Wired State

John Perry Barlow, Prokofy Neva, and the NSA -- and How Private Property and Privacy are Connected

I was thinking today how it was interesting that both Aaron Swartz -- the one-year anniversary of his suicide is coming up soon -- and Edward Snowden had something in common: both stole 1.7 million items. Swartz stole 1.7 million JSTOR articles, and Snowden stole 1.7 million documents. Obviously articles and documents can be different sizes, but that doesn't matter -- when you are copying and torrenting masses of documents, you go down directories of files and copy items -- and it doesn't matter whether the file is big or small, an article or a document -- it's still just a file. Why 1.7 million? Let's see, is this a multiple of 512?

Somebody said this was the stuff of conspiracy theories, but I said that it was a technical question -- and that anyway, everybody knows this is a "six degrees of separation" with these people. Well, one degree. Both knew Jacob Appelbaum, and they had other hackers and adversarial journalists in common in the end, too.

All this got me to thinking about the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the announcement that Edward Snowden is going on the board of the Foundation for a Free Press -- news rather uncritically retold by Charlie Savage at the New York Times using FPF's press release rather than a critical journalistic mind.

I'll remind you that FPF is the group which Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow founded, who is also founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was created to fund WikiLeaks -- and basically funds Snowden. They admit that. They even put now Snowden on the board, defiantly, as if to say, you can't investigate us for anything, it's all legal, our lawyers are already on this, and it's not like providing material aid to a terrorist, right? Well, let's hear it then, guys: what is the budget for ferrying around the world all these journalists and hackers, and maintaining them in nice hotels in the world's capitals, and sustaining Snowden and his lovely assistant Sarah Harrison for months on end? Well? Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are also on the board.

By institutionalizing adversarial journalism with the assistance of activsts and anarchist hackers, the old copyleftists hope to strengthen their legal position -- if any of these people are even stopped for questioning by law-enforcement -- as some have been -- it will be viewed as a blow against freedom of association and freedom of speech, not protection of national security. Brilliant!

So I kept thinking about these connections and how there really are so few people in these networks, they really do overlap -- and repeat.

Then I rememberd something funny -- the time John Perry Barlow told me he would kick me in my tiny avatar nuts (I have a male avatar in Second Life) -- and when I looked that up, I saw it was interesting, mentioning the NSA. Here it is, a response to this article on my blog,  in the comments, and there is no doubt it's him -- and we had many spats after that.

Here's an excerpt of my article -- basically, the issue back in 2010 boiled down to this -- Electronic Frontier Foundation failing to see the connection between respect for private property and individual rights and privacy secured in that private property, and the intrusion on that privacy by gaming companies and Google, and then the NSA snooping on that social media. Funny how we all talked about this back then, eh? But in the terms of the time, which had to do with EFF's pround indifference to copyright violation and intellectual property -- and even their hostility as they litigated on behalf of copylefists whose speech they claimed was "chilled".

JPB made it seem as if silly dancy bears in a virtual world were not worth copyrighting -- he has an extreme view on digital creations and think everything should be liberated to serve his own particular business model. I once saw a budget in a book about the Grateful Dead for their revenue -- and 30% of it came from the record sales. Some percentage came from ticket and merchandise sales. So, sure, they could give away the tapes made from the soundboard by fans because they still had revenue streams based on copyright protection. That was all about to change.

I made the point that if you couldn't secure private property, you couldn't secure privacy of dancing bears, then you couldn't secure, say, a private Muslim religious group and its activities from prying government eyes. They were intrinsically related when everything is digitalized and when we all move online to live our lives -- especially with the coming Internet of Things. At that time -- funny to think -- I took it for granted that the EFF litigation against the NSA was somehow appropriate, that it really was about some overreach of intrusion. Now I know it wasn't.

Naturally he didn't see it that way.

Excerpt of my blog post from 2010:

So you get a vigorous campaign to oppose the government's invasion of privacy with wire-tapping in which the non-electronic ACLU [i.e. real-world] wages press campaigns and litigation against this illegal intrusion, but then you get somebody like Eva Galperin writing this fucked-up condescending nasty little barb like this:

if you don’t want people taking pictures of your floating city/dancing bear/epic space opera, don’t leave your floating city/dancing bear/epic space opera in a public place.

So Eva, how does that work in real life with the government's wiretapping then? Let me run it by you after reading about your latest campaign against wiretapping:

If you don't want the government wiretapping your floating Islamic aid fund/dancing defense of defensive jihadists/epic Palestinian struggle opera, don't leave your floating Islamic aid fund/dancing defense of defensive jihadists/epic Palestinian struggle opera in a public space.

