I started jotting notes to make a timeline matching Snowden leaks with world events and their advantage to Russia -- but I just didn't have the time to do the research. This job should be done. There are now various lists and timelines of Snowden's leaked documents out there you can use. I thought I'd post these notes now to get people thinking along these lines.
John Schindler debated the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer (who else!) on this issue of "damage" tonight. The Snowdenistas claim there is no damage. Schindler, formerly of the NSA, quite rightly explains that the NSA is not going to stand up and paint a fresh target on his back and give the enemy MORE information about how badly hurt and vulnerable we are. Duh.
I've been making that point for years about Cablegate. How many millions of times have I heard that there isn't "proof" that there was any harm to individuals done by Cablegate. I would make the point -- no, my colleagues hurt by this will not be standing up and painting a target on their backs so you can hit them AGAIN. I noticed how one man, an Azeri democracy activist, got absolutely SAVAGED by the Snowdenistas, accusing him of the WORST things merely becuase he was mentioned in cables, harassed, and claimed asylum here on that basis. Shame on them! These cases are now CLASSFIED. I know more -- and no, I'm not going to tell you -- because, as I just said, why paint targets on people and their families?!
Alexa O'Brien, the Manning scribe and fangirl, is especially horrible on this point. Eli Lake debated her once on this. But really, the point has to be burned in: these unethical people who have stolen files are hardly the ones to define damage for us.
Jameel obviously anticipated that answer re: damage and was ready for the next round. He says, "Oh, but even in classified settings, briefed persons don't learn about damage."
Schindler says that's patently false, but doesn't bite on the provocation -- which is what this is. It's merely another lawyerly way of posing the same question.
What is Schindler supposed to say? "I didn't tell you that secret thing you wanted directly the first time, now you're going to try another way and sure, now I'll tell you, since you asked a different way."
Because obviously, to reveal that you were given information on damages to national security in a classified briefing in Congress is to reveal the classified information -- derp.
What, he thinks it's a routine matter to come out of a classified briefing in Congress and say, "Oh, here's what we were in fact told in this secret briefing."
Dopes.
Why is this so hard? Why do they keep getting away with this nonsensical, indefensible bullshit?!
Of course there's damage, as any idiot can see looking at relations with Europe. Germany, for starters. And um, no, it's not about the countries being "mad," it's about tendentious exposure of practices in a deliberately provocative light with intent to harm. And that working.
In fact, all we know is that Jacob Appelbaum says he had Merkel's phone in a list in a document from Snowden -- we don't know if in fact that proves the NSA did bug her phone -- and we don't know what she said. Sure, that got her mad, but she should compare and contrast her situation to that of Victoria Nuland of the State Department, bugged by the Russians, the content of whose conversation got leaked by Russian intelligence on YouTube. Life is about choices, America is better than the Russian. Want to have a third way? Ok, but appreciate which is better, America or Russia.
Who can dispute that German-US relations are worse and tattered maybe beyond repair? And yet it was absolutely right to spy on them and not put them in five eyes -- some of them are too chummy with Putin. They can't have that third way they seek that involves in fact greater chumminess with the Kremlin than us.
Yet this is the kind of idiot article you see on this -- the same people undermining copyright and demanding "liberation" and absence of the rule of law for 10 years -- surprise, surprise -- are the ones embracing Snowden and buying his bullshit.
Let's see now. Gates revealed that the French were doing bad things, grabbing commercial data as bad as the Chinese.
So he revealed that in a bid to deter it. Good!
The Chinese do bad things, hacking into our business, media, government to steal secrets and economic data.
We then hack back to try to deter them and get a jump on them. Obviously, we have no need of their economic data except in so far as we need to see what they're stealing for us.
So Snowden reveals our techniques for doing that. Great! That's called being a traitor.
Nope, I'm not seeing any moral equivalence here.
I'm seeing that Ed is a felon.
And Masnick is profoundly ethically challenged, as per usual.
What I think has to be done in these debates to get to the third round with Jameel is immediately challenge him on the Jamshid Muhtorov case. He thinks this is a terrible case; it's actually a good case. So go right to the mat with him on that because he will not look good justifying turning the other way when a man is caught chatting jihad with jihadists and gets them money and equipment -- especially when the one thing the Snowdenistas keep doing (Saul Alinsky style) is to keep pretending that despite all the snooping, the NSA/FBI/Boston police couldn't predict and stop the Tsarnaevs.
BTW, the Tsarnaev case has the same root problem as the Snowden case: the Russians.
Second, we need to shift this debate around. The Snowdenistas keep asking for proof of damage to the country. But we need to say we need proof of damage to Americans. They don't have any. A year into it, and they have nothing -- oh, except this threat from Greenwald to name victims' names.
In any event, I'm not in the classified loop, and I actually don't have a competent way of telling what "damage" is to a country unilaterally or bilaterally, i.e. which missiles were described where or which methods of tapping Al Qaeda got described, etc. but I can use common sense.
Where have our relations but deliberately harmed so that we are undermined in our foreign policy? That's common sense.
More intricately, where has Putin succeeded in gaining propaganda and political advantage while the world was preoccupied with Snowden leaks?
So, here are a few samples of what such a chart would look like, below.
Leak: Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
Response: "We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity," said a [Yahoo] spokeswoman. "This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December."
[NSA] "A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights. Those procedures govern the acquisition, use, and retention of information about US persons."
Damage: By picking an emotional and sensitive issue -- a high percentage of the use cases for Yahoo webcam is related to sex -- this revelation could ensure maximum shock and anger value; also by invoking 1.8 million affected, it could add to the narrative of "massive surveillance". Yahoo, struggling with email and group woes but on an acquisition spree, was angered but business did not seem to suffer.
Date: March 29, 2014
A 'Puppet in Putin's Hands,' Snowden Paved Way to Ukraine Crisis by Pawel Zalewski. Snowden is used by Putin in order to scupper the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, particularly on the sale of shale gas that cuts into Russia's market of gas deliveries to Europe.
Leak: The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.
Response: In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on “specific alleged intelligence activities.” Speaking generally, she said that “new or emerging threats” are “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats.”
Authors: Bart Gellman and Ashkan Soltani
Russian Events: President Putin's speech in the Kremlin about the forcible annexation of the Crimea.
Damage: Distraction from the damage Putin is doing in grabbing Crimea
Well, sadly, you get the idea. There's loads more...
Runa Sandvik in Moscow at the Sakharov Center. Photo (c) by Sakharov Center.
So Runa Sandvik, who just left the staff of Tor Project (although she remains as a volunteer), who is now at the ill-named Center for Democracy and Technology, went to Moscow at the end of April.
In brief, I think it's more than likely she used the trip's ostensible purpose - to speak to human rights groups and journalists to help them with circumvention/encryption -- in fact to liaise with Snowden and coordinate various anarcho-crypto "movement" things with him -- the spinning of Glenn Greenwald's accidental leak about her own meeting with Snowden in December 2012 in Honolulu before he stole documents -- which was to come out May 21; and possibly -- big picture -- work on the take-over/compromise/control of Tor nordes in Russia -- and also discrediting of Russian Internet crypto figures not under her group's control (e.g. Durov).
All in all, mission accomplished, I think.
Let's go over it:
This trip wasn't a secret, and she even mentioned it on her Twitter timeline, but I was busy and didn't notice it until I read the Sakharov Center's news in Moscow. She was there for only two or three days, April 29-May 1, that holiday that Workers of the World love, May Day. Hide in plain sight, you know. That's always best!
Her purpose was to give the poor Russian bloggers and human rights workers now facing Internet blockage by Roskomnadzor lessons in how to use Tor and other circumvention and encryption tools like TrueCrypt. Of course, Russia is a land of Internet nerds with nothing to do but code at their no-show state jobs and surf the Internet, so there's little she can actually teach them. No matter.
It's funny that a) the Russian government let her in if her purpose was to help people defeat their censorship and b) the US authorities didn't question her at the border, given everything. She brags about this on Twitter, that no authorities have ever questioned her about her trip to meet Snowden on December 11, 2012 *after* he contacted Glenn Greenwald for the first time on December 1, 2012 (a date that has changed, but that's the one GG is now giving in his book. She just "happened" to have a vacation right at the same time!
Number of times I have been in contact with law enforcement regarding Snowden and the Honolulu CryptoParty: 0.
The Crypto Party was likely the device for Snowden's helpers at Tor -- more important than his journalists, who are just scribes, really -- to make the real-life connections they required on the ground to exchange keys and create trust and manage verifications online later.
It illustrates what a duplicitous creature she is, because we were all asking if Tor had contact with Snowden before/during the period he stole documents, and they were all denying it - but then, here it is, leaked by Greenwald himself, possibly accidently. Or maybe he wanted to burn Tor. And this story in Wired about all this has chisel marks all over it because it's been instrumented to tell the story in the most distractive, deflective possibly way, to create an alibi.
But BEFORE this story came out on May 21, there was Runa's trip to Moscow April 28-30. Why? To coordinate with Snowden because it was known the leak was coming, or perhaps the Cinncinnatus info was already seen in early review copies some journalists got of Greenwald's book. (I don't believe he intended to leak this -- John Young of Cryptome picked up the name "Cincinnatus" used with a Lavabit email address, checked the public keys, and saw this related to Snowden.)
So the trip to Moscow was likely really designed to liaise with Snowden -- and the Russian authorities didn't have a problem with that because they are all about helping the Snowdenistas, you know? So even a cover story about "defeating" their censorship works for them.
So Sandvik first sprinkles herself with the holy water of the Sakharov Center, a group of impeccable Soviet-era dissidents and their apprentices who were colleagues of Andrei Sakharov, the patron saint of the dissident movement. To be sure, lots of events are held there, and groups pay a modest fee to help support the Center, because space where people can have free discussions is increasingly hard to find.
I would love to know the visa-support organization that invited Runa and gave her her visa. No foreigner comes to Moscow without:
o an organization or agency or business authorized to provide visa support to foreigners writing a letter of invitation with its official registered seal and a number
o approval at the Foreign Ministry of that letter and that status and that foreigner
o another layer of review at the Russian Embassy abroad, and check of all the documents submitted by the foreigner.
I don't know if the Sakharov organization invited her -- I'd be sad if it did, because it's one more example of how the hackers are invading the human rights movement to try to a) radicalize it and/or b) discredit it and hijack it.
In any event, in addition to possible coordination of how the leakage of the Cincinnatus story would work, other things are possible, like:
o coordination of Snowden's continued running of Tor nodes. Who said he stopped running them? Did he turn off those ones at NSA or get others to collude with him? And even if those servers were removed from his access (we hope) he could start new ones at any time -- and the Russian government will be only too happy!
o in the interview below, you see in fact that Sandvik has trouble denying that Snowden works for Tor -- in fact, she's basically admitting he does. That has several hypotheses that may go with it:
o Snowden is working with Russian intelligence knowingly to take over Tor essentially hollowing it out from the Navy's one-time control -- and please don't tell me bullshit about how the system can't be compromised. More on that below. We already had several dozen such compromised nodes
o At one time none other than Craig Pirrong, who was wildly harassing me for months on end over my simple criticism of his implausible theses, claimed strangely that Jacob Appelbaum went to Moscow to set up those compromised servers. I continue to maintain that that a) doesn't make sense and b) has no evidence because we can't place Appelbaum there. Plus, you don't have to go there to run these servers, given all the virtualization and remote technology out there, and it seemed to obvious.
o Now that we've placed Sandvik in Moscow it's possible in fact that's what they're up to -- busy "spoiling" The Onion Router (Tor) which is what the letters stand for, although it's also a word that means "throne" or "honored seating place in the yurt" in the Eurasian languages.
o And that means this could be a collaborative effort by Wired State types both in the US government and the Russian government who think they are above it all, beyond states, The Smart People Surrounded By Idiots, and all the rest. Or some configuration thereof. People who are too clever by half, who think they are overthrowing others who may have overthrown them.
