Wired State

Tor is Under Attack. Is This a Good Thing?

I've been blogging on the evils of Tor since forever of course, with pieces like this about the Navy's condoning of Jacob Appelbaum, helper of Edward Snowden and what a conflict of interest that was -- and most recently questioning why Quinn Norton, who lied to the grand jury about her old boyfriend's "guerilla manifesto," isn't qualified to be a peace-maker and air-clearer on this issue. Then there's my book on Snowden, which has multiple chapters on Tor.

So Tor network is under attack right now, big-time -- bigger than the times that the FBI took down something like half the nodes or at least highlighted them so that the users were compromised -- and bigger than those dozen or so malicious nodes discovered to be running inside Russia.

Tor competitors who themselves are just as nasty like @kaepora described the damage, and got a lot of denials -- Tor is good at denials and edge-casing -- did I mention they are good at denial? And Roger Dingledine is incorrigible.

This is so big, Tor itself had to put one of those reassuring messages on its website of the sort Sony has had to send to customers, or even Ars Technica, which you think would be too cool to get hacked.

The attack is called a "Sybil" attack because of, well, Sybil and her "multiple personalities" syndrome -- which is now called by another name -- disassociative identity disorder," which sounds like a problem Tor itself has suffered from, unable to decide whether it is a hipster gonzo anarchists' collective or a department of the DoD.

But what better way to overwhelm a centralized system than by love-bombing it with hundreds of new decentralized entities? Maybe the US government's cyber defense finally figured out how to democratize this arrogant bunch whose totalitarian ideals have brought us Manning and Snowden and more? Is this how they have to do it, because working through other branches of government like Congress or the courts proved too time-consuming or cumbersome -- or ineffective?

Tor Project warned earlier about upcoming attempts to take down nodes. When I saw that appear literally two days after I posted my piece criticizing Tor on Medium I thought, "My God, do I have magic powers?" Except, I've been writing about Tor -- like, forever. And it made little difference to the US government elements that found it not a problem all these years -- well, except the NSA that complained about it and tried to crack it and the FBI, of course, trying to fight crime.

Paul Carr and Yasha Levine at Pando have kept up a drumbeat of hatred against Tor (and not for good reasons, they only hate it because it's associated with the US government -- and don't have much more of anything intelligent to say after that.  Occasionally among their self-serving screeds -- replete with things like Carr whining about people "smearing one of his writers" -- he means Mark Ames -- with "rape of children" -- he means the rape of a 15-year-old Russian girl. We've been over this. Mark Ames can't have it both ways. Either this is true, in which case he's total scum and should be shunned, or it isn't true, and his legend as a gonzo journo is destroyed. Paul Carr keeps trying not to have either happen, and implies it's fiction, except Mark Ames didn't say it was fiction *in his own book* which is where the story comes from, derp.

Carr decodes that message on the Tor web site as follows:

Likewise last week, when Tor’s founder admitted that government agents would only need to seize five Tor directory authority servers to completely hickack the network, he described that possibility as “really bad.”

The risk has to do with Tor’s “directory authorities” — which are hardcoded into Tor clients and serve as the network’s centralized addressing system.

Yes, we said “centralized.” For all the talk about Tor being a totally independent ad-hoc system that operates outside the realm of anyone’s control, it does in fact have a highly centralized network architecture that’s run by key Tor developers and insiders. There are currently nine directory authorities — one is run by Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, while another is run by Tor cofounder Dingledine himself.

Wow, doesn't that make you feel safe?! Jacob Appelbaum, a fugitive from the WikiLeaks grand jury in self-imposed exile in Germany and helper of Edward Snowden runs a node?

Here's @ioerror (Appelbaum) on the subject today:

 

@halvarflake I seem to remember @esizkur telling me horror stories about that happening to a German blackhat years ago. Didn't that happen?

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) December 25, 2014

An ~85Mb/s DDOS (for a few hours?) on my #Tor Directory Authority reminds me of the late 90s. Quaint. This took down XBox and PS gaming net?

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) December 27, 2014

So, why do online games depend on Tor again? If that's what the claim is here. And these Lizard people wanted to stick it to Appelbaum:

Looks like Riseup networks and preceding cogent lines are getting killed thanks to @ioerror :)

— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) December 27, 2014

Why? You had to wonder what was up with this, too:

Combat surveillance. Fight for privacy. Support alternative, community-run ISP @riseupnet with a donation: https://t.co/UjjbINQ8ZK.

— Mallory Knodel (@chaoticfree) December 24, 2014

Competitor to Tor? Or also caught in the same symbiotic relationship?

And the ethics-free Dingledine who always makes it seems criticism of Tor is based on ignorance of "science," not morals. And hey, who are those other 7 people, guys? Say, is Edward Snowden one of them by chance! How does it work in Tor-land -- you run a node well and then graduate to running a directory authority? Who gets to decide?

Paul frets that Tor users should feel unsafe and can't imagine any of them in their right mind -- if they got the message -- would still be using it.

Carr doesn't get it apparently about the two very different kinds of users of Tor. One kind is likely the vast majority -- they just want to get around blocked sites to read them. The government already spies on them. It may even spy on them more if they see Tor usage (remember the Harvard bomb-scare student?). But they don't care, because they're only using it for circumvention, not encryption.

Then there is the much smaller group of nerds -- the crypto-anarchists and of course the hard-core criminals -- who use it to disguise their accessing of sites AND for communications, in conjunction with Tails or some other encryption program. That's the bigger problem, even if the much smaller group and use case.

But as Carr points out, this was "very not good."

So today, Tor is ostensibly under attack by these Lizard People, skiddies who want to fuck up Xbox or PSN or Sony -- except, they say on their feed they don't want to fuck up Xbox and PSN. Hmm.

I took a look at the video that the Twitter account links to of some supposedly outraged kid mad that his Xbox and PSN are fucked up.

 

Except, there's something "off" about this. I think it's an actor. Or staged. What kid says "Get it together, Microsoft. Get it together, FBI!". Really? Kids like this calling on MSFT and the FBI to help them keep their game boxes? I'm hardly convinced.

I think the Lizard thing is a persona -- it's kind of tackily put together. There's a paste-bin that's already removed, as if it said something horrible or doxed somebody, except it's a nothing burger when you look at it in google cache. Here it is. See what I mean?

The point is ~Xbox Live, PSN, etc are run by multi-billion dollar corporations eg: Microsoft & Sony. These entities spend exponentially far less on the users gaming experience then they should be. The fact that a sizeable Botnet can shut-down their services is an embarrassment, it is pitiful. By disrupting the gaming networks LizardSquad is forcing the owners of these services to deal with the disgraceful quality of their product and do better if they want to stay online. Yes services will go down for a few hours, maybe 3-5x but in the end if the gaming platform eg: Xbox live wishes to stay up they will be forced to upgrade their product. Essentially you are sacrificing a few hours of downtime for a substantially improved quality of service that will last for years to come. And course it's also for the lulz, our mascot does an excellent job of just that.

