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.
He's now building an operating system that anyone can use to replace
all of the services that Google provides — or any other cloud company,
for that matter. Email, chat, file sharing, web hosting: With Cook’s
arkOS, you’ll be able to run all of those essential services on a
secure, private server in your own home that’s about the size of a
credit card.
“Google, while it is a great service that has done wonderful
things for the Web, is showing some troubling signs,” Cook told me.
“Their shutdown of Google Reader earlier this year means that none of
the services [we] rely upon are sacrosanct if they are not profitable
enough for them.”
I couldn't complain, at one level, because we all need Google alternatives.
It's creepy the way you now go to google.com and it has this giant big log-in interface with ONE in big letters that lets you know that you are now logging into ALL Google services AT ONCE.
There's something unsettling about all their services now in that funny block that looks like an I Ching up on the right-hand corner. You go to your email, or your Google Docs, or G+ or some other G thing, and you feel that all around you is the heavy breath of Google scanning you for ads to pitch and things you've said that it will crib for those ads.
I guess my theory about Google lately, now that we have not only Team Snowden but also the beginnings of the Wired State shaping up (and those last two go together, but are in tension and even at odds, i.e. Jacob Appelbaum stops any association with the Guardian) that eventually, Google might turn into a normal company. You know, as normal as IBM or Xerox, which isn't saying a HUGE amount, as they will still be venal Big IT, but Google might become more accountable to customers and the general public as IBM and Xerox have over the years. And that's all a good thing. I guess my end game for Google is that it breaks up like Ma Bell, and is forced to calf off those hardware things like driverless cars and that it is forced to do more for privacy like get out of our email. But that's a long ways off...
I could see signs of normalcy straining to break through the geek weirdness when Google made a Halloween Doodle that was actually nice, instead of one of those things that look like it came from the Soviet Academy of Science's pick of the week, like the 108th anniversary of some obscure scientist. And it started doing that when it realized it needed to sell tablets, phones, normal things that people will buy who don't want all the geek culture crap to come with the product, they want normalcy.
To be sure, we've got alternatives. Bing is one, of course; Yahoo, if it is scanning my email, is sure doing a lousy job of it because all it pitches to me is car insurance (I don't own a car) and stuff about moms going back to school on Obama loans (sorry, I wish I had the time but I don't). That's a good thing, if it "doesn't know". Meanwhile, I write an article for naturalgaseurope.com, and go to that page quite a bit, and then every other page I visit thinks I'm a corporation and tries to sell me natural gas stuff. Facebook is still trying to give me attractive men in my region, Ugh boots, Ellen de Generes' TV show, Joe Biden, and furniture stores. None of them are relevant, but I leave them all alone or it could get worse...
But...despite needing alternatives, there are only new sets of challenges and problems that come with making a scrappy one.
Here's what I had to say about this:
Hmmm. Ordinary people won't be able to use it because it's Linux and open source nerdy stuff.
And instead of losing things we like such as Google Reader because of
Google's business reasons (not enough people in fact did like it for
them to bother and it competed with their drive to socialize people's
reading on G+ to pitch ads through that system) -- now, we'll be
dependent on the open source cult. Will they come to work, or will they
be busy at a WoW raid? or they don't feel like it or ran out of Red
Bull? Or they committed suicide? (Diaspora). Or they have to go get a
real job because Kickstart didn't raise enough?
It's no better, truly.
Of course, I really don't have anything technically relevant to say here, so listen to a guy who seems to know what he's talking about, elforesto:
And let's be honest: if the feds want your data, they will get your
data. It does not matter if the data is hosted with Google, with Bob's
Web Hosting, or on your Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/Time Warner/etc home
connection. The only way to safeguard said data is to encrypt it in
transit (which pretty much everyone already does) or at rest (which
almost nobody does). Cook is freely admitting that he doesn't know much
about crypto and it kind of shows. So what if you control the SSL certs
if the receiving mail server has an NSA tap and you didn't use GPG to
encrypt it? This doesn't actually improve the security of your data at
all.
Look, good for you for thinking about these things, but a lot of us with
a LOT more experience doing this are going to give you the best advice
you're going to get: go back to the drawing board. You're trying to fix a
human problem with software and that simply will not and does not work.
Want people to take owning their data seriously? Do workshops to help
people setup their own hosting account. Want to help people secure their
communications? Guide them through setting up GPG and give them a thumb
drive with Tails. Asking them to install a Linux distribution on
hobbyist hardware may be an effective use of buzzword marketing, but it
will not solve the problem in any kind of meaningful way.
Cook then answers him by basically demanding more user education. That's what the geeks always do, and that's always a fail in my book.
Naturally, the idea of having some little jet pack that holds "your very own server" that enables you to have a kind of walkie-talkie with all the other kids in the neighbourhood outside the bad "Internet" that is now all "militarized" seems awfully cool. I bet this will really sell, at least, as he says, to "hobbyists" lol. In fact, local intranets and Open Garden and all that kind of stuff is very attractive to people who want to go out of the commercial Internet into the darknets, which are likely to be random patches loosely knitted together, or they'd merely replicate the original problem. I can't help thinking this is all like reverse-engineering of Second Life and the making of Open Sim and Kitely. Anything that is made outside of Google will perforce have to rely on Google products, capacity, hardware items, etc. etc. Imagine, having to Google to find the free nodes, and so on.
As for Google Reader, well, I don't miss it, to be honest. And to be even more honest, I had ceased to go to it every day after making it and filling it up with customized stuff. I rapidly developed blog bankruptcy with hundreds of people's blogs sitting there unread. I got the Google alerts on news topics in my mail box and stopped "going there" to look for stuff -- and those still work.
No, I don't "go there" to G+ as a replacement for Google Reader (their idea) because:
o too busy -- too many pictures, too many gifs, too much
o too many strangers, too many Google engineers without social graces
o too harsh rules, i.e. you get ban warnings over nothing, worse than Facebook
o too high risk of losing your content over a speech offense, i.e. some thin-skin geek decides to punish you for your legitimate criticism, and now you can't access your Google docs or email -- they're all related.
So as I've always said, spread your privacy erosion over diverse platforms.
In fact, the hilarious thing is that Yahoo now has a clone of Google Reader on its new Yahoo email interface. It does all the same thing, the weather, horoscope, the news you can pick, etc. And it's purple.
Also Windows 8 has a thingie where you can make a reader based on Bing which is perfectly fine and just as customizeable as Google Reader was.
But as I keep saying, Twitter is my magazine and newspaper now, I read that. I unsubscribed from the Times around the time that Risen ran the interview with Snowden so uncritically but I also just got tired of it billing every month when my own reading of it waxed and waned. I am waiting for the Internet people to come up with wallets to pay for individual articles much more easily and cheaply, and also tip bloggers easily.
But are Schmidt and his customers really surprised that the NSA looked
for such a hole in Google's infrastructure and asked its foreign allies
to exploit it? While Schmidt and many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
likely share the civil liberties concerns of many of their fellow
citizens, the last several months of Snowden disclosures may be more
troubling to leading internet firms for another less obvious reason:
what they say about the role of technology on the world stage.
Indeed.
It's a tale that Schmidt and his coauthor Jared Cohen—a former advisor
to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and now head of Google's internal
think tank—retell at length in the book they released earlier this year,
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.
Schmidt and Cohen are careful, as they gaze into their crystal ball,
not to see a utopia. New technology, they acknowledge, can be used by
authoritarians and terrorists just as easily as democrats and
human-rights campaigners. Still, they are clear that the arrival of the
internet age signals no less than a new epoch of history—in which a
virtual world must simultaneously exist as a new testament alongside the
old one. As they write,
their vision is "a tale of two civilizations: One is physical and has
developed over thousands of years, and the other is virtual and is still
very much in formation."
I've been reading The New Digital Age by Schmidt and Cohen very fitfully -- I hate it, and periodically have to throw it across the room, which makes it hard to find then the next time I tackle it.
But speaking of virtual worlds, one of the appalling things about their ideology is the ardent belief that a mammoth virtual world -- the Internetization of things and everything -- is being built on top of this one, that we will all "have" to live in. And that real life will be "mapped" to this monstrous entity that will of course be run by coders (and PS not the NSA) and that such mapping/integration will make things "better" instead of being a God Awful Mess.
I begin to see why Schmidt is so fascinated with shall we say "distressed" states like North Korea or Somalia or Iraq. It's like the way doctors used to learn about the brain if there was, say, a train conductor who lost part of his brain and then lived in the eternal present.
By studying these dislocated war-torn or authoritarian societies that aren't the norm, he gets a better idea of how to destroy real countries and then put them back together on the Internet.
Hence, his discussion about post-war Iraq:
A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict intsability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of prtoection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, likea fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.
I feel like Schmidt should have spent even a week in Second Life, let alone Iraq, or some place like Belarus, to get the sheer folly of all this.
For one, I think he has no idea that when all land is virtualized, and all value starts to shift to its virtualization, it will start to lose value. There will be the Anshe Chung problem as the wealthy can just open up Google maps and bid on any parcel on the map all over the world that is shown in yellow "for sale" as on the map of Second Life. There will be the flipping problem. The abandoning problem. The griefing problem. The 16 m ad lot problem. The Impeach Bush sign problem. Ok, I'm going to run screaming from the room soon at this thought... I think probably only about two readers will understand what I'm talking about.
For two, I think Schmidt knows perfectly well that the Internetization of Everything will erode national boundaries and put him and his company in charge -- but he pretends that's not so.
BTW, Google had a short-lived virtual world experiment called Lively which died.
Schmidt never mentions that or Second Life or any existing experience of virtuality on line, but in a way, his entire book is about how the Internet will penetrate and virtualize everything.
Schmidt loves the idea of exile communities -- the Tibetans -- rebuilding virtual countries online that are poised to come back some day. Except they don't. The Chinese move in Han settlers, wipe out monasteries, control education, jail monks and nuns and dissenters, force more refugees, and Tibet as an actuality grows more dim. He doesn't put that bit in.
In Belaus, Lukashenka just turns off the electricity. No electricity, no computers. Or turns off the cell towers. No mobile phone, no demonstrations organized. You could have exquisite exile governments -- and they have them -- but then they founder on the rocks of the reality of dictatorships that Schmidt seems to leave beyond the frame of his thinking. He just barrels ahead planning how all these good exiles (secessionist SiliconValley, anyone?) will build wonderful virtual governments online and impose them on reality -- uh, easily. No one will object, surely.
Well, and then there's the virtualization of everything, really.
I really must try to write my book about how Second Life predicts the awfulness of the Internet of Things, including your home and even your government.
Try to think of your home as a server in Second Life, and all the delights that will come with it:
o bans and ejects
o autoreturn
o group membership -- open and closed groups
o stripping of IP addresses to out alts
o griefing with particles
o mapping and stalking.
And that's just the beginning. Wait until they take away the vote completely!
Land records were among the first things the Lindens jettisoned when they moved from making the world the product to, well, just making the product the product, in about 2008-2009 after the big boom in interest and membership.
There used to be records of every land auction (simulator, or server or part of a server), with those who participated, what they bid, and who won. Then this was blacked out -- in fact, when, of all things, they moved to using ebay auction software instead of their own custom solution (Pierre Omidyar was an early investor in SL).
They did this because land began to devalue, the more there was mapping, information, and records of it globally -- and of course, there constant printing of new land.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, at the BBC. Photo by Documentally.
This is a topic that needs A LOT more commentary, but before it gets lost in my growing, enormous queue of important articles and books to comment on (I need staff! I need fellow bloggers to do this with me!), let me note this.
People worry about the NSA and Snowden's revelations. As you know, I don't think much of them; I don't think they are established, they don't have a case, they are about an anarchist agenda used as a cat's paw by the Kremlin, and ultimately I don't think there's a there there.
The problem with the Panopticon begins with Google and other platforms and that secessionist Silicon Valley, not the NSA, which plays catch-up trying to do the job it was hired to do. We have oversight, checks and balances, remedies, means of reform for the NSA.
We don't have ANY of those things for Google. That's why the NSA is never my primary concern.
I also have a long-term worry about the gnomes of the Internet who are steadily taking over pieces of it, and have really been galvanized now that the Snowden Affair has given them an excuse to kick the US government out of standards bodies and to oppose it in international fora and so on.
Cold poached salmon with dill & hollandaise dressing
Butternut squash, red onion & spinach tart
...while you're fretting about Snowden, who is also likely eating well either on the Russian dime or from money John Perry Barlow is raising from the glitterati for him.
Of course readers of this blog and my Second Thoughts blog about Second Life will recognize Beth Noveck.
Just one year after its foundation in London, an organisation created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
and Sir Nigel Shadbolt to stimulate economic, environmental and social
innovation through a system of open data sharing and analysis, has
announced rapid global expansion of its ambitions.
The Open Data Institute
has announced the launch of 13 international centres, known as "nodes",
each of which will bring together companies, universities, and NGOs
that support open data projects and communities. The nodes will be based
in the US, Canada, France, Dubai, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Argentina, with two extra US nodes Chicago and North Carolina. Three further UK nodes are to open in Manchester, Leeds and Brighton.
The
new ODI nodes will variously operate at local and national levels. Each
one has agreed to adopt the ODI Charter, which is a open source
codification of the ODI itself, and embodies principles of open data
business, publishing, communication, and collaboration.
But they should, because of its budgets:
The ODI is a non-for-profit organisation that has so far helped set up
more than a dozen open data-based startup companies in the UK,
generating income, research and training. It has also created a certificate for open data allowing all users to access information on many areas such as healthcare, transport, peer-to-peer lending, and energy efficiency. The UK ODI secured £10m funding over five years from the UK innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, $750,000 from global philanthropic investor Omidyar Network
created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. It aims for long-term
sustainability through match funding and direct revenue through
memberships and supporters.
Note the role of Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald's new angel for this new media thing that GG has left the Guardian for.
The other people in the speakers' list will tell you of more budgets, i.e. the CTO for New York City, which has a healthy budget for open this and open that -- which has never given us an app telling us where the toilets of New York City are. (I'm going to have to code one myself, which tells me how long you may be shifting from one foot to the other.)
"Open Data" covers a multitude of sins -- I will come back another day to dissect it. These are the bureaucratic "democratic centralists" of the Wired State. They are the ones who will control your health, education, welfare -- life -- data. Not the NSA.
Somewhere, there's some NSA bugs on this table...G20 meeting in London in 2009. Photo by Downing Street.
For some people, Joshua Foust is some kind of clever authority, and they lap up his stuff on the NSA hacking scandal and defector Edward Snowden with particular eagerness because few if any journalists are tackling the story critically.
But as readers of my blogs know, I'm a long-time critic of Foust, who I have found to be duplicitious and manipulative on many occasions for reasons that are sometimes elusive and sometimes have to do with his posture as an International Relations Realist, a certain self-reinforcing school of thought in Washington particular infecting the think-tank and consultant world.
On the Snowden story, sometimes I see he is simply distracting from the likelihood that from available evidence, this is a planned caper not only of WikiLeaks, but the Kremlin. That is -- sure, he's pointing up the Russian angle, but making it seem as if it all started recently. Or he keeps saying that Snowden is a naif, a bumbler, who stumbled into the cunning former KGB officer's arms through "poor trip planning," as Evgeny Morozov phrased it in a cynical article for Der Spiegel. And that makes it seem like not Snowden, but somebody else is really to blame -- and minimizes his role.
That is, he's happy to find the Kremlin's long arm behind this caper, but then he is silent about Jacob Appelbaum, the key technical "wheels" to this caper, a creature of the German Chaos Communications Club who is now holed up in Germany, afraid to come home and face the WikiLeaks grand jury which has been the reason for his questioning at borders before and the seizure of his Twitter account by federal authorities.
Sometimes Foust seems merely to be trying to convert himself from a defense consultant -- in an area - Central Asia and Afghanistan -- which no one needs anymore now that troops are pulling out of Afghanistan -- to some other field or theme where there might be work. Can't fault him for that.
Sometimes it seems like it's the HBGary plan, stillborn after the hack, has come to life. Remember how poor HPGary, the consulting firm that was hacked by Anonymous/LulzSec because it developed a plan not only to fight Anonymous, but "go after" Glenn Greenwald, was itself hacked? Remember how scandalous everyone thought it was that any firm that the FBI might hire would even THINK of taking down GG? Of course, it was a proposal that was floated to win a contract, and actually, nothing unlawful seemed to be involved. We could have a separate discussion about whether the government should "go after" dissidents -- certainly there needs to be restrictions on that! -- but at what point does an elected liberal government get to engage in not only counter-intelligence, but counter-spin to tendentious lies?
Obviously, that's better coming from the private sector for all kinds of reasons, so now, for free, or who knows, maybe for some modest blogging fee, Foust is taking down Greenwald in ways that HBGary could have only dreamed of.
