardless of whether they commit crimes  b) rejection of law-enforcement access to the Internet in the legitimate pursuit of crimes c) blessing of non-governmental human rights groups forever as never being involved in crime and worthy of such power -- a position that comes out of Frank's understandable but not universal experience of being a leftist activist lawyer in oppressive Guatemala in the 1980s.

Which brings us to Germany -- where Merkel, as I've said acidly a number of times, still hasn't gotten over the fact that the NSA didn't disclose the content of phone conversations that we have not verified they monitored.

Yes, it's hard to believe -- although CNN did ask the questions of the leftist German journalists who broke this story in the first place -- that this is not verified. We don't have any sample conversations. We don't know what she thought or what her position was internally on the even of important events like NATO summits. We haven't learned of any fact other than that her number was in a list of numbers held by the NSA which they may have scanned for meta data.

BTW, few noticed part two of the story of Norway, yesterday, where first Snowden's adversarial journalist-activist supporters Laura Poitras an Glenn Greenwald claimed there was a purported NSA scanning of millions of Norwegian phone calls (or phone transactions -- we never are told accurately if these "millions" in fact contain the thousands of back-and-forth "calls" that a person typically engages in during a week of texting, liking, sending links, etc. on his cell phone).  But...Come to find out even later in the day that it was Norway itself scanning its own conversations, then sharing them. Even the Kremlin's RT.com had to correct this. (Or, especially RT.com given that the anti-Norway campaign by Russia has gone on for awhile unrelated to Snowden, as part of a hate-on-the-West strategy).

But why wasn't the story *reported* from the get-go by journalists being skeptical of the usual Snowden Team active measure, and asking questions directly about it?! Is Richard Orange going to run a correction?

Norway -- let alone Germany -- were never moved to launch privacy resolutions at the UN over their own activity, all these years, including sharing with the NSA.

So here we all are. A tendentious portrayal of the US as some "killer" of privacy that Russia and even Germany and even Norway killed long ago, without a whimper from the NGO gotcha-gang all this time -- but suddenly, when WikiLeaks and their Russian supporters have an opportunity to exploit Snowden backlash even further in pursuit of their anti-American goals, they obviously seize it.

 

Little Big Brothers: A Tiresome Evening with Greenwald, Schneier, Bamford and Dorfman at Fordham Law

Glenn Greenwald appears on the big screen via Skype. He says he can't come back to the US for fear of "persecution". A letter sent by a congressman to Eric Holder inquiring whether he would be arrested if he returned didn't get the answer he wanted. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Last night I went to the program "They're Watching Us: So What" at Fordham University Law School's Center for National Security -- which is an activist bunch working for the insecurity of an American government they loathe, and empowerment of bands of anarchists who advocate absolute encryption of themselves without accountability or accessibility of law enforcement.

If they think they are not those things, and not working for those things, they aren't paying attention.

The video is here.

There weren't any practicing lawyers on the speaker's platform however, and there was no legal analysis -- nor any real case actually made -- during the entire evening.

It was appalling.

It was also boring.

I've been following this topic so closely that when I hear these speakers already very familiar to me in all their permutations go through very simplistic arguments that they think they need to descend to for large audiences like these, it really gets dull and frustrating.

I'll be honest -- I even fell asleep almost during James Bamford's talk.

Not only were they simplistic, they were old. At least the kids like Trevor Trimm and Chris Soghoian have a little more life to them when they speak. Bamford is 67; Schneier is 50; Ariel Dorfperson, as we used to call him affectionately in the 1980s, is 71. These are old guys, reliving their battles of the 1960s and 1980s. I suspect the panel was convened in haste. It was co-sponsored by PEN Club, and I suspect PEN was put under pressure from members to take this on.

A very, very thin and superficial survey was put out by PEN opportunistically to fit with the headlines, commissioned by some firm that probably got a big fee, that canvassed the subjective feelings of PEN members. They "felt" they were under surveillance and they "thought" this chilled them, but not any evidence of anything but hysteria and "hate the Man" sort of 1960s antagonism was evident anywhere. It was embarassing.

The title of the panel was "They're Watching Us: So What?" But the "so what" part was left to the bored students in the audience, not the panelists who never engaged with this critique with anything remotely like intellectual honesty. I find it especially appalling when universities have evenings like this that are so horridly politicized and biased -- ending, of all things, with a black activist woman getting up and demanding that Obama be impeached because of Snowden's revelations about the NSA -- which about half the audience wildly applauded. I think even the lefty radical organizers were made a bit uncomfortable by this rabble-rousing.

Most of the people in the audience in fact were old like the speakers. They were hipsters, hippies, old professors, old Upper West Side socialists who have been around for ages. To be sure, there were actual young students, but they were only there with "continuous partial attention" as it is called. One man next to me was studying his history class notes, of all things, about the Soviet Army. The girl to the other side seemed to be taking notes on the talk but not really, checking her email or Facebook or whatever. Others were glued to their phones or i-Pads doing other things.

