Wired State

The Moscow Mule: Beyond the @20Committee Affair

@20committee this 2nd Moscow Mule is for Snowden for shooting himself in the foot over & over again. Cheers! pic.twitter.com/H65fVUEDHS

— Lesley (@Currahee88) May 29, 2014

 

So the Schindler Operation has ended -- for now -- with the online temptress "Leslie" (@Currahee88) dropping her revenge porn on Twitter, causing maximum "life ruination," as Encyclopedia Dramatica would call it, then waiting through a full 24-hour news cycle to make sure Gawker, the Telegraph, and others would take a whack - then she re-appeared humbly pretending to be sorry, and apologize. Oh, and for good measure, even refuted those claims -- rapidly and furiously spread by the authoritarian feminists for a day and beyond -- that she was a victim of sexual harassment online.

For the record, I had my expression of solidarity up for Schindler immediately -- and I have to say, I had a number of both liberal and conservative males come to me and wag fingers and pontificate about "poor judgement" -- and I sure didn't have as many re-tweeters in that first 24 hours as I did the next day, after her "apology" made it clear that she wasn't "harassed." So telling. Meanwhile, not a single woman reproached me or him -- because from the get-go they saw that little smiley and that "thank you" and that coquettish "I'm scared" and rolled their eyes and realized there was NOTHING unsolicited or "harassing" about these dick picks. Nothing at all.

Also for the record, those who took the high road among our ideological enemies: @conor64 and @ggreenwald. Those who didn't: @ioerror, @emptywheel. And others, predictably, because the difference between professional journalists who write for mainstream papers and magazines, and bloggers, is, well, that.

Then John himself came on with a Mea Culpa, not before Leslie restored her Twitter account oddly, for one supposedly covered in remorse. And so a veil is drawn over the affair, and one hopes that Schindler will keep his job -- he did no wrong but it's a "morals" question that a military college might have some rule or thought about. Fortunately, it's the end of the semester, and perhaps everyone will get back to normal by the fall. What a horrible waste it would be if Schindler lost his credentialed position -- and for no good cause.

Although I realize it follows the literary rules of a genre in our society, I wasn't happy to see his apology extend even to his snarky tweets telling various obvious assholes online to go read a book -- it fuels the bad guys, and the ones heckling him are far worse.

For example Tolstoved, who is one Jesse Stavis, a PhD student (or maybe he has his PhD by now? ) serving as an instructor in the Russian department at the University of Washington. He's a real asshole, because he heckles NSA recruiters that come to his campus -- which is a legitimate function and shouldn't be disrupted -- I hate it when people think you protest government policy by denying others freedom of speech and association.

But more than that, he deliberately came on my blog on the day I published my book and flooded it with utter crap -- specious, false, literalist attacks that weren't remotely related to any "academic discourse" in the slightest - they were just griefing. I don't know if Jesse is in a trained cadre organization -- or worse -- or whether he just learns his tradecraft on the Internet with the rest of the insolent kiddies -- likely the latter. But he's a coward, and not worth Schindler's little finger.

Most of those harassing him, including the contrived heckler from Europe to whose department Schindler finally wrote, are not operating in good faith, are not really interested in debate, but are ideological shills of the sort they pretend he is. In fact, if Schindler were only a shill, nobody would bother with him; it's precisely because he's not a shill and genuine and smart and articulate and funny that they worry.

Oh, and one hopes "Leslie" might "get help" as the kids online say, and perhaps visit Alcoholics Anonymous, as it's more than likely that depression fueld by alcoholism were contributing factors for her destructive and vindictive act.

Except, I think there's more to this story, and while many -- including Schindler himself -- may not want to belabor it when he's trying to get his shattered life back -- since I've been pursued by these same people, I'm going to lay out my thoughts here.

I continue to maintain this was a deliberate, calculated operation, encouraged by Russian intelligence, set up and played out for a year, to discredit -- and try to ruin -- one of the most informed and cogent critics of the Snowden Operation there is.

This operation bears all the signs of provokatsiya, of Soviet-style tradecraft inherited by Russian intelligence, and all the signs of the typical honey pot or active measure or agent of influence or asset. And the chief feature of these operations is that you can't "prove them" to the satisfaction of those who are only too happy to see them go down, or even to those sympathetic with a figure like Schindler.

It doesn't matter. Those who know, know. Eventually they get vindictated as they have in the past with things like the VENONA files. Or we get a defector who explains it. Or maybe there's a confession of the collaborators.

Meanwhile, I'll speak to pieces of this operation that are visible.

At least 6-8 months ago, I recall asking a friend, say, don't you find it odd that this @Currahee88 is always flirting with John Schindler, flattering him, trying to get his attention, seemingly anti-Snowden, and yet she turns on other people in the same circle like a junk-yard dog.

I remember that when I first saw her constantly in interactions with @20committee, I thought she might be some graduate student in security studies, or perhaps even someone in the military, who was somehow "one of them," and that's why they accepted her, the plunging neckline in the avatar didn't hurt either, but I thought she was known to them in real life -- so intimate did she appear. And my friend commented scornfully, "Oh, that's just some wannabee groupie, somebody who wants to be his girlfriend."

Funny, it was that obvious last year, you know?

Meanwhile, @Currahee88 (the name means "stand alone" in an Indian language), this same person, supposedly "in the circle" and pro-military and anti-Snowden would double back and cross the street to heckle me. I was surprised by that. Usually people who are critical of Snowden "get it" about hackers. They don't exonerate them. Yet she made a huge point of reprimanding me for the "crime" of re-tweeting a link to the article by Rachel Marsden which somewhat punctured the myth of the Jester.

It had all the feel of a cult or some kind of really wound-up clique at the least, the way she pursued this. I noted it as odd -- I verified this when she brought her account back on. And it was typical of other heckling she did of me and others on this and other topics -- out of character. It had the feel of the Eddie Haskell type in "Leave it to Beaver" -- smirking with an artificial grin and pronouncing, "Gee, what a pretty dress, Mrs. Cleaver" and referring to "Theodore" even as he gave Wally a kick in the leg.

Something was wrong with this picture. It might have been just the normal hot-house drama and back-biting of all online life, but it seemed more orchestrated.

And when the Schindler Operation went down, Leslie was quick to return and tell people it wasn't the Jester, and of course he himself denied it. Other accounts hastened to cross the street and bang on me -- when they never had before -- to deny this. Definitely "lady doth protest too much, methinks" material.

But I should note that Leslie -- maybe not her real name, maybe a real first name or maybe the name repeatedly given with her "doxing" on Pastebin is real -- or maybe not -- is a real person. That is, her account could still be run by a group  of people, but at this point Rosie Gray has written about her as if she is a real person, not a persona on Buzzfeed; I've been told by reliable sources that she is real, and has been reached on the phone and email at least.

She's no security studies student though (and never said she was -- that was just a kind of cloud-like impression) -- it turns out she is a waitress, age 35.

"I was working in a waitress in a cocktail bar/that much is true."

The doxing isn't really so helpful because it isn't confirmed journalistically and doesn't really explain motive or connections or true beliefs.

I have reason to believe that "Leslie" is another person in the circle who has created Leslie as the mule, and maybe even the Moscow Mule.

To digress (but it's related) -- elsewhere on Leslie's timeline we see she particiated in another op of the sort all too common now to discredit Hillary Clinton. She claims to be a rape victim (and we have no way of knowing if this is true or part of her online sympathy-getting campaign; it was never reported to the police so it is uncheckable). And then based on that alleged experience, she claims that Hillary is somehow insensitive and unprotective of women because early in her career, as a lawyer, she had to defend a rapist of a 12-year-old girl. Hillary, of course, is known for her promotion of women's rights -- and it is a solid record. Even the most horrid rapists in our country get legal defense, that's the law, and that's what civil rights is all about.

It's astounding that this story is being wrenched and politicized into something like Romney's punching out some guy when he was a youth -- only far worse. Because the purpose is to discredit Hillary not only as a fighter for human rights, but as a woman, to make her seem "insensitive". This story was never dredged up when she ran for president before, but now it is, because this is the technique of the Bolshevik/Saul Alinsky/Dead Agent (Scientology) method of trying to pin on someone who is decent some sin that is just the opposite of what they are believed to be, to undermine them with the public.

So that lets me know we could be dealing here with a particular nest of accounts that work overtime to discredit people they view as "neo-cons" -- some of the most vicious and nasty political operatives out there. But you'd have to wonder why those people, who spend most of their time taking aim at much more public and high-traffic bloggers like Robert McCain or Lee Stranahan, would bother with this niche of people who criticize Snowden -- people UTTERLY drowned out in the din of pro-Snowden media and blogging coverage. Truly, why bother?  Well, for the hard-core sectarian, there can never be even one person who disbelieves as they could potentially unravel the entire fiction, but somehow, I don't think it's this particular bunch.

Also on Pastebin, you can find speculation about a group of accounts around the Jester, believed either to be his sock puppets or fans or associates.

And sure enough, these accounts figure in with the Schindler story, either flattering or attacking Schindler, and also harassing people like me.

@Non_disclosure has been particularly active in heckling Snowden critics and seems to come with the ready-made set of views that fit such persons. One thing he's been busy doing is leaking out to various other accounts that he is "really Rachel Marsden" and then letting it be known to other accounts that he is likely "the Jester". So it's designed to keep people tied up in knots, confused, and fighting each other instead of doing the simple Jesus test:

"By their fruits ye shall know them."

Most of the people in these groups of accounts don't pass the Jesus test. Their fruits are indeed bitter and they aren't sweet as they claim to be. This is why this article by Ashera Research is particularly useful, because it tracks the claims over time, and shows that the "life ruination" quotient is high, and the jihadi site damaging is low. Or so it seems. This article also lacks names, and journalistic follow-up.

It's a shame there aren't journalists who are willing to get to the bottom of these stories, but they are put off by things that sound like they are conspiracies. See my conversation with the Christian Science Monitor reporter who doesn't doubt that there is some kind of operation going on here, but won't pursue it because "it can't be proved."

So let's come to another creepy figure amidst this bunch, @5150Committee, or "Fake John Schindler". I've always assumed -- because he has the same set of issues, obsessions, and linguistic patterns -- that this person is exactly the same as the figure once known as Mr. X, and then later as Jack Montano, SeniorEquis1775, Escobar, OpHatchAct2 and similar accounts, quite a few of them banned or deleted at this point.

Just as the Schindler Operation was going down and the private correspondence was being leaked, who should send me an email but OpHatchAct2 -- who speaks in his emails so much about @5150Committee in the "asking for a friend" mode that naturally you are further convinced that they are the same person, or at least in the same group.

That email was was received by me at 12:55 June 23rd, but on his email, it was date stamped Sun, 22 Jun 2014 20:51:56 and said that OpHatchAct2 had "ZERO" to do with "the weird crap is apparently going down as of 12:15 a.m. EST Monday June 23 with one of Schindler's longtime gal pal accounts (by longtime I mean dating back almost a year to July 2013), @Currahee88."

Well, it's not that OpHatch knew about the operation ahead of time -- although it's always possible -- it's just that the date stamp for him isn't EST. If he's 4 hours ahead, where is he? Well, actually, he's 3 hours ahead, because he is forwarding to me an email that he has likely mass-mailed to others, and that explains the discrepancy in the minutes.

Why do I think that? Why, because for days before and after this email about @20committee and @Currahee88, I've been harassed by emails screaming about my coverage of Russian news and accusing me of being a CIA agent and Nazi lover from this same OpHatch -- all of them cc'd to all kinds of people from Alex Jones to Matt Drudge.

When I looked at Twitter as soon as I got that email, the offending tweets were already there.

OpHatch goes to huge pains to explain that he knew knowing about this operation, had nothing to do with it, and that it was unrelated to his own beefs with Schindler.

But here's the thing. He also complained that @Currahee88 had "spear-phished @5150Committee" -- and if you look at the pictures on her Twitter account, she triumphantly holds up two screenshots of a URL she has obtained, which resolves to a server registered to the University of California at San Diego

Those who have watched @20committee be heckled by OpHatch for a year on his various socks know that his latest obsession has been this belief that "Schindler spear-phished him" to try to out him and get him prosecuted.Schindler denied doing this.

