The Snowdenistas have a really hard time accepting that their Snowden lies.
Verax, that Truth-Teller, that TrueHOOHAH, could hardly be accused of lying, could he?
Why, he has told the ultimate truth, by stripped the Mass Surveillance State, that Turn-Key Tyranny, of its layers of secrecy lies, right? Hasn't he?
Except, Snowden appears to show signs of being an inveterate liar, and those of us who have watched the hackers' movements for years or simply paid close attention to the Snowden story knows how deep it is in the Big Lie.
I've often found hackers to create an alternative world, a utopia, some state of affairs they want to believe in. This could be summed up with statements like "information wants to be free" or "all property is theft," and they could take it from there. By sheer force of repetition, by sheer brute banging, they try to make this reality come into being. They will use coercion and lies to make code-as-law work, even though increasingly -- disturbingly -- it works on its own. This was the essence of the Bolsheviks, too, that coercion and perversion of language.
It's sort of like Vaclav Havel's notion of living "as if," only in a malignant sort of way. Havel wanted people in unfree societies like the old Czechoslovakia to start living "as if" they were free, and make it come into being by behaving so as to overcome their fear. Poles in Solidarity did this. They even made their own postal system and stamps outside the state. Solzhenitsyn said simply, "Live not by the lie."
But what geeks are doing with their anarchist's Autonomous Realm idea in trying to wrench it into being is different -- it is creepy and coercive and so demonstrably other, and false. It's as if they reverse Solzhenitsyn and say, "Live by the lie." Believe in everything from code-as-law to Bitcoin. I guess ultimately, I think that code-as-law is code-as-lie because it is such an incomplete story about the human condition.
Snowden announces that Congress and the court didn't do their job, so now he, a 29-year-old contractor named Ed, is going to do their job for them, in a supra-democratic way, in a transcendent ecstasy of sheer righteousness. Like deux ex machina.
And along with this is the culture jamming, where the geeks say outrageous things, like "mathematics says the state is doomed" or Weev, the hacker, says in a state of agitated bipolar mania on the courtoom steps, "all I did was fucking math, all I did was add some 0s and 1s" -- as if brute force, and repetition thousands and thousands of times using cunningly extracted gadget IDs on a web site to force it to spit up email lists and people's identity is really just "math."
It's that "math" shorn of any accountability to other human beings and the harm done to them that makes these people such Nazis, such Bolsheviks. Awful.
Once could do a whole graduate student's paper on the new notion of "math" that techies have scarily brought to public discourse of their own righteousness.
But Snowden does lie, and we catch him in lies.
There's the obvious story of how he broke into a system and stole an exam, then took the exam and naturally aced it, having the answers, then said, here I am, I'm a genius, you should hire me, I got 100 on the test.
Sigh.
That even worked to persuade Luke Harding he was a genius.
But...That *is* lying. It's fraud.
Or there is the claim Snowden made that he did not use a social hack to get people's passwords, or "steal" their passwords. Remember? In his Q&A for The Verge, Snowden even took a Reuters correspondent to task for believing what an anonymous NSA official had said about this.
Then three people are fired whose passwords were purloined by Snowden -- civilian and military both. Awful. And Congress finally gets a briefing about this and releases it. Good!
So then you realize that he is, well, prevaricating. He set up some kind of glue trap and scraped the people's PWs. So he didn't use a social hack or steal them through actual breaking and entering into their desks or something but just by the oldest trick in the book.
BTW, one common thing that hackers do in systems is collect log-ons in general. What people often do is make a mistake and use their bank or Facebook log-in by accident on some other log-in like a work computer. So the hacker collects those "false tries" and uses them to see if they lead elsewhere and they often do, and he then harvests that.
Using any device, script, method, anything to strip a person's password as they enter it and use it to make unauthorized entries to a system IS stealing. Again, it's only in that contorted alternate universe I have often talked about, i.e. with Appelbaum, that it wouldn't be.
So let's come then to Snowden's lies about the NSA documents. Hackers have a terribly hard time accepting that there could be lies there, as, example, a percent (and typical) heckler on my timeline with anonymity and low-follower numbers (their names are Legion -- I love Tom Nichols expression for these people -- the Flying Monkeys).
But Snowden's very first document got reported wrong -- very wrong -- and had to be walked back.
This was reported amply everywhere in the tech press, and Flying Monkeys who can't seem to Google this and find this on their own just are lazy or dissembling.
Here's a reprint of the relevant part of my book:
I continue to maintain that savvy coders and encryption experts themselves, even those critical of the NSA, represent a good avenue for debunking some of the most destructive and extremist claims of Greenwald, Poitras, Appelbaum, and Gellman – and not because their community is beholden to the government for contracts, but because of their more careful scientific method and greater good will so notably absent from the extremists.