What's the net effect of this trip? Well, several hypotheses:
o to destroy faith in Tor as compromised by the US and/or Russian intelligence agencies to diminish the ability of people to use it to get around censorship
o on the contrary, to add luster to its reputation and dissipate doubters so that it can then lure lots of people in, and then they can be compromised.
Much of what Runa and her little friends do is premised on the arrogant notion that Tor is unbeatable. So they really don't think (perhaps) that the Russians or Americans can snoop on them due to "math".
They should read my blog, and not only the Swedish paper but Paul Syverson's paper in which he explains that within 3 months, watching the exits, they pretty much out everybody. The Russian government can see who uses Tor -- that was how Harvard was able to find a hacker who made a fake terrorist threat (and if it were up to Runa, he would have followed her good-housekeeping hints and hidden his tracks better.)
So they could simply close everyone down on that basis. Or they can compromise nodes or monitor servers through various intrusive gadgets or watch the exits. There aren't that many nodes now -- it's back down to 4,000, with the number in Russia small and highly visible. So...either or both of the Russians and the Americans and anybody else interested allow Runa to wander the world of crypto parties because she is like dye or radioactive, and then lights up what she touches. Maybe all her stickers she hands out have RFIDs -- like that one on her passport yuck yuck.
Oh, except, she tore the RFID off her Norwegian passport, funny, that. Runa also has a green card or work authorization for the US which she bragged about renewing -- I was surprised she did. No quality control at DHS I guess, especially given that Crypto Party! But she says she's been in London. Why did she leave Tor? Did she figure the axe would fall there soon? She is no longer a paid employee but just one of those evangelizing volunteers. She is also among the "technical advisory committee" at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which funds Snowden and has Snowden on its board.
FFP was started by John Perry Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation people. Appelbaum is also on that TAC, and still listed very robustly at Tor. Sandvik's interviews for the Russian media are important to look at, and I have them below, but first, study her timeline as its instructive as to how they are playing this whole ideological caper: First, before the trip, she drops a tweet to establish her street cred as a fighter for a free Russian internet:
VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, is said to be “under the complete control” of close allies of Putin: <ahref="http://t.co/cDwnlXDIeX">http://t.co/cDwnlXDIeX
But here's the thing. Runa's real attitude is one of moral equivalence -- if the US is "just like" Russia and Snowden, trapped in Putin's cage, asks the tyrant on state-controlled TV a prefabricated question, why that's "just like" a congressman in a democracy asking something of an appointed official under oversight -- sure.
Side-by-side comparison of Ron Wyden's question to James Clapper and Edward Snowden's question to Vladimir Putin: https://t.co/cxCFqCUdL1
That's how they play it -- make seeming criticisms of Kremlin policy, but then double back and make moral equivalence between the West and Russia, which then essentially undoes the criticism -- and then spin it around to make it really be about Western corporations. I've seen this technique used over and over again -- by Rebecca MacKinnon, by the Snowdenistas, by Soldatov and Sergei Makarov, another human rights activist (who wasted his personal meeting with Obama fretting about Snowden) and by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks in her "leak about Syria" which was really about the West.
It gets tiresome.
Then, Runa name-checks the leading Internet and censorship guru of Russia -- who, well, still lives in Russia:
Now, on the day she travels to Moscow, this insight -- which is something about her comms there obviously, and this crypto kid is telling us this in public..why? To throw people off the scent, or something.
Turns out @twitter's two-factor authentication backup code is only good for one use. Good thing I have a backup-backup solution in place.
While in Moscow, she has nothing to say that is critical of Putin, of course, but she has a cryptic message, in case you were waiting for her at the Cafe Pushkin!
Made it to the Red Square only to find that the area was closed off in preparation for a parade. And no luck finding Café Pushkin.
Oh, come now. Cafe Pushkin is right down on Tverskaya! Any smartphone would find it or just ask anybody. Oh, and now that I've noticed its salmon-coloured walls again and ornate paintings, I'm suddenly wondering if that's the location of the private dining room at the "hotel" where Snowden has met his various visitors. Surely Runa wouldn't miss a rendevous with Snowie!
Then for final good measure, she makes it appear if she's all about Internet freedom in Russia again:
So let's take a look at Slon. And the interview of her especially at Colt.ru, one of the best independent sites in Russia. Russian journalists are simply more used to Russian official obfuscation, lies and spin, so they ask Runa questions that she and her comrades never get asked (and should!) by the American media, which is bedazzled by Snowden:
Runa claims there are "a few thousand" Tor users in Russia but slon.ru says "100,000" because they've gone to check the open source statistics. Runa explained that a virus appeared that artificially increased the number of users (?!) Gosh, how does that work! And can we believe there are even a few thousand?
Tor gets grants based on proposals, and doesn't take instructions from governments, says Sandvik, when the Russian journalists at Colt.ru task her repeatedly.
"However, Tor never takes money in order to install a function which would reflect poorly on its reputation or on the security of the system." "
"But you can hardly agree with the fact that you can preserve your independence by taking money from the government," Colt persists:
Sandvik replies that by just publicizing sources, that should take care of any problem. That is, if you make cooperating with the government not a secret, then the problem goes away, see? Try telling that to Russians. She did!
Here she is, continuing to justify Tor (in reverse translation):
In fact, Tor was created by Naval Intelligence of American in order to protect the American government. But if you are the only user of Tor, then in fact you are easy to spot, because the Tor user is you. So they came to the opinion that in protecting everyone everywhere, you acquire an advantage for yourself, you create a system in which it is ipmossible to understand who this or that user is in America or Sweden. I think that is one of the reasons for the funding of Tor. Moroever, in the last few years, the purpse [of the American authorities] was to help users of the Internet in Iran.
Slon asks whether in fact Tor is really invincible and whether the NSA can break it, as she had claimed in her presentation. They asked in in fact if this was Snowden's leak. Runa said yes, Snowden had leaked many documents on this issue of Tor, that the NSA had tried and failed to break Tor and there was an article on this in the Guardian.
"Would you hire Snowden for the Tor team?" asks the impish slon.ru.
"Tor accepts any anonymous contributions, so anyone could take part in it," she says coyly.
Slon.ru presses further.
"But would you hire him for the job?"
"Hire for the job...I can't comment on that. Tor has funding for people who regularly help the project and work for it. I cannot imagine that Tor Project would discriminate against anyone," she dodges again. She doesn't want to be later caught in a lie, but...
That is, if you're a fugitive felon who has committed the worst heist against US national security in history, sure, send your resume, we're an equal-opportunity employer.
Slon continues to press -- does Tor help the government on crimes, i.e. drug deals, prosecution.
"How do you work with the government in those cases? Can it ask you to provide information about users?"
Runa answers with her usual mantra, "there is no one person, no one facility that could review the system and censor what users can do or not do. And in the same way there is no way for Tor to track users."
She uses the usual distractive rhetoric to deflect legitimate concern about Tor's enabling of criminality:
"On the one hand, for now this system makes it difficult to search for criminals, but on the other hand, it helps people, activists and human rights defenders. There are people in Tor who have spent a lot of time to help victims of domestic violence and have advised them, for example, how to visit sites so their abusers can't see this.
Of course, there are pluses and minuses in this but if you imagine, that someone in Tor tracks the visits of users of this or that site, then the question is raised: who should that person be? Can some project decide, whether users throughout the whole world can or cannot do online? If Tor had that ability, then perhaps one could ask the question, should he be paid from the American or another budget for fulfilling the censor's functions. But Tor has no functions of oversight which would enable it to remain free. For example, I have no special knowledge about the work of Tor, which is inaccessible to others. There is nothing secret in it, all of its work is absolutely open, and in order to know how it works, you just have to spend some time.
Slon presses even further -- they are so much smarter than American journalists!
"You said in your lecture that there is no system to check people who work at Tor. But can you imagine that the intelligence service, for example, or someone else wants to get involved in the project. Would they also not know anything?"
Runa claims there is no way to learn anything but IP addresses that the system is using and that there is "no way to know who is using Tor to visit certain sites." She ought to read the paper of Paul Syverson et. al. -- which no Torean has never committed on. Runa explains that Tor gets requests from the US, British, Norwegian, Polish, German governments asking them to help find criminals. They "explain how Tor works" and say they can't help. She claims she doesn't know if the Russian government has made a request.
Well, look then, US, British, Norwegian, Polish and German governments: if there is a perfect encryption tool that can evade all of your intelligence and law-enforcement, that is a weapon. It's a weapon that should not be in these unscrupulous hands.
Yeah, I get how hard it is to get it out of their hands now, you know, you can always copy on the Internet. But do try to think about the ramifications, here.
She admits Heartbleed was a big blow, and they had trouble getting all the people running nodes to upgrade. She said they lost 1000 out of 5000 servers because they couldn't reach people and ensure they had the patch.
Slon even asks if the staff of Tor could be bribed, and she says "no".
So what else was accomplished in this interview? What else was her purpose?
o To discredit Pavel Durov. She mentions Telegram, his mobile encryption program, and that it was made by "a guy who fled from Russia". Here are her damning comments:
"The creators of Telegram don't say much publicly how their app works, but they offer to pay you if you find a problem in their security system. I tried to ask them about their privacy policy. They assure us that they do not provide law enforcement agencies with information, but sometimes, after all it is impossible to refuse? Only if you are prepared to go to prison for the sake of your users.
Then I asked them under what jurisdiction they work, and they did not reply. Then I looked at how you can get in connect with them -- through a press service. And for that, you must load an app which automatically loads your contact list, every number and every name in the telephone. Although for users, that could be a convenience: when the system sees that your friends are using it, it offers you to become a user. The app in fact is becoming more popular."
So the purpose of that is in part just commercial sabotage -- she doesn't want anyone competing with Tor or Whispersystems, which is the mobile encryption program of her and Jake's friend Moxie Marlingspike. She even filed a FOIA on Telegram (!) -- and when the hackers asked her if she did that with all such software (because even they thought it was odd) she indicated she had plans to.
She doesn't want somehow making encryption software who isn't under the Snowdenistas' control or the control of the Russian government, I guess. Which is it? This is all a complicated chess game. There are feints and dodges and ruses. I leave it to you to figure out.
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.
Nobody wants to have the debate about the Totalitarian Bikes, ever since Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal said they were "totalitarian" and got mocked (see also below) -- but of course, they are.
"Do not ask me to enter the minds of the totalitarians running the government of this city," she snapped to the horror and fascination of the left -- but she was right about some things because we never got to vote on them.
This is very hard to admit, given that they are ubiquitous now, "accepted," and lots of yuppies and hipsters and tourists love them and ride them around. But I've been documenting a half dozen of them around my apartment buildings ever since they came out, and I'm here to deliver a bitter critique of them. (I will find and put up some of my pictures soon.)
