Wired State

Why the WikiLeaks 72-Hour Threat -- Postponed -- Is Even Worse Than You Think

@GGreenwald @johnjcook We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 19, 2014

 

There's been a certain amount of uproar about WikiLeaks latest tick-tock "time running out for humanity hourglass" sensation, in which they gave 72 hours for a small country to get on the lam before its name was leaked.

The script kiddies instantly counted the character spaces on blacked-out slides and guessed "Afghanistan," and then today, a slide with "Afghanistan" listed among the five was leaked somehow "by accident".

But WikiLeaks itself -- an account said to be run by Assange (and no doubt controlled, if not actually run every minute by Assange) -- postponed their deadline "due to the news cycle". They had originally given 72 hours at 5:00 pm or so on May 19 -- and it elapsed.

The Dead Man's Switch sort of threat made people think of insurance files again, and other threats in the past, including by Assange and Greenwald, and also made John Cook, the editor of the Omidyar-funded First Look/Intercept, get into a Twit fight with WikiLeaks, along with Greenwald.

The Twitfight led to the threat.

But the real news here isn't the tick-tock or Afghanistan -- as if we required a drama like this to figure out that US intelligence must try to get what they can out of this war zone's mobile phone calls, and for good reason, given that the overwhelming number of civilians killed there are killed not by American troops, but by the Taliban, who also have killed our soldiers as well.

And none of these outlets seemed to pick up the larger backstory to all this, although I tweeted it to some of them. I guess it's because it's too complicated as I've explained in the past. I've also written about the implications of the 30c3 speech in the past.

The real problem is Jacob Appelbaum -- and anyone else in WikiLeaks starting with Assange (and remember, Appelbaum's the American representative of WikiLeaks, and never left that role, despite his self-imposed exile in German; he is still very close to Assange.)

Here's what we have to remember, which I wrote about in my book Privacy for Thee and Not for Me.

1. Appelbaum helped Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald with the encryptioned communications with Snowden - and likely the encryption, forward, and storage in vaults (he may have done that for Manning, too, or been related to those who did). That means at any time, Appelbaum could have helped himself to a copy of anything or everything.  Poitras is on the record explaining his role for the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere; Greenwald now has airbrushed Appelbaum's name out of history, at least history according to his latest book. That's significant -- Greenwald likely fears showing any relationship to him and his involvement in moving files from the NSA.

2. Aside from what may be surreptious copying of the Snowden Operation stash -- or a private channel with Snowden's blessing as a "plan B" if his "plan A" to work with journalists didn't work -- it is known that Appelbaum has had a set of certain documents that he has leaked through Der Spiegel with Holger Stark and other Der Spiegel journalists. These are some of the more sensational and damning and destructive documents - and some have suspected that Greenwald prudently let them take the heat on this so that he and his associates didn't have to face prosecution over these leaks ruining national security and international security.

3. Appelbaum may have other documents -- from Snowden or not, it's not clear -- that are the most devastating at all. At the 30c3, or 30th annual Chaos Computer Conference in December 2013, Appelbaum gave a speech wildly popular among the crypto kids, called "Protect and Infect" -- a big slam on the NSA, and leak of their gadgets catalogue, which is kind of a Sears catalogue of all their best hacking tools. Naturally Appelbaum tried to portray these as "infect them all" although as always, the story is really about pursuing targets -- and legitimate targets.

4. Greenwald at first endorsed and recommended Appelbaum's talk in a tweet, then confessed in a follow-up Twitter conversation that he didn't know how Appelbaum got this information and even that it was "not a Snowden" document. In the talk, Appelbaum said baldly that he had his own NSA source, i.e. implying it was in addition to Snowden. Greenwald further implicitly praised Appelbaum's constraint by referring in a tweet to a specific place in the talk where Appelbaum speaks of the need for legal reasons, i.e. to avoid Der Spiegel and himself getting arrested for espionage and/or terrorism

5. Appelbaum reluctantly complied with these constraints, but like the murderous ominopotent child in "It's a Good Life," let it be known that at any moment, that might change. Why? Because he doesn't believe the US  government is legitimate. It is criminal, in his view. Therefore force and seemingly criminal actions can be used against it "for a higher cause". He even compares the NSA surveillance to "British writs of assistance" and says "we killed the British over this" -- implying it was okay to kill US government agents.

6. Appelbaum is close to Assange -- he introduced him lovingly on the big screen at 30c3, where he was beamed in, although with Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks operative who spent four months with Snowden in Moscow being going into self-imposed exile herself in -- where else -- Germany. So if Appelbaum has Snowden documents, or NSA documents, that means WikiLeaks has them, i.e. Assange has them.

And that means the "prudence" or "constraint" that Greenwald or Poitras or Bart Gellman show with this stuff -- which is a very relative concept and a thin membrane at best -- could be thrown aside at any moment.

All of this is very bad, and simply got ignored. That is, it was thrilling for hacker wannabees to read and share with each other, but no officials responded to it, keeping to the Obama Administration's low-key (i.e. wimply and useless) approach of "policing" hackers or terrorists instead of "warring" against them -- regardless of whether they war on us.

Of course, they are warring on us, and if you haven't been paying attention, read my book as to how far this war goes back, and, well, just read Assange's December 2012 manifesto against the "crypto state," right when Appelbaum was preparing another anti-NSA speech for 29c3, that time recruiting NSA agents to come over to the hacker movement -- and as we know now, Snowden was holding a Crypto Party -- which was likely just a cover for stage-managing the Tor-assisted war on the NSA we've seen since then -- including in pre-figurement from William Binney, who is a kind of John the Baptist to Snowden's Jesus, if you will, although I hate using analogies of any good figure with these evil types.

Greenwald -- in that same Twitfight last year -- made two additional sarcastic points -- one was that, geez, you think only Snowden leaks documents? Well, guess what, there's another leaker, and Appelbaum is publishing him! The other was, gosh, you're really helping Snowden here and following his instruction (not!).

Because Greenwald prides himself in following an agreement in which Snowden did not dump all the documents to WikiLeaks, but gave them to journalists -- essentially so they could behave as PR agents for the materials, and promote it for "the movement" strategically, especially tied to important world events where the US and its allies could be greatly harmed. Snowden realized that when Assange and then Manning dumped all their past US war and diplomatic documents, they got ignored. There were too many. Even on search sites, they were hard to navigate. Who had the time to study them and provide context? It needed specialists (as I can tell you, as one of the few people who has actually written about some of the cables in a consistent way, on Central Asia, trying to provide interpretation -- most newspapers just covered the scandal aspect of it).

So, no dumping -- and we're supposed to see Snowden as brave and intelligent in doing this.

Well, except, we don't know if he changed tactics, especially as he continues to be stuck in Russia, and we don't know who else got to his communications -- Tor is full of holes -- and we don't know whether -- like the separatists who fight each other in the Donetsk People's Republics over who gets to cause more mayhem in southeast Ukraine -- the hackers are fighting each other because of the PayPal 14 issue (all of them really belong in jail AND with fines, it's terrible that they are left with a fine any rich man can pay off for them) for which they blame Omidyar and Greenwald as elites -- and their overall issue of thinking everything should be dumped regardless, so no one can profit from them (Greenwald now has a movie deal, in addition to his best-selling book).

Even if WikiLeaks names the country, it's not likely to cause any more damage or less damage than if they haven't, and many have probably guessed it right.

But the larger question of what else do they have and how do they have it remains.

And there are the agents' names possessed by Appelbaum, or so he claims. At any minute, he could unleash those, and have no compunction in doing so, even if others entreat him not to do it -- because he will be caught up in the folie a deux of the moment with Assange.

These people don't want transparency or accountability; they want power over others. They've had it, for sure, as everyone has essentially been at their mercy for a year in the Snowden caper.

But it's never enough, and they might be willing to deal more damage now for various reasons of their own -- perhaps Assange wants safe passage somewhere and immunity, because he's sick of being holed up in the Ecuador Embassy. Perhaps Appelbaum and Harrison want the same. And of course, Snowden himself.

