“The companies, some more than others, are taking steps to make sure
that surveillance without their consent is difficult,” said Christopher
Soghoian, a senior analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But
what they can’t do is design services that truly keep the government out
because of their ad-supported business model, and they’re not willing
to give up that business model.”
Soghoian is a former Soros fellow and now at the ACLU, he's the most quoted "progressive" "privacy expert" in all these stories, and only represents one school of thought -- absolute encryption for the hackers, maximum transparency for the government. Oh, and hatred of capitalism -- as you can see from the sneer at the business model.
Oh, I complain about this business model, too, but it exists not because of techno-libertarians and techno-neo-liberalism of the sort Evgeny Morozov loathes. It exists because of technocommunism, and the unwillingness of people like Soghoian to couple private property and privacy -- and indeed the entire hackers' support movement spawned by John Perry Barlow and Electronic Frontier Foundation, which mainly disavows intellectual property and commerce online.
The other source is:
A tech industry executive who spoke only on the condition of anonymity
because of the sensitivities around the surveillance, said, “Just based
on the revelations yesterday, it’s outright theft,” adding, “These are
discussions the tech companies are not even aware of, and we find out
from a newspaper.”
Oh, and there's this PR flog:
Even before June, Google executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday
that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the
beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirming
that their suspicions were not just paranoia.
In response, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, issued a
statement that went further than any tech company had publicly gone in
condemning government spying. “We have long been concerned about the
possibility of this kind of snooping,” he said. “We are outraged at the
lengths to which the government seems to have gone.”
That doesn't count. (Because it's just transcribing a press release, not really scouting out real Googlers to get the story.)
The reality is, Google started hiding key word information long before Snowden. I've been noticing for ages that on my blog's list of the referring addresses, there is only "google.com" and no key words when you hover over the URL -- there's only the blog's URL itself. It used to be that I could tell that when somebody typed "Jacob Appelbaum" and "unaccountable" -- that's what brought them to my blog -- many of my hits were precisely from that combination and I presume still are because those stories are among the most popular on this site. But like other bloggers, I can't tell what the key words are anymore. I don't care, because I can more or less figure the subject matter, and I'm uninterested in tying any writing to what those key words are, I write simply what concerns me at the time.
But there is a whole science of search-engine optimization where people try to divine what those key word searches mean, and then fashion blog posts to fit them and get more traffic. These are empty calories to me. I know if I post to Reddit there will be gadzillion hits. And certain subjects get huge hits. But those aren't people to talk to and think along with -- they are drive-bys, gawkers, and they don't interact on Twitter or leave comments. What's the point? Even so, I think Google shouldn't have hidden those key words. I can't possibly see how this relates to privacy because when we saw those referring addresses and words, we didn't see WHO was making those searches. Some URL addresses will refer back to some specific blogger or news article that linked you, but Google searches don't show you anything but the country of search. Why can't they show those words? Isn't more information better?
Perhaps the mechanics of it are that when people's search terms become known even in aggregate or even disconnected to their identity, there's still some kind of leakage that eventually does trace back to them -- well, at least Google knows! And it's not as if Google is stopping itself from knowing this!
There can only be one reason really behind this, and that's the desire of Google to sell this information that before came free. So if I want to be an SEO guru, I have to pay. Little blogs like mine then wouldn't pay, but some giant site with lots of traffic would, as they would for the ads themselves. I feel Google is lying about this, and using Snowden as a cover. Maybe they had to invent Snowden...
Seriously..There's this entirely false impression that Google is "angry" or "has spoken out repeatedly" -- but that's not true. They aren't. The Washington Post reported that two Google engineers contacted informally by a reporter swore when they saw a drawing of the NSA stripping away the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) of their server traffic. But that's not Google being angry. I asked a Google engineer what was up and got...silence (that's Brian Fitzpatrick, no relation, on G+, who posted the Washington Post story without comment -- he's someone who works on the soi-disant "transparency report".) Shouldn't the real response be laughter? Because the real question is "how". The little smiley face doesn't say.
Trust me, when Google is mad, it can do a lot more than amount to a couple of swearing engineers. When it wants to, it knocks laws out of Congress completely -- like SOPA, and CISPA. With a single post on its big front page under "take action," it can produce 7 million petition-signers and more. Google has paid for a lot of Congressional campaigns.
I mean, look how short that thing is, and how lame:
Recent disclosures regarding surveillance activity raise important concerns both in the UnitedStates and abroad. The volume and complexity of the information that has been disclosed inrecent months has created significant confusion here and around the world, making it moredifficult to identify appropriatepolicy prescriptions.
Before you snooze, ask yourself...does this sound like an angry letter to you?
This sounds like a fluffy kitty cat. Not even a Grumpy Cat.
Google et. al. are asking for...something they already do:
Our companies have consistently madeclear that we only respond to legal demands for customer and userinformation that are targeted and specific. Allowing companies to be transparent about the number and nature of requests will help the public better understand the facts about the government’s authority to compel technology companies to disclose user data and how technology companies respond to the targeted legal demands we receive.
I mean, this sounds like one of those big magazine ads or video ads on the side of a web page that blink and have smart looking people giving earnest-sounding talks:
We look forward to working with you, the co-sponsors of your bills, and other members on legislation that takes into account the need of governments to keep individuals around the worlds afe as well as the legitimate privacy interests of our users around the world.
You almost get the feeling that journalists WISH Google were more mad, and is trying to desperately hype the little it has to make it come true.
See, what's happening is that lobbying groups are speaking as if they are the tech industry and are getting mad on their behalf, but they are REALLY unconvincing because we know what the big dogs can do when they are really mad -- or even just see an opportunity, and that's NOT happening. Here's the usual suspect barking:
“The NSA has finally done something so egregious that the U.S. Internet
industry can do nothing but respond with demands for reform of the law
to protect their systems and their users,” said Kevin Bankston, who’s
helped spearhead the Valley’s message to D.C. while at the Center for
Democracy and Technology and is now headed to the New America
Foundation.
Well, yeah, where else.
Supposedly, the tech titans should be worried because Snowden is hurting business. Supposedly. But I never hear any real tech people actually saying this (like Robert Scoble, whose company, Rackspace, endorsed the Stop Watching Us fizzled demonstrations last weekend).
And here we get a government guy talking again -- speculating that there is loss to the cloud industry, and yet...he's not actually from that industry any more and not actually giving us any numbers:
The disclosure of U.S. spying on
allies may temporarily undercut efforts by American companies to
sell technology overseas, according to a former official with
the Department of Homeland Security.
“We are going to go through a period of substantial
skepticism abroad about any technology we’re selling people,”
Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who headed the department’s
policy directorate, said today at a forum on cybersecurity
hosted by Bloomberg Government and Symantec Corp. (SYMC)
Then there's Gen. Alexander:
Alexander said government must work with private industry
to find ways to improve cybersecurity. President Barack Obama
met with chief executives of consumer, utility and defense
companies yesterday to discuss proposed voluntary security
standards for computer networks.