Suzanne Nossel, who is now director of PEN Club, chaired the meeting. And I was quite disappointed in her own lack of intellectual rigour on this subject. She is a former Obama Administration official who worked on international organizations and human rights, and was particularly active on the 16/18 resolution, for example, which was an effort by the Obama Administration to capitalize on the liberalization of the Arab Spring and work with former  antagonist Egypt. They came up with a resolution about hatred and racism that would NOT constitiute a global blasphemy law or accept the discredited notion of "defamation of religion," which is what the Organization for Islamic Community wanted out of it. (BTW, it's funny to see Lee Stranahan tackling this with such vigour now as the root cause of Benghazi -- I appreciate his effort to get to the bottom of the story, but he's gotten it wrong, because it was delivered to him in a tendentious context -- it's actually failure to apply the language and formulations of 16/18 by the US Embassy in Cairo over the hate video that created the problems -- the resolution in fact is based on US Supreme Court language about "incitement of imminent violence" precisely so that general criticism of theocratic states is not something that is then declared as "defamation of religion".)

For personal reasons, Nossel, famous for writing a book about American "smart power" and even credited with coining the term, which is an outgrowth of the term "soft power", left Obamaland after the first Obama term. She then went to serve as Amnesty International's executive director at a time when the organization was suffering hugely from a devastating loss of contributions and frankly the fallout from Amnesty headquarters completely losing its way in the post 9/11 wilderness and taking up defense of jihad.

Nossel was supposed to get it back on track with donors and the public, and might have done so, had she not fallen victim to a very vicious and concerted claque of people who tried to smear her as somehow sanctioning drones and other dubious acts of the Obama Administration, even though she had nothing to do with those programs and was strictly in the human rights efforts of diplomacy. That may be no excuse for some, but it is an important distinction and she herself is a "progressive" that the hard left seems to take particularly delight in pushing and destroying. It didn't help that she is Jewish, and was accused unfairly of over-protectiveness of Israel which also wasn't the case (and saying so is a form of antisemitism, quite frankly)  -- she was simply for not singling Israel out unfairly at the UN, where alone among nations it has its own agenda item at the Human Rights Council where countries like Russia or China or Iran or Sudan or Pakistan, which have killed many times more insurgents as well as innocents, are left to hold sway with impunity.

While NGOs surely appreciated her role at State in an Administration where the President does not have a single human rights bone in his body, Nossel was not popular at AI for having to cut staff and make other austerity measures needed at Amnesty, which is still far from fixed -- and she was hounded out of the organization, something I find absolutely disgraceful of Amnesty and its board. Former government officials may not make the best NGO leaders (and it works the other way, too, you know), but the board knew that going in, and shouldn't have hired her in the first place if the had problems with "I have a drone" Obama and her associations.

I don't know if weathering that sectarianism and viciousness at Amnesty -- entire hate pages were posted about poor Nossel by rabid idiots -- made her quick to jump and respond with the politically-correct program around Snowden just as soon as a few lefty and radical PEN members began to bark. I suspect that may have been how it happened, but I don't know. I think it's probably more likely that in her "progressiveness," she thinks Snowden is right. Working at the US Embassy in Geneva during the Human Rights Council sessions, maybe she even knew Snowden or heard of him, as he used to work there.

In any event, she's totally drunk the Greenwald Kool-aid, and it's a sad sight. Other members of PEN should complain about this one-sided approach by their fellow members, so that the director does not feel whipsawed by a few loudmouths. There are no findings. There are no cases, as I'm always saying; machine reading of meta data is not an intrusion in privacy and not the compilation of a dossier.

Glenn Greenwald was beamed in on a screen via Skype to wild applause and cheers -- Skype, which was said to be full of security holes and backdoors long before Microsoft, but he just had to knock Microsoft, taking a star turn to dis The Man in Big It. There he hung in the air, like the old 1984 Apple ad about Big Brother, and he himself realized that's exactly how he looked, and called himself Little Big Brother-- at least Cory Doctorow, another insufferable ass, has a little more humility and calls himself Little Brother.

Greenwald made the worst, most lame argument that the crypto kids always make -- I've heard it a hundred times on Twitter. He took up the argument that frankly probably reflected the thoughts of some of the students in the hall who didn't clap wildly for him or anybody ("battle of who could care less"). If they weren't doing anything wrong, if they were just a little guy, why should they care if the government saw their email out of a gadzillion numbers of files?

"Hey," he said in his usual snotty tone.  "If you feel that way, give me all your passwords to all your accounts and I'll be sure to mine them for something that will compromise you and publish it."