Perhaps they all want to be on one of those free and autonomous world-islands that Peter Thiel makes (the Paypal founder) whose Oslo Forum had Appelbaum speak at it last year (yes, awful, I know).

Snowden is a radical extremist and an abstract visionary and megalomaniac -- he thinks he's the state -- the Congress, the courts, everything rolled into one. He's actually no Constitutionalist, as he wants encryption to bind man, not the Constitution, in a perversion of Thomas Jeffersion. Snowden is at least "rational" in a relative kind of way, as much as anyone who has caused so much petulant destruction could be said to be rational.

But neither Assange or Appelbaum are rational. These are people suffering from more than radical politics or megalomania -- they are unhinged. Assange in particular is a full-blown case and Appelbaum exhibits all kinds of emotional disturbances.

What that means is that unlike Snowden, who has a reform agenda (get rid of metadata collection, get rid of this, get rid of that, make the NSA a neutered fluffy puppy dog), these two don't really have a list of demands other than "destruction for the sake of destruction" in the "propaganda of the deed" of the anarchist.

Law enforcement should move against these people sooner rather than later because of their threat of releasing agents' names, which will really lead to the threat of their actual deaths at the hands of either intelligence agencies in despotic states or angry mobs or opportunistic terrorists.

 

 

 

Related articles

Idiot Wind: A Compendium of Snowden, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum Topics

Wait, Jacob Appelbaum is Back in the Snowden Leaking Business?

Silicon Alley Insider: WikiLeaks Threatens To Reveal Information That Glenn Greenwald Says Could Lead To 'Deaths'

Assange threatens to release Snowden info that Greenwald says could endanger lives

Counting Down to Julian Assange's Potentially Dangerous Snowden Revelation

Who Leaked NSA Documents to WikiLeaks?

Isn't Anyone Going to Ask Greenwald Any Hard Questions on TV?

The Daily Caller is continually such a disappointment and I've stopped getting their news and forget to read it unless a Google alert comes in from a key word leading to their page.

Although at first I thought they might be actually bring a critical look to things like Frank La Rue and Soros' support of him, and "net neutrality," the problem is they are just in too deep to the technolibertarian perspective.

They celebrate Snowden and his courtiers far too much -- a function of that perspective.

Today, there's gushing coverage of Greenwald's book tour and talk show appearances and his claim that there's an "impressive bi-partisan" coalition fighting for change.

That means...Ron Wyden and....who was the other guy?

BTW, I'm kicking myself for not finding out soon enough about his Cooper Union appearance because I might have mangaed to ask a hard question and also just watch the dynamics.

My answer:

Greenwald engaged in his usual distracting tap dance. He thinks people are required to prove that damage was done -- by standing up and painting a target on their backs, and provide aid and comfort to the enemy?! No agency is going to do that, thank God, no matter how much he goads them.

Meanwhile, I'm going to ask the same of Greenwald -- to prove it. He has not provide A SINGLE CASE of actual "mass surveillance" - like Soviet propaganda, it's all about "the masses" and all about hysterical hypotheticals about the "imperialists".

How about ONE CASE of wrong doing that shows a systemic, deliberate determination to harm individuals. That wouldn't be "LOVEINT" -- which isn't a systemic issue but employee malfeasance. That wouldn't be spying on a law firm that does business with an authoritarian state because it was spying on that state -- that's not determination to harm Americans. Nor is finding out the porn habits of foreign jihadists any determination to harm someone not for cause.

So let's hear it. Where are those cases like Martin Luther King, Jr, Glenn? Where? Where's your own file or the file of any of the dissidents of America?

***

Here's an instructive exchange on the issue of why the NSA doesn't tell you about the damage done.

I still think they could do more, and keep pointing to existing events in the real world covered by the media where Russia got advantage, i.e. in sabotaging US-German relations. That's already obvious, and doesn't require revealing anything more or appearing to be weak. It's out there.

There should have been an answer to Appelbaum's infamous 30c3 speech with the Sears Roebuck catalogue of NSA gadgets that were leaked.

Note that Cisco is...penning a letter. Meek. Good! Because there really isn't anything wrong here, and Cisco should cooperate in pursuing criminals anyway. This is basic, basic stuff. Call me when Cisco files a lawsuit against the NSA for actual damages. They just pen these letters so as to have something to say to the hordes of fanboyz ginned up by TechDirt and such looking for blood.

 

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Idiot Wind: A Compendium of Snowden, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum Topics

Glenn Greenwald Still Can't Keep His Story Straight on Snowden -- And Why It Matters

Cisco Upset By Images Of NSA Tampering With Networking Kit

Why Are You So Fearful, O Ye of Little Faith?

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@Zunuzungu Would Like To Drown People Who Have Politically-Incorrect Views He Disagrees With

Yes, I'm on watch.

 

Here is what Harvard would look like if it was flooded. pic.twitter.com/eTJlVLTjMU

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) May 18, 2014

Aaron Bady (remember him?) had another appalling tweet. He fantasized about flooding Harvard. Which would, you know, kill or at least injure people.

Now, why did he want to do that? Because some scholars who did research that he didn't approve of, and said things that he didn't think were politically correct, were from Harvard.

Breaking: Harvard Doctors Coin the Term "Hood Disease" to Describe Some Black Version of PTSD Because They're Racist

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) May 18, 2014

 

Therefore, he thought about what it be like if he could just flood Harvard. Or fill it with stinging bees -- when I called him out.

@catfitz NO! The answer is to FILL THEM WITH BEES!

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) May 18, 2014

See, once again, he tried to turn it into a joke -- but I saw what you did there.

Aaron Bady can of course say what he likes, and express himself in the most robust forms he prefers. That's free expression. (Of course, if he doesn't incite to imminent violence, in the Supreme Court definition of this act.)

Trust me, if a Texas Christian pointed to a billboard on Time Square with scantily-clad teens, and said it was atrocious the way liberals disciplined their kids (the reverse of what Bady complained about last week over a PSA board in Texas advising parents to prevent their kids from drowning), or if a group of conservative white scholars said something inherent about race and intelligence, you can be sure Aaron would be all over it like white on rice (he's white himself).

But if it's the reverse, then it's all fair game.

The term "hood"is probably taken from "the hood" -- which is what blacks -- and for that matter, whites, now, too, and Hispanics -- call their neighbourhoods.

Note that they didn't call it the "hoodie disease," which might invoke Trayvon and might indeed be called racist.

The scientists were probably just trying to find ways to treat real PTSD and be more perceptive, just as they are with hypertension, which can be more prevalent in blacks.

So what began as an effort in fact to address a situation that is in part about racism then gets called racist. It's never enough for the Occupy "progressives". Ever.

Here's an article on this issue at The Root by a black journalist. She doesn't appear to call it racist.

Breitbart, a right-wing news outfit which some might be quick to accuse of racism seem to give the story a neutral treatment.

But wait until Monday, by then I bet we can whip this thing into the latest in racist outrages from The White Man if we all work hard on it, especially on Twitter.

ZungZung has shown us the way.

 

 

So the Capitalist New York Times Fires Abramson, Won't Hire Socialist Guardian Editor Gibson -- Good!

(c) Beth Cortez-Neavel/Knight Center. Jill Abramson, at a conference organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Pierre Omidyar's Network was among the sponsors.

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I've been waiting to see what this whole Jill Abramson deal was all about. Now Politico has helped explain it better for me.

I thought perhaps it really was some kind of feminism thing -- this is a real issue and I've experienced it myself in different workplaces even at the most "progressive" outfits.  The number of perfect West Side liberals who deliberately pay women less in this town, and ask them intrusive and sexist questions like whether they plan on having any more children or not would make your hair curl. I do get that.

But I still felt as if there was something else "up" here in this story. After all, when we're in the half-million a year salary category, the numbers going up or down $50,000 aren't that big a deal -- it isn't fair to compare Phil Taubman with Abramson because Phil had served in foreign postings and had more seniority -- unless, of course, you call Washington, DC a foreign bureau. Abramson had never been abroad.

Like anyone close to journalism in New York, I had heard she was bitchy and also lefty. I worried after Bill Keller left because he held the line against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and wasn't uncritical of Snowden and was there when the Times did some critical reporting, with CIA sources, of Snowden's tenure in Geneva and later his seminar in India.

