This is a terrible idea, this notion that you have to hire hackers to be cutting edge or fight other hackers among non-state actors and state actors among our enemies.
Gen. Michael Hayden had the same bad idea talking about the need to hire hackers.
When are they going to figure out that if you hire hackers like Manning and Snowden, well, you get hacked, guys?
Why do grown men -- generals -- think that 19-year-old girls with nicknames like Solid are the answer to the challenges of our hostile environment?
These are like parents letting their 9-year-old set their VCR and set up their Internet connections -- learned helplessness and stupidity and letting the inmates run the asylum.
Are any of these people professionally asked to sign any ethics statements in professional societies in their industry? No. Do they sign oaths of loyalty upon employment? Yes, but it does little good with people like Snowden who think they are literally above the law.
The choices offered in this article are all ultimately false. The government can offer high-paid salaries for coders just as they do for certain other roles, and not to uneducated ethics-free 19-year-olds but to 35-year-old people in corporations with clean employment records.
They need to learn how to recruit and keep such people by invoking a sense of mission. Look, would you rather code G+ and put in features like dazzle on photos of people's cats? Or work on facial recognition in Facebook so people can tag photos of their frat buddies faster? Or would you rather work on identification of terrorists in crowds from videos and photos online? Your choice.
To be sure, there's a pause for why Solid won't take the job:
Even if DOD recruiters could hire a hacker like Solid into its ranks, Snowden’s long shadow could drive her out. She would be under constant scrutiny, not only while working for DOD or a DOD contractor, but if she left government work for private industry; she would be taking the government’s secrets with her.
A person with ethics and a sense of mission will not mind this scrutiny, however -- only an ethics-free hacker with a sense of themselves above the law on their own anarchist mission would mind.
So look for better people.
Then there's this:
One of the issues that the Snowden event raises and illustrates is the heavy reliance that the Defense Department has historically placed on private contractors in building its cyber army” Ferguson said. “There’s a practical reason for this; private industry can pay more than government pay scales often permit."
Well, change the pay scales then. Have a special act of Congress. Do whatever you have to do to fight this war. Don't be a bunch of little bitches.
One of the issues that the Snowden event raises and illustrates is the heavy reliance that the Defense Department has historically placed on private contractors in building its cyber army” Ferguson said. “There’s a practical reason for this; private industry can pay more than government pay scales often permit - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/09/Pentagon-s-New-Army-Convention-Hackers#sthash.4pHngZx0.dpuf
Even if DOD recruiters could hire a hacker like Solid into its ranks, Snowden’s long shadow could drive her out. She would be under constant scrutiny, not only while working for DOD or a DOD contractor, but if she left government work for private industry; she would be taking the government’s secrets with her. - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/09/Pentagon-s-New-Army-Convention-Hackers#sthash.4pHngZx0.dpuf
Even if DOD recruiters could hire a hacker like Solid into its ranks, Snowden’s long shadow could drive her out. She would be under constant scrutiny, not only while working for DOD or a DOD contractor, but if she left government work for private industry; she would be taking the government’s secrets with her. - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/09/Pentagon-s-New-Army-Convention-Hackers#sthash.4pHngZx0.dpuf
Even if DOD recruiters could hire a hacker like Solid into its ranks, Snowden’s long shadow could drive her out. She would be under constant scrutiny, not only while working for DOD or a DOD contractor, but if she left government work for private industry; she would be taking the government’s secrets with her. - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/09/Pentagon-s-New-Army-Convention-Hackers#sthash.4pHngZx0.dpuf
Even if DOD recruiters could hire a hacker like Solid into its ranks, Snowden’s long shadow could drive her out. She would be under constant scrutiny, not only while working for DOD or a DOD contractor, but if she left government work for private industry; she would be taking the government’s secrets with her. - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/09/Pentagon-s-New-Army-Convention-Hackers#sthash.4pHngZx0.dpuf
Even if DOD recruiters could hire a hacker like Solid into its ranks, Snowden’s long shadow could drive her out. She would be under constant scrutiny, not only while working for DOD or a DOD contractor, but if she left government work for private industry; she would be taking the government’s secrets with her. - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/05/09/Pentagon-s-New-Army-Convention-Hackers#sthash.4pHngZx0.dpuf
The Jester (@th3j35t3r), who is a kind of modern Lone Ranger Internet character on the electronic frontier, has an interesting interview posted in Homeland Security Today. Here's the summary, here's the whole thing.
This article which appeared before the full publication led some people to get the impression that the Jester actually hacked Snowden recently, as he did WikiLeaks in the past, but he didn't claim that; he's just criticizing him. He has a number of useful and interesting things to say, like this:
Much like Bradley "Chelsea" Maninng, or whatever he's calling himself today, Edward Snowden was a person desperate to be somebody, they were both in trusted positions and both had an online presence (as most young people do) except these were guys in positions to provide information to WikiLeaks. I believe, that much like pedophiles groom vulnerable or susceptible children online, so Assange grooms US personnel.
This article claims that the Jester is "former US military"; that's in contradiction to another interview the Jester did (willingly, at least at first) with Rachel Marsden -- which led to more scandal later -- in which he characterized himself as British military with an Anglo-Irish accent. And there's yet another interview where an official claims he was part of Special Forces in Afghanistan. Maybe all these roles are not mutually exclusive.
Certain people have spent a lot of time trying to find the real identity of the Jester, who is a cult hero of sorts, or at least, a contrived cult hero that certain forces want to make into a cult hero (an Army guy has even written a paper on him).
