From the beginning, when WikiLeaks started this attention-getting tantrum of revealing the name of the fifth country not named by Glenn Greenwald at Intercept, I thought to myself, "This isn't about the country, but about some smaller entity or preson they want to get."
Why did I think that?
Because as I pointed out on Twitter, Greenwald slipped up and said "company" at one point, and not "country" when discussing this. A very common mistake I've made myself.
But what if he did mean "company," i.e. some telecom, perhaps even some Afghan-based company that the purist revolutionaries wanted to expose as a sympathizer or enabler? I was thinking that there was an American telecom company, or perhaps some kind of consulting firm funded by USAID or something.
And sure enough, it turns out to be worse than I thought.
It's not just that they've now named the country -- which many people guessed anyway and was accidently leaked by a slide anyway.
It's that they want to screw over Jared Cohen.
Why would that be?
Because Assange didn't like the way the interview Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen did with Assange turned out, because it made Assange look bad. Schmidt put it in his book.
It could be that simple. We are dealing with petty, childish, and deranged people here at WikiLeaks.
Just in case people had trouble putting together all the dots, WikiLeaks spells it out in a series of tweets:
Google Idea's director Jared Cohen was tasked with getting Afghan telcos to move towers to US bases when at DoS https://t.co/bwVvyXuMU4
The WikiLeaks cable, which may only be released now, I don't know (does anybody) or maybe was there and nobody focused on it before, identifies Jared Cohen as the State Department staffer who enthusiastically worked to get cell phone towers put in US army bases in Afghanistan to help mobile communications in general, particularly for Afghan entrepreneurs.
WikiLeaks sees this as evil, because they see it as tacitly or even complicitly helping the NSA hack into cell communications for their "nefarious purposes".
I disagree because, as much as I don't like Jared Cohen -- and I don't -- the cult of connectivity is at best commercial hype for Google's business interests and at worst an undermining of our civil liberties, Jared Cohen is:
o an official appointed in a liberal democratic government -- Obama is a democratically-elected president and the most liberal we'll ever have (I didn't vote for him the second time but he is the president, and I'd rather have him than Assange run the world);
o assigned to the job of promoting modernization, innovation, i-phones and Twitter and such -- he famously asked the devs at Twitter to move their maintenance down time so that the Iranian revolution could proceed;
o trying to do good in his various incarnations and programs -- which I disagree with, but concede to him;
o now at Google, which is a legitimate public company, in a program I don't like and whose goals I disagree with, but which also has some merit and is about doing good (peace, justice, human rights, etc);
and
o the NSA tapping into communications in Afghanistan is a legitimate measure for national security, i.e. our soldiers fighting the Taliban there.
By contrast, Assange does evil. Life is about choices.
What is it about that interview that got to Assange? Well, it makes him look extreme and deranged, in the end, not rational. I'll have to go over it again, but my hunch is that this is what it's all about.
Oh, and exposing the evil of America in Afghanistan, too. Right. But of course, I don't think it's really about that. For one, anyone with sense knows that the Taliban kill most of the people in Afghanistan, and fighting them is a good thing. You can disagree about how that fight has gone but that they need exposing and fighting rather than the US needing exposing and undermining shouldn't be a question.
WikiLeaks has really lost the plot with this one, but then, they were never about transparency and accountability, least of all for themselves, but about anarchist mayhem.
So why did Greenwald hold it back and talk about "deaths"? There are deaths anyway in Afghanistan, it's still a war zone.
Likely, as much as he likely doesn't care for Cohen's more centrist brand of liberal politics and the Clintons he represents, and doesn't care for Google (although he doesn't ever criticize them), he holds back at the idea of singling out one man, one name, and putting a target right on his back, so that he can't go to these countries (he travels all over the world) where he might be in danger.
It's really sick.
Appelbaum, of course, likely had personal dealings with Jared Cohen while Cohen was at State doing "innovation," because Tor Project, funded by the State Department's Deptartment of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Department of Defense (yes, go look at their web site), would have been thrilled with Tor as a "circumvention" salvation that leads to that cult of connectivity I mentioned above. Jared was probably one of those people at State that Appelbaum bragged was his friend even as others wanted him to be investigated by the Department of Justice over WikiLeaks (as well he should be).
So there may be a personal vendetta going on here from Appelbaum, it requires more research.
Mainly because of the war in Syria -- which is backed by Iran and Russia -- and the consequences of trying to take on these vicious states directly or indirectly, in reality or in virtuality.
Typically this debate devolves instantly to the implications of making and using -- and losing control -- of Stuxnet, which was used by the US against Iran's nuclear system - and never looks at the larger problem of the rogue nuclear state under theocrats who are willing to mass-murder their own civilians who protest against their oppression, and assassinate their critics abroad.
THE CAPITALIST TOOL IS HACKED
There might be reference to the Syrian Electronic Army, which hacked Forbes last week. (Note in reading that piece how organized, cadre-like, rigidly ideological and extreme that organization is, i.e. showing signs of training, far from the "looseknit group of hackers" people sometimes claim it is "not affiliated with any government". And note the chatty and friendly journo who friended these hackers in order to understand their sad childhoods, seemed utterly gullible on this point: "He said they are self-funded, not supported by an outside group or the Syrian government as has been alleged." Right. Then see Andy Greenberg's enthusiastic account of his own employer's hacking, which I had hoped might make him sympathize with hacker victims more -- except I think he just finds it too intellectually exciting to follow their antics.)
Maybe you can start to see the problem here.
As always, it's hard to have this conversation about Syria and cyberwarfare meaningfully in the liberal "arms control" strait-jacket that myopic anti-Americans want to put it into.
I immediately note that the East West Institute is not an honest broker for this process, in my view. It was pro-Soviet in the 1980s and remains under the exact same leadership as it had then, and is rather uncritical of Russia today -- it's a think tank that has to maintain access to the Kremlin to stay in business. That means it isn't getting to the heart of the problem that would have to precede any accord: candid admission that the real problem originates in Russia's awful human rights record in meat-world, first; its propping up of the tyrannies of Iran and Syria; its cyber attacks on Western Europe and the US which are overwhelming in number by contrast to whatever dirty tricks might be put on the Western docket; and the Kremlin's unwillingness to admit this, obviously.
It's great that 40 think-tankers self-selected in this process tilting toward the Kremlin are making little rules about spam that even Russians might sign, but that is beside the point -- and lumping together that process with NATO in Tallinn really is disingenuous (these initiatives come from very different places with different goals).
Sure, it would be nice to have a kind of new "Helsinki Accords" of cyberwarfare, where states got together and solemnly pledged not to use these new and powerful and unpredictable forms of warfare against each other.
I used to talk about this more hopefully a few years ago - I remember a year ago or so at one of the Brussels Forums special sessions on cybersecurity, my tweeted question about the possibility of "Helsinki talks" like this even got on the list, and was even discussed by people like Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. But here's the thing -- and I believe he was the one to make this point at the time -- it's kind of hard to have a new Helsinki Accords sort of agreement on something this complicated when the existing Helsinki Accords and its institutional framework --the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- have such a very difficult time getting Russia to concede to basic principles of human rights and even arms control these days.
Russia has been very, very busy crippling the capacity of the OSCE in recent years by doing everything from challenging its human rights budgets to demanding re-negotiation of its principles in a new "security charter" that would benefit its Eurasianist take on life, ruining all the progress seemingly made in the last 35 years on these principles. (Russia is also busy trying to kill the UN treaty bodies' system in exactly the same way, with little publicity or pushback.)
In a climate where Russia is being as bad as it can be at home, say, to NGOs or demonstrators, as well as abroad, in backing up the Syrian tyrant and pressuring Ukraine and even supplying help with some of the deadly force used by the Yanukovych government against demonstrators, how could you possibly open up a new treaty (or "non-binding agreement") process with them on cybersecurity?! You couldn't. The same factors that make for insecurity in cyberspace -- Russia making the overwhelming lion-share of attacks on Western Europe in both political and commercial hacks - are the factors that make a poor climate for negotiation. The problem starts with Russian denial of the problem -- and Western European reluctance to call out what the real issue is -- the Kremlin.
So, hey, in the absence of any Realism from the Kremlin, or Realism from the EU regarding what the real source of the problem is -- Russia -- let's by all means just myopically focus on the US, mkay? Hence the New York Times, fretting about all this.
You can see how all this has been nicely set up by America's enemies:
The head of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, said in an interview last year that such weapons had been used only a handful of times in his eight-year tenure.
But Syria is a complicated case, raising different issues than Iran did. In Syria, the humanitarian impulse to do something, without putting Americans at risk or directly entering the civil war, is growing inside the administration. Most of that discussion focuses on providing more training and arms for what are seen as moderate rebel groups. But cyberweapons are in the conversation about stepping up covert action.
Part of the argument is that Syria is a place where America could change its image, using its most advanced technology for a humanitarian purpose.
“The United States has been caught using Stuxnet to conduct a covert cybercampaign against Iran as well as trawling the Internet with the massive Prism collection operation,” Mr. Healey wrote recently, referring to the N.S.A.’s data-mining program. “The world is increasingly seeing U.S. cyberpower as a force for evil in the world. A cyberoperation against Syria might help to reverse this view.”
Of course, Iran has been caught ruthlessly suppressing its population, arming local insurgents and terrorists, propping up the mass crime against humanity in Syria, pressuring Israel, and receiving Putin on a mission to resume arms sales from Russia. Not to mention obstructing the Internet and hacking enemies. But do let us keep that focus on the US as the "force for evil in the world."
Let me suggest that Obama is really not the one to be adjudicating this entire debate, given that his premises and principles, drawn from his days in and around the Democratic Socialists of America, would not give him the intellectual framework to do anything else other than Blame America First.
THOSE NASTY TACTICS AGAINST HACKERS BY THE NSA!
There's another interesting context to this "agonizing" debate on Syria surfacing now in the New York Times -- i.e. being leaked by some participant in it in the Administration who wants to force Obama's hand in one way or another - and that's the diabolical work of First Look, Glenn Greenwald's new blog funded by Pierre Omidyar.
Interesting how these two topics -- US contemplating cyberware on Syria and Iran and the Western tactics said to be used on Anonymous -- come together in Leak-land this week, eh?
And there, too, to hear Glenn tell it, there is absolutely no past to this story, and nothing ever occurred before these slides were created.
THE DISCUSSION WE'VE BEEN HAVING ON THIS FOR YEARS, YOU KNOW
Of course, if you followed my blogs for the last 10 years -- my, it's been a long time -- you'd know that the issue of the hackers came first. THEY used these awful methods FIRST.
And, as Gus on Twitter has pointed out, the hacker methods are the "Saul Alinsky methods". Except, Saul didn't invent them, they came ultimately from Lenin and anarchist and communist movements a hundred years ago, and percolated their way into the Students for a Democratic Society, and the more radical Weathermen, and other groups and movements that drew on these ideologies. These methods include things like freezing a target and assaulting him with one-sided attacks, particularly trying to show that he is not what he seems because he does something that is at odds with his supposed public stance, especially if that is perceived as moral.
So, for example, in modern terms, if you are in Moveon.org or one of these moronic leftist online movements, you will take something like a corporation, which you hate for ideological reasons because you hate capitalism, and then pick out something that it does which is at odds with its purported public persona, i.e. capitalist. So you accuse it of receiving "corporate welfare" or getting tax cuts or benefits from the state -- at oddds with its belief in go-it-alone hard-scrabble can-do free enterprise.
Then you compare and contrast what conservatives say about "welfare queens" or "spongers on public dole" -- poor people, the jobless, minorities without access to good jobs -- and then apply that rhetoric to your frozen target. Voila. That these are very different types of support with very different outcomes doesn't matter; the point is to pervert the meaning of language and use it in a bad-faith manner.