First of all, why do I call them "totalitarian"?
Because we didn't get to decide democratically about them.
They were imposed on us. I don't recall a single assembly member or council member or borough president saying, hey, do you like this bikes idea? Ever. In our lives. Just didn't happen. It was sprung on us. No discussion. No prelude -- just arriving one morning out of the blue, literally.
We didn't get a say on their cost, implementation, maintainance, or impact, and that's a huge problem. Why?
Because there are issues with them which don't seem to be getting discussed.
Oh, sure, there are adulatory pieces in the yuppie and hipster press, on blogs, on local websites, and they -- oh, sell coffee or boutique food truck offerings...or something.
There's some articles, for example this one, that lets us know WHAT A LOSS it has suffered from poor management, weather (Hurricane Sandy!), balancing issues, etc. We learn that this yuppie hipster health heaven cost us $9 million. That is runs at a loss.
DeBlasio has ruled out any city investment in this black hole -- funny, that, coming from this health/pet/socialist. But there it is -- he thinks business should shoulder the burden, even though it does nothing for Citibank or any other businesses that have incurred losses -- I suppose, except the bike supply business.
1. There is an implication that the system is run by Citibank, or Citibank has kicked in all the money for them, or the city pays for them, or that their revenues go to pay their upkeep and even provides funds for other city programs -- but there's the thing: I found that in fact there is a German company involved, evidently as supplier, and I have this on absolute authority. Naturally, to stay in business they need to make a profit from this venture. There's nothing wrong with that, but was there a bid? Was there a democratic discussion about this business model? I can't say more but there it is -- it must be investigated so we understand "who benefits". I don't see any guarantee that the city of New York benefits -- it may be that the Germany company wins, we take a loss, and Citibank gets free advertising.
UPDATE: This source (very informed and well-placed) said "German company" but could they mean Canadian? The supplier is Bixi, and it's going bankrupt -- a story that is removed from the web site but I found it in Google cache. What's up? And Bixi is not the only company involved; Alta in Portland, OR is another company involved in running it (see below). Just how many companies are behind the scenes?
2. The bike costs are high -- only the affluent or occasional user can really justify that, but given that we have such a high percentage of affluent in New York City, they get high and visible use -- except where they don't. No effort was made to "load balance" or make the system flexible enough to remove or move. There are pockets where they sit unused, however, in poorer areas. I see rows and rows of them unused on a daily basis.
3. Every night, these bikes are washed. Yes, a crew of night workers comes around and hoses them all down with soap and water, mops them with big mops, and moves on to the next one. The people who do this get minimum wage or slightly above. I've talked to them. There appear to be only a few crews for the entire city as they can quickly go through them. But they do cost money.
4. The bikes sat out in the open in the snow and sleet all winter, and now are sitting out in the mud and rain in the early spring. Yes, they sat there, in the snow. So they rust, they need repairs/replacements -- and yes, trucks come for them in the middle of the night (caught above) and replace them -- more expense. Yes, I've caught them bringing new bikes out of those vans into the existing racks -- and I've also seen broken bikes sitting in the racks, sometimes with home-made signs on them.
5. The bikes take up parking spaces -- oh, do they take up parking spaces! I see 5 or 10 at a pop on each of these stands, and as I said, I have about six of them just in my immediate walking area. So yes, this means 30-60 parking spaces simply removed from an area that cannot afford them -- the parking lots even in the buildings where you live and pay rent are ridiculously expensive; the day parking lots are prohibitively costly; the monthly open-air parking lots are still expensive -- people struggle to park on the street, and struggle with the insanity of alternate-side-of-the-street parking in New York City. Yuppies and Hipsters might take the bus or ride the bus; it's the working stiff that has to put in a day as a claims adjuster in an insurance company who needs a car, or in fact an MTA worker who has to drive to the bus yard. These people need cars; they now have less place to park them for free, without risking tickets, and that's awful.
6. The bikers are dangerous to themselves and others -- the whole bike lane thing is something that never really grafted on to the narrow and busy streets of NYC, which already had to endure the capture of part of them as bus lanes some years ago. With the parking now put a length away from the curb and cars coming and going and car doors opening, you can't always see bikes whizzing by, and they can't always see cars and doors. We don't see any statistics on injuries or accidents -- it's an invisible topic for the media because they are yuppie boosters of the bikes as an environmental and health concept.
7. We also don't get any reporting on what real help they are to air pollution. People who have cars tend to really need them to drive to Queens -- as I just said -- and bikes won't really do, it's too long a trek. A lot of people don't even have cars in NYC, they take public transport (like me). So you're denting the population not with cars (who would want to tend to keep and drive their personal cars), you're denting the population taking public transport, particularly buses for shorter distances or cross town. So let's say a bus holds 60 people -- 10 people opt to take the bike -- that same bus still goes out, polluting the air, only holding 10 less people now and therefore functioning at less efficiency. There aren't *so* many bike-riders as to remove the necessity for buses or make for less busses -- there probably never will be because...
8. The cost of the bikes are just too high, but worse they have a PUNISHMENT built in to them to gouge more money out of the user which is a significant brake on its use and reveals it just to be ultimately a cash shake-down machine. Here's the problem: you can't just pay $9.99 and go for an hour, and then pay another fee hourly or daily at a reduced but steady rate when you're ready to bring it back.
If you don't get the bike back to another Citibike station within half an hour, you will be wacked by the next hourly fee if you are late by a minute. This is hugely annoying because it means you can't just go for a spin -- say, pick up the bike and ride around on -- hey! -- the bike path along the East River or Hudson River and then just pay an hourly rate that debits when you return.
In fact, the Citibike system is designed as a disincentive to ride the bike for long periods up and down the huge traffic-free and stoplight free paths along the rivers -- and is especially a disincentive to stop and have a picnic or read a book. Because you are punished with additional fees if you *don't get the bike to the next station*. The bike is socially-engineered to FORCE you to ride it to work, or to some specific destination within 30 minutes, and leave it at the next drop-off. This is the single main reason people won't use it -- and BTW, it doesn't work this way in other cities where bikes are either free or at an hourly rate billed for usage or debited if you never bring it back -- but not slamming you after such a short time.
9. The bike is capturing and storing all your travel data, which is of course captured with your name and credit card information. I've asked question of the managers when they came on a Reddit AMA and asked elsewhere about "what they do" with this data -- I never got an answer. No doubt they claim they disaggregate it which is what all data-scrapers do.
But you can see why this system was forced into place, undemocratically, with huge loss of parking an additional upkeep expenses and annoyances: somebody thought it was just a great system to gather lots of Big Data to play with -- they are now awash in it and having the time of their lives -- it's a geek's dream. They know how many people use the bikes, when, where, for how long, etc. There's no evidence that they're using this practically to retire some of the bike stations never used or reduce them in size to stop taking up parking. They're just grabbing data -- and PS that data is about how healthy you are, too.
UPDATE: I suspected that there is software malfeasance back of all this -- the frenzy about start-up bike sharing is the coder's socialist people-engineering dream come true as I know from seeing various systems demo'd at TechCrunch -- and I was right. This article says the software made by 8D Technologies isn't up to snuff and there were problems. "Both Citi Bike and Divvy, in Chicago, are withholding payments to Bixi because the software is not up to snuff." Hmm, open source cultism or lazy start-up culture? I hate to ask for the programming budget on this monster, I bet it's a killer.
But Ben Fried, editor-in-chief of Streetsblog, which is at Ground Zero for the biking lobby and socialist undemocratic urbanism, claims the problem is that Bixi ditched 8D Technologies, a Montreal-based company, and then Bixi itself went bankrupt, making it appear as if the problem was Bixi's ditching, not the software.
I'm totally skeptical. I am wondering why there are so many companies and suppliers and sub-contractors on this caper -- and all outside our city! That makes it hard to monitor and manage with a customer-intensive operation like this -- and truly, why are Canadian companies are brought in when New York City needs business like this. What's up? Was there a bid? Did they come in cheapest or best? or it is computer cronyism? How were the companies selected?
10. The system, of course, has more than a little nanny-state feel, for which our former Mayor Bloomberg, who was supposed to be a libertarian, became infamous in his later years (he was also going to limit the size of Big Gulp drinks out of the 7/11, which was insane, because people would just then buy two anyway). The idea is that we would all just grab a bike, ride to work or to the store or to friends, and get in shape by using it at least 30 minutes a day. But while some segment of the population may do that, others find it too expensive, too risky, too annoyingly restrictive, and too much of a loss compared to other things we need in this city -- like parking.
11. If you asked the public (me, for example), what they'd like to do with X million dollars for the public, I'd prefer after-school programs for kids that had playground equipment, gardens for planting, various games, educational activities, etc. So many of these programs were closed, or moved to outrageous costs a few years ago. Having people, especially young people, kept engaged in those crucial hours of 3-6 before their parents get home for work, and when they are likely to make trouble or get into drugs or alcohol -- that's more important than having the hipsters get healthy when they can afford to buy their own bikes and go on the existing bike paths for exercise. Riding in stop-and-start traffic in exhaust fumes doesn't strike me as a health addition.
These bikes don't serve me -- and I like bikes, I have gone biking on vacations the last few years, and we all happen to have used or new bikes in our family to ride on the bike path, as do most of our friends or family. Used or refurbished bikes -- if you're not going in some marathon race -- aren't that expensive, truly.
And then there's the issue of helmets. When you have your own bike and you're on the path, you tend to wear your helmet. Nothing in the Citibikes encourages helmets. They aren't for rent. There are no ads for even purchase of them nearby. Nothing. How many are getting injured without them?
So at this point, I'd like reporting, I'd like numbers, I'd like real democratic and transparent debate -- and I'd like change. At the very least, tear up the bike racks that don't get used, and don't put them every few blocks --- that's nuts. The same yuppies who want the exercise in the first place can walk a block or three, my God.
My bottom line on this: I don't want reporting from biased papers like Streetblog and boosters of undemocratic socialism. I'd like mainstream, critical press to run these numbers and look at the performance of these companies.
The hard truth lurked behind the gates of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where employees of Citi Bike were tasked with testing the program last spring after nearly a year of delays.
As workers soon realized, the system was not completely ready, plagued by fussy software and managed by an Oregon company that strained to tame its sprawling New York City arm.
Privately, officials in the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg were urged to consider another delay. But with less than a year left in office, they were clear in their response: Perfect or not, Citi Bike’s time had come.
Yet another indication that this utopian project was software-driven, by coders and their choices, and not consumer-driven with actual field data and feedback. The signs were everywhere -- and they are now bearing out.
But what I mean by investigative journalism would be something much more thorough that studied the background for how companies were chosen, whether there were bids, how performance was judged, where the funds are coming from, where the revenue is going, etc. Charts, graphs, with real revenue from credit-card payments, annual memberships, maintenance cost (they do say $10 million in damages from Sandy was incurred!), etc.
To be sure, we have gotten this gem from the hipster NYT reporters:
The Alta team, based in Portland, Ore., has at times been frustratingly disengaged, supporters of the program say. Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a rider advocacy group that helped bring bike sharing to New York City, said the company appeared “content just to sort of let the New York system founder.”
The reason why the system doesn't work is obvious now: it's designed and run from Portlandia.