Then Keller left, and things changed for the worse. Charlie Savage, who went from a Manning critic to a Snowden booster, was allowed to run loose with the stories, all pro-Snowden, and some of which reprinted Foundation for Free Press press releases -- even though he is way too smart for that.

Not a single critical thing has been said about Snowden all this time, and glowing coverage is given to Greenwald's prizes (the prize really went to the Guardian, not him), his new book, etc. -- and worst of all the ombudsperson, Margaret Sullivan, who is supposed to be impartial, has absolutely gushed and fawned over the Snowdenistas.

There's a story in Glenn's book about how Sullivan privately apologized for an article that went out early in the Snowden affair in which two experts on China from the intelligence community were quoted as saying they thought it likely that Snowden's laptops had been copied by the secret police in Hong Kong. Greenwald bristled that there was "no proof" of this.

Well, what would he accept as proof? China is a police state and copies people's stuff all the time -- they hard-wire it into their computers for sale in the West. I'll never forget how the former political prisoner Wei Jingsheng once called out the West at the UN for selling the very equipment that enables China to do this surveillance better, too.

Not that they can't surveil on their own. I once watched in horror as Lenovo computers were gifted to all the winners of prizes one year at the Overseas Press Club. China hacks everything, including, BTW, the New York Times, whose people were threatened with expulsion. Of course anything Snowden had was copied, if nothing else, over that state-controlled wi-fi at his hotel and other means.  It doesn't matter if there was "nothing" on his laptop but the means by which he reached his stashed documents -- they still might get something. Greenwald has no proof that they didn't.

Although Sullivan was appalling on this incident conceding in a column that it wasn't fair reporting, and appalling in another one conceding that the extremist loon Kevin Gosztola had a point, it wasn't enough for Greenwald, he still knocked the Times for not completely removing the offending lines about the theory of Chinese penetration. Imagine! Unless the field is completely sanitized of wrongful thinking, the Snowdenistas are never satisfied.

To be sure, the relationship between the Guardian and the Times has been cosy, although not completely without some mysteries (such as why the Guardian stole away Robert MacKey, another tendentious "progressive", but then he abruptly quit soon after making the move -- whereupon he came back to the Times again.)

The Guardian gave the Times all their Snowden stache when the British authorities came calling with a buzz-saw to destroy all the stolen documents. The Guardian also collaborated on WikiLeaks.

Abramson may have thought she could pull off this Guardian-splicing maneuver without anyone noticing it if she just kept it on the down-low and eased Gibson in as an "innovator" who was going to fix the Times lagging digital edition -- but it was caught, and that compiled with other problems meant she had to go.

Seldom at a place like the Times is the issue of "socialism" versus "capitalism" ever actually debated out loud, with terms like "technocommunism" ever being discussed -- that would be absurd. These things have to be articulated in "the personal is political terms".

But it's clear as a bell to me. Sulzberger, a capitalist, and his various editors, are liberals who want certain socialist things, and backed Obama for that reason. But they don't want socialism completely for themselves, and don't want to be overthrown, obviously. They like Snowden because he helps batter away at a Washington that they feel still hasn't "reformed" enough and doesn't welcome them sufficiently, and he is for "transparency" which they as newsmen like in theory (although not about themselves). They like the whole anarchy thing because it's a useful tool to get rid of enemies.

Yet they're not going to go to the mat for the revolution -- for example when Natasha Leonard, an Occupy operative who got away with pretending to be a Times stringer for awhile, was outed when she got arrested for refusing to disperse at the Brooklyn Bridge, she was out of the Times in a New York minute. That's how it is, and that's a good thing, because Leonard is a vicious radical socialist ideologue -- as you can see where she is perched now, salon.com.

Perhaps this near-death brush with socialist revolutionaries will be a sobering experience for the Times. Maybe the coverage of Snowden will come back and I will subscribe to the digital edition again.

 

 

 

My comment at Politico, "under moderation":

Oh, I get it now! This isn't at all about feminism, glass cliffs, salary discrepancy, or even a bitch female management style that wouldn't rankle if a man had it.

It's about whether or not the Times, which is liberal and capitalist, is going to hire away the stage manager of the Snowden operation, Janice Gibson, from the radical and socialist British Guardian's American edition.

And the answer is: no.

Abramson thought she could wrangle this by not keeping people informed, by making it be about women or digital or something else.

But it's about radicalization of the Times, and the owner saw it for what it was, saw that it was being put over on him and their colleagues, and said "no".

And I'm glad he did because I don't want the Times to be the Guardian. Indeed, I stopped subscribing to the Times precisely because of their poor and uncritical Snowden coverage which is way too enthusiastic about this felon and hacker.

Had they brought in Gibson, who authorized and engineered the Snowden operation in Hong Kong with Greenwald and edited the stories, under the guise of "modernity" we would get even more horridly skewed news. No thanks.

Watch to see Abramson get picked up by Pierre Omidyar for his "Intercept" or related projects -- although really, she's likely too expensive and too high-class for that operation that has filled up with bloggers like Greenwald. I can see her going to some other mainstream liberal paper or news magazine, perhaps. On the other hand, Marcy Wheeler has abruptly quit Intercept, they don't have any other women except Laura Poitras who is a mouse, so maybe Pierre will step up.

 

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Jill Abramson's Exact Salary and What the New York Times Thinks Is Wrong with the New York Times

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Glenn Greenwald Still Can't Keep His Story Straight on Snowden -- And Why It Matters

Glenn Greenwald, adversarial journalist and scribe for fugitive former NSA hacker Edward Snowden's leaks, has never been able to keep the story straight of when Snowden first contacted him, when he seriously began working with him, and what stories and documents he discussed.

I've chronicled the half dozen versions of the story that existed before his book. Now that his book has come out, No Place to Hide,  I suppose we must accept the "versions" as finally set in stone. But are they?

In some instances, it seems as if he goes to enormous trouble to make a detailed new chronicle of events as if to ward off various "convergence" theories that place him with too early access to Snowden before he goes to BHA to hack more NSA documents -- and thus implicate Greenwald and his fellow "adversarial journalist" Laura Poitras and her hacker friend Jacob Appelbaum as accomplices going beyond the protections of the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court decision.

As we know, Greenwald absolutely bristled at any such suggestion early on in the criticism of the Snowden operation by a Hillary Clinton campaigner, Zach Green, and called such persons "drooling imbeciles."

Except, we're not stupid when we see so many changing versions and so many strenuous efforts at building detailed narratives at variance with the past record. Greenwald is a lawyer. Something's up.

The issue of when Greenwald really began to deal with Snowden of course matters regarding any culpability he might have in guiding his hacks, enabling his hacks, knowing about his hacks, etc. Again, remember, this isn't the Pentagon Papers. This is not Daniel Ellsberg taking only 7,000 documents, many of which he wrote himself, and all of which he was authorized to access as an employee -- and then standing, alone, at a Xerox machine to make a copy to pass to the New York Times without any tech help.

The Snowden story involves 1.7 million documents, involves him stealing and exploiting other workers' passwords, reaching documents he was not authorized to access, and is far more damaging. It also involves more people in the middle (Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras and possibly others) helping with encryption and communications, and the need to store and forward the documents safely -- it's not a one-off affair with one delivery.

So let's look at what Greenwald told Michael Calderone back in June, when he first met Snowden in Hong Kong, then stayed with him as Snowden outed his identity on June 9th, 2013. Calderone published an article on June 10, 2013 which means he had to have been talking to Greenwald before that. Obviously, he is a "progressive" like-minded journalist, and Greenwald took time out for him at a very hectic moment when he was surrounded by numerous press and even sneaking out the back door of his hotel to escape undected.

So here's what Calderone writes, in a context where a dispute has arisen over "who had Snowden first" with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, who also published a Snowden leak at the time, but had declined to come to Hong Kong.

Greg Mitchell of The Nation who also wrote about the story early calls Calderone's article a "valuable untangling".