In any event, this last weeks's offerings, recently in How Many Documents Did Edward Snowden Take and then earlier Least Credible Accusation and then later Proliferation of Edward Snowden, is designed to dazzle us with the Big Data of all those docs, and distract us from something else: the very precise stories that are very deadly whacks at the NSA and our national security.
See, I'm going to play Team B here and simply assume that everything that Foust comes up with is wrong and a distraction and like the product of a mole. You can take it or leave it if you'd rather be on Team B.
So to play the theory out here, let me explain:
o If you invoke the "20,000" or "58,000" or more documents, it just sounds like so many as not to be "serious" -- there's that naif again, who "doesn't know what he's got". That disguises the fact that he's all too cunning and it may be much more planned.
o If you invoke all those zillions of docs, it makes it seem like Snowden's hack was random or opportunistic -- he was in Sector A today, so he dumped Sector B; tomorrow he happened to be in Sector Q so he dumped that, unwittingly, quickly, unable to see what he had for fear of being caught. The randomness and pointlessness of it then sounds like the sullen Chelsea Manning, unhappy at her job and situation and resentful of the government and vaguely upset about various "civic" issues, so she decides to just dump 200,000 docs *because she can*. You know, hacker nihilism. But that makes it seem like less of a crime. Vandalism more than espionage...
o If you invoke precise but very different numbers -- especially different versions of the story -- it's 9,000 -- no, it's 50,000 -- no, it's 58,000 -- you open up the story to reasonable doubts that none of it is true, or that there is some other unknown number that no one really has -- it's unknowable.
o But most importantly, if you invoke all these documents, you distract from the fact that the team "G9" may have worked together long before May 2013 with a wish list in order to harm the NSA the most -- both because the war on the NSA that hackers have announced even more than a year ago, and as part of the Assange-led operation to whack hard at the NSA -- which was begun long before Snowden and which is prefigured in his Democracy Now! interview about Binney.
Foust says that the differing numbers help us realize that maybe they are lying -- but what he finds more interesting is the notion that Snowden and his co-conspirators cannot possibly have read everything -- it is not physically or humanly possible. So then he concludes that therefore, he cannot control damage (much as Manning couldn't when she leaked zillions of reports of battles that contained sensitive information and names that could harm sources of the US military and US soldiers themselves):
So when we combine all of this — the constantly upward-revised number
of documents Snowden stole, combined with his clearly dishonest claim
that he carefully read all of them — a troubling picture emerges. Edward
Snowden could not have read all of these documents, nor could he
possibly have the understanding to contextualize and explain them to
anyone else. Moreover, the journalists who have helped him push this lie
into the public have, themselves, lied about both the content of these
documents (namely, the damage that would result from unredacted
disclosure) and their extent.
This leaves me with the same question that’s been bugging me since
this whole scandal picked up speed. If the source, and the journalists
closest to him, are lying — constantly — why on earth should we trust
them to report on their documents honestly? At this point, I have no
faith that they will do so — and I think it is safe to assume that if
they find evidence that the law is followed, or a document exonerating
the President, they will refuse to publish it because it would weaken
their argument.
So all of this sounds important and sincere and it's why the IC crowd licks it up.
But here's the thing. It distracts. It distracts from the other much more likely scenario, in my view: that Assange, Appelbaum, Poitras and Greenwald had a wishlist of the kinds of documents they needed to make the best case they could, they tasked Snowden to find the documents, and he willingly cooperated, and they produced them.
Like this: "We need to influence the German elections". "We need to get business afraid." "We need to get the geeks who do the crypto standards really freaked." "We need to convince ordinary Americans that the feds are in their cat pics." etc. So go get docs A, B, C that do those things.
When Manning talked to Lamo in his famous chat whose logs were published in Wired, he had a grab-bag of soup to nuts. He had the Vatican doing something bad one day -- he looked it up because he hated the Pope for supposedly encroaching on his sexuality, as so many online types do, so he went looking for a cover-up of a child abuse scandal. Or he had something in Iceland another day because he had to show "proof of life" to Assange that he knew that they were watching him, to prove he really had what he said he had; or he had some other random thing some other day, not linked by any larger scheme, but more to do with this or that personal agenda or beef. Then Assange, the older, more cunning and wiser mind, puts him up to this or that thing to hack as it suits his larger agenda.
It's my view that Assange already knew that he could make a huge propagandistic splash with the "Collateral Murder" video and he got Manning to get it - and Manning may have seen it by then and may have readily agreed, then read further on in via the Internet (that's what it sounds like to me from his trial testimony although he never quite confesses that -- the prosecution says they found proof of his contact with Assange.)
But other than that, the 200,000 cables weren't particularly linked with sense; their leakage had a haphazard effect to them. For example, when Hillary went to Kazakhstan, then they might find something from Central Asia to embarrass her, but neglect to publish the Uzbekistan cables to embarass her on the next stop of her trip -- they just weren't really caring. Or when Holbrooke died, they might pull up something about him but totally accidently, as something related to something else about Pollack. Or when they wanted to stick it to MasterCard which wouldn't take their payments, they would dig around until they found the "scandal" of the US Embassy in Moscow helping MasterCard try to win some contract with the Russians (not a scandal, as all embassies are tasked to help US business abroad as part of their lawful mission, and those not hostile to capitalism don't have a problem with this.)
By contrast, the Snowden "oevre" is much, much more methodical in its selection, meaning and impact. Snowden isn't hurting the NSA and our country because he's random (as Foust implies) but because he and his comrades know exactly how to best inflict the wounds -- and when.
THE MEANING AND TIMING OF SNOWDENS' LEAKS
Now that Al Jazeera (who else!) has made a helpful timeline of all of Snwden's leak-stories, you can get it more clearly -- it is designed to attack various segments of civil society and/or the state or professions in order to weaked the country as a whole.
This kind of attack waged symbolic figure-by-symbolic figure is summed up in the famous saying against the Nazis "First they came for the communists, etc" but it's also in fact the way the communists themselves killed civil society in any country they infiltrated -- kill priests, trade union leaders, scientists, writers, picking out various figures, then hollow out the groups or institutions or bodies they ran and simulate them only with the communist ideology.
So in similar fashion, this attack on our country starts with the Verizon telephone info +leak from the business accounts, because that would scare business -- business, when affected, moves markets, shapes public opinion, because that's where the money is. Everybody holds a cell phone in their hand; many people have Verizon as their carrier. Instant impact.
The first leak also presented the very misleading PRISM slides that made it seem falsely as if the government could snoop in everybody's Facebook at will. Everybody's on Facebook.
Then next leak attacked the big tech companies like Apple or Google and made it seem as if they were in bed with the government -- to tap in the free-floating animosity that is out there against these big companies that dominate our lives, and also make them see that a slogan like "Don't Be Evil" from Google was fake and a lie.
The list of cyberattack sites was supposed to add to the sense that the US was the most evil country in the world waging war on other countries first -- and of course came just in time for the flight to Hong Kong to be useful to the Chinese.
The "Boundless Informant" leak about global surveillance that impacted Americans if they were connected to foreigners was supposed to undermine the government's key argument about all this - that yes, it monitored foreigners because it had to in a dangerous world, but it didn't spy on our own people. This leak, like others, wasn't about substance but about reputational sabotage and undermining. It's like the Saul Alinsky method (which originates in the Lenin method) of freezing a target and calling attention to ways that it is "unlike itself" or "not true to its ideals" and the opposite of what it seems like, to discredit it and make it seem as if things that are far worse (China, Russia) are good by contrast.
Then came the leak of Snowden himself, so that he could differentiate himself from the legions of Anonymous and LulzSec who always lack credibility because they don't name their names and Americans tend to then find them duplicitious and not leading up to their ideals of "transparency" if they can't do it for themselves -- as with WikiLeaks. So Snowden took care of that credibility problem in a second, even as -- in my view -- he and Jacob Appelbaum likely had some other anonymous or Anonymous help in this caper.
Then comes of course more leaks on how the US spies on China -- to make the package attractive to China -- and then spying on the G20 in 2009 -- just as Russia is gearing up for the G20 (that just passed) and with all its sins against dissidents, LGBT, and migrants, has to appear "holier than thou". Perfect timing.
The Skype leak was meant particularly for legions of people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union who use Skype, which originated in an Estonian company who use Skype for their personal phone calls because they can't afford expensive smart phones. It's a particular favourite for large diasporas and labor migrant populations. Sure, we all use Skype, but some people use Skype all day long and are particularly wedded to it in some places -- and if that massive group of people could now worry that someone was spying on their chats with babushka, that could undermine faith in America, blame America first, and gather support for Snowden, who might otherwise be seen as a strange defector going in the wrong direction.
Someone should really vet the Al Jazeera descriptions to see if they are accurate, but assuming they are more or less descriptions, you can go on and on. Each leak has a really specific reputational sabotage goal. The leaks never show any specific case of anyone actually spied on wrongfully or illegally or any concrete data even about blanket statements made, i.e. "The NSA spied on the G20" or "the NSA spied on the EU" and therefore "X was learned about Y and Z action was taken."
GERMAN AND OTHER ELECTIONS
Laura Poitras piece in Der Spiegel about the spying on the EU, as well as the spying on Germany specifically, was meant to influence the German elections. It was meant to distract from the fact that Merkel was challenging Russia over legitimate issues from human rights to Gazprom and distract to make the US the problem for Germany, not Russia. The German left from the Pirate Party to the Greens to the SDP naturally don't like the Americans and are indifferent or even friendly to Russia and all these leaks served that agenda. "NSA Keeps Tabs on Ordinary Germans," screams the headlines and these parties put people out into the streets protesting instantly by the tens of thousands. This is like the 1980s when they would scream about American missiles planned for deployment and never Russian missiles already pointed right at them.
Then over to Australia for a leak also tied to elections there, and Snowden's dramatic Sheremeytevo sojourn. Then more on individual emails supposedly being vacuumed up -- then the big black budget leaked just in time for Congressional debates about the deficit. There's much more -- it would take a very lengthy post to analyze it all - but skip to the news that gasp, the US spies on Brazil -- just when Glenn needs a boost after not publishing for awhile, and when his husband, David Miranda has been caught at the airport as a mule with sticks given him by Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras in Germany to ferry to Glenn via London.
DO THEY IMPROVISE OR IS THERE A PLAN?
Now, at which point are these people improvising and playing catch-up - as they might have been with the Brazil leaks or others -- although the Brazilian leader is due for a big banquet in Washington soon that may get cancelled -- and which are they strategically following a road map of world events and groups of people or countries they need to target?
A recent leak targeted the crypto community itself, opening up the idea that even the standards and algorithms themselves upon which all the edifices of things like SSL and https are built could be on shaky, manipulated ground. That was to undermine everything about the NSA completely as an entreprise, all those who worked for it, and even all those who talked to the NSA in various standards committees or conferences in the corporate world. Very thorough, this Bolshevik-like undermining and hollowing out of civil society,the professions, the trust in government.
But had they started with that, they would have lost their audience. Only nerds care about things like secure sockets and algorithms. Only professors and think tankers care about things like the G20 or the EU. If you want to get Americans' attentions, you have to go first to their businesses, their phones in their hands, their Facebooks and imply that the feds are in there.
So...How could people just grabbing a huge trove of docs be certain they could affect the German or Australian elections, or the G20 meetings, or Congressional budget debates or your fear for your cat pictures' lives? Either they have to be extremely nimble on their feet, or they had a plan and searched for the materials that would fit that plan first. I think it's the latter.
DID SNOWDEN PLAN ALL THIS?
It's hard to believe that Snowden himself, a 30-year-old narcissist whose interests ran to anime and computer forums and his pole-dancing girlfriend was really a huge student of world affairs. To be sure, he was stationed at the UN in Geneva and maybe absorbed some of it in his job, but he didn't seem to speak in the Ars Technica forum discussions with any huge geopolitical depth -- he was mainly interested in chatting about his theories of international finance and currencies and stocks, like all gold bug sorts are on forums. When he puts on his deep voice to impress the women and tells us that China isn't really an enemy because we have trade to link us, he just sounds ignorant even about the massive Chinese hacking right in his own field, which his own clients and government bosses must have been preoccupied with -- he never mentions it.
So that's where Assange, Greenwald, and others (don't forget Ewan McCaskill who is the most silent of all these partners) come in to tell him what to hack.
Now, I'm well aware that these people are incredibly savvy about 1st amendment precedents and the Pentagon Papers and British libel and terrorist laws (perhaps not so savvy about the latter given the Miranda episode) and they may be fully cognizant of how close to the line of commissioning hacks they can come to without looking like actual co-conspirators in espionage. I think that's why none of them will tell us a straight story on their dates of contact with Snowden or the processes for moving the docs.
But I think any or all of them are capable of, er, shaping what young Ed got up to. I'm willing to bet real money that Snowden, who didn't seem to go to any international conferences, hacker or otherwise, wasn't the one who thought up the idea of undermining the geek community's belief in standards -- that had to have been Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, world conference goer.
WHAT SCRIPTS DID THEY USE TO MOVE AND ENCRYPT THOSE FILES?
And how did they torrent those files? What was the script they used to torrent those many docs?Hey, was it the same one Aaron Swartz used? Was it the one Bradley Manning was given or taught about by MIT hackers (Danny Clark and others)? Appelbaum was in Boston and knew these same hackers. Swartz FOIA'd himself to see what the feds might know about his massive torrenting activities and that's where I came up with the theory that he was related to either the Manning case or the WikiLeaks grand jury.
SECRET SHARERS?
Several people working night and day might still have a hard time coming up with this timetable of strategically leaked documents, however. For example, let's just take the innocent activities of human rights activists who want to raise cases during international events -- something I've done many times myself. Endless phone calls, memos, emails, travel plans, picketing permissions, visas can go into trying to become involved in something like an EU or G20 meeting -- writing up talking points or bullet points or manifestos takes time.
So they went full tilt on all this and maybe they did it all themselves but...I think they had help.
And maybe help they themselves didn't know they had.
STOPPING THAT SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DAILY WORKER
I'm drawn repeately to the fact that Snowden stops talking on line by 2009 or so. He may come back for one or two remarks to Ars Technica, but all his activity stops around them -- he's just not visible. Nowhere. His anime site -- nowhere. It's like the proverbial case of the guy who stops his subscription to the Daily Worker, so he won't look like he's a communist connected to the CP before he actually goes to work as a spy for the Soviets. Like that.
Example of a scenario: Snowden is recruited in Geneva or Tokyo years ago by Russian intelligence or their allies and they set this hack up. Gradually, he gets the wish list from them and gets it. But obviously, they need believable conduits. So they approach Greenwald and co. who know nothing of the previous recruitment or the wish-listing at all. Plausible deniability. Cut-outs.
Or there is someone else in this "chain of custody" who is working with Russian intelligence who makes suggestions about what is needed to "make the case" -- and that's when Snowden goes to Booz Hamilton to hack even more, and every specifically -- not just randomly downloading 50,000 units at all.
See, that's where Foust's story really breaks apart -- we all know Snowden went to work deliberately at Booz -- a person just randomly hacking and downloading megabytes would not do that.
MORE THAN HUMAN
As for this "not humanly possible stuff" -- well, this is More Than Human. There are all kinds of computer (duh) programs that can scan files and pick out key words and phrases and organize them for you. Even just going and clicking the start button on your PC and getting the file search can do some of that in a pinch. So they plug in the terms like "EU" or "encryption standards" or "email" and get what they get as needed. No need to read zillions of boring docs, some of which may have been fetched merely because they were technical systems manuals, or lists of names and phone numbers.
In just a few grabs over a few months, Aaron Swartz had something like 1.7 million files from JSTOR which he did search -- in fact, the alibi floated for him was that he was merely getting Big Data to research his theories about corporate funding and its affect on academia and published articles. So 50,000 docs is childs' play. People keep emails by the tens of thousands -- and yet search them instantly and effectively. So that's that.
Far from being guilty merely of trying to harm us because they don't know what they have, like children playing with matches, I think we are dealing with a sophisticated enemy that knows precisely how to harm us and our allies and is working with a roadmap. What's next?
Jacob Appelbaum and William Binney at the Whitney in April 2012 (Poitras, not visible in the photo, is also on the platform). Photo by Audrey Penven.
BY CATHERINE A. FITZPATRICK
Read my new book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack on Kindle or Scribd.
Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press / Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out quick but when they will I can only guess /
Pincus' article tracks with the sense a number of us have who have been following these radical activists long before the Snowden story broke that these people all knew each other long before, and collaborated much closer than they admit to bring about the Snowden defection to Russia.