Except...the governent doesn't do that.

If the government scans my email by some fluke -- perhaps I'm six hops away from a terrorist or a spy -- it doesn't delve into the content unless it has a warrant or it feels that the case is serious enough to fit under FISA rules of warrantless surveillance.

And even if it does scan my mail, it does not publish it.

It doesn't try to smear and embarass me as Glenn promises to do with anybody who thinks government surveillance isn't a big deal, and is willing to give him their password.

I really wish more people would stand up to him when he makes that utterly dishonest argument.

In fact, there isn't a single case brought to light by Greenwald from Snowden's material publicizing anybody's private communications. There isn't a case where the government publicized something they purloined from email to embarass or silence someone. No one can show that, at all. This is not COINTELPRO as I've said a hundred times. (Read my timeline for an interminable debate on this very subject with a rather dense individual named Andy Downs who has a major grievance with the FBI -- an agent shot dead his father, a pilot, when he was trying to rescue hostages who had forced his father to fly a small plane. From this case of 40 years ago, which isn't anything like a COINTELPRO case but is just his own case of excessive force/ failure to follow procedures -- a case he doesn't seem to have -- Downs tries to claim that there are concrete cases now of the NSA watching people and harming them. It's truly sad, but it's typical of the emotional blackmail we constantly face on this topic by people with agendas trying to tie them to the NSA.)

It's really terrible watching the feeble minds -- and the conniving manipulators like Greenwald -- going through these really flawed and lame arguments that smart professors at a place like Fordham should be decimating. Very worrisome. The "give me your password and I'll publish all your stuff if you don't think it matters" is especially manipulative yet stupid because the government doesn't publish what it sees -- or "sees" only in a mechanical sense.

Manipulators like Greenwald try to capture the predictably emotional reaction people would have at the thought of "the world" seeing their private communications, and tries to exploit that to bring them around to taking an antagonistic position about meta-data dredging. But meta-data dredging doesn't involve naming and shaming you in public; it doesn't even involve human eyes looking at your mail; chances are your mail isn't even involved if you aren't in fact related in some way to foreign spies or terrorists, even distantly.

Greenwald is intellectually dishonest and in fact committing malpractice as a journalist if not a lawyer when he makes this hugely contrived argument. More people have to say what I've been saying to him: OK, Glenn, bring it. I'll give you my passwords, but here's the thing. You have to do exactly what the government does, then. As you've reported that it does! You have to NOT PUBLISH IT. After all, we don't know the CONTENT of Merkel's phone, do we? And you may store it and mine it -- but only with key words or numbers drawn from terrorists and other criminal suspects.

What the government does NOT do -- you haven't proven that it has -- is mine our stuff, pick out things to harass and humiliate us,and then publish them.

That's what Jeremy Hammond does, and that's why he has 10 years in prison.

I really worry that we are dealing with mass hysteria here, where even very smart people who have done decent work like Suzanne Nossel are captured by this contrived bullshit. It's terribly wrong.

The Crypto Gramps at Fordham. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Ariel Dorfman, an old lefty from the past who survived Pinochet, gave a moving and stark depiction of life in Chile when people had REAL concerns about government surveillance insead of the yuppie ones that Americans have now. He showed scenes of prisons with wires used to spy on people and described all the chilling effect it had on the soul and the literal relationships of life. To his credit, although he is an old socialist antagonist of capitalist US government for ages, Dorfman didn't make fatuous comparisons between a real society of oppression like Pinochet's Chile, at least for communists and socialists, and the United States today. He's too decent for that.

Arial Dorfman speaks of secret police wires installed in prisons to spy on people. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Less so everybody around him on the panel, and in the audience. That's the problem. His job was to provide the "Global South" contingent to this lily-white panel of North Americans, and he did the job admirably.

You can watch the video linked above, but meanwhile, let me note how awful Schneier is. I'm a long-time critic, and he, like so many of these cryptos, was indeed worse in real life than on the Internet.

"Hurray for Anarchy"? No, Ten Years in Prison for Anarchy

A tiny handful -- not "large numbers" as falsely reported by some lefty media -- gathered to protest Hammond's sentence near the courthouse. Photo by pameladrew212.

Not surprisingly, Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years -- this was deserved, as I wrote.

The difference between the Guardian and the Times -- the Times at least understands there are crimes involved here.  As the Time aptly reports about the court's response to Hammond's antics as an Anonymous leader:

But Federal District Judge Loretta A. Preska was unmoved, telling Mr. Hammond “there’s nothing high-minded or public-spirited about causing mayhem.”

“These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, John Adams or even Daniel Ellsberg,” she said, referring to the former analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to several news organizations. Mr. Ellsberg had written a letter to the court praising Mr. Hammond’s hacking campaign.