Indeed. Now it's a valuable stark contrast to what Greenwald himself is saying in his book:

 Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed his identity Sunday, first approached The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald in February and, by the journalist’s account, said he had information "that would be of great interest.”

But there was a problem. Snowden only wanted to communicate securely using PGP encryption, for which Greenwald didn’t have the proper software installed at the time. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenwald acknowledged that he's no expert in using such technology and said that Snowden even provided a step-by-step email and video to help secure their communication. At that point, however, Greenwald didn't know what his would-be source had (or didn't have) and continued to prioritize other stories instead.

Snowden also approached Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who is working on a trilogy about post-9/11 America and last year published a short documentary featuring NSA whistleblower William Binney on The New York Times' website. Both Poitras and Greenwald serve on the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organization that supports independent journalism. Greenwald had written last year about the difficulties Poitras faced after she was put on a government watch list.

A few months ago, Poitras met Greenwald at a New York hotel and informed him that the source in question was working for an NSA contractor and had "documents showing serious government wrongdoing." Greenwald set up the encryption software and began speaking directly with Snowden in late March or early April, he said.

Questions about the length of time Greenwald communicated with Snowden have arisen since Barton Gellman suggested in The Washington Post on Sunday that the source approached Greenwald only in recent weeks -- and only after he had approached the Post with materials related to the NSA's top-secret PRISM program and the paper refused to guarantee their full publication.

On Monday morning, Greenwald tweeted that “Gellman's claims about Snowden's interactions with me -- when, how and why -- are all false,” but did not elaborate.

Bart Gellman's claims about Snowden's interactions with me - when, how and why - are all false.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 10, 2013p>

Greenwald told HuffPost that Snowden was communicating with him for months on what would become a series of stories. Since May 16, he had apparently also been speaking to Gellman for what would become the Post's PRISM story. Greenwald said they expected an article in The Washington Post would “invest official Washington in the leak," so they brought in Gellman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, for that particular story. He said it was Poitras who introduced Snowden to Gellman.

So in his zeal to one-up Gellman -- about whom he had doubts and who he didn't want in the story but was overridden by Gellman's friend Poitras -- Greenwald likely told what was the truth: that he had been in touch with Snowden through encrypted email as early as "March or April". Snowden deliberately took the job at Booz, Hamilton Allen on March 15, 2013 and went for training on March 31, 2013. He hacked his last document on May 17, 2018 and departed for Hong Kong May 18 or May 19.

Now let's look at the other version of this story in Greenwald's book:

On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him. The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack.

Not February. December.

Then:

After returning to Rio, I heard nothing for three weeks. I spent almost no time thinking about the source because all I could do was wait. Then, on May 11, I received an email from a tech expert with whom Laura and I had worked in the past. His words were cryptic but his meaning clear: "Hey Glenn, I’m following up with learning to use PGP. Do you have an address I can mail you something to help you get started next week.

The tech expert was likely Jacob Appelbaum, who Greenwald has had spats with and may have decided not to identify to limit his liability for prosecution.

Then this:

The tech person then sent a package via Federal Express, scheduled to arrive in two days. I did not know what to expect: a program, or the documents themselves? For the next forty-eight hours, it was impossible to focus on anything else. But on the day of scheduled delivery, 5:30 p.m. came and went and nothing arrived. I called FedEx and was told that the package was being held in customs for "unknown reasons." Two days went by. Then five. Then a full week. Every day FedEx said the same thing—that the package was being held in customs, for reasons unknown.

I briefly entertained the suspicion that some government authority—American, Brazilian, or otherwise—was responsible for this delay because they knew something, but I held on to the far likelier explanation that it was just one of those coincidental bureaucratic annoyances.

By this point, Laura was very reluctant to discuss any of this by phone or online, so I didn’t know what exactly was in the package.

Finally, roughly ten days after the package had been sent to me, FedEx delivered it. I tore open the envelope and found two USB thumb drives, along with a typewritten note containing detailed instructions for using various computer programs designed to provide maximum security, as well as numerous passphrases to encrypted email accounts and other programs I had never heard of.

So on May 21 ("roughtly") he gets the USB sticks and the encryption programs and tutorials.

But he told Michael Calderone it was "in March or April" that he set up the encryption software.

Furthermore, Calderone describes Greenwald meeting Poitras "a few months ago" i.e. April. Not May, or he would have said "last month".

Then there's a slightly different account of this story, in Luke Harding's book, evidently based on existing press reports and his interview with Ewan McAllister -- he doesn't get to interview either Greenwald or Poitras for the book from all appearances.

In mid-April, Greenwald received an email from Poitras. It told him to expect a FedEx delivery. Neither of the two parties had communicated much in the interim; Greenwald still hadn't got encryption. But the FEDEx parcel signalled that things were moving and that, as Greenwald puts it, 'the eagle had landed'.

The package arrived; inside it were two thumb drivs. Greenwald at first imagined that the USB sticks contained top-secret documents 'wrapped in layers of encryption and Linux programs'. In fct, they contained a security kit, allowing Greenwald to install a bsaic encrypted chat program."

So in Greenwald's book, the email comes from "the tech person" on May 11 to expect a package. In Harding's book, the email comes from Poitras herself but earlier, in April. Of course, both could be true, and Greenwald is leaving Poitras out of the story now for some reason, just like he's leaving out Appelbaum's name.

(BTW, this is an awful shaggy dog story about the FedEx being stopped at customs, and it's hard to know what it's really all about -- perhaps it's meant to establish that both US and Brazilian customs had the means of communicating with Snowden in their hands in the mail system, and evidence of Greenwald's involvement with an NSA hacker that early, yet let it go through, i.e. are to blame in some way.)

It seems there is a discrepancy in the descriptions about when Greenwald met with Poitras first to really discuss all this with her as well.

In Harding's book, this is the account:

"In late March she returned to the States. From here she sent Greenwald a message, suggesting that they meet face to face, without any electronics.

Greenwald was already due to fly to New York to give a talk to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim civil rights organisation. The pair met in the lobby of Greenwald's hotel, the Marriott in Yonkers -- an unlikely, 'horrible' venue for what was to be the first step of the most significant leak i nUS intelligence history.

Poitras showed Greenwald two emails. She didn't know the unknown source had already tried to reach Greenwald himself. Was he real? Or an imposter, trying to entrap her?

[...]

In another email Snowden said that the 'hard part' of pulling the document was over, but that a different dangerous phase was beginning. "I could sense the stakes," says Poitras. 'He was very worried about his friends and family being implicated. He didn't want to remain anonymous. He didn't want other people to take the fall.'

[...]

By late spring 2013, the idea of a conclusive meeting was in the air.

'I need six to eight weeks to get ready to do this," Snowden wrote.

What exactly the 'this' meant was still tantalising unclear. Poitras returned to Berlin. Greenwald returned to Rio. He got on with his life. The shadowy source wsa interesting. But -- as is so often the case with journalistic leads -- the 'this coul dhave been less lluring than it seemed: one of journalism's many false starts. 'I didn't sit around fantasising about it. He could be fake," Greenwald says. As the weeks went by it seemed less rather than more likely that something would happen. 'I gvae it almost no thought. I really wasn't focused on it at all.'

So the CAIR speech in Yonkers is April 20.

Here's Greenwald's version now:

On January 28, 2013, I emailed C. to say that I would get someone to help me with encryption and hopefully would have it done within the next day or so.

C. replied the next day: "That’s great news! If you need any further help or have questions in the future, you will always be welcome to reach out. Please accept my sincerest thanks for your support of communications privacy! Cincinnatus."

But yet again, I did nothing, consumed as I was at the time with other stories, and still unconvinced that C. had anything worthwhile to say. There was no conscious decision to do nothing. It was simply that on my always too-long list of things to take care of, installing encryption technology at the behest of this unknown person never became pressing enough for me to stop other things and focus on it.

C. and I thus found ourselves in a Catch-22. He was unwilling to tell me anything specific about what he had, or even who he was and where he worked, unless I installed encryption. But without the enticement of specifics, it was not a priority to respond to his request and take the time to install the program.