It's my conviction, too, that they all have known each other a long time, and that if they hadn't found Snowden, or recruited him, they'd have to invent him. And maybe they did -- the fable he tells -- and which Greenwald repeats -- about the "direct access" between IT companies' servers and the NSA is, in my view, one of the greatest active measures of our time against the United States. It's an active measure that fits into a whole series of attacks by anarchist hacker movements related to Anonymous, WikiLeaks and Occupy who have either been used by Russian and Chinese intelligence or have colluded with them from the beginning, as I describe in this long time-line.
Sure, my basis for these contentions is basically just a hunch based on tracking how these people behave or a long period of time, but it's based on repeated experience of seeing how they operate; how they edge-case and obfuscate and distract about their motives and actions. I always feel with these people that it's like playing Monopoly when you're kids, and you invent all these extra rules, like "if you roll the dice and ding my hotel on Boardwalk, you have to pay me $100 in damages" -- and then endless arguments about whether the dice really came near the hotel, or whether it was really $100 you agreed on.
Walter Pincus' contention that Greenwald had a prior relationship with WikiLeaks and his story had essentially been "previewed" or shaped by them came from two things -- a video interview with Julian Assange on Democracy Now! on May 29 2013 before Greenwald's story came out -- which was also about Stellar Wind and how the NSA purportedly invades privacy -- and a story that he saw on WikiLeaks' website by Greenwald about the NSA.
Greenwald flew at him like a bat out of hell with corrections to what he implied were outrageous errors -- in fact Assange had been talking about the NSA's eavesdropping programs in the past and (supposedly) didn't have the information about PRISM (yet); and Greenwald first published his piece on Salon.com, and WikiLeaks' blog just reprinted it later, which is why it appeared as if it came from them.
But these aren't substantive corrections; they're the sort of technical error that Greenwald thrives on discovering to distract from a reader's catching him out in the bigger picture of his seeming collusion.
And the reason they aren't substantive is because indeed, Appelbaum and Poitras did indeed prefigure (that's the word I'd use) the Edward Snowden story with ex-NSA employee William Binney more than a year previously in New York at the Whitney Museum (I was there and blogged it and it was also online, along with interviews with Democracy Now!) at a "Surveillance Teach-in". And Greenwald has indeed shilled for WikiLeaks for years, and not been honest about admitting that both Poitras and Appelbaum had radical histories of anti-government activist that led to US agents stopping them at borders for questioning.
You can view Binney as a trial run or a stress test or a beta and you can view Snowden as 2.0; but the fact is, they are written from the same code.
Greenwald succeeded in stirring up an uproar and getting the tech and lefty media echo chamber to make that uproar even more fierce against Pincus, who was associated long ago with the CIA and hated by the "progressives" and libertarians. (They made it seem as if it was some outrageous crime against journalistic ethics that he took awhile to research and respond to the attacks with some corrections, but it was within a few days). But this shouldn't distract from the essential truths that Pincus was stumbling on and all of these things bear re-examination.
Why is it important to show that these people in fact knew each other in the past, and collaborated on this story earlier than we knew and aren't telling us everything? Well, not only to show that if they lie about this thing, they could be lying about the entire NSA story (and I believe they are); but we can see more clearly the deeper activist agenda they have and the larger plot involving WikiLeaks assault on America, with Russian help.
As I explained in my long timeline, the purpose is to weaken and discredit America as a champion of Internet freedom; to claim that it is a hypocrite and not true to its ideals; to act as if it is no different than the surveillance states of Russia and China; and to make it seem as if the "sovereign Internet" plans of these authoritarian governments then are justified due to the discreditation of both US commercial and government involvement in the World Wide Web.
So here are the topics that all bear re-visiting on the Snowden story and further investigation:
GLENN GREENWALD'S RELATIONSHIP TO WIKILEAKS
Glenn did not just discover WikiLeaks when he worked with Appelbaum this year to handle the Snowden story, and that's why his neuralgic reaction to Pincus' claim that he was published directly by WikiLeaks is so silly.
I spoke this morning at length with Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks’ Editor, regarding the increasingly aggressive war being waged against WikiLeaks by numerous government agencies, including the Pentagon.
Many people didn't really tune into Assange until November 2010, when he leaked the State Department cables; the war cables didn't get as much attention in the mainstream media although the anti-war and leftist media covered them. Likely Greenwald goes back further than March 2010, but I believe this is his first major defense.
In early November 2010, Glenn also wrote about the people who were being harassed at the border for their support of WikiLeaks -- he wrote about hackers David House and Jacob Appelbaum. He notes that Appelbaum addressed him openly on Twitter about how his equipment wasn't returned after border searchers. (Appelbaum openly supported and fund-raised for WikiLeaks when he took Assange's place at a hacker's conference, and is widely believed to have been deeply involved in WikiLeaks, which had its start in the use of the circumvention software named Tor which Appelbaum develops and whose non-profit organization he heads.)
In 2010, Greenwald also got into an epic fight with Wired over their spilling of a chat log between Manning and the hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned out to be an FBI information -- he had become alarmed at the kinds of secrets Manning was going to spill when he was contacted by him (they had mutual contacts in the MIT hackers' community), and he decided to report him to the FBI. Greenwald mounted the same sort of savage and hysterical attack on Keven Poulsen, Wired editor (no angel he; a former indicted hacker from the phone phreakers era) over what he felt was disloyalty and endangerment of Manning and also incomplete disclosure of the full texts of the IRC channel chat logs, which he felt was damning. Poulsen said at the time that full disclosure had not been made merely to protect features of Manning's private life like his transgender status and ultimately ended up publishing the whole thing.
(See, if you're going to get into a fight with hackers or over hacking, bring your own trusted hacker to the fight; that was poor Walter Pincus' biggest mistake.)
Said Lamo at the time:
Unfortunately, the appearance of that source turned out to be suspiciously convenient. Described in the Salon article as "a well-known hacker of the Tor Project who has known Lamo for years," Appelbaum has other associations - namely as a high-level volunteer for Wikileaks.org, who has personally met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (who started the site with documents stolen via the above-mentioned Tor Project) and has been tracked to the same location as Assange as recently as this year. And it's clear that Assange and Appelbaum share a huge vested interest in trying to discredit me and exonerate Manning, with Assange even allegedly sending Wikileaks.org lawyers to try to defend Manning.
See, Glenn failed to do this little thing -- explain in his Salon story that Appelbaum wasn't just the Tor guy but was a huge WikiLeaks supporter -- and as many believe, engineer/helper/encryption maven/whatever. Greenwald then said rather unconvincingly that he just didn't know that about Appelbaum, he just hadn't read the news. As always with Greenwald when he literalizes and edge-cases like this, there's little you can do. Everyone else following this topic knew about Jake -- he says he didn't. Oh, well.
It's awfully similar to the way that Glenn didn't really explain in his angry rebuttal to Pincus that he really had no call getting so angry about being accused of publishing on WikiLeaks blog because good Lord, he's been stumping for WikiLeaks constantly since 2010, from their lips to his ear. And it's awfully similar to the way that Glenn's story about the way in which he first heard from Snowden has some kinks in it or his omission of crucial information about Poitas (see below).
Greenwald has long been a close contact supporter of Appelbaum; last April 2012, he tweeted support of his Democracy Now! "prefigure" video (as I call it) about the NSA.
WIRED BREAKS STORY OF NSA EAVESDROPPING
James Bamford of Wired broke the story of a new facility being built in Utah and the Stellar Wind program in March 2012. It would be interesting to see if he ever dealt with Appelbaum or Poitras but maybe not, given possible antagonism between Kevin Poulsen, Wired editor, and Appelbaum over the Manning/Lamo chat logs that "betrayed the hacker movement". And wouldn't it be funny if this grave breach of our national security was rooted only in a pissing match and turf war over a couple of haxxors?
I remember when the story came out, and it didn't really get much attention beyond the nerd pack. But he does mention William Binney -- who is about to make his Democracy Now! debut the next month and be featured even on the mainstream nytimes.com then in August 2012.
But just as Greenwald had failed to tell his readers in the Wired epic clash that his hacker friend Appelbaum worked for WikiLeaks (he claimed he didn't know yet), so Greenwald failed to tell his readers why Poitras was being stopped at the border, really -- not because of her criticism of the US government, but for an incident involving allegations that she knew about an ambush of US troops while embedded with insurgents in Iraq covering the war, but didn't tell them.
Ever since, this MacArthur genius award fellow and Pop Tech speaker and beloved film-maker of the anti-war movement has been stopped at the border, yes, because the US government continues its investigation of this and other incidents.
I don't know whether the New York Times didn't know of these allegations in August 2012, when they published her tendentious film on William Binney, "The Program," on the nytimes.com site as an "op-ed piece". But this film also -- to use my word -- "prefigures" the Greenwald story of Snowden.
Important contradiction: The Weekly Standard notes that Laura Poitras denies being on the roof at all before the ambush. But in her interview with Maass, now Poitras says she accompanied the family of the doctor she was filming up to the roof several times. Now she admits she was on the roof. Maass tries to frame this story to her advantage by saying that Iraqi troops, backed by US troops, raided a mosque. Of course, terrorists misused mosques to hide in all the time, and bombed mosques as well in the Iraq war and still do. Whether or not the US committed a wrong here can't distract from the question of whether Poitras knew of the ambush or not.
LAURA POITRAS' ASSOCIATION WITH WIKILEAKS, HACKER AND CRYPTO PARTY MOVEMENTS
Peter Maass praises Poitras' skills in defeating surveillance from US government agencies she has actively opposed as a radical film-maker. She learned these skills, as she recounts it, from Jacob Appelbaum, developer of Tor, the circumvention software originally developed by the US Navy which has been involved in a number of controversies. Appelbaum has also been wanted for questioning by the WikiLeaks grand jury after he openly took Assange's place at the HOPE hacker conference and actively worked for WL.
Photo by Daniil Vasiliev.
Poitras appears to be the person seated here at the right who attended a Crypto Party, i.e. an event arranged by a hackers' movement to teach activists to encrypt as can be seen from this picture by Daniil Vasilyev.
A week before Glenn Greenwald's story broke and then Gellman's story appeared, Assange gave an interview to Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! about the Stellar Wind program at NSA. Pincus felt that the story line was so similar -- the evil NSA eavesdropping on all our email and telephone communications -- that he described this as a "preview' of Greenwald's story -- as if Assange knew about Glenn's story and was plotting with him and this constituted proof.
I think Greenwald, Appelbaum, and Poitras (or any one or two out of the three) alerted Assange to the big story of Snowden about to break. How could they not? Maybe Greenwald and Poitras aren't especially close to Assange but Appelbaum is, and he'd also have the chops to make encrypted comms with him to reach Assange's comfort level. He'd also want to vet Snowden through Assange to avoid all of them getting burned, I should think. After all, while we think of these people as constantly winning in their struggle with America, they're paranoid and playing victim all the time and imagine they'll be stung at any moment. How could they be sure he's the real deal?
I believe the proof of authenticity was a quest given to Snowden to get an example of bugged communications that the hackers Appelbaum or Assange would know about or suspect, to see if Snowden would a) get the goods and b) help their side out. When Snowden tells Poitras and Appelbaum in the Der Spiegel article about "the suspected hacker's girlfriend" whose cell phone abroad was ostensibly snooped on, I think that is the story; that's the quest he had to fulfill. That suspected hacker is either Appelbaum himself, and the girlfriend is a friend who is a girl in Boston (a story he tells in his Berlin speech of July 25, 2013 where he's anxiously trying to line up narratives to match his digital footprint), or someone like Quinn Norton, the ex-girlfriend of suspected hacker Aaron Swartz -- or perhaps someone else in this circle. I was told this was a manual hack and not a Stellar Wind scrape, but no matter; the quest trophy is similar to the one Bradley Manning brought to Assange in the form of an Iceland cable that showed Assange was under surveillance.
Since Greenwald has bent over backward so hard to discount ANY connection between Assange and his "prefigurement" story and his own work, it's worth looking at closely:
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, let’s look at this phenomena from two aspects. Don’t be deceived by what appears to be small maneuvers by the Department of Justice to go after AP, to go after Rosen, to go after us, etc. We have over here the bulk surveillance industry run by the National Security Agency that already has all these records. It has them all already. The National Security Agency—and this has come out in one court case after another—was involved in a project called Stellar Wind to collect all the calling records of the United States, every record of everyone calling everyone over years. And the result of that lay out the entire community and political structure, based upon who people are friends with. You can infer that by who calls who, and what the status is by the relative flow of calls around the country, to suck out the entire community structure of the United States. That has already been done. Those calling records already enter into the national security complex.
What we’re talking about here are mechanisms to use that information in a court case, and therefore it has to be clean. This is the dirty team; this is the clean team. And so, these are maneuvers to pull people into court cases that will become public to set a deterrent against national security journalism. And the most pernicious aspect of that is the abuse of the Espionage Act and other mechanisms to try and conflate the activities of a source with the activities of a journalist or a publisher, and to try and say that whenever a journalist deals with a source, they’re in fact engaged in a conspiracy. And if there’s an allegation—of course, allegations can be very easily made, placed on the table, just invented from thin air—that a source’s behavior affects national security and is therefore espionage, and therefore, extend that allegation over to the journalist and to the source—and to the publisher. In the case of Rosen, they have done that in order to get at Rosen’s emails and other records, to then back reflect onto the source or onto other sources. You know, it is simply a disgrace. It is unethical conduct. It is politically worrying conduct. It is chilling conduct. And it is—why is it being done? Because they believe they can get away with it. It is part of advancing the frontier of the national security state to roll on over the First Amendment and every other traditionally accepted U.S. value.
Note how Assange strives to get us to look away from the IRS or AP story, ultimately, and look at the larger NSA picture (because that would be personally about Obama and his Administration and WikiLeaks has always gone through these shenanigans to appear as if they are not attacking Obama, but the security state actually built under Bush).
The problem of "conflating a source with a journalist" is of course the very problem Greenwald now faces regarding Snowden.
I could add as an aside that the claim of "sucking the community structure out of the US" (which I believe to be a gross exageration) is something actually foretold by The Sims Online and Second Life, which I always try to explain are testing grounds for hacker movements and Big IT and anyone else who shows up anonymously. The "balloon connections" invented by Will Wright, inventor of the Sims (which he's still tinkering with in other settings) made vivid the whole social tree of everyone online in that world; map-tracking of avatars online in Second Life and then later the proximity data scraped by the short-lived SL Watch also accomplished the same thing of showing how everyone related to everyone else, and how often and how close. These sparked huge outrages about privacy violations in these communities and while people laugh at virtual world problems, in fact we inhabitants of these worlds were the first completely digitalized people (at least as far as our avatars went) who got to see first-hand what it would be like living in the Panopticon we're getting today in real life on the Internet at large.
So -- sure, Greenwald has the alibi that Assange is talking about the sort of larger issue of privacy and the Panopticon that I myself might discuss or Evgeny Morozov or anybody, and it's not really a preview of Snowden. Except, well, it is. We know it in our hearts.
THE DISCREPANCIES IN THE STORY OF HOW GREENWALD FIRST CONTACTED SNOWDEN
There are at least five different version of this story and they bear a close analysis, even if it's boring, because they contain important clues, working backwards:
“Anybody who wants to accuse me or anyone at the Guardian of aiding and abetting Snowden has the obligation to point to any specific evidence to support that accusation,” Greenwald told me. “Otherwise they’re just spouting reckless innuendo.”
“We had early conversations about setting up encryption, so we worked early on to set that up,” Greenwald says. “We didn’t work on any documents. I didn’t even know Edward Snowden’s name or where he worked until after he was in Hong Kong with the documents. Anyone who is claiming that somehow I worked with him to get those documents or helped him is just lying.”
Well, maybe people thought that because he said that he was in touch with Snowden in February in the other version of the story; but Greenwald's response to the confrontation from people on Twitter was merely to call them names.
In a tweet arguing with Joseph Weisenthal, Executive Editor of Business Insider (@TheStalwart) on Twitter confronting him about timeline issues, Glenn wrote:
Glenn apparently felt upstaged by Bart Gellman, who worked with Laura Poitras on a separate story for the Washington Post on Snowden.
The reason this timing matters is because people began to wonder, once they heard the revelation from Snowden in his June 24 interview with the South China Morning Post that he had deliberately joined Booz, Allen in order to "hack moar," as the kids say, whether Greenwald knew about this plot and was in on it.
And the people confronting Glenn on this are not exactly conservatives or neocons; here's a Hillary supporter and Twitter developer, Zach Green, who asks:
He emailed me back in December of last year, anonymously, and said something along the lines of “I and a few other people have some things that you’d be interested in. The problem is we can only communicate with you by encrypted email, so do you have PGP encryption?” I answered him and said “I’ll do it in the next couple of days and then you can email me back.” And he emailed in a few days and said “Did you do it yet?” and I said, “No, I haven’t done it yet,” and then he sent me step-by-step instructions — encryption for idiots, basically.