The script kiddies keep harping on the idea that Judge Preska should have recused herself. Nonsense. My response to a typical idiot in the comments:

• haveagoodlife
• USA

How did this judge not recuse herself, when her husband's email was one of the emails Hammond was accused of releasing?
Take note activists, the system takes no heed and has no need of you.

• Catherine Fitzpatrick
• New York

Because Stratfor has more than 860,000 clients. He worked with one of them and all that happened was his already-public email was exposed. There was no evidence of any intent to retaliate on his or her part, and the petition to recuse failed as it rightly should, because such a tendentious petition, with such a tangential relationship to the case, rightly fails.

Otherwise, you would get things like Google saying no one could judge their case if they ever used Google but complained about it. With this large a victim base, it's inevitable that there could be some relationship to the judge or prosecutors.

In real life, only something like the judge discovering that his in-law was the victim of a crime (a case I actually saw) would lead to a judge having to recuse himself.

Recusing is a concept that means that a judge is removed if there is reason to believe he or she will be biased. Having a relative whose email was in a list of 860,000 is hardly a reason.

One of the provocations introduced into this trial and bruited directly by @ioerror on Twitter (Jacob Appelbaum) and simultaneously promoted by RT.com, Voice of Russia and other Kremlin outlets, was that somehow, the FBI "put Hammond up" to hacking foreign web sites.

This is evidently arrant bullshit.

If the defense had this information, they would have brought it up during the trial proceedings, not had Jeremy himself put it into his own final speech and blurt it out before being told to cease by the judge.

There is no evidence that Sabu, at the behest of the FBI, did this. The sites indicated, in Turkey, Brazil, Iran or Poland, don't have any relationship to anything, and the FBI wouldn't be pursuing hacks abroad. Say, that's the NSA's job! Except, we don't have proof that either engaged in this supposed hack abroad. Sounds like it is just the usual tactic to confuse and distract, like tactics that Hammond has used before.

The Times couldn't resist putting in some of their "progressive" bullshit, however:

On Friday, Mr. Hammond described Stratfor as a “deserving target,” an organization engaged in “intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.” Both he and his lawyers framed his actions as noble efforts to bring greater transparency to a rapidly growing and largely unaccountable private intelligence industry.

There is nothing "unaccountable" about Stratfor. If someone wants to provide a research and risk analysis business and sell that information, they get to do that in a free society with a free market. Attempting to stop it is authoritarian an unfree. If you believe they have somehow done something unlawful, by all means, bring the case. Where is it? There isn't a case.

If a private company wants to watch private and public persons, it gets to do this -- you know, just like Anonymous feels it has the right not only to watch and comment on private and public persons, but even stalk and hack them. Stratfor has committed no crimes. Again, it's a distraction technique.

The judge put it in focus:

But at the end of the hearing, Judge Preska said that Mr. Hammond had caused “widespread harm” beyond his intended targets. Among other things, she said, his 2011 attack on the computer system of the Arizona Department of Public Safety had disrupted the state’s sex offender website and Arizona’s Amber Alert System, which broadcasts messages about abducted children.

Meanwhile, while the purpose of this 10-year-sentence should help deter hackers, Anonymous hasn't been deterred, at least not yet. They have been hacking up a storm, mainly against governmentn and corporate sites that don't fit their harsh, extremist totalitarian worldview where only they and their tribe can decide who gets freedom to manage their organizations and servers as they see fit, and who doesn't.

No media seems to cover cases like this critically -- the tech press is craven to hackers for some reason, although you'd think sites like CNET selling gadgets would be a little more aware of the relationship between hackers causing billions of dollars of damage and the harming of the interests of the main people buying their ads and buying the gadgets on their site. Declan never draws these lines and his managers never think to, but he just goes on spouting what amounts to the technocommunist world view -- when it's not the technolibertarian world view.

But once refreshing thing to see is the way Ars Technica's seasoned geeks has handled this. The overwhelming number of comments to their article are negative about him and rightly explain how he is a criminal, not a "hacktivist" or "whistleblower" or any of that nonsense.

Here's one interesting comment:

 Andrew NortonArs Praetorian

I should also add here, I knew him and dealt with him before he went into prison the first time. I then had about a year of dealing with him while he was out on parole, before he went underground to do this.

I know for a fact he didn't abide by his parole, because he did the same to some stuff I was working on (including an internal pirate party election, so his friend would win). When I said I'd go to his parole officer, he started threatening me (do I really want to be SWATed... and in the rural south, they just shoot, questions require too much brainpower) and saying over and over that 'snitches get stitches', and 'he doesn't give a fuck about the law'. Oh, and later he tried to rationalise it by saying the guy he wanted to win authorised it. Yeah....