Like stringy grey-haired hippies of the 1960s, you know you hate the government's wiretapping and automatically salivate. But you don't have a vision for how to get rid of Google and Twitter wiretapping, which is scraping and keeping and using and manipulating all our online data, all the time. You hate corporations -- except when you don't.

Like some right-wing junta in the old Latin America, you talk about "freedom," and talk about "fair use," and you talk about "progress" but you insist that what appears to be my private property (my electronic property) isn't really mine, and that game or world companies can intrude on them for any reason or no reason, and that I should be simply available all the time, with my dancing bears and epic space operas, for perusal, use, ridicule, whatever without any recourse -- making me in fact reach for that government you thought was such an evil wire-tapper, because I can't think of any other power that would trump the overwhelming intrusion of Google Plus Electronic Frontier Foundation, *undermining my rights*.

Of course, there's an entire critique to be had about your awful destructive views about private property, in which your REAL agenda about DMCA or fair use constantly pokes out with the "Creative Commons" shtick of Cory Doctorow and others -- we're supposed to liberate our property by default, and any effort to protect it will instantly be branded as suppression of freedom of speech.

Of course, there's little comprehension for the fact that in a virtual world, all the property, all the scenes you see, are built by people who mainly haven't been paid -- unlike that real-world street where architects and city planners have corporate and public money available to pay for themselves and their materials, before photographers "fairly use" their scenes in works that further make *them* money.

And it's no accident, comrade, because the technocommunist beliefs underpinning EFF mean that you never fashioned a way for people to get paid online -- you only fashioned a way for them to get liberated and browbeaten online if they didn't force-march to the "Creative Commons".

The "Electronic Frontier" now looks like a pretty tacky shopping mall with a grimey "head shop" selling hippie memorabilia and tattered Woodstock posters along with beeded Indian dresses. You've commodified the ideals of the hippie era into the California business model letting you steal content online in permissive regimes until you get a DMCA notice that you'll bless as being "fair use".

But the rest of us are living on a very different Electronic Frontier where bots are scraping our data, third-party viewers are stealing our content, and everything we have is really owned by a company that has no government regulation to prevent its abuses. You're all fine with that. You think it's only about a progressive company in San Francisco, and a bunch of fools with dancing bears you can ridicule.

Hey, have I got news for you. This stuff is all going to get LOTS bigger and LOTS more important very quick -- and if you zoom away from your preoccupation with Second Life, where people still have those backward notions about their private dancing bears and their intellectual property you think should be available to swipe, to the 500 plus million people on Facebook and *their* dancing bears and *their* photos and artwork, hey, it gets bigger.

Yes, it's true. We are all living now on an Electronic Frontier where you are only visible as a distant hippie cabin with a tattered tie-dyed freedom flag, irrelevant to our lives and without a vision of the horizon.

Here is John Perry Barlow in the comments:

Mr. Neva,

It strikes me that if you're going to take the Electronic Frontier Foundation so sorely to task, you might at least get our name right... But that's a minor point.

More importantly, I have a hard time figuring out what we've done that has you so pissed off. As far as I can tell, we have somehow failed to defend your dancing bear avatar from the Linden Lords who gave "him" a "place" to exist to begin with.

Unfortunately, much of what we do revolves around the law... changing it, adapting it, and seeing that it's enforced appropriately in areas of electronic ambiguity.

Thus, you placed us in a weakened position with regard to defending your "rights" on Second Life when you clicked "agree" to the long terms of service agreement you probably didn't read when you signed up. After you did that, there wasn't much we could do for you.

I'm sorry you believe that this merits screeching a lot of truly insulting things about us. For an old hippie who really doesn't think he's "like all the others," it is personally painful to read your tantrum. Indeed, it made me long for an opportunity to kick you in your tiny nuts.

To claim that there is something malignantly hypocritical about our suing the NSA to stop warrantless wiretapping in America because we don't also protect your online avatar from the rulers of the walled garden where you elected to create him traffics in a logical inconsistency that it's not worth my trouble to point out.

And to tweet that you're trying to undo what I've spent 20 years doing bespeaks a level of ingratitude that would make even my children blush.

Fortunately, I don't give a shit about your gratitude. I'm going to go on defending your rights - in those areas where you actually have some - whether you're grateful or not.

