Wired State

Why the Internet of Things Should Not be "Open" -- to Collectivization and Criminality

Here's my quick answer to an important article in Foreign Affairs on "the Internet of Things" by Neil Gershenfeld and JP Vasseur . It's frustrating to see yet another article on IoT appear without grappling with the communist aspect or the criminality aspect. And this isn't some bizarre outlandish problem that only crazy cat ladies think up who fear reds under the beds. This is barkingly real.  Just as soon as one of these IoT geeks sees Jacob Appelbaum hacking and driving off their car -- or worse, their pace-maker -- maybe they will "get it."

Yes, it belongs in "foreign" or "international affairs" and "foreign policy" because it is about the interconnectedness of states and corporations on the Internet.

I could add some more thoughts about how the war on HTML5 already ended with a defeat of Tim Berners Lee and others trying to impose the "openness" of socialism which really means defeat of true openness -- choice, and protection of private property, which is what is the basis of civil society and protection from the state. I could mention how Esther Dyson, another Internet socialism, lost the battle to stop corporate names at ICANN (although who knows, maybe she will get her way as her struggle to get ICANN out of American hands may pave the way for third-world forces instigated by Russia to socialize it back.)

In the end, TBL had to let go on the HTML5 struggle, as I understand it, because corporations wouldn't pay for it and do it unless they could have DRM.

One of the commenters also made this point: these authors are horridly biased and self-interested. Gershenfeld is an MIT professor -- MIT is basically a business incubator and that's how in the end, even the most concerted anarchist-hacker proponents supporting Aaron Schwartz couldn't get the IT people fired there who made the decision to cooperate with authorities to prosecute his massive guerilla-manifesto hack of JSTOR via their servers. But it shouldn't come to that and we shouldn't rely on their tender mercies given how sectarian they are themselves on open source.

The other author is more forthrightly self-interested as running the IoT program at Cisco, the routing business. Obviously routing will be HUGE on the IoT and Cisco plans to make a KILLING. And that's exactly why you see various forces now trying to hack away at Cisco as a business -- the latest accusation about bribe-taking, as if no other business doesn't do the same thing.

***

Extreme and persistent advocates of open standards and open source software unwilling to admit true openness with *choice* on the Internet -- I call them technocommunists -- try to make their case for imposition of "openness" by claiming that it led to "innovation" and the success of the Internet we see today. They inevitably invoke the specter of the "walled garden" of AOL at the dawn of the Internet and how that "failed" as "open" browsers prevailed.

But this is completely misleading and tendentious, as AOL grew into a company that bought out the two top liberal traffic-collectors, TechCrunch and Huffington Post -- certainly having the last word on "walled gardens" in one sense by understanding what communities are and what they demand. And Facebook and other enormous online communities with membership, rules and proprietary code as well as commercial data mining have won the day -- the very "walled garden" mode that certain techies so hated and screamed would be a break on progress. Open-source social media like Diaspora failed miserably. People like walls; they keep out criminals, and they make it possible to have freedom *from* not just freedom *to*.

In the same way proponents of "net neutrality," which at the end of the day is a collective farm and collectivization of scarce resources by the state, invoke "innovation" instead of justifying their property grab in the name of bureaucratic collectivist states.

Now we come to the Internet of Things. And we should be very afraid. Because whoever owns the code -- and the platforms, but mainly the code -- will own your things. Private property as we know it, even land, will change radically and the New Class of rapacious coders epitomized by the greed of Google for private data and the greed of Edward Snowden and his helpers for files to destroy the state will take over our lives. It will really be about a war for encryption -- who gets to encrypt, and who gets to break through encryption.

All you have to do to understand my thesis of Internet of Things as Bolshevism is to contemplate your electric coffee pot when it is broken. While you might boil water and try to use it if the pot is broken (people seldom do), if the electricity is out, you're struck. When your coffee put is run by the Internet -- wired and under the control of code and platforms you don't own or control -- when it's "down" or "broken" you might as well not own it. It is worthless as your property. Indeed, it has been collectivized. That's hard to see until you contemplate not only every object in your house, but every other object in the world you might use and every *system* of your life -- travel, work, leisure. Add to that permissions systems -- who gets to touch, use, interact with your objects or any object or your systems -- and the limitless realm for hacking, harassment, blocking and banning that we have known from the anarchic geek world and their oppressive Big IT overlords from the beginning.