But you know, we had this in CISPA, and the geek goons inside and outside of government lobbied the president to veto CISPA -- and he did. In fact, I always argue that they should have passed CISPA which would have put those dinner relations under the rule of law.
Look, guys. Who forced the click-ad model on us? Tim Berners-Lee and his architecture choices. That Internet he made which is anti-privacy (to be "collaborative") and resists intellectual property and commerce online as counter to such collaboration. He did not want the commodification of information or knowledge -- which means any form of code to these people - and here we are all with digital goods having a tough time getting paid.
Still, the human marketplace routes around the Cathedral -- to borrow a set of metaphors that the open source cult wanted to be about something else entirely LOL. So a lot of buying and selling does get done on the Internet.
I'd like to think we will move out of the click age, and DRM in HTML5 is maybe one sign of that, but there will have to be a complete rethinking. Or rather, a concerted battle because it is a war -- and it means a war against Bruce Schneier.
Basically, Google already encrypts stuff on their servers, but if this is true, then the NSA just got at the pipes between where vast amounts of data is routed. So, it's like the way Turkmen shepherds who are dirt poor in gas-rich Turkmenistan poke holes in pipelines to get some for free because only a certain amount is rationed by the state.
There's a lot of this story we are just not getting and what is being passed off as barking is not that at all. Stay tuned to the next post.
P.S.
Here's an interesting statement from a Googler posted on G+. Hat tip Nuno Maia.
Oct 31, 2013
"I
can categorically state that nothing resembling the mass surveillance
of individuals by governments within our systems has ever crossed my
plate.
If it had, even if I couldn't talk about it, in all likelihood I would no longer be working at Google.
Whatever
the NSA was doing involving the mass harvesting of information, it did
not involve being on the inside of Google. And I, personally, am by now
disgusted with their conduct: the national security apparatus has
convinced itself and the rest of the government that the only way it can
do its job is to know everything about everyone. That's not how you
protect a country. We didn't fight the Cold War just so we could rebuild
the Stasi ourselves." -- +Yonatan Zunger
My comment:
+Nuno Maia
Thanks. But then the question is, if he didn't see anything like that,
why is he disgusted with a government that wasn't doing that, as far as
he knows? See, that's what's so weird about all this. Either he's right
and the government didn't do this, in which case he should join the
effort to expose Greenwald and Snowden as manipulating perceptions for
their own agenda. Or he should find proof of what he know believes the
government is doing. But he's trying to have it both ways.
It seems that time again when there's a willingness to look at the horrid elitism of Silicon Valley.
Usually Silicon Valley's rich and famous are never targeted by mass culture because they are too hipster and too secretive and too interwoven with the social media platforms. Even to make a collage with Sergei Brin's face inside Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly Game is to commit a blasphemy (maybe I can't find the old one I made of Larry Page on a blog because it has been Google-bombed to get rid of any footprint...)
So now there's this -- Silicon Valley's Dysfunctional Fetish -- but that's a really misleading headline because it's not just that SV likes to laugh at other's misfortune, they really do think they are a superior breed.
And surprise, surprise, there's Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook biggie who now invests in every single thing you use on the Internet, who I remember tweeting about from TechCrunch last spring when he gave an interview on the stage, and talked about how everyone should learn to code and if they didn't, they were chumps. No way! (I tweeted with the hashtag and Arrington instantly started following me, and I figured I might be blocked or something. Evidently not.)
Palihapitiya: We're in this really interesting shift.
The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we've known it now
for probably four or five years. But it's becoming
excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is
created is no longer in New York, it's no longer in Washington, it's no
longer in LA. It's in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when
you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and
when there's no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal
that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful
events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value
of the government is effectively discounted to zero
Of course, this speaks not only to the idea, long held by the geek overlords that the finance industry and the old dying manufacturing industries of the East Coast "don't add value" -- and their apps to send pictures of your cat do - but it's more about the Shutdown, which fulfilled their notions of the "broken Congress" that has to be "circumvented" -- as they said during the anti-SOPA crusade.
As we know, technocollectivist Beth Noveck, who for a time served as a deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology (!) openly said she wanted to "blow up Congress".
Geeks always go around saying Congress people are stupid, they don't get tech, blah blah. Long ago when Scoble went to visit Congress and get them all using Twitter, the invasion started. Not a theory I buy.
In part, the elitists can think as they do because they've hidden all their manufacturing and back end overseas, in China, India, Russia so they don't have to think about their working conditions and standards of living. Occasionally, someone will be seized with guilt over suicides at an Apple factory, but not really. The really don't have to think about "how the other half lives" in their industry because it's all invisible. They seldom have to think about the working stiffs in their own country because they take company buses to work, they have company masseurs and company chefs and never have to come out of the bubble.
Some might call this technolibertarianism, and even Randianism, but I think it's more complex -- it's "communism for thee, capitalism for thee". (Note Stowe Boyd below whining about "neo-liberalism" in Silicon Valley. For every technolibertarian, there is indeed a technocommunist to bait him.)
I'm not surprised that this story involved Jason Calicanis. I remember when Jason blamed people whose houses were foreclosed on as being in over their heads -- it was all their fault. I distinctly remember when he said that; I distinctly remember when we all argued about this on 2008 in Twitter.
At the time, my brother and I were dealing with my mother's foreclosed home -- and the case didn't fit his prejudice. All that happened to her was that she died before being able to make her latest mortgage payment. Before that, she had paid for the payments out of a teacher's pension and my father's insurance money after he died. The condo she lived in was one that my parents had saved up for their entire life for their retirement. But Wells Fargo seized it rapidly after her death for some reason, not being willing to accept my brother's check for the mortgage. There was a long drawn out case with lawyers and fees and finally a re-mortgaging -- but then oops, it couldn't be rented out, even at half the price of the mortgage, because in the recession housing collapse, there were still developers building new condos and letting them go for less. It was impossible to sell this white elephant for any amount. My brother lived in it and commuted 90 miles every day and then finally gave up. In the end, the bank took it again. Sad. But not anyone's fault for "living beyond their means". Oh, yeah, none of us had an extra $2000 a month to spend on a house we hadn't planned on paying for, that's all.
Sure, there were people who lived beyond their means. But that took bankers giving them the NINJA loans (no income, no job applicants) -- and part of this was a desire to lift the poor and particularly minorities to a better place, which was encouraged by programs under Clinton and encouraged by Fanny Mae and other lenders. It was supposed to be a good idea.
When I re-argued all this with Calacanis again the other day, he insisted that he said both at the time -- yes, people lived beyond their means and yes, there were greedy and predatory lenders. Except I don' recall him saying the second things at the time and the fact that he still blames the victims lets us know that is his mindset.
Today there's yet another story like this, some good reporting by Alexia Tsotsis, who lives the life of the rich and famous herself (her boyfriend is the Instagram billionaire) but who is always stumping for the little guy (because they all, even when they do it well, want socialism for the masses and capitalism/riches for themselves.) A Better World!
A Twitter exec is shown banging on BART workers on strike.