With all due respect,

John Perry Barlow

Posted by: John Perry Barlow | April 04, 2010 at 09:42 PM

***

Fascinating, all of it, to think of today....

The argument John Perry Barlow so casually invoked -- that when I signed a Terms of Service agreement when downloading Second Life ( or like the End User License Agreement on the wrapper of any software) I essentially ceded my rights to a private non-state actor and made it impossible for anyone to defend me under the Constitution. To which I can only say -- irrelevant, because games and worlds and social media platforms are increasingly what the entire online matrix is, and where people increasingly exercise their rights, so it becomes more like civil rights cases against shopping malls and other public spaces, not mere private realms.

Funny how JPB was willing to sneer a the TOS over a dancing virtual bear, but he could overlook what is really the problem for his claims about NSA surveillance -- the initial situation where we cede all our data to Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, and they retain and use it. When blasting NSA collection, he doesn't say airily, "Oh, well, we all signed a TOS when we signed up for Twitter or G+, so too bad."

I had more to say to Barlow back then here and here where I wrote a Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace From its Founding Overlords which reversed his famous Declaration deliberately, precisely because of how destructive his hippie freak ideals had been to basic civil rights and liberties online.

 

Related articles

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Wait, Jacob Appelbaum is Back in the Snowden Leaking Business?

EFF: "Everything we know about NSA spying" from 30C3 - Boing Boing

Edward Snowden to Join Freedom of the Press Board of Directors

All Systems Are Insecure Until Proven Otherwise: An Interview with Bruce Schneier

Internet Activists Look Back at Aaron Swartz's Life as 'The Day We Fight Back' Approaches

So Wait, What Appelbaum is Leaking Aren't Authentic Snowden Docs? Per Greenwald

Are You Confused? Here, I Will Explain Everything to You About Politics!

Are you confused about who's on first?

Do you find it hard to understand what left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and libertarian mean any more?

Is Glenn Greenwald on the left or right? Libertarian (he used to consult for Cato) or communist (he has spoken before the Socialist Workers' Party annual meeting)?

How can it be that if Greenwald debates Ruth Marcus, a liberal Democrat and columnist in the liberal Washington Post, denounced by conservatives, he and his Twitter sock-puppets/cronies can accuse her of supporting the Bush Administration's torture? But wait, she agrees that James Clapper "lied" and "he should be ashamed of it" and "it's totally intolerable" -- so what's the difference between her anti-NSA statement and Greenwald's?! (well, he will settle for nothing less than a trial and punishment of this "lying" official, and Marcus points out to this lawfaring lawyer that perjury law is complicated and getting a judge to actually do this against an official merely doing his job as he saw fit would be quite hard to do).

Do you wonder how it is that Paul Carr, Mark Ames formerly of the Exile and Yasha Levine, all funded by Silicon Valley (they were bought out by Pando Daily) and technolibertarians of sorts (or are they?) can print trash about Snowden, and suddenly decide to bash Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, the NYU professor, for joining on to the new media enterprise First Look -- funded by the ebay millionaire Pierre Omidyar, who himself loves Greenwald...who speaks to the socialists? They're all about Big IT and Silicon Valley and technocommunism in the end -- why don't they get along?

How is it that Jacob Appelbaum, who still apparently gets Department of Defense funding and never really seems to scream about Obama the way Glenn Greenwald does, can be doing even more radical work revealing documents that aren't even from Snowden, but could even be -- who knows! -- from some GRU mole in the NSA merely using the Snowden flurries as a cover?

Well, if you look at this handy-dandy infographic chart I've made (sorry, I suck at Photoshopping), you will start to see how it all comes together -- or falls apart (and this chart helps explain why Omidyar and Greenwald will not last.)

Think of the four corners of our Metaverse as the extremes of thinking 1) Obama is a devil; 2) Obama is an angel; 3) Snowden is a traitor, or 4) Snowden is a hero. That's one level (think of the first horizontal X-axis in Second Life).

Then, think of people's attitudes towards capitalism and communism which really infuse everything (that's the Y-axis then, or a second horizontal layer). Everyone likes to pretend these categories and these ideologies don't exist anymore, but of course they do. Look, do you like Occupy Wall Street and want to shut down the stock market and jail the banksters? Then you're a communist. Do you think it's okay for Goldman Sachs and wealthy law firms to fund Obama's campaign along with Google, even though you're for that crazy unworkable socialist ObamaCare of his? Then you're a capitalist. Understood. Don't pretend these categories don't exist.