Facebook and even Twitter emerged from the chaos of open and anonymous chat rooms and blogs and fora where anonymity served as an excuse for abuse and where also people didn't have control over their data. While it could be argued that we don't control data Facebook scrapes or that supposedly the NSA grabs, there is at least a board of directors, corporate discipline, rules, appeals processes, and accountability. With concrete corporations and elected democratic government, due process is possible, and reform. Not so when Internet of Things coders run rampant with indifferent large corporations and diminished and weakened government There isn't that due process on the electronic frontier writ large that advocates of "open" always want to impose -- usually in the name of *their own* business model. We have already seen the massive collectivization of intellectual property -- music, news, books -- and now we will see *the same collectivization* absolutely destroy private property as we know it -- everything else. Houses, cars, hair brushes, cheeseburgers.... everything wired, and nothing belong to us as individuals anymore because other people control and run them.

It's my hope that openness -- in the sense of confiscation and collectivization of property by coders, riots by anarchic hackers, and criminal forces -- will not prevail, in fact. People will turn to familiar brands and companies, like Facebook, despite being the platform geeks "love to hate" and despite claims that teenagers stopped using it (false), will be one of them. Same with Apple, Google, etc. The real contest will be who can provide the most customer-based, comfortable, optimal experience for the consumer. People hopefully will not sit still for the whole-sale destruction of entire industries -- as we already saw with the rapacious Internet making a few jobs and massive riches for a few in Google or Twitter, and destroying jobs for so many other people in the print, video rental, camera, book, media, etc. industries.

As always in "future" discussions, the "what can go wrong" part is left for law-enforcement or future generations. Already with existing electronic control of drugs, we have a vast drug epidemic of pain-killers, and only more capacity for this epidemic to flourish will come with Internetifying things. Geeks always use "health" to make their case for "the future" knowing that it is an emotional and high-sounding argument clincher. Recently an elderly neighbor was terrified when her wired thing -- supposed to be that lovely device from the future -- misfired and firemen came storming into her apartment to "revive" her. She nearly had the heart attack then. What if a hacker hacks a pace-maker because he doesn't like someone? This is already possible.

3D printers are grossly exaggerated -- they should be called slow plastic extruders with huge costs for supplies and machines, that have come down somewhat but can not replace the existing industries of cheap things in China and other centers manufacturing from molds. The striated layers of the 3D object are also an engineering nightmare rarely really tested by heat or cold or other environmental stresses.

Hopefully, the technocommunists will not be able to stop the creation of proprietary networks with DRM and high encryption and full-fledged, aggressive defense of patent and IP rights that will ensure private property and privacy -- something that the original pioneers of the Internet like Tim Berners Lee actually engineered *out* of the Internet, and we live now with the consequences.

Related articles

No, Tim Berners-Lee, This is Not the Web We Want At All

How Can You Kill That Which is Not Real? Well, Arrest the Human Who Invented It

Weev isn't Just a Problem for Feminism, It's a Problem of Hacker Culture in General for All of Us

Bruce Schneier Will Have to Go Somewhere Else to Fight the Man

Collectivization in the Soviet Union

Glenn Greenwald is All Wrong About His "Facts" on How NSA Stories Are Reported

Everything about Glenn Greenwald's "Facts" about How NSA Stories Are Reported is wrong, and his article and supportive commentary by Ryan Goodman on Just Security are designed to lawfare and distract from the basic fundamental bad faith here.

First of all, the reason Snowden undertook to expose how the NSA hacked China was because he wanted to make himself appealing to the Chinese government to get asylum. He actually thought he could live in the relatively more liberal Hong Kong after his revelations, and be accepted by China. He thought by bringing them that information, he would buy his way in. We know this, because he himself has written to a number of countries offering to give them information -- Germany and Brazil -- in exchange for asylum. His plan was to get asylum in Hong Kong -- it failed, and his lawyers had to break the bad news to him that he was not wanted, and that's how he ended up in Russia. But there is no question that he offers documents for asylum -- he's done this multiple times, and he did it with China -- right on the eve of an important meeting between US and Chinese presidents.

That's how it works in Snowden's world of immorality. That's where his moral compass points -- which is to say that it doesn't point. That's number one.

Number two, it's the most basic, basic form of disinformation and propaganda to try to portray the enemy as unlike what he is believed to be, and perceives himself to be -- and therefore "show him up" and discredit him. An old, old story.

This happens to be a "Saul Alinsky" method used by the cadre organizations of the left -- targeting companies or individuals with black tales of how awful they are, so that they are seen as not what they seem, acting contrary to their stated principles. But that's because the "Saul Alinsky methods" are merely a compressed version of the old Bolshevik and Leninist methods that are still in use today by the Kremlin -- most recently in the Crimean War.