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've noted how the Muhtorov case was heating up to become nationally prominent and would get a lot more attention now that anti-NSA agitators can use it as an emblem of their struggle.
In the motion filed in federal court in Denver, Jamshid Muhtorov also requested that prosecutors disclose more about how the surveillance law was used in his case. Muhtorov denies the terror charges he faces.
"We've learned over the last few months that the NSA has implemented the law in the broadest possible way, and that the rules that supposedly protect the privacy of innocent people are weak and riddled with exceptions," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said in a statement Wednesday. The ACLU called the filing the first of its kind.
I began writing about Jamshid Muhtorov, an Uzbek refugee who was active in movements in his homeland, soon after he was arrested and summed up everything we knew here, and wrote about it again when the NSA angle began to be used. Along the way, I've had to refute persistent smears of me by the notorious Joshua Foust claiming falsely that I deliberately tried to get this man kept in jail.
First, I have to point out, regardless of the premises the ACLU will bring to this case about "unconstitutional" actions, the program of meta-data collection with secret FISA courts which the NSA ran is and was legal. Whatever Snowden's claims, whatever this or that panel or commission claims, they are lawful and remain so and were at the time of Muhtorov's arrest. Jameel did not yet prove this program unconstitutional; indeed, his lawsuit in Manhattan Court was found without merit by Judge William Pauley and the constitutionality of the NSA's program was upheld.
This will go all the way to the Supreme Court, as another suit on the same issue led to a different decision from Judge Leon.
Maybe through the enormous NGO and media pressure that only the ACLU and EFF and company can muster for cases like this serving their interests, they will manage to get this case thrown out of court and get Muhtorov's release.
But that doesn't change the legitimacy of the program as it functioned -- that when the NSA picked up a domestic source contacting a foreign source known to be associated with a terrorist group, the Islamic Jihad Union, they had grounds under the law to examine and probe Muhtorov's phone calls and lawfully arrested him when they suspected he was providing material aid to jihadists.
The case isn't proven yet, and the "unconstitutionality" issue may wind up getting it thrown out, or, closer examination of the conversations and his behaviour may turn out not to merit sentencing and he will be declared not guilty. The trial hasn't begun yet.
I'll be particularly interested to see the conversation -- both its original and translation -- where Muhtorov says "I'll see you in heaven" to his daughter -- prompting an interpretation that he was prepared to die in jihad. As I've said in the past, I wonder if the word was "na nebe" or "na nebesakh" or "s neba" in Russian or the Uzbek equivalent, which would mean "I will see you in the sky" or "I will see you from the sky" -- something every parent tells their child as they are flying away somewhere - that they will look down and see them from the sky in their airplane as they pass over.
Obviously there is a lot more that the case hinges on than that one statement, and there seem grounds to make the charges of material aid because he had been in telephone contact with this jihadist group, and was bringing cash and phones and a GPS on his trip. Muhtorov had followed a checkered course of first becoming active on his sister's case, where he believed her charge of complicity in murder of taxi cab drivers by local mafias was unjust; then moving on to become involved in various local human rights groups and distributing Human Rights Watch reports critical of the Uzbek government's human rights violations; then joining a more radical group seeking to overthrow the government; culminating in his flight to neighbouring Kyrgystan, and ultimately his re-settlement in the US -- where he became more religious and extremist in his views and is now charged with helping a terrorist group in Turkey related to another terrorist group on the list of US foreign terrorist organizations that has attacked our troops in Afghanistan and other targets in Europe and Uzbekistan.
I think the ability of the NSA to discover people who are maintaining ties with known terrorist groups abroad by collecting metadata at home is a good one, and one that should be maintained, and the bulk collection metadata program should not be discontinued. The world is very interconnected now by mobile phones and the Internet and this simply has to be watched and the suspects followed when there is probable cause.
It might be that political forces like the ACLU and EFF and various Congress people manage to get this overturned and declared "unconstitutional" and I accept that. We'll see. But that doesn't mean that I will think it is right or advisable.
I also reject Edward Snowden's claim -- completely tendentious and manipulative -- that there is "no" success with this program and no cases where terrorism has been stopped.
First, we don't know that because not everything about the successful "hits" with this collection programs has either been leaked by Snowden or declassified or shown up in a court case. Some cases are still in the investigation and pre-trial stage -- Muhtorov's case, those of other Uzbek exiles both related to him and not related, and I suspect other cases we haven't heard about (because they are from secret FISA courts). And it might be tomorrow or next month that the very hit that the NSA makes with this program will be one that saves a city from something like 9/11 -- then everyone will be glad that the NSA dredged millions of phone header data to get such a "hit."
Even if Muhtorov's case is thrown out, that doesn't mean this program isn't doing the right thing and isn't making arrests on valid grounds.
Secondly, Snowden, like all hackers, follows a literalist, culture-jamming approach to these issues to try to put over his version of reality -- it's all part of the social hack in which he and his comrades are always engaging in to win. We can't know, for example, that this program helps deter terrorism -- it might well do that, and for that reason alone is worth retaining. After all, the purpose of law-enforcement -- one that tendentious geeks eager to exonerate themselves from computer crimes never accept -- isn't merely to literally prosecute on solid evidence, but also to deter crime by making a credible threat of prosecution. That is a legitimate purpose of law enforcement, too.
Foust's purloining of blogs is notorious, as we saw constantly in the Snowden case -- he constantly swipes people's insights and findings and claims them as his own, being careful not to look like he is "plagiarizing" with actual copying of text.
In re-telling the story whose elements I discovered, Foust distorts them -- and introduces new distortions:
o He implies Muhtorov fled the Andijan massacre. He didn't. He was no where near it. He was not a victim in these tragic events. His own public record does not claim that as his story; he was elsewhere then. His "well-founded fear of persecution" stemmed from his activism -- itself somewhat dubious -- not from having been at the site of the massacre or related to it.
o He implies that Muhtorov was on his way back to Uzbekistan (via Turkey), where his sister was in jail on what he believed were false charges. I can't believe Muhtorov, whatever his shortcomings might be, would be stupid or reckless enough to attempt to return to Uzbekistan. Everyone knows that any politically active person who returns winds up getting followed, arrested and then -- if they are lucky -- expelled. Having gained political asylum and refugee status in the US, he would stand out with authorities and of course they would track him. It just doesn't make sense that he would have returned to Uzbekistan.
o Foust cites David Walther, who lived in Uzbekistan when Muhtorov was there and who posted at Registan, as evidence that the authorities in Jizzakh, the town where Muhtorov lived, were more likely to charge activists with Islamism than financial improprieties. But Uzbek authorities everywhere use any and all methods to trump up cases against their critics -- sometimes common crimes like assault or robbery; sometimes embezzlement or financial mismanagement; sometimes extremism associated with Islamism. There isn't enough evidence to suggest that authorities in this or that town "always" did it one way and even if there is a pattern, isn't by itself proof of anything. The reality is, Vassila Inoyatova did at first help Muhtorov and involve him in her human rights group, but then came to accuse him of financial mismanagement -- a fact that she mentioned in a conversation with the US Embassy staff -- which led to it winding up in a WikiLeaks cable -- one I first wrote about here.
Yet another example of a source of an activist not redacted by the lovely Assange and team, eh? And Foust joins in further bashing of Inoyatova here by implying -- through selective quotation of Muhtorov -- that the real problem with her wasn't her legitimate scrutiny of finances in the branch led by Muhtorov, but Muhtorov's criticism of her as not being willing to be activist enough against the government. Sigh. This is Uzbekistan. Inoyatova has had a very tough time keeping her group open, fending off constant inspections, raids, fake libel lawsuits, etc. and naturally she tried to keep the books straight to remove this as an avenue of harassment by authorities.
o Foust softens the description of the farmer's group that Muhtorov joined. He said it advocated for "regime change" -- a vague term which can mean many things. What they advocated for was overthrowing Karimov and that was on the record.
o Foust invokes Muhtorov's distributing of the Human Rights Watch reports as somehow exonerating. If anything, this is one of the elements of his story I find opportunistic. I believe he was doing this to try both to gain cover from HRW's reputation and also to set up his asylum story. Why? Because this is an extremely common phenomenon in this region as anyone who has worked on asylum cases knows. HRW is not an activist organization that has mass membership or encourages leaftleting and pamphlet distribution. That's not how it operates. To be sure, it has reports translated into local languages. But that is to notify the authorities of its concerns, and also to work with other like-minded human rights groups in advocacy -- a more specialized activity than activist pamphleteering. HRW did not mandate or encourage Muhtorov to distribute their reports.
o Yes, Uzbek authorities use all kinds of trumped-up charges on activists -- Islamism, embezzlement, and in Muhtorov's last arrest, sexual harassment. To be sure, he tells this same story differently and that opens up legitimate questioning about it. And even more, we have to wonder how he was able to get smuggled out of Uzbekistan so easily. This is not an easy thing for any activist to do once the authorities have them in their clutches. So questions have to be asked about this.
o Foust cites the picture he claims was "scrounged up" by uznews.net and other emigre news sites but it is his picture. And those news sources didn't merely say that his beard was a sign of Islamism; they said that that the bruises on his forehead from repeated banging of his forehead on the ground in prostrate prayer was a sign of very devout Islamic practice. Foust has repeatedly left out that detail each time he writes about it.
o Foust cites the tell-tale use of the word "wedding" in conversations Muhtorov had with a website supporting terrorists -- this is believed to be a code word used by Al Qaeda. But he never points out some real family wedding that Muhtorov could have been doing to -- and he used the word repeatedly over many months suggesting that it might have been code.
o Despite being told by the current manager of Registan, Noah Tucker, that the Islamic Jihad Union is "pretty hard-core" and that they "want to be the Al Qaeda of Uzbekistan," Foust nonetheless engages in his typical minimizing of this alarming information:
All things being equal, the public evidence in government affidavits against Mukhtarov is pretty thin: it amounts to exchanging emails with the website admin of a terror group, having some coded phone calls, and buying a plane ticket. He is not accused of trying to bomb anything or kill anyone, just “materially supporting” the IJU though providing either himself or by carrying to them a some cash he was reportedly arrested with.
o Again, material support is a serious issue -- other cases that civil libertarians hated got prosecuted despite their invocation of the First Amendment because judges and jurors recognized the line of imminence was crossed. Foust also misrepresents the story once again -- he didn't just buy a ticket, he was arrested at the airport preparing to leave. He didn't just have some cash, he had phones and a GPS; he didn't just exchange emails, he made plans to meet up with them and quit his job and left his family.
o Foust raises a new issue that has appeared in the case, charges that Muhtorov was going to fight in Syria with Al Qaeda:
Yet in the nearly two years Mukhtarov’s arrest, his plight had gone largely unnoticed by the public until last month, when the government gave official notice it was going to use NSA-collected information to prosecute Mukhtarov. In doing so, they levied a new accusation to journalists, claiming he was going to travel to fight for al Qaeda in Syria — something the IJU, as best as anybody can determine, has never done (they fight exclusively in eastern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan).