So meanwhile, the likely scenario seems this: Leslie decided to do one of those "missions" that the hacker and provocateur set always does, whether in Anonymous or working for Russian intelligence, in order to prove their reliability and loyalty to the cause.

In the Anonymous setting, these "missions" or "ops" as they call them can be conceived in a freelance manner and not "approved" and then the aspiring script kiddie hopes to eventually come to the attention of an Anonymous higher-up their very rigid chain of command (it's not the loose thing people imagine) by doxing or DDoSing a victim hated by "hive mind". If he accomplishes his mission and it is seen as a "hit," he will move up the ladder in the intricate cult.

For a KGB or later FSB informant or asset, it could be more disciplined -- an assignment would be given from the top-down. Often, the assignments given were ridiculously simple and unnecessary. For example, go get a newspaper clipping that of course the KGB could get itself. But what was important wasn't the content of the assignment but THAT the agent would be put on the hook then, beholden to the KGB as having done a favour for them.

Bradley Manning did this sort of favour for Assange finding the cable about the FBI's surveillance in Iceland; I have hypothesized that Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, who come from a movement and an organization with this kind of cadre method would have demanded the same of Snowden -- and possibly he of them. Maybe Runa Sandvik had to come to Honolulu to his crypto party and give him a Tor sticker...

So Leslie went vigorously about this challenge, and purported to come up with something about this @5150Committee account related to the University of San Diego. We don't know if she could triangulate this with other data she had picked up to zero in on the person who might be @5150Committe or not -- we can't even be sure that the entire thing was faked up as a op-within-an-op to make it look like she had gotten Schindler's enemy mad (when all along he could have been DMing Leslie in cahoots).

There are services now that home right in on the server, but they aren't accurate. There are a variety of different locations showing for this server. One is in the parking lot of a branch of the San Diego Public Library across from the Salvation Army. Doesn't that fit the picture of some loon, mumbling to himself, the character OpHatch is always trying to pretend to be? (And I have no doubt now it is a pretense, having seen the last bit of hate mails and threats he has sent to me -- and his staging of a discreditation campaign of me as Nazi-loving CIA agent blah blah). But wouldn't the public library have its own server? Maybe they use the university's system?

The other locations go to near a university department in San Diego that matches with information that I have come up with in researching about a possible figure who might be doing this, or it goes to another parking lot at the beach, or to an apartment building near the university. Well, the person could be in a car or on a bike with a laptop.

But it's not conclusive and the entire thing could be a false lead, just to keep people tied up in knots.

(If you want to see how inaccurate these services are, look up your own ISP on them and find yourself in the river and not in a building.)

Meanwhile, we notice that Leslie has on other occasions flirted with military men, tried to get close to them, and try to get information out of them, including a person she thought was a Navy SEAL. What's up?

Here's another odd thing, related to Leslie's friends, and similar to Leslie. Here's a group of people on Twitter who are all security or regional experts -- I even know two of them because one of them follows me and retweets my every pearl of wisdom (something I never trust on Twitter), and another blocked me.

In this group, like a rose among thorns, if you will, is the account said to be "the Jester's girlfriend" (I don't know if this means in real life or online, likely the latter). This Texan doesn't seem to be in security studies, and I'm told that she has had a life checkered with her husband's arrest for child pornography and her own involvement in some hacking story and an even more bizarre and intricate story involving a chess federation scandal. She doesn't seem to fit in intellect or class with the others, yet there she is, put into a Follow Friday grouping, even with a "thanks, Angel".

What to make of things like that? These are accounts with under 2000 followers that almost never chat or make comments, but only tweet or retweet headlines on the topic. Are they all socks? To what end?

One sees these sort of mysteries all the time on Twitter, and perhaps *cough* Twitter is the great equalizer and class and regional and nationality differences are dissolved in the great encounter of minds online.

Somehow, I don't think that's it, though.

So looking at these various accounts and their interactions, I start to get a sense of a faction, if you will, or a movement, that basically sounds like a kind of Oathkeepers outfit. These are people who glorify the military, but without really looking at the military's purpose in the context of a civil society or its civilian control. They have a contrived and over-heated sense of harm done to "the people of America" by officials, particularly military officials, who have turned out to be corrupt or violated their oaths. Snowden fits into that category for them, obviously. 

They don't exactly fit the profile of a Tea Party or Ron Paul type because they don't seem to have the same list of obsessions, and they are more liberal. In fact, they think Tea Partiers are stupid and even destructive to the military. They aren't anti-gay or racist; they drink like horses and take drugs randomly; they want "freedom" and do a little bit of flag-waving but not like Confederates or biker gangs.  They worship the Jester because they see him as having all the good qualities of military (stealth, strength, cunning, bravery, steely determination to fight enemies) without any of the bad qualities that keep coming up with our military as I have written about at length here -- figures like Petraeus or McCrystal who through weakness or vanity or stupidity end up creating wild scandals and undermining our nation's image and perhaps real security as well -- and hey, perhaps they had their own Moscow Mules at work in their stories, too.)

As I said about the Jester before, he exists because the real armed services and intelligence agencies aren't doing their job. By that I mean they are undermined by poor management but more to the point, factions of bureaucrats and officers who really do have a mindset antithetical to what have traditionally been America's foreign policy goals and democratic methods. Snowden couldn't have happened otherwise; he didn't happen in a vacuum; he happened within a culture, a wikification, as I've called it, just like Manning.

These are people raised on the Internet who dislike Israel, admire Putin, think we should be friends with Iran, and want to wind down the "war on terror" because they think Islam is a religion of peace that America is primarily to blame for riling up. These are who grew up without any of the landmarks we older people have in our consciousness of the 6-day war or the Chechen wars or the Iranian hostages.

I encounter this faction or others similar to it all too often, and most troubling, I encounter it in young people in power in the State Department, embassies abroad, multilaterals and various agencies. They admire Snowden and think he did something important. They don't get it about Russia; hell, they *are* Russian. That's just it -- the government doesn't support Russian studies and put a priority on Russian area studies and language anymore by non-Russians who are therefore unbiased and friendly to US policy; they skimp and take second-generation or 4th wave Russians without checking to see what their political beliefs are -- and more often than not, unlike past waves of emigration, they are pro-Kremlin and anti-American -- they've learned this on their college campuses, if not at home.

But here's the thing about this faction or overlapping factions or "movement" -- they might have some views that overlap with people like me (or Schindler, for that matter), but their methods are antithetical to the rule of law. They believe in dirty tricks, subterfuge, sabotage -- the end justifies the means.

I have only a vague sense of this faction sabotaging Schindler because I haven't had time to study it or look for it, and I haven't even heard of things like the "Tenthers" until this week. But it's that kind of thing -- a faction, a sect, if you will, devoted to "taking action" and remaining underground.

Why am I speaking of factions and not some 50-year-old chain-smoker named "Ivan" who is good at photoshopping and even simulating geolocation of Twitter account photos for Omaha, Nebraska?

If you woke Leslie up at 3:00 in the morning and asked her if she were a Russian agent, she'd deny it furiously. If you gave her a lie-detector test or worse, some harsh interrogation -- she'd still deny it vigorously and she'd likely be right -- because she is likely not a conscious agent of any kind at all. Indeed, the very idea might be antithetical to her beliefs.

Instead, she is a Moscow Mule. She is someone used to convey ideas and hints and nudges without question by other operatives to the side or above her -- because unconsciously -- she is the beast of burden of the operation, if you will.

Yes, I'm aware that the Moscow Mule is an entirely fake drink.

Now, that means you have to ask who the "real" Russian agents are in groups like this. Are they the silent people who barely make an appearance or have so many cut-aways you can't find them? Are they actual Russians or agents of influence who are actually more visible? Or are they the ones that seem to try really hard to seem like crazy, loony, sectarian Americans -- you know, like Tea Party or Oathkeeper types -- yet are "off" just a bit and are crazy...like a fox?

The reason they call it an "operation" or "op" whether at the FSB or Anonymous is because it has methods and means and a beginning, middle, and end, and an intended effect and an aftermath and perhaps a "gift that keeps on giving" as a bonus. But it's meant to be secret and distractive and subversive, so it's not possible to detect. A blogger like me without resources can't really get anything out of it, even though we might see all the contours of "Moscow's hand."

I think as with the Snowden Operation, as it is called, or the Snowden Hack as I call it, that there are hacker movements like WikiLeaks and Anonymous that are either collaborating with or infiltrated by Russian agents, and then all it takes is a nudge here and there. You know, a blog post, a Crypto Party guest list, an email, a PGP key, a photo, a clue -- a something.  A nudge -- and away we go.

Sometimes you can stir up a whole bunch of trouble just by getting people mad at each other who used to be friends on the same side of the barricades.

Along the way, it's easy to create many diversions and distractions. Some people aren't very bright and tangle it up further. There's a Russian-language account who keeps dropping Russian chastushki (limericks) about professors and dicks, perhaps automated. There's an Anon who seems to hold one of those sharia-like courts berating Lesie and "educating" her. There's another Anon berating her for selling Tre (The Archer) down the river. And so on. The usual online derp, and tiresome cult-like sect.

Who has the time to sift through it? I hope someone bothers, especially if they have all those network identifying tools which I personally don't want to bother with now.

There's of course the Archer -- the account that "white-knighted" it for Leslie, with a name similar to the Jester, but that may be just "leet speak". Why was this account even needed? To avoid having the Leslie account banned. That way she could delete the offensive pictures, once she proved the provenance from herself, because they are a TOS violation, and have this other account flog them to maximize the damage -- and then not care if he is banned or forced to delete. There's a person by this name in the Navy. Maybe another person with just the same name...

So let me come now to a last funny data point -- the Jester YouTube with the Russian-language news web site open in the background that makes up the wallpaper of a video about the use of his hacker tool Xerxes to take down a site.

That's odd.

While one of the persons said to be the Jester -- and then rejected as such -- Robin Jackson -- is said to know Russian, the ongoing Jester figure doesn't seem to know it. Or does he?

The news site is an obscure one -- what amounts to a local shopper in the Crimea -- yes, that Crimea which was just forcibly annexed by Putin.

But the stories shown are from 2010 long before the invasion -- they are about Easter ceremonies, about awards ceremonies for the Russian Navy, hyper local stories for those towns in the Crimea like Feodosiya.

In months of total immersion in the Ukraine war, I've never come across that very local publication, because it is not a major news vehicle -- when I say "shopper," I'm trying to convey that it's a rough equivalent of not even the Village Voice, but Town & Village, which is my neighbourhood newspaper.

Why would an American military man have that particular local news site open on his desk top?

One theory might be that he was gathering intel on Russia in some fashion. In the very old days, the Soviets used to prevent foreigners from ever seeing their newspapers, local or national even, because they feared Western spies getting intel from them. In fact, journalist Nick Daniloff was set up and arrested precisely for accepting a bundle of provincial newspapers -- the hardest kind for foreigners to get - which were sought after not only by spies, but by scholars and journalists because even with state censorship, they had useful things to convey about how life was lived outside the main cities where foreigners were not allowed.

But that's no longer a factor today, and even if you could glean things like ship movements, or determine an occasion when a spy on the ground could go and observe the line-up of military leaders and observe relations (such as at an awards ceremony), it seems like an awfully clumsy way to get it -- there are likely much more sophisticated methods.

So another theory is that a person who was from that locale would be interested in reading about his home town, as only a such a person can be interested in such papers, i.e. the Jester is from there.

Crimea is a place of a lot of activity -- there are ports -- but it's somewhat cut off from Russia (it's only getting a bridge built now after the occupation). But it's a place of criminal activity as well, and the people who came to political power there are connected to the Russian mafias, because mafias the world over get into shipping, and what is shipped, like arms or metals.

A third theory -- the publication had classified ads in which Russians selling bot networks could advertise in code. That has to be studied more, but that might be why a hacker in the US would be studying a very local paper.

That's all for now, and I don't have time to put in any links or spell out names. To be continued...

 

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Why Electronic Frontier Foundation is Antithetical to Freedom and Democracy and Indeed, Everything We Cherish

The Aereo Supreme Court decision, which I embrace and rejoice in, has brought all the pirates and copyleftists and crypto anarchists out of the woodwork to scream about how "innovation" has been stifled and even "free speech" and how the Internet is being "broken" by evil people.