In the face of my inaction, C. stepped up his efforts. He produced a ten-minute video entitled PGP for Journalists. Using software that generates a computer voice, the video instructed me in an easy, step-by-step fashion how to install encryption software, complete with charts and visuals.

Still I did nothing. It was at that point that C., as he later told me, become frustrated. "Here am I," he thought, "ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life, to hand this guy thousands of Top Secret documents from the nation’s most secretive agency—a leak that will produce dozens if not hundreds of huge journalistic scoops. And he can’t even be bothered to install an encryption program."

That’s how close I came to blowing off one of the largest and most consequential national security leaks in US history.

The next I heard of any of this was ten weeks later. On April 18, I flew from my home in Rio de Janeiro to New York, where I was scheduled to give some talks on the dangers of government secrecy and civil liberties abuses done in the name of the War on Terror.


On landing at JFK Airport, I saw that I had an email message from Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker, which read: "Any chance you’ll be in the US this coming week? I’d love to touch base about something, though best to do in person." [...]

At JFK, reading Laura’s email, I replied immediately: "Actually, just got to the US this morning. . . . Where are you?" We arranged a meeting for the next day, in the lobby at my hotel in Yonkers, a Marriott, and found seats in the restaurant, At Laura’s insistence, we moved tables twice before beginning our conversation to be sure that nobody could hear us. Laura then got down to business. She had an "extremely important and sensitive matter" to discuss, she said, and security was critical.

Note the difference between the first version, where Poitras sends an email in March, and Greenwald tells her plenty in advance that he is coming to NYC for lectures (and we know that was April 20 -- there was a subsequent one at the Massachusetts ACLU as well) -- and the second version, where Greenwald lands in New York already and then Laura simultaneously contacts him. None of this "gosh, whaddya know, what a coincence, I'm here already" in the first version that he has now in his own version.

Why?

Maybe Harding got the month wrong. Maybe Greenwald wanted to play down the fact that lots more communication was taking place in March when Snowden is about to steal documents.

 Even if Harding got the month wrong, there's still the sequencing -- that first comes and email from Poitras, then comes the meeting later -- not nearly simultaneously.

Were there two meetings with Poitras? That seems unlikely but could be researched.

Most likely the two were repeatedly in touch via email, and in fact the encryption did happen earlier and they really did talk to Snowden substantively in March and April.  And that means they had more input into what he stole, and he had more input into what they should leak first, than any of them are telling us.

Related articles

5 key takeaways from Glenn Greenwald's new book about the NSA

Idiot Wind: A Compendium of Snowden, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum Topics

Glenn Greenwald Changes His Date Again on First Snowden Meeting

Glenn Greenwald's Pulse-Pounding Tale of Breaking the Snowden Leaks

The (misguided) passion of Glenn Greenwald

Wow! Cincinnatus in Honolulu -- Is This a Break in the Snowden Story?

I'm not going to get my hopes up, as Public Keys can be faked and manipulated for various purposes as I discovered and reported here.

But let's take at face value an intriguing report from Cryptome, a site maintained by John Young, a crypto conspiracy crank who quarreled with Julian Assange and now occasionally publishes exposes of the Snowdenista gangs.

On 14 May, like a lot of us Snowden-watchers, Cryptome noticed the use of this code name "Cincinnatus" first mentioned in relationship to Snowden by Greenwald in this book (that's as far as we can tell).

Greenwald then handily ties Cinncinatus to Verax, the other nym that Snowden used in his communications. Greenwald doesn't say how he knows it's the same person; he says it *is* the same person (and he may come to regret that!). Likely, he validated this in person in a meeting with Laura Poitras.

First, Cryptome searched public key dbases and found that the name Cinncinatus (and there were probably more than one as it is a common one) was tied to lavabit.com -- the service Snowden used for his encrypted email which closed down when the feds came calling with a search warrant.

Young did a simple Google search most likely and tied the name [email protected] to a Crypto Party -- of all things. He is listed as the contact person for registering for a Crypto Party in Honolulu on December 11, 2012.

The Crypto Kids such as this enthusiastic blogger think this is just wonderful, as they see it as endorsement of Snowden of their methods, their tools, and their radical movement for maximum encryption -- which means of course maximum lack of unaccountability and license to organize radical movements without law enforcement being able to monitor them.

Here's what Wireless Fantasy writes about this revelation, first referencing the "PGP for Journalists" tutorial which Snowden made:

Having created this tutorial, whoever planned the event in Oahu fits the profile of Snowden, used Lavabit as he was known to do, and one would be hard-pressed to prove the shared name and location is merely a coincidence. In his new book No Place to Hide, Greenwald produces a paragraph written by Snowden to Laura Poitras, which explains what Conor Friedersdorf has termed his “other motive” for leaking:

The shock of this initial period [after the first revelations] will provide the support needed to build a more equal internet, but this will not work to the advantage of the average person unless science outpaces law. By understanding the mechanisms through which our privacy is violated, we can win here. We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search through universal laws, but only if the technical community is willing to face the threat and commit to implementing over-engineered solutions. In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man.

Right. We would be hard-pressed to prove this is merely coincidental, right you are!

These movement people are in so deep they don't get that it implicates Snowden and his friends in collusion in ways they'd rather not talk about or have public.

The Crypto Party is a movement organizing tool popularized by people like AsherWolf and other radical hackers which draws from old Marxist-Leninist movement ideals, people and methods; Occupy, of course; and the culture-jamming of the latter-day anarchist hacker movements. The goal is to create play-pretend front activities that look like they are just "helping ordinary people" learn to encrypt their communications better so The Man, or their jealous ex-boyfriend, can't hack them. But of course, it's a way of recruiting and training people for the cadre movement seeking absolute encryption and anarchist goals as well (i.e. overthrowing the state, capitalism, democratic government as we know it, etc.)

Whatever you may think of the Crypto Party -- and you can tell I don't think much, having followed it through its various fake permutations, including when it even attracted grant money in Europe and involved more mainstream groups, as fronts always do -- here's the thing:

THIS particular Crypto Party was in -- of all places -- Honolulu, Hawaii.

At a time when Snowden was in Hawaii, too.

The blogger quoted by the organizer of the Crypto Party -- surprise, surprise, an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist named Parker Higgins is asking frantically:

Wait wait wait wait wait. Is this Snowden quoting my blog for an event in December 2012? http://t.co/Ihg6TJlmw9

— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 15, 2014

 Well, you know what my next question is, then:

@xor Is this how Snowden got that EFF sticker for his laptop, at your Crypto Party in December 2012?

— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) May 17, 2014

BTW, it's odd that Parker immediately thinks "Snowden" is blogging -- as a hacker himself, surely he knows Cryptome is John Young.

Remember the Spring Break of Code? We should have kept looking.

Now, there are several possibilities.

1) Snowden himself even came to this Crypto Party in person, incognito, to learn more hacking methods to steal NSA documents.

2) Snowden was already known to some of the people there, who helped him.

3) Cinninatus is another person, likely Jacob Appelbaum of Tor, or some other Torean who wants to be anonymous, who helped Snowden -- maybe in the hacker movement, but maybe even in the NSA himself.

4) Cincinnatus is merely Jason Axelson, the guy who wrote the original notice -- except Jason is at HiCap and Maker Space, and Cincinnatus is described as being at Tor.

5) Cinninatus is operated by multiple people.

Guess who else was at this December 11, 2012 Crypto Party? Runa Sandvik, another Tor developer, who also coincidentally was in Hong Kong three weeks before Snowden arrived with his stolen NSA documents to pass them to journalists.

I suppose only Greenwald knows if the public key he can see now on Cryptome is the same one that was generated for him to read Cinninatus' mail.

(Or was it overwritten with the new key generated the day Greenwald's book came out?)

What does all this mean?

That the Snowdenistas were in touch with Snowden LONG before they admit. And BEFORE he stole some of his most devastating documents.

That implicates them in the theft of the documents -- they could have given him ideas for what to steal (always my theory from the beginning) and also literally helped with the tools.