Greenwald tunes into this issue with his Snowden-leaked document as if there was no history of even the cheer-leading tech press documenting the massive assaults by hackers on government, corporate, nonprofit, and media websites, not to mention individual blogs. As if something like the Syrian Electronic Army attack on Forbes never happens.
It's a good time to remember some of the discussion even of only three years ago about the assaults caused by WikiLeaks and Anonymous -- which, after all, attacked the US government *first* with, um, WikiLeaks itself (my, how quickly people forget the basics!)
The vicious attack on me from the old Alphaville Herald (Second Life press) for getting such high-profile attention by being on Wright's show, and debating him directly. This is of course the work of Peter Ludlow, the linguistics professor who supports Anonymous and WikiLeaks ardently, and his sidekick Mark McCahill, Internet pioneer and lover of hacker mayhem himself.
If you read the comments at the Herald, I am mercilessly ridiculed and heckled for taking this position, and even accused of somehow queering a job prospect for some kid (a start-up genius who got millions of dollars -- who then failed, and got more funding -- yeah, right). But do read the comment there from mercury which sums up my position and its ramifications very well.
Don't forget that this a lot like Russia buying South Koreans or Brazilians to win the Olympics: the agencies in our country feel they "have to" have hackers on their teams to win, so they bring them in -- and suffer the consequences (Snowden).
So again, the question I have for Greenwald and all the Snowdenistas: how come you're tuning into this topic YEARS LATER, after the hackers HAVE DONE THIS FIRST?
I mean, even the last three years of this debate, given the links I've just provided, would clue you in. Lots of people discussed Anonymous' use of the DDoS, very much backed up by WikiLeaks (and we now know they even recruited hackers to help them fight their enemies like PayPal) -- and the usual suspects like Morozov and TechPresident and Slate and Zeandt all endorsed the use of this awful method of crashing other people's servers. Where were you?
HACKERS ATTACK SNOWDEN CRITIC
And this isn't somehow an abstract notion that happens to other people, oh, those corporations like PayPal that have phalanxes of engineers to fix their hacker problems in a few days.
It's a very real climate of intimidation that Snowden critics really live with (as I can testify myself -- one only has to look at the drive-by assaults on my book on amazon and the type of methods used in making "reviews" to understand that).
We discover that Lawfare Blog has been under assault for its criticism of Snowden and has had its server crashed and disabled repeatedly.
And because comments can get so drowned out there, let me reprint here my thoughts on the hacking of Lawfare:
I don't wish this experience on my worst enemy, but in a way, Ken, I'm glad you are finally seeing up close and personally the strength, ugliness, persistence and sinister nature of the hacker movements that otherwise libertarians tend to dismiss as mere "trolls" or "kids". It's important to see that these are hard-core, echeloned cadre organizations sometimes even with hostile state backing. And they really are determined to make sure that no one uses the Internet in any way that they don't approve first. I say this after blogging for 10 years.
One way to try to combat these movements is to use commercial blogging sites, so that the headaches of these attacks and subterfuges go on the engineers at these sites who are more experienced. But the problem is the hacker culture is among them, too. And large and busy commercial sites don't always understand not to respond to falsified DMCA takedown notices on fake grounds which are merely meant to chill speech. Or to realize that malicious inclusion of your blog site in a malware list on sysadmin's lists when of course you have no malware is very hard to undo. Another technique is to deluge your site with porn or commercial spam to force you to close or remove comments -- I have found it not uncommon to get 20,000 pieces of spam injected on my site by bots in an hour just to stop me from being able to keep comments open or from posting as the site hangs.
The only way to address this is to start documenting and fighting it like the human rights abuse that it is. But you have to change your mindset about it first. It's not really so much about cost, as you can get a commercial site for $14.95 or $21.95 a month. But it's about combating on a systematic basis and constantly documenting and reporting.
So when Glenn Greenwald is ready to concede free speech for thee and not just for me, and concede that Lawfare shouldn't be hacked by his friends, then maybe we can talk. Except, I probably wouldn't even begin the conversation with them since the entire thing is in bad faith.
As usual, all these slides and documents from the NSA are context-free and we don't know the most important thing: were these concepts used?
Is there a list of actions taken as a result of these concepts?
Or is it more like HBGary planning to hack Anonymous but not getting to it?
IF these methods were used, then surely we can get *some facts*. You know, names, dates, places, wind chill factors. Details.
Of course, all these hacker movements are "injured if not innocent" at best -- and I'd love to have a conversation about how everyone thinks they will be stopped -- along with the Syrias of the world -- if we are supposed to adhere to an ethics charter that no one else has signed or implemented.
That conversation can only start with a conversation about where the problem started and who is to blame.
BTW, read the obnoxious Christine Fair's timeline, if you want to see some Twitfights recently on the "who started it theme" in Central Asia, where everybody naturally blames the US for the Taliban (false), and she helpfully points out to a debater that aid to the Afghan rebels went through Pakistani intelligence -- which props up the Taliban even today. Then her various insincere and anonymous interlocutors rant about CIA dirty tricks in the 1950s in Latin America or Africa or Asia, to which I can only say: two wrongs don't make a right, i.e. moral equivalence is wildly out of order here given the mass crimes of humanity perpetrated by the Soviets from the 1900s through the 1940s in particular -- which help set up the Cold War.
The Helsinki Accords, begun before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and persisted in negotiations with Kremlin henchmen even as they prosecuted this war in the 1980s, eventually was a framework that bore fruit in terms of the free flow of people and ideas. But while it was helpful in breaking up the Communist bloc and saving some countries for the EU -- and bringing Central Asia into a context of care that it really has nowhere else -- it has suffered terrible reversals in the last 10 years in particular. I guess I would have to conclude for now that the cybersecurity issues cannot be successfully grafted on to OSCE (although that's likely where some will graft them) and that a new Helsinki Accords of any kind, least of all on cybersecurity, will not work.
Meanwhile, I don't plan to become a booster of American use of cyberwarfare any more than I am a booster of drones -- I just expect to remind those raging about these issues that they are horrificially onesided in their approach.
I thought perhaps this giant love pat with an interview even of Paul Syverson himself was part of the overall Snowden Operation offensive in the last week, with Snowden getting loving attention from the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Verge, all publications that can ensure maximum snowing of key intellectuals in policy and tech. None of those "interviews" succeeded in asking even the most basic critical questions, as I've suggested asking in the past about Greenwald.
Then I saw a reason why the Tor devs are busy trying to counterspin their flawed project and immoral ideology that goes with it, i.e. which basically involves having the US military take digital human shields to protect its own spying, while tolerating even the undermining of national security, not to mention massive crimes like child pornography and illegal drug sales while it is doing this . That is the real lack of ethics at the root of the Snowden story, unlike the fake exposures of supposed lack of ethics in the NSA in much of the Snowden materia.
Lots to study there, including the information about the use of Moxie Marlingspike's SSL strip attacks which he developed (of course, as open source tools they could be used by anyone, not just him). The chart in the paper shows a URL in -- of all places -- Hong Kong -- and -- on of all dates -- on June 5, the first day Glen Greenwald went public with his Snowden stories in the Guardian. Just a coincidence? Did the Russians get in early on spying on Snowden and his journalist friends? Or are they all in on it? All of this needs more study. The URL resolves to Sun Network Limited, a Hong Kong ISP. The map location is inside a large park, the Aberdeen Reserve. Look up the Mira Hotel, where Snowden stayed, on Google Maps. It's about 11 kilometers -- too long for a stroll, but not for a cab ride, and maybe this actor is Snowden's helper in Hong Kong, who was said to be Russian. (The Russian consulate in Hong Kon is 5.6 kilometers from the Mira Hotel. This is a Miru Mir Mirror as Nabokov might say.)
I've been very busy on Sochi Olympics material this last 10 days and haven't had time to read all the Twitter feeds. @LibertyLynx and @streetwiseprof have been posting links to this material avidly.
A word on these two: a slam on me involving outrageously fake claims that I am Mr. X, a notorious character involved in Internet harassment, seems to have been removed. A post I tried to submit not only to counter this idiocy but the other nasty remarks on Pirrong's website was blocked, and so I see how these libertarians are playing this -- illiberally.
@libertylynx may be a mathematician and may know math, but he/she is not necessarily an expert on circumention software -- we don't know, because he/she is anonymous. Up to a point. Unless we discover what kind of derivatives he likes at Koch Industries.
But no matter, his/her identity isn't the point -- and as I've often had to explain to vicious non-entities like this, not only do I not "need to know" who they are, but I do not advocate for everyone to be *forcibly* made to adopt real-life names -- and suffer things like attacks from the FSB (LL claims to have suffered them). Or their violent exes -- Tor often invokes the cause of helping domestic violence victims to cover its tracks and its radical agenda elsewhere. I'm not for forcing people to have to use anonymous social media *either* -- and that's what happens when you let in deluges of Anonymous and anonymous to any social media -- you can't tell the people in your Facebook group from real people whose names have accountability attached to them versus the secret police using nicks.
But I will say the obvious truth about anonymous people -- they can poison the well easily in a community, and play havoc and destruction worthy of the best KGB-style wreckers and splitters -- and you may not be able to tell the difference between a psychopath and an actual agent. What's especially annoying is that if you disagree with their harsh methods and extreme libertarian notions and agenda (which is turning out to be more extreme than I thought), they denounce you and whip up their friends to denounce you like little Komsomol pukes. This just makes for so much annoying noise, and maybe it's deliberate.
@LibertyLynx's contribution to this debate basically has been to scream things like the people on Maidan should not use Tor. And indeed they shoudn't -- Tor is compromised in multiple ways, and is slow anyway. I don't know if people actually busy showing real-life solidarity on the street in person while fending off violent attacks from riot police have time to check their Twitters using clunky Tor but that's not the point -- somewhere they might have use for circumvention and they should find it elsewhere than Tor. Of course, the great thing about Maidan is that it shows just what a real revolution is -- people and solidarity, in person, not just social media, and Russians in particular as well as others can learn from this.
But LL's feed is also filled with shrill and crude invective against at Appelbaum and others castigating them for never mentioning dead journalists in Russia, or dead demonstrators in Ukraine -- and therefore implying that if only these types would balance their critique of West with East, all would be well. No matter that these types of loyalty tests are the least sort of thing @LibertyLynx or @Streetwiseprof -- himself under ideological attack from the New York Times right now -- would ever want practiced on themselves. Their methods really do self-discredit, and self-destruct eventually.
This is where I begin to ask questions -- not because I'm uncritical of Appelbaum or Tor -- and not, as LL and SP say like taunting twelve-year-olds, because I will simply be contrarian to anything they say now after their vicious behaviour. No, I ask questions -- and give credit where it is due -- because I want it to be solid and for people to show their work. I want the critique of Tor, Appelbaum, and Snowden and all their works not to be written off as a hysterical Internet conspiracy.
Derp, I get it that Streetwise's August post about NASDAQ isn't a post dated this month. But the claim in it was the same as being implied now -- that every Russian hacker we turn up or every massive destructive act against the US will be related to these people around Snowden and Tor or could be, and we should always assume the worst. Maybe they are, but there so many different Russian-related bad actors that it's not necessarily the case.
And it could just be some opportunistic Russian hacker looking to slurp up what they can from Tor -- as none other than Julian Assange himself did once, as we all know who have been following this, thanks to Cryptome's expose. Or it could be the Russian government -- and with a name like Main Directorate (Glavnoye Upravelniye) it might well be -- or associated with government agencies of all types, including of course intelligence. We don't know. It has to be run down.
And that's where I start to ask what these two are really up to -- whether their purpose is to serve as radicalization agents to feign the anti-Putin shtick and attract a certain following but then discredit the cause of criticism of those who are either fellow travellers or not as zealous as they think people should be on the Cause.
This is all a very, very old story with the KGB and other intelligence services, even including our own, so you just can't be sure what is going on.