So, for example, the Kremlin tries to make false equivalences between the Iraq war or Kosovo's liberation and the Crimea, although what preceded the situations in Iraq and Kosovo are very, very different -- try years of tyranny, imprisonment, torture and UN resolutions for starters, none of which obtained for the Crimea (there were no significant human rights violatios in Crimea before the Russians took it over, and they had no grounds to do so to "protect Russians").

So a centerpiece of the hacker movement that preceded -- and recruited - Snowden was to assault the US as hard as possible and undermine it's credibility in the world by making it do things that were uncharacteristic and be seen as something it was not. That was Assange's openly stated goal -- he wanted the US  literally to close in on itself in response to Cablegate, become unlike itself, i.e. more restrictive, and thereby be districted in the world. Again, that was and is his stated goal.

Best of all for such propaganda techniques is if the target can be shown to be "doing the same bad thing" as the opponent. So everyone knows China hacks, and if the propagandists can show that the US hacks China, too, and is "no better," it will morally prevail.

Of course, this is as hollow as the war comparisons, as the amount of hacking that China has done of the US is enormous -- government, media, corporations, and private organizations have all experienced massive amounts of hacking for years. It utterly dwarfs whatever the NSA is or isn't doing with Huawei. The Chinese government -- and the Russians on propaganda outlets like RT.com -- naturally try to deflect from their badness and their lion's share of hacking by pointing to the US ostensibly "doing the same thing." This is all so  out of proportion that Greenwald's and all the Snowden chorus has to be called out for their incredible bad faith. This has always been the hallmark of all Greenwald's claims -- outrageous exaggerations, aggressive myopia about the rest of the world outside "evil America" and then claims that anyone who objects to this outrage is a tool of the Stasi state or a supine scribe and shill.

So this story is primarily about these two very bad-faith objectives -- nefariously making Snowden attractive to his originally-anticipated hosts and a deliberate hostile propaganda goal of making America look bad by a false comparison outrageously blind to the actualities. Both of them make the sordid underbelly of this entire article, yet Greenwald pretends neither exist.

Now let's look at his points:

1. Snowden hasn't leaked any documents since Hong Kong. Really? There has been some serious scrutiny of this claim by Michael Kelly and others, and Snowden's own statements that are at odds about this. Greenwald glides over this without comment. "He has played no role since then in deciding which documents" also begs credibility.

What do Greenwald and Snowden talk about every day in their "daily" conversations -- which Greenwald has claimed they have? Don't they decide which documents and when? Are we really, truly to believe that no political judgement and back-and-forth has gone on about the strategic publishing of these documents at certain key times?  For example, take right now for instance, when the world's attention is focused on the badness of Russia invading Crimea, and frankly, the goodness of the US and EU in trying to at least sanction these bad actors. This is just the time to introduce a story of America's purported badness and being "unlike itself," i.e. more hacky than China -- because...why?

Snowden in his ARD show -- show is the only way I can describe 23 minutes out of six hours of tape as heavily constructed as that broadcast was -- also is at great pains to tell us that only journalists have responsibility. Really, guys? This is actually patent bullshit. Because Snowden is the one who stole the damn documents. HE decided to steal them, and HE leaked them. He leaked ALL of them, we're told, and washed his hands of it -- but only on his alien planet where the moral plane runs perpendicular to our world at cross purposes. So of course he bears responsibility, and pretense of a firewall between him and others just can't stand. He stole. He leaked. He is in ongoing discussions we are not privy too. So sorry, Snowden remains responsibile for the damages these stolen, unlawfully accessed documents continue to cause by his poor judgement and reckless criminal action. There is no getting him off the hook.

2. Nor are the journalists to be let off the hook, either. The Pentagon Papers Supreme Court ruling isn't an endless carte blanche to endlessly undermine and destroy national security. At a certain point, there is a limit -- and not one that we'd expect adversarial journalists steeped in both the "progressive" and "libertarian" extremists positions would ever admit to. So they can't be the judge. Courts of law will be, as they will be in Risen's case and others. It's one thing to make some technical acknowledgement, that it appears that the NYT has not violated the law by publishing documents that draw more attention to the supposed heinous activity of the US, the VICTIM of Chinese hacking -- engaging in *gasp* some espionage  -- than China, the MUCH MORE MASSIVE PERPETRATORS of  hacking  -- which the New York Times is a victim of itself, too!!! But it's another to say that it may have excercised poor judgement, and merely taken the politicized anti-government position that it seems to always want to take on the Snowden affair. Some day it will regret this.

Why are we to trust the word of a FORMER DOJ official that the story is "based on leaks other than Snowden documents." How does he know? And even if he were in the DOJ today, again, how would he know? And even how would anyone in the NSA know, as they don't seem to know what has been lost, in full? This is a non-issue, and designed merely to try to distract and deflect from the culpability of a) Snowden for stealing and leaking and b) journalists for having *at some point on a line that has to be acknowledged as existing*, going too far in destroying national security.