See, this is also about hate-on-Twitter month because instead of staying with the socialist collectivist plan of always just making everything for free and having coders live on Ramen and entrepreneurs renew VC cash or be passed around to Big IT buyers, they decided to go IPO. That took them out of the technocommunist realm into the technolibertarian round.
So this suit is complaining about strikers and wishing a Doberman to attack them....er no, not them, whoever is "causing" the strike. Hmm, that was some fancy footwork...
So do the Silicon Valley overlords rule our world? In some ways they rule the mindshare with things like Twitter or Facebook. But their lobbying so far has only been about things directly related to their California Business Model (anti-SOPA) and then only about immigration, since they want more Indian and other programmers to be able to come to the US and be paid less than Americans already here...or something. They don't seem to have a grander vision than that.
There's also this -- remember when we were counting how many jobs all these new Big IT things make up -- Google, Facebook etc? It was like half a million. A ridiculously small amount. SV is not a job generator; only very highly skilled people for the most part get jobs there and there aren't that many anyway. I bet fracking in North Dakota or health car ein New York have higher rate of job generation now than the app factories. Most people employed in the USA have jobs outside this sector, not in it, even if they rely on it or are tangentially involved. Yes, everything is coded. But not everybody codes.
Imagine, if I hadn't happened to go to the dentist's office, and hadn't happened to have to wait for some time for the doctor, and if I haven't just happened to pick up the B, and not the A section of the hard-copy of the New York Times instead of staring at my i-phone, I might have missed this hugely, hugely important story: Court Says Privacy Case Can Proceed vs. Google
I would never have found out about it if I hadn't seen that discarded B section of the Times on a chair in the dentist's waiting room.
Because this very important development was a story pushed down very much below the fold at the Times; it was not reported on TechCrunch; it didn't appear in the daily tech news from Politico; nobody tweeted it from the tech set -- it just was NOWHERE to be found.
But it's hugely important - and I'm going to repeat this regularly and often.
It's not just because a court is finally going forward on pushing bach on increasing Google encroachment -- the real problem with our privacy, not the NSA.
It's because of how the court pushed back and defeated Google's hacker culture and specious edge-casing hypotheticals and contrivances to try to gain freedom for itself to do what it wants above the law.
And this is truly a beautiful thing to behold.
The case has to do with the issue of Google driving around -- "war-driving" it's called -- and slurping up data from people's wi-fis.
Why on earth would they need to do this when they already have gobbled SO MUCH?
Well, because they can't get at wireless cell phone or ipad search unless they can get into your wireless. When most people were on laptops or PCs that were connected to the Internet via wires to ISPs to servers that Google could scrape, it was easier. When the world went mobile, it got harder, to make a more complicated story simplified. Why do you think Google is out there offering free wireless to people in Kansas? So they can scrape them. They need to eat -- their only revenue model other than selling some over-priced gadgets few people really want or need is to offer the loss-leader of search service for free, and sell ad space on search results for fees. They need this like air. It gets harder and harder to sustain and people upload and download more and more stuff from the Internet without paying anybody for it.
But people began to push back. They not only didn't like the StreetView stuff which sometimes caught them in a picture they had no control over, they certainly didn't like their wireless and passwords and content being vacuumed up by Goog. The judge saw it their way.
In a major legal setback for Google, a federal appeals court here said on Tuesday that a lawsuit accusing the Internet giant of illegal wiretapping could proceed.
The ruling, which comes at a moment when online privacy is being hotly debated, has its origins in a much-publicized Google initiative, Street View, which tried to map the inhabited world.
In addition to photographs, Street View vehicles secretly collected e-mail, passwords, images and other personal information from unencrypted home computer networks.
But lawsuits in Europe and a class action lawsuit here in the US compelled the court to take a look at this Big Gulp, and then Google naturally tried to fight back and defend its Big Grab:
Google tried to get the case dismissed, saying the Wi-Fi communications it captured were “readily accessible to the general public” and therefore not a violation of federal wiretapping laws. The lower court rejected that argument, and on Tuesday the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit did too.
“This is an important opinion for privacy rights,” said Kathryn E. Barnett of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, one of the law firms working for the plaintiffs. “It says that when you are in your home, you have a right to privacy in your communications. Someone just can’t drive by and seize them.”
So this is all good as a principle of privacy -- from the real threat to our privacy, which isn't the NSA.
But here's the beauty part. The judge did not buy the edge-casing bullshit that Google engineers and lawyers tried to serve up (emphasis added) to defend their shaky case:
The unanimous, 35-page decision by a three-judge panel found little merit in Google’s legal maneuverings, stating at one critical point that the company was basically inventing meanings in an effort to declare its actions legal.
The court wrote that Google’s proposed definition of “radio communication” was “in tension with how Congress — and virtually everyone else — uses the phrase.” Radio communication is not covered by the wiretapping law.
The lawyers and some consumer rights groups are seeing that they may finally have gotten the clout to hit Google in the wallet with this:
If the case does become a class action, millions could join. The potential penalties might, in theory, be large enough that even Google would notice. The plaintiffs are asking for $10,000 each along with unspecified punitive damages.
“In the past, Google has been able to buy its way out of privacy violations with penalties that are mere pocket change,” said John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, which is a co-counsel in the case. “This suit has the potential for meaningful damages.”
Google at first tried to claim nothing was taken, then blamed it on a "rogue engineer," then finally said they were "sorry". As a lawyer said, however, "I don't think Google was sorry until they were investigated." Initially, Google denied regulators the right to see what they collected (!) -- and at first got a soft touch from the FCC (Obama's appointees have all been pro-Google copyleftist net neutrality types).
But the litigators persisted.
To me, the best part of this is the extraordinary repudiation of geek thinking. The kind of specious and contrived logic that Google has used here is exactly like the hacker-think in all these cases. Why, Weev is only "doing math in the browser" when he steals emails from AT&T's customers; or Matthew Keys is only "reporting" on Anonymous when he gets with them in an IRC channel and eggs them on to hack his former employer and deface a website; or Aaron Swartz is only "taking out too many library books" when he steals 1.7 million files with a circumvention script to defeat a paywall/student log-in wall, or Barrett Brown is a "journalist" when he actually enables hackers to gain access to a link to privacy-busting files and credit cards.
This case goes far to whacking at that sort of geek-speak and stinkin' thinkin' and I hope it is indicative increasingly of how judges are going to look at the utterly fake hypotheticals and fictions that hackers think up to do what they want. Listen to this!
The ruling, written by Judge Jay Bybee, took sharp issue with Google’s contention that data transmitted over a Wi-Fi network was not protected by federal wiretapping laws because it was an electronic “radio communication.”
“In common parlance, watching a television show does not entail ‘radio communication,’ ” Judge Bybee wrote. “Nor does sending an e-mail or viewing a bank statement while connected to a Wi-Fi network.”
Neither did the court think much of Google’s argument that unencrypted data sent over a Wi-Fi network is “readily accessible to the general public” because both the hardware and software needed to intercept and decode the data are widely available.