The sheer viciousness with which both of these online personas go about their business, however, seems that it is more likely they are just extremists all on their own, without any manipulative *intelligence* agenda, but only a manipulative agenda to create hard-core circles of "their own."
Here's the problem with taking up these extreme positions on the problems of Tor and Appelbaum: they make it easy to discredit all criticism of Tor and Appelbaum (and as I said, maybe that's idea).
So...Streetwise Professor claims that Appelbaum could have set up the malicious nodes in Russia. That will naturally be something that not only Appelbaum but his many fanboyz and fangirlz in and around Tor will viciously deride -- setting back the effort once again.
And there are arguments to be made against it, as follows -- and the task then is to go to the next, more sophisticated level with these people, not spout hysterical nonsense:
o The Swedish researchers, obviously fans of the world of encryption and Tor, seek to minimize the damage (and we don't know they are in good faith in doing this, but still, we have to look at it). Not only in the paper, but in a follow-up post, they stress that the malicious nodes used little bandwidth. That means they were low-bandwidth sites, and the Swedes then claim that the system "routed around" this -- that it optimalizes and balances and seeks out the faster-running nodes with more bandwidth -- and given how notoriously slow Tor is, that seems plausible. In other words, we don't know if these malicious nodes really did any major damage. Given that Hong Kong location and date, all this needs a closer look -- but we don't know yet.
o While not an absolute requirement, given the Internet's great capacities for collaboration, setting up Tor nodes might be something the Tor freaks prefer to do in person, with personal (and safer) exchange of encryption keys, and establishment of trust levels that come with all the shared memes and ideological tics that these people possess. We have not placed Appelbaum in Russia ever. So how did he set up these nodes? Or how did he convince the Russians running them to turn them against the network and snoop? What is the usual SOP for setting up Tor nodes -- it seems to me their close hacker friends usually are the ones to run them, and parties in their trusted circle -- although obviously, they want to obfuscate so that it doesn't become like the PGP early sign-up trust community being exposed.
o If you were running an operation that involved first robbing the NSA of its crown jewels, then spiriting that jewel thief away to Russia to the "loving arms of the FSB" as Congressman Mike Rogers aptly put it -- would you run malicious Tor nodes in Russia? I mean, wouldn't it be a good idea to cancel those way in advance, like your subscription to the Daily Worker? Why would you *keep* running them past June 2013, risking exposure, even by some routine check by some well-meaning person, let alone Swedish academics scrutinizing this intensely?
o Sure, there are plenty of WikiLeaks connections to Russia and no shortage of both obvious and hidden WikiLeaks operatives there to perform something like this. It doesn't have to be Appelbaum himself.
o These Russians don't seem to have used other Internet proxies or made it too easy to discover their use of Tor by these Swedish researchers. Really? The FSB doesn't know how to do this better? That suggests to me that more amateur hackers in a mafia or some corrupt business could be at work with this opportunistically, not necessarily the Party's Sword and Shield.
And to loop back to Appelbaum one more time. He, of course, is a confederate–co-conspirator, actually–of Snowden, who is in the grips of the FSB. Which means that Appelbaum could be helping to bait a trap in Russia, using those 18 malicious relays.
Moreover, it means that via Appelbaum, the United States Navy is connected to Edward Snowden (and hence the FSB): who, by the way, has been photographed with Tor decals displayed prominently on his laptop. This is a much closer connection than the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon variety. If Obama has his way, the NSA will be limited to two “hops” to connect terrorists with American citizens. The US Navy is two hops away from Edward Snowden, with Tor being the connection. Navy->Appelbaum->Snowden/FSB. With Tor providing the common link
The knowledge that Appelbaum and the Navy are connected doesn't require any sleuthing -- it's in the open. You would not have to expose malicious Russian Tor nodes to prove this.
And...A bait for what? Who actually went through those slow Russian nodes? Other Russians in remote parts of Russia going on Facebook? The Russian government is spying on its own people with its own SORM and other programs -- no doubt it exploits Tor, too, but are we certain that the same people who want to hide Snowden and his daily comms are happy to have their malicious nodes discovered? Again, this is likely other malevolent actors, of which there are no shortage.
As I've maintained since this began, those decals on Snowden's laptop aren't just something this NSA contractor, who supposedly wore the anti-NSA EFF hoodie, we're told by a Forbes source, got by mail-order from the Internet. And Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras, in their 40s, aren't really sticker-type people -- that's something younger people do. My guess is that either Jacob or some other younger Tor activist gave the stickers to Snowden, despite the pre-empive efforts by EFF to spin this and of Tor activists to ridicule it as tin-foil hattery. He always displays those stickers in every photo, and it's a meme and a taunt. He believes no one will ever trace thim. I've personally witnessed Appelbaum hand out stickers to people, and know that's just what he does -- and might have done it in Hong Kong or Hawaii or who knows...
As for these hops, there are mixed metaphors here, but as I've indicated, the Navy-Tor-Dingledine-Appelbaum connection is alive and well and proximate in real life, they are even invited to the same conference in -- where else, Germany.
But obviously these people feel very comfortable in their certitude that nothing will ever be made of this, that they not only have solid scientific alibis, but that they have the mighty Business Week to help them spin this. This isn't just a tangled web, this is something that casual bloggers in Houston, TX -- regardless of Pirrong's academic credentials -- or New York, NY -- regardless of whatever credentials I have (which these two attempt to impugn) -- are not going to be able to get to the bottom of -- at least, not easily.
Appelbaum is still listed on the Tor web site as their "main" promoter or "evangelist," the term that the software cultists in Silicon Valley actually use for their religious product. And of course they wouldn't risk the extremism now associated with him at 30c3 -- openly calling on people in the US to sabotage their computers and leave their jobs in order to join the anarchists' revolution.
I won't be a bit surprised if we witness the shedding of Jacob Appelbaum from Tor which will be described by his long-time comrades as for the good of the cause. Won't be the first time revolutionaries have removed their own from the picture. On the other hand, the sheer bold certitude of these people in their own righteousness and unimpeachability lets me know they have powerful friends. They may do nothing because they don't have to.
Syverson's claim -- which the Tor evangelists always claim as if we're stupid and don't get systems philosophies -- is that the Navy "must" have a tool that even pornographers and NSA hacker fugitives can use because otherwise circumvention has "Navy" stamped all over its exit nodes.
Well, please. Tor is not the only circumvention software or community of developers -- there are a half dozen others. And there is nothing to stop the Navy from using, oh, farmer with barns in Iowa who don't rip off NSA files and sell drugs -- instead of the people they rely on for the nodes -- the trusted set of characters that Jake and his pals come up with -- which is to say, not people we should have to trust.
If you think people from farms in Iowa don't know sophisticated code and circumvention issues, think again. There is absolutely no reason in hell why Tor has to be run with these people, this way, with this track record -- and yes, the ethics of communities of developers matter.
And to loop back to Appelbaum one more time. He, of course, is a confederate–co-conspirator, actually–of Snowden, who is in the grips of the FSB. Which means that Appelbaum could be helping to bait a trap in Russia, using those 18 malicious relays.
Moreover, it means that via Appelbaum, the United States Navy is connected to Edward Snowden (and hence the FSB): who, by the way, has been photographed with Tor decals displayed prominently on his laptop. This is a much closer connection than the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon variety. If Obama has his way, the NSA will be limited to two “hops” to connect terrorists with American citizens. The US Navy is two hops away from Edward Snowden, with Tor being the connection. Navy->Appelbaum->Snowden/FSB. With Tor providing the common link.
- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=8023#sthash.3OsWu5ky.kkMP9mrS.dpuf
And to loop back to Appelbaum one more time. He, of course, is a confederate–co-conspirator, actually–of Snowden, who is in the grips of the FSB. Which means that Appelbaum could be helping to bait a trap in Russia, using those 18 malicious relays.
Moreover, it means that via Appelbaum, the United States Navy is connected to Edward Snowden (and hence the FSB): who, by the way, has been photographed with Tor decals displayed prominently on his laptop. This is a much closer connection than the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon variety. If Obama has his way, the NSA will be limited to two “hops” to connect terrorists with American citizens. The US Navy is two hops away from Edward Snowden, with Tor being the connection. Navy->Appelbaum->Snowden/FSB. With Tor providing the common link.
- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=8023#sthash.3OsWu5ky.kkMP9mrS.dpuf
Could we please have a different process and more kinds of people decide this great matter of national security than this guy:
(this was fake album cover art for a fake punk band Snowden dreamed up back in the day)
and these people (the Silicon Valley titans who met with Obama to make a deal as to what they will find acceptable in all this).
Photo by Pete Souza, The White House, December 17, 2013.
and this guy?
[picture of Glenn Greenwald in flip-flops and barking dogs and screaming monkeys in the trees if I had one]
There is a debate about clemency for Snowden, or what sort of punishmen is appropriate, and it's a sterile one, and one I think disingenuous.
It distracts from the real issues of why does Snowden get to decide reform, why do his journalist activists get to decide reform, and why Obama has to be rushed into reforming something that in fact may not need reforming -- and wasn't democratically decided.
The RUSH to reform the agencies in the US -- unseemly, given that only six months have passed since Snowden's hack -- is one I am not in favour of.
I don't see that the NSA needs reform. Sorry, I will buck the tide here. That is, I don't see that it needs reform through these methods which I find suspect.
I think there are ten other things that have to be decided first, conceptually. They are:
1. Is Obama destroying the state? Obviously, you wouldn't want to do a delicate and hard thing like fix the NSA if that's what Barry is really up to. The elements of the state that make up national security -- the Department of Defense (Pentagon), the military, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Attorney General's office, Homeland Security -- not to mention the NSA and CIA -- they all seem under terrible assault under Obama (see "Why is Our Military So Screwed Up?). I would submit in all clear seriousness not as a conspiracy theory that Obama is undermining all these bodies as institutions. Just by paying attention to everything from how Swartz's case undermined the justice system, not only Holder but liberal attorneys general; the cases of WikiLeaks, Snowden and Manning of course; Petraeus and all the rest; even things like failing to fill all the top posts at Homeland Security and now also making other controversial hires. Robert Gates new memoir seems to make something like this case.
I say it's not a conspiracy theory but a genuine investigation that has to be had. Obviously, there are all kinds of reasons why governments are undermined in our time -- the Internet, demographic booms of young people, the recession, global warming, bird flu -- whatever. I'm interested in examining closely what Obama is up to here.
I really think thoughtful journalists need to lay out a timeline of Obama's actions, starting from when he didn't do anything with the DoD and CIA and kept Bush's people at first -- as almost a feint and a dodge -- leading to the most methodical and destructive demolition of the armed forces I've seen since Stalin -- this is a post for another day.
So that's question number one. If we are not dealing with a sincere president but dealing with one who, for stealth socialist/ideological reasons, however sincere (and I don't think for a minute they are), then his "reform" efforts have to be looked at with a really weather eye.
2. Is a little commission of Obama's cronies, that is not good enough for Marcy Wheeler, nor me, even if for wildly different reasons, really the way you reform a giant, complex, wounded thing like the NSA, post-Snowden? I'm sorry, I don't think so. And yet, supposedly, that's our only process -- they rush out a really rather thin report, for all its length; Obama ponders it and rushes edicts? Why?
Reason: because when we reformed these agencies post-Clifford Case'srevelations and all the rest in the COINTELPRO years, which, as the FBI itself admits, was opposd by Congress and the American people; we had CONGRESS do this. You know, those people we elected? I'm much, more more in favour of having them, through the democratic political process, do this. I don't care that you think Congress people aren't technical and don't understand the issues, that's bullshit, of course they do, Google has bought quite a few of them. They just don't always understand them your way. I don't care that you think Congress is irrelevant, or, as the Tor developer put it, "should go die in a fire" or should be "routed around" or is "broken". What geeks mean is that it is democratic in ways they don't like. I'm not for indulging their anarchic political monopoly here, I'd like to keep Congress as the pluralistic, representative thing it is, whatever it's flaws. I really don't think we can solve this with an app where only get to "like".