I agree that this seems like a "fashionable" addition, as the Uzbek-related terrorist groups, while turning up in Afghanistan, have not seemed to have turned up in Syria. That doesn't mean the situation stays static and they don't cross over into fighting in Syria. We'll see what comes out at trial. So far, Foust quotes Muhtorov's lawyer as saying that the indictment in fact hasn't been expanded to include the Syria charge. (She also said he was never charged with going to Afghanistan. But that's not the issue with Afghanistan; the issue there is that the IJU is related to the IMU, the same terrorist group that has attacked soldiers in Afghanistan.)
o Foust implies falsely that I have "spent years" attacking all sorts of journalists and academics. Nonsense. I engage in legitimate criticism of public figures whose public writings merit criticism. He implies there are scores of such people, what he means is just himself, Sarah Kendzior, at that time an academic, Katy Pearce, her colleague who remains in academic, and Nathan Hamm, the Regist web masters.
o Foust, Kendzior and Hamm have all left Registan and turned it over to other people. All of them have left their jobs. As it is frequently claimed falsely by LibertyLynx that I "ruined their careers," let me reiterate that this is utterly false. They themselves do not make this claim, which would be absurd in any event, given that it would mean that a minor blogger who polemicized with their much more highly trafficked website was somehow capable of influencing their careers. Each of them made career moves on their own, in part because the entire field of Central Asian studies is shrinking and becoming de-funded as our troops being withdrawn from Afghanistan.
It's a new game on the Internet to claim that if someone criticizes you on their blog, why, they are "stalking" you or "harassing" you. Ridiculous. I'm engaging in First Amendment protected speech about critical matters of public policy.
o Foust implies that I adopted a contrary position on Muhtorov merely as part of some longer "stalking" or "harassment" campaign against him and his web site. Again, stuff and nonsense. I began my blog to write freely about Eurasia, to criticize the regimes of Central Asia, US policy regarding these countries. Yes, that includes criticism of Registan's writers, the gaggle of Peace Corps workers suffering from clientism with their host countries, shadowy defense contractors, academics soft on the regimes -- and the hordes of trolls, regime tools, and out right intelligence agents from the Central Asian regimes and our own country that they attracted with their "open source active measure," as I came to see Registan (i.e. their site was free and available for multiple agendas).
o Foust implies that I have deliberately somehow contributed to putting this man in jail (!) as part of some diabolical operation:
Worse still, it seems the prosecution had relied on random blogposts to try to cast doubt on whether Mukhtarov was really a human rights activist. In describing Mukhtarov as too violent to release, it appears the prosecution tried to say he had faked his experience as a human rights worker in Uzbekistan:
A prosecutor also asserts that Muhtorov may have misrepresented himself a human-rights activist and that he may have received refugee status on fake grounds…
Holloway writes that some online articles say Muhtorov was an “opportunist who was dismissed from the Ezgulik Human Rights Society because he supported violent extremism.”
Another, Holloway wrote, “claims the defendant acted as an informant for Uzbek intelligence and received refugee status on fake grounds.”
Those articles come from Catherine Fitzpatrick, who is active in online circles and has a history of personally attacking those she disagrees with. She has spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer, and took to her blog to then try to defame Mukhtarov because people she disliked had expressed skepticism of his case (that full story is here).
The prosecutor obviously had plenty of other regions to authorize the extension of Muhtorov's detention than my blog. To suggest otherwise is to fly in the face of the realities of the indictment and the case as it has progressed.
And again, as I've patiently explained repeatedly, I published *translations of other people's articles with those claims*. That is legitimate activity. Those claims vary, as I indicated, from a respected human rights activist to a refugee official in Kyrgyzstan who might be less credible. I discussed these knowledgeably as a person who has written about the Eurasian region for years and evaluated them. That is legitimate activity. The prosecutor cited my blog in his statements -- and he's welcome to do that, just as the lawyer is welcome to cite whatever they want to site in making their case.
This is America. The case will come to court. Each side will have ample opportunity to make their case, and the judge and jury will decide. Meanwhile, the public, the media, and bloggers have the right to discuss their hypotheses about this case. It's completely preposterous -- and sinister -- to claim that a blogger translating and discussing news articles about the case is somehow engaged in some illicit or unethical or even actionable activity.
Far from being some contorted contrivance -- Foust is projecting too much on his own methods -- my taking up critical discussion of this case is done on its own merits. I have long been a critic of the school of thought prevalent in Washington, DC think-tanks and the State Department that minimizes the terrorist threat, and implies this is a hyped-up construct created by conservatives and "the Jewish Lobby". I reject that idea. I think the terrorist threat is real, that Islamism is a threat to civil society anywhere, and that documenting it and opposing it is not equivalent to hatred of Muslims or hype. This is the same "anti-anti" issue we saw with communism historically and now see with the Snowden case.
I've also long been a critic of the extremists among the emigre and domestic human rights movements as well, and not limited to Muhtorov's case.
So ultimately, I have to say that in reviewing this material again something jumped out at me and the tumblers clicked.
I've never been able to understand why Foust was so zealous about insisting on this person's innocence and claiming he was a victim of an over-aggressive US justice system that was prosecuting "thought crime". The grounds for arrest seemed legitimate and very far from any "thought crime." To be sure, he could be doing this merely as an ardent proponent of the International Relations Realist school, to score points with the influential members of this school in Washington in particular.
But I do wonder if more is driving this. And when I contemplate and discuss possible hidden agendas, that doesn't mean I'm a believer in conspiracies, it just means I think it's appropriate to contemplate and discuss possible hidden agendas.
I noticed in the press releases and in Foust post that the point was made that the US processed claims and brought the victims of Andijan to the US.
Everyone in the community of Central Asia watchers knows that the US was forced out of Uzbekistan when it publicly condemned the massacre -- exactly the right thing to do. We even know from Rumsfeld's memoirs that this was argued about and some advocated trying to keep the presence there for the sake of supplying the troops in Afghanistan.
Some in this community also know that the CIA had assets among the opposition and also helped them escape. That's a good thing -- both as to having assets, as well they should in a terrible place like Uzbekistan -- and as to the humanitarian gesture of getting them out after Andijan. I suspect the CIA or perhaps some more sanitized US government agency is still supporting some of them for humanitarian reasons and also to help them have conferences or web sites -- and that's a good thing, too. Remember, we are dealing with a terrible, murderous regime that tortures large numbers of people, that the US was forced to deal with merely to get food and supplies to troops in Afghanistan next door. But ultimately the US would only be happy to see peaceful democratic change come to this country.
What I can see happening here, however, is this: when one of the emigres they've helped -- either an actual intelligence asset, or perhaps merely one of many in a community of people they helped for humanitarian reasons -- turns out to be charged with terrorism, it taints their operations.
What inevitably happens is that on scores of conservative and Tea Party type of websites -- we've already seen this with the Muhtorov case in Denver -- people start griping and saying "Why are we letting all these Muslims in the country as refugees, they just turn out to be terrorists."
And that's wrong, because the vast majority of refugees from Uzbekistan are deserving of their status and are innocent. The few who have been prosecuted as terrorists, including one who threatened President Obama himself, are a tiny number of exceptions to the rule -- like the Tsarnaevs are the exception to the majority of Chechens given refugee status. There are real reasons of persecution for which these people are rightfully given asylum or refugee status and they have done no wrong.
But the US government knows that they have a public relations problem on their hands, especially if the CIA was involved in helping certain communities of people. Then some among them might be hell-bent in trying to silence the messenger about extremism and even the suspicion of terrorism in the midst. Foust comes from the defense contractors' community and may have been moved to do this sort of discrediting all on his own, or he may be part of an informal operation of some kind. The incredible zeal, aggressiveness, and hate brought to bear here; the financial resources for conferences, travel, web site maintenance, etc. and the sheer determination to keep smearing me force me to ask this question. It actually hadn't occurred to me before.
I've also wondered whether Muhtorov was an asset of the SNB, the Uzbek secret police, and whether they didn't bother to save him once he got in trouble (they're like that). I think we can see from certain strange scandals and incidents over the years in the emigre community that they seed radicalization agents into the community to set up and discredit some people and get them arrested or tar the entire enterprise of opposition to the regime with the brush of Islamist terrorism. The Uzbek regime would love nothing more than to discredit all emigres and all opposition and human rights advocates as extremists. Strangely, the Uzbek press has been silent on Muhtorov.
It's even possible that this SNB asset became known to US intelligence and then they had to get involved in rescuing him out of the justice system and will stop at nothing now to do so (because they once had to make deals with the SNB on things like this). That's a conspiracy bridge too far, but not impossible. Uzbekistan has a cunning and murderous secret police, and our government -- and its intelligence and security branches -- have had to get into bed with this regime for the "higher cause" of supplying troops. Now that we're withdrawing our troops, maybe other operations have to be cleaned up.
Whatever it is that is driving this campaign to discredit me -- that is taking increasingly bizarre forms -- it needs to stop. Surely the US government can thread the needle of blessing the vast majority of Uzbek refugees yet prosecuting any strays that turn out to be rare examples of actual assistance to terrorism. If Jameel succeeds -- and the Denver media taking his side -- and the prosecutor is defeated, then the justice system, such as it is, will have triumphed. That doesn't mean the problem of possible connections to terrorism will have disappeared, and the US will have to go on threading the needle.
Foust claims that Muhtorov's arrest was wrongful:
There is a legitimate and genuine threat from Uzbek terror groups, including both the IJU and IMU. But it is difficult to see how those groups are successfully countered by criminalizing speech and persecuting human rights workers for their associations online.
I don't believe his arrest was wrongful and that it does not involve "criminalizing speech" or "persecuting human rights workers." Muhtorov is not a human rights worker. He was expelled from a reputable human rights group and took up with an extremist group. He did more than just talk -- he bought supplies, collected funds, and set about traveling to meet up with these known terrorists in Turkey. That's not vague or First Amendment protected, and will remain troubling even if the case is dropped because of successful invocation of the NSA issue. It is my right to continue to assert these beliefs sincerely and not be smeared by a person who has worked as a defense contractor and now works for a US government funded assistance organization.
Do you find it hard to understand what left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and libertarian mean any more?
Is Glenn Greenwald on the left or right? Libertarian (he used to consult for Cato) or communist (he has spoken before the Socialist Workers' Party annual meeting)?
How can it be that if Greenwald debates Ruth Marcus, a liberal Democrat and columnist in the liberal Washington Post, denounced by conservatives, he and his Twitter sock-puppets/cronies can accuse her of supporting the Bush Administration's torture? But wait, she agrees that James Clapper "lied" and "he should be ashamed of it" and "it's totally intolerable" -- so what's the difference between her anti-NSA statement and Greenwald's?! (well, he will settle for nothing less than a trial and punishment of this "lying" official, and Marcus points out to this lawfaring lawyer that perjury law is complicated and getting a judge to actually do this against an official merely doing his job as he saw fit would be quite hard to do).
Do you wonder how it is that Paul Carr, Mark Ames formerly of the Exile and Yasha Levine, all funded by Silicon Valley (they were bought out by Pando Daily) and technolibertarians of sorts (or are they?) can print trash about Snowden, and suddenly decide to bash Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, the NYU professor, for joining on to the new media enterprise First Look -- funded by the ebay millionaire Pierre Omidyar, who himself loves Greenwald...who speaks to the socialists? They're all about Big IT and Silicon Valley and technocommunism in the end -- why don't they get along?
How is it that Jacob Appelbaum, who still apparently gets Department of Defense funding and never really seems to scream about Obama the way Glenn Greenwald does, can be doing even more radical work revealing documents that aren't even from Snowden, but could even be -- who knows! -- from some GRU mole in the NSA merely using the Snowden flurries as a cover?