The notion that adversarial journalists are the best judge of the public interest is as risible as it is to suggest they are the best judges of what constitutes national security. They aren't. They are only one of many pretenders to this role, in a field that actually should have more players in it than they.

3. Snowden has made repeatedly clear that he didn't want all the documents he provided to be published.

Oh? then why did he steal them?! In fact he hasn't made this clear, and this is a new notion that has crept into the Snowdenista narrative that they really can't back. In fact, Greenwald threatened to publish more when his husband was arrested -- regardless of how he tried to spin this later. In fact, Appelbaum has called for all the documents to be published at once and has accused his former colleagues of sitting on them -- and created a scandal over the Tor documents. So this isn't a settled matter at all.

The notion that it is "obvious" that Snowden could have "just uploaded" them is ridiculous. That's not the case. The only reason Snowden got journalists involved was to get more publicity -- full stop. He realized that a bunch of technical, wonky documents, even if uploaded in full, would only sink like a stone with few exceptions -- much like the many war documents that WikiLeaks tried to get attention to, or the miles of Stratfor correspondence that WikiLeaks tries to pretend is such a trove. No one pays attention. It's not the scandal imagined. Only if the stories are framed and pushed at politically-strategic times do they have value -- and why this isn't really a journalistic exercise, as much as that is heavily flogged as the cover. It's a hacker movement's war on the NSA, using the PR capacity of highly visible journalists. Let's not pretend otherwise. It is war.

Snowden's posturing that he needs journalists to "interpret" the documents is just manipulation and propaganda in this war. What he needs is attention, and media is about organizing attention to make sure documents don't sink like stones.

This sudden knowier-than-thou over-explanation about certain documents to be published and others not published is NEW, people. It is NEW. And it is likely part of a sub-rosa or encrypted, if you will, deal-making effort between Snowden, his journos, and the NSA. If he gives back or doesn't publish certain documents, maybe it will go better with him. Maybe he can come home, and face a lighter sentence. The idea that Snowden would only provide documents for background and never to publish has never been said until now, and Greenwald actually thinks no one will remember, or that he can yack his way out of this obviously glaring discrepancy as he does every other one -- by aggressively talking over critics. No matter. We know that it has never been said before, it is new, and represents deal-making and ass-covering, if nothing else. (Oh, and if some technical instance where Snowden has seemingly said this or actually said this is produced, so what? That's just the usual 99/100 machine-thinking. The center of gravity is this: Snowden has never emphasized that he had documents he never intended to publish. It is not in his early interviews.

Ben Wizner's atrocious spin on this is for the birds. It is meant to plea-bargaining and make a deal for his "client" (he is merely an advisor, and doesn't have signed attorney-client privilege; he is not hired by Snowden to represent him). Wizner is trying to convince himself as much as us that these august newspaper establishments have judgement that in fact Glenn Greenwald doesn't think they have -- because he quit working with the Guardian and went to a brand-new untested entity to publish these documents, not some institution with experience. It's just him -- an opposition blogger -- and a bunch of anti-war activists. Let's not try to prettify this, in order to get Snowden off the hook -- which is all it's about.

4. It is not "jingoistic" to see other countries' citizens as having less rights than you as a citizen. Every single country of the world works that way. Every country spies. In fact there are hostile enemies that spy much more aggressively than the NSA; when they intercept the private conversations of people in Ukraine or Estonia or the EU, we learn the content of them, to the embarassment of those people and the profound disruption of their national politics -- unlike Merkel's phone calls -- about which we know NOTHING. Hello!

It's not just that every country spies; no country places foreigners on equal par with its own citizens in terms of rights. Just Security and others who invoke the recent General Assembly resolution and the liberal spin given on this very politicized act as "international law" should explain why the Snowdenistas never actually tried to bring a case to a treaty body of the UN.(Answer: they didn't have one.)

Instead, they dealt with the same kind of hortatory, wishful-thinking approach that all the lawfarers at the UN adopt. Germany, pissed off at the Merkel phone issue, sponsored an anti-American resolution -- it isn't aimed at Russia, which does far more destructive spying - nor at China. It's anti-American. The US tried to diminish the one-sided of this resolution, and also take away its social engineering of internationa legal precepts -- Germany has not been able to demonstrate that passive collection is privacy-breaking surveillance (privacy itself is contingent on a legal understanding of freedom of expression, and therefore already tenuous), or that listening to terrorists violates every individual's rights.