But there's more -- there's your attitude toward government -- think of this as yet another axis (like the vertical Z in Second Life if this were a 3D object which of course we could make in Second Life but I can't draw here).

There you might be an anarchist (no government), or a minarchist (for minimal government, but at least some); you might be for democracy, which means elected officials and separation of powers and the rule of law, or corporatocracy, which might be rule-by-law and emphasis on both private corporations and governments agencies.

Above the "democracy" line you will find those who like Obama -- he's president, after all -- and tend to think Snowden has done something wrong -- he's broken the law and gone against the democratc consensus that yes, we do need state secrets and agencies to keep them -- and find intelligence to keep us safe.

Or below the "democracy" line, you still might be in the Obama tank and loving Snowden, but you might be for oligarchy, which is where there is a state nominally affirming capitalism, or engaging in "state capitalism" as the Trotskyists called it -- but just as likely embracing many aspects of communism. This state still accords power to certain wealthy boyars -- as long as they support the state. You may even want to transform this state so that it is better for your business.

If you're under the anarchy line, you're for destroying government and running everything from the Internet and the IRC channel with your friends, maybe with a Drupal site and some Liquid Democracy Pirate Party "voting" scheme -- but fuck America, militaries, even roads.

Well, you get the idea. It's a grid -- and you can slide in any direction up or down or across or diagonally.

Naturally, I've put myself in the most perfect, centrist, democratic and good position, as any author would : )

But note what else is going on -- the attitiudes towards technology and how it will be used to pursue one's other values of anarchy or statism, communism or corporativism or statism.

Technocommunist as readers of this blog know is a belief that you can collectivize people online and use technology to redistribute wealth; the state withers away, as it is supposed to under communism and "every cook can rule the state". Of course, there's an avant-garde of the workers who know best (coders).

Technolibertarian can amount to "communism for thee but not for me" or a belief in social Darwinism, Randianism, meritocracy on steroids -- and no illusions that you will teach the homeless to code or even most kids in high school to do anything. Fuck 'em, you are going to have California secede from the United States.

Technoliberal means that you embrace technological innovation but you expect democratic government to maintain oversight over technology so that it does not harm liberal democracy itself.

Technoprogressive means that you believe in the transformative power of technology to change human nature and "make a better world" and you will make money in order to spend it on establishing socialism -- which will work better because of technology and distributive...stuff.

Technosocialist means that you would establish more limits on corporations in establishing your equitable society, except for the Big IT ones and those that provide you a paycheck. Distribution will be coerced. You're welcome.

Technostalinist means that you are for using technology to settle scores with your political enemies, and establishing some kind of state that can crush evil greedy oligarchs and capitalists.

And that's how we get the different boxes in this grid.

You could find Snowden a hero and think Obama is a devil -- and be a technolibertarian like Rand Paul for minimal government.

Or you could find Snowden a hero and not think much of Obama but not really pay attention to him, and be for anarchism and communism -- which you think you and your friends will implement just fine.

OR you could find Obama an angel and Snowden a traitor -- that would put you on the top of the box, with the majority of Americans, quite frankly.

Somebody like me who did not vote for Obama a second time is still in that box because Obama is,after all, the president, the result of a democratic election and therefore a figure of legitimate authority.  Looking at this box, you could additionally pin little pictures of Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz into the boxes fairly easily -- I'd be on the Hillary side of the line.

Supportive readers of this blog will likely have no trouble finding MarkAmesExiled in the Technostalinist box. That's because he hates capitalism -- he loathes Obama as a sell-out to Wall Street -- and he is for hanging capitalists he hates from the lamp posts. He admires Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik, and he finds Snowden a traitor - but a traitor to...what, exactly? A powerful state that he imagines can be made a utopian state by ridding it of evil, corrupt capitalists? He's no anarchist, in fact, and he's no libertarian, because he imagines some mighty force that will be capable of punishing these big, evil oligarchs. There isn't any such force except Stalin.

Paul Carr, on the other hand, might slide more toward the technolibertarian box because he's more of a softy, but at the end of the day, his paycheck is still signed by the titans of Silicon Valley and he appreciates that.

Up in the love-Obama box is of course Jeff Gauvin, 18,000 followers, unfollower of me because I said something he didn't like once, hater of Greenwald, lover of Obama (his Twitter name is Jefferson Obama).  Jeff is actually Canadian, for all his American hero handles, and therefore tends toward the socialist as a national trait -- Canada is a country where a large percentage of the working population has jobs with the government or funded by the government.