So my hunch is that Lizard is our guys at some kind of government cyber defense thing. Or that the anti-Lizard are our guys. Or both? You know how copies of thing can be just a little bit off, a little fuzzy around the edges -- well that's how this feels.

Now, shouldn't I be happy that Tor is at long last being taken down, that perhaps it's beautiful wickedness is finally melting?

Well, as I point out in my succinct piece on Medium, Tor should be suspended and investigated by Congress and the FBI!

(Medium is a terribly sucky platform BTW, more on that later, but the biggest problem is that when you respond to someone's piece there, there's no notice of that under their piece, so you can't get attention!) --

And by that I mean exactly what I said, suspended and thoroughly investigated. Debated. Changed, because it is corrupt. Or perhaps abolished. Shutting it down by merely making a fake hackers' group isn't justice, because you haven't made educating people about the difference between right and wrong part of the process.

But perhaps the feds had to jump in and take action because things are at such a pass.

Tor Project itself has been smarmily drumming up support by using professional PR methods, perhaps they even hired consultants or reputation management services. So they found like three or four very high follow individuals on Tor, some of them fellow travelers like Biela Coleman and Peter Maass (Laura Poitras hagiographer); other more geeky types like Chris Pirillo and Ycombinator Hacker news, and others more generic and further removed from hackers per se like Alec Empire, and some who can help pretend Tor is merely about freedom-fighting like Colin Anderson, and academic and got them to tout Tor and imply that none of us would have privacy or freedom movements in places like Iran without it -- which is of course arrant bullshit.

[Update: oops, I was wrong that Empire was more about music than hacking. Should have paid more attention to that socialist father! Here is key-noting at 31c3:

I'm excited to see @ALEC_EMPIRE give the keynote at #31c3.

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) December 27, 2014

And the hook they've used on these manufactured pitches is "misogyny" and "stopping attacks on women online". SUCH bullshit. This is about trying to pin on JBJabroni10 the "crime" of "attacking" women -- which amounts to a few tweets, some of them funny and ironic. The purple-haired @puellavulnerat who pretends to be such a wilting delicate flower who can't take the heat on the Internet claims falsely that he stalked or harassed her.

SHEER BULLSHIT. This is a nasty, vicious cadre who herself has harassed and heckled people and of course doxed JBJaborni10! Instead of getting an apology for this from Tor, we've got this tables-turning bullshit "protect the women" crap, utterly misfounded.  I'll never forget how Andrea Shepherd whistled and got one of her junkyard dogs from Latin American to harass and intimidate and bully me for hours and days on end about a supposed libel suit coming from a country where he could make it stick because I properly said that Tor staff casually condone criminality in their product. Each time this issue comes up, we not only hear pious and arrogant bullshit about how the pipes aren't responsible for the content, we get suppression and smearing of critics.

But there's another possibility, just like the Sony Hack (which I think is a combination of NK and Russia exploiting hackers through nudging them, and that we are weathering now the tiresome annoyance of "security experts" minimizing the hack and telling us we're stupid for thinking it's either or both states known for their use of sabotage and hybrid war, especially Russia).

And that's indeed Russia -- because, remember when Russia advertised a bounty for the first person to crack Tor?

You don't think that in Russia, there weren't swarms of smart programmers who were happy to get a state bounty to take on this social task, that this wasn't fairly easy to accomplish, precisely because of the centralized nature of the network and the fallibility of arrogant types like Appelbaum?

Is that what we're seeing now?

 So when we know better who is behind this hack - the US, Russia or some script kiddies -- then we'll know better how to respond.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related articles

Yasha Levine Gets it Wrong About Tor But Why Tor Should Be Suspended

Tor Gang 'Privacy Keepers' Dox and Persecute a Twitter Critic - Destroying Privacy. Why Do THEY Get to Do This?

Quinn Norton Has Zero Credibility As Any "Air-Clearer"

Quinn Norton has a self-serving and faux "peace-maker" piece at Pando Daily in which she attempts to stem the tide of hate unleashed on Tor by Yasha Levine's "exposes" -- about which I've also been critical.

She's also posted on Medium.

My response, posted on Pando:

Quinn Norton has zero credibility as any "air-clearer" not only because she is part of the arrogant hacker cult herself, but because she  lied to the grand jury when she claimed her former boyfriend, Aaron Swartz, was not the author of the "Guerilla Manifesto" he published, and that it was some kind of group effort. In fact, the Italians who sponsored the conference that led to his unethical and criminalized document credited Swartz solely as its author on their website after he committed suicide -- I guess she and they didn't line up their stories. The Guerilla Manifesto incites people to commit vandalism and theft and crime by deliberately defying legitimate copyright laws and stealing content -- as Swartz did with Jstor. It's radicalism in the service of a cultic belief in a utopian system and it only endangers freedom and livelihoods. Why are we to respect such anarchist manipulations?

Then Norton goes on to make downright scary claims, as if Tor was the only circumvention tool -- it most certainly not -- and that all that is standing between the freedom and safety of Iranian activists or gay teens is Tor and its preservation. Arrant nonsense. No activist should be putting all their safety in the hands of software, which is a vulnerable human artifact, and in this case, run by unethical thugs prepared to bully and harass people and cause them to lose their jobs over their legitimate Twitter criticism of this software cult. And activists and victims have plenty of other ways besides Tor to keep themselves safe. In fact, Tor is a marker of illegal activity that only draws attention to itself, and as it turns out, rightly so in too many cases.

Quinn makes it seem that if the math is perfect in the code and software is always about the numbers, why, her dubious colleagues in the radical transparency and encryption movement must be allowed any excess and allowed to rule us all with their "math". Norton here espouses Lysenkoism, or worse, the "science" of Marxism-Leninism. Ideology can be perfect and "scientific," and no checks or balances or separations of powers are needed on its imperfect humans, because "it's math."

Tor is not at all a road system or a telephone network, not at all, and these analogies are used perniciously. On roads, you require licenses and license plates -- identity and registration. We don't have that for the regular Internet, much less Tor. But it's that identity that enables law-enforcement to stop speeders, drunk drivers and contraband. We don't want to require licensing for Internet use. But then what's Tor's plan to curb crime, which is very real, including the crime of the abusiveness of the "mathematicians" at Tor itself?! Law-enforcement can get a warrant and tap telephones, which also require real-name registration. Not so the Internet or Tor -- especially now with the invincible encryption of the iphone6. What's the plan then to deter crime? Just leave it to the feds to jam and crack Tor using exploits such as were in the Tor Browser Bundle? Tor thugs are supremely uninterested in the problem of law-enforcement -- especially over themselves. We as a society can't afford to be so indifferent.

Most loathsome is Quinn's notion that she and her hacker friends just haven't found a way to "tell their story" correctly -- fix the narrative, fix the problem, like Kremlin propaganda. Well, no, because lying can't paper over the very real ethical problems in and around Tor. The problem isn't that Roger Dingeldine is a social misfit or can't get his PR right on his brain-child; the problem is that his brain-child is unethical at root because of the notion of using other people to achieve the state's goal or any other goal. Bundling together a lot of disparate use cases of such exploitation doesn't sanitize it. There are other models, and not everything has to happen online. Everything about Dingeldine's concept should be debated in Congress and if need be the courts, because it shouldn't be imposed as a weapon on everyone.