In December 2012, a number of things happened:

o this Crypto Party was held

o the Foundation for a Free Press was formed by John Perry Barlow, founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, close associate and funder of Julian Assange, for the express purpose of funding WikiLeaks and other leak activity. In December 2012, when it was announced, Poitras and Appelbaum were already members; later Appelbaum was added as a consultant or advisor and Snowden was added. It explicitly raises money for Snowden's work now.

o Appelbaum gave his talk at the 29th Chaos Computer Congress recruiting NSA members to leave "the dark side" i.e. the government and come work for the "transparency" and "privacy" movement.

o Snowden first contacted Laura Poitras, and tried to contact Greenwald. Appelbaum, who is Poitras' long-time tech helper and a representative of WikiLeaks, likely helped.

All of the tools listed for discussion and development at the Honolulu Crypto Party were those used by Snowden and his enablers -- the Tor Browser Bundle, Tails (a further encryption before using the encryption of Tor), OTR (off the record, an encrypted chat program), etc.

Yes, you could also say of Snowden that he used "the Internet" and there are any number of Internet related meetings in Hawaii, and it doesn't mean the people at them are in collusion with an anti-state hacker.

Except, an awful lot of the same names and tools come together in this one convergence, so there's likely something going on.

The reason geeks like to meet in person instead of just chatting at the IRC which is their preferred native habitat is to do things like build in-person trust and exchange public keys and other crypto information that they don't want to have available online, in order to create the "air gap" needed off the wire.

To be studied further...

The passage from Greenwald's book:

On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him.

The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. ...

The email began: “The security of people’s communications is very important to me,” and its stated purpose was to urge me to begin using PGP encryption so that “Cincinnatus” could communicate things in which, he said, he was certain I would be interested. ...

In this email, “Cincinnatus” said he had searched everywhere for my PGP “public key,” a unique code set that allows people to receive encrypted email, but could not find it. From this, he concluded that I was not using the program and told me, “That puts anyone who communicates with you at risk. I’m not arguing that every communication you are involved in be encrypted, but you should at least provide communicants with that option.” ...

C.’ s email did not move me to action. Because I had become known for covering stories the rest of the media often ignores, I frequently hear from all sorts of people offering me a “huge story,” and it usually turns out to be nothing. And at any given moment I am usually working on more stories than I can handle. So I need something concrete to make me drop what I’m doing in order to pursue a new lead. Despite the vague allusion to “people out there” I “would like to hear from,” there was nothing in C.’ s email that I found sufficiently enticing. I read it but did not reply. ...

After the “BOUNDLESS INFORMANT” article was published , Laura and I planned to meet at Snowden’s hotel. But before leaving my room, out of nowhere, as I sat on my hotel bed, I remembered Cincinnatus, my anonymous email correspondent from six months earlier, who had bombarded me with requests to install PGP so that he could provide me with important information. Amid the excitement of everything that was happening, I thought that perhaps he, too, had an important story to give me. Unable to remember his email name, I finally located one of his old messages by searching for keywords.

“Hey: good news,” I wrote to him. “I know it took me a while, but I’m finally using PGP email. So I’m ready to talk any time if you’re still interested.” I hit “send.”

Soon after I arrived at his room, Snowden said, with more than a small trace of mockery, “By the way, that Cincinnatus you just emailed, that’s me.”

It took me a few moments to process this and regain my composure. That person, many months earlier , who desperately tried to get me to use email encryption … was Snowden. My first contact with him hadn’t been in May, just a month earlier, but many months ago. Before contacting Laura about the leaks, before contacting anyone, he had tried to reach me

And there was another passage which explains he got a package May 11 from "a tech helper" (likely Appelbaum) with the tools to make the connection to Snowden securely, but that it was still "six weeks" before he actually met Snowden in person.

UPDATE: Here's Parker Higgins blog about CryptoParty from August 2012, linked in the Cryptome article. Parker, an EFF operative who is active in crypt circles, has spoked at Remember the Forth and at a "privacy" rally in Berlin is already spinning this, denying any involvement -- although of course he is friends with all the players, including the people who organized the Crypto Party -- which he enthusiastically endorsed.

 

@catfitz sooooo what makes this an EFF CryptoParty? First I'd heard of it was on Cryptome

— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014

@catfitz But also: if I blogged about it I organized it? That makes actually zero sense

— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014

@catfitz Cryptome quoting Cincinnatus, Cincinnatus quoting me. Young alleges C is Snowden; if true, Snowden quoting me.

— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014

@xor So are you confirming for us that Greenwald's Cincinnatus who is Snowden is the same Cincinnatus organizing the Crypto Party? Thanks!

— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) May 17, 2014

@catfitz No idea, and no I was not at this event. They quoted from a blog post I wrote about similar events.

— Parker Higgins (@xor) May 17, 2014

I think is a case of young Parker first tweeting the "wait wait wait" tweet because he was so excited and thrilled to be one degree of separation from Snowden, and have Snowden quote his blog on the meaning of Crypto Party, that he didn't realize the implications -- this puts Snowdenistas and Snowden together BEFORE he steals and therefore implicates them. Second, even when I challenged him -- because of the implications -- he was still quick to make a link between Cincinnatus mentioned by Cryptome in Greenwald's book (who Greenwald links to Verax and hence equates to Snowden) -- and the organizer of the Crypto Party. He could have immediately begun denying it, as lawyers might have advised.

 

FURTHER UPDATES:

o This blogger Eugen Kabelmast wrote about the coincidence 2 days ago. He failed to note I was the one who discovered the Rubik's cube tweet. He also immediately makes a Spring Break of Code connection, although there isn't necessarily one, other than that the same crowd may have been involved in both. SBOC was in March/April 2013.

The same announcement for this Crypto Party is mentioned in a Maker Space Google Groups by the same Jason:

Jason Axelson

12/3/12

There will be a CryptoParty December 11th at HI Capacity at 6pm. Runa S. from the Tor team will be speaking along with a few others (more speakers are welcome!).

 

Here are the details:

https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/Oahu#Potential_Workshops_for_12.2F11_Cryptoparty

 

If you plan to attend (or want to speak) RSVP on this thread or with cincinnatus (.a.) lavabit.com

 

Jason

 

Maker Space is also where the friends of Chelse Manning and her boyfriend were involved, along with long-time supporter Jacob Appelbaum.

 

Nobody seems to be saying the obvious that Cincinnatus@lavabit could be Jason's own address. I minded the Maker Space stuff in Tokyo for signs of Snowden, forgot to look at Honolulu's!

 

o Cinncinatus posts a notice and discussion of the ARD interview with Snowden. He's also worried about the government searching every labavit email.

 

Read my new book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack on Kindle or Scribd.

Reason Can't Tell the Difference Between Technolibertarianism and Technocommunism

So eager is Reason magazine to find possible allies among the entpreneurial technocommunists in the new "sharing economy" that they peer at the collective and miss the forest for the trees. "All Hail the Share Economy," they say, though they of all people should know better.

Except, as time wears on, I've become more and more disgusted with Reason, which seems to become more and more an exaggerated version of Ayn Rand with each passing year -- it has an ugly cast of characters among the writers and commenters who aggressively -- viciously -- stump for drug legalization beyond all reason, gun rights beyond all reason, capitalism uber alles without regulation, and so on. They are now a kind of caricature. They never seem to recognize when the extension of their endless rights and liberties encroach on others and thus take them away worse than any state because of how hard it is to fight non-state actors with institutions disintegrating.

I used to read Reason regularly because it seemed to be good on the communist countries, back in the 1970s and 1980s. It was good at debunking the hippie left. But it is so extreme -- Ron Paul extreme -- that it is now hideous to read. The spirit of it has changed. Reason has gone, as such. In its place is Zeal.

When we get to the Internet of Things, this will get worse, i.e. more collectivized, more unfair.

My reply:

Technolibertarianism and technocommunism appear similar and intertwine and some entrepreneurs try to exploit both, so they are hard to tell apart sometimes.

Reason should stop being snowed by the idea that this is capitalism or "redistributed capitalism" away from multi-nationals. What it is, is communist-style oligarchy.

First, your property is collectivized -- AirBnB, GetAround etc. collectivize everybody's rooms, car time, dinner table seat, etc. and own it all and put it on *their* platform that *they code and control*. You no longer own your property, or to be more precise, the value of your property as yours alone has now been made nil, and you know only have value to the extent that you particulate in the coded collective.