In fact, lawyers who are honest about this admit that there isn't a case here, and that trying to stretch the privacy concept to cover the "no surveillance" concept by blessing the Bruce Schneier "passive collection=active surveillance" argument just doesn't fly; in fact there isn't the international legal jurisprudence for this spin on things. I'd challenge all these lawfarers to actually try to bring a case to the UN Human Rights Committee -- make it even Merkel's phone. And I'd submit that the treaty body would not be able to do anything with it because no privacy was violated. If Victoria Nuland brought a case against Russia, however, she could prove it in spades. Time, again, to look at cases, not the sweeping generalities that the Snowdenistas prefer to deal in.

Greenwald and co. keep repeating that there is a "collect-it-all" mentality or that "entire country's entire phone conversations" are swept up -- yet they can't even show us one call. Meanwhile, while they blather in destructive generalities and enable the Chinese Communist government's hacking better by tipping it off, Russia has shamelessly hacked the phone conversations of Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt on Ukraine; Alexander Navalny and his colleagues on the EU and Russia; Yuliya Timoshenko; Catherine Ashton; the Estonian Foreign Minister Paet on Ukraine. We know the content of all those conversations that should have had a privacy rights. Worse, their publication has been done in a tendentious and wrenched manner so as to manipulate impressions and create false and destructive versions of the narratives.

There's also the grand question of the nature of the governments in question -- which Greenwald never entertains. China hacks to gain technical, political and military advantage; the US has hacked in order to find out about hacking and the nefarious plans of state companies to harm the US -- which are part of foreign policy.

Nowhere can the Snowdenistas show that US hacking was done for some crass commercial advantage, to make more sales than Lenovo or something.

So natter away though he may about what is "noxious," the real "noxious" quality to this entire discussion comes from the profound bad faith of Glenn and his allies: they cannot concede that harm was done, done deliberately, and that one party in this equation is really the more injured one, and has a right to fight back. That fighting back is not the privacy destroyer claimed, and no country in the world can be expected to extend its Constitutional civil rights to everyone in the world.

Debating Robert Wright on Israel and Anti-Semitism and the CAP Incident

As my comments on this awful piece by Robert Wright two years ago was so buried, I'm duplicating it here but go read the whole monte with all his apologists if you like.

So, first, read Robert Wright's defense of a "junior staffer" -- and the management -- of the Center for American Progress.

This is despicable, of course. People forget this old story involving a Twit-spat and the Jewish community -- and it all got smoothed over and forgotten, although both sides suffered casualties.

But I never forgot because it really epitomizes so much of what CAP is about -- and that means Soros, since they are among its most important funders.  John Podesta, the former head of CAP now in the Obama Administration, has always been one of Soros' chief thinkers.

Says Wright:

Suddenly lots of people are asking whether calling someone an "Israel-firster" is anti-Semitic. The occasion for these reflections is a controversy--the subject of a Washington Post piece yesterday--surrounding the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. The Post piece noted a "dispute with several Jewish organizations over charges that some center staffers have publicly used language that could be construed as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic."

Don't be misled by the attention being given to the term "Israel-firster" into thinking that it's the real issue here. That term was used by a single, very junior CAP staffer on his personal twitter account, and he apologized weeks ago. So if people ostensibly complaining about the 'Israel-firster' thing are still after CAP scalps, we know that the issue must go deeper.

Here is the real issue: Some people at CAP who haven't used the term Israel-firster have committed a different sin--criticizing, sometimes harshly, the policies of Israel. And some defenders of those policies find it easier to stigmatize critics than to answer them.

Well, you know where it's going from there, keep reading, and predictably, it's one of those whiney chest-beaters about how criticizing Israel isn't anti-Semitism, but organized Jewry and AIPAC always exaggerate that it is to "place a chill on speech" blah blah.

Except, it is anti-Semitism, because the practitioners are so intensive, repetitive, vociferous, and nasty. It's not just criticism of Israel. It's hate. it's antipathy beyond all reason. It's obsession.

This is a faith issue, perhaps. I don't believe the Israeli occupation is a "moral abomination." I think Palestinian terrorism and the sustaining of that terrorism and violence for decades by the Arab League are the moral abomination, and when that stops, what you don't like about Israel will stop, too. I'm for sequencing here.

My responses:

I want another look at this "very junior staffer" business. I'm trying to track down where it was said that this fellow was so "junior".

Here's what is said about him on the Think Progress website, which I'll quote here in full because the site may be updated:

Zaid Jilani is a Senior Reporter/Blogger for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Zaid grew up in Kennesaw, GA, and holds a B.A. in International Affairs with a minor in Arabic from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining ThinkProgress, Zaid interned for Just Foreign Policy and was a weekly columnist at The Red & Black, the University of Georgia’s official student newspaper. He is a co-editor at the Georgia-based blog Georgia Liberal and a regular on RT America's The Alyona Show and The Thom Hartmann Show and has been a guest host on Al Jazeera English's The Stream. He is also an occassional contributor to the op-ed pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

http://thinkprogress.org/autho...