At this point I still didn’t know who he was or what he had. I frequently get people saying, “I have a huge thing for you,” and the vast majority of the time it turns out to be bullshit. So I didn’t prioritize it, but after a couple of days he wrote me back, and I still hadn’t done it. Then he made me a step-by-step video that he posted on YouTube about how to install and use PGP encryption. But I still didn’t do it, and so then he got frustrated and went to Laura Poitras, who he knew I had worked with and was friends with, because she does have encryption, and he said, “I’m going to give this stuff to you and then get Glenn involved.”
So I almost lost one of the biggest leaks in national-security history because I didn’t bother to install encryption.
Of course, Glenn gets furious when people nail him on this discrepancy because he can explain it away by saying the email contact from Snowden in December 2012 (possibly under a pseudonymn) (or earlier, as he is now telling Maass) and the handing of the documents from Hong Kong in May 2013 were really two different things, or stages in the same process of first trying to vet Snowden and see if he was useful and authentic.
But it is important to note that he tells the story differently, emphasizing different things and to probe further -- is it November or December or even earlier? And how can we establish this outside the circular loop of Greenwald and the other close-knit circle closely guarding this secret?
Greenwald said Snowden made him a training video and uploaded it to Youtube. Where is it? Can Greenwald provide a link? What was the date of its upload?
So naturally I've been scouring all the PGP how-tos uploaded seven months ago or six months ago that might fit the timeline (did Snowden learn languages?), but there are lots of them and one can't be sure which low-view video could be his (and he may have removed it by now. Somebody could methodically study that, but it occurred to me that Snowden could also avoid having to repeat the wheel and leave clues about himself online by using someone else's training video, oh, Jacob Appelbaum's, for example, in his surveillance workshop of April 28, 2012 in New York. That might not be a for-dummies enough explanation (I'd have to study it more) but there it is. Somewhere, there is (was) a PGP training video with Snowden's fingerprints.
Let's pause for a sec and wonder how Greenwald, so enamored of WikiLeaks and reporting natsec stuff all the time, wouldn't have a PGP, but that's what he says.
So this "different version" in a sense "tracks' because it's involves Snowden, a first-time contact who is frustrated, Poitras is involved, then they come back to Greenwald later. Still -- it all bears scrutiny.
As Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the story, pointed out on “Morning Joe” today, this wasn’t a WikiLeaks-style data dump. “[Snowden] spent months meticulously studying every document,” Greenwald said. “He didn’t just upload them to the Internet.”
Months.
But Snowden didn't get his job at Booz, Allen where he could go back to serious NSA hacking until March 2013. So he had like...month. Not months.
Unless he started hoarding stuff while working as the NSA contractor at Dell. BTW, what connection does Dell have to the NSA?
THE PGP KEYS
Naturally, the hordes of script kiddies out there in the IRC channels like little busy hornets are always available to crowd-source and look at stuff like this and even turn against their own when they feel like somebody's story just doesn't add up. That is, even people who are four-square against the NSA and are for hacking the hell out of anything might turn on Greenwald if they were on the Wired side of the epic fight (or Wired itself). Wired's story about the NSA's new hive was overshadowed, big-time, by Snowden via Greenwald. That's why I think we may live to see the day of the great Wired takedown of Greenwald. Don't forget Greenwald (and Snowden above all) were exposed as mistaken/ignorant about tech in their "direct access" story from the PRISM slides.
Naturally, since Jacob Appelbaum went to Hawaii in April 2012 and again in April 2013 to celebrate his birthday, right when Edward Snowden was also there, we're all wondering. LibertyLynx broke this story from a reliable source who had noticed the "alibi video" Jake desperately made in Berlin trying to explain the reason for something he feared NSA analysts might have noticed -- that he was in Hawaii in April 2013 when Snowden was also there (and I could add - in April 2012 when Snowden was already there, too).
And it's important to know (because some newspapers are muddled on this and Pincus tripped on this and then Greenwald whacked him) that Snowden goes back to March 2012 in Hawaii. Talking Points Memo fetched that out of his girlfriend's blog -- and I saw her blog before she deleted it and it was definitely there as a timeline she described (and you can still find her blog in the Wayback Machine).
The Times is the only source I've seen (correct me if I'm wrong) that posits a segue between Dell and BAH where his hacking for the ultimate great revelation starts at Dell, and gives him reason then to move to BAH.
In what may have been his last job for Dell in Hawaii, he was responsible for the security of “Windows infrastructure” in the Pacific, he wrote, according to people who have seen his résumé. He had enough access there to start making contacts with journalists in January and February about disclosing delicate information. His work for Dell may also have enabled him to see that he would have even more access at Booz Allen
Somewhere in the numerous Appelbaum videos online, somebody might someday find some "windows infrastructure" help-desking (naturally Appelbaum loathes Windows) or some clue that will tie them together more intimately in Hawaii. For now, it's only same state, same time, but we don't know if Jake passed through Honolulu to talk to his future WikiLeaks protege Ed in April 2012 or April 2013.
Of course, the essence of hackers is to be online and be anonymous and "exist in cyberspace". But for virtual worlders, they do in fact spend a lot of time in meet-ups and conferences and hackathons and teach-ins and whatnot, and that's what has to be studied. December 2012 at 29c3 (the Chaos Communications Club conference) is when Appelbaum openly recruited government programmers to "leave the dark side" and come join his chaos club...
From Snowden's girlfriend's now-deleted blog, we also have an indication that Edward flew somewhere in March 2013 for a week or so "on business". To Maui, 100 miles away, to see Jacob Appelbaum and other hackers at the Spring Break of Code? An even that Appelbaum first described as a birthday gift for a vacation that he spent with 20 of his friends, but is described by other people at the Spring Break of Code as an event they organized in January to encourage young coders intereset in privacy encryption. If they are separate events, they intersect, but maybe they aren't. Snowden may have also flown to the mainland, possibly for BHA training at this time -- this is March-April 2013 before he fled Hawaii to Hong Kong.
Yes, surprise, surprise, these folks, spearheaded by Gramps, as I've called the Grateful Dead's John Perry Barlow in several heated debates in person, raised a bunch of dough to help out WikiLeaks, whose coffers were emptying out in the past year because they had trouble getting payment providers after PayPal and MasterCard and such blocked them.
But this isn't a smoking gun so much as a gun that was due to go off in the first act years ago, as Chekhov would say. These people have long been working together before, as we've seen. They grace the masthead of this operation with various other lesser known hacker types because they felt that flush from their victory defeating SOPA/PIPA and CISPA -- legislation to regulate intellectual property and cybersecurity and privacy, of all things -- they should move on to bigger projects like tackling the security state more ambitiously with WikiLeaks.
One could ask questions about in which form FPF, a 501-c-3 nonprofit organization raises money to WikiLeaks, and whether it is going to Assange's private entity, which is a for-profit business that is not a 501-c-3 equivalent overseas. They could be in violation of charity law if they are not exercising expenditure responsibility and keeping to nonprofit activity.
Of course, there are other operations that do this work and probably have even more political clout, like Access, which has the ubiquitous former Googler (and former White House tech official and former just about everything else) Andrew McLoughlin.
They're also leading the charge on the NSA issue -- who knew?! And there is an entire network of these organizations, and they literally get millions from the Soros Foundations and other "progressives".
CONNECTION BETWEEN POITRAS AND APPELBAUM
These two were likely in Iraq together; she was there in 2004-2005 (when the ambush incident happened); Appelbaum was there in 2005 (which he brags about endlessly; he ran with the rebels and carried an AK47 himself).
We can't prove they ran into each other, but Laura refers to Appelbaum as her friend who helps her with encryption stuff at the time on several occasions.
Did you immediately know what was the best, most secure protocol to go about it?
I actually did. I have a lot of experience because I’ve been working with — as you note in your thing, I’ve done filming with WikiLeaks, I know Jacob Appelbaum. I already had encryption keys but what he was asking for was beyond what I was using in terms of security and anonymity.
How did it proceed from there?
So that’s where I’m not going into a lot of details, but sort of ongoing correspondence. I didn’t know, I didn’t have any biographical details or where he worked, had no idea. He made claims and said he had documentation. At that point it was all completely theoretical, but I had a feeling it was legit.
You know what jumps out here? The "I've done filming with WikiLeaks". Because her film on Binney posted on the Times doesn't seem like a WikiLeaks project and doesn't mention WikiLeaks; I don't know what she means, actually (before Snowden). And even with Snowden, her first interview with him doesn't make him a WikiLeaks "brand" or "mascot" -- it's her show, and Greenwald's show up to that point. This point bears more study.
"In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me," Appelbaum said. "She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her."
"She was in the process of putting questions together and thought that asking some specific technical questions was an important part of the source verification process. One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower. I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment. We sent our securely encrypted questions to our source. I had no knowledge of Edward Snowden's identity before he was revealed to the world in Hong Kong. He also didn't know who I was. I expected that when the anonymity was removed, we would find a man in his sixties."
EWEN MACASKILL
So there are still loose ends to tie up -- lots of them -- but one dog that hasn't barked is MacAskill. Who is he? That man has quite the low-impact online footprint! He's with the Guardian in Washington, and was in the hotel in New York with Poitras and Greenwald when all of this was going down.
1 June Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill and documentary maker Laura Poitras fly from New York to Hong Kong. They meet Snowden in a Kowloon hotel after he identifies himself with a Rubik's cube and begin a week of interviews with their source.
HACKERS CONVERGE ON HONG KONG
To come -- the other hackers who also were in Hong Kong at the time of Poitras, Appelbaum and Snowden; they may include Christine Corbett, a scientist and friend of Appelbaum and MIT hackers who was also at the Hawaii Spring Break of Code with Appelbaum.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
Poitras and Appelbaum were due in New York City in June 2013 at PS1 to do another happening like the one they had done at the Whitney in April 2012. They didn't show. They cancelled. Others, including Thomas Drake came in their place. I don't know why; I speculated openly on Twitter whether it was because they knew they might start facing a lot of questions about the timeline with Snowden.
Well, actually, now we do know why, because Appelbaum has decided to become an immigrant in Germany and apply for a resident permit, as he announced in his recent speech at the Technische Universitat in Munich. He believes US authorities will ask questions about his presence in Hawaii at the time Snowden was there and his ongoing support of WikiLeaks which has now culminated in a defection to Moscow. And Poitras has said she also fears returning to the US since her involvement in the Snowden story.
***
Now everything's a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped What's good is bad what's bad is good you'll find out when you reach the top You're on the bottom.I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed your eyes don't look Into mine
The Guardian somberly intones that the story isn't Edward Snowden (pay no attention to that little man behind the new Iron Curtain!) but the "real story" is "the Internet" (that thing Evgeny Morozov claims doesn't really exist, and some days, one could believe him when they see the Internet described like this, as a fragile thing shrinking from rumour and innuendo).
John Naughton's hysteria:
In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What
matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA)
had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of
citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone
records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has
been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.
But the NSA hasn't accessed the meaningful content of citizens' digital content across the world; it has at best scanned only metadata and at worst machine-scanned content of some flagged accounts for cause in order to make matches. This "secret court" that has Naughton and others so outraged is already known (and wasn't revealed by Snowden) and is a court that has oversight by Congress -- and has to perform the function of countering terrorism. What's your plan for combating terrorism if you publicize everything you know about their plots with open data on suspects? Did you have one?
Snowden
hasn't committed any public service or whistleblowing (he was
deliberately misleading about the "direct access" issue to sow panic);
with this Kremlin-inspired agitprop, he has helped unleash mass hysteria
and anti-American hate campaigns to the advantage of Russia and China,
um, those friends of Internet freedom.
But it's mainly the
Guardian stoking this moral panic about privacy that no one has yet to
prove is really violated by blind machines scanning metadata for matches
to terrorist groups -- you know, even less intrusive than the way
G-mail scans the content of your email to serve you ads. No one has
produced a single case of actual civil rights violations except a vague
invocation by Snowden of "a hacker suspect's girlfriend" having her cell
phone bugged. Tell us who that is, and maybe we can assess the bona
fides of this entire caper better, you know?
I expect that
companies will respond with a bit tightening of opt-in or opt-out
privacy issues usually described as access to data for marketing
purposes, and life will go on. Capitalism usually does trump communism.
The
longer Snowden stays in Russia and the less we hear from him, the
harder it will be for the Guardian to make this entire narrative stick.
I personally have always thought "the cloud" was an iffy proposition due to hackers, intramural rivaly among the Big IT corporations fighting over it, and bad actors like Russian and Chinese government sponsored hackers.
The cloud, put simply, is other people's computers, not your own. When you put your data on other people's computers to save money or time or have virtualized machines or whatever, you lose the ability to protect it on your own private property. It's a very simple proposition that has literally been clouded over by the fantasy elements afforded by imagining that the Internet is heaven.
The piece which appears in both German and English portrays the US as a decrepit data addict reduced to sucking up data for a living, something like the meth addict Wendy in Breaking Bad.
It might be funny even if weren't for the horrible, vicious barb -- NSA did all this slurping, but it couldn't even stop two brothers who had big social media profiles and bombed Boston.
IT'S NOT FBI FAILURE TO GATHER DATA BUT FSB FAILURE TO GIVE DATA
Of course, there are two real reasons why the Tsarnaev brothers could succeed at their deadly plan:
a) Evgeny's beloved Mother Russia did not help the FBI as he and others duplicitiously claim but in fact witheld crucial information. While ostensibly warning the FBI about the behaviour of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Moscow Central failed to deliver the most important news they had about him -- which they revealed only much later -- that he was in the company of a jihadist that they assassinated, and that two other jihadists they assassinated were also believed to have been in contact with him. Hey, that's pretty important metadata, you know? And the FSB held it close.
b) When the FBI did get the tip at look at the terrorist brothers' Youtubes, with its celebration of 9/11's losses, its extremist Islamic preaching, it's Russian-language jihad trainers, it's hate-fulled arguments in the comments, it decided it had no grounds for arrest. That's because a general hatred of America or even incitement of terrorism in a general kind of way are protected activities under the First Amendment. In fact, the FBI didn't violate the Tsarnaevs rights, even after getting the tip to look at their media, which is something that anti-American antagonists like Evgeny can never concede. The FBI didn't try to get a wiretap, or install one illegally or put an illegal GPS on the car, where they might have found Tamerlan going to buy explosives from a firecracker warehouse in New Hampshire, or might have found Dzhokhar testing them. No, they did none of these things they are forbidden to do by law and court cases without probable cause.
Russia could have given them that probably cause; it didn't. Evgeny is silent about that glaring factor, as so many "progressives" are, starting with Glenn Greenwald.
So while Evgeny might want to portray America as an old crack hag with meth mouth to boot, in fact her toothlessness, if we're going to call it that, is actually a function of exactly the kind of activism that Greenwald represents, civil rights crusades that ultimately stick in law and affect police practice.
EDWARD'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE OR HOW MOROZOV AND SHAMIR SAY THE SAME THING
With his trademark dry humour, Morozov mildly reprimands Snowden for having "poor trip planning skills." Of course, that's to pretend that he is tacitly conceding that going to Moscow makes no sense for freedom-lovers, but it's also to distract us from really asking why the lad never went to Venezuela in the first place, or didn't stay in Hong Kong after he kindly leaked helpful information about America's response to Chinese hacking to the Chinese government. The whole Moscow thing seems to be WikiLeaks/Assange's idea, and given how Assange has his own TV show on Kremlin-supported RTV and relies on a notorious Russian agent provocateur to do some of the circus-acting around this entire big-top performance, it seems like Moscow was the plan all along. I suspect it was for Edward, too, as I think the ideology he embodies -- technocommunism -- and its Bolshevik methods like hacking states to make a point -- inevitably wind up in the home of those ideologies, which has only shorn their outward form and continue to make heavy use of their methods.
And Morozov calls Snowden's felonies -- which he admits to -- and his defection a "noble mission" -- so you really can't have any doubt about his agenda -- to defeat America in its present form and turn it into something else. And of course that was his mission back when he began whacking away at Clinton's Internet freedom program in the most unseemly way -- given his purported at least Internet freedom seeking credentials. Yeah, Morozov was all about debunking Silicon Valley utopian hucksterism and gloatingly telling us that the authoritarians of the world were the real ones making use of all this social media and all this free data, but he was supposed to be for freedom, too, right?
Well, no, because he starts barking this nonsense, straight out of the Moscow agitprop handbook with its eternal lament of the Unipolar World ruled by evil Amerika:
Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.