There are three hypotheses for what the Jester is:
o a lone, non-state actor, i.e. a hacker, possibly really former military, who might interact informally from time to time with some elements of military or law-enforcement
o a group of non-state actors taking turns creating the composite character, possibly some who are real past military or law-enforcement
o a group of state actors creating a persona to appear as if a lone or group set of hackers are making progress against our enemies.
Whatever he/they are, the problem with them isn't their views -- which I share nearly identically -- on Snowden, jihadists, and other criminals -- but their methods, some of which are illegal and could be prosecuted under the CFAA -- and rightly so.
I believe serious hacking tools should only be in the hands of the government. And for the literalist script kiddies that harass me by the dozen for this view on Twitter -- does that mean that I believe the government should get to do the "criminal acts" outlined in the CFAA? Yes, I do, because the key is authorized versus unauthorized; it is not criminal then. If it is the democratically-elected government making the call to pursue a suspect using hacking, then that is authorized by definition. And given the real checks and balances we really do have in government, and the separations of power, this really does matter and isn't trivial or contrived.
People don't like that; too bad. The nature of government and authority matter. I'm for picking a liberal democratic government under the rule of law to make authorized "unauthorized" intrusions, i.e. hacking, not bands of ethics-free anarchist hackers trying to overthrow the state making the judgement calls on things like whether they "might" reveal agents' names or not (see Jacob Appelbaum, 30c3).
I don't notice Google or Cisco suing the NSA for "unauthorized access" to their systems using the CFAA, do you? Alright then.
That's not a popular view. I don't care. Grow up and deal with it; this is the crucial issue of our age. Um, no, that doesn't mean that pen testers that a corporation puts in the hands of their white-hat consultant should be banned; it means the weaponized, warrior, serious hacker tools that cause real damage should be treated as the weapons they are and regulated Again, this isn't a popular view really with anyone. Hackers in government don't like it because they defend their tribe's right to have anything they want, in and out of government. Hackers out of government hate it because they want to hack. Some ordinary people who haven't thoughout about this still think there's something thrilling about hacking. As a civilian, I don't think they should just get to do what they want, any more than people should get to do what they want with knives and guns, and they should be regulated. A longer discussion.
The nature of the Jester matters only in terms of this issue: if he is a non-state actor, then his hacking isn't in the hands of the government, and might pose a problem even if he is "on our side". Will he always be? Will he turn his powerful tools not on jihadists or Snowdens, but on people who complain about his use of these tools? That's my concern. Not to mention collateral damage.
Such as to freedom of speech. No liberal likes Westboro; unfortunately, Westboro is lawful under the First Amendment. Nobody has been able to make stalking or harassment challenges stick; only "time, place, and manner" challenges work, and badly. The Jester fills that gap with his own brand of "free expression" and Tango-downs their servers. I'm not for downing servers. The DDoS is not "like" a sit-in. I'm for mounting other civic challenges to the problems of Westboro -- criticial journalism, investigative journalism on their finances, etc. Taking down anyone's servers, even those who seem to deserve it, means all of us have less secure freedom to use our servers for protected free speech.
If the Jester is a state actor, then his persona as a non-state actor continues to blur a distinction that I'd prefer to be made, i.e. I believe serious hacking tools should be in the hands of intelligence and law-enforcement for the purpose of fighting crime and terror, not in the hands of the crypto kids.
But here's the thing.
These agencies, especially in the Obama Administration, have not done their job.
That's why the Jester exists; you have to hand him that.
Obama may have finally caught Bin Ladn, but he let Snowden happen on his watch. Not to mention Manning. Among the many factors that there are to blame for this is the attitude, promoted by Gen. Hayden and others, that the government "has" to hire hackers in order to be "cutting edge". I think that's a terrible idea and keeps leading to cases like Manning and Snowden who turn on the system -- and are heavily recruited by people like Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange to do just that (and on that the Jester and I agree fully). How many more of these will it take before they get the idea that they need to have more quality control and need to stop glorifying hackers and need to build in more protections to these blatant recruitments from the bad guys?
There just isn't enough day-to-day starch on fighting jihadists and Kremlin stooges with proper counterintelligence -- and it's part of Obama's flawed notion that you have to quietly pursue terrorists only with policing methods, and not "declare war" or "glorify them as warriors". That they glorify themselves and declar war on us blatantly never matters for those with this perspective. Ditto the Kremlin ideological gravy train.
But...The entire project of the Jester is meant to glorify hacking as a crusade. If it is just a lone ranger, understood. If it is a group of state actors, then it is problematic. But frankly, it's problematic even if he is only a lone actor given the tacit endorsement he gets from military and law-enforcement.
Here's the problem: neither the Jester, or his fans, or his golf-clappers in government, are interested in having this debate about the legitimacy of the means of struggle against our enemy, or who should possess these means. See above for their policy of glorifying hackers.
I don't think the government can expect to go on having it both ways, i.e. glorifying hackers and then trying to fight the results -- it's called "blow-back."
But -- because there isn't even an indictment for Snowden, or for that matter WikiLeaks, despite crimes obviously committed, that's how you get vigilantes like the Jester. They fill a gap. In fact, one can understand why many men in blue think "thank God for the Jester, he does what we can't get away with in the Obama Administration."