And here's what CAP said in defense against his tweets:

A very small number of tweets on the personal accounts of ThinkProgress staff were inappropriate, and the authors have publicly apologized for using objectionable language

Zaid Jilani is called a *senior* reporter/blogger. Maybe you can be a "senior blogger" but a "junior staffer," but I wonder how, if it is in fact the same guy. While he sounds young, he's not inexperienced and has even gotten himself on that premier "progressive" anti-American circuit, the Kremlin-sponsored Russian TV's Alyona Show, and that other premier "progressive" anti-American circuit, Al Jazerra English's The Stream.

Of course the anti-Israel/anti-semitic/anti-American/anti-Western ideologies are often co-morbid.

I cite this to make the point that there is an intellectual climate here that isn't about some junior staffer carelessly saying something that was only his personal opinion in isolation from something more mainstream. His expression *was* the zeitgeist of the "progressive" circles he moved in, and we find the "Israel apartheid state" slur in leaked OWS email and other places, and then as has been pointed out, the American variant of the "Zionism=Racism" Soviet canard, which is "Gaza is like the American south was". 

Mind you, I'm *not* for firing/disciplining/gagging people on Twitter. I think the answer to any and all complaints about Twitter must be "don't follow that person if you don't like them". If a staffer then spouts nonsense and hate, he should have less followers or objectionable followers that will self-discredit. And that's how it has to be. Of course we are going through a feudal period where the little city-states of the think-tanks become defensive and try to rein in their serfs and establish even more draconian polices for expression on twitter, so that instead of open intellectual life, we have rich and powerful institutions using their leashed junior attack dogs on Twitter against others -- or most often, absolutely silence by senior fellows terrified of losing their jobs over a Twit-fight.

That era will pass.

***

And more...

This is lame, Robert. Your argumentation should not be based on the "personal Twitter account" gambit or "the guy is long gone' excuse. I'm not for punishing people for their personal tweets, obviously. I don't think CAP should have fired him if they truly had the "progressive" values they claim (and they don't in a case like that, which is why I always use the term in quotation marks). The guy just said what many think or even say, and even say at conferences (Durban). You know that and I know that. So looking for literalist search-strings of text on CAP-owned servers is silly.  If CAP reaaaalllly believes that it is an indefensible slur and wrong, then let them write that? Instead of firing the guy, you know?

***

Then more:

Um, I'm going to say that number one, junior staffers should get to say what they like on Twitter and not have to go through self-criticism sessions, and if somebody doesn't like their tweeting, they...can just not follow that junior staffer? That's my advice all around.

But you're being entirely disingenuous with all your literalisms and word-string searches here if you don't realize that "Israel the apartheid state" (a modern variant of Zionism=Racism) isn't in fact a mindset and a phrase that is part of the lexicon of the "progressives" and found everywhere on the hard left. If you don't technically find that search-string on some other blog or website in around CAP, that doesn't mean it is entirely absent as a mindset. It isn't. That staffer merely said whateverbody else says, only not on Twitter. He's not the problem. Making him seem like the problem, and that the problem went away because he was canned is pretty misleading.

Number two, I'm going to say, what, we can't criticize Soros-funded think-tanks Robert? Ever? In our lives? Even when they use really sly and nasty code expressions like "Israel-firsters". Is that like birthers? Or is that like truthers?  You know, it's like here in New York? You say "The Bronx" but you don't say "The Manhattan"? So if you put an "er" at the end of the term like that, it's pejorative. And you know that.

Number three, CAP is so awful in other ways. Like the way Samuel Charap was on Russia, currying favour with Putin. He then went over to State. I wonder how that's working out now.

CAP *is* toxic on Israel. They're obsessive and mean like a lot of the left is on Israel. It's really awful to see. Shouldn't the Arab Spring have done one thing, show everybody who was obsessing about Israel where the *real* crimes against humanity are, like in Syria?

The occupation isn't a moral abomination; to any extent that it is for anybody, you would have to concede that there were moral abominations by the Palestinians that forced the situation, like suicide bombing, which your indignant CAP types never condemn, or at least with never of the throaty enthusiasm that they scream about Israel.

What's terrible about your intervention, Robert, is that you upped the ante and made it seem like no one can ever call out hateful anti-Israel writing let alone anti-semitism people disagree about without getting smacked down by the liberal establishment as "smearing a think-tank".