Even more loathsome is the ridiculous idea that Tor is so complex and so technically complicated that journalists without coding degrees can't legitimately write about it. What Norton really means is her oh-so-special circle of anarchists and cultists are seeking exemption from the laws of morality and the laws of the land. The concept really isn't hard, folks. Read some of the early papers, read some of the critiques and you can grasp the basics. I've just outlined them here. Let's not let arrogant "scientists" take over society undemocratically, please, by snowing people with "science."

This is not about Tor "telling a better story" -- i.e. lying better. It's about unethical coders who will not submit to the rule of law, and want to make the rest of us submit to the rule of code.

Related articles

Tor Gang 'Privacy Keepers' Dox and Persecute a Twitter Critic - Destroying Privacy. Why Do THEY Get to Do This?

Yasha Levine Gets it Wrong About Tor But Why Tor Should Be Suspended

The Oahu CryptoParty - and Who Was in Touch with the Organizer Cincinnatus, or Snowden

That Time a Tor Developer Doxxed a Troll

Tor Is Not a "Fundamental Law of the Universe"

Witness 40 Shouldn't Have Been Doxed Because the Prosecutors Already Did Their Job

I've been waiting for the media -- and especially social media -- scrum to settle down and sort out to try to understand the Michael Brown case better.

In general, I feel the Eric Garner case is more clear-cut. Here was an unarmed man, not committing any violent crime or doing any threatening and yet he got piled on and choke-holded to death. It seems a homocide, once found by the coroner, should have been prosecuted here. Maybe it's because my son is also a victim of NYPD police violence that I have an easier time with this case, closer to home.

But Michael Brown's case never held up for me because as far as we know, he grabbed for Officer Wilson's gun, and indeed Wilson had abrasions on his face showing he was struck or slapped. There's gun powder on Brown's hand found in forensic examination, and of course Wilson himself testifies this. I've heard all kinds of distractions from this story, i.e. "Wilson wasn't seriously wounded in the head so it's not a case" -- as if it's okay to just lightly slap or swipe a policeman and not expect any response. I endlessly hear the retort "he doesn't deserve the death penalty" -- by which they mean extrajudicial execution. Of course not. No one does, ever, and I oppose the death penalty anyway.

But the sequence of events -- robbing the cigars, roughing up the store owner, jay-walking, disregarding the policeman's legitimate request to get out of the road - then most importantly, slapping a policeman and going for his gun -- did lead to death because law-enforcement has to maintain credible force -- and the only response police can have in this kind of case is deadly force. The idea that they can have some kind of community policing Kumbayah and discuss things might work in some Better World, but this is reality. We could say Wilson should have called for back-up and not coped himself, but I'm not so sure the outcome would be different.

He didn't have to shoot, once his gun is grabbed for? The idea that police can just disable a suspect by only shooting them in the legs belongs to a fictional notion of how things work -- although I think it's more than fine actually to have a debate about whether that policy should be changed. The conclusion about how police work has to be done from many studies is that deadly force has to be used once a threshold is crossed.

Was it? We can't be sure, because the testimony isn't clear cut, and now there's a big hullaboo about Witness 40 lying.  But even without any Witness 40 at all in the picture, there were enough doubts in the claims. Unless someone can show that no gun was grabbed at all, I will continue to have doubts about this case. And no, I see no reason to disbelieve Wilson's story.

However, I'm here to point out that we didn't need to have the hate parade, the doxing, the savage glee over this we're getting because Witness 40's testimony was already impugned.

The prosecutors themselves did that -- duh.

Back two weeks ago on December 2 when Daily Kos published the grand jury testimony, and the St. Louis Dispatch published documents, I read through a lot of them, although it's a huge amount of stuff I couldn't hope to find time for. But even before the Smoking Gun expose, days ago, we could see that the prosecutors essentially called out her lying. See for example here:

and here:

You don't have to see her racist statements on Facebook; you don't have to know that she suffers from bi-polar depression and memory loss since a head injury, which is also made public, to figure out: her story doesn't hold. She couldn't have been where she said she was because there are video tapes and her car doesn't show up. She couldn't have driven the route she said because the streets are blocked. And so on. There are many details and the prosecutors call it out, and they are not "gentle" about it, but firm.

She's already thoroughly discredited here for anyone who can bother to read into some grand jury testimony documents online already. So why the doxing, hounding, persecution of Smoking Gun and blackamericaweb and all the rest?

It's vigilantism, of the same kind we've gotten from Anonymous at the start of all this, when they outed the wrong officers' names, and the socialist agitators inciting violence and looting which we're told is "redistributive justice." And calls to boycott Black Friday when a lot of stores do their business, because, you know, white and black owners both all over American should be punished collectively because of one story of injustice! Oh, you think it's 2,000 such cases, and every single case of a police killing is not justified? Surely some aren't; I've just mentioned Garner, but every single one? And you know that...how? By dialectics and Marxist ideology?

In any event, I expected to be all alone with these thoughts, since the stampede is to lynch this woman because she's racist, stupid, and a liar.

All true, but my point is: the system work, this was already established by the legal process itself, with prosecutors' testimony heard by the grand juror, so there was no need for more persecution.

There is absolutely no way in hell anyone can prove that Witness 40's false testimony, exposed in the process of the questioning itself and published, made the grand jury not indite.

Interestingly, it turned out I wasn't alone, and Slate.com, which can be a mixed bag, also reasoned along these lines in this article, although they were mild about it:

Indeed, a review of the grand jury documents released by St. Louis County shows that McElroy's account was questioned openly and extensively by authorities. Grand Jury Volume 15 includes her Oct. 23 testimony in front of the grand jury, as well as a transcript of a recording of an Oct. 22 interview between McElroy and a federal prosecutor that was played for jurors. The federal prosecutor tells McElroy that her account of driving through Ferguson is physically impossible, informs her that her car can't be found in any images from the scene, solicits an admission that she "used the N-word" online a half-dozen times in relation to Brown's death, and asks her explicitly if she used media accounts to fabricate parts of her testimony. McElroy speaks about having memory problems in both the recorded interview with the federal prosecutor and the in-person interview in front of the grand jury, and tells both the federal prosecutor and the jury that she suffers from largely untreated bipolar disorder. In McElroy’s Oct. 23 testimony, the grand jury prosecution picks skeptically at her claim to have come across the Wilson-Brown encounter—which did not take place on a main road—after getting lost while trying to find a friend's apartment. (And, to repeat, the federal prosecutor's skeptical interview with McElroy was played for grand jurors that day as well.)