People can easily buy technology to log every keystroke on someone’s computer, the court noted, but that did not make those keystrokes “readily accessible to the general public.”
Amen. The can=permission-to-do thinking and 99/100 or 0/1 binary thinking about it cannot rule organic life. Just because something is open to your manipulations doesn't mean you get to grab it.
I couldn't be more delighted and I hope this case goes forward and we will get more like it.
Andy Greenberg always exasperates me. He's supposed to be reporting from "the Capitalist Tool," as Forbes used to call itself before it became pro-Putin (Mark Adomanis) and pro-technocommunist (see all the Internet, hacking, WikiLeaks, etc stories). But he's always on the side of the hackers sort of surreptiously, golf-clapping, secret-sharing to get the story. He always acts so dewy-eyed and enthusiastic about these hacker heroes he's ostensibly covering critically (I'm reading his book now This Machine Kills Secrets and the passages on Assange are so thrilling and dramatic -- for him. (Secretly he imagines WikiLeaks is like Woody Guthrie's guitar with the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists" -- maybe it just isn't in the hands of the right player yet!)
Palantir's CEO is called "deviant" because...his hair stands on end and...he's like any geek in his views and tastes and probably no different than Andy Greenberg himself.
It's called "CIA-Funded" because....it has an investment from the start-up investment arm of the CIA and because it has CIA contracts.
If every Silicon Valley that has government contracts were called "funded by" the government, that would be ridiculous, of course. Greenberg can invoke this "funded by" -- as if Palantir lived on public assistance like a welfare queen -- because of this start-up funding and its contracts with the NSA to do scanning of Big Data.
But if one of those "Start-Up America" type of things comingling government and AOL funds and involving Tim O'Reilly were to "fund" something, why, that would be cool and not exposed as "government funding". Some other friend of Obama getting masses of green stimulus cash wouldn't be exposed as "government-funded" by Forbes but would be a cool start-up. Oh, you know, like Tesla, Musk's electric car company, gets government subsidies (isn't it 30%), but Andy isn't writing an expose about how this form of technocommunism is functioning in our society.
Instead, it's only evil Palantir and evil CIA that gets the scrutiny because everything is tied to the NSA scandal now.
My comment buried in the collapsed comments at Forbes:
Nothing you’ve reported here indicates that Palantir is committing any crime or suspected of any crime.
Katz-Lacabe never complained about Google driving around and
vacuuming up his wireless connection data because Google is “cool” for
geeks and Palantir is “evil” — maybe because it doesn’t have the usual
“better world” technocommunist mantra, but is made up of
technolibertarians (they are fiercely at odds).
You reference the HBGary scandal that indirectly involved Palantir.
But HBGary created a proposal to do things like create fake Internet
personas or try to discredit Glenn Greenwald. This was a pitch to
potential customers in the government, not actualities. You neglect to
mention that we know these private *thoughts* and *intentions* of this
private company because they were hacked by Anonymous as you well know,
using coercive, fraudulent and illegal methods *for which some of them
were arrested and are now in jail*. HBGary was also not found to have
committed a crime; it’s not a crime, thank God, to want to “get” Glenn
Greenwald, or tens of thousands of people would be in jail over nothing.
As for this, the self-referential ethics created on the fly, the Bat
phone and all the rest — this is no different than any geek anywhere in
power. John Perry Barlow told me the source of his ethics was himself
and his friends when I challenged him directly on this, given all his
loopy ideas. Any geek running any code anywhere thinks they are smarter
than others, above the law, and don’t need to answer to “corrupt”
politicians or “outdated” law that “stifles innovation”. This is a
problem throughout the entire industry that doesn’t self-regulate and
never met a piece of legislation from Washington trying to curb its
anarchy that it didn’t hate and didn’t unleash its techno firepower and
agitation of the geek masses on Youtube to stop.
One thing that represents a glimmer of hope in terms of ethics here
is that the paranoid leadership at Palantir at least creates firm data
trails for every engineer accessing every thing so they have records.
Maybe they should do more of that at Booz, Hamilton Allen.
* * *
As for Katz-Lacabe whining about his license plate -- along with his kids -- getting snapped, I'm finding it hard to care about this in some deep way and it reminds me of the TSA whiners.
First, when information like this is scanned and put in a data base, it isn't read by humans -- it's not humans gawking at his kids. It isn't combed by humans -- it's a machine, filtering for matches. Obviously, the ability to make a data set like this saves the lives of children abducted, as Palantir notes citing real cases. And no one, least of Katz-Lacabe, can show how he has actually suffered some loss of rights or false arrest or false anything due to this record. It's a hysterical hypothetical. It might be used wrongly. It might compromise him in some way -- but it hasn't nor can he demonstrate that it will, really.
I view all of this activity on the Internet as merely the electronic version of a cop on the beat. If a human cop walked down your street or drove down your street, scanning with his human eyes your car, your children, your lawn, you wouldn't care. This is acceptable and even needed. If his human memory retained some of these images, such as to be able to ask questions when he spots your car in a ditch, or spots your child being tugged away by someone who isn't you, you'd only be too happy.
The difference between human agency and machine agency is seldom analyzed in these debates.
Remember when everybody said Amazon would fail because it was just too costly to maintain all those servers with all those books advertised for sale and it just couldn't pay for itself? Remember when it went for years without a profit? (And when people said the entire Internet would fail.) People just wouldn't send payments over the Internet or shop that way, and it will go broke, they said. Then there was the dot.com bubble birst.
Of course, thanks to Amazon (and e-Bay and a few of those other early Internet merchants), we have a normal Internet now instead of a giant collective farm herding us into communes guided by "thought leaders". Good! To be sure, with each passing year, Amazon seems to be grabbing a bigger and bigger cut in fees from your used book sales...I believe the plan is to make the value of the hard-cover book so low -- lower than paper back -- that it will cost more to ship it by the old USPS than its worth, and people will move to Kindles. Already, you can see many books available for one cent...
Even so, this is not an instant process nor one that can invade every aspect of life.
THE INTERNET IS A BIG TELEPHONE ATTACHED TO A BUNCH OF TRUCKS
While the Internet is properly described as a "series of tubes," I've always thought it was practical to explain that the Internet is really just a big telephone hooked up to a bunch of trucks.
Yes, there are pictures and movies and text on this big telephone, and that makes it "special,"and people will go on living in that "cyberspace" that Evgeny Morozov says doesn't exist, consuming content and chatting on the Internet that Morozov also says doesn't really exist as a human artifact -- so much so that he is as scared of it as a ghost, and keeps it locked up for a good portion of every day, with the screw driver he could use to open the safe thrown into the safe for good measure...
But when it comes time to explain "what is it that the Internet does," you have to concede that what it does is make it easier for you to browse books (or vacuum cleaners) online on Amazon.com, read some reviews, flip through some of the pages, then order it either new from one of the big box warehouses or from some people in another state who send it to you via the US Post Office.