Think tanks should be able to take care of themselves without harassing and bedeviling those who don't like their thinking and criticize them.

You were at New America Foundation, which had Soros funding

http://newamerica.net/about/fu...
And you've blogged at OSI
http://blog.soros.org/2011/09/...

That's fine; I have too. But then don't pretend you're not tribal here, defending the pack.

***

then to some of the other people in this forum:

Bullies? What? The bullies are people who fire staffers for tweeting what the management believes and even says privately and the bullies are those that claim we can't criticize leftist think tanks for fear of being told we're "smearing" somebody.

I am so profoundly tired of people slyly hiding behind their artificial distinctions between anti-Israel views and anti-semitism pretending they can get away with their malicious obsessiveness forever.

Uh, no. Maliciously obsessive is how people get about Israel, and keep backing and filling and pretending they aren't antisemitic ohnoes and that they "get" to make "legitimite criticism of Israel" and who-are-we- blah blah to tell them they can't apply universal human rights to Israel, and are we really for not ever applying human rights scrutiny to Israel blah-blah-blah. I've heard it a million times. No sale.

Those people who do that never crossed the street to defend intellectuals being dragged from their homes in Syria until now -- and some not even now. They didn't work on these other countries now bursting into flames. Their imbalance was shocking. They applied universal standards all day long -- to that one country, Israel. They would never lobby the obviously hypocritical countries in the Human Rights Council who opposed any country resolutions, but who upheld a special stand-alone agenda item for Israel.

So don't talk to me about blurred distinctions. The blurred distinctions in are those who can't see how horridly obsessed they've become about Israel and its offenses, real and imagined, to the obscene exclusion of many other country situations.

Ask yourself: did you do anything about the violence in Nigeria between Christians and Muslims? Did you condemn fundamentalism Muslims making attacks in Nigeria? Or were you busy taking out your microscope for Israel?

Check a map right right back at you, big guy. Look at Israel. Look at the *size* of Israel. Look at all the countries surrounding it, and their powers. And stop your nonsense.

I know I'm not going to have a rational conversation with someone who can't acknowledge that multiple suicide bombings over years caused the occupation of Gaza and that many other acts by Palestinian terrorists over years caused and/or exacerbated the other situations. So I won't try.

As for Desmond Tutu, people who want to dignify the odious term "Israel apartheid state" often try to drag in his name, thinking that no one will dare to object to a black bishop in South Africa using the term "apartheid" about something.

But I do. There is a world of difference between institutionalized state racism in South Africa's apartheid, and Israel's policies, where racist acts, if they occur, have a framework where they can be prosecuted.

Yes, people who think they find "unpleasant similarities" are indeed antisemitic, and yes, Desmond Tutu and Uri Avnery are guilty of inciting hatred on false racism charges with this loaded and unjust comparison, yes indeed, regardless of their record on behalf of human rights and justice elsewhere.

The problem with South Africa's ANC politics is they absorbed a lot of the Soviet ideology, and the "Zionism=Racism" canard fostered by the Soviets -- which finally Kofi Annan called a "low point" in the history of the UN, and which was reversed on a General Assembly vote after the USSR collapsed. Soviet legacies like that within ANC politics should have collapsed too. They didn't.

So no, again, no sale. People need to stop pretending they can find daylight between antisemitism and anti-Israel statements that make use of this odious canard, which itself is what deserves oppobrium.

And again, that's why I'm for not firing that staffer or forcing him to leave and letting him talk on Twitter. He is saying what everybody thinks. Let them take responsibility for that, fully. Let people debate the staffer and CAP openly as much as they deem necessary about this terminology. Let people stop thinking they can hide from their responsibility for it by forcing a staffer off Twitter and pretending he's the problem.

 

 

NYT Public Editor Embraces Bolshevik Tactics of Kevin Gosztola, Fails to Nail RT

There is so much wrong with this response from the New York Times Public Editor that it's hard to know where to begin.

But let's start with this odd phrase, "A number of commenters whom I admire (including Kevin Gosztola, who writes on civil liberties issues for Firedoglake.com)....

Let's stop right there. How could you possible admire someone who uses these kinds of outrageous Bolshevik tactics against a journalist critical of RT.com?

In fact, Robert Mackay's liveblogging of the RT.com issue represents a weak but welcome beginning and exposing this Kremlin propaganda mill that the Times should have been on to years ago.

Yes, Bolshevik tactics is the proper name for them -- ascribing sinistter conspiracy and lies to open reporters like Jamie Kirchick who openly describe what they are doing -- because projection, you know.

That's what the Public Editor really needs to answer for, instead of caving to the stampede of orchestrated outrage from the enablers of the Kremlin's propaganda outlet. How can she?