As the Smoking Gun does mention, McElroy returned to the grand jury on Nov. 3 with a new story about why she was in Ferguson. In testimony in Grand Jury Volume 18, McElroy reads from a journal and attests that she was in fact travelling to the area to conduct personal research to help her understand black people (!). But the Smoking Gun doesn't mention that, in those same grand jury records, a prosecutor says (in front of jurors) that McElroy had admitted she may have gotten details of her earlier testimony off the Internet, points out that her journal entry from the morning before Brown's death is suspiciously detailed, and asks McElroy directly whether she may have made up or "dreamed" the events that she's testifying about. Another prosecutor tells McElroy she believes McElroy is "confused" about her own account and grills her about her animosity towards blacks and her use of racial slurs.

Given all this warranted skepticism expressed toward Sandra McElroy in front of grand jurors by prosecutors—and the incredibly obvious flaws in her testimony itself—it's hard to believe that any sane juror, no matter how inclined to believe Darren Wilson, would have taken her testimony seriously. While the Smoking Gun's investigation is useful in undermining those in the media who would take McElroy's words out of context, it's doubtful—given the evidence currently at hand—that the grand jury's ultimate decision would have been any different had she never testified. 

Even before this, the leftist Conor Friedersdorf  at the Atlantic was forced -- because he at least went through the intellectual due dilligence -- to admit it wasn't so clear-cut:

I haven't yet had time to go through all the documents released by St. Louis County, but based on these witness statements, I can see why the grand jury would have reason to doubt whether Officer Wilson committed a crime. At least some witnesses corroborate his story. Some that don't contradict one another. If the witnesses above all testified in a criminal trial, it's hard to imagine that a jury would fail to have reasonable doubts about what really happened. There are hundreds of pages to sift through that the grand jury saw. In coming days, we'll probably discover at least some eyewitness testimony contradicted by physical evidence. But it seems all but certain that we'll never know exactly what happened that day.

There are quite a lot of radicals and "progressives" who think "reasonable doubt" isn't justice and want to achieve vigilante justice or force federal authorities under media pressure and civil disobedience to bring about an indictment. Likely a trial would do no better at establishing the truth, but the slower and more public and explained process -- unlike thousands of documents on a website that most people won't be bothered to read and comprehend -- might establish that it really isn't possible to do more with this case. In the New York City case, demonstrations and a "progressive" mayor I myself didn't vote for and don't care for may bring about some other outcome, but maybe not, because no city father wants to second-guess police and ruin relations with them when he needs them to control crime in the city or he and his party lose power -- just ask David Dinkins.

The New York Times has behaved worse with this story than the far more politicized Atlantic and Slate.

Note this correction the Times had to put in -- after the damage in public perception was already done!

Correction: December 9, 2014

An article on Nov. 26 examining the grand jury evidence in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., referred incorrectly to an exchange during the testimony of Officer Darren Wilson, who killed the unarmed teenager. It was a grand juror — not the prosecutor — who asked Officer Wilson, “You felt like your life was in jeopardy?” and then followed up with another question, “And use of deadly force was justified at that point in your opinion?”

Yeah, makes a difference, that -- grand juror, not prosecutor!

The Times showed us they'd cooked it in an early paragraph:

But the failure to bring any charges against a white officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in murky circumstances has set off a new storm of protests and questions about the objectivity of the grand jury process.

NYT writes this as well:

But the gentle questioning of Officer Wilson revealed in the transcripts, and the sharp challenges prosecutors made to witnesses whose accounts seemed to contradict his narrative, have led some to question whether the process was as objective as Mr. McCulloch claims.

Nonsense. As Ben Mathis-Lilley and even Connor Friedersdorf at Atlantic can admit, the prosecutor already exposed Witness 40 completely.

And the Times authors can write about "gentleness" despite saying in the same story:

“Yes, I personally saw him on his knees with his hands in the air,” one witness said in a recorded interview with federal officials that was played for the grand jury before he testified. The prosecutor questioning that witness did not hide her skepticism, highlighting the contradictions in his various accounts.

“Basically just about everything that you said on Aug. 13, and much of what you said today, isn’t consistent with the physical evidence that we have in this case, O.K.?” she said to him.

Er, gentle, guys? It's clear, forceful -- and devastating. What, you think the prosecutors should take the same vigilante tone that people take on Internet forums and Twitter?

I guess this is what happens when four different journalists patch together a story and some managing editor that "smooths it" with an overlay of his or her own prejudice.

Is the story as murky as the NYT says? It might be if there was no gun powder on Brown's hand, and if there was no abrasion on Wilson's cheek. The testimony of those who say he went into the car and even grabbed the gun may not hold, but the other evidence points to a confrontation and then a struggle.

 

 

 

"The Last Capitalists": Why a Powerful Philanthropist Operative Wants to End the Philanthropic System

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), right, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, express their outrage to reporters about the changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law in the $1.1 trillion spending bill. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Gara Lamarche has an article in Democracy titled Democracy and the Donor Class that many people are discussing as an "important" critique of philanthropy.

As you can see from this article in Inside Philanthropy that purports to be "critical" but actually embraces him, Gara is one of those rare individuals who has served in all the major influential and wealthy leftist institutions of are time -- the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies. No, you don't have to be a Republican activist blogger like Michelle Malkin to call him "a militant leftist philanthropist" -- one of the hallmarks of such militants is that they are always pretending they aren't militant, and they are smeared by conservatives.

They should just come clean -- and see who shows up. Except that would never work -- making a coherent third party and funding it at levels that would make it succeed and create parliamentary instead of bi-partisan politics in America. It wouldn't succeed because not enough people would show up for the name "Socialist" even if it were packaged as "Democratic Socialist" or "Social Democrats".  The wounds of Stalinism are too deep and never healed.

So they do it the other way -- the "long march through the institutions" -- NGOs, Democratic Party organizations, projects -- and the march is now a lot shorter due to the Internet.

Socialist Capitalists and Venture Communists

I spent many years working for Human Rights Watch and Open Society, overlapping with Gara LaMarche. Here's how the system works: George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Ford Foundation and others all come from 20th century wealth, made from the capitalist system of America, either from their own work and investments, or from inheritance. Yet they want to be the "last capitalists," they want to create a system in their lifetime that functions as a democratic socialist state that will not only "eliminate poverty and inequality" but will ensure that a "New Class" of their grantees – the smart people with the correct ideology - will stay in power and manage the re-distributive state.

While they personally benefited from the capitalist system and their children will as well, none of them want to preserve or protect let alone embrace the capitalist system as such for the rest of us. That this system in fact sustains and is sustained by the rule of law, an independent judiciary and bar, a free media, civil society, independent educational systems and so one isn't something they want to sustain. They don't tend to give to universities or hospitals or even start-ups (like some of the leftis libertarians like Fred Wilson or Peter Thiel.) What they want to do is install socialism, their ideal, the socialism of the Democratic Socialist Party of America (Michael Harrington) of the 1980s, or even something more radical, like Occupy. Today they fund and promote projects related to Edward Snowden, “national security” projects by which they mean overthrowing the existing "security state" which they see as the "bastion of capitalism" they don't like. They want to break up the state. They want "regime change" - they do not want this system.