Either way you slice it, it will come to you via a truck -- trucks move more than 2/3 of America's freight. Without those trucks, the Internet wouldn't mean anything to you. Most people don't get a date or a quick sexual encounter via the Internet, and the movies they watch or the games they play or the chat they have about their cats aren't terribly fulfilling. The Internet delivers when it delivers -- when you get some bargain -- like a peacock purse from Kings Way constantly thrust in your face by Facebook. No. I didn't mean that. Because I would never, ever buy that peacock purse thrust at me by Facebook. However, my daughter did find this cool canvas tote with a drawing of Medusa on it at etsy.com
If you have family members who drive trucks, or who drive around fixing server farms for big news companies, or even just printers of Catholic Church bulletins, you would understand this basic truth about the Internet and about how other things work and why they never seem to "go on" the Internet.
SPECIAL DELIVERY
So when we're told that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for its "delivery system," I might almost believe it, although I have to wonder if the system that involves 11 year old boys throwing the Washington Post on porches in suburbia, which hooks up to stay-at-home moms driving to get bundles of papers, and union trucks delivering those bundles can also handle vacuum-cleaners. Well, maybe books.
I think some church bulletin printers can stay in business because there are still pizza parlours, funeral parlours, lawyers, clothing stores and beauticians who find it profitable to place ads in them. Someone might invent an app to replace the church bulletin, but most people like the process of first getting the folded paper from their fellow parishioner and chatting after the service, then taking it home and affixing it to the refrigerator with a magnet where they might say one of the prayers, remember the holy days, and use the pizza coupon or call the lawyer.Have you ever tried to throw away a church bulletin? Your conscience will twinge, and you will read that homily you skipped and curse yourself for missing the deadline on the sub sandwich offer.
But it's about systems for storage and forwarding -- connection.
SERVER FARMS
First, there's former Amazon employee and current Googler Steve Yegge's
notion that Bezos has this fabulous far-reaching futurist top-down view
of everything that makes him brilliant. (Yes, he was an early investor
in Second Life.)
Here's the thing that Yegge says that's important in terms of the Wired State -- servers and data:
You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure
they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be
transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they
have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce,
and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o'
other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the
backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal
favorite of the bunch.
WASHINGTON HOOK-UP
Maybe when you buy the Washington Post you buy the center of all the relational data of lobbying and politics in people's heads who work there... You literally buy the connections to power...
Fast explains then that we're not talking about the newspapers rolled up going on the porch:
When you look at these as capital investments in the context Yegge
offers, you can start to think of the newspaper as a computing
infrastructure for distributing information. The Washington Post has one of the best APIs
of any newspaper; it’s a distribution mechanism for short-form content.
(Although reportedly the team that developed the API was not sold to Bezos
as part of the deal.) Purpose-built distribution networks for different
kinds of content are beginning to solidify into infrastructure, just as
e-commerce did 10 years ago. And if we’ve learned anything about Bezos,
it’s that he loves to own his own infrastructure and leverage it into
new kinds of business we can’t even imagine right now
Well, watch this space.
I personally don't think Citizen Bezos bought this bauble (for one percent of his $25 billion personal net worth) for merely tinkering with "short form" (news apps) or "long form" (books) content and "delivery systems" in the sense Fast is describing it. Come now, there are better APIs in the world than the Washington Post's -- oh, Amazon has them lol.
I think it more about the quest for political power that Silicon Valley has long wanted -- they're not content to just make the gadgets that other people who are in power are using to get and stay in power, they're not content to just connect everybody else, they want to be integrated as part of the process. So it's not just the president's Blackberry (and maybe he, too, converted to a smart-phone by now), not just the president's dinner with the Valley tycoons, not just the help Obama enlisted from Google, Facebook and other engineers to win the election, but being in the institutions themselves.
THAT OTHER SILICON VALLEY BAUBLE HATES ON BEZOS
The New Republic -- itself an example of Silicon Valley gobbling up a venerable East Coast establishment -- to my enduring sorrow -- is hating on Bezos doing exactly the same thing they did.
Is this the technocommunist fighting the technolibertarian? I think so -- there has always been a struggle for the soul of Silicon Valley between those who want to steal from the middle-class and give to the poor (e-Bay) or make the middle and lower class work for free to provide content and feed a new oligarch class (Facebook and Twitter) and those who sell widgets and make money the old-fashioned way (Apple) and those trying to combine all of these things (Google).
The TNR piece by Mark Tracy on Bezos "murky politics" translates to the technocommunist's aversion for people who don't want excessive taxation of the rich and his lament that Bezos is "no George Soros or Sheldon Adelson". Even so, Tracy thinks that as corporate-oriented as he is, Bezos might take aim at the "conservative" (i.e. not cravenly "progressive") elements of Washpo:
Bezos has also announced there will be no layoffs from the Post’s staff of 2,000. If I were a Post
employee who does not believe Bezos when he claims he will not meddle, I
would probably be most scared if I were one of the editorial staffers
who have fostered a distinctly conservative editorial page whose columnists include Obama administration “critic-in-chief” Charles Krauthammer; Bush administration staffers Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen; false-balance-peddlinghawk Fred Hiatt (also the page’s editor); former New Republic editor Charles Lane, who consistently (and I speak only for myself) takes vintage “even the liberal New Republic” contrarianism about three steps too far; racial profiling enthusiasts Richard Cohen and Kathleen Parker; and serial climate-change-denialist George F. Will. Them I imagine Bezos not jibing with.
If Bezos gets rid of these people -- then, see what I mean about how we need a new magazine. Tracy forgot to bas Jennifer Ruben, the in-house neo-con.
Bezos can be expected to hew to the line of the other Silicon Valley "thought influencers" who argue for net neutrality or more visas for engineers or good relations with China, where the manufacturing base of Silicon Valley is located.
But one very important thing that Bezos decided, which puts him in the company of those non-progs that Tracy and other TNR writers so loathe is that he removed WikiLeaks from his servers. Good! That was absolutely the right thing to do. When Sen. Lieberman asked publicly why Amazon was storing the stolen classified cables that Bradley Manning had hacked with Julian Assange's connivance, and invoked Amazon's own terms of service, which prohibit uploading content that is not your own and distributing it, Bezos to his credit instantly got it and blocked Wikileaks from his speedy server services -- a decision he has maintained to this day and which I hope he never goes back on.
Perhaps we might even make a pillar of the community out of one of these Internet moguls yet.
EVIL BOX WAREHOUSES AND BRAND
Alec MacGillis, TNR senior editor, who once tried to spin Obama's socialism away as merely a kind of liberalism, speaks of the "shock and dolor" involved in Bezos' purchase. Oh, there's those evil box warehouses without the AC where ambulances stand by at the door to carry away fainting employees and where robots can't quite do the low-paid jobs yet but might soon. Oh, there's all this evil capitalist stuff.
Chris Hughes, who did the same thing to TNR -- and made himself editor which at least Bezos isn't going to do -- tries to spin this as "buying a brand". Ugh. Can't these people think in terms of anything but brands? There's no more uglier form of capitalism than technocommunism, you know? Because for them, brand is partiynost', party discipline...