Oh, stuff and nonsense -- and here's the thing, a lot of this is driven by one group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and then its various clones or front groups or spin-offs, from the original gang starring Tiffaniy Cheng sponsored by Mitch Kapor, which today includes Fight for the Internet, Demand Progress, Access, and Foundation for Freedom of the Press, which is where some of the EFF staff have migrated.

It doesn't matter if these groups have separate registrations or even the connective tissues aren't always so visible, or even, for mysterious reasons not disclosed, Mitch Kapor doesn't fund them anymore and has left EFF. They are all part of an ideological coalition, funded by Silicon Valley giants like Google as well as philanthropists like Soros, and they are a certain political tendency.

Parker Higgins -- the very same EFF operative I debated vigorously on Twitter, mentioned by none other than Snowden himself in a blog post under his pseudonym "Cincinnatus" back in November 2012 when he was announcing the Crypto Party to be attended by none other than Tor's Runa Sandvik -- has a blog post up titled "The Troubling Truth of Why It’s Still So Hard to Share Files Directly" lamenting the Aereo decision, praising the "innovation" of Snowden's file mule Micah Lee (who works with Greenwald now) who invented a direct file exchange gadget that bypasses platforms and rules.

So here's my answer, which explains what I've long meant for the last ten years of blogging regarding EFF's antipathy to freedom and democracy:

Answer: because you don't own the copyright on the content you are "sharing," i.e. stealing and redistributing for your own political or business agenda. Micah Lee is also helping in the process of "sharing" Snowden's files which were stolen from a liberal democratic government for no good purpose. No civil rights violations have ever been found in this last year; instead, serious damage to relations with allies and tremendous advantage for enemies like Russia has occurred instead.

Let's hope that the content companies go after Onion App as they have ever other version of a copybot that exists because of course it's not going to be used for sending recipes, it's going to be used for stealing and circulating digital content mainly from the entertainment sector.

Copyleftsts love to indulge in the sophistry that "sharing" isn't "stealing" as the hapless owner of the content rights is "left with his original". But of course it *is* stealing in a very real sense because it is theft of the ability to commodify content, and loss of the exclusivity of that right. Infringement is still theft in a very real and normal sense. The Aereo decision ought to help drive that home, once you wave away the smoke and mirrors of the Pirate Party trying to obfuscate this basic fact -- they hijacked content other companies paid for to make their own money off ads, i.e. they followed the Google model which we're supposed to pretend represents "innovation".

Let me take this opportunity to mention once again why the Electronic Frontier Foundation is such a pernicious outfit, and has been since it started litigating for phone phreakers and has continued to litigate the Snowden agenda until they found Snowden. It truly is ideologically, one of the greatest threats to liberal democracy and the greatest advancers of the crypto-anarcho agenda today. You do not want to live in a world where they take power, believe me.

They start with undermining the rule of law on copyright, since it gets in the way of the highway robbery business model of Silicon Valley, whose interests it essentially represents even if a non-profit "movement".

They continue claiming that copyright violation isn't breaking the law, but "free speech" and therefore to be "protected" -- which further undermines the rule of law and common sense. Breaking the law -- then pretending it wasn't that, but a civil "right".

Having thus broken up two fundamental pillars of democracy -- the rule of law and the meaning of free speech and civil rights -- they then naturally head toward national security, pretending that stealing classified secrets is "whistleblowing" and a kind of "liberation". In other words, it's revolutionary anarchy, a big power grab from Washington to Moscow (as Neal Cassady once put it), which they have smugly cloaked in "rights" terms and law-faring to conceal their agenda.

Parker has never adequately answered the question of how Edward Snowden came to get an EFF sticker on his laptop.

Parker and the rest of the EFF operatives should have the courage of their convictions, and stop pretending that they are about "rights" or "law" or "technical innovation". They're for revolution, and overthrowing capitalist corporations and for replacing them with communist collectives. Where they think the content and money will come from after they're done is beyond me. Good luck, comrades.

***

Now, that may not be clear, and people hate it when you state things starkly, in candid ideological polemics, because they think you shound like a 1950s anti-communist recruitment poster scaremongering with Bolsheviks in Your Bathroom.

I really don't care. Because that's how you have to fight people who are constantly attempting to use language to reconstruct reality, like Humpty Dumpty, getting a thing to mean what they say, and who are using frivolous and malevolent litigation with a political agenda to try to overturn democratic institutions. I think it's more than fine to speak in this manner, as starkly as you need to. I don't care if you think it has to be said in more nuanced tones -- you go do that.

And it's important to realize that the dogs are not really barking quite so hard about Aereo -- Forbes has an article explaining the "myths" of the dramatic reaction to Aereo and "venture communist" Fred has a very muted statement on Aereo given the jihad he has run for years against the cable companies. All important to note.

Some idiot named Andrew Norton who runs the Pirate Party in the US (which has...50 members, does it?) is ranting at me on Twitter.

@catfitz All I have to say is, you're possibly the most ignorant and ill-informed troll I've ever had the misfortune to deal with #killfiled

— Andrew Norton (@ktetch) June 27, 2014

 

One of the things these characters always do is reach for two very lame, very tired, very threadbare arguments (which I've heard for 10 years, so they are particularly worn out for me).

First, they tell you with vicious know-it-all glee that you are "ignorant" and "don't understand the law" because you refer to "theft" or "stealing" regarding copyright, and in fact "the law" says it is "infringement of rights" and "not" stealing.

Well, this is sophistry, of the sort I've routinely dealt with in my posts like Twelve Unconvincing Arguments of Copyrightists and Pirates.

And my little infograph, crude but effective, on why piracy *is* stealing from an article asking why Kim Dotcom isn't in jail:

Pirates always tell you this idiotic thing:

They think they are so clever stating this literalalist, bi thinking "factoid".

To which I say:

Piracy and copyright "infringement" -- a word that already sounds like it is a lesser offense than a crime -- steals the value of a thing, your ability to SELL it, which is a  GOOD property for digital content to have, since not everyone wants to live in the share-bear collective commune of Creative Communism, but wants to earn a living, you know, like Silicon Valley coders and people in non-profit groups advocating copyleftism do.

Second, they claim falsely that if you criticize them, you are putting a chill on speech, and if you oppose piracy, why, you are against democracy and progress. These arguments ought to self-discredit, but they are re-tweeted so often by other ignoramuses that you have to take pains to debunk them.

Any 12-year-old can go and read the court decision and grasp it -- it's not about "theft" in a technical sense and does not use that term but it doesn't matter -- because it's a wrong, a tort, a violation, a loss which is why there is a LAWSUIT, duh. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz, much hated by the crypto kids because she's the one who lawfully prosecuted Aaron Schwartz, said it best:

“Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”

In ABC vs. Aereo, the Supremes take you through the concept of "performance" and "copying" and so on and conclude that Aereo just doesn't fit their existing jurisprudence -- a whole area of law that the online lawyers seldom grasp because they think laws are literalist mechanisms that execute like code unambiguously, when in fact laws are in the context of judges and PRECEDENT which means humans constantly intepret it in light of both law and past decisions.

And indeed, Aereo is not "performing" when it automatically swipes signals and then enables customers to pick out what they want from the cloud.

The dissenting opinion in this case by Judge Scalia doesn't say that Aereo is right; in asking whether they are a copy shop or offering a library card, to use his analogies, he still says they are guilty of a wrong. It just says the law should be applied differently.

No matter. Aereo has had its ass handed to it by what still matters, the court system, and the litigators will have to gnash their teeth and live to try their destructive strategems another day.

No "innovation" was harmed in this episode because there's nothing innovative about thinking up yet another script that snags other people's content they paid to produce or made themselves to earn a living, and then hijacks it to sell against ads for their own business. This isn't innovation; it's highway robbery. Silicon Valley needs to get a new business model, not Hollywood or the paid content Internet or TV broadcasters.

As I always say at these moments -- stone soup, but who's bringing the turnip, guys?

Aereo is going to have to pay CBS and others for content it swipes, just like other businesses have to pay their business costs and not get stuff for free, you know, like Google on YouTube, as much as it still makes a killing off illegal uploads and playing the "catch me if you can" DMCA chase game.

We've had to hear a whole lot of nonsense about "technological innovation" -- crime -- not only trying to be decriminalized but turn into "rights" -- and unfortunatley this is getting new life now with the release of "The Internet's Own Boy" about the life of Schwartz, and a revival of all the crazy exaggerations prevelant at the time of his death - that he faced "35" or even "50" years of jail -- although...he was released before trial on bail, ordered to get mental health services (a fact never admitted in the tech press), and was offered a six month sentence by the prosecutor in exchange for a guilty plea. Some 35 years...

Schwartz, like his more tenured and resourced ideological uncles, wanted to use language to change reality, and had a certain amount of Silicon Valley and Soros money to do so. But this linguistic assault, followed with the Occupy sort of real assault, hasn't (mercifully) been so successful (and was a tragedy for him and his family and friends personally).

The pirate Andrew Norton has also harassed me with this notion that if you criticize pirates, or these ideologies, you are "suppressing" speech. If I call for "pirates to be put in jail" -- they should be when they commit the crime of content piracy  -- then I must be "against democracy" because Pirates have organized themselves into political parties and are even elected.

So what? They can't sanitize their crimes by being elected to political office. Good Lord, the pirates would be the first to call out people they don't like in parliament as crooks, and even find real crooks hiding in office. These people are SO much for democracy -- except when they're not. After trying to best you in an argument about piracy, telling you that pirates are elected to parliaments, five minutes later they will tell you that only 7% of the American people in the latest poll trust Congress, and therefore we must "route around" Congress, as one hacker put it, or "blow it up," as ideologue Beth Noveck memorably put it, figuratively, of course. They hate Congress or parliaments, do not think they are legitimate, and only play the game of elections as one anarchist strategy.

It's hardly suppression of free speech to advocate that people who commit crimes under the law be put in prison. As pirate leaders in fact are, in Europe. Good! And it's hardly suppression of speech to point out that people in cadre movements exploiting democracy politics with pernicious ideas antithetical to democracy should get some resistance for the sake of democracy itself. This story is as old as Bolshevisim.

SOPA should have been passed, because it provided a very good legal framework for how to handle this pernicious issue, by defining punishable piracy as not your grandmother downloading a Bible verse or your son downloading Game of Thrones, but:

o large quantity pirates

o repeated and persistent pirates who don't heed warnings

o pirates who monetarize their purloined content

o pirates who can't prove that dismantling the pirated content on their site is a technical difficulty.

o specific notorious repeat-offending piracy sites should be blocked

Read SOPA, few do. That's what it said, and it was eminently sensible, and we should bring it back.

So you may not share my thought processes on how a group that starts by trying to get phone phreaks off the hook and tries to stop government regulation of the actual weapon of cryptography, and moves on to aggressive litigating against government secrecy and copyright, winds up recruiting and aiding and abetting -- yes, literally financing and helping -- Edward Snowden. But this isn't exactly hidden material; it's all there on their websites.

Many go on yammering that all this destructive activity is in the realm of advocacy and free expression and democratic politics, and sure, some of it is. But increasingly I'm convinced some of it isn't, and I have faith that the institutions that still function in our democracy are going to prove me right.

Now, you may not have liked MY take on why EFF is evil -- but then, come on over to the Silicon Valley funded Pando, and see how the sectarian technolibertarian/technocommunists go and harass EFF for their own reasons:

Why are Greenpeace and the EFF working with extremists who want to nullify welfare programs and the EPA?

 

What follows there in the article by David Holmes is an expose of how EFF, to gain more breadth and depth to their existing linguistic and legal assaults, have gotten in to bed with various right-wing or libertarian extremists like the Pauls, the Tenthers, and the Oathkeepers.

 

I need to read up more on these extremist groups which I haven't heard much about before. Tenthers? But this is an old story, as every time EFF or some of the other Kaporians add on anything slightly to the right of Lenin, these sectarian Marxists like Yasha Levine and Mark Ames scream bloody murder at Pando.