The only thing wrong with this plan is that it is going too slowly, and after the lessons once again of midterm elections, they fear there may be a backlash. So they must begin seriously to fight for "campaign reform" and even overturn 501c3, the non-profit tax exemption they exploited for decades, and especially get rid of Citizens United, which they stayed away from because their NGOs benefited from it -- for now -- but the correlation of forces may tilt to the right and they might lose the next election.

Who Decides What is "Unalloyed Good"?

The key to understanding the DSA program below the surface is the phrase "unalloyed good." Neither public television or the Green Revolution (cited as philanthropic successes) are unalloyed goods; certainly drug legalization isn't, and while I benefit from ObamaCare personally, I wonder how we as a society can really pay for it, and why it couldn't have been left to states to work out themselves. I agree with the leftists that Gates obsession with AIDS comes at the expense of other basics like getting kleptocratic African states to spend on health care and doctors' salaries (again, see Russia, slashing its old socialist health care system now without any help with Larry Summers or Jeffrey Sachs, and after chasing some of its best capitalist economists and businessmen out of the country). But all Gates did was absorb the obsession on AIDs from the previous decades gay men's campaigns; foundations don't move so quickly. They wanted to save themselves, not Africa.

Yet LaMarche doesn't want there to be a genuine democratic debate about what the "unalloyed good" is through existing institutions like the media and Congress, he wants his class to decide this, and impose it. This can be seen in his statement:

"The standard is whether the record of philanthropy justifies the foregone tax revenue that in our current dire fiscal state could be used to keep senior centers and libraries and after-school programs open, hold tuition within reach at public colleges and universities, expand Internet access in rural communities, and on and on."

LaMarche has already decided what the list of goods are for the state to fund as if they are self-evident -- without debate.

Who could be against senior centers or libraries or after-school programs? Yet there are always issues about what the content of these programs are. Public colleges in particular are bastions of political correctness and radical socialist programs and Internet access is merely a code word for Google's business model and further reach for its essential ad-agency business, along with the educational value either might also provide. And that means such things should be democratically decided -- but that's the last thing the "last capitalists" want, they want to overthrow the state and impose one system.

There Can Only Be One

In his earlier years, George embraced more of the true ideas of the open society, that is genuine pluralism and competing ideas. But in recent years, he abandoned the notion of pluralism because he felt apprehensive (and this was stoked by advisers) about the Right gaining more power. He went from thinking he should fund variety for idealistic reasons to realizing that he should just pick One Big Idea and promote it heavily in order to succeed -- which he thought was a valid notion because pluralism was already "guaranteed" by the existence of the Right through the Koch brothers. That’s why Soros fellows like Michael Massing called for investigation of Fox TV in the New York Review of Books – although there was no evidence that it was guilty of any crime -- and why Bill Moyers sounded the alarm with scary words like "Orwellian" about "Fox Assassins Against Soros." Bill Moyers didn't lose the battle for putting George's thumb on the scale as Inside Philanthropy claims in its article on LaMarche; he won it. Soros NGOs never stopped tilting at the windmill of Fox with its mere 2 million viewers, although Huffpo has 40 million a month and Buzzfeed and Gawker, with many millions more, are politically identical.

Lost was the idea of debate and competing programs; in fact, Bill Moyers won. So Soros did things like give $100 million to Human Rights Watch -- not divided up into a dozen or even half dozen separate and independent human rights organizations. He began to fund more radical groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation and others promoting Snowden's NSA hack that weren't devoted to a liberal notion of human rights, but introduced anti-copyright campaigns and litigations and radical state transparency (hacking by WikiLeaks and Snowden) encryption as "rights" to be promoted, taking a big whack at the modern capitalist system depending on copyright law, and a secure state. These ignore concerns of how crime will be fought when even with a warrant, the police cannot gain access to the code -- and companies and coders are indifferent to how they will do this (see the iPhone6) debate. The reality is that if you are going to break up the state and take it over, harnessing anarchists at least temporarily, you need to ensure invincible encryption (this is the thesis of my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee) and can’t be too tough on crime. You have to convert "broken windows" policing into racist militarization of the police, and fight the realities of abuses and over-militarization not with civil rights movements, but direct-action, civil-disobedience, and even violent revolution.

Funding the Cultural War

"The Last Capitalists" selected as philanthropic projects three cultural battles in the overall cultural war that would ensure the splitting and hobbling of the “religious Right” and even the liberal centrist Catholics around them: 1) drug legalization (marijuana, harm reduction, pain amelioration); 2) gay marriage; and 3) birth control/abortion imposed on employers. If in the old ACLU days these issues would be achieved through campaigns and litigation that might result in compromises, today with the Internet they are achieved as massive bombardment in social media and overwhelming of state-houses by propaganda force; if you go up against this tide, not only may your business be shut down through boycotts and banned from placement in many cities (Chik-fil-A) but you will never be allowed to decide your priorities independently as a private organization again (Komen).

Again, for those with difficulty in reading comprehension and Twitter attention spans: I'm all for LGBT rights and equality in marriage; I accept abortion is the law of the land although I don't personally support it. What I'm doing here is making a distinction between these legal rights and the way they are achieved through advocacy and litigation relying on a system of "all human rights for all" and protection of freedom of speech and association, versus social/socialist revolution that scorns that approach and even undermines those rights for others.

So you could achieve gay marriage rights without crippling the freedom of a business to advocate against it if they wished, without imposing on cities or universities the shut-down of businesses whose views you don't like. You could achieve protection of your abortion rights without forcing Komen through public shame and boycotts to shift its donations away from Planned Parenthood. These are revolutionary actions and not a rights movement. Radical supporters of these causes seek to achieve by revolutionary campaigns -- economic force and public humiliation -- what they could not achieve more slowly through litigation and rights campaigns. They couldn't win by a vote or by changing law legally, so they try to win by force and intimidation of businesses and nonprofits they don't like. That's not sustaining civil society; that's killing it.

Of course the "progressives" don't see it that way -- they demonize the civil society of others as racist, misogynist, oppressive, so that they can de-legitimize freedom of speech and association for all by making it appear as criminal. Along the way, they disguise their own criminality in fostering violent anarchy, maximalizing encryption for everyone from drug lords to child pornographers, and destroying business through piracy and anti-copyright campaigns.

Even so, it's important to notice that the broader gay rights movement chose the path through the state-house and the rule of law rather than undermining freedom of speech and association with boycotts -- and that it worked. More states have gay marriage rights today, and it was achieved without shutting down Chik-fil-A.