The purchase does not include Foreign Policy -- not to be confused with Foreign Affairs -- which is that edgy hipster IR lounge for neo Real Politickers (which I happened to stop reading for 6 weeks and didn't miss it, and even The Cable and Democracy Lab don't hold me as they once did -- we need a new magazine.) Does that mean it is going to die and Blake Hounsell will have to stop tweeting? (Oh, wait, I am SO out of date. Blake is now at Politico, not FP. But...why can't Bezos buy Politico, too?)
OUR VERY INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE
James Fallow -- whose own magazine somehow got taken over by the Silicon Valley scientism virus even if a tycoon didn't buy it out I don't think is spouting nonsense.
For now I mean only to say: this is a moment that genuinely surprised
me. I think I'll remember where I was when I first heard the news -- via
Twitter! -- and I am sure it will be one of those
episode-that-encapsulates-an-era occurrences. Newsweek's demise, a long time coming, was a minor temblor by comparison; this is a genuine earthquake.
* * *
So let us hope that this is what the sale signifies: the beginning of a
phase in which this Gilded Age's major beneficiaries re-invest in the
infrastructure of our public intelligence. We hope it marks a beginning,
because we know it marks an end.
Yeesh. Yes, the Atlantic is now filled with open source loons like Alex Madrigal, and gaggles of young fangirlz gushing love for every single arrested hacker anarchist, as well as a stable of Realist and even pro-Kremlin authors on the foreign policy left over from FP.
If a denuded Washington Post now stuffed with "short content' online Amazon style is supposed to be our intellectual infrastructure, make me a new Internet please.
Pretty soon, like Roland LeGrande, my Second Life friend, they will be talking about Journalism-as-a-Service (JaaS, per Jeff Jarvis) just like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
I love this Washington Post article for the title alone -- Who is Jeff Bezos?
A possible downside, Friedlich said, is that “there is unquestionably
some element here of a highly successful guy buying a seat at the table.
Chris Hughes at The New Republic, John Henry in Boston, Jeff Bezos in Washington. Citizen Kane 2.0.”
Bezos provided a whopping $11 million to start the online virtual world of Second Life, where I still remain active with a small rentals business. I don't know if he saw it, as I do, as a kind of proving group for the whole web 2.0 movement, where many phenomena, good and bad, were tried first in this petri dish before expanding to the larger Internet. People think of Second Life as having failed years ago after its peak in 2007-2008 when a lot of marketing companies invaded it, but in fact it's going strong and I think represents the future of the Internet with payment systems and auction houses and oneline marketplaces for user-generated content in digital creations and services. I think most people have no idea that this world of some one million people with about 70,000 concurrency spread over even a smaller number of server clusters than it used to be (now 26,000 I believe, down from 30,000) actually turns a profit ($75 million a year) not only for its owners, but its users (who trade about $400 million every year).
That's incredible, on an Internet filled with technocommunism and "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Eventually, we will come out of this era of sterile collectivism, which is why Rod Humble has bought Desura.
Bezos also invested in another start-up of Second Life inventor Philip Rosedale, called Coffee & Power. It was sort of a job-space sharing and errands trading interface that eventually died when it couldn't get past the latte drinkers and coders in San Francisco to people who could really spend money on it -- and it was facing competition from similar jobs and errands boards. Rosedale has now moved on to make a better virtual world with another start-up called Hi Fidelity.
P.S. See below about how the cool kids are explaining to us that a) Amazon is not in Silicon Valley (snort) and that b) the Iceberg is buying the Titanic, yuck yuck.
Tom Watson is a social entrepreneur who used to work as a reporter who today, like a lot of the "progressive" consultants and "thought influencers" and "change leaders" you see on Twitter have figured out how to make the dying field of journalism and NGO activism pay on social media by tying it to a consulting business for cause non-profits and betterworlding blogging. Good for him! Better to be paid by the diminishing nonprofit world and blogging and tweeting than not be paid except for Google ad pennies, right? Let me sum up one of the positive things about Tom -- as far as I know, he's never done a TED talk.
The problem is that the line between journalism and business in the center or right which "progressives" are always claiming to quickly ascertain as blurred in mainstream media, in favour of The Man, the Establishment , the Prison Military Complex, and Wall Street, in fact is just as blurred here on the left where the upbeat messages of the efficacy of social media to "change the world" are in direct proportion to the need to get consulting contracts. That is, you can't report critically on a space where you also hope to make money selling that space as effective -- this is what I explain to Alex Howard, who keeps angrily insisting he's a journalist although he's the PR guy/lobbyist for O'Reilly in Washginton. These jobs are public relations or marketing jobs and there is nothing wrong with marketing! But let's not mistake them for ethics-grounded journalism.
The thing is, Tom Watson is better than most of these social media gurus because he's actually willing to be a tad critical of not only the artifacts of Silicon Valley but the anarcho-communist hacker movements that have thrived on Big IT's products. For example, I remember him willing to frown at least a little bit at the tactic of DDoSing other people's servers you don't like if you want to force your own ideas on people.
Tom Watson has published a piece in Forbes -- which I have to wonder can be properly called "the capitalist tool" anymore, what with Andy Greenberg writing with barely-concealed envy of hacker-heroes and Mark Adomanis shilling for the Kremlin. But capitalism, like socialism, has to make a living online nowadays like all of us and isn't what it once was...
And that's just it -- Watson explains to us less perceptive folk that we're all wrong if we think Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are "traitors" -- and he even hints that the old concept of "whistleblower" isn't quite right. Oh, these old ethical categories must fall away, you know, like these silly distinctions between "marketing" and "journalism" of the new order.
Well, in part, that's progress, because neither of these two malevolent hacksters are "whistleblowers" because neither of them has focused on a single real case that they really cared about and really worked on it -- which is frankly not only my test for sincere human rights and social activism, but the public's, when they look past the rhetoric.
But Watson wants to abandon the old ethical categories and terms for people who disown their own countries and reserve for them now a special new category -- pioneers:
I was thinking about those days in the context of the often
cartoonish coverage of mega-leakers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.
So much of the question about them boils down to a lame cultural A/B
test. Each man is either a hero or a traitor. There’s no in between –
which runs counter to every experience I ever had as a reporter with a
source who handed me documents that I wasn’t supposed to have. Bradley Manning: Traitor or Hero,
asks the Daily Beast. And the usually canny pollsters at Quinnipiac
actually commissioned a poll that demanded a choice on Snowden – whistle-blower or traitor
– because, well, that’s the attention span and depth most people give
the story. Whistle-blower, hero, traitor – all loaded words.
So let’s try on another: how about “pioneers?”
Well, let's not and say we did. Watson right before that lets us know that when he was on the cub reporter's beat in the Bronx, he would meet with all kinds of whistleblowers, and yet he knew enough to probe deeper and find their motive, their axe to grind.