I personally don't care for swinging dicks among former law-enforcement or military in particular (they seem to be the most macho) who act as if civilians cannot understand what they do, or can't have a say in what they do. You find a lot of that on Twitter and places like Second Life. It's a certain type -- often not terribly educated or thoughtful. Perhaps they are men of action who cannot become bogged down in intellectual musings. Understood. But the reason we have civilian oversight of the military is because otherwise, we have juntas and police states.
The insiders' critique of the Jester from former or current hackers is that he doesn't really hack. This is an exotic critique that has to do with hackers' own notion of what they'll accept as "hacking" which is overly narrow and tends to exonerate their tribe. Or they say that he hasn't really done the damage he claims. I'm not in a position to judge, except to say that if the Jester's hacking isn't really all that, in a certain way, so much the better, because otherwise, fighting terror and espionage with serious weaponry has moved to an anarchic non-state sector and is no longer under control of the state, and we already have enough of that. Perhaps this is the ideal state; that the lone ranger Jester is able to hack just a little and just enough to prove a deterrent to our enemies, and a prod on our law-enforcement that can't seem to get it together to fight our enemies.
Vigilantes bore me quickly with their machismo and brittle personalities refusing to debate or accept criticism -- and it's mutual, which is why Jester blocked me nearly instantly after I began to ask a series of hard questions about what he was claiming during the Boston bombing. (He had a claim about a shooter within 6 minutes of the first eye-witness tweet; he had predicted Anonymous would move to bombing the day before the attack.)
He seemed to find out about it awfully quick, which points to sources in law-enforcement, or even actual law-enforcement status -- but he may only be a guy with a police radio tuned in and the time to keep listening -- any of us can and did do this during the Boston terrorism crisis. Recently, the Jester seemed to have early or exclusive news about airports and airplanes -- again, it's a police radio dial most likely. The Jester is the Drudge Report of such things -- some people follow him just for that.
My own guess is that the Jester is just one person, and not a group, or at least, not a very well organized group, because he doesn't post that frequently, given his following and mission and the crucial gap he is filling, and there are long pauses -- as there would be with a real person who had real-life intrusions (a group, especially a government groups, would keep the posts going).
The question of "who is the Jester" and "why he does what he does" and "what he has done" are all uninteresting to me, and unfortunately, take up a lot of an interview where many more interesting questions could have been asked and maybe answered, for example whether he thinks Snowden really has the hacking chops to have hacked what he did, or whether he had help, and whether that help was non-state or state.
All of this hyping of the legend of Jester distracts also from the question of whether we should have such people or not. That's the debate I'm interested in having, not "where/who they are". Of course, we don't get a choice in it. Such people already exist, and function, and the Army writes papers on them. They play catch-up and try to hire and co-opt them; they are them then.
So I'm interested in the higher meta discussion of whether we as a civil society should be pushing back more on this uncivil use of the Internet, and how, and whether ethical coders can be bred outside of the hacker milieu to have ethics and really serve a liberal democratic government and not merely their own tribe.
What I'm most interested is that a figure like the Jester or his avid backers not be able to stop that debate or force it to occur only on his own terms. That he would do if he harasses people who question his methods as distinct from looking for him.
At last, we have some "new news" on the Snowden case -- we haven't had any in ages!
That's because his leaks aren't news about him, and the manufactured news events that his supporters create -- like visits to him last October by German leftists -- aren't real news.
(BTW, nobody even from the Western Snowdenistas camp of German Greens, British leftists or American "progressives" formerly working for intelligence have physically seen Snowden since November 7, 2013. That's six months no one has obtained a proof of life! He's only been seen in electronic format, beamed into various meetings like the Wizard of Oz with a script.)
Oh, to be sure, there was a kerfluffle recently with the Snowden Award for Internet Journalism (!) created in Russia, but that's merely a manufactured news on the Russian side, with some coopted (or maneuvering) journalists and Internet associations. They swear they have obtained his permission for use of his name.
Translation: To be honest, @gdekak [Venediktov's assistant] did make an agreement with Snowden.
They likely went through his Russian lawyer, the FSB-proximate Anatoly Kucherena. Ben Wizner, who calls himself Snowden's lawyer at the ACLU (I think he means "advocate" in the human rights campaign sense), claims that this award is a "hoax" and that his "client" has no knowledge of it.
That was merely spin to keep damage control around Snowden's bad choices (or coercions) going strong -- it wasn't a hoax, as not only I wrote, but as Max Seddon of Buzzfeed pointed out to Wizner, trying to get him to respond to repeated statements coming out of Moscow that in fact these journalists had gotten Snowden's approval just wasn't working. I saw him try to get to the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, and not get any public answers anyway, and make a few more queries, then drop it. That's just the problem. Journalists hate criticizing Snowden because of the pressure they get from the left and from their own convictions, so they don't pursue these obvious stories.
My guess is that this Snowden Award was possibly the quid pro quo for Snowden getting to have a "challenging question" (i.e. softball) to Putin on his call-in TV show. Ty mne, ya tebya. But wait, wasn't it enough of a compromise for Snowden to have to be coopted on this show in the first place, in Putin's court, pitching the softball? No, in the contorted thinking of Snowden, we know that he thinks that he asked a question "just like" Ron Wyden asked in Congress -- and then he may have felt that in addition to be in this obvious propaganda setting, he should sign off on the awards in his name.