3. Should reform ever be undertaken by force? There are smug wags saying about the NSA, "Some people are born with openness, some acquire openness, and some have openness thrust upon them" and so we should just be grown-ups and proceed anyway. I disagree. I don't like the way any of this smells. It is not right. It is wrong.
I don't think Snowden "started a national conversation" and "raised important issues" because it was not done legitimately, openly and democratically -- liberally. It was done BY FORCE. By a handful of anarchist thugs and activist journalists with a huge beef with the US that in some cases just comes down to their personal sad childhoods without good fathers, and in other cases is very well organized subversion, maybe with some hostile help from Russia and others.
What kind of conversation is it, where we don't get to object? Where we can't say, hey, who are you, you haven't answered 100 questions about yourself and your flight to Moscow, who do you think you are?
Stealth socialists always talk about how so-and-so with his violent or anarchistm movment, in the SDS or Occupy, "started a national conversation" -- I've heard this phrase uttered in movement meetings for years. What they mean is that they presented forceful facts on the ground through coercion. When you try to change society that way, it doesn't work. There is resistance. And you yourself are thuggish and illegitimate.
4. We the people are not in charge of this process -- only a few anarchists and "progressive" politicians are.Snowden think's his mission is accomplished because he wanted to see if the American people would reform if he started this. Now he thinks they have. Why? Merely because he;
o started an international mass hysteria making everyone hate America and fear its intelligence operations
o got saturation media coverage by liberal and libertarians that pretty much define the media;
o got a few lefty Congress people like Ron Wyden to speak out and had a few hearings where the NSA people were grilled;
o got Obama to have this little crony commission to discuss things;
o produced two contradictory judicial decisions under duress from law-farers of the extreme left and extreme right.
Um, what? That's not the American people. That's just Jameel Jaffe, Glenn Greenwald, Cass Sunstein, Ron Wyden, some truthers and some bloggers. It's not me, and it's not even you even if you disagree with me. This is not a public process. It is not democratic. It doesn't have ownership.
There have only been a few hearings on this subject, one of which produced -- under duress -- this supposed "lie" of James Clapper. I definitely support the way the NSA has responded to this -- that it is not an intentional misleading -- and I don't believe it is a lie.
My point is that this is not enough. We need more hearings. We need things even on why Tor is developed and allowed to be used by criminals to the damage of US security. LOTS more hearings. Congressional commissions. Other panels of distinction that aren't this crazy thing Obama put together.
In my view, the best thing Gen. Alexander, Michael Hayden and these sorts of people could do is not disappear from view, but fight. Make a think tank. Make a Committee for the Clear and Present Danger. And put forth their knowledgeable views.
5. We have not achieved agreement on what should be put under surveillance. To hear Jacob Appelbaum, Snowden helper and Tor developer, we should not have any spies. Glenn Greenwald might tolerate one small spy shop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that just makes sure incoming missiles don't land on American territory from North Korea. So we need to have a debate -- and that starts with a really full and frank awareness that Snowden's operation is not about civil liberties, but damaging relations with allies, as this list helpfully explains from Jim Geraghty.
6. We have not achieved agreement on what is metadata or whether collecting it violates privacy. Extreme civil libertarians -- civil rights activists aren't really what they should be called anymore -- think the government shouldn't be able to collect data, under law, and then task it when looking for suspects, under a set of rules. I think they should. I'm immune to scare tactics by Glenn Greenwald who says that if I think that, I should give him my email archive. Nonsense. The government doesn't read my email archive -- let alone dox it on Pastebin like Glenn's little script-kiddy friends would. There's no comparison. The MIT nerds trying to make people think that reading headers and making social graphs from them with their scare program is the same thing are also incorrect. The government doesn't make massive social graphs and mine them indiscriminately for no reason. They follow suspects. Our names are in the telephone book. Unfortunately, our addresses and phone numbers, whether we like it or not, are on Spokeo. And our metadata is at the NSA. Too bad. That''s life in the big city.
7. We need to decide what signals are. In the old days, when the NSA got started in 1975, a signal that they should track was just a thing coming from a Soviet submarine, an enemy radio communications, foreign broadcasting, stuff like that. SIGINT wasn't HUMINT because humans, by and large, didn't emit signals.
It wasn't your teenager's Snapchat on Android phones or your IMs on your iPhone the way it is now. We are all now producing signals; before only governments and various broadcasting entities and various combatants and such produced signals. Now each and every one of us is a little telegraph station, broadcasting our me-shows 24/7.
Lenin said that the first thing to do in any revolution is to overthrow the telegraph station. And that's what Snowden and Greenwald and their shadowy helpers have done -- overthrown a lot of us with fear and confusion and crazyness. We have to get a grip. We are all signalling. But the government is not picking it all up, and when it does, it's for good cause. Let's define this, please, and stop the madness.
8. Courts are currently divided on this for a variety of reasons -- the specifics of the cases; the left versus the right bringing the suit; the DC libertarian Republicans versus the Democratic Machine in NYC appointing the judges; the more physically devastating experience of 9/11 in New York versus Washington; lots of things. It is what it is. It will go to the Supreme Court. But it will not be decided there, any more than ObamaCare was really decided there. So again, this is too big to be only about any one branch of government, all must be involved.
9. Media must investigate Snowden and his helpers far more than they have. Loud-mouthed and guilt-tripping Glen Greenwald has made it seem to liberals that they can never ask questions about "the indoor cat" in Russia. Why not? He's demanding nothing less than a coercive, thuggish, undemocratic overthrow of our government's vital national security agencies. Why can't we be a little more curious about that, guys? Outside a few journalists like Fred Kaplan at Salon and Michael Kelley at Business Insider, and a few bloggers like frankly me and very eloquently Benjamin Wittes, there's nobody going against the tide. And of course also Craig Pirrong (could the bizarre hugely visible attack underway on him over his Wall Street consulting and his views by the New York Times be related to his principled and persistent critique of Snowden? When I see what has happened with Craig, I feel as if I get a glimpse of what could happen to me.)
What we need is more information about those calling for this undemocratic change precisely because it is undemocratic and was started by them for murky motives. We need more glasnost. We need time for more newspapers, more TV shows like 60 minutes (which got nothing but shit from the "progressives" despite their SATURATION pro-Snowden coverge DOMINATING every single broadcasting media for months on end -- disgraceful). We need more blogs, like this guy's:
So when I hear people arguing about The New York Times editorial stance on Edward Snowden, or read civic-minded freakouts about the National Security Agency violating the civil liberties of "ordinary Americans," I turn away in frustration.
Sure, we need to be concerned about the power we give to government. Duh. Glad we're finally having that conversation.
But the public media freakout over NSA data collection misses the primary point of those systems entirely: The NSA's email metadata campaign is designed to efficiently collect and then discard information. Not because the NSA is a civic-minded agency that wants to protect our theoretical privacy, but because your personal email isn't the target of the fucking machine. Your mundane metadata is the shit that NSA machine operators have to shovel in order to find covert organizations.
Simple and straightforward, isn't it? And we have to shut down metadata collection entirely on the strength of one or two progs in Congress, a few progs in the media, and a prog Obama crony commission? Instead? Really? Why? This is America!
10. We have to consult with allies. After all, not only the five-eyes program, but just the interconnected world at large requires that the US not proceed in isolation -- nor be spooked into action by scare headlines manufactured by dubious people.
Jacob Appelbaum's blockbuster talk at the aptly-named Chaos Computer Club's 30th annual Congress (#30c3) has stirred up a lot of interest in him which was missing before -- I guess it takes stepping on the Apple fanboyz tails to get them to focus.
Of course, when the CCC vandalizes products and accesses them in ways the manufacturer never intended -- that's called hacking, by the way -- it's only in the public interest for "privacy" and it's publicized only as a public safety bulletin, right guys? *Cough*.
But the Apple stuff tackled by the cosmically-named Appelbaum isn't really the news story here, although it guarantees that we'll see it through a few more news cycles for sure.
And the list of (now very outdated -- it was 2008, remember) used gadgets that the NSA supposedly has to spy on people -- which are now likely available on the international illegal arms black market for Bitcoins after Jake's talk -- aren't even the news although we can talk about that later. Like what hacking tools are in Jake's own tool box that are little different than these toys?
If Not from Snowden, then...From Whom?
The real news story of this talk as I already blogged here and here is that these are not confirmed Snowden documents. Nowhere in the Der Spiegel article are they claimed to be; Greenwald emphatically says on Twitter that they are not claimed to be and he didn't give them to Appelbaum. Later in his TL you can see him commenting with a knowier-than-thou remark to the effect that geez, everybody thinks hacking only gets done by Snowden, like he's the only one."
And maybe they are Snowden documents (an even closer reading of Greenwald indicates that he doesn't say they aren't Snowden docs; he just says he wasn't involved -- clever! and that they don't say they are Snowden docs) -- and maybe they aren't. Maybe Jake has direct access to Snowden and maybe Snowden didn't give everything to Greenwald and maybe Snowden still leaks or maybe Appelbaum got their own set of documents from other hackers, maybe even in their midst. We may never know, but it pays to ask.
Jake Has His Own Source in the NSA
A shocking point in Jake's talk that no one seems to have noticed is that he claims to have his own source within the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
Gosh, the rot goes deep if that's the case -- that there are actually people in the NSA who aren't already working for the GRU willing to talk to Jacob Appelbaum. Of course, this isn't THAT far-fetched to conceive -- the Navy has still-employed developers that still work on Tor and even presented a paper on Tor's vulnerabilities (sorry kids) at the same conference in Berlin that Appelbaum gave a paper at and no doubt they talked (I haven't confirmed that they actually went and gave the paper but I'm trying to; they were listed on the program.) Tor is still getting 60% of its funding from the Department of Defense, even though it has snotty little employees who say things to me on Twitter like "Congress should go dire in a fire" and casually offer pro-tips and biz dev ideas for how Silk Road --one ofTor's biggest customers! -- should have better secured itself better from the feds.
We don't know if these are fresh and current contacts Jake claims to have in the NSA -- how could they be if the manual is from 2008, guys? We also don't know if in fact Russian intelligence is using the same caper they used in the CCC's old KGB collaboration case of the past, where they deployed their own moles within US intelligence to double track the German hacker they had coopted to check his work -- and also pin everything on him, one might add. Snowden could work that way too. But we can only get so far with this part of the story today, so let's press on to the other news value of this talk:
Anarchists Call for Sabotage, But is Someone Fighting Back?
The WikiLeaks/Snowden saga dynamics and Jake's claims of protection for his brand of "journalism" are an important part of this story -- for my money, more important than this or that claim about this or that gadget that might do this or that thing -- remember, one of the claims is that the NSA can transmit bursts of energy to zap people ("What if I told you that the NSA had a specialized technology for beaming energy into you...") . We're all doomed -- PS that zap is what killed Hugo Chavez.
And those dynamics, as we saw, in a separate appearance at 30c3, involved a Wizard-of-Oz like big-screen appearance from The One (Julian Assange), with properly reverant introductions from Appelbaum and Sarah Harrison (who spent nearly five months in Moscow with Snowden, then fled to Germany, remember, and says she can't go home to the UK for fear of questioning unde the anti-terrorist act).
Assange's purpose seemed to be to convince everyone he's still really behind everything, but since the video link kept cutting in and out (sabotage?) it sort of undermined his thesis. No matter, because there were two news pegs:
1) Assange, and Appelbaum, call on all systems administrators of the world to sabotage their networks which are all part of the mass surveillance security state with which Big IT is in bed (remember these people are anarchists; they are not "transparency activists"; they are not "privacy activists," they are anarchists. It's funny how Appelbaum's recruitment of people out of intelligence agencies to turn against their employees of last year at 29c3 (which worked great -- he got Snowden!) -- is never mentioned, and this even further call not just to hack and leave -- but sabotage too -- will also never get notice.