When I heard about his arrest, I can't say I was surprised. He was always arrogant, and thought his farts didn't stink. He also had an UNBELIEVABLE faith in 'solidarity'. As in livng in a predominantly hispanic area gave him solidarity with latinos who were bullied by the cops, because 'living there'. Not because he had to deal with the prejudices every day (being a white male) but because proximity was enough.

I believe Ars Editor Nate Anderson will be covering some of this in his next book.

Hmm. I wonder how critical that book will be...But this is a start...

"Hurray for Anarchy!" cried Hammond as he exited the court room. Juvenile nonsense. Not hurray, but 10 years.

Well, with time served already, with good behaviour, as hard as that seems to predict, this destructive force will be unleashed in no time on society.

 

Related articles

Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years in Jail

A Dispatch from Jeremy Hammond's Sentencing

Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond sentenced to ten years in jail

Damaging the Democratic Discourse: Hammond Deserves to Be Arrested

LulzSec Hacker Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison

Payback Time

Mikko: "I'd much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother"

Here's Why I Oppose Drug Legalization and "Harm Reduction" Without Compulsory Treatment

I get sick of the Soros-funded, constantly showing up in my feed with their whining about the war on drugs, about supposedly "misguided" policies combating drug abuse and drug lords selling drugs, and even the "reconstruction" by the DEA of NSA intelligence about, say, Mexico or Afghanistan.

That's because drugs and their addicts and sellers wage war on me, my family, my community, my neighbourhood, and I think it's more than fine to fight back.

Many people who have never watched the justice system actually work in New York City have this illusion that there are "all these people" that are poor, black, Hispanic, minorities who are arrested for small amounts of marijuana and locked up.

That's not true, as the vast majority get a desk appearance ticket, and if they show up, the charges are often dismissed, in my experience watching how it works *directly*, not from theory.

If they are recidivists, if they have a little more amount of the drug, yes, they might find themselves forced into a plea-bargain, which is arguably overused in the system, or they might, if they are poor and black and forced to rely only on the Legal Aid Society, be shuffled into the poor people's court system, which indeed works very different than the rich people's court system, and be forced to go to jail or 30 days or do community service or worse. An expensive lawyer meanwhile may get his rich client off.

The rich can afford bail; it's impossible to even get bail if you are in debt or owe taxes or have some lien in your record -- it won't be given to you, even if you produce the 10 percent amount. Many attempts have been made to reform he bail system desperately in need of reform; it's currently unaccessible.

Stop and frisk is over used -- my son was among a group of youths hanging out in Brighton Beach, he dropped a kleenex on the ground while the police were trying to shake down these kids and find out if they had any drugs, and when the police accused him of throwing away drugs, he retrieved the dirty kleenex and explained he had allergies. This was considered sassing the police, and he got a desk appearance ticket. He had no drugs; none of them did. He complied with a request to retrieve and show what he had thrown away; he was not charged with any offense. Even so, he got the DAT. The DAT is WAY overused and I've seen this over and over again.

Yes, stop and frisk is overused on the poor and the black and Hispanic, and it should be reformed -- it is overbroad, in the apartment complexes, the homes, chasing people up stairwells into their apartments -- all of this is overkill. We all know this, but the judge in the case where it might have been reformed was too zealous and politicized and tried to throw the justice system toward her "progressive" beliefs and now the results are overturned. Pity.

So I don't have a problem understanding the justice systems flaws, and I'm four-square for civil rights.

here's the problem. There still needs to be a war on drugs *anyway*. Here's why.

The oxycontin epidemic sweeping over our state (roxies, blues) is hugely scary. It leads people to go to heroin and crack very quickly, they start powdering and smoking roxies then move to heroin.

It has been shockingly horrible for me to witness how neighbourhoods where I and my relatives live have been demolished by this drug epidemic that Soros thinks can be fixed merely by legalization or harm reduction and not combat with arrests, trials, sentences, diversion of youths into custody in juvenile homes, and compulsory treatment. I'm all for a separate drug court; then use it. Fight crime with it. It needs fighting.

Why? Because two children in my children's Facebook circles DIED from drugs. One minute my daughter is giving the homework assignment to a girl in front of her in a class; two hours later she is dead from a drug overdose. Another boy "wakes up dead" from taking a drug, his parents found him.

What's especially sad is how many Russians and Eurasians are caught up in this epidemic -- the children of dissidents, the children of Jewish refuseniks of the Soviet era, the children of Central Asians escaping tyranny of the Putin era, children of many scientists and mathematicians and teachers and computer programmerss who even got into good schools like Stuyvesant. Really, really sad to see this.