Sub-Rosa Single Issues versus Regime Change

At first the socialist philanthropists may have only wanted to mitigate capitalism but they accepted the Marxist critique that this was merely putting a band-aid on a system they should overthrow. So as the "the Last Capitalists" they have a bold vision that will bring about socialism so that we don't have to even have philanthropists any more -- the state will be changed, they will put Obama in power, health care and drug legalization will be achieved for the masses to placate them, and then they can proceed with radical identity politics programs which they've been taught by Soviet Marxist culture to promote to break up the capitalist state  -- extreme feminists who cramp speech and remove due process from prosecution of sexual crimes; radical minorities who incite violence like the Black Panthers; militant gays boycotting business and so on. This could have been articulated in the form of civil rights, to convert the American public to the old civil rights paradigm by which first women, then blacks, then gays seeking marriage and employment were given deserved equality.

But "the Last Capitalists" chafed at how slowly their single-issue approach -- health, LGBT, mentoring for black male youth -- was working to overthrow the state under the old civil rights model and bring about "real change" -- as they saw it. The strategy for DSA in the 1980s as articulated at the Socialist Scholars Conferences was to hide out in single issues like women's rights or inner-city education or other "community organizing" programs during the pro-capitalist anti-Soviet years of Reagan -- and keep the actual socialist program sub-rosa. Civil rights was a temporary tactic, but really socialist revolution was what they wanted. Obama is a product of that tactic and that thinking.

The "Last Philanthropists" who serve the "Last Capitalists" chafed at how NGO programs or even elected politicians didn't seem to kill off "Wall Street," even after they funded Occupy, and not so covertly. The American capitalist state is highly resilient precisely because it is built on civil society (if you don't agree, see Russia, China, India). It's the kind of civil society the socialist philanthropists don't like for cultural reasons, based on churches or Rotary Clubs or small businesses closed on Sundays --  or even based on the kind of single-issue programs that radical visionaries see as mere stop-gaps, not ends-in-themselves, like contracts for minorities from city hall, early-childhood programs or the old state health care systems before ObamaCare.

Going for the Jugular

Now they don't see any reason for half-way measures, as the state has been severely weakened with military scandals such as Petraeus , Snowden, the CIA torture report, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. -- and not without a lot of help from their grantees. So now's the time to go for the jugular. Their grantees are already preparing the way -- if under Neier in the 1970s, the ACLU litigated for housing for blacks or "reproductive rights" along with free speech for the KKK under a civil rights/equality paradigm and campus free speech, today the ACLU has a Snowden in a telepresence robot and litigates against the NSA and companies like Verizon cooperating to target criminal and terrorist suspects, trying to cast this as "privacy intrusion" and "the 4th amendment" protection.

What's extraordinary is that the Snowdenistas achieved this not through exposition of facts, but through blatant propaganda and disinformation. None of the Snowden journalists have found a single case of actual COINTELPRO civil rights violation -- not a single case of anyone who was improperly put under surveillance.

Workplace snooping on romantic interests at the NSA (LOVINT) doesn't rise to the test of civil rights violation as it is about workplace ethics. And we never learn (because full documents aren't revealed) whether Muslims at home or abroad were legitimately targeted as helping terrorism, even though one woman had a boyfriend in the Taliban, which seems to indicate proper surveillance indeed. Not a single case has been produced to back up the claim  of "massive surveillance" or prove that Clapper was lying when he said the government doesn't put surveillance over all citizens as a matter of course. Even the venerable New York Review of Books has fallen for this massive ruse.

So given this state of affairs, there is absolutely no contradiction or surprise for me that LaMarche is now at the head of Democracy Alliance, the engine for wealthy people to impose political change,  used to bring Obama to power along with Silicon Valley (the mining of Facebook personal data) even as he frets about the huge impact of supposedly apolitical philanthropy on politics. I have absolutely no doubt that Democracy Alliance will fund Elizabeth Warren for president through NGOs, media, direct contributions and support of radical campaigns. The reason is because for "the last capitalists," Hillary Clinton is too pro-capitalist and too much a representative of the liberal versus "progressive" paradigm.

TNR Purge is to Support Warren

By the way, the new media or "digital verticals" of this “New Class” sustain this effort – the TNR purge was about removing Hillary supporters and clearing the way for radical Warren pieces; The Intercept stands ready to serve; Politico already tilts toward Warren and there may be only the Washington Post owned by the more moderate Jeff Bezos (who stood up to WikiLeaks and Snowden and wouldn’t let them store stolen documents on Amazon servers) to stump for Clinton (and I'm not so sure about that as I was even last week after seeing this Washpo article sympathetic to Warren, explicating her expose of Clinton's chief economic adviser Larry Summers). Pando will also join the anti-Hillary fray, not to mention Huffington Post.

Warren made it clear from her famous "you didn't build that" speech that she conceives the state to be central, with confiscatory taxes to keep entrepreneurs in line and fund the state. She doesn't see that first exists initiative and entrepreneurship, then comes the generation of wealth, then the state rightfully takes a portion for roads and electricity and hospitals in a civilized state. She has the paradigm flipped -- not generation, but re-distribution of wealth.And she demonizes those who say her paradigm is flipped by claiming they are rapacious and predatory, as if they don't understand the importance of roads.

Like "the Last Capitalists," she doesn't have a plan for how new wealth will be generated in the next generation or how to preserve the capitalist system because she doesn't need one -- she imagines in her lifetime such a successful democratic socialist state will be created that she won't have to worry about new entrepreneurs -- the state will hand out contracts to green or Internet business, jobs will be created enabling people to keep small business afloat, and Google will never have to come home from its tax holiday in Ireland.

 

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Tor Gang 'Privacy Keepers' Dox and Persecute a Twitter Critic - Destroying Privacy. Why Do THEY Get to Do This?

So the big news in the world of Twitter (but nowhere else) is that @JbJabroni10 has been uncovered, doxed, and forced off Twitter -- and apparently even his workplace called or confronted with his "bad behaviour."

Now his account is deleted apparently, although you can still see his pictures here as it is an artifact of the Twicsy service that it has to make copies to serve you the view of the pictures. In fact, that was Geronimo's trademark, taking pictures of texts on his phone and analyzing them. And it was through a picture that he was outed.

The pre-eminent Tor nasty @puellavulnerata (Andrea Shepherd) is the one who doxed and exposed him, as she describes using a photo trail jedi trick.

A defense of him has been blogged by "Sassay Sourstein".

So I condemn doxing and especially trying to harm him in real life, although I'll say that I didn't care for his style of heckling tweets. None of his speech rose to the test of getting him banned through abuse-reporting to Twitter management, so I don't think that he "deserved" to be doxed and persecuted in this way.

It's another scary example of how the Tor Gang functions, and why you should not want these people to run your state. They are awful, despicable people and I call once again for Congress to investigate why we are continuing to fund Tor, given not only these unethical people running it, but the fact that Tor is used for crime.

Investigating Tor is NOT Like Investigating the Weather

And no, that is not like "prosecuting the weather" as some Twitter wit claims, because the human artifact of code is not beyond reproach, and not neutral and not merely a tool. It can be managed better or worse, have better and worse policies. It choses worse policies. It must be changed, and that means suspending, investigating, re-doing the whole Internet Freedom thing at State and DoD. I think Tor should be given to a private foundation to run, ideally, but that wouldn't rescue it from ethical problems which I think persist in it when it is used by government and law-enforcement, in that it both takes human shields to perform surveillance -- it's taking the shields that is the problem, not the surveillance, when it follows legitimate targets -- and it fails to cooperate with law-enforcement surveillance over targets like Silk Road.