What's extraordinary here, too, is the continued gingerly politkorrektnost around Abby Martin -- as if she wasn't really a radical picking up various odd conspiracy theories to peddle in Hate-America-First narrative.

At this point, Rosie Gray at Buzzfeed pretty much has the whole RT.com story down pat, with lots of close reporting, factual exposes, and concrete situations that blow apart the Big Lie.

So...I wonder how long Buzzfeed will last at this. Putin is not going to like that green-hued picture, and already that creepy nationalist outfit Sputnik & Pogrom has lobbed a nasty tweet at Miriam Elder, the former Moscow correspondent who know does international affairs for Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed probably has the most traffic now of all these light news sites -- correct me if I'm wrong, but it's up there with Gawker and more than Huffington Post.

I predict that Max Seddon, their Moscow correspondent, is soon going to develop trouble with his visa or journalist credentials the way David Satter did -- or the way Andrew Nagorsky did years ago at Newsweek after that cover with Brezhnev that was so unflattering.

But I hope not, because Buzzfeed is just better all around on reporting about Russia than the Times or even the Washington Post.

No, Tim Berners-Lee, This is Not the Web We Want At All

Oh, dear, I knew it. Tim Berners-Lee and the gang are getting up a head of steam on this idea of a "Magna Carta for the Internet". I predicted this when I noticed some of the things they were getting up to lately, remember?

We need, in fact, a Magna Carta to free us from them.

Berners-Lee is utterly, completely hypocritical here. It's largely thanks to his collectivism vision of the Internet that *engineered into* the Internet is a) lack of privacy -- he was for endless public collaboration and no creation of locked off spaces or private corporate spaces; b) lack of commercialism/capitalism/private property -- he hated commerce on the internet like many of the technocommunists who pioneered the early Internet and engineered it out -- he hated DRM, securing of private property through code; c) he was not for copyright protection but for "sharing" because he believed copyright was part of that corporativist, commercial vision of the net he hated. To the extent the Internet succeeded such that you can even write these thoughts on something called Facebook is a triumph of reason and normal capitalism over these sectarian freaks who tried to engineer their socialist vision into the Internet. I am not kidding, Andrew. That is indeed what it's about. That's why this talk of "open" and "neutral" is really hogwash until we can route around -- which the Internet is good at doing -- all this forced communist march to "liberation" of content and property, anonymity and anarchy, and enable a real open society which in fact will be based on private property that is secured under the rule of law. That's how privacy has always been secured, and thinking you get it from sectarian coders is a deep delusion.

Even Cory Doctorow, the content liberationist extraordinaire, has been given pause by the horrible conundrum (horrible for copyleftists) of the need for code that protest privacy -- essentially a DRM -- and the DRM on content they oppose.

Hmm, how to square that circle?

Well, you can't.

DRM is about corporations -- and that means governments -- not coders and various loose Wired State formations like Cory and his friends running things. That's why they hate it. Cory spends an inordinate amount of time fighting US-EU trade agreements and other international agreements that have copyright and anti-privacy as part of their rule-of-law approach.

Protection from the NSA -- if the NSA were even the thing the Snowdenistas claim, which I don't believe it is -- really does come from having a robust civil society, which means a robust private sector of free enterprise. States do not create robust civil societies, and for that matter, corporations alone don't create them, but neither do NGOs or social movements of the Occupy or Pirate Party or Crypto Party sort.

As I keep repeating, and I am probably the only one in the world with this perspective, had we passed CISPA, which would have forced Obama to submit to regulated relations with the Big IT companies instead of just have secret deals with them and fending off their lawsuits, we would have a regulatory framework for governing how people's data is kept and used. Big IT hated this, and so did Obama, so they whipsawed all the geeks on YouTube to hate it, but we'd actually have all been better off to have law governing these relations rather than secret White House meetings -- and Snowden would have had a much harder time making any case against Big IT collusion with the US government -- which in any case I believe is vastly over-stated by him, and not really the issue for us with Big IT.

The "web we want" is the sort of language Dave Winer and all the other lefty scripters and coders and Silicon Valley technocommunists have been talking about for years. We do not really want this web, because it doesn't root society in the power that civil society really needs to have: private property.

Geeks who are happy to liberate your property in piracy and doxing and collective your property on the Internet of Things are definitely not the people you want to run things.

The "web free to use for everyone" bullshit isn't something that even the most socialist societies believe in, even for electricity and phones. Even in the most heavily subsidized of societies, you pay something for light and phone. And the web is merely just another form of electricity and phones, when you take away the magical thinking around it. "Free to use for everyone" is merely another way of saying the state pays, and therefore the state controls.