In working on the stories those sources generated, it was always vital
to include the leaker’s motivation in the formula for how to handle
follow-up reporting and writing. The politics almost always mattered; we
didn’t go the good guy-bad guy route. They were all shades of gray and
the allegiance of the reporters and editors I worked with was to the
impact and accuracy of the story. If we chose sides it was manifest in what we decided to report on – which stories we deemed important and spent out time on – and not in how we wrote them.
But sadly Watson now throws overboard his very important real-life training in journalism and experience in dealing with sources -- that frankly most bloggers and tweeters just don't have -- and decides that he doesn't need to ask the kind of hard questions about the motives of these WikiLeaks anarchists that I do. Instead, he can embrace them as heros in the new matrix of social media, cyberspace and governance -- that Special Unicorm Realm where Tom now makes his living as, well, a propagandist for forcing social change through the coded artifact of social media using NGOs still able to live off the remnants of wealth generated by 19th and 20th century business tycoons.
Why is Watson willing to bless Manning and Snowden as "pioneers" in a Brave New World? Well, because as computer programmers, they hold the keys to his special realm of cyberspace and are ushering us into the future:
What matters is that digital security in our still young,
newly-networked age is losing almost as quickly as privacy – and privacy
has lost, almost completely.
So...it doesn't matter that these two disabled a liberal democratic state under the rule of law with separation of powers and checks and balances that legitimately classified files on diplomacy or war or counterterrorism -- what matters is that all these old structures be swept away and we let infantiles who didn't graduate from high school and were raised on the Internet without fathers (unless you count Richard Stallman and John Perry Barlow) decide our world and form of governance for us.
What matters is our "newly networked age" -- whatever that is (I'm always questing to find out what it is these champions of the Wired State are ushering so quickly into being, and I wonder if they know themselves.)
And here Watson gets especially enthusiastic -- because it means consulting work to explain to non-profits how they can best take advantage of all this:
...there’s a trend on the social commons that has relevance not just
for government, but for every organized activity and entity collecting
and using digital data.
You know, marketers. Educators and thought leaders!
And that trend relates to the ease with which vast quantities of data
can be transferred – the very aspect of technology that makes our
digital lives possible. There is, quite frankly, no way to reconcile
hundreds of thousands of security clearances for government workers and
contractors – given access to data in the name of public safety and
national defense – with the ability of any of those individuals (with a
political axe to grind or not) from making the information public.
So, let's not try, right?! Watson makes no secret of the fact that he finds this all exciting and heady:
Gathering information is easy, and getting easier – as millions of
consumers voluntarily put their personal data on public or corporate
networks. Keeping that information secret is clearly much more
difficult, and may be getting harder. That’s why Snowden and Manning –
whether traitors or heroes or neither – should be rightly be regarded as
the first arrivals of the wave still to come.
Why exciting? Well, you don't call people "pioneers" and speak of a thrilling "wave to come" if you think there might be something disturbing and wrong about what these radicals are doing in other people's names.
And that's why I put this reply to Tom:
Tom, I don’t know why it’s so hard for you “progressives” to
understand that when the road leads to Moscow — as it surely did for
Snowden and always has for Assange and WikiLeaks — Manning’s chosen
anarchist organizations — then you don’t keep nattering on about whether
they are whistleblowers but you call it — they are indeed traitors. Russia
is objectively speaking our enemy precisely because the Kremlin wages
war on America and the West itself, and we are forced to address this
security challenge. The overwhelming majority of cyber attacks in Europe
emanate from Russia. If I have to explain how WikiLeaks and Russia hook
up, you haven’t been paying attention.
What you fail to grasp is that the way in which you run movements
really matters. If you run them like Bolsheviks, you get Bolshevik
results. We do not require having national conversations by force and
fiat, coerced by fait accomplis organized by these infantile nerds who
think they are still blowing things up at their Play Stations. None of the
things they claim they are about are true, which is easy to see in
Manning’s case because the story that supposedly caused his “epiphany” —
the Iraq printing press operators — was one that neither he — with his
fit of conscience — nor Assange — who found it just not interesting and
sensational enough — ever saw fit to publish. Maybe they feared if they
did, we’d all discover there was in fact good reason to arrest people
who weren’t only about a printing press? See, this is why they can’t be
trusted. As for Snowden, when he’s ready to tell us who that “suspected
hacker’s girlfriend is” with the bugged phone, and we can all check the
story, maybe he’ll have more credibility. Right now he has zero on a
hundred fronts.
It’s almost as if you can’t conceive of an agenda for reform for your
“progressivism” that might involve more transparency or less secrecy
without first deifying these creeps who achieved this *by force*. Trust
me, you do not want to live in a terror-state created by anarchists.
That’s what Russia is. That’s why we’re all here having this
conversation.
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."
I think the Snowden affair has to be seen in a much larger context of 1) assault on the US by anarchist collective WikiLeaks and its collusion in hacking and disclosure of sensitive military and political files; 2) concerted and repeated attacks on US government, business and media organizations by radical anarchist hackers' movements (Anonymous, LulzSec) and arrest and trials of some members; 3) the case of Bradley Manning, the soldier who collaborated with WikiLeaks to leak US government files; 4) concerted attack on US Internet freedom programs, led by Evgeny Morozov and Jacob Appelbaum; 5) the rise and fall of Occupy Wall Street; 6) the failure of various US legislative initiatives to regulate intellectual and cybersecurity issues on the Internet (SOPA/PIPA, CISPA); 7) Obama's courting of Silicon Valley to win the 2012 elections and use of Silicon Valley's social media platforms and digital analytics to influence public opinion; 8) the campaign of Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and others against the NSA begun in 2012; 9) the revelation of PRISM program and flight to Hong Kong and Moscow with the help of WikiLeaks
This isn't to suggest a causal relationship among all the items in the timeline, although all students of hacking should look closely at the trajectory of WikiLeaks campaigns against the US, its collusion with the Russian government; Evgeny Morozov's concerted assault on US government Internet programs along with elements of Silicon Valley's social media platforms and WikiLeaks promotion of Snowden. Rather, viewing the timeline should prompt people to think of the context for one of the largest assaults on US security in history, which also coincides with Russia's bid to control the Internet internationally; its backing of WikiLeaks and the US hacker movement; Kremlin TV's propagandistic celebration of US hackers in Anonymous; WikiLeaks and Occupy; Russia's own crackdown on Internet freedom and "foreign agents" at home (mirroring its one-time championing of Western peace movements by the Soviet government even as it jailed pacifists at home).
If you think timelines linking these elements cast too wide a net, you haven't been paying attention to the news. Well, and as William Burroughs once famously put it, "Paranoia is having all the facts."
Timelines are helpful for things like seeing the long-term role of Evgeny Morozov in attacking US Internet freedom programs and Internet regulation against cyberattacks; in seeing the handing of Julian Assange of his own TV show by the Kremlin's TV in the context of an overall propaganda assault on the NSA by Democracy Now! and other left and liberal outlets; in tracking the rise and fall of legislation in the US congress to rein in Internet criminality and cyberattacks , hacker attacks, and Obama's condiminium with Silicon Valley tycoons and their help in his re-election.