After all, the good reporting on the errors and unsupported claims in Greenwald’s early work have come from the tech community press itself like The Verge, which asked “When will we see the rest of his evidence? Or GIGAOM that said “somebody’s lying” about the claims of the NSA’s “direct access” into Internet companies like Google. Or CNET which said there was “no evidence of direct access” from the NSA. Meanwhile, the Washington Post had to print retractions. It’s just a question of time – and with new and shiny revelations barreling out every week, it’s easy to distract tech readers and fuel a climate of suspicion that is retarding more sober analysis.
Indeed, Greenwald was able to put out the Tor fire at least temporarily by appearing on reddit – and then moved on to the next sensation, together with co-author Jeremy Scahill, on the NSA’s involvement in assassinations overseas.
There are a half dozen more like that I didn't even include, use your Google.
It does no good claiming it's "the journalists" who made this mistake -- Greenwald (who yes, did report on that story; it was not only Gellman) relied on Snowden to interpret this document and its importance.
Gellman didn't have Ashkan for that first story -- he got them precisely because of his mess-up. Greenwald didn't have Appelbaum or James Ball or Bruce Schneier yet -- he put them in later because also he was shakey on tech stuff and felt he needed techies to shore him up.
But on those swan songs June 5 and June 6, both Gellman and Greenwald messed up and claimed there was "direct action" because that's how they understood it and Snowden guided them to it.
There are two possibilities here, and they may be separate or merged.
1) Snowden didn't know about relations with the big IT companies and how they did this. It was not his area. He wasn't in that department. Not My Department, so to speak. He followed other issues like how the Chinese hack us. This is my theory; we don't know exactly what he did because US authorities haven't told us a lot (to minimize damage -- to talk about these specifics is to add to the damage).
So he winged it. He said what he thought it wsa, ideologically, or what the diagrams seemed to say. He didn't know the political setting of the Transparency Report with Google, etc. He was just a lowly sysadmin out in the boondocks, not some top manager. In fact, the entire narcissistic construct that he has that he can "tap the president or the federal judge from my desk in an afternoon" is just sheer macho bullshit.
2) Snowden hated the relationship the big IT companies had and thought it was direct; he thought the tap was either without their knowledge or they were complicit, likely the latter. He thought this because he had adopted the standard geek libertarian adversarial stance toward all things goverment, including his own employer. So he just believed it out of ideological reasons -- that banging of the virtual down over the actual I talked about above -- and just articulated that "reality" as he "saw" it.
The blog Please Cut the Crap has an excellent parsing of the changes to the Washington Post story on PRISM -- and also a takedown of Greenwald's lawyerly...shall we say "exaggeration" -- about the supposed "unlimited acces" given when that was not what was in the FISA ruling.
And here's another excellent highbrow blog called Skating on Stilts that parses very carefully the whole dubious concoction that Gellman has handed us, with his, er, "High Journalism," as Skating on Stilts wonderfully and accurately dubs it; his failure to give us the true story on the NSA's minimizatoin procedures; and then his slippage from journalism into advocacy.
It's especially an acute problem I'd say because Gellman first piously tells his Skating "what journalism is supposed to do" as if he is neutral and clinical -- but then becomes adversarial on the privacy issue. It is classic, classic, and I commend Skating for capturing all this brilliantly.
Let me offer my own modest contribution to this effort in my own interchange with Gellman on the "direct access" issue he was claiming in a later piece.
The Washington Post was also guilty of stealth edits, said Breitbart which you might discount, but they were only citing ZDnet which is a respectable tech site.
Ed Bot's story there is really the definitive story breaking it down for you.
And this is on Edward Snowden because he surely had to have discussed this. It isn't the case that Snowden met Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong and just handed them USBs with all the hundreds of thousands of docs on them.
He sent them samples and proofs of concept, so to speak, which they describe reading on the plane -- and the had some earlier.
They HAD to have discussed this with him.
But here's another hypothesis: he took what they asked him to get, which was of interest to them from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's litigation (failed) where they didn't get this document they needed to prove their claims about metadata (like Edward, who has likely absorbed this slogan from them, as they've been at this longer and are lawyers, unlike him -- collection *is* espionage and metadata *is already* a violation of privacy, i.e. that doesn't occur later, when some conscious human drills into it with sense and meaning on a legitimate case.
And Snowden, without a deep understanding of these issues or this document, just started framing it to his Alternate Reality in step with the Movement. This happens.
In this case, he would be lying as well -- dissembling, trying to make square pegs fit into round holes. Either way, it's not looking at the facts - it's not admitting he doesn't know, or admitting that it could be read differently. That *is* lying.
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