 

They have a huge campaign going against Glenn Greenwald not on the grounds I might have, that he is antithetical to a liberal democratic establishment that has institutions of secrecy that are legitimate -- a centrist and liberal position -- but because he's not leftist and extreme enough for them, and is in bed with the Man by accepting money from an oligarch who is related to PayPal, which gasp, blocked WikiLeaks from Amazon server payments. And that was a good thing.

 

This particular take on GG is interesting but boring. It leads them to idiocies like "exposing" that Omidyar *gasp* funded an NGO in Ukraine which USAID also happened to fund at a time of revolution -- even though this is legitimate, common, and the NGO was not central to Maidan.

 

This makes him a creature of the neo-con neo-liberal neo-imperlialist Amerika, you see.

 

Read the comments -- priceless -- one idiot compares this tactic to us allying with Stalin to fight Hitler, which we were forced to do.

 

Because, you know, the e-bay founder is so much like Stalin, right.

 

 

In Solidarity with John Schindler @20Committee

I declared a day of Twitter silence today when I saw what was done to John Schindler, the Naval Academy professor and former NSA analyst (@20committee) because I wanted to emphasize that when someone like him is bullied and maneuvered into silence by evil forces, we are all partly silenced, too, if we interacted with him, responded, or re-tweeted or "favorited".

But as some have noted, maybe instead at a time like this you need to speak up all the more.

Let me start out by expressing my unconditional solidarity with John Schindler -- what has happened to him is what could happen to any of us who are Putin critics and Snowden skeptics. Be warned.

As many have seen, Schindler is now suspended from the Naval War College, and the lefty/libertarian media is having a field day with what they see as a very gleeful gotcha of a conservative figure.

I don't know John Schindler personally and have never met him -- and it may turn out at that in real life, behind his role as a most excellent and valuable public intellectual on Twitter, he's some kind of Anthony Weiner type.

I think it's more than likely these pictures are fake, or there is an elaborate and staged set-up here, but it doesn't matter if in fact there was some bad judgement here in reality.

I don't care. If you've ever been to Second Life or Chat Roulette or in fact many places on the Internet, you know that it is a fact of our modern life that some men show their dicks online. It's like some hard-wired evolutionary thing. I don't know why some do and some don't; I think some do it under stress. Whatever. If it is not done to harass men, women or especially if it does not involve minors, it's hard to see why anyone should be prudish about it or call for "action". I don't find it attractive and I think probably most women find it a turn-off, but perhaps there is a sub-set that finds it legitimate. It doesn't matter.

What matters here is that I believe Schindler was set up. That he was watched for a long time, and ways were found to target his weaknesses and silence him. You have to judge missions by their outcomes. This one was accomplished. He has not only deleted his invaluable Twitter account, he has posted a notice -- changed at least once -- on his blog that he is taking a break from social media -- and apparently that now includes his blog. It might be permanent, knowing how these things go. I hope not.

For me, Schindler was the most important person online criticizing Snowden. That's because not only did he have the credential of being a well-versed Russian expert and particularly knowledgeable about provokatsiya or Soviet/Russian tradecraft, he was formerly an NSA analyst himself so he had actual knowledge of how espionage with the Russians works. Few do, who are also in public.

It was always a marvel to me that someone who was young, from a generation that didn't know the Soviet Union and the Cold War, could understand so perfectly what we learned first-hand in the field -- the elaborate and cunning methods by which Russian intelligence disinforms, distracts, subverts, lies -- and often by telling even partly the truth.

Some people, particularly Schindler's incessant hecklers, were put off by his occasional brandishing of his PhD or his knowledge, or his swagger -- which seems of a piece with dick pics. They were seldom put off by the worse swagger of some of his worst hecklers among the ABD and aspiring journalist set. It doesn't matter. None of that detracted from the impressive and persuasive body of his work, which stands, and will continue to stand and I hope will be added to again when he emerges from this scandal.

What none of the journalists covering this story so far seem to grasp is that Schindler was under assault constantly by not only leftwingers or libertarians who didn't like his views, but by hackers and pro-Kremlin troll accounts.

One of his most persistent enemies was an account that first appeared a few years ago using the name "Mr. X" on various blogs, then on Twitter used various other names which were banned, and recently has used the handle @OpHatchAct2.

That persona -- who could be one person or a group of persons -- is the very same person who has harassed me for a year on Twitter, in separate blogs made just for that purpose, and in emails.

One of the things this creep has accomplished by invading a group of Kremlin and Snowden critics online has been to turn them against each other with suspicion -- and now some people have claimed *I'm* this persona, which is, of course, ridiculous. I've noted multiple times that I'm happy to cooperate with any campus police or federal authorities on any investigation of this persona who has been more than a nuisance to a group of us; he has been an ominous, organized threat of the type that only comes from resourced operations like a state.

If before, I thought he was just a crank, maybe hooked up to those networks of psychopaths who harass people they think are neo-cons online, I don't think that any longer. That's because after a period of silence he's been heavily active again in recent weeks as the criticism of Putin escalates over his war on Ukraine. The more violence Putin instigates in Ukraine, the more some of us have criticized the Kremlin, the more the Kremlin propaganda machine cranks up to lie about things like refugees and "white phosphorus" -- and the more then the pro-Kremlin trolls attack us in all kinds of unseemly ways. A whole rash of posts have gone out online calling me a Nazi-loving CIA neo-con hack blah blah -- there's a lot of "chatter" now on these networks.

Perhaps it's no accident, comrades that last night while working I got an email in my box from this creature which said basically "That's not me on Twitter doing that to Schindler". In fact, it was one of the most sane communiques from this persona who works hard at appearing like a crazy Tea Party maniac obsessed with the Hatch Act and nailing Schindler on it -- funny, that.

I looked on Twitter at saw the outrages. And I saw that it was the account @Currahee88 "Lesley" which is now deleted. I figured either she was hacked or drunk. She was tweeting what purported to be screenshots of private conversations between her and Schindler -- clearly with a vindictive aim.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," I thought to myself -- it seemed like this groupie of Schindler's may have ultimately been rejected, even if he contemplated a fling, and that explained the behaviour.

My own experience with Currahee led me to wonder about her real motives and real personality from the get-go. That's because months ago, even as I saw her suck up to Schindler and other people in his circles, she would turn on me like a junk-yard dog, criticizing my take on hackers and Snowden. That is, on the one hand, she purported to be a conservative groupie and a critic of Snowden and Assange herself, except...not always consistently on every point, and sometimes deliberately stirring up trouble.

I've seen this behaviour pattern loads of times on Twitter, and @dj3petros has been defining it very well on his blog Ukraine@war -- all of a sudden, you get somebody on Twitter who "wants to be your friend" and seems to live to re-tweet your every thought, but then after some period of time, they turn on you over some technicality, some minor difference, and keep flogging it. Seemingly you are fighting the same battle in the trenches, against Putin, yet suddenly, this person has some bone to pick with you that seems irrelevant. They heckle for days on end on non-essentials. Sound familiar? It's a classic psy-ops method.

Currahee88's relentless heckling at the time made me wonder: a) is this really a female or yet another story of a man online posing as a woman and behaving particularly viciously b) what's her game here? But I blocked her and ignored her for much of the time, occasionally only seeing her in re-tweets by credulous males.

Except, does "Lesley" even exist, and is she not a comely 20- or 30-something online with her bosom showing and coquettish and flattering remarks all day aimed at certain men commenting on Russia and intelligence -- but some 50-year-old chain-smoker named Ivan sitting at a desk at the FSB?

Such is the nature of online life and persuasiveness of personas that it had not occurred to me that "Lesley" might not even exist at all. But that issue was raised on Twitter by RevMagdalene a person knowledgeable about hackers, in response to Ashera_Wolf,  the queen of the crypto parties, who herself coincidentally is retiring from online life once again -- she frequently takes breaks after major operations, I've seen in the past, as when she was investigated for enabling the Anonymous accounts that hacked the Boston police.

Odd, that. Maybe related, I actually think not. And I couldn't find any evidence that "Lesley" exists in real life, as a Google search of her photo shows nothing and the name doesn't seem to exist at the university said to be outed by what was claimed to be a spear-phishing expedition of OpHatchAct2's mail -- for which he blames Schindler. Schindler denies it.

It's puzzling because at times it seemed as if the "Fake Schindler" parody account @5150Committee was the same person as OpHatch2, but OpHatch2 claims it is a separate person.

Of course people like this lie; of course they confuse and commit subversion and diversion. That's what they do. And this "they" could be the actual Russian intelligence services, or various "plausible deniability" hacker groups, related to WikiLeaks or Anonymous or spinoffs who have either nudged into such attacks, or who are exploited, or who outright collude. These are all obviously things that are hard to investigate and take the resources of more than just an amateur blogger.

There's another curious thing about the mass Schadenfreude now on Twitter about Schindler -- from the very people who claim to be privacy advocates and who encrypt themselves to avoid their own privacy being compromised, ostensibly. Hypocrites, all, whose ideology and actions I exposed in my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee.

Some of the same accounts have appeared in other operations I've seen go down online.

For example @caulkthewagon is the very account that emerged to take up the very vocal and voluble defense of Sarah Kendzior in her latest strange escapade, that involved incriminating a radical leftist magazine with the charge of supporting rape threats, and starting the sort of ruckus only she can start on Twitter and the Internet in general, pressing on all the trigger buttons of the politically-correct pearl-clutchers there.

I see other accounts, now deleted, that took part in the anti-Schindler operation, and have  popped up in dialogues with others in the past.

Then I've found one hugely troubling and odd coincidence.

Let me say this: this sort of investigation is above my pay grade as a volunteer blogger without tools, but I hope the appropriate investigators are going hard on this and going fast -- because the tweets are getting deleted as we speak. They need to see all the interactions, networks, RTs, etc. etc. around Schindler. In that sense, it's regrettable his account is deleted because that makes it hard to investigate.

I'm pretty convinced, looking over the wreckage on Twitter, that this was a calculated and planned set-up, staged for months. Whether it was totally fabricated out of whole cloth with everything about it faked, or whether it exploited some weakness or stress of John's to amplify something he did with poor judgement thinking it would stay in private -- it's immaterial.

I've written in defense of people who are even my worst enemy, like Peter Ludlow, when it seems they are a victim of a politically-motivated witch-hunt and ultra-feminist hysteria.

So of course I'm going to speak out in defense of John Schindler, who I viewed as an online friend, even if I didn't know him in real life. He's far more of a sterling character.

I hope his university and even the NSA itself and any other relevant parties investigate this thoroughly.

But keep in mind, any of you in the Newly-Acquired Conscience Society about sending gross pictures online like Anonymous and pro-Kremlin hecklers do routinely, that this is a victimless crime, except for John and his family who have experienced the full "life ruination" effects, as Anonymous calls it.

I hope his university will close ranks behind him and restore him, and face down this evil attack, just as I hope the leaders of Europe close ranks around Radek Sikorski, also under attack this week in Poland over an embarassing leaked conversation which wouldn't have been said in the same way if public.

This could happen to any of us. In fact, it will happen to any one of us next, and we have no idea what private comments, what pictures, what acts that we don't even remember or think about or even see as anything bad might be dredged up and publicized to harass and ruin us.

Once again, I have to point out the sheer evil and pernicious nature of the Snowden Operation unleashed by Snowden himself, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum. They have not come up with a single goddamn individual case of civil liberty violations. Not one. Not a single credible case that shows the NSA had some systemic or systematic practice of violating civil rights deliberately, in harm of someone not a targeted suspect, or in harm of someone targeted wwho shouldn't have been.

The only things that happen are cases like Schindler -- and his private text messages fabricated or leaked if they are real. Privacy for me and not for thee...

 

 

 

You Know Where I Want Some Press Freedom, Pvt. Manning? From You, About Those Iraqi Printing Press People

A Soldier of Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 5th Battalion, 82D Field Artillery, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division inspects a printing press believed to be used in a terrorist counterfeiting operation. The press, along with 10 other printers, five computers and three cell phones were all seized by the soldiers and Iraqi Police during a raid to disrupt terrorist funding activities in Qayyarah, Iraq, September 13. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Eric A. Rutherford)

 

Pvt. Chelsea Manning has an op-ed piece in the New York Times that all the hacker skiddies are retweeting. It's cunningly titled "Fog Machine of War" and pretends that the US liberal media "kept us in the dark" about Iraq and that we're all sheeple and that's why even Democrats supported the war in Iraq.