Jake in his own talk openly calls on programmers not just to leave the CIA or NSA, but to actively hack it -- "get the ball and bring it out" he says, to wild applause. Like it's a game of football.
2) Some wag in the audience (and "the Internet" will surely tell us who soon enough) asked him a provocative question:
"How did you get Snowden out of the US?"
Business Insider -- one of the few papers to be critical in covering the Snowden story -- was quick to pick up that odd locution which may have been a CIA-planted provocation, or maybe just a clueless git who didn't realize that Snowden was smuggled from Hong Kong, not the US; he got from Hawaii to Hong Kong on his own steam, without apparently Sarah doing his trip planning.
Assange didn't miss a beat and pronounced this a loaded question, and indicated that there legal questions related to answering it. Michael Kelley of BI seemed to think this was an indication of Assange's awareness of his culpability -- that Grand Jury inquiry into WikiLeaks is still open and running -- that if he were seen to move Snowden around here and there that might be booked as more than "journalism," especially if from the US -- but I think the reference is to *Snowden's* own legal protection -- Assange always likes to style himself as a big protector of sources. Of course, that didn't work for Chelsea Manning, and lots of other people he never redacted out of the cables.
The Thin Line Between Hackers and Journalists
There are lots of technical issues to pick over in Jake's talk, but let's come to where I think the really big challenge is, and the long-term news value that won't go away: a defiant bid for moving the goal posts even further for journalistic impunity in anarchist attacks on the US government.
Appelbaum puts forward a number of theses that Greenwald tries to style -- in his approving tweets -- as great altruistic deeds that are a model for all those working with hacked materials.
Nonsense.
(BTW, it seemed that Appelbaum publicly broke with Greenwald when he accused him of sitting on stories from Ed -- stories that in fact later got published, but without Jake as the tech byline, and other tech specialists like Schneier as the byline. Oopsies. Jake also seemed to be in the WikiLeaks gang accusing Greenwald of selling out and commodifying Snowy's stash to millionaire ebay guy Pierre Omidyar. But nothing is ever what it seems with these people, and it may be that they patched things up, or Greenwald knows that Appelbaum is such a cunning reptile with such l33t skills that he is now praising him to keep on his good side. No matter.)
Real adults who care about the rule of law and liberal democratic states that aren't so open that they are enabling their own hacking to death by anarchists bent on their destruction have to begin asking some questions now about this so-called "journalism" which we are hearing so much about, especially from Jake, who is a hacker but tells you 10 times in this talk about his "investigative journalism" and his article that appeared (with two other people having to help write it) in Der Spiegel so as to invoke the journalistic "Pentagon Papers" cover.
Jacob Appelbaum, True American Patriot!
o Appelbaum says that he has "very large editorial process" redacted out the names of NSA spies and their home addresses and telephone numbers which were in this material [wild applause from the audience] (!). Gosh, thanks. (And don't think that wild applause is about his civic-mindedness it's that the NSA was pwned by this kid.)
o But he had a really, really hard time doing this because he didn't really agree that this was the right thing to do. "When we redact the names of people who engage in criminal activity in drone murder, we are not doing the right thing, but I think we should comply with law in order to continue to publish," he says. So look out! This is blackmail. Political blackmail. Thuggish coercion to try to impose an anarchist movement's will -- not for the good of society.
o Appelbaum also has the names of the alleged victims of the NSA's surveillance. But he won't let all those script kiddies who think they can get validated this way know if they're on the list (sorry to disappoint) just in case any of the targets are legitimate. This made him very uncomfortable (he assumes they are all innocent) but just in case there was that rare case of a terrorist the NSA legitimately pursues, "we didn't want to make that decision" to expose the fact that they were targets. Gee, thanks Jake.
To put these bursts of civic decency and generosity *cough* into perspective, I invite you to read this very interesting debate between Jeremy Duns, the author who has been critical of the Snowden case and confronted Appelbaum (@ioerror) on Twitter. He marvels -- as all decent people in the humanities of good will should marvel at the criminality of the machine-induced hacker mind should marvel -- at how casually Appelbaum rejects basic principles of civilization.
Here's one:
http://t.co/srQPSeHQqI A great piece on why, even though we need spies, we need better oversight of our spy agencies.
The utopian ideal that we should live in a world with "no spies" is presumably going to include him, and his friends, right? And his kit of surveillance tools which he uses to keep tabs on people he thinks are keeping him under surveillance, perhaps pre-emptively, right? And we're to unilaterally close down our spy shops even though Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Sudanese etc. intelligence aren't going to be doing this, let alone Al Qaeda.
So here's where I take a stand.
The Rights of Journalists Are Not Limitless
Many liberals and specifically liberal journalists are really scared of saying -- or even asking questions about! -- that anything that Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum --- and for that matter Bart Gellman and James Risen -- are doing is wrong ethically, let alone legally, because then that might lead to what they view as a chill on free expression and free media, and even legal repercussions.
They also may fear the terrible backlash from activist-journalists and their anarchist hacker helpers who try to bully and shame and heckle and harass them to death if they raise an eyebrow about any of the ethical or legal ramifications of their facilitation of hacking.
So this very thin membrane has developed were the rules work like this: -- as long as you don't physically do the hacking, you are safe in journalism land (and note that "hacking" is a word that hackers themselves like to very narrowly define and dumb down so that it is never evil). Also, as long as you don't actually tell the hacker what would be useful to hack, you are safe in journalism land. As long as you don't get involved in moving those files around -- that after all, do contain the names of agents and their home addresses and phone numbers, and their victims and their identifying data, too, as Appelbaum confirmed -- you're also safe in journalism land too. Well, in the UK, were laws against terrorism are stricter and libel laws are stricter, you can't move and possess those files with impunity or you will be arrested like David Miranda was at the airport, or you will be questioned and told to destroy files like Alan Rusbridger was at the Guardian.
But you can spirit out those files to the US, where there is a looser interpretation -- at least so far -- about possessing the work files of your leaker that you ostensibly only need to do your journalism -- as long as occasionally you have lunch with an intelligence official and pretend you're cooperative.
If you threaten a dead man's switch -- that if you are put in jail someone will spill all these beans -- as Greenwald has definitely done although he denies to furiously -- then you are still safe in journalism land, although you might be branded finally as an activist journalism.
Stretching the Definition of Journalism to the Breaking Point
But what if you thin out this membrane even further, stretching it to the breaking point, by saying that you've kept to the letter of the law -- barely, for now -- but you really don't believe this law is just. Why should you keep private the names of people from a system that does drone killings? Why, isn't there a higher law that suggests you should name all these representatives of the Stasi-like mass surveillance state? (Notice how these hackers always speak of the Stasi, the now-defunct East German police, and never the KGB, whose agent is still head of Russia. Wouldn't want to hurt any feelings now, would we...)
Now, this is where I think you are not only firmly in activism land and far from the borders of ethical journalism, and not in a place called "ethical hacking" because it's not ethical to harm the intelligence agency of a liberal democratic state. That's my position.
And that's why I think your investigation, and even arrest and interrogation would be in order. You have gone too far. You can't keep hiding behind the cloak of journalism. You can't keep invoking the Pentagon Papers decision forever. Crime is crime. Food Lion established that you cannot commit offenses -- lying on your employment application, trespassing, secretly videotaping without consent and so on -- for the supposed greater glory of your journalism. There are other cases.
The rights of journalists are really important to protect in a liberal democratic society under the rule of law. I'm a big believer and practitioner of the First Amendment and I think we have to go a long ways not to jail reporters. Glenn Greenwald, even with his talk of dead man switches and his aggressive adversarial stance to the US, does journalistic work protected by law.
But Jacob Appelbaum and others like him who show up at the CCC, which has openly hacked Apple products and has a history of KGB collaboration and an openly antagonistic stance of war against the NSA; who brag about their direct ties to NSA agents; who show manuals they got from who knows where of gadgets they claim (without proof) are used for some mass surveillance and not legitimate targeting; AND who say that they have names and information about agents and their supposed victims that they really think they should leak, but are kind enough not too for now -- I think they've gone too far.
I'm not afraid of the damage to press freedom to stake out that position because the ramification of letting it continue is that then we turn over press freedom to the whim of thugs -- and the aggressive heckling I am undergoing now by Appelbaum's hacker thug pals on Twitter now, threatening me with libel suits because I call out the criminality of Tor -- is proof enough of that harsh reality that deserves it's own Homage to Catalonia.
If we accept that hackers get to endlessly hack liberal states -- the Obama Administration is the most liberal state we've had in our history -- then we don't get to have liberal democratic states that we have chosen democratically, with checks and balance and separation of powers, with oversight by elected representatives and the courts. Instead, we have thuggish and brutal anarchists working by the Bolshevik "ends justify the means" to get their sectarian way.
Appelbaum thinks that by skating up against this very, very thin ice but not quite breaking through that he is a hero, and Glenn Greenwald and thousands of people wildly clapping in the CCC hall agree. I don't. I think it's beyond the boundary and it's time to call it.
What, you should depend on the good will of someone whose "Your Personal Army" Anonymous friends and hacker thugs on Twitter endlessly heckle bloggers like me and threaten us with libel suits for telling the truth about their lack of ethics and even criminality?
@paulcarr I'm actually not for people losing jobs over their speech. I'm for apologies and distinguishing right from wrong, however.
What an appalling interchange.
Why is it always so hard with these Silicon Valley assholes and their misogyny? You would think with all the incidents and all the scandals, they would at least learn to behave outwardly and not pretend this ok.
All of Silicon Valley was in an uproar over the CTO of Business Insider because he cracked an off-color joke about rape and made a few other misogynist remarks on Twitter. He was not only fired, Anil Dash demanded a meeting with him and then told him "you'll never get funding in this town again."
And here's a creep who tells us in his memoirs --- which are never identified as "satire" as Paul Carr claims -- that he had sex with a 15-year-old Russian girl (actually a mother of a 3-month old baby) even knowing she was under age, and even knowing that the legal age of consent in Russia was 16 (it was later made younger, age 14,but that changes nothing).
Even if this were satire, why is it ok? why do I get called a bunch of names and told I'm crazy, instead of Paul saying "I think it's satire, I agree it's pretty awful stuff but I like Mark's style" he insists I'm the problem.
But here's the thing. This incident -- and the one right after it where he forces another Russian girl pregnant with his baby to have an abortion -- tell us of the awful character of this man.
And that's why he doesn't have much credibility when he goes after Glenn Greenwald, who was once a porn lawyer and of course is helping a traitor destroy American security (and Europe's, too), or goes after Pierre Omidyar for funding the new media venture with Greenwald.
I'm all for criticizing Greenwald and Omidyar and I do. But Ames' claim that Omidyar is responsible for farmer suicides because he funded a credit scheme for the poor just isn't credible. He doesn't interview anyone or find documents or any facts at all proving this link. He just acclaims it as true as a smear. The thing is, Ames hates big corporations, rich people, and capitalism in general. He's a real little Leninist, as his love of the National Bolshevik Eduard Limonov is emblematic of that.
Since I knew Edik while Mark was still diapers, I've always found Limonov to be a manipulative fraud. Like Zhirinovsky, ultimately he works for the secret police, even if he doesn't literally, by creating magnets and inciting people and shuffling them off to jail as examples.
Nothing I've read of Ames --- and I'm a subscriber -- convinces me that he has done anything but bloviate in his gonzo journo way -- which he thinks if it's hardcore enough, passes as a substitute for investigation.
Carr says Ames lived with him -- I was wondering how on earth he ever brought him on. I don't know the back story, but it seems to have coloured his judgement.
Here's what I know.
I do not deserve to be called names, called a fucking idiot, declared insane, declared "obsessed" with Ames merely because I point out that he bragged about sex with a 15-year-old Russian girl, and that's uber creepy.