MOROZOV'S LONG CAMPAIGN AGAINST AMERICA'S INTERNET FREEDOM PROGRAMS
So of course Morozov belongs there because as I've said a 100 times before in numerous posts, Morozov is always doing the regimes' work for them, cynically demolishing any hopeful plan for cyber-freedom by "helpfully" pointing out that some regime will exploit it so it's not worth trying (that's always his message and this piece is no exception with it's call to "forget Internet freedom"). That, when he's not busy trying to convince skittish liberals that they are harming the very people they want to help -- the Secret Policeman's Ruse (yes, you need to go back to 2010 when Morozov first began viciously attacking Clinton's Internet program in the strangest way).
This part of the typical active-measures manual is one that both Morozov and Sami Ben Gharabi used to ill end when they hystericallycampaignedagainst Haystack (a circumvention program devised for deployment in Iran by an outside coder that the State Department in fact didn't use) and the prospect of trying to do circumvention work in Iran. At the same time, WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum joined the chorus on the Mighty Accordian by dumping on the Chinese dissidents who used VPNs that were not his Tor to try to discredit them in the community and with the State Department, their funders. All of this highly concerted effort led not only to disarray and loss of funding for some; it led to a planned hearing about help to cyberdissidents being cancelled -- and this was before the Arab Spring.
Google the term "Haystack" and see the enormous deluge of tech media that piled on here -- joining the frenzied hate of the State Department and its programs ostensibly because this experimental software was going to harm people. The reality is that it wasn't accepted by the State Department, wasn't used, and no one was harmed. But you would never know this from the hysteria wall that prevented rational discussion. What this was really about was the gang of thugs like Appelbaum demanding that people who had proprietary software projects they didn't want to reveal "share" (be collectivized) in the open source movement because this was "better". That the thousands of eyes working on the bugs include secret police and Appelbaum didn't trouble Morozov and others screeching about this. It was one of Morozov's most successful active measures.
See, there was a very strenuous effort by some Arab bloggers and Jillian York and others around the Berkman Center to try to derail the US from helping opposition forces -- and some of these people were either coopted by regimes or simply of anti-American and anti-Israeli political persuasion. In the end, they couldn't stop US involvement in the Arab Spring, which has been a wild tiger to try to ride in any event, with the US damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. The main take-home here is that the kinds of programs and connections and lessons learned that might have taken place got dented at least in part by this vicious campaign against Clinton's program -- one that the Russians also waged on their end by blocking passage of an Internet freedom resolution in the OSCE and hysterically launching a "foreign agents" witch hunt among NGOs, starting with one that they said was "sponsored by Hillary" which monitored elections -- and found them to be fraudulent in Putin's controled space.
All of this strenuous tactical work Morozov and co. were waging in bureaucratic battles in Washington and intelligentsia magazine blog posts and such seemed to fly under the radar of his "larger" intellectual work debunking the sillier concepts coming out of Silicon Valley. There were so many people eager to see some of these inflated egos punctured like Jeff Jarvis or Clay Shirky that they seemed oblivious to how much damage the ultimate message was causing: don't really try to win the Internets because the very process of doing so enables tyrants -- hey, your companies that make stuff only wind up having it accidently sold to the bad guys, boo, hiss. America could never do right.
People in the State Department would laugh when I would point out this was going on. Are they laughing now? But then, some of these people were the same ones funding Jacob Appelbaum well past the sell-by date -- until finally those WikiLeaks grand jury subpoenas on his email and such forced them to realize that they had to let it go.
I think RevMagdalen got it right in the comments to one of Morozov's many Haystack blogs in which among many dubious points he claimed Haystack had attracted politics around itself but Tor had not (false):
Many readers have noticed that this blog seems to be entirely about
Haystack these days, and it didn't take them long to Google and discover
that you, Mr. Morozov, have been a longtime and very vocal proponent of
the idea that the internet cannot and should not be used to promote
freedom. With that background, I'm sure it would be hard to resist
crowing over Haystack's demise. Some authors would consider it
unethical to fail to disclose that history to readers who might be
unfamiliar with your past, but hey, it's their lookout if they can't be
bothered to research people's motives on their own, right?
CYBERSPACE EXISTS LIKE ALL HUMAN MENTAL CONSTRUCTS
Finally how Evgeny so fussily obssesses with scholarly punctiliousness abuot the existence or non-existence of the Internet or "the Internet" or "cyberspace". Of course these things exist; he's soaking in it. What is not cyberspace if it is not his endless afternoons indulging in his net addiction while he refrains from locking up the Internet in a box and throwing in the screwdriver (which he actually claims to do to get work down)? His tweets are a case study in virtuality: the Sage of Soligorsk as witty salonista and flâneur dropping mot after mot, some of them no doubt written by interns.
From two hours ago: "Advice to budding theorists: When in doubt about the originality of
concepts you've just coined, just capitalize them. Or use Latin." From three hours ago: "Now we know why the Mayans died out: They ran out of hackers." Or another from three hours ago: "Evgeny Morozov
@evgenymorozov3h
Excellent essay title in search of excellent content: "Luther Was a Hacktivist."
I think you could probably string these all together at some point and make a book like "Shit My Dad Says".
A MISREADING OF MICROSOFT?
And do we chalk it up to non-native English or just ill will when Morozov takes a statement like this -- which could just as well mean that Microsoft realizes it will have to offer customers more protection because of the enhanced government interest in tracking people -- and pulls this out of it?
Buried in Microsoft’s non-denial is a very peculiar line. Justifying the
need to make its digital products compatible with the needs of security
agencies, Microsoft’s general counsel wrote that “looking forward, as
Internet-based voice and video communications increase, it is clear that
governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal
powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or
tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over
the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels
of privacy and security.” Read this again: here’s a senior
Microsoft executive arguing that making new forms of communication less
secure is inevitable – and probably a good thing.
If we have less security and privacy on the Internet than imagined, let's not forget why: the inherent flaws welded into it by one of its chief architects, Tim Berners-Lee, who wanted the Internet deliberately to be open, free, copiable, nonprivate and non-commercial. The very same piracy and copying functions that undermine intellectual property rights are what make it impossible to create a world of privacy, too; the technolibertarians and the technocommunists both failed to realize this.
I do have to say I chuckled when reading today how Cory Doctorow, a vicious copyleftist nerd who has campaigned aggressively against any kind of cybersecurity or anti-piracy regulations, has now come around on DRM in a funny way, as we learn from libtech; finally gets that the same features that protect easy copying of content might come in handy to protect grabbing of data and invasion of privacy, too.
SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE REDUX
Now comes the Secret Policeman's Ruse again -- making Americans feel guilty for their sins not because they might hurt themselves -- oh no (because they might have trouble believing because, you know, there's no case; WikiLeaks has no case). No, it's about their troubles harming someone else. You know, getting that dissident in trouble if you visit him or contact him.
The secret policeman wants to grab hold of your liberal guilt and gullibility and convince you that if you help a dissident hack out of a dictatorship, why, you might harm him. Better not to. Better to wait. Better not to help. Mission accomplished!
So, we want to catch all the terrorists before they are born? Fine, Big
Data – and big bugs in our software and hardware – are here to help.
But, lest we forget, they would also help the governments of China and
Iran to predict and catch future dissidents. We can’t be building
insecure communication infrastructure and expect that only Western
governments would profit from it.
Except -- that thinking is circular and ridiculous. We never said, "Because the Soviets had tank superiority in Europe, let's not have tanks, and let's not even have Cruise missiles". Just because they can use the same infrastructure for ill doesn't mean we abandon it -- it's a fight. And wait, who said Microsoft is building deliberately insecure infrastructure to let governments in the back door to fight terrorism? Evgeny has frankly pulled that out of his ass. I really want a third and tenth opinion on this because the paragraph he's cited out of context reads like in fact it may say the opposite. Does anybody else dare say this? Does everybody just swallow this shit whole?
Evgeny couldn't be more delighted about "information sovereignty" -- in fact he practically wets himself welcoming Iran's foreward-thinking policies that ensured it could control, dissidents, sure, but more importantly, be protected from that awful evil NSA that Snowden has brought ill tidings about. Hmm, and maybe that was the idea all along with this defector and his Kremlin-friendly hacker pals -- to enable Russia and China and Iran and other autorcrats to tell their people that in order to protect their social privacy from the Man -- GosDep! -- they have to have sovereign Internets filtering out everything that could harm healthy living and right thinking. Yes, that means snaring some dissidents along the way, but privacy is so important, it's worth it.
It's like one old peacenik recently told me on Facebook -- she'd be happy to have 9/11 repeat every 20 years (!) if only our privacy could be ensured. Imagine! 3,000 people are to die every generation just so that her email with her addle-headed ditherings about evil American capitalism and imperialism can be hidden from, um, Big Brother.
But, you say, if Morozov is explaining how people will suffer from information sovereignty, how can you claim that he is welcoming it? Because he's making it seem inevitable. Because he's not explainIng how in fact people fight it, at home and abroad. Because he is deadly cynical -- and his description of everything in this deadly cynical tint is then invoked as diktat. You see, now, we should just go along with what they want at the WCIT.
LIVE JOURNAL WASN'T DOWN
Morozov makes it seem like he's savvy -- and concerned -- about maintenance issues on Live Journal seeming to crop up at strategically important times.
But...it's not true. I was on LiveJournal all night for two nights running in the days before Navalny's verdict; in fact I was reading his LJ; in fact I was translating his LJ and a few others and refreshing the pages and reading comments. There was no maintenance problem. I didn't hear anybody else claiming there were. Sure, there are at times, not only because it's big and slow but because the Russian government probably really doesn't interfere. But it hasn't in fact gotten in the way of a huge outpouring of expression around the Navalny trial. Therefore, how are we to understand Morozov's strange claim: as a threat?
See, that's the sort of thing that must be asked about this man, so I ask it.
THE SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE FOR REAL
Now here come the nut graphs -- and Morozov could have saved us the other 3500 words that are rehashes of his dyspeptic views already spun for years now:
This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s
going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the
hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning. America has managed to
advance its communications-related interests by claiming high moral
ground and using ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” to hide many
profound contradictions in its own policies. On matters of “Internet
freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America
enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds
of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on
matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or
Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in
neither.
Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of
specific evidence has allowed America to buy some time and influence.
These days are gone. Today, the rhetoric of “Internet freedom agenda”
looks as trustworthy as George Bush’s “freedom agenda” after Abu Ghraib.
Washington will have to rebuild its policies from scratch. But, instead
of blaming Snowden, Washington must thank him. He only exposed the
shaky foundations of already unsustainable policies. These policies,
built around vaporous and ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” and
“cyberwar” would have never survived the complexities of global politics
anyway.
But nothing about these paragraphs is true. The Internet freedom agenda of America stands. The job of protesting when anti-corruption bloggers like Navalny go on trial remains -- along with other bloggers in Russian and elsewhere who have been silenced, beaten, jailed or even killed. These are very, very basic human rights causes that America will continue to take up and continue to be appreciated for when it does.
US officials will have hard explanations to make, especially due to the riotious uproar of agitprop that Snowden himself has concocted and perfected with Assange's and Poitras' assistance -- and amplification courtesy of the Kremlin. It takes awhile to explain to people that no one has actually read their mail and that their real problem is their governments that in fact do -- and published them in the paper as Evgeny's homeland does.
But I doubt any dissident getting a grant or equipment to help with Internet freedom is suddenly going to reject the financing due to Snowden. Oh, there may be a few who will be whipped up by Jillian Yorke or something, but not really. Abu Ghraib definitely tarnished America's reputation and undermined its ability to advocate for human rights. Yet it did press on in world fora, and among those people it helped and those rights it advocated were Egyptian and other Arab NGOs, despite whatever objection Morozov and Sami had. And Morozov and his likeminded nihilists never have a good explanation about terrorism -- the terrorism that continues in Iraq after we leave and will continue in Afghanistan after we leave; the terrorism that led to 50 people killed in marketplaces and schools and mosques again and again and again in Iraq to the point that most of the 100,000 people killed there were killed by terrorists, some backed by state, not US troops. And the same is true of Afghanistan. The anti-anti-tyranny club Morozov gleefully commands never has a way of coping with these realities -- they are de-rendered.
HOW THEY DO IT IN BELARUS AND RUSSIA
One of the most irritating features of this whole NSA hysteria deliberately unlished by Edward Snowden and his hacker pals at WikiLeaks is that Americans and West Europeans discussing this don't seem to realize what real surveillance of a real totalitarian state with real consequences is. And so as always -- with SOPA, with CISPA, with CFAA, with a host of other Internet legislative issues -- they take the hysterical hyperthetical and the breatheless edge-case over the actual sense and meaning of real practice.
In Belarus, the government simply jumps in -- actually, with the help of an Austrian telecom as it happenS -- and exploits features of Skype -- that were present even before Microsoft, actually -- or just makes use of Firefox's handy feature to save passwords -- and grabs everybody's email and chat and online footprint -- just because they can.
They allow some websites to thrive just to capture everybody going to them. As a Belarusian trade union leader told me even 25 years ago before the Internet, "Glasnost is a cowbell around our necks they use to find us." That's how it works.
So they get everybody's yammerings, then they just dump it into the main newspaper, still called Sovietskaya Belarus, just like the secret police are still called the KGB, and the materials are not only used to embarass and tendentiously frame opposition leaders, it is used to prosecute them. They actually go to jail because their government has a huge surveillance component; they don't just spout hysterically on Twitter about how someone is seeing their cat pictures; they really go to jail.
In Russia, an opposition leader like Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny will find the transcripts of their cell phones and their emails spilled out in the press -- by a murky process that no one every seems to investigate too closely -- and the whole world gloats at their petty squabbles or nasty characterizations of each other -- or in the case of Navalny, is actually surprised not to find much of a scandal.
WHAT'S THE BIG DATA SCRAPE REALLY ALL ABOUT?
This sort of thing is all too common in these countries -- and people in the West don't seem to get it.
That is, they get the process when it happens to somebody like Anthony Weiner, a mayor candidate exposed once again as sexting on the Internet with young women despite already supposedly apologizing for this electronic ego-pumping addiction and vowing to reform. The government didn't get in Weiner's mail, but perhaps some right-wing group did and then they become suspect.
But the public can't seem to grasp that when there's something like the last phone call Trayvon Martin made to his friend, the reason why we can't really pin it down today, and have to rely on the words of a flustered teenager changing her story, is precisely because the government doesn't store and retain and make accessible the content of your phone calls. Hello! If they did, we'd know much more about what happened that night.
As I've always explained on this blog, the big IT companies scraping data not only for marketing but for political campaigns (as we discovered with Obama's successful campaign) are the source of the problem, and blaming one of the end-users, the NSA, is merely to succumb to the grand distraction these very cunning WikiLeaks hacksters have created in a kind of open-source active measure along with the Russian and Chinese governments -- and anyone else who wants to pile on.
The slurping up of metadata by Verizon is meaningless because it doesn't scrape the content of your call; they don't have your call's sense and meaning, it's content. Duh, we get it that the various proximity data points and social network and location data points might yield some sort of profile about you, but so do your Four-Square check-ins and tweets.
When Google scans your g-mail to pick out keywords and sell you ads for Geico, you don't complain even though every word of your communication had to be stored and analyzed for that to happen; when the government peels off the top layer of this data packet to match it to known information about terrorist groups or other criminal activities, you whine that your privacy is invaded. How childish.
Given how much hysterical hype there is on this now, I'm simply not going to yield to all the facile talk about FISA courts and such and will keep demanding findings and cases. We haven't had a single case of anyone claiming their rights were violated by this big NSA dragnet, and meanwhile the constant whining that we can't know because the FISA courts are secret doesn't cut it -- when there are clients whose lawyers are concerned they've been nabbed only on the basis of a secret FISA court review of such electronic information, they complain. Maybe they don't keep complaining becuase they know the government has a case. Or maybe they have another strategy. If there were a person who really could point to a false arrest on the basis of invasion of his metadata, we would hear about it in the country that has produced Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, journalist, friend to hackers, threat-conveyor, and who knows, possible defendant in some future case hinging on the decision of a judge that journalists who know about crimes committed and refuse to testify about them cannot expect immunity from prosecution. Whether that judicial decision is right or wrong actually depends on whether there really was ever any good will or sincerity on Greenwald's part -- and I remain unconvinced to date.
INTERNET OF THINGS DRIVES MOROZOV TO THE STATE FARM
Morozov plays his hand here more clearly as a statist in the end -- despite his endless derision of weak Western states faced with cunning Eastern tyrants -- because he lauds European regulation of the Internet and thinks it was a mistake to "go into the cloud". Here we will learn anew the difference between sovkhoz and kolkhoz.
He converts this old-fashioned bureaucratic centralist statism of his, that went out with Brezhnev and Tito, into a faux anarchy fighting the machine -- fighting the capitalist bourgeois Internte of things with a revolutionary plan to turn it into a state arm.