Of course it wasn't like that, and we'd know that, if the Times itself had more spine and stopped being guilt-tripped by these hacker kiddies into agreeing with them that they were scribes for Bush. But it is bullshit as the record shows. And you know, the outcome we're seeing now with ISIS in Iraq is a story that should start helping some people see this, but they don't.

In any event, I want to hone in on this question of the Iraqi printing press. This was supposedly the moment when Chelsea turned against her country for good and decided to betray it.

She was told to investigate individuals running the printing press:

Early that year, I received orders to investigate 15 individuals whom the federal police had arrested on suspicion of printing “anti-Iraqi literature.” I learned that these individuals had absolutely no ties to terrorism; they were publishing a scholarly critique of Mr. Maliki’s administration. I forwarded this finding to the officer in command in eastern Baghdad. He responded that he didn’t need this information; instead, I should assist the federal police in locating more “anti-Iraqi” print shops.

I was shocked by our military’s complicity in the corruption of that election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American media’s radar.

OK, so you would think that with that seminal moment, a crucial turning point in the formation of Chelsea's "conscience," that this would be the first document she would leak to WikiLeaks.

But it wasn't. It was never leaked at all.

It disappeared and was never mentioned throughout the whole case.

I kept asking about it over and over again. I seemed to be the only person doing this.

To me, a real human rights activist would care about people, not millions of documents. What are the documents about, after all, if not about people? Chelsea was never a human rights activist for me on this basis -- she didn't care enough to publicize the cases of those pieces. Chelsea was no CPJ. If she'd had even one good, solid case of abuse to report -- instead of millions of documents designed to undermine security; if WikiLeaks really worked on real cases, and not fake propaganda pieces like the Apache helicopter manipulation, perhaps I might have thought better of WikiLeaks. But of course they didn't, because that's not the nature of coercive, authoritarian radical movements like theirs.

But I kept wondering -- why? Was she really such a utilitarian cadre that "the movement" and the "cause" and getting as many documents as possible to "stick it to America" trumped getting justice for those 15? Where were the documents about them?!

Then, to my surprise, Manning actually mentioned them finally (after years of pre-trial when they weren't mentioned) during the trial, and said that she had suggested to Julian Assange that he publish them and he refused.

Here's the account of it.

He said they weren't important -- WikiLeaks "needed more specifics" to "gain the attention of the international media" and rejected it -- which "disappointed" Manning. Huh? Since when is WikiLeaks such a big fact checker -- as distinct from a dumper! -- that they'd prevent Chelsea Manning, their chief agent of Cablegate, from publishing the very document that converted him to radical anarchist?! Truly a  mystery!

Again -- the hallmark of revolutionary hacker assholes is indeed this: they don't care about people, they don't care about cases, they just care about vast hypotheses and statistics and getting the attention of the international media -- instead of doing the right thing. They are like the reverse of Stalin (and don't bore me with proving that Stalin never said this): one person is a statistic; millions of people are a tragedy. It's like the millions who are supposedly hacked by the NSA, and yet we don't have one single case to prove there is actually civil rights violations.

But if Chelsea thought the 15 were important, why didn't she just go around Assange? Remember when Adrian Lamo essentially asked in the chat logs Wired published, something like "why do you kow-tow to Assange?"

Indeed.

Why didn't Chelsea, oh, tell David House, here's these names, this is important, publish this. Why didn't James Ball, Man of Conscience, who quit WikiLeaks get it and publish it?

At any moment, given the massive numbers of files leaked in Cablegate, Assange could have doubled back finally and published that document right? Why didn't he? Oh, it wasn't there? You're saying Chelsea didn't bother to get it? But given that she did have a conversation asking to publish it, it must have been in the batch. Indeed, from the court account, it seems that she thought these men might have even ended up in Gitmo! All the more reason to find out their fate!

Why doesn't Alexa O'Brien get this document and publish it?

Let's have it. Let's get it.

And let's ask the State Department or the military to get it and publish it. Let's all have a look. Were those people terrorists? Where are they now? Are they in prison or dead?

I wonder if this story isn't a lot like Ed Snowden's "whistleblowing e-mails" that he can't seem to come up with despite stealing 1.5 million docs.

If you want to get rid of the Fog of War -- and the Fog Machine of War -- start at home. Chelsea, let's have that list of 15 names of Iraqi men running a printing press -- the one page of which "proved" they were only making a scholarly critique of Maliki. Right? Let's look at the rest of the pages! And them!

Have you forgotten them? Foreign names can be hard to remember, even when you are based in a country for awhile.

But then, the document exists, right? So give the word, get it published, let's all have some transparency here. Don't be part of the fog yourself!

Nothing Chelsea says has credibility until we see that list and get those names and track them down.

I suspect Assange probably found some actual terrorists in the list or was afraid he might, which is why he discouraged Chelsea from publishing it. It's the kind of very telling detail that can pull down an entire fake operation, you know?

But by all means -- let's have transparency not just for thee, but for these cases. After all, they caused you to betray your country. So it better be worth it.

 

Molly Crabapple Has an Atrocious Article in Vanity Fair About Dissidents

This is an absolutely awful and mendacious article by Molly Crabapple in Vanity Fair. My God, their politics have gone downhill lately.

Trying to make Ceily McMillan, a labor activist and Occupy demonstrator into a human rights victim is a huge fail - like other huge fails trying to turn that radical, violent movement into a poster boy for human rights and democracy, when in fact it's about deliberate, Marxist-Leninist-style violent revolution antithetical to human rights.

Cecily McMillan was heavily intoxicated by her own admission in court when she got into an altercation with police trying to break up an attempt to reinstall Occupy, which had already legitimately been dispersed -- because months-long urban camping in public squares, replete with public urination, rats, rape, garbage, noise, etc. -- isn't guaranteed under the First Amendment; restrictions are allowed for time, place, and manner.

The pictures that Occupy show of another woman being supposedly grabbed by the breast are outrageous -- for one, it's a distraction because one policeman even if proven to have grabbed a woman's press isn't proof in a completely different case with McMillan.

But when you look at the photo, you see the cop has grabbed the woman *underneath* her breast as he's trying to round her up. Getting people from behind is a better method than trying to get them from the front when they might flail their arms.

McMillan's claims of having a bruised breast didn't hold up in court. Given that she was drunk and passed out and fell on the floor, the bruises could have come from something else, even her own hand if she fell on it. There just isn't any evidence of police brutality here as try as they might. Compare and contrast the New York Times and Village Voice versions of this story to understand what this is about:  radical politics and Occupy rioters lying to get their way.

McMillan hit a policeman with her elbow when she was detained -- she was drunk and disorderly. She was properly arrested and charged. Is the sentence too long for a crime that wasn't deliberate? Perhaps. She has good lawyers and they can go for an appeal.

But this case has NOTHING to do with free expression at all.

Ditto the case of Barrett Brown, who was not arrested for journalism but for enabling hackers and for making threats to law-enforcers.


http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/09/barrett-brown-is-not-on-trial-for-journalism-but-for-hacking.html

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/09/barrett-brown-is-not-on-trial-for-journalism-but-for-hacking.html


Snowden isn't a human rights victim, either; he's a wanted felon and fugitive. The Snowden team has not come up with a single case of human rights abuse involving an individual, as opposed to blanket, hypothetical hystericals about how a system *might* be used. Greenwald is promising to deliver some sort of list soon, but it's terribly lame, and he's already walking it back.

Snowden did not "have" to go to Russia, he could have gone to Latin America before exposing his identity.

Why the coyness about naming the organization? It's PEN Club. And they've really gone off the rails by not sticking to cases like Pussy Riot -- which also has some elements that make it not about free expression, too, because your right to invade other people's churches while they are excercising *their* free expression isn't unlimited, either. But they shouldn't have gotten heavy sentences.

And McMillan's sentence isn't an equivalent (Pussy Riot committed no assaults) and three months is considerably lighter than the 2-3 years the Russian women got. Pussy Riot took up this case as a balancing act to try to appeal to American leftists who were ignoring them and try to position themselves as not anti-government per se in Russia but just pro human rights. It's a fail. There is no moral equivalence between a country that perpetrates wars in the North Caucasus and Ukraine and jails protesters for years who weren't drunk and who didn't strike any policemen.

PEN should stick to really clear-cut classic cases of imprisoned writers. There are enough of them to keep them busy. Unless, of course, it was never really about that, but merely a vehicle for certain trendy liberals and leftists to use as their political hobby horse.

Human rights are not for overthrowing a state that in fact ensures those human rights, and replacing it with something far worse that is antithetical to human rights.

Sarah Kendzior is disgraceful -- she's just instigated a massive witch-hunt against a leftist magazine's writers and editors because they dared to link to her public tweet about rape threats -- which has resulted in an astounding suppression of freedom of expression all around.

All in all, a horrible intervention from radicals once again -- and we're unimpressed with Vanity Fair, which thinks if they put a positive article about Pussy Riot in the same issue by Masha Gessen, then it's all balanced.

It's not.

If Occupy and people like Sarah Kendzior came to power, we'd learn what it's like to learn under bureaucratic and oppressive Bolshevik rule.  Let's not make it easy for them and draw a distinction between violent revolution and human rights.

Why Can't We Get Some Basic Journalism Done on @sarahkendzior and "Jacobinghazi"?

I'm pasting my answer to Rancid Honeytrap's post here, as his site looks to be the sort that has arcane and arbitrary rules and he is something of a sectarian loon who might block people.

Look, would it be too terribly bourgeois “view-from-nowhere” imperialist lapdog presstitute of me to ask why we can’t learn who the brocialist is who sent those rape threats to Sarah Kendzior? Shouldn’t that be reported? Shouldn’t there be a Human Rights Watch style naming and shaming? Shouldn’t the police be called? Couldn’t we get not only the name, but the content, so we can determine what the context is? That doesn’t diminish the problem of rape threats on line, or doubt a woman’s word, or diminish the problem (as some seem to imply) but only bolsters the factual approach needed to combat it. By implying we can’t ask this without being part of “rape culture,” we’re enabling future rape threat emails to be sent with impunity. There’s a curious authoritarian feminism convention at play here that says we have to keep an omerta on rape threats or acts, real or online, because otherwise we are re-traumatizing the victim or taking the oppressor’s side. Huh? Can’t we just have due diligence on the facts and due process and journalism here?

It’s important to see this latest provocation of Kendzior’s within a context of a long string of political provocations on the themes of authoritarianism and rights that mainly seem to be about either disrupting politics for the sake of disruption, or establishing a sectarian cadre network’s take on politics. I’ve summarized them here:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2014/06/sarahkendzior-is-a-political-provocateur-and-three-reasons-why-her-rape-threats-lament-are-wrong.html

I’ve followed the Registanis for years. Yes, Hamm and Foust were DoD contractors, but Foust’s job before the current one at Eurasia Foundation was at the American Security Project, which is a liberal hawk think tank with John Kerry and others. He was let go when Kerry was made Secretary of State and Central Asian funds began to be wound down as the war in Afghanistan was announced to be “ending”. Casey Michel was in the Peace Corps and seems to be one of those Peace Corps volunteers who comes back with clientitis, in this case for the Nazarbayev regime.

As a supporter of the military but a critic merely of how they did this or that, Foust has a long controversial record as a gadfly, serial harasser of various human rights leaders like the regional directors of ICG, HRW, CPJ, etc. and regional activists against drones, etc. When he took his current job, he evidently was told to cool it with the endless Twitter wars he got into with all these people on a routine basis. Few people consistently stand up to him because he is so vicious (I have) — for their troubles they will find themselves endlessly libeled in the way he slams these Jacobin editors not just due to a misunderstanding, but to enabling of the highly sectarian and selective reading Kendzior has put on this.

The Registanis are not neo-cons. They’re too young to be true neo-cons and didn’t live through the Cold War. They themselves loathe neo-cons and constantly seek to disassociate themselves from them. Rather, they are a kind of establishment liberal hawk clique that promotes drones, but condemns the war in Iraq; intellectually facilitates the war in Afghanistan but is averse to strikes on Syria, and so on. They also flip-flop, particularly Foust.