Paul Carr should acknowledge that -- whether true or fiction, it's bad. If true, it really is awful that he is part of a cover-up and a denial.
I don't think he should be fired, but I think Carr as the editor should say it was wrong, he gets why people say it's creepy, and he should apologize over it.
Of course, he's done a lot of apologizing masking as enthusiastic stiff-upper-lip boosterism for his failed mag, which now has been rescued by Sarah Lacy.
Sarah should care about this incident involving the rape of a young girl. It doesn't matter if she is drunk, or already a mother, or Russian and it "doesn't matter". It's legally and morally wrong. All of these tech journos went on and on about how wonderful Anonymous was in calling out the rape in Steubenville, heedless and even exculpatory of their terrible vigilantism that only got in the way of justice.
I've written at length about Barrett Brown, who was justly arrested -- and not for any "journalism" -- and is awaiting trial on charges of assisting the hack of Stratfor.
He was regularly quoted by the media as an expert on Anonymous, the loose affiliation of hackers that caused headaches for the US government and several corporate giants, and was frequently referred to as the group's spokesperson, though he says the connection was overblown.
In 2011, through the research site he set up called Project PM, he investigated thousands of emails that had been hacked by Anonymous from the computer system of a private security firm, HB Gary Federal. His work helped to reveal that the firm had proposed a dark arts effort to besmirch the reputations of WikiLeaks supporters and prominent liberal journalists and activists including the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald.
In 2012, Brown similarly pored over millions of emails hacked by Anonymous from the private intelligence company Stratfor. It was during his work on the Stratfor hack that Brown committed his most serious offence, according to US prosecutors – he posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents that had been released online.
But however some literalist may parse even the Guardian and claim that Brown is somehow a pristine step or two away from actual dirty hacking, it always pays to read the indictment and ignore most of what geeks rant on Twitter.
Barrett Brown is charged with "Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features" (18USC pars 1028 (a)(2), (b)(1)B), and (c)(3)(A) and Aid and Abet (18 USC par. 2) and also of course threatening an officer of the law and his family.
Brown's supporters spend a lot of time trying to prove he's a "journalist" and "not a hacker"; as that gambit has become rather threadbare when we see all the things he's done which I've outlined, they're now focusing on trying to prove that he "isn't a hacker," citing technical meanings of the word and their own idiosyncratic take on the law.
Of course they're wrong, because Barrett Brown is indeed a hacker.
First, a word on the special-snowflake status of the very word "hacker" -- for hackers.
Naturally, they want it to have only good connotations, and mean only positive things -- "making a computer work better" (or anything, for that matter; there's a site called "Lifehacker" that teaches you how to make Bunsen burners out of beer cans).
That "work better" can mean anything from speeding up performance or getting rid of annoyances to making sites inaccessible to "doing math in the browser" to get at other people's personal data lets us know how dishonest and corrupt hackers themselves are with this term.
They will never, ever accept that any unauthorized use of a computer -- doing to a computer what the owner doesn't want done to it and didn't intend to have done to it -- is "hacking".
That's because they want as capacious a meaning as possible of "good" for what they do that is in fact bad, to let themselves off the hook. In fact, this is what most of them mean by fighting for "Internet Freedom" -- innoculation against prosecution for harassment, piracy, illegal drug sales, even child pornography.
For them, Weev is not a hacker because technically, in the world of their own self-referential meaning, he didn't "touch a server," i.e. either steal or crack a password or log-on routine.
That he used cunning and brute force to compel a site to return to him lists of names and emails of customers by screwing around with serial numbers of devices he did not own doesn't count as "hacking" in their book.
When Aaron Swartz spoofed IDs and log-ons to gain unauthorized access to JSTOR's servers via MIT, that wasn't "hacking," in the eyes of these disingenuous extremists. Even when he directly jacked into MIT's LAN to access servers that kept tossing him off because he was using a script to grab numerous files rapidly, that "wasn't hacking" in their book because he in principle had access to JSTOR through his credentials at Harvard as a student (of all things, at the center for ethics) and could have logged in normally (but he didn't).
Once you find out the incredibly tendentious and dishonest lengths hackers will go to call things that are obviously hacking "not hacking" -- based on some highly technical definitions that in fact they aren't even consistent in applying in good faith -- you realize you cannot let them define it.
Like date rape or racism, there's a certain threshold where you have to allow the victim to define what the crime is -- and of course the law -- and not the perpetrators, who are always trying to get themselves off.
Meanwhile, the general public uses "hacking" in ways the little nerds find indiscriminate and "wrong," and use it to mean ANYTHING involving miscreants attacking their computer in any way.
Good! I've for the continued use of hacking to mean anything that is done to your computer that was not your intention. That means that someone who accesses your personal data online that is scattered around and uses it to social-engineer your password, or somebody who gets at your website's data by jamming on some vulnerability because you didn't "hash" or "salt" database tables is hacking, and is the problem, not you.
For example, when people's sites are attacked with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack so that it no longer functions and is "down," they say the site was "hacked." Precious geeks eager to keep the term available only for the most heinous of crimes (and not even always then) tell them with withering knowier-than-thou rectitude that they haven't been "hacked," because in fact, when some flaw in MYSQYL or whatever is accessed to enable numerous accesses of the site, overloading it, this isn't "a hack" because their password wasn't stolen by technical or human (social engineering) means or by a brute crack, but by a "lawful" procedure. On this basis, a lot of these assaults on computer systems are "written off" and even declared to be "civil disobedience"(which of course they are nothing like, due to their coerciveness and violation of other people's rights, as I explain here.)
I think a lot of people encountering hackers for the first time don't grasp several essential features about them that anyone in Second Life or any online community would have grasped years ago:
1. They lie -- they go to great lengths to cover up their tracks, deny their crimes, and distract from their crimes as part of the crime itself -- think "Eddie Haskell" or "Hannibal Lector".
2. They try to rewrite or overwrite (i.e. hack) reality to create a realm where their crimes -- piracy, DDoS assault, even child pornography) are not really crimes, but merely essential, reasonable acts that should be normalized.
This connivance and tricksterism usually escape people looking at them superficially and seeing that they are driven by some sort of "Robin Hood" or "Gandhi" motivation -- supposedly -- although if Robin Hood took from the rich, he didn't kill them or gag them, and if Gandhi staged a demonstration, he didn't disable or silence his persecutors either.
Anarchists are always and everywhere trying to get their crimes exonerated -- declared as not crimes at all -- so they can win. That means -- despite their ostensible belief system of "not having governments" -- taking power themselves. I'm not for letting them do that. I'm for the rule of law -- over them -- which of course, these outlaws don't concede.
When it comes to an intellectual gangster like Barrett Brown, however, the faux-indignant nerds really feel they have a case that he's "not-a-hacker," however because he didn't personally sit at a keyboard and log in to somebody else's site.
But this is nonsense for all the reasons I've outlined -- let's go over them again -- he's charged with "traffic in stolen authentication features" and "aiding and abettin" with good reason:
1. He enabled hackers by going into a private IRC chat rooms and pasting links for the hacker masses to access -- and they did access them. Enabling hackers is hacking too. If you drive a car for a bank robber, not only will the media call you "a bank robber" in the group of bank robbers robbing a bank, the law will call you one, too, because you "aided and abetted". Hackers especially want to break down this link so that they can create an entire free, untrammeled realm for adversarial journalists -- some of them with about two-and-a-half press credits like Jacob Appelbaum -- to escape charges of hacking, i.e. enabling unauthorized use of servers to get informall unlawfully. Again: enabling *is* hacking and the law treats it is such even if "hacking" isn't a technical term.
2. He took responsible for the Stratfor hack in a press interview. Hey, he didn't mind calling himself a "hacker" even if his dishonest little excusers want to get him off now.
3. He served as the spokesman for the hacking collective Anonymous whose trademark activity is hacking -- and even hacking that the little fastidious nerds have to concede is hacking. Not only did he serve as spokesman, he used this position to threaten HBGary with worse repercussions involved in the hacking of them by Anonymous. That is aiding and abetting.
4. He ordered others to hack very explicitly, staying on line and staying in touch with them as they carried out hacks of websites where he wanted to get revenge. To be sure, an obvious case of this -- the hacking of Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs and Robert McCain at The Other McCain -- is not put in the indictment, and Brown may never face charges for this unless Johnson attempts to take him to court. But it's on the record as part of his online reputation and shows he very deservedly is called a hacker -- you don't get to devise, instigate, supervise, and victory-dance over a hack and not be called a hacker yourself -- like you're some hands-free safe-cracker who gets your assistant to do all the work in a jewelry heist as you stand over them giving tips. The law wouldn't excuse you from robbery charges and it is no different when you're online.
5. He partakes of all the hacker culture. It's a pretty safe bet that if you use various kinds of software, and you go and chat on the IRC channels, you are part of hacker culture. A lot of people are in hacker culture and never actually hack anything. But they subscribe to hacker culture. A key feature of hacker culture is the overriding sense of righteousness and superiority telling other people that what Barrett Brown does is not hacking.
That's how you know someone is in hacker culture, and no longer subscribing to the rule of organic law.
It doesn't matter if Brown himself didn't use the credit cards. So what? He took responsible for the hack and helped others hack. Duh.
BTW, I see that Barrett Brown's mother (see below), who is also a participant of sorts in hacker culture although she may never have gone in an IRC channel much less clicked on a link to stolen credit cards -- because she tried to hide her son's laptops.
This isn't a huge crime, especially as they were easily found, but I don't know why the judge had to undermine the law herself and start babbling nonsense about "as a parent I can understand you" or "I know you meant the best," etc.
No, that's arrant bullshit. One of the reason's Barrett Brown is the way he is -- a heroin and suboxone addict, a threatener of violence to law-enforcers, an orchestrator of hacks of sites he doesn't like, and all around conspiracy nut and loon -- is because of his parents. They need to take some responsibility. The fact that he was living with his mom and getting high and living the hacker's life at his age at the time of arrest lets us know that she didn't set boundaries (dad is missing from the picture, as he is for so many of these hackers).
If God forbid my children were charged with a crime, it would never occur to me to start running and trying to hide their laptops. That's just wrong and you achieve nothing by it. Of course you cocoperate with authorities. That so many people think you shouldn't is the problem, not the police, doing their jobs.
Now, a chat log isn't an indictment (although hackers themselves are the very first ones to treat them as such). A lawful indictment as we have in Brown's case showing ample reason for his arrest on these charges also isn't a sentence.
So we'll see what happens in a court of law, and whether his lawyers -- and a jury inevitably influenced by media overwhelmingly positive of Brown and a hacker contingent bent on exonerating their own criminality -- do the right thing.
Otherwise all of us become less free, and at the mercy of hackers who believe they can take our rights away with impunity at any time.
Glenn Greenwald appears on the big screen via Skype. He says he can't come back to the US for fear of "persecution". A letter sent by a congressman to Eric Holder inquiring whether he would be arrested if he returned didn't get the answer he wanted. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Last night I went to the program "They're Watching Us: So What" at Fordham University Law School's Center for National Security -- which is an activist bunch working for the insecurity of an American government they loathe, and empowerment of bands of anarchists who advocate absolute encryption of themselves without accountability or accessibility of law enforcement.
If they think they are not those things, and not working for those things, they aren't paying attention.
There weren't any practicing lawyers on the speaker's platform however, and there was no legal analysis -- nor any real case actually made -- during the entire evening.
It was appalling.
It was also boring.
I've been following this topic so closely that when I hear these speakers already very familiar to me in all their permutations go through very simplistic arguments that they think they need to descend to for large audiences like these, it really gets dull and frustrating.
I'll be honest -- I even fell asleep almost during James Bamford's talk.