Next, in exchange for a substantial percentage of your income from the transactions -- you know, like share-cropping, you are allowed to rent out part of your collectivized property to the collectivized public (who is now using these services as "cheaper" than regular motels, rental cars etc in the regulated economy).

It's not that you yourself decide to rent out your room or sell a meal in your home and use a neutral platform or tool under your control to do so; instead, you submit to the collectivization of the platform owner. He wins and makes big money. You don't, you're a mouse trying to take crumbs from your own property.

Worse, as the coders' collectivation machine gets more and more data points -- you know, yourself and your former-property -- there is more and more competition of sorts, or rather favouritism in the "reputation economy." Reputation is supposed to manage everything. What that means is the worst sort of self-criticism circle as in the Soviet Union or China -- and the worst sort of anonymous denunciation as in those police states. Indeed, it's small wonder that the collectivization platform adopts those police-state tactics. So just as on Yelp, one yuppie malcontent can ruin the business of a family struggling to run a little restaurant forever and have no recourse, so in the "sharing economy" bad reviews drive away your business and those who know how to best manipulate the gamification of reputation win. Hideous.

Then, precisely because it *isn't* regulated and not part of the free-enterprise economy, middlemen appear just as they did in the communist systems and begin to harvest large numbers of rooms, either they get welfare apartments, or they take various rooms they'd have to submit to a regulatory system that would make equals of everyone under the law, and they capitalize on the affordances of the platform to make more money than honest hotel owners who submit to regulations on safety, insurance, etc.

You pretend that these systems like city agencies regulating taxis or hotels are corrupt or political patronage havens. But that's because you haven't studied the middlemen that emerge in the "share economy" and their exploitative methods which all have less transparency. The courts asked for a simple thing: a list of the tenants and rooms or apartments. Middlemen tried to hide behind customer privacy to avoid having to show whether they had legal access to the properties, whether they were sub-sub-letting illegally in violation of a lease, and so on. The judges said the customer data could retain its privacy; what they needed to see were numbers, generics, and the nature of the properties. And this is all still in play as unaccountable middlemen refuse to deal.

The services ruthlessly suppress customer complaints; customer service is their weak point.Technolibertarianism and technocommunism appear similar and intertwine and some entrepreneurs try to exploit both, so they are hard to tell apart sometimes.

Reason should stop being snowed by the idea that this is capitalism or "redistributed capitalism" away from multi-nationals. What it is, is communist-style oligarchy.

First, your property is collectivized -- AirBnB, GetAround etc. collectivize everybody's rooms, car time, dinner table seat, etc. and own it all and put it on *their* platform that *they code and control*. You no longer own your property, or to be more precise, the value of your property as yours alone has now been made nil, and you know only have value to the extent that you particulate in the coded collective.

Next, in exchange for a substantial percentage of your income from the transactions -- you know, like share-cropping, you are allowed to rent out part of your collectivized property to the collectivized public (who is now using these services as "cheaper" than regular motels, rental cars etc in the regulated economy).

It's not that you yourself decide to rent out your room or sell a meal in your home and use a neutral platform or tool under your control to do so; instead, you submit to the collectivization of the platform owner. He wins and makes big money. You don't, you're a mouse trying to take crumbs from your own property.

Then, precisely because it *isn't* regulated and not part of the free-enterprise economy, middlemen appear just as they did in the communist systems and begin to harvest large numbers of rooms, either they get welfare apartments, or they take various rooms they'd have to submit to a regulatory system that would make equals of everyone under the law, and they capitalize on the affordances of the platform to make more money than honest hotel owners who submit to regulations on safety, insurance, etc.

You pretend that these systems like city agencies regulating taxis or hotels are corrupt or political patronage havens. But that's because you haven't studied the middlemen that emerge in the "share economy" and their exploitative methods which all have less transparency. The courts asked for a simple thing: a list of the tenants and rooms or apartments.

Middlemen tried to hide behind customer privacy to avoid having to show whether they had legal access to the properties, whether they were sub-sub-letting illegally in violation of a lease, and so on. The judges said the customer data could retain its privacy; what they needed to see were numbers, generics, and the nature of the properties. And this is all still in play as unaccountable middlemen refuse to deal.

The services ruthlessly suppress customer complaints; customer service is their weak point.

Related articles

Disgraceful Position that Reason and Cato Take on Copyright

The Hot Breath of Silicon Valley is Breathing on the Neck of the East Coast Establishment

It's fine if you're a Technolibertarian, just don't pretend it's progressive

Are You Confused? Here, I Will Explain Everything to You About Politics!

So-called "Sharing Economy" - Middlemen not letting go of their share

Anil Dash, You're in the Way of Progress

Technolibertarianism

How Google money is helping turn the political right against strong copyrights

Who built the internet: the corporation or the state?

Three Hard Questions Every Editor, Book Reviewer and TV Host Needs to Ask of Greenwald on His New Book

I've spent the last year writing reams of blog posts and finally an entire book -- Privacy for Thee and Not for Me -- about Snowden and his adversarial journalists, led by Glenn Greenwald, his hacker supporters, led by Appelbaum, and his cast of fellow travelers led by WikiLeaks Julian Assange.

We critics of Snowden have nothing of the resources that Greenwald has in mainstream and alternative media and intelligentsia opinion has been so whipsawed by them it's hard to have a normal debate about this subject.

Even so, I'll try yet again and try to boil it down to three bite-size sound byes.

There are three hard questions that every media person reviewing Greenwald or talk show host interviewing him need to ask, and not flinch from asking:

1. Why did Snowden go to Moscow? And no, he did not have to go there. Be ready to go the second and third round on this by reading this blog post with the time-table.

Snowden deliberately took a job at Booz Allen he held only for a very short time to steal certain documents and then left that job May 18, 2013. He didn't go to Russia until June 23! So let's not be children. Let's ask ourselves why Snowden CHOSE to go to Russia instead of the many other places he could have gone in the MONTH before that.

If he had his heart set on Hong Kong for various reasons (and we haven't heard them all), then he already knew by June 11th that the Chinese authorities were NOT going to give him asylum despite his bringing to them of hot stuff from the NSA which he deliberately leaked to them on the eve of Obama's meeting with the Chinese, to harm relations and up the ante for his own value as a defector.

So he still had 10 days or so to get the hell out of Dodge once China fell through and go directly to Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador or Iceland. There was even a plane to take him to Iceland. If Iceland also fell through, he can't claim that Latin American countries did. We have no proof of that. Fidel Castrol himself said it wasn't true Cuba was intimidated. There were still other countries. He could have flown directly to them on May 18th to ANY of them and put some facts on the ground; Iceland would find it hard to deny his application process at least.

BUT HE CHOSE TO GO TO RUSSIA. And that's because he oriented toward Moscow in the first place, thinking they were great because they could "stand up to America" and because WikiLeaks strongly advised him to go there. It has said this openly and recently.

Let's not get distracted about why whistleblowers who leak state secrets -- you know, like the information about what we are hacking of China's -- which isn't anything to do about privacy for Americans -- and please, spare as any baloney about economic espionage. That's not what Snowden brought to the Chinese; he brought URLs of what we were hacking in China.

2. What documents or verbal accounts or information or ideas, willingly or unwillingly, did Snowden give to the Russians and what trade did he make for asylum? And no, don't accept bristling hostility and distraction by insisting there are "no facts" of any of this. Keep asking. Be persistent. Why? Because Snowden deliberately brought the Chinese documents to make himself attractive to be given asylum as a defector; he offered documents to Brazil if they would take him; he offered documents to Germany. We all know he made these offers AFTER he already ostensibly turned over all the documents to journalists. So if he can do this for China, Brazil, and Germany, what, he can't do this for Russia to get asylum where he actually did get asylum? Again, let's not be children here. Let's use a little parallel construction and conceptual thinking here instead of rigid rejectionism about any line of reasoning concerning Snowden's treason.

He did it once for China; he could do it again for Russia. Did he?