Kendzior’s politics in fact have little in common with Freedom House, but she likely saw an opportunity to infiltrate this centrist organization with her own brand of sectarianism on both Internet and Central Asian issues. Whatever you think of them, FH is now a standard for annual surveys on the levels of freedom and democracy in countries, and she wrote the Uzbekistan chapter. BTW, it is a freelance job not a full-time job, and Kramer would not be her immediate supervisor on this consulting position.

The field of Eurasian studies is small and opportunities for work and publication are limited. Just about everyone in this field, regardless of their politics, publishes on RFE/RL, because they used to pay fees (now generally they don’t). There is nothing sinister about RFE/RL as it has not been a CIA program since the 1970s and long ago was put under the direction of a separate Board of International Broadcasting and funded by Congress, which gives it oversight and scrutiny. In the academic and regional fields, RFE/RL reporting is accepted as fairly free of bias. It is not seen as conspiratorial and is not propagandistic in the matter of the Kremlin’s RT.com.

You tend to spin conspiracy theories based on what you see as bastions of some kind of neo-con movement, but in fact, the neo-cons are almost non-existent today — they are ridiculed and have had to rebrand or disappear all over the place. Think tanks today are filled with International Affairs Realist School devotees — that’s what all these people at Registan are about. That makes them tend to be uncritical of Putin (Foust wrote an awful essay knocking Pussy Riot); they tend to believe we have to pragmatically deal with the tyrants of Central Asia for the sake of the Northern Distribution Network required to get supplies to troops, and so on. If you look up Mark Ames on Foust, you will see the trigger for his serial rant on Foust’s “failing up” was Foust’s minimizing of a terrible massacre of workers in Zhanaozen, and his joining in, along with Kendzior, of a disparagement of a lesbian Russian writer who reported more victims of this massacre than the state media would admit. That was a typical story at Registan.

Since leaving academia, Kendzior has worked for Al Jazeera and has swerved more to the left opportunistically but also because her own brand of liberal hawk politics in fact were decidedly old-school DSA although she is too young to have been trained in the DSA. But she shows the marks of training somewhere in some cadre organization as she is manipulative, uses classic psy-war techniques, and picks up popular SEIU-type socialist topics like internship pay and minimum wage.

Sarah in fact has not written much on Ukraine because it doesn’t fit her politics; Foust has been more vocal and for the first time in years has even had critical tweets against Putin, which was not his pattern before when he was in the reset business with Obama. But what she has written is awful, implying that journalists who care about Ukraine are day-trippers and war porn gawkers. Disgraceful. But that’s typical of her method of indirectly defending the status quo of bureaucratic socialist-oligarchic regimes in this region by attacking their liberal or leftist oppositions and exaggering their rightist oppositions. Her main thesis in all her Internet articles — to summarize what is a convoluted and cunning set of arguments — is that radicals who write too much about human rights violations are making the Internet get shut down for everybody, and therefore precluding incremental reform.

Kendzior and Foust are not part of the “kreakly” as the Russians call them (creative class) because they are pragmatic realists who defend the state here and abroad because that’s where their jobs are.

In the old days, this entire saga would be easier to call — we would learn that Moscow Center had decreed that Jacobin, once a loyal front group, had to die because it was too bourgeois and error-prone, and then nudges through the networks would be made until the proper agents of influence would be deployed to unleash the usual active measures. Today, it is all far more complicated than that.

Popovic is smeared in this account because Occupy was looking for scapegoats after its huge self-induced failures — taking USAID or NED or Freedom House grants doesn’t make you a tool of US intelligence, it just makes you good at grant-getting for your particular cause. Funny how you don’t slam Soros who put more into colour revolutions than the USG.

There’s lots more that I could say about this but you’re in another universe on most of these issues which we won’t agree about. I can only repeat that you have to see Kendzior’s provocation here within the context of a whole series of provocations ranging from her promotion of the “suicide girl” hoax in Uzbekistan to the knock-down of the woman who wrote “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”.

So @randomdijit, What Exactly Are You Supporting When You Support @sarahkendzior?

@randomdijit -- an anonymous person who gives a name "Jake Turk" which is not really tied to any real-world identity behind this blog  - made a dramatic gesture of unfollowing me tonight as some sort of drastic punitive action of the commuuunity -- something he'd threatened to do the other night over some disagreement, so I thought it would be helpful to go back to basics.

As this dispute revolved around his casual re-tweeting of Sarah Kendzior's manipulative tweets around her "rape crisis," and my tweeting of a link to my blog critiquing her latest provocation, I thought I'd go back to her actual works.

Usually, when she succeeds in pitting people against each other, it's because she gets them distracted with secondary and tertiary meta issues that emerge in the blogging and re-blogging of the original story and the ensuing debate, and they forget to see what is truly objectionable in her original writings. A lot of times, people don't even look beyond the tweet connected to the pieces. Her original piece is almost something you're never supposed to look at again, as its purpose was to provoke reaction, and get reactions to that reaction, and not have you notice her original bad faith.

So let me ask you, "Jack Turk," fellow human rights advocate and person of concern about Russia and Eurasia and the oppression there, just what exactly are you supporting here?

I'm dead serious.

I've had a number of people harass and bully me over my critique of Sarah Kendzior -- inside and outside of her posse -- but I suspect few have ever sat down and read her articles, especially the academic pieces. Have you?

In Sarah Kendzior's original famous essay -- the one that put her on the map in this field of Central Asian studies -- we get it that it's about confronting the regime in a contrary position to Fred Starr. All well and good. But do you support the distraction from the original violence that the Islamic businessmen perpetrated in springing their comrades from jail, killing policemen, and taking hostages and human shields? Do you support the argumentation based on claims that Akrimiyah doesn't even exist and is a propagandistic figment of the regime to persecute people -- because you're unaware that the businessmen themselves use this term to this day?

Or to skip to the more recent past, as we might never agree on the right emphasis to put on this terrible tragedy of Andijan for which the regime deserves much of the blame -- do you support her decision to publish and demand sympathy for a dubious story that others instantly saw as a typical intelligence agency hoax? What really was to blame was this foolish young woman's desire to express herself on a Western invention when she shouldn't have used the Internet to oppose Karimov, right Jake? Isn't that the thrust of this piece?

Oh, I know she says, "Now let me be clear. Facebook doesn’t kill people; the national security services of Uzbekistan do. But Gulsumoy’s Facebook page was, according to most reports, the only thing linking her to Uzbek dissident causes" -- so we get where it all went wrong, right? Taking part in social media without being anonymous and on political causes, which only lead to trouble -- right Jake? Isn't that right?

You're smart enough to see a Facebook profile made up with "workplace: People's Movement of Uzbekistan" as something that doesn't make sense for anyone actually in an oppressed exile movement to do, right?

Or perhaps you agree with her that the "suicide girl" couldn't possibly have ever been planted by the secret police of Uzbekistan because the opposition is worse, right, Jake? That's what you think?

Or perhaps you support this article, in which Sarah and her ideological partner Katy Pearce discuss "networked authoritarianism" and explain how authoritarian governments discourage people from activism on line -- which means they are winning the Internet, right Jakes? Or read an earlier version of that article if you can't get access because you're not in academia and tell me you share the conclusion that "greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest" -- too much activism, you bring persecution on yourself, you know, so cool it ? Right? Even though you spend every day yourself documenting suppressed dissent. Do you think you're only helping to send people to jail, Jake?

They raise questions about those who use the Internet to report gross human rights abuses, implying that they drive others away and deter the growth of the Internet for everybody -- do you share that notion?

This piece on Al Jazeera articulates Kendzior's theory once again that sub-rosan incremental activities are better than activist work in countries like Uzbekistan. So do you agree, Jake? Here it is, that slam of the "loud, proud lobby of the political refugee" that hasn't worked in 20 years anyway, right Jake? So why don't go to the web's "quiet corners, stoked by citizens who might never overtly align themselves with activist causes -- and whose ambigious plight offers little recourse." Those radicals just get themselves in trouble and spoil it for the rest of those more sober-headed reformers, right, Jake?

Or maybe you liked the title of this article -- Stop Talking About Civil Society -- which is a contrived and ineffective and Western-dominated concept, anyway, isn't it, Jake? Wouldn't you say so? Surely you believe we need to get rid of all the problems associated with the US government supporting democracy and human rights abroad -- they're just too impossibly compromised, right Jake, even if they supply some of the daily news feed to which you're addicted from things like RFE/RL, and even if they give people jobs or sustain NGOs you support, right? Using terms like "civil society" forces people to "pick sides" between "the people" and "the government," and that sounds like a bad idea, right, Jake?

Of perhaps this slam of a woman telling the truth about her violent son and her enormous difficulties in getting adequate mental health care for him was something that you felt was just fine, because you took her side against this mother? Right? You, with your concerns about justice. Any parent who tells an autistic child to put on his pants and get in the car, and if he keeps raging and ranting, that he will risk being constrained must be wrong, right? If that kid even took kitchen knives up, it must just be poor parenting, right? Wouldn't you agree that this mom sounds like she's the problem, Jake?

Or perhaps it was Kendzior's uninformed take on the NGO system at the UN in a series of tweets, of which this is only one, which you surely know something about, and the characterization of charity balls that auction off internships as something evil? These groups work to bring attention to violence against women, especially in places where it is epidemic such as civil conflicts in Africa. Do you disapprove and think they shouldn't have unpaid interns and should never have auctions and that they're silly bourgeois white folks?

Or maybe it was her tweet, referenced by a leftist feminist's critique of the all-too-casual use of "bro" -- that automatically trivializes every issue attached to it -- about something as serious as a rape threat. You don't think using "bro" trivializes the issue? You don't think rape threats are serious and shouldn't be trivialized?

Now try this experiment. Read everything on Sarah Kendzior's timeline about Ukraine. Hmm, there isn't that much, even though you care passionately about Ukraine, as I do, as many people not only following this region's politics do, but concerned liberals around the world. Why do you think there isn't much from her? And when she does tweet about Ukraine, it's to approve of articles that discount Obama's critics and say it's not really his war?

Sarah hasn't written a lot about Ukraine, but when she does, it's pieces like The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine. Do you pretend to care about Ukraine, Jake? I don't think so! So what's she going on about, exactly? So you think that Gourevitch and Shuster were just doing "apocalypsticles" on Ukraine, Jake? Well?

You must write a hundred times a month about Putin, right? OK, maybe three months. But you're unabashedly critical or you ridicule the obvious, right? What is it that Sarah Kendzior does on Putin, exactly, would you say?

Well, I could go on doing this all night, but hopefully, the lightbulbs are turning on.

Say, is your mind clearing at all about Sarah's method and madness. It should be. If it's not, I could go find 10 or 20 other articles that do the same weird thing -- subvert meaning and pit individual groups against each other and make offenses out of innocuous or inconsequential things.

If you still think I'm the problem, there's little I can do about it. Sooner or later, you will have your own direct experience with this phenomenon of political provocation I'm exposing, and you'll get it. Until then, unfollow back.

@sarahkendzior is a Political Provocateur and Three Reasons Why Her Rape Threats Lament is Wrong

First, let me tell the story in three quick tweets:

@catfitz I hope you’re getting ready to kill yourself because you’re ugly old and fat— Andrew Auernheimer (@rabite) April 18, 2014

@catfitz Catherine, ppl have recommended I call the police b/c you've threatened me so many times. They are shocked by your behavior, not me — Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) February 16, 2012

"I want people to stop sending me rape threats. I want to do my work." http://t.co/LjWKKCGP6k— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) June 9, 2014

 

So this should establish:

a) I know what it's like to get nasty, vicious misogynous hate tweets from creepy males on the Internet -- most women bloggers do -- there's a sample of just one of thousands, by the creepy hacker Weev (@rabite). I don't have a problem with calling out and condemning this kind of behaviour, but I don't think it's merely a feminist problem; I see it as an anarcho-hacker culture antithetical to human rights and civil society in general for all of us, women, men and children.

b) Sarah Kendzior has a long history, in different settings, of causing provocations, stirring up raging controversies, and then when anyone debates her dubious theses and shifting premises, pretends they are guilty of incivility, harassment, sexism -- and as you can see, even imagining she needs to "call the police" (!) etc. Read my blog Different Stans to get an idea.

c) When I see her latest provocation based on rape threats, I keep this history in mind, although of course I condemn any such threat delivered against any women online. That's not the issue here -- but by once again creating a cocoon of sensitivity taboo and political correctness around a topic, counting on the fact that most gawkers at her provocation don't know her history, Sarah has obscured her active measure and promoted once again a peculiar, oppressive, non-documentary and arbitrary way of addressing the wrongs of the Internet.