Not only were they simplistic, they were old. At least the kids like Trevor Trimm and Chris Soghoian have a little more life to them when they speak. Bamford is 67; Schneier is 50; Ariel Dorfperson, as we used to call him affectionately in the 1980s, is 71. These are old guys, reliving their battles of the 1960s and 1980s. I suspect the panel was convened in haste. It was co-sponsored by PEN Club, and I suspect PEN was put under pressure from members to take this on.
A very, very thin and superficial survey was put out by PEN opportunistically to fit with the headlines, commissioned by some firm that probably got a big fee, that canvassed the subjective feelings of PEN members. They "felt" they were under surveillance and they "thought" this chilled them, but not any evidence of anything but hysteria and "hate the Man" sort of 1960s antagonism was evident anywhere. It was embarassing.
The title of the panel was "They're Watching Us: So What?" But the "so what" part was left to the bored students in the audience, not the panelists who never engaged with this critique with anything remotely like intellectual honesty. I find it especially appalling when universities have evenings like this that are so horridly politicized and biased -- ending, of all things, with a black activist woman getting up and demanding that Obama be impeached because of Snowden's revelations about the NSA -- which about half the audience wildly applauded. I think even the lefty radical organizers were made a bit uncomfortable by this rabble-rousing.
Most of the people in the audience in fact were old like the speakers. They were hipsters, hippies, old professors, old Upper West Side socialists who have been around for ages. To be sure, there were actual young students, but they were only there with "continuous partial attention" as it is called. One man next to me was studying his history class notes, of all things, about the Soviet Army. The girl to the other side seemed to be taking notes on the talk but not really, checking her email or Facebook or whatever. Others were glued to their phones or i-Pads doing other things.
Suzanne Nossel, who is now director of PEN Club, chaired the meeting. And I was quite disappointed in her own lack of intellectual rigour on this subject. She is a former Obama Administration official who worked on international organizations and human rights, and was particularly active on the 16/18 resolution, for example, which was an effort by the Obama Administration to capitalize on the liberalization of the Arab Spring and work with former antagonist Egypt. They came up with a resolution about hatred and racism that would NOT constitiute a global blasphemy law or accept the discredited notion of "defamation of religion," which is what the Organization for Islamic Community wanted out of it. (BTW, it's funny to see Lee Stranahan tackling this with such vigour now as the root cause of Benghazi -- I appreciate his effort to get to the bottom of the story, but he's gotten it wrong, because it was delivered to him in a tendentious context -- it's actually failure to apply the language and formulations of 16/18 by the US Embassy in Cairo over the hate video that created the problems -- the resolution in fact is based on US Supreme Court language about "incitement of imminent violence" precisely so that general criticism of theocratic states is not something that is then declared as "defamation of religion".)
For personal reasons, Nossel, famous for writing a book about American "smart power" and even credited with coining the term, which is an outgrowth of the term "soft power", left Obamaland after the first Obama term. She then went to serve as Amnesty International's executive director at a time when the organization was suffering hugely from a devastating loss of contributions and frankly the fallout from Amnesty headquarters completely losing its way in the post 9/11 wilderness and taking up defense of jihad.
Nossel was supposed to get it back on track with donors and the public, and might have done so, had she not fallen victim to a very vicious and concerted claque of people who tried to smear her as somehow sanctioning drones and other dubious acts of the Obama Administration, even though she had nothing to do with those programs and was strictly in the human rights efforts of diplomacy. That may be no excuse for some, but it is an important distinction and she herself is a "progressive" that the hard left seems to take particularly delight in pushing and destroying. It didn't help that she is Jewish, and was accused unfairly of over-protectiveness of Israel which also wasn't the case (and saying so is a form of antisemitism, quite frankly) -- she was simply for not singling Israel out unfairly at the UN, where alone among nations it has its own agenda item at the Human Rights Council where countries like Russia or China or Iran or Sudan or Pakistan, which have killed many times more insurgents as well as innocents, are left to hold sway with impunity.
While NGOs surely appreciated her role at State in an Administration where the President does not have a single human rights bone in his body, Nossel was not popular at AI for having to cut staff and make other austerity measures needed at Amnesty, which is still far from fixed -- and she was hounded out of the organization, something I find absolutely disgraceful of Amnesty and its board. Former government officials may not make the best NGO leaders (and it works the other way, too, you know), but the board knew that going in, and shouldn't have hired her in the first place if the had problems with "I have a drone" Obama and her associations.
I don't know if weathering that sectarianism and viciousness at Amnesty -- entire hate pages were posted about poor Nossel by rabid idiots -- made her quick to jump and respond with the politically-correct program around Snowden just as soon as a few lefty and radical PEN members began to bark. I suspect that may have been how it happened, but I don't know. I think it's probably more likely that in her "progressiveness," she thinks Snowden is right. Working at the US Embassy in Geneva during the Human Rights Council sessions, maybe she even knew Snowden or heard of him, as he used to work there.
In any event, she's totally drunk the Greenwald Kool-aid, and it's a sad sight. Other members of PEN should complain about this one-sided approach by their fellow members, so that the director does not feel whipsawed by a few loudmouths. There are no findings. There are no cases, as I'm always saying; machine reading of meta data is not an intrusion in privacy and not the compilation of a dossier.
Glenn Greenwald was beamed in on a screen via Skype to wild applause and cheers -- Skype, which was said to be full of security holes and backdoors long before Microsoft, but he just had to knock Microsoft, taking a star turn to dis The Man in Big It. There he hung in the air, like the old 1984 Apple ad about Big Brother, and he himself realized that's exactly how he looked, and called himself Little Big Brother-- at least Cory Doctorow, another insufferable ass, has a little more humility and calls himself Little Brother.
Greenwald made the worst, most lame argument that the crypto kids always make -- I've heard it a hundred times on Twitter. He took up the argument that frankly probably reflected the thoughts of some of the students in the hall who didn't clap wildly for him or anybody ("battle of who could care less"). If they weren't doing anything wrong, if they were just a little guy, why should they care if the government saw their email out of a gadzillion numbers of files?
"Hey," he said in his usual snotty tone. "If you feel that way, give me all your passwords to all your accounts and I'll be sure to mine them for something that will compromise you and publish it."
Except...the governent doesn't do that.
If the government scans my email by some fluke -- perhaps I'm six hops away from a terrorist or a spy -- it doesn't delve into the content unless it has a warrant or it feels that the case is serious enough to fit under FISA rules of warrantless surveillance.
And even if it does scan my mail, it does not publish it.
It doesn't try to smear and embarass me as Glenn promises to do with anybody who thinks government surveillance isn't a big deal, and is willing to give him their password.
I really wish more people would stand up to him when he makes that utterly dishonest argument.
In fact, there isn't a single case brought to light by Greenwald from Snowden's material publicizing anybody's private communications. There isn't a case where the government publicized something they purloined from email to embarass or silence someone. No one can show that, at all. This is not COINTELPRO as I've said a hundred times. (Read my timeline for an interminable debate on this very subject with a rather dense individual named Andy Downs who has a major grievance with the FBI -- an agent shot dead his father, a pilot, when he was trying to rescue hostages who had forced his father to fly a small plane. From this case of 40 years ago, which isn't anything like a COINTELPRO case but is just his own case of excessive force/ failure to follow procedures -- a case he doesn't seem to have -- Downs tries to claim that there are concrete cases now of the NSA watching people and harming them. It's truly sad, but it's typical of the emotional blackmail we constantly face on this topic by people with agendas trying to tie them to the NSA.)
It's really terrible watching the feeble minds -- and the conniving manipulators like Greenwald -- going through these really flawed and lame arguments that smart professors at a place like Fordham should be decimating. Very worrisome. The "give me your password and I'll publish all your stuff if you don't think it matters" is especially manipulative yet stupid because the government doesn't publish what it sees -- or "sees" only in a mechanical sense.
Manipulators like Greenwald try to capture the predictably emotional reaction people would have at the thought of "the world" seeing their private communications, and tries to exploit that to bring them around to taking an antagonistic position about meta-data dredging. But meta-data dredging doesn't involve naming and shaming you in public; it doesn't even involve human eyes looking at your mail; chances are your mail isn't even involved if you aren't in fact related in some way to foreign spies or terrorists, even distantly.
Greenwald is intellectually dishonest and in fact committing malpractice as a journalist if not a lawyer when he makes this hugely contrived argument. More people have to say what I've been saying to him: OK, Glenn, bring it. I'll give you my passwords, but here's the thing. You have to do exactly what the government does, then. As you've reported that it does! You have to NOT PUBLISH IT. After all, we don't know the CONTENT of Merkel's phone, do we? And you may store it and mine it -- but only with key words or numbers drawn from terrorists and other criminal suspects.
What the government does NOT do -- you haven't proven that it has -- is mine our stuff, pick out things to harass and humiliate us,and then publish them.
That's what Jeremy Hammond does, and that's why he has 10 years in prison.
I really worry that we are dealing with mass hysteria here, where even very smart people who have done decent work like Suzanne Nossel are captured by this contrived bullshit. It's terribly wrong.
The Crypto Gramps at Fordham. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Ariel Dorfman, an old lefty from the past who survived Pinochet, gave a moving and stark depiction of life in Chile when people had REAL concerns about government surveillance insead of the yuppie ones that Americans have now. He showed scenes of prisons with wires used to spy on people and described all the chilling effect it had on the soul and the literal relationships of life. To his credit, although he is an old socialist antagonist of capitalist US government for ages, Dorfman didn't make fatuous comparisons between a real society of oppression like Pinochet's Chile, at least for communists and socialists, and the United States today. He's too decent for that.
Arial Dorfman speaks of secret police wires installed in prisons to spy on people. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Less so everybody around him on the panel, and in the audience. That's the problem. His job was to provide the "Global South" contingent to this lily-white panel of North Americans, and he did the job admirably.
You can watch the video linked above, but meanwhile, let me note how awful Schneier is. I'm a long-time critic, and he, like so many of these cryptos, was indeed worse in real life than on the Internet.
A tiny handful -- not "large numbers" as falsely reported by some lefty media -- gathered to protest Hammond's sentence near the courthouse. Photo by pameladrew212.
The difference between the Guardian and the Times -- the Times at least understands there are crimes involved here. As the Time aptly reports about the court's response to Hammond's antics as an Anonymous leader:
But Federal District Judge Loretta A. Preska was unmoved, telling Mr. Hammond “there’s nothing high-minded or public-spirited about causing mayhem.”
“These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, John Adams or even Daniel Ellsberg,” she said, referring to the former analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to several news organizations. Mr. Ellsberg had written a letter to the court praising Mr. Hammond’s hacking campaign.
The script kiddies keep harping on the idea that Judge Preska should have recused herself. Nonsense. My response to a typical idiot in the comments:
haveagoodlife
USA
How did this judge not recuse herself, when her husband's email was one of the emails Hammond was accused of releasing? Take note activists, the system takes no heed and has no need of you.
Because Stratfor has more than 860,000 clients. He worked with one of them and all that happened was his already-public email was exposed. There was no evidence of any intent to retaliate on his or her part, and the petition to recuse failed as it rightly should, because such a tendentious petition, with such a tangential relationship to the case, rightly fails.
Otherwise, you would get things like Google saying no one could judge their case if they ever used Google but complained about it. With this large a victim base, it's inevitable that there could be some relationship to the judge or prosecutors.
In real life, only something like the judge discovering that his in-law was the victim of a crime (a case I actually saw) would lead to a judge having to recuse himself.
Recusing is a concept that means that a judge is removed if there is reason to believe he or she will be biased. Having a relative whose email was in a list of 860,000 is hardly a reason.
One of the provocations introduced into this trial and bruited directly by @ioerror on Twitter (Jacob Appelbaum) and simultaneously promoted by RT.com, Voice of Russia and other Kremlin outlets, was that somehow, the FBI "put Hammond up" to hacking foreign web sites.
This is evidently arrant bullshit.