Yes, why, just like me, (although I've been writing about IOT for years before he did) he begins to warn of the Internet of Things and how dangerous this is. But here's the difference: for me, every threat that comes from the Internet in the form of people or companies or governments has a remedy: a free market in levels of service -- in our case, First Amendment levels and Fourth Amendment levels, if you will. The Internet is merely another human artifact and the laws of humanity apply to it; maybe Morozov's problem is that he isn't a technophobe but a misanthrope. What has made the Internet -- and yes, it's a real thing, very real, and will bite Zhenya in the ass some day -- is that it is diverse and pluralistic -- made of individuals, companies, nonprofits, governments, and multilaterals. These represent competing interests and that's ok. It isn't the end of the world if some companies demand that you show your real identity and use a phone to sign you up and end your unaccountable anonymity but also sell your data to make a living; if someone wants unaccountable anonymity, or no data sales, great, they can live on a darknet but then they can't then expect to organize 20,000 people on Facebook, they'll have to make do with Twitter. And so on.
GOVERNMENT FIRST
For Morozov, like others in his jetset, only blanket police changes will do -- he implies that the entire Internet has to be run from Geneva by UN bureaucrats who have read Zizek (although he's sly enough never to really come out with a detailed positive vision, you have to etch it in like a batik). Even so, he gives away the store at times: He pictures the smartness of yours shoes or your umbrella or your toothbrush as somehow *first* being available to the government.
But that's arrant nonsense. The government is the last in line for the dregs. Like the dystopia envisioned in the sci-fi novel Snowcrash, which prefigured the Internet and virtual worlds, we're in the world of Mr. Lee's Hong Kong (already visited by Snowden!) and the US as a kind of diminished postal services island. So the real people who first have this data are corporations and mafias and of course hackers. They already control us and already find us and know where we live. Gen. Alexander explained the threats to the Internet are hostile governments and hackers like Anonymous, and that tells you who already really controls the Internet.
The hackers that Morozov seldom chastises (because they're thrilling! because he's still hoping to harness their revolutionary fervour to create the state farm!) are the ones that already thrive in this and can plan to hack into your pace-maker and shut if off if they don't like your blog -- unless of course they die first testing zappers on themselves or snorting heroin, because that's what hackers often do.
The government in fact is what you will want to have to keep you from being persecuted by these other entities; they will be the protectors of civil rights, not a bunch of drugged out Silicon Valley start-up freaks or the goofball script kiddies and sinister and seasoned anarcho-communists trailing behind them.
And there he goes again -- glibly claiming that because Google scrapes our g-mail to pitch ads -- which troubles him not one whit, though it should -- that the NSA has access to our content. It doesn't. It has access to metadata that no one has yet proven was misused to violate a real individual's real civil rights.
LEGAL NIHILISM
Oh, and here it comes, Bazarov-style legal nihilism!
Laws Won't Be Much Help
As our gadgets and previously
analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere.
One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that
will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost. In
other words, you get your smart toothbrush for free – but, in exchange,
you allow it to collect data on how you use the toothbrush. It’s this
data that will eventually finance the cost of the toothbrush. Or, for
objects with screens or speakers, you might see or hear a personalized
ad based on your use of the device – and it’s the ad that will
underwrite the cost. This, for example, is the model that Amazon is
already pursuing with its Kindle ereaders: if you want a cheaper model,
you simply accept to see advertising on their screens. Amazon’s ultimate
Faustian bargain would be to offer us a free ereader along with free
and instantaneous access to all of the world’s books on one condition:
we will agree to let it analyze everything we read and serve us ads
accordingly.
But...the world already works that way. And if anything, in the wake of the Snowden-induced hysteria, Verizon is now sending out emails asking customers if they want to opt out from data sales.
And laws will be of help -- and hey, that's what CISPA was before you all hacked it to death, remember? It regulated relations between the government and private Internet companies so that privacy could be protected while crime could be fought -- but you didn't like that. You wanted Obama to be able to issue edicts instead -- and get James Rosen's emails for real.
THE BIG DATA BAZAAR
Like Jaron Lanier and Eric Schdmit and Jaren Cohen, Morozov climbs on this crazy bandwagon of predicting the sale of services like medical care based on big data in some actual marketplace. They don't seem to realize that human services are really still not replaceable by bots (especially in hospitals, in fact) and that the data is terribly devalued and is only kept artificially inflated by the fiction of the social contract of "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" that social media now gives us -- we provide content they can copy and scrape and sell and they give us a crappy platform.
This is going to be changing as increasingly the idea that content has to be sold catches on -- in fact already some of these pioneers are speaking of this now even as they scorned it in the era of Farmville or Groupon when they thought they could just keep getting time-suck in exchange for ad-clicks -- ad-clicks that never gave any ROI, as finally they found out. Morozov must not have noticed the revelation at TechCrunch from one of the Facebook execs that click ads just don't work for anybody to pay anything seriously -- especially on mobile. The model -- and the world will change as a result.
That is, the marketplace that Morozov hysterically invokes as a violator of rights -- big sales of big data by evil exploiting capitalists -- isn't going to happen that way -- and where it does exist it is waning, but instead, individuals and small and medium business will at least find its place as the bigger Internet monopolies like Google are forced to break up. A facebook will be something your local phone company puts on for you.
Fumes Morozov, however, behind the times, "Market logic has replaced morality" -- as if commerce and capitalism is by definition immoral. Who says? Sour post-Soviet socialists? But market logic -- a willing buyer and a willing seller -- is what freedom is all about. Why is that so distasteful to this post-communist East European scold? As he admits, people willingly turn over data and time to these gadgets and aren't horrified by either corporate or government intrusion as much as the tech set thinks as they are scared by their own shadow on Twitter.
When Morozov invokes the notion of "political latency" (what a term! worthy of Zizek!) i.e. that if the environmental cause is making progress -- lights now go off when no one is in the room -- then the efficiency of "scientific" notions of "betterworldism" deciding what is "best" for us now works to collectivize ourselves and our property. He must not have looked out the window in any big city. Loads of people never turning off lights; many of the lights are the little screens of gadgets. The reality is, the gadget revolution that made so many millions spend millions and put further stress on the electrical grid as a result completely undid whatever advantage you might have gotten from conservation in the pre-Internet days.
Then Morozov winds up as dishonestly as any of his targets of derision like Shirky or Jarvis. He completely manufactures a model -- that "we're all" going to make this Faustian bargain where in exchange for having "smart gadgets" we will sell the data they scrape to either the highest commercial bidder or the government or both. But who said we were going to do that? Who said anyone values our data beyond a one dollar one-time sale -- when they already got most of it for free?! It would be great if it goes as I'm hoping-- with more access to a more diversified market for content and services on the Internet. I'm more hopeful than Morozov and I think it will. Humans usually correct the monsters they make.
ALL POWER TO THE CODERS
But...The power is in the hands of the coders, not yet in the digital commodity which has been devalued -- and in fact, what the Internet of Things does is not commodify data but collectivize everything and put it all in the hands of the technocommunists -- not the user with his scraped data. In fact, it may be too late to imagine yourself as an economic actor on this scene. We'll have to see what cartels and what hacker attacks occur, in fact, and then there's this: all these wired gadgets will work like ass. Tech stuff always breaks down.
The people who will above all possess the data -- completely left out of Morozov's equation and no accident, comrade -- are the coders. They're a ruling class that Morozov hopes to work along side (like Joshua Foust does) because he will understand them and understand them so well that he will like them and imagine they are some bulwark against the depradations of the exploiters. But it is this New Class that will be the problem for us all, not "commercialization".
So Morozov's solution is actually to demarketize -- to get rid of markets -- because markets are horrors:
As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data
shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from
the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would
simply buy – on the open market – what today they secretly get from
programs like Prism.
But in fact, a free market of Internet services, including data protection, including making the stuff work, including user-generated content, is what will enable freedom, not destroy it. That's because of the plurality of actors and the free determination of value. Like so many Soviets, Morozov fears commerce -- hates it. That blinds him from seeing that markets, like the one that enables his books and lectures to sell, are good things. Right now, in fact our information isn't very useful, and it is being scraped to feed a threadbare and dying model --the click ad. In the future, the other models of individual users assigning value and marketers emerging to aggregate and harvest this will change things.
PIRATE PARTY IS 'NONSENSE' -- EXCEPT, NOT REALLY
Morozov pretends that he advocates not leaving everything to those young coders, and even the sectarianism of the Pirate Party. But listen to how diabolical he is with this:
What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their
ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever
will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just
another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and
hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it. Rather, we
need more topical domains - “privacy” or “subjectivity” to overtake the
domain of the network. Forget an ambiguous goal like “Internet freedom” –
it’s an illusion and it’s not worth pursuing. What we must focus on is
creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and
preserved.
Note the message here really is this: forget Internet freedom, it's an illusion. Sublimal it's not! Before he would hammer this message subliminally, by constantly having water wear away the stone, telling us the tyrants were really winning the Internet, so we should give up. Now, he's saying airily that the Pirates are has-beens and he envisions a world of topicality like "privacy" to be above the mechanics of the Internet and the corporations that run it. How? By taking them over with a network of elites and/or an agency in Washington that regulates them? In one of his essays for the New Republic in fact Morozov advocates just that to deal with the problem of uneven Apple "innovation".
But aren't we saying the same thing, if I'm saying we need to enable free markets in goods and services and Morozov says he is for "creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved"? Not at all. For Morozov, that environment is a state farm, at the end of the day, run by the smart people, like him. (So, the coders want a collective farm; Evgeny wants a state farm. You know the difference.)
Morozov is right that the Pirate Party's utopian vision of remaking governance by Internetizing it is bunkum -- but I would say it's because they follow the same rules of the Benevolent Dictatorships of Open Source which are antithetical to liberal democracy.
And what he would do is spout incoherent nonsense himself, after saying the Pirate Party's notion of running parliament like Wikipedia (the horror!) was nonsense:
But the good thing that did come out of the Pirates was the nudge to get
everyone else thinking about digital matters and their impact on the
future of democracy. This is the content – rather than the process –
part. That project must continue but, perhaps, be reoriented from
pursuing the faux goal of “Internet freedom” to thinking about
preserving real freedoms instead.
Er, just having a "national conversation" are we -- and "thinking about digital matters"? what the hell is the content behind that? That's not concent, that is in fact content-free process waiting to be filled with some prefabbed ideology just like the technocommunism that always seems to be lurking behind Morozov's door. Faux Internet freedom? Is that like Marxist "false consciousness"? Real freedoms are preserved by law -- but Morozov gave that up many paragraphs ago when he said it would do no good against the Internet's tide of anarchy. Oh, we'll see about that.
And finally, the Grand Insight:
Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.
But by that, Morozov means that anybody wanted to make money from the Internet and data and content anyway, when it should have been all a selfless subbotnik. Pretty soon we will be told not to consume because that is so bourgeois. He's forgetting that there are consumers and buyers -- but also prosumers, and that the buyers cannot harm their consumers or they don't have customers anymore.
SNOWDEN UBER ALLES
And finally, there's this: why in Germany, why now? I'd love to know who and how this piece was commissioned, eh? All of a sudden? In Germany? Now? Where Jacob Appelbaum has decided to remain indefinitely, after publishing his sensational interview, along with Laura Poitras, of Snowden in Hong Kong? After Snowden was awarded a whistleblower's award? When Snowden has become an item of domestic warfare for the SDP against Merkel?
In the end, Morozov has said nothing more original than "information wants to be free". But it doesn't. As any consultant or writer like Morozov will tell you, "your information wants to be free; mine is available for a fee."
If you're of a certain age, you will remember this scene from The Graduate.
Dustin Hoffman plays the character of a young man graduating from college. At his graduation party, a neighbour takes him aside confidentially and says, "I have just one word for you -- one word -- plastics".
What he means is that he is "confidentially" telling him what the "next big thing" is which he should chose as his field of study and employment. It's hard to remember why plastics would be a big thing, but in 1967, when this movie came out, plastics were not ubiquitous. There were paper bags, not plastic bags at the supermarket. Less things were shrink- wrapped in plastic, they just came as they were. Toothpaste tubes were made of aluminum, not plastic. Children's toys were made of rubber, an older product, not plastic. There were bed springs and cotton stuffing, not memory foam. Cottage cheese came in paper tubs, not plastic (yoghurt wasn't as ubiquitous). There simply weren't designer water bottles at all. And so on. Plastics, with their "More Science High" and chemicals-for-better-living took over the scene and nobody thought about how they had once hardly existed. Indeed, it was a booming field for a young person looking to start a career in a big company.
So today, if you're at that graduation party your parents have thrown for you and you're feeling alienated and at loose ends, surely someone will come up and take you aside and say, "I have just one word for you -- actually two -- Big Data!"
Big Data is now the latest or the Next Big Thing and it's just everywhere. Colleges are scrambling to make majors around data mining, businesses of course have been touting it for years already and it's now going to rule our lives. Big Data will show us why we're wrong if we object. Nate Silvers is all about Big Data.
I thought this paragraph was really telling as to what Big Data was all about -- finding, like within a Rorschach blot, what you'd like to see and making the numbers fit your story:
Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science”
last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the
title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer
scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to
be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K.
dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in
them.”
Somehow, a separate science or critical industry has to spring up alonside these "computer scientists," that will question how they form their narratives to see the structure in those unstructured situations. Who will provide this necessary service?
Of course, other things go along with Big Data -- the Cloud, where it all has to be housed; neuroscience, which is going to purport to duplicate the brain's functions, only make them better, despite what critics say; and then online governance (the wired state) in which Big Data will increasingly be used -- and maybe deployed so as even to obviate the need for voting at all. The geeks who want to eliminate political parties and voting would be happy to see data-scraping and strategic deployment of its results replace organic -- and messy -- democracy so that they can control it as coders.
Most of all, the forced majoritarian democracy of Big Data results will be deployed as "science" to prevent deliberation and voting at all -- or even as a to selectively chose votes (likes) to make a point. I would see this sort of thing in Second Life all the time on the JIRA, the public board where you could vote for a bug to get attention from the developers, or suggest a feature. So, only two people would vote for some obvious bug that affected businesses, and the open source cultists who hated business would flash mob 100 people to comment against it (or start another bug entry and vote for that), and the devs would say, "oh, you're in the minority, sorry". These people who in fact were never ruled by democracy and never really even consulted democracy would suddenly invoke "democracy" in a narrow, manipulated setting to make their point. They avoided a real show-down by having a properly-notified vote with the issues framed properly, and a one-person, one-vote system to avoid alts or sock-puppets -- and of course didn't even have the ability to vote "no" which was an automatic skewer.
So Big Data is above all about who frames the data and who is telling the story, and how they tell it. It's also about the "garbage-in" problem -- if Wikipedia is forming the basis for new data-gathering and Big Data drilling projects, small wonder that we will have political skewing.
It's not really about the data. It's about the story. I would see this with Nate Silvers time and again. There was never anything wrong with "the math" -- how could there be, it was math! But it was about what was selected, which polls, which story to go with them, where the cuts were made. This goes in, that doesn't go in.
I remember one of the big discoveries I made in Second Life was that there was a very different real popularity list than the "top 20 popular sites" list that the company kept featuring. I had this instinctual sense that where I saw my customers going, and where the company said they were going were different.
The "top 20" was manipulated, of course by several factors. First, the company itself would pick out sites it liked for ideological or business reasons, and feature them in various ways -- sometimes with a blog post, or even something as seemingly innocuous as the CEO putting it in his own personal "picks" on his avatar profile. There could even be guided paths to those sites -- like Cubey Terra's Aerodrome -- for the newbie when he landed in the world and was looking for things to do. So those "top 20" sites had some steerage -- and then it was a self-fulfilling prophecy -- once boosted, the site would stay in the high ranks as people came to it because people came to it...Having had such a windfall a few times for my own sites -- when unbenownst to me, my sites were picked when I hadn't even applied -- I can see the deluge of traffic that would come to them, no doubt the way the traffic for the sites featured right now on the Linden blog, like Eshi Otatawa's dress store.
The other factor would be the manipulation of traffic statistics in Second Life through "camping" as it was called -- paying people to physically remain at your store or hangout or dance club to artificially drive up the numbers. Soon people deployed bots, hiding them in boxes up in the sky so their artificial nature wouldn't turn people off, and that way they could make it appear as if hundreds of people were coming and staying at the site.
So I suggested that instead of looking at those fake and manipulated numbers, the company should tabulate another source, which amounted to the "likes" on Facebook -- before that system even existed, and before Facebook was widely used. These were the "picks" that you put on your profile. When you visited a store, you could "like" it by clicking on the button to have it show up in your picks, and then the picture and name and URL would automatically render on your profile. To be sure, there were companies that were willing to buy people's picks, but really not that many of them, because most people found the few spots on their profile to show their favourite places to be so precious they didn't want to sell them to some store. In fact, they used them as a story board, and put up moments of their Second Life, like their first home or their virtual weddings or a party with friends, and then in a sense the place where their story had occurred became a "favourite".