Well, if you look at this handy-dandy infographic chart I've made (sorry, I suck at Photoshopping), you will start to see how it all comes together -- or falls apart (and this chart helps explain why Omidyar and Greenwald will not last.)
Think of the four corners of our Metaverse as the extremes of thinking 1) Obama is a devil; 2) Obama is an angel; 3) Snowden is a traitor, or 4) Snowden is a hero. That's one level (think of the first horizontal X-axis in Second Life).
Then, think of people's attitudes towards capitalism and communism which really infuse everything (that's the Y-axis then, or a second horizontal layer). Everyone likes to pretend these categories and these ideologies don't exist anymore, but of course they do. Look, do you like Occupy Wall Street and want to shut down the stock market and jail the banksters? Then you're a communist. Do you think it's okay for Goldman Sachs and wealthy law firms to fund Obama's campaign along with Google, even though you're for that crazy unworkable socialist ObamaCare of his? Then you're a capitalist. Understood. Don't pretend these categories don't exist.
But there's more -- there's your attitude toward government -- think of this as yet another axis (like the vertical Z in Second Life if this were a 3D object which of course we could make in Second Life but I can't draw here).
There you might be an anarchist (no government), or a minarchist (for minimal government, but at least some); you might be for democracy, which means elected officials and separation of powers and the rule of law, or corporatocracy, which might be rule-by-law and emphasis on both private corporations and governments agencies.
Above the "democracy" line you will find those who like Obama -- he's president, after all -- and tend to think Snowden has done something wrong -- he's broken the law and gone against the democratc consensus that yes, we do need state secrets and agencies to keep them -- and find intelligence to keep us safe.
Or below the "democracy" line, you still might be in the Obama tank and loving Snowden, but you might be for oligarchy, which is where there is a state nominally affirming capitalism, or engaging in "state capitalism" as the Trotskyists called it -- but just as likely embracing many aspects of communism. This state still accords power to certain wealthy boyars -- as long as they support the state. You may even want to transform this state so that it is better for your business.
If you're under the anarchy line, you're for destroying government and running everything from the Internet and the IRC channel with your friends, maybe with a Drupal site and some Liquid Democracy Pirate Party "voting" scheme -- but fuck America, militaries, even roads.
Well, you get the idea. It's a grid -- and you can slide in any direction up or down or across or diagonally.
Naturally, I've put myself in the most perfect, centrist, democratic and good position, as any author would : )
But note what else is going on -- the attitiudes towards technology and how it will be used to pursue one's other values of anarchy or statism, communism or corporativism or statism.
Technocommunist as readers of this blog know is a belief that you can collectivize people online and use technology to redistribute wealth; the state withers away, as it is supposed to under communism and "every cook can rule the state". Of course, there's an avant-garde of the workers who know best (coders).
Technolibertarian can amount to "communism for thee but not for me" or a belief in social Darwinism, Randianism, meritocracy on steroids -- and no illusions that you will teach the homeless to code or even most kids in high school to do anything. Fuck 'em, you are going to have California secede from the United States.
Technoliberal means that you embrace technological innovation but you expect democratic government to maintain oversight over technology so that it does not harm liberal democracy itself.
Technoprogressive means that you believe in the transformative power of technology to change human nature and "make a better world" and you will make money in order to spend it on establishing socialism -- which will work better because of technology and distributive...stuff.
Technosocialist means that you would establish more limits on corporations in establishing your equitable society, except for the Big IT ones and those that provide you a paycheck. Distribution will be coerced. You're welcome.
Technostalinist means that you are for using technology to settle scores with your political enemies, and establishing some kind of state that can crush evil greedy oligarchs and capitalists.
And that's how we get the different boxes in this grid.
You could find Snowden a hero and think Obama is a devil -- and be a technolibertarian like Rand Paul for minimal government.
Or you could find Snowden a hero and not think much of Obama but not really pay attention to him, and be for anarchism and communism -- which you think you and your friends will implement just fine.
OR you could find Obama an angel and Snowden a traitor -- that would put you on the top of the box, with the majority of Americans, quite frankly.
Somebody like me who did not vote for Obama a second time is still in that box because Obama is,after all, the president, the result of a democratic election and therefore a figure of legitimate authority. Looking at this box, you could additionally pin little pictures of Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz into the boxes fairly easily -- I'd be on the Hillary side of the line.
Supportive readers of this blog will likely have no trouble finding MarkAmesExiled in the Technostalinist box. That's because he hates capitalism -- he loathes Obama as a sell-out to Wall Street -- and he is for hanging capitalists he hates from the lamp posts. He admires Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik, and he finds Snowden a traitor - but a traitor to...what, exactly? A powerful state that he imagines can be made a utopian state by ridding it of evil, corrupt capitalists? He's no anarchist, in fact, and he's no libertarian, because he imagines some mighty force that will be capable of punishing these big, evil oligarchs. There isn't any such force except Stalin.
Paul Carr, on the other hand, might slide more toward the technolibertarian box because he's more of a softy, but at the end of the day, his paycheck is still signed by the titans of Silicon Valley and he appreciates that.
Up in the love-Obama box is of course Jeff Gauvin, 18,000 followers, unfollower of me because I said something he didn't like once, hater of Greenwald, lover of Obama (his Twitter name is Jefferson Obama). Jeff is actually Canadian, for all his American hero handles, and therefore tends toward the socialist as a national trait -- Canada is a country where a large percentage of the working population has jobs with the government or funded by the government.
Jeff is typical of a lot of tweeters who loathe Greenwald because he threatens their Obama and their progressivism with his...libertarian/communism or whatever it is. Note that I have Greenwald straddle the two categories because I think Greenwald just does what's best for Greenwald in the end, a powerful force that perhaps someday, may lead to contrition or at least turncoating.
John Schindler is more liberal than I am -- he's for reforming the NSA and I'm for leaving it absolutely untouched until other more profound issues are solved (more on that later) and until Obama is out of office, since I believe as a stealth-socialist, Obama is merely trying to destroy the capitalist state.
We may or may not get lucky and get Hillary back, in which case I will vote for her and so will John Schindler. If we get only Elizabeth Warren as a candidate because of powerful hate-Hillary forces gathering in quite a few of those boxes, I will definitely NOT vote for her; Schindler, I don't know.
Poor General Alexander I've put in the corporatocracy box merely as a kind of symbol. I have no idea what his personal views are. He may be a closet libertarian, for all I know. He may be a liberal Democrat struggling to reform this monster -- who knows. I'm assuming that he's mad as hell at Snowden and I'm putting him very close to the "Snowden=traitor" box. I'm putting him in the same column with the "Obama as devil" because I have to figure Gen. Alexander feels like Obama threw him under the bus. I put him in the corporate box merely because the symbiosis between the military and the private corporate contractors makes up a state-within-a-state in some ways, although I am not a conspiracy monger and actually don't think there is something inherently wrong with military contracting in a free and capitalist society. It's just a tendency you want to watch and regulate and I'm for doing less contracting and having more paid, benefitted staff -- Manning and Snowden were contractors.
I actually think the most important thing Gen. Alexander could do is to form a think tank to fight for national security after he retires, responding to all the outrageous things that people are likely to do to the NSA.
Why don't I put myself up smack against the traitor box?
Well, I don't think that's a useful category to discuss Snowden, really; usually I'll call him "that little felon." To be a traitor, you would have had to show loyalty to you country first, and then betray it; I think for Snowden, the Internet is his country, he has absolutely no loyalty to anything like "homeland" or "government" and leans toward technocommunism or technolibertarianism if not technostalinism -- after all, he ran to first China, then Russia to help him in his struggle to smash the American state.
I think the issue is this: there are warring factions in government, and Snowden represents in fact a faction within the state -- the Wired State in the making, if you will, which is part old state, part oligarchs, part anarchists or Stalinists.
That's why I worry. Cory Ondreijka, formerly of the Navy and the NSA, represents just such a faction, too (more on him soon). While I'm generally supportive of the NSA as an institution, and I find it legitimate and necessary; I'm not supportive of some of the geek factions in government, including in the NSA, which I view as the enemy of liberal democracy (and they exist out of government, too, and are in a revolving door between government and Silicon Valley).
It used to be that people in government in the civil service and foreign service had their little factions, but they kept them to themselves, engaging only in minor skirmishes and minor sabotage; they more or less served the elected president.
They don't do that any more, since the wikification of government and social media gave them a lever and a voice to destroy government leadership they don't like.
So now people who are for friending Iran, despite the will of the Congress or the pragmatism of a compromising president, will deliberately leak, sabotage, undermine and present people with fait accomplis.
They'll make anonymous Twitter accounts and so damage there.
People who think the smart, hip thing to do is to dump on Israel as the problem for why America doesn't have good street cred in the world also leak, sabotage, undermine and create facts on the ground (like the botching of Syria and capitulation in Iran negotiations).
Well, you get the idea! See what you think and suggest ideas and changes. If anybody is better at Photoshop than I am, you're welcome to make this look better, just credit me for the idea!
Updated 1/24/2014; 5/01/2014 and 5/31 with some additional links and background and a few corrections, following publication of Luke Harding's and Glenn Greenwald's books.
I often find that people arguing on Twitter on behalf of Snowden use as one of their key arguments the notion that he was "driven" into the arms of the Russians by the US revoking his passport.
Over and over again, as an argument against finding anything suspicious in his sojourn in Russia and possible cooperation with Russian intelligence, supporters invoke the idea that "he had no choice" because the US government ostensibly "blocked all his exits".
Today, WikiLeaks changed their narrative to admit that they advised Snowden to go to Russia where he would be "safe" (although not for the first time -- Assange has made this point before as Michael Kelley has pointed out).
— Michael B. Kelley (@MichaelKelleyBI) May 1, 2014
In researching this story as it unfolds, I have to say that this is the weakest argument on Snowden's behalf on two legs, but most people never really bore down into the details to see why it ever got legs in the first place.
First, let's look at the complete timeline of events -- the accurate and actual timeline, and not the one that most people cherry-pick selectively or remember selectively:
May 1 Snowden and his girlfriend leave their rented house in Hawaii because the lease is up. The landlord confirms this to media.
May 1-19 Snowden goes to another rental house -- or so we're told from some news sources. At some point his girlfriend conveniently goes away on a trip, and Snowden is missing -- i.e. he is not placed anywhere reliably although likely he remains in Hawaii. At some point he tells his new employee of only about two months, Booz, Allen Hamilton that he needs to take unscheduled leave to treat his epilepsy. But he doesn't go to any hospital and his location during these long three weeks is not confirmed. Did he stay in the rental house? Did he go anywhere else during this period?
May 17 Snowden has his last day of work at Booz, Allen where he steals his last set of documents. Why doesn't he leave to go abroad on this day? What does he do on May 17 and 18 while his girlfriend is away on a trip evidently?
May 19 or 20 Snowden flies to Hong Kong, by his account. (The difference may be explained by the time difference.) He checks into the Mira Hotel, according to news reports -- but this is not confirmed. He is in touch with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras by their admission and likely Jacob Appelbaum about his stolen files. He insists Poitras and Greenwald come to Hong Kong.