Needless to say, I've never made any threat against Sarah Kendzior whatsoever -- it's preposterous. As the record shows, all I've done is...criticize her academic articles or blog posts. It's wild. I've never written her any emails and my tweets or blogs criticizing her don't contain anything remotely resembling a threat. Yet she herself complained about my legitimate criticism of her to my boss at a job to try to create an atmosphere of intimidation for me -- creepy!

Does that mean maybe her claims about these rape threats are fake as well? Oh, they may be very real, but it's her manipulation of this situation that should be examined here as it follows a historical pattern.

First, if you've been in a cave and missed all the Twitters (I did, too, for most of it), here's a summary from the libertarian right and a summary from the loony left -- and here's another summary from the liberal left and the sectarian left.  So already you can see the problem.

Trigger warning: no actual rape occurred, and the rape threats that occurred didn't occur from any of these parties but some other (invisible) parties, but people disagree what it all means. Basically, in the course of trying to knock the use of the term "bro" about certain figures that deserved a critique (or conversely, worship, I'm not sure, given that it's Piketty they're talking about as the "bronominist"), the link was made to Sarah Kendzior's tweet about rape threats from a "brocialist," and the Jacobin article seemed to fit that usage of "bro" as one of the cases of trivializing serious things.

Well, you might say no good deed goes unpunished, but it was an odd thing to do to accuse the target of the rape threats of doing something trivializing about her own rape threats to make a point only about "bro" linguistics -- not to get too meta about all this. But then, it's Jacobin. And that's just it. All of these people are sectarian weirdos.

Hence, Sarah's active measure around vilifying the left's various sorry manifestations. Whatever their sins, like good little PC children in the fierce re-education camp that is Twitter, they've deleted their Tweets and links and have written ardent apologies and thoughtful recantations. So that's all good, except, Sarah is now on a rampage and wants blood -- both she and her sidekick Joshua Foust falsely accused Jacobin editors and writers of issuing rape threats against her -- something that even all the sectarian leftists parsing this had to denounce as mendacious because they had done no such thing.  But here's the thing:

Sarah Kendzior's purpose in life is to disrupt social movements, to pick out sectarian topics that she can use to pit people against each other, and to promote a "line" that can be shifting, but which generally tends to a) favour authoritarian Eastern governments and oppose Western governments b) favour ideological premises over rights and the rule of law c) favour networks of approved cadres over principles.

In her career on the Central Asian scene:

o She became famous for standing up to a widely-respected but pro-regime professor in the Central Asian studies field by chronicling the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan, but in the process, both minimalized violent Islamism and created a cover for many more reports later that in fact challenged dissenters or questioned the role of opposition movements (instead of challenging the regimes themselves) and favoured the status quo;

o Once flogged the cause of an Uzbek female student who committed suicide after making a Facebook profile and getting arrested by the secret police  -- a story that turned out to be a hoax; then went on to disparage the woman human rights activist who uncovered the hoax with due diligence as well as me as a blogger covering the topic. She joined male academics and think-tankers heckling and ridiculing an establishment woman academic whose views were actually closer to their own than they admitted, and a Russian lesbian investigative journalist because she reported on a higher death toll in a massacre by government forces of workers (the Zhanaozen story is complicated -- and it's one Mark Ames has used to blast Foust but with errors, so if you have questions, just ask.)

Then, unrelated to her academic work, Kendzior:

o bullied, harassed and pilloried a single mom of an Asperger's patient who frequently became violent who wrote a famous article, "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" -- and so pressured her that the woman finally agreed to write a joint statement with her -- although Kendzior accused her of violating her son's privacy and of being a bad mother -- merely for speaking the truth about her situation.

On another front, related to her obsession with unpaid internships, she:

o bullied, harassed and vilified a nonprofit organization working at the UN on violence against women, publishing falsehoods, displaying ignorance about how the NGO system works at the UN, and peddling a sectarian line supposedly about worker's rights, but really much more about naming and shaming her academic colleagues and peers.

Notice a pattern here?

Each one of these stories involve women's rights or human rights in some form or another, but yet in each instance, Sarah uncannily finds something politically incorrect about the women involved, and diguises her own assault on them as some sort of mission on behalf of higher principles of feminism -- even though concepts like women's rights aren't really what she supports -- what she supports is bureaucratic, authoritarian little cabals of only certain women and men bullying others and arrogating to themselves the power to decide what is "right". You know, Bolshevism.

When I saw her consistently backing up and excusing and running interference for the men at the Registan collective (she was the only woman), I called her the "office wife" because that's exactly how she behaved -- without any respect for women's rights and basic due process and decency and without any solidarity. That got me called "sexist" by her partner in crime (and protector in this current dispute, as in past disputes), the former DoD contractor Joshua Foust -- although the original problem with sexism started with her inability to stand up to bullying men -- and men writing awful stuff about women in the field and in general treating others terribly and taking utterly cynical positions on behalf of programs like drones.

It's odd -- and it doesn't make sense until you see it happen enough times over and over, and you realize that she is either a patholitical Internet persona engrossed in some sort of version of Internet hystrionics syndrome -- or working on behalf of some cadre movement or some other sinister power (she writes for Al Jazeera, a state news service of Qatar, which for me is not journalism but propaganda). When you see this pattern happen enough times, over enough years, with ever more publicized results and divided people, you realize there's something "up". Investigation is indeed required.

The three things she has done wrong on this particulate episode with the "rape threats," in my view, although your mileage may vary, is as follows:

1) She has treated the threats and the links to the threats or the casual attitudes toward the threats by Jacobin and Salon writers as somehow specific to these individuals and their superiors at their publications, but not to the leftist Marxist/socialist/radical ideologies they represent.

Imagine, being involved in any incident with something called "Jacobin magazine," and never pointing out that this is a radical movement celebrating Jacobinism, that is, overthrowing the state, and along the way, killing off class enemies with the guillotine. And whatever Salon's liberal genesis, is it now home for many Occupy-style radical ideologues like Natasha Leonard, and the real issue here isn't just their casual response to violence speech or acts against women, but their entire violent revolutionary ideologies that make the end justify the means, and the means coercive and destructive. (In a separate post, I will explain how the extreme, sectarian left ultimately diminishes rape by making it a mere subset of the problem of capitalism.)

The entire story in fact began with a casual remark on Twitter by the notorious Aaron Bady @zunguzungu - he's exactly what I mean by violent sectarianism.

This neglect of the deeper problems of the "movement" to single out only some aspect is what she does with the problem of women in tech -- it's about feminism, and not about hacker culture -- which she wants to preserve for its usefulness in breaking up bourgeois Western states, especially America.

2. She has implicitly denigrated the act of reporting on and publicly documenting one's rape threats or any kind of mistreatment as some kind of "privacy" act that is to be discouraged -- but which she herself is to be allowed "this one time" -- and then, of course, only partially. There's a lot of mystery surrounding the whole thing.

In her manipulative blog post, she lays out those parameters -- (the sectarian Firedog Lake was her Greek chorus in this regard) -- we must never demand that she publicize her e-mails or document her threats because to do so would be to indulge in "rape culture; worse, if anyone else decides to use the route of documentation and publicity, they must be attention whores -- because she's taking the high road by "never" talking about her personal life (the way the woman did who wrote that she was like "Adam Lanza's mother" -- who was first burnt at the Internet stake then sent to re-education school.) 

Further, we are treated to the dubious thesis that "to talk about rape threats is to make them happen again or make more happen therefore we must never talk about them or link to them" -- a position that puts us not into feminist empowerment but submissive cultdom or frightened omerta.

This position is very much similar to her odd thesis in Central Asia studies journals that people who talked about the gross human rights violations and oppression of the regimes of Central Asia or the Caucasus were "scaring off" more ordinary Internet users and "ruining it for all of us" and thereby preventing a more moderate and incremental Internet space to be created. Fortuntately, activists in the region paid not the slightest attention to her.

3. She has favoured suppression of free speech over the old principle of displacing bad speech with good speech, thus joining the ranks of the PC and those who seek brow-beating and self-criticism circles on the open Internet, "trigger warnings" and removal of speech or forced apologies or shunning (in this she is just like her dear friend Jillian York who, counter-intuitively, is a program director at the Internet freedom organization Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

I had never heard of some of the newer feminists Kendzior has allied with or conversely attacked, although of course I know of Katha Pollitt and have gone to hear her speak in New York on a number of occasions and read her in the Nation.

Few women who read Mikka Kendall have actually laid in critical condition, bleeding on the operating table with a fetus with placenta abruption. I have. So I can look her dead in the eye and say I'm sorry for your terrible experience, I've had it, too, but here's the thing -- pregnancies at the stage of late-term abortion/premature birth are very hard to manage, but in our country with advanced medicine they usually don't end with the death of the mother, and all but a handful of Catholic hospitals (which make up 12% of all hospitals in the US) are not going to have second thoughts about abortions at this stage (if they really can establish it is 20-22 weeks). (I was offered an abortion, although also only after hours of painful waiting, but opted to have a very premature baby and have her treated in the NICU. She died a month later.) So I'd like to hear some more eyewitnesses to this story.

I usually don't favour Pollitt's own sectarian old-style socialist politics that have trouble finding fault with violent Islamist movements dominated by men and her embracing of the atrocious Anonymous provocation around the rape of the student in Steubenville.

I think what Sarah is doing now is a lot like the Anonymous disruption in Steubenville, which actually led to further vilification and shaming of the rape victim, the exposure of her name, the unjust persecution of innocent people, and obstruction of justice by making it difficult to gather testimony and get court witnesses.

Nothing that Anonymous was doing there was really about stopping rape culture -- a rape culture they themselves embraced before, during and after Steubenville in some of their outrageous statements on women, including against me, as a blogger covering their antics.

Rather, it was about disrupting the justice system as an institution of society and helping to break up society so that anarchy could prevail.  There is some evidence that forces like Al Qaeda and foreign governments like Russia infiltrate and manipulate these hacker movements (the Snowden hack is only one very big and obvious example), and this is how they succeed -- while appearing to be an ordinary protest movement of the sort that has had legitimacy in American society.

What is the end result of what Sarah Kendzior is doing with this latest outrageous caper of hers? Is it really about pushing back against the outrageous behaviour of especially male techies and hackers online against women, and trying to create a safe space for women to excel? Not really, because that's not the result. The result is:

o splitting an already divided left even further -- although to be clear, the problems of the left's cohesion is not my problem and they will be doomed to division as long as they embrace radical and even violent ideologies over the rule of law;

o establishing only certain online figures as authorities on how to interpret the issue, and quashing dissent and the due process of publications and debates;

o discouraging the documentation and publication of human rights abuses, including online threats, under the guise of "privacy", and refusing to submit to due process and the rule of law to address the issue of violence against women; instead of building institutions, enabling networks to run roughshod over others who step out of line.

Trust me, the problem of violence against women, which is very big on the Internet even if it is cyberspace and injuries are psychic and not physical, does not get solved by creating a cabal of a few bullying, coercive females to rule the roost and discourage not only dissent, but calls on themselves to be accountable.

It's like the problem of misogynist men in tech is definitely not solved by having Anil Danish threaten, bully and get fired a coder who happened to make a tasteless rape joke on Twitter -- and then vow to run him out of the field all together. No women were raised up by Dash's Bolshevik tactics, and we don't want to live in a society where people like Dash, using those methods, prevail by force over others using positions of publicity and power.

The problem of hatred and misogyny is not solved by discouraging documentation and publication and thwarting the steady building up of movements of rights and solidarity. These methods sound old-fashioned in a world where we are supposed to achieve justice by getting links removed or tweets deleted or people blocked or banned. They only recur because those digital solutions do not change or curb human behaviour.