Tech companies and software should not be making boxes that are locked and openable only by the user and that even a warrant cannot get opened by the tech company. This was not the policy with telephones and it shouldn't be with the Internet, and I'm all for dredging up 1789 laws on writs to make this point.

Who was JbJabroni10?

When the Snowden operation went down and this fugitive former NSA contractor -- which is the only way I will ever refer to him, i.e. not as any hero -- went into hiding in Russia -- and yes, because he chose Russia -- a number of Snowden critics appeared on Twitter. Some of these people had this sort of profile -- liberal, Democrat, pro-LGBT rights, anti-gun, critical of GOP, etc. -- and they seemed almost too good to be true. That is, that profile actually fits me more, and I'm a Snowden critic, so it makes sense, but given that EVERYONE on Twitter seemed to be pro-Twitter -- right and left alike, as the Ron Paulists also love Snowden -- I just wondered if they were personas, especially when they used nick-names.

Maybe the beleaguered NSA didn't need to create personas to defend itself, after all, it's the government -- still. But I wondered if some of these characters were creations, and possibly creations with an agenda, to try to get the Snowdenistas riled, to talk, to try to goad them into saying something, to track them.

Is this a justifiable method for the government to use? I think when the assault on national security is as grave as this one it is, but your mileage may vary. To claim that only Anonymous gets to use their nefarious methods and those fighting them don't is to be pretty hypocritical.

Is this a justifiable movement for civil society or civic movements to use? I don't think so. I don't think it's easy to judge where the line is crossed, but I do think there is a kind of devoted heckling that is beyond hard questioning and I think that was what he was doing more and more. The punishment for that sin shouldn't be doxing or losing his job in real life. The punishment should be that you block him, possibly abuse-report him if he seemed violent or threatening -- but that route wasn't tried (and that he has socks is no excuse because you can just block those, too). And hey, do you need to spend your life on Twitter? Get some sunlight.

Geronimo had a profile that glorified smoking marijuana with Bob Marley pictures and of course he took the additional nickname of a persecuted Native American. I always find it sus when white males pick up these icons of "people of colour," and I figured that 27/New Jersey/pharmacist if anything meant white or Asian, as that's the typical profile of pharmacists in the tri-state area. But I didn't attempt to figure out who he was because in fact I respect *pseudonymity* as distinct from *anonymity* on the Internet, i.e. the creation of a persistent, consistent character that builds up a predictable set of positions and is responsible for their actions at least in terms of that persona. I didn't realize he also had additional socks, which is of course the bane of Internet existence.

Blocking Geronimo - and Steve Gillmor's Dream

As it happens, recently I blocked Geronimo myself because I just found he was getting too weird, too extreme, too abusive. I felt that he was smoking too much of that pot he was advertising or sampling his pharmaceuticals -- that could account for his increasingly weird statements. I knew he had a theory that was "out there" with the "Limited Hangout" stuff (i.e. Snowden is some kind of vast plot by the CIA against the NSA, or the CIA *and* NSA to control dissent...or something).But he generally stuck to criticism of the hard left and the Snowden fable, and that seemed laudable, and didn't indulge as much on his pet conspiracy theory.

I personally don't buy that conspiracy theory around Snowden -- the reason he didn't leak anything from the CIA may have an Occam's Razor answer -- because he was just an IT guy and didn't get access or didn't have enough to support his own favourite conspiracy theory of "mass surveillance."

I recently unblocked Geronimo for a funny reason -- I was debating with someone some arcane point about Snowden or Lindsay and the divergences in what they said over time, and I was given a reference to @JbJabroni10. And because I couldn't see his answers in the chat, I thought perhaps he deleted his tweets. Did he do that? I hadn't known him to do that.

Then I finally realized that Twitter finally realized Steve Gillmor's long-time dream, about which I debated him strenuously on Twitter, even on his show (where he cut the microphone off) and enabled block to work not only for your regular Twitter feed, where you chose not to see someone in it, but also for vanity searches of your own name, the "@" section as well, where now you can't see anything directed at you.

I thought this was a terrible thing because it meant certain high-powered Twitterati with huge followings, influences and government officials for that matter, could not simply eliminate the people's right to petition, by just never seeing a discouraging word, ever.  You can still search and see people you have blocked or who have blocked you in Twitter search, thank God, they haven't tinkered with that objectivity, but by muffling out protesters talking back, making sure they are never seen, I think they ultimately cripple the environment of free speech. The idea that public influencers should be shielded forever -- like the personal choice a personal individual should be able to make -- from public criticism directed at their @ is anathema to me. In fact, the way in which such thin-skinned types get people they don't like banned from Twitter is by abuse-reporting them for "@"-ing too much -- although with the block this shouldn't matter (but it would still show up on a vanity search or track-back).

In any event, I temporarily unblocked Jabroni just to see what he was saying, and I found again that he was spending a lot of time just heckling all the principles of the Tor conspiracy. And I find this pretty unproductive and counterproductive, even. I don't think his remarks rise to the threshold of some police actionable harassment case at all -- when @runasandvik says she is at the top of the Washington Monument, and JB says "Jump. Tor will protect you" -- I think that's funny, and it's like the Biblical "lest you dash your feet against the stone" and skewers to a "T" the sense of invincibility these people have about themselves and their dubious software.

But telling people to go kill themselves? No, that's never acceptable. There's just way too much of that in his feed, and too much personal attacking. I don't think Andrea's purple hair is off limits -- it's a signifier of her anarchist beliefs and I think she can't expect to die her hair purple and not hear some snarky remarks about it. But JB also seemed to obsess too much.

Tor and EFF Gang Hardly Arbiters of Free Speech or What Constitutes Harassment

I hardly think Jillian C. York or Jacob Appelbaum (!) are arbiters of where the limits are, as their thin-skinned hypocrisy is notorious. But even so, I think this heckling of these people doesn't achieve any end. I'm all for confronting them with hard questions on their bad ideas and dubious claims about software and about anything to do with national security -- this is a democracy, they are government-paid NGO employees, and not above criticism even of the harshest kind, certainly. In EFF's case, while they are a private NGO without state contracts as far as I know, they get tax exemption to sustain themselves, and that means they are also not immune from criticism by the public which should demand accountability of those who get tax-exempt status and do their own thing rather than paying taxes to the public coffers.

Now the Tor gang is sitting smugly that they have "smited" a "troll" and a "misogynist" (and I don't think that charge really sticks deeply)

I don't understand why these people just didn't block him and his socks. That's what I did. The end. If you have a burning need to see what they're saying later, go and search or unblock. But why all the agida and doxing? Are you children, unable to cope with taunts in your play yard?