Because, you know, asking a soft question of Putin that he turns to his advantage to lie in ways no one inside his society can really challenge now forcefully, on state-controlled TV that just got even more controlled is just like a democratically-elected senator from Oregon asking a question in the democratic and free body of Congress at a hearing really representing civilian oversight, of an appointed official under the oversight of that body, whether his agency collected data on Americans. Right, just like. And in Snowden's mind -- where he believeves he himself is doing the Atlassian work of Congress and the courts all wrapped into one! -- it is. Of course, we know better -- even though few people ever say so.
But again none of this is real news. Real news is stuff like learning that in fact, neither Jesslyn Radack, who at least says she has a retainer signed from Snowden, and Ben Wizner, who hasn't commented clearly on the exact nature of his agreement with Snowden, are his attorneys in the sense commonly understood, i.e. not his reps on a book deal, or his reps in a cause they all share, but his negotiatiors with the government of the United States, which is of course the wronged party (as all of us are) in this case.
I remember -- laughably -- anonymous idiots on Twitter claimed that there weren't any negotiations with the US government, i.e. they wouldn't negotiate it. Not long after, the story came out that yet another lawyer -- Plato Cacheris, a real lawyer, with a real retainer -- appeared saying he had represented Snowden in talks with the government over his plea. What kind of deal could be made? For example, could he "return" (as much as you can "return" any copyable file on the Internet) the stolen files or explain what he had or what the journalists had in exchange for some kind of deal? This didn't seem to be going anywhere, and maybe there are no negotiations at the moment, but there were once! That made Wizner and Radack look like they were out of the loop -- again. As they did over their charge's dubious choice to get coopted for Putin's call-in show.
Now we have some real new news again -- and I haven't heard any of Snowden's "lawyers" comment at all.
Edward Jay Epstein, a veteran investigative reporter, has taken on the Snowden affair -- and thank God, there is a new counter to the "adversarial reporters" on the Snowdenistas' side.
In a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation? -- thanks for that question alone! -- he tells us an interesting bit of news -- that a former Cabinet member in the Obama Administration thinks there are only three explanations for the Snowden story, given the massive number of files he took which aren't about the civil rights issue of privacy, but are about our national security -- and expose us to Al Qaeda, the Russians, and so on.
Here's what this source say (emphasis added):
Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden's theft of documents as "an act of treason." A former member of President Obama's cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.
Add that to what our top military official said:
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2014, that "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden . . . exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities."
According to Gen. Dempsey, "The vast majority of those [stolen documents] were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures."
Of course, the Snowdenistas went wild again at the very thought that their mascot was being tarred with the brush of "espionage" again -- they realize that if their civil rights hero and privacy whistleblower is shown in fact to be helping an enemy power or powers, he's toast. And of course they tried to spin away the notion of "damages" as furiously as they can. But when even a Second Life furry coder is writing me that he has lost faith in Snowden, you realize the Snowdenistas are losing their audience.
Epstein also provides us with more news -- if by "news" we mean he reminds us of things that everyone has forgotten and the mainstream liberal press, let alone the "adversarial journalists" backing Snowden never ask.
He reminds us that Snowden is not indicted.
Even Obama (especially Obama?) had to be reminded of this "technicality".
Good Lord, why isn't someone who has stolen the number of documents Snowden has stolen, tied to national security and capabilities, not citizens' privacy, and who has leaked with the damages indicated by Gen. Dempsey not indicted yet?! My God, it's been a year! What the hell is going on?
The WikiLeaks grand jury didn't close, either. Remember, years ago now, they asked for -- and got, despite the lawyers working overtime! -- the Twitter communications of Jacob Appelbaum and the other WikiLeaks activists. Understandably, this grand jury's efforts seem to have become protracted in the effort to find ties between Assange and Manning and Appelbaum, and foreign WikiLeaks operatives like Brigitta Jonsdottir of Iceland, who is a parliamentarian and might be hard to get at due to "immunity" and her country's reluctance to cooperate on prosecution WikiLeaks. With Manning's case, it was possible to establish her connection to Assange in the court martial, using the data on a confiscated laptop (not to mention, oh, the Wired transcripts!) Manning has already been sentenced to 35 years in a court martial. But sentencing indicting anyone else -- like Appelbaum, who is afraid to return to the US over this issue, along with his deep involvement in the Snowden heist -- or any kind of decision on how to address Assange -- has been delayed in political indecisiveness.
Or perhaps grand juries don't seem to do things like look at YouTube videos of the Chaos Computer Club and its annual conferences and follow the leads...or something. They're taking forever.
But Snowden?! Snowden's indictment shouldn't be taking so long, and the reason it is can only be political, and only be about Obama's continued reluctance to have this case prosecuted on his watch, because of pressure from the left.
I wish there was as much motivation to pressure the White House on Snowden as there is on Benghazi, but here's the issue: it's not just pressure from the left (ACLU, EFF, and worse) but the right (Ron Paul loonies).
With Epstein's revelation about what someone in the Obama cabinet really thinks (i.e. evidently because they have been briefed) about Snowden, perhaps more will come out. The time for Snowden's renewal of his asylum -- which the Russians have indicated they will renew -- is coming. He's tried desperately to get an invitation and clearance to go to Germany, and failed, because Chancellor Angela Merkel simply refuses to ruin relations with the US that much. Good!