Kids maintaining drug dens in the rec room while their parents are at work -- and the police know it and do nothing. Why? They're waiting to catch the kingpins? So it's okay to watch dozens of our kids get addicted by these shadowy figures and do nothing in the mean time?! Kids arrested multiple times for bringing their friends to their parent's house even when they are home, getting them high, stealing all their computers and wallets. Kids arrested for stealing thousands of dollars of their parents' own jewelry to get drugs. Kids beaten by drug dealers to the point of disfigurement. Kids going to Rikers Island (prison) now instead of college.

I'm talking about dozens and dozens of kids -- it's a scourge. Kids who used to be on the playground, swinging, or on the basketball court, playing ball, or next to my kids in math class -- now on Rikers, now sent upstateto rehab, now in the hospital with broken bones from a drug dealer.

Please call me when you are a parent, and your kids have THIS happen to their friends. When you wake up every day thankful your kids aren't on drugs, and pray they will make it through another day in their drug-ridden schools without being harmed.

Harm reduction doesn't help -- I live in a neighbourhood chock full of hospitals where they all come for needles and methadone and the more popular suboxone which is really heroin, too, and all it does is add to more crime, more sales, more mayhem. I stood in line for a prescription for my son while he was in the hospital, and police are guarding the line, and trying to control the chaos caused by scamming drug addicts.

In between the time I handed my prescription in to the window, and the time I went to the line to wait two hours at another window for pick-up, *my son's prescription was simply stolen*. By the personnel. Before it even reached me. I had to go to doctors to get it again, who sighed because this happens a lot.

While in the hospital, I saw the personnel simply pocket the oxy that wasn't used -- say the patient was alseep, or didn't want the dose, or happened to have an allergy. Once issued, that medication doesn't go into a cabinet again -- it goes right into a pocket, and out the door.

The back ally is filled with personnel hanging out with homeless-like types doing..something. Whatever.

The streets are filled with hustlers, and they nod out in the parks. Then they start the cycle again stealing bikes, grabbing cell phones or jewelry.

A group of teens storm into a drug store, demanding the cough syrup required for Purple Drank as they call it. The clerk refuses. They threaten to trash the place. Or they grab the stuff for Drank and try to purchase it through the automatic checkout. The clerk casually lets it go through, chuckling as if "kids will be kids".

I once saw a mother of a boy high in class on dope all the time complain desperately to a principle. Why was he allowing smoking dope in school? The principle merely chuckled and joked about "red eyes". Why? Because it's a great management tool for violent youths -- let them dope themselves into a stupor, they sit quietly.  Especially after they've crushed their legal Adderol and smoked it and then need to "come down".

Sorry, I'm not for legalizing drugs. Maybe that's because I see a social and city policy of deliberately making especially black kids stupid -- a shockingly racist policy, in fact. That's the policy of looking the other way as they smoke pot openly outside the school doors, or inside in the stair wells. The principals and and even the police don't fight this blatant abuse. It's a management tool. That the kids are too stupid to study or learn doesn't matter. They are moved along, pushed along, kept high. It's like Orwell's Soma.  I have witnessed this countless times with my own eyes. Kids 12 and 13 getting stoned right in the school yard, damaging their growing brains, without any adults stopping them, anywhere, with police 10 feet away.

Doctors -- over and over again I see records where the doctor writes "home medications given" and oxy is listed, although in fact it wasn't issued, wasn't received - and once again pocketed and sold or used. I know two doctors who became addicts themselves -- and had to work painfully to overcome their addiction for years.

This is an epidemic. You don't fight epidemics with "harm reduction" like merely coughing into your sleeve or washing your hands. You combat it with real war. Stopping the root spreaders. Isolating and detoxing the spreaders. The sellers.

All of you human rights activists and other Soros-funded advocates -- you will never convince me. OSI has been mysteriously overthrown on this issue by powerful interests in California and elsewhere in the technolibertarian set who have coopted Soros into funding all this. Not that Soros apparently needed much persuasion, but it's mainly ideologues at the helm who have introduced this obsession with using stealth methods to work to undermine anti-drug legislation and move toward legalization. Hence:

o harm reduction, although it hasn't been shown to work, and no, not in Vancouver as claimed

o pain mitigation which is all well and good, but isn't accompanied by compulsory long-term court-ordered addiction treatment and tightening of procedures to prevent all the abuse I've just outlined above

o hospice/death amelioration which is used as a form of emotional blackmail to force people to legalize drugs in one medical setting, which is appropriate, but again, without the checks and balances of compulsory court-ordered treatment.

I saw what you did there, Soros; I'm unimpressed. Come and look into the face of a drug addicted 17-year-old boy who used to collect Pokemon cards with my kids who is now trying to steal my purse and who ends up in jail. Look into the face of a beaten-beyond-recognition addict who didn't have the promised drug money from sales to dozens of his friends he got hooked due to the flood. Come and sit with parents who lost their kids to drugs -- they come home and find a good student, age 18, lying dead with a needle hanging from his arm.