3. Now that he's in Russia, just what is Snowden's real service to the Russians, willingly or unwillingly? Why has no Russian journalist ever been able to interview him? Why has not even a Western supporter, lawyer, or insider journalist been able to physically see him for six months in Moscow? What's up? Why haven't we heard anything from his Russian lawyer lately? Is there a deal in the works with the US government to turn him over?

There are many more complicated questions one can ask about the time-line -  which has famously changed with every re-telling (and now, I suppose, that Greenwald has put it in stone in a written book, it might be settled). But it's worth going over again, asking the dates of when Greenwald -- and Poitras and Appelbaum -- really first dealt with Snowden.

Few people will likely get past Greenwald's bluster, bluff and bullshit. But few try. These three questions have never been asked and no one has ever really had it out with him. I hope some will try. Because he hasn't had any good answers to these questions and they really are crucial to unravelling his constructed narrative.

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Dear Gen. Rogers, Why Are You Catering Only to the Snowdenistas?

I'm vexed by what I hear so far coming from the new guy at the NSA.

I feel he is playing to the Snowdenista lobby and not realizing that they are a fraction of ordinary Americans -- or even realizing there are anti-Snowdenista lobbies, too, he should cater to more.

I'm glad to hear he's locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. That's a start.

But I'm honestly not impressed with palaver about transparency because I don't need transparency in the superficial, PR way that it might be given -- or for that matter, even in some deeper way (and I can't imagine how you do that at a mass, public level).

The vote on whether to reform the NSA by Congressional legislation was already had, General. The Snowdenistas lost. To be sure, Obama's executive reform committee pushed some things through, but that wasn't democratic and some of the people in the group had radical agendas (Cass Sunstein, for example).  These people do not represent anything but extreme constituents -- they shouldn't get to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

We have Congress, we have the courts, we have all kinds of internal procedures. What I'd much rather hear about is why Snowden isn't indicted, and what the plan is to either return him (likely futile) or limit his damage. A frank admission that there IS damage is in order, given that one of the chief propaganda points of the Snowdenistas is that "there is no damage."

Well, at least Gen. Rogers said this:

Rogers said some NSA staff were "confused" by the onslaught of criticism because a series of official reviews found that the agency had for the most part abided by U.S. law.

But he acknowledged that the NSA's internal security, which allowed Snowden to remove thousands of secret documents, had been too lax.

"Clearly we should not have allowed this to happen," Rogers said.

I'll say.

And they're right to be "confused" because they haven't done anything wrong.

I really mean it about the smallness of the Snowden lobby -- way, way outsized by its voice in social media in particular.

There aren't "lots" of Congressmen who push the Snowden agenda. There's...Ron Wyden of Oregon. And a few others. It's nothing like Benghazi. In fact, why isn't there a Benghazi-type GOP backlash on Snowden? In part, it's because the Ron Paul right that backs Snowden has paralyzed that quarter. It's hard to get people in the middle or at the center to become activists. But that's what is needed.

It's not as if "all" the press is up and arms about Snowden, either. There are about...six regular "adversarial journalists" on this -- Greenwald, Gelman and the rest. A few tech press regulars. And the rest have lost interest and moved on to Ukraine, you know, that victim of Russia, the dictatorship to which Snowden fled?

Or the kidnapped girls in Nigeria -- in a setting where fighting terrorism for everybody got harder due to Snowden. Thanks.

What I'd rather see from the NSA guy is a frank and full judgement of Snowden. We're not really getting that. At least are getting the basics of knowing right from wrong because he says Snowden shouldn't have taken these documents and people who have issues should go to their superiors, not the media.

It's exasperating. Because there is no point person on the Hill or anywhere who can keep pushing the Snowden critique, who can keep saying, every day, as this former cabinet member at least said once for Edward Jay Epstein -- there are three options here -- Snowden is either a Russian agent, a Chinese agent, or a Sino-Russian agent. Not some fourth thing.

All of this may just have gotten a lot harder with this:

 

This may be the end of my blog and tweets. #WINNING http://t.co/EzPy2OH12x

— John Schindler (@20committee) May 9, 2014

Just awful. I can't imagine life without @20committee.His blog is really the political home of liberal centrality that is missing anywhere else -- see the excellent piece he did on Benghazi for example.

What is so needed in the Snowden affair -- precisely because nobody on the Hill or at the White House or State or the intelligence agencies supply it! -- is a steady stream of "No, that's not what it means" and "no, that's not what it says" and "no, you don't get the context."

On each Snowden leak, Schindler is able to comment with that kind of wisdom and knowledge. Yes, there are others like Tom Nichols but he has a particular expertise on Russia and tradecraft. I just wonder how this civic job will get done that Schindler has voluntarily filled -- and with nothing but harassment from trolls and creeps much of the time, not to mention wannabee intellectual has-beens and never-wills in the progressive set.

It really is vital to be able to comment on leaks to frame them properly and provide the counter-narrative given the huge propensity for Greenwald and co. to distract, obfuscate, confuse, and try to bring into being realities through virtual language manipulation -- also known as "lying."

Indeed, if any "transparency" is needed from the new general of the NSA, it's not about "why we do what we do" -- which is fine in my book -- but "why these adversarial journalists are misleading the public when they make the claims they do based on Snowden."

I'd  like daily counter-propaganda -- counter-intelligence -- not Kumbayah sessions where we try to be more open with our feelings about things.

I realize why the government has to do this muffle -- although it's ridiculous to do it a year after the leaks and they shouldn't cast such a wide net with it and I hope they'll reconsider or restrict it or write some important exceptions.

They want to be able legally, so their lawyers explain to them, to claim that this remains secret material that should have stayed classified and shouldn't be leaked. If they become casual on that point and speak about leaked materials as if it were "normal" that they were leaked, then they lose their claim to stolen property, so to speak. That seems to be what it's about, as it was for CableGate.

To which I can only say, come on guys, finish up with the indictment, and then this issue will become to diminish.

Related articles

"Privacy for Me and Not for Thee": My Book on Snowden is Out at Amazon and Scribd

Expose the Snowdenistas

FOCUS | The Day We Revealed Edward Snowden's Identity

Glenn Greenwald's Very Pointed Response To Matt Lauer's Snowden Question

Snowden Follows His TV Stunt with Putin with a Cloying, Self-Serving Op-Ed Piece

Is Snowden a spy?

Edward Lucas "Snowdenista" piece in the Wall Street Journal is the most dishonest thing you'll read today

No, It's Not a Joke @zunguzungu

This was appalling:

 

 

The advice you get from billboards on how to discipline your children in Texas is kind of intense. pic.twitter.com/xAqc6Lgwyy

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) May 12, 2014

 

Imagine the perfect state of nihilist WikiLeaks Occupy hatred you'd have to be in to see a useful public service announcement on a billboard designed to prevent the drowning of little kids as something overly "intense" about "disciplining children" in "Texas" (hate, hate).

As if keeping your children in hand in the water is about "disciplining" and not just basic safety and good parenting.

This nasty-assed swipe from a non-parent was designed to be a statement about Texas conservatism  -- you know, Bible-thumping and getting in your face about drowning kids.

It was supposed to strike a blow for freedom for all children living under such "oppression" and being "disciplined" in such a fashion -- you know, like the way they are "forced" to learn about creationism and not just evolutionism.

What an ass. If you don't know who Aaron Bady is -- he is the Assange-explainer who gained wild Internet fame among the cognoscenti when his wonky graduate student's blog analyzing Assange's anarchist writings suddenly got attention with Cablegate. If you thought he was just an interesting scholar, you'd be wrong, because he went on to join the ranks of the Occupy forces in California, championing the most violent Occupy in America, in Oakland, and justify their violence, mayhem, craziness, and Marxism-Leninism -- ardently. And he continues in the ranks of the Snowdenistas flogging the Chomsky/Derrida/Greenwald line on this.

This type of comment from him is typical of the "cultural critique" he thinks he brings to the world on Twitter. Nobody ever pushes back. I do. That leads him to pretend it was a joke. Of course it wasn't a joke. It was a dog whistle -- and not a dog whistle but a human whistle to round up his posse and ridicule Texas born-agains.

 

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