May 30 A close friend of Appelbaum's sends a tweet about a Rubik Cube's party. She is one of the people attending the Spring Break of Code in Hawaii at the time both Appelbaum and Snowden were also known to be in Hawaii. Were they in touch earlier than they said?
May 31 Greenwald and Poitras (and Appelbaum?) travel to Hong Kong on this date (according to Greenwald's interview with Haaretz) or June 1 according to Guardian later. Which is it? They make contact with Snowden June 3rd using an agreed sign of recognition-- he is to be carrying a Rubik's Cube. Poitras films Greenwald, and also makes a written interview with him, both of which she later publishes with Appelbaum sharing the by-line.
June 3 According to Luke Harding, this is the date in fact when Greenwald and Poitras met with Snowden at the Mira Hotel. What were they doing for the other days if they in fact arrived earlier in Hong Kong? Which is correct? Greenwald himself then gives this date in his book, not June 1st, as the Guardian originally reported. Why the discredpancy?
June 5 Greenwald's first story about Verizon and meta-data appears in The Guardian.
June 8 Greenwald publishes his second story about "Boundless Informant".
June 9 Snowden decides to go public.
June 10 Snowden checks out of his Hong Kong hotel.
June 11 Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, offers Snowden to apply for asylum. Russia doesn't have many refugees and an invitation at the presidential level is as good as a granting of asylum because it's a political decision in this sort of case.
June 12 Lana Lam of the South China Morning Post publishes the first interview with Snowden outside the Guardian; he explains that he deliberately got employment at Booz, Allen in order to hack more documents better.
June 13 US opens up a criminal case on charges of espionage against Snowden and warn countries not to accept him.
June 14 The Home Office instructs airlines not to allow Snowden to board any flights to the UK.
June 15 -- British authorities bar his overflight and Iceland says it can only consider his application if he comes to their country.
June 16 -- Hong Kong authorities say they would review US extradition request re: Snowden.
June 20 -- US sends extradition request to Hong Kong.
June 20 Snowden arrives at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong -- or at the apartment of a Russian diplomat -- or at some safe house where he makes contact with Russians -- with a ticket to Cuba via Moscow already in hand. He stays overnight.
June 23 Public statement is made about the revocation of his passport which has already occurred earlier.
June 24 Journalists get on a flight to Cuba based on reports that Snowden is on it; he isn't.
Snowden then goes on to ostensibly stay six weeks at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, although according to Russian media, he was met on the tarmac 23 June by the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan diplomats who wisked him away to one of their residences. Ultimately he is granted asylum just as Putin had indicated he would be back on June 11.
So once you see the time-table laid out, you have a number of questions you have to ask (if you didn't ask them before back in 2009 when Snowden was in Geneva, had his first clash with his bosses and his first adverse performance notice while working at the CIA.)
Number one: why didn't Snowden immediately flee to Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador or even Brazil, where Greenwald is based, immediately, starting May 1st or May 17 or whatever date he told his bosses he was going on unscheduled medical leave -- when he in fact decided to leave his job under a pretext and make the final break from his life as an NSA contractor?
At any time he could have simply fled to Latin America to any of those countries. He had just as much ease of doing this as he had in flying to Hong Kong three weeks later. He could have immediately fled to Cuba BEFORE revealing his identity even after meeting Greenwald and Poitras.
Any time during May or June he could have made this flight to any of these Latin American countries, particularly BEFORE he revealed his identity.
So why didn't he?
Claims that this would have triggered more alarms at his workplace or from NSA that kept employees routinely under surveillance don't wash -- a trip to Hong Kong suddenly is just as suspicious as a trip to Venezuela.
Claims that he "wasn't safe" in Latin America from supposed CIA abduction or extradition from governments supposedly too weak to withstand pressure just doesn't wash --after he revealed his identity, ostensibly to prevent just such a clandestine or overt development. The CIA isn't going to kidnap such a very public figure at that point and then look even more guilty of the crimes supposedly US intelligence is committing. Ecuador, which accepted Assange into their Embassy in London, is not going to just give up Snowden. Just not going to happen. Nor in the even more highly anti-American countries Cuba and Venezuela. Even Brazil, given the Rouseff claims and Greenwald's considerable clout, would be safe enough.
But there are more questions, obviously.
What did Snowden do during those three weeks in May? Was he busy shoveling 200,000 documents into cyber vaults with Appelbaum's help? Or what, exactly? Was he talking to the Chinese or the Russians? Was WikiLeaks, and then "helping" him -- without explaining they were talking to the Chinese and the Russians?
And once he got to Hong Kong and gave away the store, and was told that his hopes were dashed, that "China, which isn't our enemy" (as he claimed in his interview with Poitras) wasn't going to risk taking him for their own pragmatic reasons -- why didn't he immediately, on June 6 or even June 10th flee before the US had an extradition request out?
Because it didn't have the extradition request sent until June 20.
That's nearly two weeks when he could have fled somewhere, but didn't.
Where did Snowden go on June 10? Did his Hong Kong lawyers put him up? Did he in fact go to the Russian consulate then -- which accounts for why Putin issued this generous invitation to apply for asylum on June 11? Otherwise, why did Putin -- at his level! -- get involved so quickly? Putin claimed later he didn't "need" to "sheer this hairless pig". So why even bother? Why does no one ever ask that question?
When the facts came out in the Russian media that Snowden had been in the Russian consulate on June 20-21, Putin himself confirmed this, admitting that it hadn't been mentioned before. This caused a funny thing to happen -- Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden's lawyer who helped him with his asylum claim and who has close ties to the FSB, had at first lied and said that Snowden wasn't in the consulate to the media. Imagine how he must have felt when Putin himself contradicted him.
Does this show disarray in the Russian government or a war within Russian intelligence about what to do with Snowden? Or just the usual Russkaya khalatnost'? (incompetence and negligence).
Then there's this question to ask: when did Snowden buy his ticket, exactly?
According to Kommersant's source, he arrived with the ticket to Cuba already in hand in the Russian consulate on June 20, before the US revoked his passport, on the day that the US issued the extradition request (but had not yet revoked his passport).
Obviously, he couldn't have bought the ticket after this, with no valid passport; with the clock ticking on the extradition, and his Hong Kong lawyers telling him that China would not offer his asylum. Likely, he had to buy it before -- on June 19th or earlier.
Why? Because you cannot buy a ticket board a plane to Cuba via Moscow without showing your passport. He likely knew or was informed by his Hong Kong lawyers that once the extradition request went out and Hong Kong had already told him that a) they would not give him asylum b) they had no objection if he left (according to Kommersant), then he would realize he had to get on a plane soon -- and without a passport, he would be blocked soon.
Russians and indeed most countries -- and hence most airlines! -- will insist on a show of a passport to get a visa and you must indicate your flights and travel plans on the visa application purchase a ticket -- and in the case of Russia, and Cuba, for Americans, you have to show a valid visa along with your passport to board the plane. These are not countries where Americans can just pick up visas at the airport by paying a fee. They have to get those visas way in advance.
While Snowden could get by without a visa to Russia, if he were only supposedly transiting Russia to Cuba, he would still need a Cuban visa.
Note: updated to make it clear that a) if he used a travel agent (unlikely, as he wouldn't want to attract attention), *that agency* could have asked for his passport to buy his ticket and apply for his visa all at once. But he likely did *not* use a travel agency, ordered the ticket online, but still had to get a visa for Cub -- or some intercession from Russia.
Usually two weeks or more is what it takes; express visas still take 5 days often. So did Snowden in fact visit the Russian consulate BEFORE the 20th to get a visa? Or the Cuban consulate to get a visa? How was this done? When?
It's here that your typical Anonymous Twitter arguer claims that the US "bullied" Cuba into not accepting Snowden. The State Department asked Cuba not to accept him -- but since when does Cuba do what the State Department tells them?!
So...why didn't Snowden go to Cuba on June 24th? Is Castro lying? Was Snowden going to stay in Russia the whole time anyway, and this was a distraction?
There's another date to pin down here, and that's the date the US actually revoked the passport. The announcement was made on June 23rd, but it was likely done on June 22nd; indeed Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica report it as revoked on the 22nd. It might have been made earlier, but not THAT much earlier because Snowden bought his ticket. Note:
“Such a revocation does not affect citizenship status,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson told Ars.
As explained, you cannot, as an American, buy a ticket to Havana or Moscow without showing a passport and a visa.
While it's possible "the system" didn't get the news flash that the passport was pulled right away, for something like this, you might think that all the red buttons would have been punched. So that means it's most likely that Snowden bought the ticket with the passport still valid, before it was pulled, on the 20th or possibly even earlier, after the extradition notice was issued and his lawyers informed him that it was not likely it would be disobeyed. Why did he then delay his departure -- with the clock ticking? What deal was he trying to get...with which country? China or Russia?
He would have been able to buy the ticket a still-valid passport -- not pulled, and therefore not forcing him into any particular travel arrangement -- on the 20th.
You know, instead of sitting and partying with the Russians for two days, Snowden could have used the two days before his passport was revoked to go somewhere else -- anywhere else -- particularly Latin America.
See, it's this detail about how Russia and its old pupil Cuba work when it comes to controlling foreigners travelling to their countries that so stands out for us Russia-watchers.
That's why we can't believe that Snowden "decided on the fly" to go to Russia or stay in Russia after he got there.
He had to have gotten a visa; more to the point, so would Sarah Harrison, his WikiLeaks compansion and minder -- and perhaps she already had a multiple-entry visa to Russia due to her work on Mediastan for Wikileaks, or easily arranged an invitation, which is required by Russian law for foreigners to have longer stays.
The visit to the consulate on the 20th with the ticket already in hand might have been used to pick up a visa, but usually the way things work, that would have had to have been done before the purchase.
My bet is that with WikiLeaks help, Snowden dealt with the consulate much earlier -- but maybe hadn't gone in person, maybe Sarah Harrison did all the menial work of filling out applications, attaching photos and taking them over to the Russians. When did she arrive in Hong Kong? We only know from her statement covered in the Daily Mail that she went "in June". When? She isn't in the film or mentioned in the stories, but she is there, in the background performing these kinds of tasks obviously.
I think it's quite possible that even as early as May, again, there could have been chats with the Russians via Assange and Harrison or others about Snowden coming to Russia.
Don't forget, WikiLeaks has quite a base of operations in Russia, as I establish here and here. When they released the film Mediastan recently, which they had working on for years, we realize that not only do they have Israel Shamir, the notorious pro-Kremlin provocateur and antisemite who has definitely performed work for WikiLeaks and represented its interests despite WikiLeaks denials -- and whose idea it was to organize the airport meeting with Snowden -- but also his son Johannes Walstrohm, also a disgraced journalist and antisemite working for WikiLeaks directly -- about whom WL doesn't make any denials but instead credits him as the producer of their video Mediastan.
In addition, they have Russian Reporter and other film-makers, journalists, and assorted helpers in Russia, quite a crew to help out something like the care and feeding-- and the recruitment and tasking, too? -- of Edward Snowden.
Snowden could have fled anywhere in the world before his identity was publicized; it was his call. He had weeks to make this decision, even if something spooked him into fleeing earlier than planned, i.e. a fear that someone at his job had already caught him. He could have gone to Latin American at any time during the weeks he hung out in Hong Kong, with a valid passport, and long before the US issued their extradition request -- which wasn't until June 20th -- a month after he arrived in Hong Kong!