Many of you promoting this aren't parents at all. If you are, you  have only small babies, not teens. you don't get it. You don't see it. You live in wealthy neighbourhoods where the bums and the hustlers and the vets hooked on smack just aren't visible to you. I do. So stop lecturing about human rights. Stop lecturing me about how you don't see the harm to society.

I do, daily. We need to keep the war on drugs. Your child or my child might be the next casualty in the war waged against us, which can only be met with war in return. Peace didn't work.  If you don't believe me, send your children to public schools, like I do, and come back and tell me what you think in a year.

 Oh, and if you want "humanism," and you think drugs should be legalized, why stop there? Why legalize them, and allow the addicted to stumble around stepping in front of buses or pushing people in front of subway cars?

Put them in warehouses, give them all the drugs they want, like gerbils pressing levers in a cage, give them three healthy meals a day, give them clean bedding, showers and a few other amenities for free -- movies, Internet -- and store them until they die.

That sort of shocking dehumanizing of people is actually what you are advocating, and actually what we will see.

Because of opposition to law-enforcement and the "medicalization" of crime, we will come to such warehouses.

It will be cheaper for the government to put people in such government-run drug hostels -- and hold them there until they either die or agree to go into detox and anti-addiction programs -- than let drugs be sold openly and cartels fight each other (which they will only do more when it is legal).

Just don't cry when you see your loved ones end up in such a warehouse.

 

Damaging the Democratic Discourse: Hammond Deserves to Be Arrested

Tomorrow, recidivist hacker Jeremy Hammond will be sentenced, and I expect that he will get the 10 years that his counsel has apparently conceded. Hammond, one of whose nicknames is not surprisingly Anarchaos, deserves to be arrested and is right where he needs to be -- in jail.

There's an enormous amount of nonsense and deliberate lies written about this case in the tech media and by biased fellow anarchists and hackers. Disregard the noise. Here's what this case is about: not letting radical thugs take away othe people's rights to freedom of association and freedom of speech.

Because that's exactly what Hammond did in hacking Stratfor -- he didn't like its views or its activities, although it is a lawful organization engaged in legitimate business and has a right to exist and thrive.

Activists covering this story claim the nonsense that Hammond and his co-conspirators claim, that somehow they've uncovered wrongdoing in the private emails of Stratfor. Again, there is no evidence whatsoever of any of this.

I remember how well Stratfor handled this hack -- they reassured their customers immediately on Facebook and didn't hide what was happening as some companies do. They let their customers fret and complain. THAT is how we know that quite a few of them were robbed -- Jeremy's little script kiddie friends whom he sicced on the private emails and credit card information of the hapless customers of Stratfor reported that their credit cards were used by the hackers to buy online games and all sorts of crap. All that propaganda about how they were "taking from the rich and giving to the poor" was so much smoke and mirrors. The reality is that they are common thugs, not special, not "indigo children" or pioneers of a new age or "whistleblowers" or anythin of the sort. They are criminals who take away the right of freedom of association of others.

It's helpful to read not the breathless and outraged tech press and alternative press on these cases, but the indictment which says:

...the defendant hacked the website of an organization he disagreed with politically and obtained information uch as the credit card numbers, home addresses and other identifying information of its members and customers.Right. He believes you can use force and destroy the property of others and expose them to harm just because you don't like their ideas.

And lest you also buy the arrant nonsense that this is all an FBI sting-operation, and entirely cooked up by the FBI (which is what Al Jazeera is reporting -- which is among the reasons why I refused to go on their show about Hammond, although they invited me to speak), read his goddamn chat logs all covered in the indictment. He indicts himself, and doesn't require any "sting". Example:

2
 (Bates #078241-42.)
 
A bit later, in the same chat, referring to one specific AZDPS employee, Hammond proposed, “if we drop AZ stuff on wednesday, we might want to pull some other  prank, like change the AZDPS facebook group, his online dating profile or something silly.”
23
 For example, in a chat on December 19, 2011, Hammond said to his co-conspirators: [Hammond] I was thinking we order some servesr with them stolen CCs [Hammond] lots of servers with big hard drives [Hammond] and make four or five mirror .onions with them . . . . . .

<el che> getting servers with CCs [Hammond] it may be till the end of the mnth before the cc owner recognizes the bad charges

The prosecutors pretty much identify the problem:

Hammond’s own statements, while he was plotting and committing these attacks, demonstrate that his goals at the time were essentially to cause “mass mayhem” by destroying websites of entities he disliked, particularly related to law enforcement, and revealing stolen  private information such as physical addresses, personal emails, and credit card data belonging to swaths of people remotely associated with those entities. Against this evidence, Hammond’s claim now that his various law enforcement targets “were significant to [him] as a way of  protesting police brutality, overly aggressive and militaristic anti-immigration laws and practices, and the governments’ use of drones, tear gas and other weapons abroad” (Def. Mem. at 21) is, at  best, beside the point.