The 'Smearing' of Yasha Levine

Yasha Levine has also portrayed the Tor Gang as "smearing" them -- and visa versa. Hmmm. He mainly told the truth about them, which wasn't a secret. But why I disagree with him is that he defaults to hating the US government as a generic, and despising US-paid NGOs as a generic, and I oppose that. I don't have a problem with the US government funding circumvention and helping freedom movements abroad; I just don't think they should do it *this way*.

Levine thinks ANY US government support is tainted, as do some of the other champions of JB, like "Sassy Sourstein"who also rags on Omidyar for supporting a Ukrainian NGO -- something which HARDLY affected the Maidan or its outcome and which was a GOOD THING anyway. Sassy's "map of the world" in which the US is guilty of "millions" of massacres and "invading" 1/3 of the world is hilarious -- not only because she never studies the Soviet Union and China and their invasions and real take-overs that have lasted to this day -- that form the basis for the justification of a lot of US action -- she books a Russian invasion to the US, I'm not sure on what grounds. Um, those "13 armies" that supported the Whites and fought the Reds back in the teens of the last century? Or, hmm, Hillary endorsing the granting of government money via NED to an election monitoring group that in fact did good and legitimate work? Ridiculous. These people have a crazy, myopic anti-Americanism that is completely uninformed by the realities of other countries.

What is the End State?

I also don't endorse the idea that the objective should be to have all the Snowden docs leaked at once on WikiLeaks or some other site (and I recently uncovered further evidence of that once being a plan which I have to post).

Or that the end state should be no state, or no surveillance agency. I personally don't see a single reason to institute any "Snowden reforms". Nor does our democratic Congress, thank God.

I'm not sure Snowden himself endorsed that idea of "maximum leaking", not out of any love for national security, but because I think he, Greenwald, and Poitras are shrewd enough to realize that WikiLeaks really stepped on its own story by just dumping everything out, first with its Afghanistan/Iraq stuff, then later with the State Department cables. Nobody but total country nerds (like me on Turkmenistan) would pay attention past the first few headlines, and you lose your audience.

By doling them out and always timing them to world events like the G20 meeting or Russian-German talks, you maximize their effect, and they know that. In fact, it's not always clear that they know what they have in that huge batch as I'm not sure key word searching is a given. But at any rate, going the route with Omidyar at Intercept seems rational to me, and not somehow further evidence of their already criminal/anti-American state.

To be sure, Greenwald and his backer Omidyar are skating on thin ice or riding along a thin line, and I'm all for debating that. Do they enable/incite/become complicit with hacking when they do this? They aren't merely about transparency; they want "regime change" -- although I reject the term "regime" for the United States, which is a liberal democratic state under the rule of law. If you don't think it is, try Russia. Are these the people you want installing new regimes or governments? Not me, no thanks.

And certainly Appelbaum crosses the line into complicity when he procures and leaks more documents than even Snowden has, and calls for sabotage by systems analysts. "Get the ball, bring it out," as Assange famously said, and which he quoted. Well, does this fit merely into free speech? I don't think ethically it does, and I don't think any computer scientist or tech company or platform or community of coders should think it's alright to "get the ball and bring it out" from national security. They are not the ones to undemocratically decide; their judgement on this is not only flawed but again, about regime change that itself is antithetical to freedom and human rights.

Cover for Anarchy

And speaking of which, there's Andrea Shepherd, who famously told me that "mathematics makes the state obsolete" (although not journalism, apparently) and who unabashedly confirms that the purpose of crypto is to enable anarchists.

My critique of Tor has been extensive and not only spans numerous blogs but my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee.

And nowhere has this been more exemplified than in what Shepherd did to Geronimo, by doxing him and exposing him to "the Internet" and of course his bosses.

I don't believe taking food off people's table is EVER right. I don't think anyone should EVER lose their job for their smart remarks on Twitter, objectively objectionable, or objectionable only to certain thin-skinned Twitterati. The exception, I think, is people who are in government who use anonymous Twitter accounts to harass people, leak from their shops, diss their bosses, etc. I think government jobs are something you are not required to take; we don't live in Canada or some other country where so many jobs *are* in the government. If you take that responsibility to serve the people in office, you should be named, in uniform, so to speak, with your name and title visible. So I think it was right that the national security guy got exposed and fired from his White House job -- and I doubt he had any trouble with his views finding a new job.

But some pharmacist in New Jersey? Really, Andrea, you with your $120,000 a year government-paid gig in Tor are going to harass and bully a guy who probably makes half of what you do and deprive him of possibility getting a job in his field again?! What kind of savage, vicious asshole anarchy is that?! Not one I want to live under.

There's the obvious hypocrisy of privacy activists using the privacy-busting affordances of the Internet to harass a critic, even one who "went too far." And these affordances, like Spokeo, are well known, but the picture URL fiddling isn't so self-evident. This is not information you get by just right-clicking on a photo. You probably have to run a script or command or something. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think to get the information for "Figure 8" in her blog, Andrea had to do something like this .

Regardless of whether these are "open tools" or "jedi Internet tricks," it took some malevolence, jiggering and determination to dox this guy. Anonymous people sooner or later make a mistake that gets them outed, and looking at Andrea's Linked in and not logging out of LI first was a dead giveaway.

I have creepy people like that looking at my profile frequently, often after I publish a critical blog. They either log out so it just says "a LI member" or they are logged on and I can see that someone in "maintenance" at "Pfizer" in "Ireland" has a need to repeatedly look at my profile. A creepy type like that is probably Anon with a job as a janitor. I had some intern at the Department of Justice via CACI looking at me the other day. Also Anonymous? Or? What, exactly?

But even if people make mistakes like that, and you don't like what they say on Twitter, why is it okay to dox them? IT's NOT.

Government is made up only of people, and there are factions in government just as there are anywhere. And there is a pro-Tor faction, and this faction represents a set of beliefs, and I think those beliefs are ultimately antithetical to human rights -- and I've just illustrated one of them, whereby "privacy keepers" get to decide who keeps their privacy, and doxes people they don't like who criticize their privileges and power. Scary!

I've often mentioned the very notion of the "human shields" that have to be taken in the deployment of this weapon -- and it is a weapon -- of Tor. Sanctifying this process by invoking the need for victims of domestic violence or freedom activists in Iran or Russia doesn't work for me.

But the idea that those who create privacy also have the keys to undo it with their technical skills is one of the reasons I am not for coders taking over, and not having code-as-law. This.

After all, these people don't *have* to use Tor. In Russia, just using the Opera Browser gets you around the government blocking of some sites, and that's mainly what people need. People who need to make anonymous communications figure out how to do this often without resorting to Tails or Tor or OTR, all of which have their problems and flaws. Freedom movements existed long before the Internet and go on existing. As one of the anarcho-communist-whatever types on Twitter pointed out, the real activists are not online. And of course not. We know there were data mules who went from Occupy to Occupy camp with USBs or just analog data, for example.

I hope that JB doesn't lose his job and will come back on Twitter and do his thing, and that eventually there will be enough momentum to get Tor investigated.

 

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