If the defense had this information, they would have brought it up during the trial proceedings, not had Jeremy himself put it into his own final speech and blurt it out before being told to cease by the judge.
There is no evidence that Sabu, at the behest of the FBI, did this. The sites indicated, in Turkey, Brazil, Iran or Poland, don't have any relationship to anything, and the FBI wouldn't be pursuing hacks abroad. Say, that's the NSA's job! Except, we don't have proof that either engaged in this supposed hack abroad. Sounds like it is just the usual tactic to confuse and distract, like tactics that Hammond has used before.
The Times couldn't resist putting in some of their "progressive" bullshit, however:
On Friday, Mr. Hammond described Stratfor as a “deserving target,” an organization engaged in “intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.” Both he and his lawyers framed his actions as noble efforts to bring greater transparency to a rapidly growing and largely unaccountable private intelligence industry.
There is nothing "unaccountable" about Stratfor. If someone wants to provide a research and risk analysis business and sell that information, they get to do that in a free society with a free market. Attempting to stop it is authoritarian an unfree. If you believe they have somehow done something unlawful, by all means, bring the case. Where is it? There isn't a case.
If a private company wants to watch private and public persons, it gets to do this -- you know, just like Anonymous feels it has the right not only to watch and comment on private and public persons, but even stalk and hack them. Stratfor has committed no crimes. Again, it's a distraction technique.
The judge put it in focus:
But at the end of the hearing, Judge Preska said that Mr. Hammond had caused “widespread harm” beyond his intended targets. Among other things, she said, his 2011 attack on the computer system of the Arizona Department of Public Safety had disrupted the state’s sex offender website and Arizona’s Amber Alert System, which broadcasts messages about abducted children.
Meanwhile, while the purpose of this 10-year-sentence should help deter hackers, Anonymous hasn't been deterred, at least not yet. They have been hacking up a storm, mainly against governmentn and corporate sites that don't fit their harsh, extremist totalitarian worldview where only they and their tribe can decide who gets freedom to manage their organizations and servers as they see fit, and who doesn't.
No media seems to cover cases like this critically -- the tech press is craven to hackers for some reason, although you'd think sites like CNET selling gadgets would be a little more aware of the relationship between hackers causing billions of dollars of damage and the harming of the interests of the main people buying their ads and buying the gadgets on their site. Declan never draws these lines and his managers never think to, but he just goes on spouting what amounts to the technocommunist world view -- when it's not the technolibertarian world view.
But once refreshing thing to see is the way Ars Technica's seasoned geeks has handled this. The overwhelming number of comments to their article are negative about him and rightly explain how he is a criminal, not a "hacktivist" or "whistleblower" or any of that nonsense.
Here's one interesting comment:
Andrew NortonArs Praetorian
I should also add here, I knew him and dealt with him before he went into prison the first time. I then had about a year of dealing with him while he was out on parole, before he went underground to do this.
I know for a fact he didn't abide by his parole, because he did the same to some stuff I was working on (including an internal pirate party election, so his friend would win). When I said I'd go to his parole officer, he started threatening me (do I really want to be SWATed... and in the rural south, they just shoot, questions require too much brainpower) and saying over and over that 'snitches get stitches', and 'he doesn't give a fuck about the law'. Oh, and later he tried to rationalise it by saying the guy he wanted to win authorised it. Yeah....
When I heard about his arrest, I can't say I was surprised. He was always arrogant, and thought his farts didn't stink. He also had an UNBELIEVABLE faith in 'solidarity'. As in livng in a predominantly hispanic area gave him solidarity with latinos who were bullied by the cops, because 'living there'. Not because he had to deal with the prejudices every day (being a white male) but because proximity was enough.
I believe Ars Editor Nate Anderson will be covering some of this in his next book.
Hmm. I wonder how critical that book will be...But this is a start...
"Hurray for Anarchy!" cried Hammond as he exited the court room. Juvenile nonsense. Not hurray, but 10 years.
Well, with time served already, with good behaviour, as hard as that seems to predict, this destructive force will be unleashed in no time on society.
Tomorrow, recidivist hacker Jeremy Hammond will be sentenced, and I expect that he will get the 10 years that his counsel has apparently conceded. Hammond, one of whose nicknames is not surprisingly Anarchaos, deserves to be arrested and is right where he needs to be -- in jail.
There's an enormous amount of nonsense and deliberate lies written about this case in the tech media and by biased fellow anarchists and hackers. Disregard the noise. Here's what this case is about: not letting radical thugs take away othe people's rights to freedom of association and freedom of speech.
Because that's exactly what Hammond did in hacking Stratfor -- he didn't like its views or its activities, although it is a lawful organization engaged in legitimate business and has a right to exist and thrive.
Activists covering this story claim the nonsense that Hammond and his co-conspirators claim, that somehow they've uncovered wrongdoing in the private emails of Stratfor. Again, there is no evidence whatsoever of any of this.
I remember how well Stratfor handled this hack -- they reassured their customers immediately on Facebook and didn't hide what was happening as some companies do. They let their customers fret and complain. THAT is how we know that quite a few of them were robbed -- Jeremy's little script kiddie friends whom he sicced on the private emails and credit card information of the hapless customers of Stratfor reported that their credit cards were used by the hackers to buy online games and all sorts of crap. All that propaganda about how they were "taking from the rich and giving to the poor" was so much smoke and mirrors. The reality is that they are common thugs, not special, not "indigo children" or pioneers of a new age or "whistleblowers" or anythin of the sort. They are criminals who take away the right of freedom of association of others.
It's helpful to read not the breathless and outraged tech press and alternative press on these cases, but the indictment which says:
...the defendant hacked the website of an organization he disagreed with politically and obtained information uch as the credit card numbers, home addresses and other identifying information of its members and customers.Right. He believes you can use force and destroy the property of others and expose them to harm just because you don't like their ideas.
And lest you also buy the arrant nonsense that this is all an FBI sting-operation, and entirely cooked up by the FBI (which is what Al Jazeera is reporting -- which is among the reasons why I refused to go on their show about Hammond, although they invited me to speak), read his goddamn chat logs all covered in the indictment. He indicts himself, and doesn't require any "sting". Example:
2 (Bates #078241-42.)
A bit later, in the same chat, referring to one specific AZDPS employee, Hammond proposed, “if we drop AZ stuff on wednesday, we might want to pull some other prank, like change the AZDPS facebook group, his online dating profile or something silly.” 23 For example, in a chat on December 19, 2011, Hammond said to his co-conspirators: [Hammond] I was thinking we order some servesr with them stolen CCs [Hammond] lots of servers with big hard drives [Hammond] and make four or five mirror .onions with them . . . . . .
<el che> getting servers with CCs [Hammond] it may be till the end of the mnth before the cc owner recognizes the bad charges
The prosecutors pretty much identify the problem:
Hammond’s own statements, while he was plotting and committing these attacks, demonstrate that his goals at the time were essentially to cause “mass mayhem” by destroying websites of entities he disliked, particularly related to law enforcement, and revealing stolen private information such as physical addresses, personal emails, and credit card data belonging to swaths of people remotely associated with those entities. Against this evidence, Hammond’s claim now that his various law enforcement targets “were significant to [him] as a way of protesting police brutality, overly aggressive and militaristic anti-immigration laws and practices, and the governments’ use of drones, tear gas and other weapons abroad” (Def. Mem. at 21) is, at best, beside the point.
Indeed.
Hammond is, after all, a repeat offender. Here's what the judge said to him when he was first charged for hacking:
I believe you when you say that you have learned. I think, also, that after you’re done serving your sentence, I would be willing to believe you if you told me that you understood precisely how damaging the democratic discourse of what you did is. I don’t know that you fully understand that now. I concede that you fully understand what you did was wrong.
But of course that's not the issue. He fully knows what he is doing, and does it deliberately; that's what anarchy is; that's why you jail anarchists who commit these crimes against all of us.
As the indictment explains:
Rather than heed the Court’s message, or even apparently reflect much on its leniency, Hammond then proceeded to undertake the same conduct the Court had cautioned against – but on a much greater scale – launching an online campaign of cyber attacks characterized by “unguided malice [and] a desire to wreak havoc.” Hammond’s history and characteristics fully support a sentence of 120 months. 33
Despite these harsh, cold facts of the indictment that explain the "unguided malace and desire to reak havoc" which has been Jeremy Hammond's life as a hacker, you find arrant propagandistic nonsense written in Truth-Out and Occupy (where else) claiming he's some kind of dissident:
He called on hackers in a speech at the 2004 DefCon convention in Las Vegas to use their skills to disrupt that year’s Republican National Convention. He was, by the time of his 2012 arrest, one of the shadowy stars of the hacktivist underground, dominated by groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks in which anonymity, stringent security and frequent changes of aliases alone ensured success and survival. Manning’s courage prompted Hammond to his own act of cyber civil disobedience, although he knew his chances of being caught were high.
Hammond became well known to the government for a variety of acts of civil disobedience over the last decade. These ranged from painting anti-war graffiti on Chicago walls to protesting at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York to hacking into the right-wing website Protest Warrior, for which he was sentenced to two years in the Federal Correctional Institute at Greenville, Ill.
“I saw what Chelsea Manning did,” Hammond said when we spoke last Wednesday, seated at a metal table. “Through her hacking she became a contender, a world changer. She took tremendous risks to show the ugly truth about war. I asked myself, if she could make that risk shouldn’t I make that risk? Wasn’t it wrong to sit comfortably by, working on the websites of Food Not Bombs, while I had the skills to do something similar? I too could make a difference. It was her courage that prompted me to act.”
The author, Chris Hedges, goes on to tell us about Hammond's political grandfathers and grandmothers:
Hammond—who has black-inked tattoos on each forearm, one the open-source movement’s symbol known as the “glider” and the other the shi hexagram from the I Ching—is steeped in radical thought. As a teenager, he swiftly migrated politically from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the militancy of the Black Bloc anarchists. He was an avid reader in high school of material put out by CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that publishes anarchist literature and manifestos. He has molded himself after old radicals such as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and black revolutionaries such as George Jackson, Elaine Brown and Assata Shakur, as well as members of the Weather Underground. -
Hey, paging Eric Raymond, creator of that "glider" symbol for the open source cult (author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"). You said on the page about this that you opposed people using this symbol and hacking "into other people's computers". You said that was wrong and that you'd go after such people. Well? What, they get to pick and choose political targets anyway?
Let's understand what we're dealing with here: technocommunism, even if it hides under modernistic lovely-sounding little "leaderless collectives" (they're still collectives, that means they are still coercive inevitably, and that the leaders are merely "the cadres who decide everything"):
He said he is fighting as “an anarchist communist” against “centralized state authority” and “exploitative corporations.” His goal is to build “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” It is essential, he said, that all of us work to cut our personal ties with capitalism and engage in “mass organizing of protests, strikes and boycotts.” Hacking and leaking, he said, are part of this resistance—“effective tools to reveal ugly truths of the system.”
We need a tool to reveal the ugliness of you guys.
Twitter, Al Jazeera, RT.com are filled up 24/7 in defense of these ugly and destructive assholes. Why does no one oppose this?
Why don't computer professionals oppose it, but instead secretly root for this thug?
Note how hacking and Occupy go together -- and what was radicalizing and pushing Occupy to the hard and violent left:
Hammond spent months within the Occupy movement in Chicago. He embraced its “leaderless, non-hierarchical structures such as general assemblies and consensus, and occupying public spaces.” But he was highly critical of what he said were the “vague politics” in Occupy that allowed it to include followers of the libertarian Ron Paul, some in the tea party, as well as “reformist liberals and Democrats.” Hammond said he was not interested in any movement that “only wanted a ‘nicer’ form of capitalism and favored legal reforms, not revolution.” He remains rooted in the ethos of the Black Bloc.
I'm going to write Eric Raymond about this as he doesn't seem to be on Twitter.
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