Indeed.

Hammond is, after all, a repeat offender. Here's what the judge said to him when he was first charged for hacking:

I believe you when you say that you have learned. I think, also, that after you’re done serving your sentence, I would be willing to believe you if you told me that you understood precisely how damaging the democratic discourse of what you did is. I don’t know that you fully understand that now. I concede that you fully understand what you did was wrong.

But of course that's not the issue. He fully knows what he is doing, and does it deliberately; that's what anarchy is; that's why you jail anarchists who commit these crimes against all of us.

As the indictment explains:

Rather than heed the Court’s message, or even apparently reflect much on its leniency, Hammond then proceeded to undertake the same conduct the Court had cautioned against – but on a much greater scale – launching an online campaign of cyber attacks characterized by “unguided malice [and] a desire to wreak havoc.” Hammond’s history and characteristics fully support a sentence of 120 months.
33

Despite these harsh, cold facts of the indictment that explain the "unguided malace and desire to reak havoc" which has been Jeremy Hammond's life as a hacker, you find arrant propagandistic nonsense written in Truth-Out and Occupy (where else) claiming he's some kind of dissident:

He called on hackers in a speech at the 2004 DefCon convention in Las Vegas to use their skills to disrupt that year’s Republican National Convention. He was, by the time of his 2012 arrest, one of the shadowy stars of the hacktivist underground, dominated by groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks in which anonymity, stringent security and frequent changes of aliases alone ensured success and survival. Manning’s courage prompted Hammond to his own act of cyber civil disobedience, although he knew his chances of being caught were high.

Hammond became well known to the government for a variety of acts of civil disobedience over the last decade. These ranged from painting anti-war graffiti on Chicago walls to protesting at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York to hacking into the right-wing website Protest Warrior, for which he was sentenced to two years in the Federal Correctional Institute at Greenville, Ill.

“I saw what Chelsea Manning did,” Hammond said when we spoke last Wednesday, seated at a metal table. “Through her hacking she became a contender, a world changer. She took tremendous risks to show the ugly truth about war. I asked myself, if she could make that risk shouldn’t I make that risk? Wasn’t it wrong to sit comfortably by, working on the websites of Food Not Bombs, while I had the skills to do something similar? I too could make a difference. It was her courage that prompted me to act.”

The author, Chris Hedges, goes on to tell us about Hammond's political grandfathers and grandmothers:

Hammond—who has black-inked tattoos on each forearm, one the open-source movement’s symbol known as the “glider” and the other the shi hexagram from the I Ching—is steeped in radical thought. As a teenager, he swiftly migrated politically from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the militancy of the Black Bloc anarchists. He was an avid reader in high school of material put out by CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that publishes anarchist literature and manifestos. He has molded himself after old radicals such as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and black revolutionaries such as George Jackson, Elaine Brown and Assata Shakur, as well as members of the Weather Underground. -

Hey, paging Eric Raymond, creator of that "glider" symbol for the open source cult (author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"). You said on the page about this that you opposed people using this symbol and hacking "into other people's computers". You said that was wrong and that you'd go after such people. Well? What, they get to pick and choose political targets anyway?

Let's understand what we're dealing with here: technocommunism, even if it hides under modernistic lovely-sounding little "leaderless collectives" (they're still collectives, that means they are still coercive inevitably, and that the leaders are merely "the cadres who decide everything"):

He said he is fighting as “an anarchist communist” against “centralized state authority” and “exploitative corporations.” His goal is to build “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” It is essential, he said, that all of us work to cut our personal ties with capitalism and engage in “mass organizing of protests, strikes and boycotts.” Hacking and leaking, he said, are part of this resistance—“effective tools to reveal ugly truths of the system.”

We need a tool to reveal the ugliness of you guys.

Twitter, Al Jazeera, RT.com are filled up 24/7 in defense of these ugly and destructive assholes. Why does no one oppose this?

Why don't computer professionals oppose it, but instead secretly root for this thug?

Note how hacking and Occupy go together -- and what was radicalizing and pushing Occupy to the hard and violent left:

Hammond spent months within the Occupy movement in Chicago. He embraced its “leaderless, non-hierarchical structures such as general assemblies and consensus, and occupying public spaces.” But he was highly critical of what he said were the “vague politics” in Occupy that allowed it to include followers of the libertarian Ron Paul, some in the tea party, as well as “reformist liberals and Democrats.” Hammond said he was not interested in any movement that “only wanted a ‘nicer’ form of capitalism and favored legal reforms, not revolution.” He remains rooted in the ethos of the Black Bloc.

I'm going to write Eric Raymond about this as he doesn't seem to be on Twitter.