We're making progress. Let's hope there will be more new news soon! This can and should become an election issue. Right now, Hillary has spoken up forcefully in that she faults Snowden for fleeing. Good! That helps to continue to pierce the veil of illusion over his flight that WikiLeaks keeps trying to pull. WikiLeaks itself has admitted now very frankly that they advised him to go to Russia. This isn't new news, but it's news coming at a time of other news (like Clinton's statement) that reinforces the awfulness of it. It's what enables Michael Kelley then to write a story about how a hole has been blown wide in the Snowden narrative. And indeed, as I've been pointed out for a year, Snowden was not forced to go to Moscow -- that is a myth. He had loads of time to flee elsewhere and didn't.
In adopting a critical stance about Snowden (she may say he still has useful "national conversation starter" effects on privacy, but she will draw the line on damage to national security mainly via Russia), Hillary will likely take most of the Democratic Party (liberal to left) sentiment with her. Unlike other issues that the hard left still hiding out in the Democratic Party has used to split the party or make it lurch to the left (Obama), such as health insurance or abortion, this time, if it keeps flogging "Snowden as hero" in the face of an indictment or more revelations about Russian collusion, it will be isolated (and that's a good thing). That's why we need to keep asking about this indictment.
Peter Ludlow (known in Second Life as Urizenus Sklar) has gotten himself into a terrible sex offense mess -- it's in real-life media.
It's not only in the campus news but online news and it has all the predictable cast of characters -- extremist feminists, outraged student's groups, hipsters screaming, etc. -- and even a Second Life angle. It's not only a campus case -- it is now in the court system in Illinois. Here's the court documents.
Ludlow is barred from teaching this quarter and seems to have quit (or been essentially fired) and while he was apparently in the process of obtaining a new position at Rutgers, students at Rutgers are up at arms. Although Ludlow has not been found guilty yet of any crime (from what I can tell), the mere existence of such a case is enough to get hysterical students rioting over his placement in their school.
These are people who -- like Ludlow themselves in their anti-Western contrarian politics -- who don't care about, oh, the massive abduction and rape of young girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria and aren't demonstrating against it like they would anything about Palestine, and who of course -- like Ludlow -- have nothing but contempt for law and order when it comes to Snowden stealing files and running to Russia -- or whether Weev or Browning or other creeps are let go and not prosecuted for their crimes.
But when it comes to a perceived sexual offense that does not even seem to be very serious on the face of it -- the plaintiff is not charging him with rape and indeed mass media with such headlines does appear to be defamatory -- they become absolutely hysterical. I try to understand what this is really about. No doubt Uri himself will have a paper on it someday... Surely it has something to do with the perversion of meaning or language...
Here's the thing: does Ludlow deserve his fate or is the manner of his prosecution not something any of us would want in a liberal society under the rule of law with basic due process rights?
Where does one start with Ludlow's loathsomeness? I was originally friendly with him and even shared an TSO lot with him for a time but then some friends and I pulled a prank on him to prove the outrageous fallibility of his "journalism" about online life. (We made a composite fake character called Selena, a teen-age witch, and had her tell Uri a tale of horror of online abuse by adult male warlocks -- and he bought the line and published it -- and then we revealed that she was faked and he was furious and banned me from his site for a time.)
Then there was his strange press campaign years ago to complain about his banning from TSO over his criticism of what he saw as underage prostitution -- but which was a story that he could never prove journalistically. And it was a contrived issue by contrast with another very real issue he would never criticize, which was the presence of hard-core BDSM communities and sites within TSO -- an online game which had kids as young as nine in it.
When I gave interviews to the New York Times and the Boston Globe with my criticism -- I opposed his banning on speech grounds but disagreed on the issues with EA.com, the game company, which were getting into the news -- Ludlow relentlessly searched for links between my real-life identity and my avatar's nickname until he could "out" me. He's very much of a "privacy for me and not for thee" sort of guy. He was my original experience with that sort of horrid doxing.
Then there was his delight in the dark Sim mafia -- the Shadow Sim Government -- that took over all the venues and bribed and extorted and terrorized -- in a simulated fashion of course, although you could really buy and sell the simoleons on ebay for real dollars. (The man who ran that had the last name Chase; I see his attorney has the same last name.)
Then there was his running of the tabloid Alphaville Herald, "a virtual paper for a virtual world" that was "always fairly unbalanced" which I worked at for a time despite our differences because I thought free press in oppressive online virtual environments controlled by companies was vital. We agreed on that, but of course, but only to a point. The minute I began criticizing the big corporate backers of the Alphaville's owners, who I said colluded in the copybot disaster undermining copyright in the virtual marketplace, I was reprimanded and then hounded -- so I quit. Uri presided over the most horrible harassment (known as griefing) of me inworld and out.
For years, he and the editrix in chief, Pixeleen Minstrel (who in real life was an Internet-famous guy named Mark McCahill who invented the Gopher program) vilified and harassed and ridiculed me to death in their paper because I criticized the same thing I criticize today: a) criminalized hackers b) arrogant ethics-free coders c) the open-source cult d) various online cults from BDSM to transhumanism e) the whole Chomsky/Derrida reductionist "there is no meaning" fractured fairy-tale which is philosophy today in universities -- which of course, is Uri's realm.
Precisely because of the Chomsky angle -- and his contrarian (actually -- establishment!) love of all things WikiLeaks, anarchism, Snowden, Manning, Barrett Browning, etc. -- Ludlow is very popular and seems to get tenure at every university he goes to -- and he has been to 10 or something in his career, he keeps changing them. He has published multiple books, including one on the Sims and Second Life that has a chapter on my character, Prokofy Neva, and has penned numerous op-ed pieces and articles favouring anarchist open-source cultism and copyleftism.