So the idea that he was "forced"to go to Russia because "he had no choices" is as big a lie as any told in this entire caper, and it should help to unravel the entire false narrative.
Colum Lynch -- a respected columnist and one of the few journalists to cover the UN and make it interesting -- has a scare headline posted today at Foreign Policy in The Cable:
I keep thinking how Brazil and Germany were never motivated to mount a resolution like this when the Russian opposition's cell phone conversations or the Belarusian opposition's cell phone and Internet conversations were put online by the secret police and a hundred other things like that even inluding the open Russian plan to capture all metadata during the Olympics to oppose terrorism but also any anti-Kremlin protest. None of that moved these diplomats before because they know the UN, and didn't want to go up against Russia or China.
The US is a softer target.
So hence this resolution, really opposing the US and nothing else. By invoking it as a backlash against Snowden, they can get even Russia and China to tacitly agree because those authoritarians know that like all UN rights agreements, they have absolutely no intention of implementing them. And few countries -- least of all Germany or Brazil -- will ever have the guts to hold them to account around it, even though their privacy disruption is far worse.
Then there's the fact that the claims Snowden has made about the NSA have never been validated with actual cases and court decisions.
What I've been saying about the "Snowden revelations" and in particular the case of the alleged bugging of the Brazilian president's telephone conversations is that Rouseff should bring her case to the Human Rights Committee, the treaty body of the UN that actually already has plenty of privacy language to work with in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
She doesn't need a new resolution. Let her bring an actual case -- something that has been non-existent throughout the Snowden saga anywhere, in any venue (there is already one failed court case against the NSA run by the ACLU, which is having another run at it). And see if it could even be adjudicated! Merkel, too. Or, if they are concerned about never having had interstate complaints on the ICCPR (although there's no reason not to try one), let individual citizens of Germany or Brazil brings cases where they prove their privacy was eroded.
I wonder even with the tendentious review this might get in the HRC, if they could make their cases, given that...the content of their talks has never been revealed nor has it been confirmed that their calls were eavesdropped on in real time. No one has ever come up with a single case of an individual who can show his personal privacy was deliberately violated such as to harm his rights.
I'd love to be there when the HRC examines a case involving an indignant complaint that somebody listened in on...a Brazilian oil company -- the kind of oil company that NGOs usually scream about as a terrible violator of indigenous rights and environmental rights. Imagine, the HRC, at the UN, admitting that oil companies, of all things, have privacy rights. Go ahead, I'll wait, as they say...
No one would want extra-territorial *anything* nor making the US compelled to uphold it if it weren't for this anti-US campaign triggered by WikiLeaks and Snowden's hacker and activist-journalist friends. As we know, if they made an extra-territorial push for an end to reprisals for human rights advocates, as states at the Human Rights Council attempted to do yesterday, that would be killed by South Africa -- yes, South Africa! -- because they were mad at the ICC's "excessive attention" to Africa's mass murderers -- the ICC has tended to prosecute African tyrants rather than tyrants from elsewhere around the world. Maybe the others are harder to reach, i.e. like, oh, Russia, over its mass murder of Chechens and Dagestanis -- Russia, where Germany has vested business interests and a friendly foreign policy, or Iran, where a decided international lobby antagonistic to Israel wants to friend up this tyrant on the basis of promises, not performance.
(No, those countries haven't ratified the ICC statute, but then neither did some of the African states -- they got Security Council referrals that would be impossible on other regions of the world given the Russian and Chinese vetoes.)
Look, if you think this resolution is really in good faith, and really about privacy, you don't know how the UN works.
Germany has many other more effective ways of displaying its wrath, if it thinks its complaints about the encroachment by its long-time partner, the NSA, are founded. For example, yesterday we learned of the billions Germany has harvested in Internet business - they had a banner year in sales. A good chunk of their revenue comes from amazon.de -- hey, an American company, with servers located in America, whose innovation and cost reductions due to scale they can utilize to make profits. You don't notice Germany shutting down amazon.de or demanding that Amazon suddenly place all servers with German data on German territory under German control -- or it may come to that, and even Jeff Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post and considerable lobbying clout may not stop it.
But nary a word, because that's business, and that's money, and Germany and the US are heavily intertwined there.
Instead, what we get is this ding at the UN, which "doesn't matter" in a sense that it is just rhetoric," even though people like Dianna PoKempner, who has decided to make Human Right Watch's crusade against the NSA an aggressive personal project, think this is "soft power" that NGOs can manipulate via international fora to get their way. That's because they might fail at more more mundane work through democratic institutions at home with factions that oppose their anti-Western positions and leniency with tyrants like Russia and China.
BTW, I'm one of the human rights advocates who learned about these private negotiations before Lynch's article, but it didn't seem appropriate to leak the negotiating position of the US. Nowadays, there's a determined lobbying clique of NGOs starting with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, and other radical Internet activists who don't believe in private negotiations by states -- in fact, they don't much believe in states, period. They whined and whined about the secret negotiations of the TPP -- even after hackers got ahold of the secret documents somehow, we're not told -- either a bad-minded state party or leftist political party faction in a state leaked it, or it was actually hacked, we don't know.
But negotiations should be secret because that's how states can reach accommodations and compromises. The time to get your country to have a position you can support is before the international conference, at home, through the democratic process.
International negotiations, particularly those involving undemocratic states or states with very different positions, have to be done in secret to reach agreement. That's an axiom of international diplomacy that works -- and it works on the Disability Rights Treaty as much as the TPP.
It's ok to have secret negotiations in a hostile world where there are numerous enemies to basic universal human rights and values. The animus driving this issue about "secrecy" isn't really based on any value of transparency because it's more about anarchy -- these radicals do not accept that elected, legitimate liberal states like the US and Germany or even for that matter Brazil, whose record as a demoracy is not as good, should be able to negotiate in good faith on behalf of their citizens -- because they are elected.
The elected part bothers the anarchists because it goes against their brutal, nihilist grab for power themselves (anarchists who always oppose governments and try to make you think they are against big government and just for lovely little local collectives always forget to tell you the PS to the memo -- that in overthrowing others, they get in power, and are far less accountable or transparent themselves because they don't believe in voting or due process or democratic procedure -- they are all about coercive, collectivizing takeovers and pretend "consensus".)
At the UN, the leftist forces in Germany and Brazil in particular -- where parliamentarians wear Snowden masks and Glenn Greenwald has safe haven -- have succeed in pushing the Snowden backlash into the complicated and dull procedures of UN committees.
This is actually a process that long preceded Snowden, as this same concerted claque that pushes the extreme "Internet freedom" agenda at the UN -- against copyright, against intellectual property, against trade, against sovereignty of states, against any criminal oversight of the Internet to oppose terrorism and crime -- has been very busy already trying to undermine what they see as an "unacceptable' historical US control over the Internet and force through various measures.
When Elaine Donahoe, the ebay president's wife, an Obama campaigner and fund-raiser, was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the UN Human Rights Council, these radical NGOs leveraged the obvious interest in Silicon Valley in defeating pro-copyright and anti-piracy legislation (SOPA and PIPA) and under the guise of "Internt Freedom," got various measures put in -- here's the background on the "Internet Freedom" resolution. This let in dangerous wording that in fact brings in more state control under the invocation of the concept of "development" (i.e. in the technocommunist model, by states, or in the technolibertarian model, also by states they capture).
If this wife-turned-ambassador was getting her appointment in the Bush era, as a Bush fund-raiser, and her husband was the head of some less beloved Silicon Valley corporation, imagine the furor of the NGOs that business was using international fora to get its way in the marketplace. Not so when it's ebay -- as we're seeing about ebay founder Pierre Omidyar's support of Greenwald and others in a new radical media project.
There's a lot more boring background to this at the UN that few people have been paying attention to, which basically involves this same gang, with mainly Soros and other "progressive" funding, going to the UN to get language favourable to their ideological positions into various resolutions and mandates -- mainly because no one else bothers to show up and give some pushback to their blatantly sectarian maneuvers.
They have been particularly active at the international bodies that have aspirations to control the Internet -- the International Telecommunications Organization and the Internet Governance Forum. Brazil has pushed the latter heavily, just hosting the meeting, to get its own brand of socialist control over Internet affairs -- gathering all the usual anti-American fans in the process.
The IGF feigns support of what they call the "multi-stakeholder approach" -- as long as the stakeholder are things they like and control -- and it's important to note that ALL these NGOs are UTTER HYPOCRITES because FOR YEARS they've been in the Global Network Initiative with the likes of Google and even Facebook claiming to promote Internet rights. They were never, ever bothered by Google's massive data-vacuuming and Facebook's privacy-busting all those years. Instead, they sat by quietly while the GNI secretariat was mainly silent about things like the Internet being entirely shut down in whole countries or Internet journalists being jailed -- real freedom issues. Instead, they pushed for things like the right to keep a Youtube of a disabled boy being humiliated and bullied online in Italy despite a court action -- in the name of "freedom of expression" -- which was really a business issue for Google to keep their California Business Model intact (let everyon upload freely, chase over copyright or legal issues later, after the ad revenue is scoopd up). You don't hear so much about GNI anymore... in fact, EFF dramatically left it, funny...
This gang has promoted Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, through various Soros-funded evenings like this one at NYU, and its his decidedly anti-American antagonism which has driven the Internet resolutions at the UN seeking a) absolute encryption for non-state actors, regardless of whether they commit crimes b) rejection of law-enforcement access to the Internet in the legitimate pursuit of crimes c) blessing of non-governmental human rights groups forever as never being involved in crime and worthy of such power -- a position that comes out of Frank's understandable but not universal experience of being a leftist activist lawyer in oppressive Guatemala in the 1980s.
Yes, it's hard to believe -- although CNN did ask the questions of the leftist German journalists who broke this story in the first place -- that this is not verified. We don't have any sample conversations. We don't know what she thought or what her position was internally on the even of important events like NATO summits. We haven't learned of any fact other than that her number was in a list of numbers held by the NSA which they may have scanned for meta data.
BTW, few noticed part two of the story of Norway, yesterday, where first Snowden's adversarial journalist-activist supporters Laura Poitras an Glenn Greenwald claimed there was a purported NSA scanning of millions of Norwegian phone calls (or phone transactions -- we never are told accurately if these "millions" in fact contain the thousands of back-and-forth "calls" that a person typically engages in during a week of texting, liking, sending links, etc. on his cell phone). But...Come to find out even later in the day that it was Norway itself scanning its own conversations, then sharing them. Even the Kremlin's RT.com had to correct this. (Or, especially RT.com given that the anti-Norway campaign by Russia has gone on for awhile unrelated to Snowden, as part of a hate-on-the-West strategy).
But why wasn't the story *reported* from the get-go by journalists being skeptical of the usual Snowden Team active measure, and asking questions directly about it?! Is Richard Orange going to run a correction?
Norway -- let alone Germany -- were never moved to launch privacy resolutions at the UN over their own activity, all these years, including sharing with the NSA.
So here we all are. A tendentious portrayal of the US as some "killer" of privacy that Russia and even Germany and even Norway killed long ago, without a whimper from the NGO gotcha-gang all this time -- but suddenly, when WikiLeaks and their Russian supporters have an opportunity to exploit Snowden backlash even further in pursuit of their anti-American goals, they obviously seize it.
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.
Recent Comments