American and British hackers have steadily been launching attacks on US web sites and servers, and in a few cases getting caught and being jailed and sentenced, although never to the draconian 25-year-sentences that overwrought tech media supporters imagine they will get -- they get suspended sentences, parole with psychiatric assistance, or sentences up to one-two years, in fact.
But by and large, their assault on the US government, business, nonprofits and media has been an unprecedented effort to undermine US cybersecurity that has occurred simultaneously with attacks by Russian and Chinese state-sponsored hacking on the US, and their crackdown on domestic human rights activist and opposition leaders.
Aaron Swartz who hacked JSTOR and MIT; Andrew Aurenheimer who hacked AT&T, the LulzSec gang who hacked Sony and Stratfor; Jeremy Hammond who attacked Stratfor; the Anonymous who hacked the websites of the CIA and Pentagon and the US Sentencing Commission; these are all part of a movement that has been battered a weakened US state under Obama, savaged by Chinese and also Russian hackers. The hacker movements have used both judicial and extra-judicial means to get its way -- a world in which states have maximum transparency (and are weak) and individuals have maximum secrecy (and thus the sovereign group reigns).
The hackers were also involved in a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act and related legislation and were ultimately successful with some Congress people such as Darrell Issa supporting them. The hacker networks and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation also began to aggressively call for changes to the CFAA in light of some of the cases.
They also campaigned against CISPA, prefering to the rule of law the condominium Obama maintained with the major Internet companies who helped fund and secure his election through social media analysis and bundling of campaign donations. CISPA -- which might have regulated the ways in which Internet companies collect data and the use to which metadata is put to fight terrorism. Instread, ad-hoc arrangements took the place of clear legislation.
As hackers and "progressive" organizations attacked the US and weakened its ability to pass legislation to combat hacking, piracy, and other online crimes, they also half-heartedly and belatedly countered Russia and other bad actors in the international arena at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) but Russia, with long experience in controlling multi-lateral institutions through manipulations and vetos, prevailed.
So they failed, and Russia's big grab for power over the Internet at home and abroad was successful, up to a point. At home, Russia increasingly cracked down on the Internet as it also continued to undermine international institutions and programs for freedom.
And the timeline adds some support for my thesis that the Snowden affair helped to distract from Bradley Manning's confession of guilt and the exposes of his collusion with Assange in the trial as well as the decision to try him for assistance to the enemy -- all big losses for the hacker movement seeking to exonerate him. And Snowden's flight also distracted attention from Russia's internal crackdown on domestic critics and its own far more considerable efforts to control the Internet.
Whether that means the Kremlin's masters are just good at exploiting US weaknesses or whether they script and execute attacks in concert with WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and Occupy remains to be studied.
America has enemies from both domestic and foreign non-state and foreign state actors, some of whom show signs of collusion with each other; they are succeeding to alarming degrees; the pushback against them causes new backlashes and enables enemies to portray the US as "oppressive" and distract from the greater oppression of Russia, China, Iran and other authoritarian states; nevertheless we should keep fighting.
This is a work in progress; feel free to put corrections or additions in the comments. Hat-tip to David McDuff for additions.
Anonymous hacks security consulting firm HBGary which had been planning to infiltrate Anonymous and among other campaigns, discredit blogger Glenn Greenwald; Anonymous victory-dances over its successful defeat of plans to retaliate against Anonymous hack of PayPal, MasterCard, Amazon and others.
@JPBarlow issues his call to arms to Anonymous on Twitter to fight back against Paypal and MasterCard blocking WikiLeaks: "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. #WikiLeaks"
Anonymous attacks US security firm Stratfor, stealing emails and passwords including of government subscribers, shutting down the site for days while it is repaired, and using credit cards of subscribers both for forced charity donations and purchase of games and merchandise online.
Russia begins scheming its big grab at Internet control through International Telecommunications Union at the World Conference on International Telecommunication (See Wired State, Streetwise Professor) (less visible are simultaneous Russian attempts to gain control of human rights programs at OSCE and treaty bodies monitoring international human rights covenants at UN).
Freedom of the Press Foundation announces program to fund WikiLeaks and other radical organizations. Founded by Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, John Perry Barlow, Laura Poitras, Xeni Jardan and others.
Aaron Swartz, facing prosecution for hacking JSTOR and MIT's computers, committs suicide.
January 25, 2013
A federal appeals court in Virginia ruled that the government can keep hidden its efforts to obtain internet users’ private information without a warrant. The appeal stems from the legal battle over the records of three Twitter users sought by the government in connection with its investigation into WikiLeaks: Birgitta Jonsdottir, Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp.
Bradley Manning's statement at his military trial, where he complained that neither the New York Times or the Washington Post got back to him when he tried to leak materials to them, and ultimately he went to WikiLeaks. Manning reiterates Assange's "Collateral Murder" propaganda and explains that Assange suppressed the files on the closure of an Iraqi printing press that Manning wanted to publicize -- the beginning of his decision to hack military servers.
Edward Snowden begins work as an infrastructure analyst of the NSA with Booz, Allen Hamilton. He takes a week or longer business trip to unknown location (Maui? to meet Appelbaum and other hackers gathered for the Spring Break of Coders in Hawaii?).
Julian Assange interview with Democracy Now! on WikiLeaks, Manning trial and NSA Surveillance; mentions NSA's program Stellar Wind "collecting all the calls" -- the "prefigurement" of the Snowden story.
Veteran Washington Post journalist Walter Pincus publishes article "Questions for Snowden" raising questions about links between Greenwald and WikiLeaks; he is forced to publish corrections about what he had claimed was Assange's May 29 preview of Greenwald's article and Greenwald's post on WikiLeaks, which was actually re-post. (He should have raised Appelbaum, Poitras and Binney previews of attacks prefiguring Snowden.)
Dan Baer, Hillary Clinton's main State Department staff person who worked on Internet freedom in Washington, DC at the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is exiled to Vienna to become US ambassador to OSCE.
Cryptome article appears on public PGP keys made by Verax, the pseudonym used by Edward Snowden, in generation of keys in May and March 2013. Possible tie to Michael Vario?
July 7, 2013
Poitras and Appelbaum scheduled to appear at PS1 in New York to talk about the "surveillance state"; they cancel, Poitras sends video about Snowden, and Thomas Drake speaks in their place.
Strange story -- probably fake -- of the power-ministry veterans' union claiming they received an email "with a North Carolina IP address" asking to join them, and they publicly offer help to Snowden with clothes and even "a tablet to contact his family".
Russia media reports Snowden had an encrypted chat with his father, Lon Snowden.
August 15, 2013
Wall Street journal reports of disarray in the Snowden camp and splits between Lon Snowden and his lawyers, and Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks on the handling of Edward.
August 15, 2013
Statement supposedly from Snowden released by Michael Calderone of Huffington Post in which Snowden purportedly says his father and his lawyers don't represent him, and speaks of the "tragic vacuum of my father's emotional compromise for the sake of tabloid news".
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