I don't know if scandals attend every change in his colleges, but there it is. It is common knowledge that he has had girlfriends much younger than he is (he is just my age, 57) -- I've met some of them even in real-life and in SL -- and he hasn't hidden that he makes hook-ups through Second Life of young women, but he hasn't ever been known to commit any "crime." This is legal, adult behaviour, you know -- the sort that feminists demand for themselves.
While he has an annoying online persona and belief system -- in real life, like a lot of such nerds, he's quiet, even shy, although he can be aggressive in smaller circles. Uri has a certain cult following, i.e. among the Woodbury University 4chan set.
The scandal he's currently involved in has a sordid Second Life angle -- wouldn't you know?! He was teaching a course on ethics in Second Life, and instead of discussing things like the way he and his friends would try to disrupt free association and free speech on servers in Second Life (mine) with speech they didn't like and felt shouldn't succeed, by dog-whistling and golf-clapping those who crashed servers and endlessly enabling their heckling and harassing of people, he tried to turn IBM's rather short-lived and not-too-deep involvement in Second Life as some sort of corporate evil. That's Uri - the Man, Capitalism, the One Percent -- you know, Occupy, hack, crash, whatever.
So somehow a woman in his class -- she appears to be under 21 -- gets together with him to go to an art show or something, and they wind up going from bar to bar and she claims Ludlow got her drunk, then groped her, then took her to his house and didn't drive her home.
He disputes a lot of it, but the facts of their time together, drinking, and ending up in bed (but not doing anything) don't seem disputed. Although his deputations, Uri seems to use that method so common to Second Life griefers -- pretend you are the victim and act outraged, when you are being called the perpetrator.
But...Here's the thing. If you are accused on a campus by a student, you have little recourse or rights. The hysteria, the feminists, the political correctness -- it's awful. They constitute a terrible witch hunt.
Not only is there any sense of proportion -- this is not a rape accusation with penetration we're talking about, or even groping of sexual organs against a woman's will, as in Steubenville -- this is a charge of attempted kissing, maybe a grope of a breast -- and not driving home. It's astounding that we never learn why this woman doesn't call a cab or friend and go home at any point in the evening if she had the discomfort level.
Naturally, if any of us had been on this particular scene in Second Life, we would have taken this woman aside and said, "Oh Gawd, don't hook up with Uri, he's awful, a lech, stay away." But she seemed to be pursuing -- to him tell it - and of course he could be lying -- the same way that he lies that crashing sims isn't a crime, or lies that Barrett Brown is being prosecuted for journalism, or any number of altered word-salad virtualities he passes off as reality in his Philosopher's Stone column at The New York Times (!) and elsewhere.
But...he gets to mount a defense against such accusations and he didn't get a fair trial. No one ever seems to in these campus cases. He quite rightfully pointed out that if he could bring records from the video camera in his elevator at home, receipts from restaurants and bars, and other kinds of adversarial evidence, i.e. eye-witness testimony, he might refute this girl's charges!
Yet he wasn't allowed to -- campus proceedings aren't real courts of law with laws for evidence and due process and discovery. The university simply rejects the attempts to bring other evidence.
Now that his case is in the Illinois justice system, maybe his lawyer will then get to bring forward such evidence as he can muster, and the case might eventually determine whether someone whose charges doesn't seem to amount to more than making some awkward sexual advances and not driving a woman home after a date might warrant the harsh punishment of expulsion or worse.
But meanwhile, he's already reportedly leaving Northeastern and heading to Rutgers, where he has been offered a position. And there, the Rutgers politically-correct students have their knives out and are phone-jamming and boycotting and saying that they can't have sex abusers on their campus.
Yet -- unless I missed something -- he hasn't been found guilty in a fair trial although the university seemed to automatically take the student's side and hasn't been able to mount a defense as a defendant should be able to do in a court of law.
Somehow, I think Uri and his lawyers will word-salad his way through yet another jam and pervert meaning along the way. But if you care about justice and civil rights, you have to hope that he is not punished for such mild infractions in a setting where he can't even mount a proper defense. This is a lose/lose case. If he wins, his reputation will be as low as it always was in some quarters; he will get high-fives from horrific misogynists nerdy creeps that make up his fan base; if he loses, no women's rights will actually have been served. In fact, even if he were prosecuted or fined or even jailed for cause, they would not be served. Because these cases are so often not about real rights, but about the political war-faring of enraged feminists undermining justice as a whole for all of us.
It is getting so that when you go out on a date, you have to get your date to sign a disclaimer. You have to get them to accept that you don't have a "duty of care" over them if you take them to a bar or drive them in your car. You have to get them to warrant that if they become intoxicated, it will be due to their own poor choices and not your fault. And so on. I can see contracts having to be signed even simply to have a cup of coffee. There's an insanity to all this that I just don't know where it will end.
I guess I feel that this sort of situation should be solved by real ethics -- the sort of ethics Uri and his awful hacker friends simply don't have. That would start with the basics -- that you don't socialize alone with students, taking them to bars, taking them to your home alone. These are all terrible practices. They should be unethical practices, for which teachers or professors should be censured and disciplined, but I don't think from one incident like this that doesn't have an actual rape or serious sexual abuse of any kind involved should a person be fired.