 

 

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Uh...

#YesAllWomen is/are important

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Why Did the New NSA Director Not Call Snowden a Russian Agent? And Why Focus Is Needed on Fellow-Travelling

 

Wild, eh?

The new NSA head Michael Rogers is saying this, as quoted by the Guardian:

In one of his first public remarks since becoming NSA director in April, Admiral Michael Rogers, who also leads the military’s cybersecurity and cyberattack command, distanced himself on Tuesday from contentions that Snowden is or has been a spy for Russia or another intelligence service.

“Could he have? Possibly. Do I believe that’s the case? Probably not,” Rogers said during a cybersecurity forum hosted by Bloomberg Government.

 

Yikes. Has he been chewing on the same chocolate bar as MoDo?! How could he?

At first glance, this is awfully hard to understand. Why would the head of the NSA take this position pre-emptively? What on earth could be the reason? Why would he, a spy guy, volunteer more information than was needed for this question?

A more prudent answer in keeping with his mission even under Obama might have been:

"Obviously, Snowden is currently under the complete control of Russian intelligence agencies. We have an ongoing investigation and I cannot comment further."

But seriously, why did Rogers "go there"?

Here we have an ex-NSA official, John Schindler saying the obvious thing about Snowden that every intelligence community person, current or former, seems to say: WHEN did Snowden go over to the Russians, not WHETHER. (I've said the question is HOW because the process of how common cause is made with the Kremlin, and America is fought, is more important to me than the tertiary issue of whether Snowden is on the payroll of the FSB.)

Despite my own non-interest in determining whether Snowden is a Russian agent, in fact, I haven't heard any current or former IC people, except for those "whistleblowers" that have joined the Snowdenistas, say anything different but: "of course he's an agent, surely you understands how it works!"

Russian hands  who get it about how Russia works and those who have studied the statements of people like former KGB general Oleg Kalugin also say the same thing.

I think what the DIRNSA equivocation about is simple: political direction.

The DIRNSA is nothing if not a political animal, especially this one, especially now. His job is to guide the NSA through this painful and public transition period while Obama, the most liberal leader in American history, is in office.

So he can't be out of step with the President, and he can't sound like his namesake Mike Rogers at the House Intelligence Committee, who has a lot less hard of a time saying forthrightly that Snowden was likely a Russian agent. Or like that former Obama cabinet member quoted by Edward Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal.

Because Obama, from his DSA and Socialist Scholar Conferences days in New York, has always seen Russia as "progressive" and America as the larger problem in the world, and he's not going to change his "reset".

To be sure, Director Rogers actually says both things might be true -- so he can sit between two chairs -- he says "possibly" so he can placate the IC and the conservatives or liberals unwilling to turn the state over to crypto anarchists. Then to placate the other liberals and leftists and the Ron and Rand Paul rightists who are willing, he says "likely not" so that he is "all things to all men."

And he may genuinely believe this, although it's not the job of the DIRNSA to express his personal opinion like a teenage girl on Facebook.

Schindler, BTW, had a great line about all this:

DIRNSA is a pathological liar to Snowden's fans, unless he suggests that Ed wasn't a Russian "agent," in which case his word is gold. #GotIt

— John Schindler (@20committee) June 3, 2014

 Hah!

Even so, it's discouraging that DIRNSA has said this  -- because it "pours water on the mills" of the Snowdenistas and it undercuts the criticism that was just finally starting to get steam with the more skeptical press coverage of Snowden that was happening after his idiotic softball question to Putin on TV; with his NBC appearance, and even that great pwnage by the NSA's publication of Ed's email showing him to be an obnoxious concern troll rather than a whistleblower.

But, we'll soldier on. More is coming.

One of the things I've seen as the greatest hobble to the entire Snowden story coverage is the fear -- cold-sweat trepidation -- of journalists who don't want to be appear to be -- implying much less calling -- Snowden a "Russian agent". Or to be seen to call Snowden's "adversarial journalists" and hacker-helpers and cheer-leaders as "Russian agents."

They don't want to do this because the minute they imply or state this, Greenwald and the other enablers come down on them like a ton of bricks and call them scribes for the security state or presstitutes or McCarthyist red-baiter types. It's the old anti-anti-communism we had to live with from the 1960s-1980s until it became more obvious where the real problems were, due to glasnost and Gorbachev, and unearthing of files that showed some people were really spies for the Russkies after all.

I think journalists and bloggers and anybody should go on asking, without fear or persecution, whether or not Snowden and his helpers are Russian agents. Really, at the end of the day, why is this taboo? It's not like the Rosenbergs or Hiss turned out not to be Russian agents, you know? I'm old enough to remember when it was absolutely taboo in left and liberal circles to say anything but that these agents of the KGB were framed. How that changed!

More to the point, Russian agents abound now. There are more of them now than there have ever been in my life-time. You now have not just the left or liberals who might flak for the Kremlin or even join its cause; you now have the conservatives and far right. The surface area for cooptation is just so much wider.

Many more journalists should be asking -- way, way more than they do -- whether such people are Russian agents -- and of course this can mean not just crassly paid agents directly on the payroll of the Kremlin, but agents of influence or fellow travelers, as they used to be called. "Useful idiots" was another term.

In my book, I don't make the claim that Snowden was a Russian agent and I don't get into the analysis that some bloggers have about various factors that might make him a classic target -- disaffectation with his employers' mission, stock losses, desire to be a part of some larger worldwide movement of power, etc. These are all valid lines of inquiry and anyone should be free to pursue them.

My own hypothesis as I laid out once again recently is that the Snowden Operation (a term I tend not even to use, preferring the Snowden Hack) does not necessarily have to be a wholly-owned Russian FSB operation from start to present to a) harm America b) serve Russia's interests.

I think it's more about the hackers and the groups being coopted or infiltrated or "partnering" with the FSB because they share the same hatred of the US and the NSA. Then it's a small matter for an actual Russian government agent to accomplish his mission.

To me, the fellow-travelling or agent-of-influence problem is just as bad as a paid, recruited agent problem. Maybe the NSA worries more about those paid kind from a legal perspective, but to me, the enablers are our worse problem. We need to be absolutely free to call that out always and everywhere and not be branded as conspiracy-minded, witch-hunting or even crazy.

Precisely because moral equivalency is now the most corrosive and distractive, even more than the more easily-debunked outright lies -- the "95% good man" as described in John Carre's A Most Wanted Man is the most treacherous of the hour.

And I think where the FSB is the most successful in its various ops is in the grey area where journalists or activists aren't even agents of influence but just moral equivocators who can drop into the pond over and over again the idea that Russia isn't so bad, and really, America is the same or worse.

In my view, by deliberately creating this journalistic fear and sense of taboo and sensitivity around the "agent" question, Greenwald and the whole Snowdenista tribe succeed in never having to ask any question about the real damages of what *this* kind of radical and extreme political protest really amounts to - when you help America's enemy.

It really lets them off the hook and they are free to bully and intimidate people endlessly  so that you constantly get good liberals like Benjamin Witte trying to carve out a space where they can be seen as "better" or "less compromised" than those who have called Snowden an agent -- or seemed to call him an agent. They do that to keep their street cred to get @emptywheel even to reply to their tweets, but it means the space for intellectual inquiry is then quite shrunken.

Due to fear.

It really is preposterous that we're having this conversation, of course, given that Snowden is under complete control of the FSB and other intelligence agencies. He is not free to go where he chooses, and no one is free to contact him without an elaborate clearance procedure that involves absolute ideological fidelity with the Snowdenista -- and I might add Russian -- ideological cause.

To my mind, the only way to keep trying to carve out the necessary intellectual space to keep questioning this outrageous Snowden Hack when distractors try to browbeat you with claims of McCarthyism and conspiracy-mongering is to:

o Keep pointing out that it isn't material whether Snowden is an actual recruited, paid, deployed Russian agent, and it isn't material whether his various scribes, supporters and sympathizers are recruited, paid, deployed Russian agents, either. Let History Judge, and in the age of the Internet, it might be online tomorrow.

o Having said that, clearly there are some organizations -- WikiLeaks springs to mind -- handling Snowden's odyssey that have had absolutely no compunction about making common cause with the Russian government and even taking payments from their propaganda arm, RT.com, as Julian Assange has done. It doesn't matter whether this is agentry; the fellow traveling is damaging enough. Let's be clear on this and expose it.

o The way in which the Snowden caper was hatched and deployed may involve true believers who are exploited; cynics who are coopted; or "partnerships" of an opportunistic type. When Moscow gold is in the picture is immaterial, or even Moscow's foot-print. The end result is harm to America, destruction of America's role on the Internet, and help to Russia in its quest for a "sovereign" Internet that will control civil society. Those are the identifying marks and the measuring sticks for how to talk about this. Not enough explication is happening journalistically about the political harm to America from Snowden.

o People who want to keep quoting Jack Devine or Oleg Kalugin or do new research to try to establish that Snowden was always a Russian puppet should be free to do so without being exiled from liberal intellectual life and indeed, journalists who adopt this course should obviously be as free as Greenwald to challenge the status quo on this.

But the reality is, Obama and the establishment in DC have set the parameters of this intellectual exile and the DIRNSA merely reflects that gestalt.

And that puts us in a peculiar political realm where even the director of the NSA -- the very organization whose main priorities include espionage against Russia, our enemy! -- is not willing to publicly entertain the realities of Snowden's likely agent-hood especially now, in Moscow. That seems counterintuitive, especially when it gives cause for rejoicing of the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler.

It means that the most obvious journalist course that would have been obvious to any reporter or author in the 1980s is hobbled, discouraged, ridiculed and even persecuted.

We live in terrible times.

I think it's great not to go around branding people as Russian agents -- and more importantly, the correlary to doing this that happens most often on social media -- dogging and harassing and heckling people suspected of that agentry.

Like Graham Philips, for example. I have no use for Graham and his range of silly to sinister lies for the Kremlin. But Philips undercut a lot of his critics with this simple statement: "If you're not there, you're reporting other people's news." It's true he's there.

I've discovered few people agree on where the line should be drawn betwee pushback and resistance to propaganda and heckling and harassing and "becoming like them". You know, like this account of a hacker working for a non-profit, pestering me because I criticized Snowden and Tor:

 

@catfitz Answer the question, Cathy--Are you being paid by the US government? c @ggreenwald @ioerror

— AIDS Policy Project (@AIDSPol) June 4, 2014

I personally don't think it's important to get Greenwald or Philips or any of these fellow travelers to start protesting the harassment of Pussy Riot or Ekho Moskvy or Durov or Navalny or any of them, and to acknowledge that Putin, an old KGB officer, spies on everybody more -- and leaks their convos, which the NSA at least don't do.

I'd find it insincere on their part if they began doing that, and ill-advised projects to get them to be put on the spot by Snowden's softball to Putin -- ostensibly for the greater cause of opening the conversation in Russia -- self-discredit.

What I think is much more important, and not enough of it is done, is constantly reporting the narrative alternative to the Kremlin, RT.com, Greenwald, Snowden etc. To constantly question why there are distractions or distortions or moral equivalences around the obvious problems of a tyrannical monster increasingly harming his people at home and more and more abroad now, especially in Syria and Ukraine.

That's the obvious story and I'm sticking to it.

Along the way, it means calling out the disturbing moral equivalence even by the injured-but-not-innocent NSA, whose director can airily speak of the "possible" but "probably not" agent status of Ed, like he's at a Georgetown cocktail party.

If it were me, I'd say "We need more good investigative journalism on this subject, and our own law-enforcement agencies are very much on the case as well, and we hope to have more to say on this in the future."

There's always this, you know: maybe by affecting the style and politics of an International Relations Realist School senior think-tank specialist, the NSA director can essentially say to Snowden: "come to Papa." 

Wouldn't it be fun if DIRNSA were engaged in an elaborate dance in which he signals to Snowden that he really can come home because no one really thinks he is an agent of a foreign government, which then would have more punishment to go with it.

I think the more mundane explication that DIRNSA serves his political master -- as essentially, he's supposed to do in an elected government -- is more likely the truth. That means the journalistic uproar has to get louder about Snowden's evasions, silences, and outright lies.

 

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