So I challenged the company to track those "picks" and put up the results, and Philip Rosedale was finally persuaded to do this once, and even Hamlet Au, who loathed me because I challenged his house-organ style paid writing for the company at the time, was forced to write about this great idea of mine, which was called a "folksonomy". Naturally, the pristine state of the "folksonomy" couldn't last long, as companies might then game it. But it was less gamed than the other means which was determined by traffic -- itself a category that then got discarded and manipulated with other secret algorithms a la Google (and even the Google Search Appliance was used).
I thought of all this when I read Socialbakers' report on the top brands "liked" in America based on what people clicked on Facebook. Sure, those companies may be hiring bands of "likers". But by and large, I think they have pretty much genuine material. I see hundreds of my friends "liking" those brands. Once, I heard someone complain that a brand he didn't think he "liked," really, was showing up in his feed. Did he accidently click when he was hovering? Is it sometimes put in without your liking? (Right now, I see things in my Facebook feed I can't believe I could have ever accidently clicked, even, like "Lower My Bills," so it's right to ask the question).
Even so, if pressed, I think these analytical firms could show through representative samples that most of the "likes" are organic.
Wal-mart, the store that the left loves to hate, is America's favourite store. They love it. They "like" it on Facebook. For real. Because they are not like you. We are not like you. I shop at Wal-mart's when I can, which isn't so often as we don't have one in New York City, which is too urbane and hipster and lefty for Wal-mart -- it would never get approved. We don't have very many big stores beyond Macy's and a few like Bed, Bath and Beyond anyway -- be thankful we have at least a K-mart.
Note that Apple doesn't even appear on this list; Samsug is the favourite brand for gadgets.
Despite the left's best efforts, Chik-Fil-A's picture of their founder enjoying a birthday was the most interacted picture. The second-most interacted, i.e. reposted, was a critique of Michelle Obama's birthday party at a time when White House tours for kids were cancelled. The third is a demand that McCain apologize to Rand Paul.
Now, you might conclude that these are just organized conservative or liberatarian flashmobs, and maybe they are, but they are interesting, because they are so different than the flashmobs we seem to see on Twitter.
Here's another "crowd-sourced" evidence of the "liking" of Wal-mart from Dorothy Gambrell. This is the place where people are, when they spot someone they'd like to date, but either don't get up enough nerve to meet, or else lose in the crowd before they can say anything. This romantic "missed connection" idea is very popular on Craig's List, and this map of the country pining in their place of "missed connection" is quite telling about culture -- the 24-hour fitness gym in California, the subway in New York City where people have to take long rides underground -- and Wal-mart so many other places!
The fact is, while the left keeps trying to demonize Wal-mart as part of their assault on capitalism as a system, because they think it exemplifies its evils, people keep shopping there because it's convenient, helpful, and the prices are cheap but the goods not too low quality. The left prefers to bash Wal-mart for buying goods manufactured in China, even as they tweet arrogantly on their iphones also made in China by Silicon Valley companies like Apple.
Whenever I see one of these anti-Wal-mart stories, I always have to wonder where they come from. I saw one, two, three of them the other day, and they all seemed to come from the same source at the same time, or are recycled. It seems to me Business Insider, despite its name, consistently runs a leftist or "progressive" line that is anti-business of the sort that Silicon Valley hates culturally or finds competitive.
So I asked using that self-same social media whether other people were finding that the Wal-mart shelves were empty, the sales people were depleted, and the lines were long. Yes, there was a picture of an empty shelf at Wal-mart in these news article, but was that what people were randomly discovering in their particular Wal-mart?
Not surprisingly, some people in different locations across the country reported that they weren't seeing any of this.
Some reported that they saw less sales help and longer lines, but not empty shelves. I will have to come back and post my findings when I hear from some more people, but even with just a half dozen answers where no one found any empty shelves, I had to question what this story was about.
Now, a brisk Silicon Valley Big Data manager might tell me that the numbers were showing empty or emptying shelves over the entire system. Or the journalists trying to make a point maybe selected a geographical sample, or an illustrative sample to make their point. And how will we know, as journalists are increasingly babbling about how they are crowd-sourcing and using Big Data now and there is even an implication that we need "journalist-coders" for the future.
But if they cannot faithfully render what might only be the minority experience, it's misleading. And as we keep encountering these seeming "Big Data" pronouncements, dripping with mathematical certitude and self-righteousness, how can we dare combat them? The media could be selective or it could really use "Big Data" from across a system, but come to tendentious readings of it. Telling the story their way.
And there will really only be one way of combating this, if strong enough social movements rise up to keep insisting on their own narratives. One side will always find the other's to be "false," but what's important is that there be mulitple narratives so that there's a running critique for the ordinary man to try to make up his own mind.
As for that job you're trying to land? I'm not sure there will be that many six-figured data-mining jobs so available just yet. And despite what you read in the papers, Wal-mart is always hiring and is massively popular, so try there.
Creepy cult TED talk by Beth Noveck. Especially laughable is the notion of the Russian state-owned bank's "crowdsourcing" -- and her preaching against civil society's "antagonism" with government when it gets "transparency".
If you ever want to see the seeds of totalitarianism, just look at this!
What Could Bring Totalitarianism Via the Internet?
Basically, I mean these six premises, creating the circumstances where an "advance guard" of revolutionary intellectuals take power of the state through their networks and rule it with "science":
o The gov 2.0 or "open government" movement has never really been democratically decided or sustained any liberal democratic critique; it is a movement of technolosts benefiting themselves first and foremost
o the reputational systems that this movement wants to use for various "Better World" purposes, generally those maintained by Wikipedia, Facebook or LinkedIn, are highly flawed and have technological and political limitations and little ability to opt-out or appeal their tendentious results;
o the "social pressure" that these goverati want to harness through social media can range from the vigilantism of their political networks to Anonymous hacking, and is itself a coercive means of bringing change, usually according to a revolutionary agenda;
o the "automated processes" invoked are decided by coders, without much democratic input, according to the ideology of the network in power;
o the allusions to "participation" or "more voices" are highly stylized and often consist of models like Code for America, which are just ingroups getting together with their networks to force changes without scrutiny or political process;
o there is no grown-up oversight, public or private, of these ideas, as they are mainly concocted in certain think -tanks and railroaded into government offices untouched by any critical process.
All of those things contain the seeds of totalitarianism in them.
Big Brother in Your House -- And Whom Morozov Doesn't Mention or Criticize
@dgolumbia Sounds more like Big Brother in your house as opposed to you firing bureaucrats.
Well, exactly. I've been jumping up and down and yelling about Beth Noveck and her ideas for eight years now. For this reason. It's the seeds of totalitarianism. Everybody needs to fight it or we really do lose our freedoms, as this isn't just some professor -- it's somebody on Obama's transition team who occupies the White House Office of Science and Technology for some years before returning to academe and still remaining a beloved guru of the State Department tech set and many other influential networks.
So...I went to look up Beth Noveck -- I can't keep up all the time! -- after noticing a troubling thing: in his Evgeny Morozov's enormous critique of Silicon Valley, it's as important to see who he doesn't talk about, or mentions in a half-line as it is to see he obsesses about (like Jeff Jarvis or Tim O'Reilly). I guess part of it is "Silicon Alley" doesn't capture his attention as much -- he spent a lot of time in California. Beth Noveck, based in New York City, is eclipsed for him (or in fact he likes some of her ideas). Fred Wilson, who is the entrepreneur who should be mentioned in any great study of technocommunism as the praxis master bringing actual money, thought, and action to a lot of the wacky ideas that would remain in the can without him, gets no mention by Morozov; AnneMarie Slaughter, better known for her "can't have it all" cry against certain kinds of feminism, but actually among the key Twitterati intelligentsia, and now to head the New America Foundation is not mentioned at all; Rebecca MacKinnon, also at NAF and on the board of CPJ, gets just a brief mention of her Internet-centric notions of politics; and Beth Noveck gets only a paragraph or two, although she is an example of someone actually getting to a position of power with these ideas -- she was assistant director to the White House Office on Science and Technology, and is now back at New York Law School (not to be confused with NYU Law School) and very influential.
I first became horrified with Beth Noveck's writings here in 2005 and here, where I talked about the coming collectivization on Web 2.0, and here, where she was speaking in Second Life from her perch at the White House. Last year, I saw her in person at Tech@State and even managed to get a question from the audience through a horrible Twitter backchat filter (the conference hired a live team of geeks to sort through tweets with the hashtags of the conference, and then only use the ones they liked, and then replay the ones they liked and that they felt suited their notion of what should be promoted on a large screen in the conference room, and little screens all over the conference space -- truly awful stuff defeating the free speech of Twitter, of course).
Since she is on the record as saying she wanted to "blow up Congress," I asked Noveck whether he various conceptions were really about circumventing Congress -- some geeks have actually articulated this as a goal, and she has indicated it as a wish. Her answer indicated merely that she had learned the PR speak of saying that she had in mind enhancing democratic governance.
But that's just why all her neo-collectivist ideas are so awful -- they are cloaked in the language of participation, transparency, democracy, good governance, etc. -- but in practice they are an electronic mapping of Leninist democratic centralism and collectivism. Once she, like Shirky, found that the masses that showed up in free unmoderated social media were too unwashed -- on the White House discussion pages they would advocate for marijuana legalization or raise questions about Obama's birthplace -- she then had to figure out how to hang on to the democracy lingo yet still use coded systems to her advantage.
So she devised various bureaucratic methods as any such authoritarian would do long before the Internet was created -- internal groups of friends where the real action was; notices that went out only to those on the list or to those who could muster the patience and determination to follow boring and arcane discussions; simple mutes and bans (especially on Twitter) for those who needed to be filtered out, and so on. When all else fails, there was the 15-day or 30-day or 0-day discussion closing limit on the web-page that would be invoked by her staff at any time.
I view Beth Noveck as one of the most dangerous thinkers in terms of actually installing the Wired State, a state run by elite groups with the Internet and smart gadgets with considerable power to suppress dissent and the free media. Indeed, they already have an embryonic form of it on Twitter and in various group and web networks.
Perhaps the rule is "you can't criticize your fellow NAF fellows" and that's why Morozov, himself a NAF fellow, doesn't have anything to say about some of the characters there. Or maybe he doesn't take women in tech seriously, or women on the East Coast in tech seriously. I do!
Fornicating Dragons of Democracy Experiments
Beth Noveck was in Second Life for a time back in 2005 -- Lawlita was her avatar's name (!) and she formed something called Democracy Island, to do experiments with her class and which was ostensibly "open" and about "open government" but which became rapidly actually "closed" to those who weren't in the invited group (you couldn't visit the island unless she invited you into the group). Now, sure, any university might want to do this to keep out griefers and day-trippers. But then they have the option to put their whole island on invisible in the system, not have it in search, and not pretend they are doing experiments for a Better World that are ostensibly in the public interest and "open".
As one of the more perceptive participants in her class pointed out, in time -- a few months? -- even when she did finally open it up to public access, the island lay fallow. The "Creative Commons License Machine" that was supposed to revolutionize Second Life had cobwebs on it from unuse -- only 30 people had touched its dispense I discovered when I looked at the time because the DRM of Second Life itself engineered into the object menu just worked much, much better for them than Lessig's cult. As my friend who used to be in the groups said, one day he logged on to the empty and deserted island and found, as he put it, "two dragons fornicating" there -- it had become a trysting place for furries without land (furries are people who chose animal avatars, either real or mythical).
So that about summed up "Democracy Island" for me. Fornicating Dragons! Lots of smoke but not too much light!
Beth Noveck continues to make her reputation in so many places for having "revolutionized" the patent system -- although there, she was never able to fully incorporate her system, which basically involved a bureaucratically-centralized system for casting about and filtering in "experts" to work on patents -- basically an online version of "the cadres decide everything" where you have a more efficient way to cast about and filter for cadres and then put them to work. Noveck used her own considerable real-life network or "social graph" to test and include those who "fit". I don't think the system got approved in the end, and in any event, Noveck left the Administration to go back to academe. She then set her sights on the federal rule-making system -- fertile ground to invade as it is arcane and nerdy and perfect to use as a stealth-overthrow operation because most people won't be able to pay attention. Take a system that is supposed to work under democracy, where the candidates to various agencies are appointed by the president, then they hire experts and consultants or keep various civil servants employed in the system -- and they make the rules that enable the implementation of laws. If you don't like a law, break into the rules-making system and see if you can place "civic pressure," i.e. your networked lobbying group of likeminded persons on it, under the guise of "public participation". If anyone cries foul, say "but the people are participating, what, you're against open government"?"
When I see the cult-like political movement in New York City called Working Families getting into budget meetings and calling in new Internet-based "participatory democracy" on budget meetings, I cry foul in the same way -- in fact it was an extended argument about the true meaning of this system with Alex Howard that got him eventually to block me on G+. But if anyone had world enough and time, all they'd have to do is show up alongside the cadres at any of those meetings, and try to insert any other political perspective, and see how "democratic" the "participation" would be...
The Constructed and Collectivized Online Self
Beth Noveck's writings here are what began to trouble me so greatly because she was willing to dispense with the individual so quickly and reconstruct her online:
Avatars are “public” characters,
personalities designed to function in a public and social capacity.
Avatars think and act as members of a community, rather than as private
individuals. Having to construct an avatar in a virtual world not only
allows me to see myself but it demands that I design a personage for
interaction with others
Everything that I had learned from extensive involvement first in the Sims Online, then in Second Life, let me know that this was not true. People bring themselves online and stay intact as individuals with rights. They may manifest as a dragon or as a beautiful 20-year-old female club dancer when in fact they are a 40-year-old postal worker, but it doesn't matter. They manifest a part of their soul and being and it is an extension of who they are. One could argue that the self is constructed offline for interactions -- "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" as T.S. Eliot said -- but Noveck takes it further -- coded virtual-world systems (of the sort that we will all be living in some day because that's how the Internet of Things and other features of web 3.0 will be managed) *force* you to construct that self. That force-constructed self, of course, is controlled ultimately not by you, but the platform provider, in this case a private company (like Linden Lab is for Second Life, or Facebook, which is a virtual world as well (and now that it is coming as a phone interface, it creates even more virtuality -- or augmented reality, which is also a form of virtuality).
For Noveck, "avatars think and act as members of a community" -- the groupism and collectivism seems to happen as soon as you log on. Of course, in real life, too, you are "think and act as members of a community" in various settings -- the PTA, or the book club or the political party. But these feel less rigid and more easily than the constructed self of the online world. There are various technical exigencies that come to play. Let's say there are the hard limits of the servers dictated at Facebook -- you can only have 5000 friends. You also can't talk too rapidly to those friends, or the managers will automatically stop you as a spammer, and possibly even ban you. In Second Life, as in a lot of communities, there is a hard limit to the number of groups you can join -- for a long time, it was set at 20; today, it is set at 42 -- that number geeks love as it is the answer to life. So you can only put so many groups that identify your interests on your profile (some groups and stores get around these limits by designing other "group joiners" that amount to mailing lists). I don't know what the Facebook limit for numbers of groups you can join is -- there is likely on.
More to the point, group owners can decide to invite you or not, let you speak or not, mute you or not, etc. -- these are functions long present in Second Life groups, and today we see them on Facebook, G+, Plurk and other forms of social media. I think Twitter has a hard limit on "lists," which is a kind of group.
Coded Reputational Systems and the Technological Confines of the Online Self
There are all kinds of other hard limits put on the collectivized self online -- the extensive system of mute, make invisible, delete, and ban, all heavily made use of by "thought leaders" on social media. I think I haven't even begun to explain the half of it, especially when Google Glass enables some people to take lots of pictures of life and people and do what they want with them, and lots of other people not to be able to "play" as they either won't have $1500 for the goggles, or they won't like the disruption of having a game-world-like HUD up in their face in real life.
(Ironically, generations of especially young buys who played World of Warcraft and other games are perfectly suited to Glass adaption, as they spent hours and hours of their formative years glancing at dashboards and heads-up-display (HUDs) in front of their eyes while concentrating on game action; it is precisely this factor that will encourage more young males to see the world as a place where you can engage in MMORPG -like shooting as well -- who doesn't doubt that among the first apps or games we will see with Glass will be a game to target and shoot people you don't like -- that complaining customers ahead of you in the store line, that slow driver, that annoying clear -- and make them splatter, and get points for it?)