Students also should have ethics. Why do they go out with professors twice their age alone and drink with them? Are they trying to get good marks or do they have a daddy complex? No one in these situations ever wants to blame alcohol or drugs themselves, although clearly, no one has benefited from either parental or educational restrictions on over-indulgence in alcohol and usage of illegal drugs. If more people like Uri weren't blurring the lines on ethics in their teaching -- teaching that is entirely about subversion and perversion of customary meaning and morals -- we would all be better off.
I will never forget how Uri told Selena, when she texted him that she had to go and set the table, that she should deliberately put the fork and spoon out of their usual order to flummox her parents. So very Uri...
Human beings have a need for these laws -- and so what ethics can't fix because it's missing, and what morals can't fix because it is uncool to have them, the justice system has to fix -- badly! This is like trying to fix the problem of homelessness through emergency rooms in hospitals instead of through housing -- costly, stop-gap, ineffective.
For all the lawsuits and kangaroo courts and dismissals and ruinations of careers we've had in schools and universities in the last 40 years since the 1960s sexual revolution, has anything really gotten better? Doesn't it seem as if there are MORE rapes on campuses than less as a result? And it would be one thing if these were actual rapes prosecuted -- rape is a crime and has to be punished by state law, not merely campus regulations.
But how many of these cases involve just an awkard pass on a date gone wrong or somebody changing their mind? Too many...
The politically correct -- and their victims! -- would rather wield the power of troikas and draconian justice systems instead of simply conceding that the kind of morals you get from religion and civic and parental training in schools and home are necessary and should be valued. So reluctant are people like Uri to do anything but ridicule decency as some kind of cramp on their freedom that nothing but career ruination works. And now he is living that horror.
This is a situation like Weev's for some people (not me). They feel like he was so awful to Kathy Sierra (stalking her and threatening her and doxing her) and so awful to so many other people, and such an asshole in general (just review his Twitter timeline) with the most awful hate speech, antisemitism, and crazy violent shtick (the other night he sent me a link to a horror movie with a creature with a drill for a penis because...I had the temerity to say that I didn't think any force but governments should operate hacking tools) -- that he should get punished in a hacking case. But that's wrong, if you can't mount a successful harassment or stalking case (and maybe it hasn't been tried), to except a hacking case will do that job for you.
Those who want to exonerate hacking as a crime want him let off even though he's an asshole. I hope he will be prosecuted in a new venue for the crime of obtaining unauthorized access to AT&T's customer data through hacking -- yes hacking, because that's what hacking is, unintended use and stealing of customer data not intended for hackers to take and cause havoc with. His fans think it's a free speech issue.
In Uri's case, I couldn't ask for an unfair trial on hysterical feminist witch-hunting to be the way in which he meets his justice. Because then any one of us could be subject to such a politicized system.
As I said in Steubenville, when Uri was happy to sanction Anonymous wild and unethical behaviour, I'm on the side of the rape victim and don't try to diminish her suffering or plight. I'm a big believer in Andrea Dworkin's saying that the punishment for getting drunk on a date with a frat boy in your dorm should be a hangover, not rape. Certainly if these student's charges stick, some kind of discipline might be warranted short of dismissal simply because there are simply too many elements of this story that require that the student herself, even if she were under 21, should have exercised basic good judgement and remedy her own situation.
Remember, in this case, rape isn't even part of the charges, and even sexual groping or "getting a minor drunk" or whatever other offenses might pertain are not established by courts of law -- and it sounds like they won't be.
Like that dying Islamist who flew to America for medical treatment before going to Paradise about whom V.S. Naipaul wrote, Uri is now looking to law and meaning and courts and righteousness and justice to save him -- all the things he thinks are shit and the Man and should be destroyed by Anonymous and Occupy. All the things he ridiculed and undermined his whole life. I hope the irony is not lost on him and he experiences some kind of remorse -- although it sounds like there is none available in his particularly invincible virtuality.
There's an odd feature of this story -- the Rutgers Department that Uri may be hired into is the one where my cousin used to teach -- but he died recently. He fell ill some years ago and there was a vacancy -- maybe the very one that Uri is now filling.
There's been a lot of pearl-clutching, i.e. from Foreign Policy's John Hudson, with whom I've argued on Twitter, about VOA "losing its editorial independence" and now being required to broadcast consistent with the mission of US foreign policy under draft reform plans in Congress -- which yes, aren't passed yet but I hope they will be.
This editorial in the WSJ gets it right -- the overhaul is necessary and the "editorial independence" issue is a red herring when the independence they supposedly had only led to pro-Iranian tracts being cut and pasted. The only difference here I'd add is that this is not mission drift; it's very aggressive mission take-over by certain ideological groupings.
The pearl-clutching is entirely misplaced because the same lefties whining now about how conservatives may rob the radios of their unbiased nature were completely MIA when it came to complaining about the awful Obama bias of "progressives" in this period. THAT is the problem.
Not surprisingly, John Hudson leapt on the idea that "editorial independence" would be sacrificed implying that it was the first casualty in war-mongering Washington due to neo-cons. No, he did not contain those search-strings in his article, but he implied them -- as he always does when flogging a progressive/Realist line -- if not actually manufacturing news by going to Pravda and gleefully asking them to help him set up McCain for a fall.
Yes, I do get it about editorial independence -- I worked at RFE/RL for several years as a freelancer. I never was censored -- once I was asked to hold something back because reports of mass demonstrations (in Kiev) can help turn out even larger ones so the editors -- with 1956 Hungarian invasion syndrome -- take a close look at what they themselves are doing as they are part of the story inevitably. And then another newsletter I filed with a comparison of the crackdown of the RNC demonstrators and demonstrators in Belarus (not a moral equivalence) didn't run -- but I think that was for other reasons. And no, the reason for not having censorship wasn't because I was a myrmidon perfectly tuned to my overlord's political demands. Believe me, I had more censorship at the Soros-funded EurasiaNet than I've had in any news job in my life. And that's because censorship comes from those heavily ideologically engaged -- warriors -- not from those merely trying to get the news out that isn't getting covered in the target regions.
We have editorial independence in a ton of other things in America -- hey, Intercept, anyone? It's not required in tax-supported entities about which there could be wild political disagreement (which is why they are dysfunctional). What we need is mission -- and that means the broad foreign policy goals of the US which are bi-partisan generally in nature.
And indeed, when you obsess about "editorial independence" as if you were in Russia, and your state media that got away with a little (like RIA Novosti) is now being reined in by the state, you have only a narrow take. You overlook the facts of what happens when you supposedly have "editorial independence" *in America, in non-commercial state-funded broadcasting*.
You actually get even more editorial bias based on not only the party in power -- all the radios leaned left and "progressive" under Obama and softened their coverage of Russia under the "reset." You also get free-lancing ideologues in English and foreign-language services who use the vacuum of "editorial independence," i.e. insufficient oversight and lack of insistence on mission broadcasting -- to broadcast even wild stuff like pro-Nazarbayev hate speech or anti-opposition screeds in Russian or these Persian examples -- they are numerous.
Ask yourself: why is it that these radios "seemingly under mismanagement" develop this seemingly random set of problems?
o silence from the Turkmen service -- only wire stories
o strange pro-Nazarbayev tracts
o Real Politik blogs and op-eds about how the Russian opposition is useless, depressing, or scarily nationalist and Putin is a good for the country
o Cut-and-pastes from Iran state news
o Breathless coverage of Anonymous and featuring of anarchist hackers who support harming the US
These are all things I and others have criticized in various venues. But what on earth do they have in common?
Answer: a certain type of "progressive" American International Relations School of Realism that has the following necessities:
o negotiating a pipeline with Turkemenistan (it failed)
o negotiating a transportation line in and out of Afghanistan with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan for the sake of getting supplies to troops
o favoring of open source software, Wikis, Google, and less role for government intelligence and fascinating with hackers who represent both "Internet freedom" and collectivist theories about removal of copyright, sharing, etc. online
o acceptance of Russia's sphere of interest and admiration for a strong leader
o hatred of Israel and blame for its failure to make peace; myopia about Palestinian violence
o desire to make friends with Iran and hysterical belief that Israel might bomb Iran and we must do anything to make peace
I've met and debated exact, real people like this in the State Department, National Security Council, foreign broadcasting, Embassies and multi-laterals. They exist; they are a force; they are everywhere. They think they are the smart ones, surrounded by idiots. They think they are fighting a brave fight against hide-bound hawks and neo-conservatives who thwart them -- although those forces in fact are very weak and never prevail.
The same person who loathes Israel and makes antisemitic jokes and has bright ideas about friending up Iran will be the same person who says he admires Snowden. This is all of a piece, and people have to understand that this strain of American foreign policy establishment is very entrenched and never gets a real debate, let along exposure of it existence and actions. People think "progressives" are outside at the Center for American Progressive or Snowden-lovers are in the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Not so. They are the people with badges not only golf-clapping and meeting those NGOs, but revolving into power in State from the offices of Google.
The reason these problems exist at the radios is because they exist, writ large, in an entire generation of foreign policy experts and foreign service officers. Little in their training leads them to do anything else but hang on to and expand on their views of Iran, Israel, Snowden, etc. because they never get a challenge.
The world was criticizing Putin's overblown and oppressive Sochi Olympics. What did VOA English do? They interviewed fellow-traveller types from the US who graced this Olympics for ideological support (others stayed home) and praised Putin -- even as Circassian demonstrators were being beaten and jailed and Pussy Riot was being whipped by Cossacks. Those tales of abuse got told in Russian, but in English, they didn't exist because they didn't fit the politics of the "progressive" editors who featured on Happy People Eating Noodle Salads.
How could that happen? Not only because of Obama and the re-set -- after all, Obama didn't go to the Olympics. But becuase of deep-set "progressive" socialist-style old politics that finds something forward-looking about Moscow, and finds "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" even when conducting American foreign policy with the enemy -- because the real enemy to people like this isn't Russia or Iran, but the perceived "neo-cons" in the next cubicle.
In my view, what's happened at these radios (where I used to work) is not drift or mismanagement; it's seizure by a very aggressive RealPolitik "progressive" line common to a very definitive camp in the State Department, NSC and even intelligence communities that is part about the Obama Administration but existed even under Bush -- it's the camp that leaks, it's the camp that brought us failures in negotiations with Israel and Iran, not to mention Snowden. That position hates Israel; snuggles up to Iran; is 'pragmatic" about Russia; etc. etc. It's a line that you can trace through many stories and I'm for pruning it back hard. Why? Because it has had too much unexamined control of too many things with too many disastrous results.
Once you see what happens to the Ukraine story -- the Kiev government is knocked as weak and unable to control the country when the real problem is Russian pressure with masses of troops at the border and sabotage within by the GRU -- you see why "editorial independence" is only a lever to feed this certain camp and its goals, not real independence.
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