Reputational systems are another thing we have had long and bad experience with in Second Life, and then later on Twitter and Facebook and such -- and I could summarize these as follows:
o any of them can be gamed, and people can find extra-network ways to get lots of "pluses" -- think of Jason Calicanis, the entrepreneur, who offered a free ipad to anyone who could follow him on Twitter in the early days; think of bosses and teachers getting all their employees or students to follow them
o those with old-media star capacity can easily take over new media reputational systems -- Justin Beiber can get 30 million followers on Twitter because he's broadcast all over the world on TV and radio and of course Youtube.
o people may not become your friend for various reasons, and then they aren't in your friend deck, and you can be judged for that
o you yourself may not have spent adequate time nurturing your friend list, which is often achieved by mining others' lists and then putting those friends-of-friends in the awkward position of saying "no," which often makes them cave to "yes"; you can be limited in your numbers of friends.
o pluses for good behaviour as well as neg-rating (if they are even ever put in) can be gamed or flash-mobbed or be happenstance -- even paid for, as we discovered famous game-maker Will Wright himself did to corrupt his own game in the Sims Online by paying people to take "friendship balloons," probably the earliest form of what we all take for granted today as the "friends list". (Of course if there were friendship lists in the Well predate this, but they didn't have the same features, especially the feature of showing "where you had been" and becoming greener or redder depending on interactions).
o inability to get rid of trolling negrates or inflationery plusses meant to discredit -- not appeals system
o proximity issues -- as geolocation gets matched with friends, you are characterized as a "friend" of someone you merely were next to for X minutes, and this gets inflated, misunderstood, can't be changed, etc.
So that informs you of my background for making the claim that the following notions -- merely lightly put up as questions on a professor's web page as "totalitarianism".
But that's just why I worry, as I spent many years working in that sort of field myself and dealing with these institutions and I know how culty and undemocratic they can get.
Leftist Cultural Attitude Toward Corporations
The first problem for the average lefty professor is accepting that corporations have a right to exist. Under current law, like it or not, they also have the right to make political donations and are persons in ways that a certain hard-left cadre does not want them to be (although they don't feel that way about the corporate persons that are unions or nonprofits or law firms -- the traditional bastions of Democratic candidates and their revenue source).
The problem in trying to rein in corporations with all sorts of do-gooding corporate responsibility schemes, like the Ruggie principles (which do not have the force of international law, but are just "soft law" or recommendations) is that the corporation itself -- the profit-making association -- is not first blessed, legalized, and accepted in the UN and other such bodies. With the crippling of the structures for years by the Soviet Union and its allies, that could never happen. The corporation was just a given force outside of these multi-national bodies with no real definition of, and therefore acknowledgement of its right to exist.
To be sure, the right to associate with others is one of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that gets you a certain distance; private property also has some acknowledgement but not sufficient. The right to make a business and run it at a profit is basic to human existence all over the world, even in countries of "really-existing socialism" where at least cronies or shoe-shines are allowed such businesses, but it doesn't really exist as a universal principle in international law.
So in settings like the former Soviet republicans or some Africa countries, where kleptocratic and oligarchic governments suppress small and medium business for the sake of keeping themselves in power, there isn't any body of international law to turn to -- there is only the socialist-informed precepts of various UN bodies long hobbled by the Soviet Union's descendents. One of the cures to the depradations of transnationals might be small, medium and even large businesses of the national sort, but most UN-type schemes fetishize in fact bureaucratically-controlled very small micro-credit schemes, of say, women basket-weavers, over the more challenging businesses that would help countries join the modern world. They fear and loathe them. They don't fit into their ideology.
Lefties, "progressives," socialists of every kind, tend to view capitalism as a system and the corporation as an entity as suspect and needing to be reined in, as always predatory, as alwayd destructive. Understandably, tThey want to devise every kind of aggressive control over it in the belief that they are harmful, and not worry about how free enterprise is nurtured in the first place.
So it's this basic underlying perception of the Eurocrat and the leftist American professor leaning toward Marxist that informs this discussion -- corporations bad, "the people" good.
Responsible Corporations and Free Enterprise
I don't share their worldviews. As a Catholic and human rights advocate, of course I want businesses to be responsible public citizens, to have fair labour practices, not to despoil the environment, not to exploit workers abroad, and so on. Who would not be for these values in our time? But I start from a different place: the belief that capitalism is not immoral and that regulation can ensure its morality in a liberal democratic society. The socialist does not start form that premise: he starts with fear and loathing of the corporation.
I'm not seeing it. In my whole life, my neighbours, relatives, friends and I have worked for big corporations. If not Xerox, than Kodak. If not Home Depot, then Rite-Aid or Wal-mart. Wal-mart is particularly the target of sneering leftists as symptomatic of the "worst" practices. I shrug because I know they are selective, tendentious, and deliberate in this targeting as a project of undermining the capitalist system per se, not genuine as improving this or that company. I see that Wal-mart in fact as responsive to many of the concerns brought to it by this tendentious bunch not really representing its workers. Millions of people work for corporations, large and medium. Corporations give them their livelihoods, their communities' revenue. Those in particularly Soros-funded nonprofits of the left, and leftist university faculties, naturally see the world differently. The world of finance that created the Soros billions that enable them to feed their families (including me for many years I worked at OSI) is opaque to them -- they don't see how it connects to those very corporations they want to bring down (Soros himself is of course something of a perestroika liberal socialist especially in prescriptions for other people).
The Goverati Bring it All Home to You and Run Your Life
Well, as you can already see, I don't share the felt need for "automatically" and "efficiently" regulating industry in quite the same way as this professor. I've stood at the Xerox machine and fed it for hours in testing; I've stood at the Rite-Aid counter for hours or laboured in the back room files of Citibank; my friends and relatives have stood for hours in the Home Depot, selling lumber or plants for homes; or at Wal-Mart or Aeropostale selling dresses; they've toiled in the mines at JP Morgan and Kodak and IBM and Dow Chemical as accountants or programmers or engineers or scientists. And by and large they are happy with their lives; they may even be in the 47% if they are part-timers with a school loan or food stamps, but they have nothing like the visceral hatred of corporations that people in universities or the UN can acquire.
So I have BIG questions about HOW and WHAT the regulation is about (and this is often quite deliberately left vague).
Even so, Evgeny Morozov, if he were to apply his critique even-handedly (he doesn't) would have questions about the Internet-centrism and solutionism implicit in all these "automatic" and "efficient" systems. Who gets to decide them, and how?
Who Decided That We Needed to Re-Imagine Democracy?
These proposals come from one of the numerous gov 2.0 meetings -- too numerous to track meaningfully -- this one called the London Summit on Re-Thinking Government and Re-Imagining Democracy with these goals, all of which are means of either a) intalling technocommunism by making the "peers" be "progressives" or (in this case) cloaking with "open government" speak things that in fact are the same old big government:
Promulgate a new theory and vocabulary for open, participatory and “peer progressive” governance;
Define a new curriculum for teaching participatory governance and
problem solving to the next generation of public servants and civic
innovators;
Create methods with which to gauge the effectiveness of open and collaborative governance practices;
Design a research and action agenda to discover and apply new designs for our institutions of governance.
But what was the Alternative Regulation Working Group (getting inside those federal rules!) up to?
How the Advance Guard Can Decide Things for You -- and Shame You on Social Media
As we learn, it's this:
How can we design regulatory processes that are automated and optimized?
How can we involve more voices in the regulatory process and promote distributed decision-making?
How can we create reputation mechanisms best promote self-policing within markets?
How can we apply research on behavioral economics and social pressure to promote better behavior among regulated entities?
How can we create real-time feedback loops that provide information
with which the success of individual regulatory processes can be revised
and improved?
Well, even if you don't share my views about corporations and corporate responsibility that comes parallel first with an acceptance of free enterprise, you might have worries.
Who says we need to automate regulatory proceesses and how is optimized designed?
"Involving more voices" in the regulatory processes sound grand, until you see it in action Beth-Noveck style, which means picking relatively obscure processes with arcane procedures -- like the Patent Office and harnessing networks of likeminded friends to flash-mob them -- from existing opposition lobbides -- in merely a more robust and aggressive form of lobbying electronically.
Distributed Decision-Making Means You Don't Decide, an Algorith Does
"Distributed decision-making" is one of those fashonable academic buzz phrases that can mean different things and also cover up a multitude of sins as those decisions are distributed right away from you.
For $219, you could learn about what it means here:
Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in
quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain
management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to
a paradigm shift. The book providesa unified approach to such
seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming,
hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations
or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person
decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and
leadership situations are covered.
How can we create reputation mechanisms best promote self-policing within markets?
As I've explained above, the best reputation system is no reputation system. Automatic, Internet-based reputation systems are always inherently unfair. To be sure, we are stuck with them now with Facebook, as Facebook profiles become a means to hire or fire people. But when you have "self-policing in markets" there's always the question to ask why markets, if they are free, need these "self-police". What about organic law? That governs the issue of labour, pollution of the environment, etc. What else were you going to demand self-policers take on? The corporations of Silicon Valley are never discussed in the leftists' critique of corporations -- it's as if they are invisible. But when they do discuss them -- such as Anil Dash discussed Apple's app store last night on Twitter with me -- they have all kinds of politically-correct demands to make. Apple should sell the intifada app, even if it incites hatred of Israel and glorifies violence, and the drone app, even if it carries the Google logo or seems to be a crude coverage of war they apparently want to discourage -- and not some other app they don't like. Try as I may, I couldn't get Anil to accept the notion of pluralsim
Indeed, the biggest temptation -- and the affordances to make good on it -- that the Internet and mobile gadgets give to "progressives" is to make universalist, unitarian, blanket rules and norms for everything. They think they have the tools and the information to do this now. They can enter into a quest to make one big thing good, rather than tolerate the scrum of thousands of smaller things actly freely and enable market choice. They can believe it is possible to make one thing good (government, a corporation) through automation and "solutionism" -- which is a form of scientism.
In Second Life, it's possible to prevent people from entering your server by putting their name in the list. But there are many other varions on this that led one thoughtful programmer to conclude that any ban system is a weapon.
For one, a system that bounces you back to your "home" set sim, or bumps you hard away, or even makes you crash, i.e. forcibly logs you off, is rightly called a weapon.
But here's what else:
o bans based on the age of the account
o bans based on whether the account has any form of payment on file (this can be hard for Europeans, Latin Americans and many others who find it difficult to get a Mastercard or PayPal account accepted in the North American systems)
o bans based on membership in a group or lack of membership in a group (group-access only)
o IP-based bans (these can give false positives, althought hey work more accurately than admitted, and what they often do is expose alts)
In the world of the Internet-connected Internet of Things, how will these systems which we've experienced so horribly in wired onlined communities like Second Life, or for that matter Facebook or Twitter, actually function in the ideal version of these professors?
What happens when electronic bans can be set up everywhere -- you can't enter -- or at the very least, your smart phone or gadget won't work -- if you don't fit Facebook and other scraped-data criteria, including facial recognition?
The leftists usually contemplate this horror in the hands of corporations (it already is in their hands) and imagines them blocking people from stores, offices, government buildings.
But picture these powers in the hand of those invisible corporations like Google that the "progressives" don't imagine -- look at this appalling concept of "fiberhoods" brought to us in Kansas City creating broadband haves and have-nots in a system that was supposed to increase broadband -- see the subscriber-edition of Harper's by Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson, critiquing the much-ballyhooded Google broad-band project:
Utility-owned networks guarantee access to every citizen in a municipality. Google, by contrast, divided up Kansas City into 202 "fiberhoods" -- and decreed that between 5 and 25 percent of the residents in each fiberhood had to preregister for its service by paying a ten-dollar fee and opening a Google account. Fiberhoods that didn't qualify would be left out of the network. Worse, Google's fiberhood map bisected the city at Troost Avenue, a historical racial divide. It soon became clear that most lower-income black areas would fail to meet the preregistration quotas. Local teachers and librarians began canvassing door-to-door with Google employees, urging residents to sign up, and charitable groups raised money for registration fees. A majority of these fiberhoods ultimately qualified for service. But the frenzied volunteer push revealed an uncomfortable truth behind the city's "real partnership" with Google: Kanasas City had left itself poerless to guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents. And it could not compel Google to redraw its maps in a less discriminatory way. (Of course, the vegan bakery, Pilates studio, and Italian deli next door to Google's subsidized offices received their fiber service for free.)
Or picture this in the hands of Rahm Emmanuel, who vowed to keep chik-Fil-A out of Chicago. What if this was achieved not just by the blocking of an organic paper permit, but made good everywhere with an electronic ban -- no person could come into the city limits if they were an officer or even family member of that corporation; they couldn't buy supplies; they couldn't do business.
The point is, automated processes of regulation devolve down to which ever political group is in power, and they come to power not just through pure democratic "participatory" means, but by coded systems, mediated by coders, with existing power-possessors managing them.
Behavioural Economics
Here's another element that I find a glimpse of that totalitarian future:
How can we apply research on behavioral economics and social pressure to promote better behavior among regulated entities?
We saw this used to win the election for Obama -- he kept his own team of behaviour social scientists on staff to help manipulate the narratives and the demographic drill-downs.
What are "behaviour economics" and "social pressure"? Selective economic boycotts? Who gets to decide them? Deliberation is never the strong point of social media -- even Morozov admits that. (I think he's willing to leave more room for deliberative politics than the automaters in Silicon Valley because he is still feeling safe in the belief that "the smart people surrounded by idiots" will still get to run things).
Recently I read an article which unfortunately I can't find now that described new research in behaviour and norm-setting. If you put up a sign in Yellowstone Park telling people not to take the stones or pick the flowers, they didn't listen. They picked the flowers and took the fossils anyway. Because they saw other people had. But if you put up a sign saying "Millions of visitors did not pick flowers and take stones" or "80% of our visitors did not pick flowers," then they would feel a norm pressuring them and would comply. People comply not with what they are told, but with what they think most people do. This can get very insidious, as you can just hear the fakery coming down the track
Who Runs the Real-Time?
Now this:
How can we create real-time feedback loops that provide information with
which the success of individual regulatory processes can be revised and
improved?
This sounds promising until you ask, again, who decides in the first place about all this, and who actually manages the "real-time feedback loops" -- possibly filtering them their way, just as Tech@State could filter away criticis.
Then you have to ask -- well what do you mean, exactly? What is it you are regulation? And how?
Inside the jpeg of the whiteboard included in this post, you can see:
Fuel efficiency, size, seatbelts, texting.
So these do-gooders want to get into people's cars -- or make them not even drive gas-guzzlers in the first place -- and force them to wear seatbelts and never text.
You could think of a super-automatic way to stop people texting -- include in each new car a text-zapper, or even a mobile dead zone -- but that could work against someone struggling to call for help in a car crash on a deserted winter road, and most people would fight that as too much intrusion.
So the efficiency gag at the "open government" conference suggests "notify receipient of texting while driving - social pressure". How? Have other people who spot him snap pictures and his license place and put it up on Twitter or Facebook? You know, like Adria Rich did at the PyCon about those bad boys who said "dongle"? Is that what you'd like? How about having the driver's boss fire him for extra good measure?
Of course, the free media's coverage of people smashing cars while texting also constitutes a certain social pressure -- news you can use -- but most people think they're the skilled exception. Police arrests of people in jurisdictions that have passed laws against texting while driving also serves as a deterrent. Do we need the "progressives" social pressure, their way, too?
As for size and fuel efficiency, well, who wants to waste gas and pollute the environment? The high price of gas itself does some of this "social pressure," but what are the ways in which the university gang would interfere with the free market to "optimize" their agenda? Pictures on Facebook of fat Wal-Mart shoppers driving big SUVs? And again, could you get them fired from their jobs, for good measure? Or hey, would local laws on emissions and demands to get inspections also work?
Just what needs to be automated here, and who gets to apply that lovely social pressure, and how?
There's lots more to say and analyze here, of course, but I have to move on. Suffice it to say that much of the open government movement isn't really open. It is decided at conferences like these, in "progressive" university classrooms like these, by power-possessors who get their candidates into positions like the FCC or the White House Office of Science and Technology. Most of the public is in the dark -- and the lefties would say it's their own fault.
But Congress never got to decide that gov 2.0 was either necessary or sufficient. They never got to debate it or decide it. Much of gov 2.0 was forcibly introduced as a Trojan Horse from Silicon Valley through the invocation of the magic word "innovation" and "technological upgrades". The entire "wikification" of government (that I submit is part of what led to WikiLeaks) happened without Congress, in spite of Congress. There's never been a hearing that was a critical examination of the premises and practices and products of gov 2.0 -- there has only been a few cheerleading brand-awareness sessions (by the former Sen. Ed Markey, for example).
Eventually, these intrusive gambits of revolutionary collectivism will get more examination, even from liberals, not to mention conservatives. It might be too late to role back some of the engineering the goverati have installed by then.
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