Jeff is typical of a lot of tweeters who loathe Greenwald because he threatens their Obama and their progressivism with his...libertarian/communism or whatever it is. Note that I have Greenwald straddle the two categories because I think Greenwald just does what's best for Greenwald in the end, a powerful force that perhaps someday, may lead to contrition or at least turncoating.

John Schindler is more liberal than I am -- he's for reforming the NSA and I'm for leaving it absolutely untouched until other more profound issues are solved (more on that later) and until Obama is out of office, since I believe as a stealth-socialist, Obama is merely trying to destroy the capitalist state.

We may or may not get lucky and get Hillary back, in which case I will vote for her and so will John Schindler. If we get only Elizabeth Warren as a candidate because of powerful hate-Hillary forces gathering in quite a few of those boxes, I will definitely NOT vote for her; Schindler, I don't know.

Poor General Alexander I've put in the corporatocracy box merely as a kind of symbol. I have no idea what his personal views are. He may be a closet libertarian, for all I know. He may be a liberal Democrat struggling to reform this monster -- who knows.  I'm assuming that he's mad as hell at Snowden and I'm putting him very close to the "Snowden=traitor" box. I'm putting him in the same column with the "Obama as devil" because I have to figure Gen. Alexander feels like Obama threw him under the bus. I put him in the corporate box merely because the symbiosis between the military and the private corporate contractors makes up a state-within-a-state in some ways, although I am not a conspiracy monger and actually don't think there is something inherently wrong with military contracting in a free and capitalist society. It's just a tendency you want to watch and regulate and I'm for doing less contracting and having more paid, benefitted staff -- Manning and Snowden were contractors.

I actually think the most important thing Gen. Alexander could do is to form a think tank to fight for national security after he retires, responding to all the outrageous things that people are likely to do to the NSA.

Why don't I put myself up smack against the traitor box?

Well, I don't think that's a useful category to discuss Snowden, really; usually I'll call him "that little felon." To be a traitor, you would have had to show loyalty to you country first, and then betray it; I think for Snowden, the Internet is his country, he has absolutely no loyalty to anything like "homeland" or "government" and leans toward technocommunism or technolibertarianism if not technostalinism -- after all, he ran to first China, then Russia to help him in his struggle to smash the American state.

I think the issue is this: there are warring factions in government, and Snowden represents in fact a faction within the state -- the Wired State in the making, if you will, which is part old state, part oligarchs, part anarchists or Stalinists.

That's why I worry. Cory Ondreijka, formerly of the Navy and the NSA, represents just such a faction, too (more on him soon). While I'm generally supportive of the NSA as an institution, and I find it legitimate and necessary; I'm not supportive of some of the geek factions in government, including in the NSA, which I view as the enemy of liberal democracy (and they exist out of government, too, and are in a revolving door between government and Silicon Valley).

It used to be that people in government in the civil service and foreign service had their little factions, but they kept them to themselves, engaging only in minor skirmishes and minor sabotage; they more or less served the elected president.

They don't do that any more, since the wikification of government and social media gave them a lever and a voice to destroy government leadership they don't like.

So now people who are for friending Iran, despite the will of the Congress or the pragmatism of a compromising president, will deliberately leak, sabotage, undermine and present people with fait accomplis.

They'll make anonymous Twitter accounts and so damage there.

People who think the smart, hip thing to do is to dump on Israel as the problem for why America doesn't have good street cred in the world also leak, sabotage, undermine and create facts on the ground (like the botching of Syria and capitulation in Iran negotiations).

Well, you get the idea! See what you think and suggest ideas and changes. If anybody is better at Photoshop than I am, you're welcome to make this look better, just credit me for the idea!

Why Isn't the 'Go Away Cameron' Chrome Extension a Violation of Google Third-Party Policy?

The UK created some kind of pornography filter on the Internet.

Already the coypleftist gang at TechDirt are bragging that someone has already gotten around this with a Chrome Extension.

I noted to the open-source cultist and anti-copyright crusader Glyn Moody on Twitter that naturally Google would be for getting around some porn filter because they need more ad clicks. Those XXX sites are filled with pop-ups and clickables.

Glyn countered that it isn't Google who made this, but just some geek, anyone can write code for the open-source Chrome and he implies Google has no say over ths.

Nonsense. Like Linden Lab (who copied the idea from them eventually), Google has a third-party policy, and rules for engineers who write code for their browser. Of course they don't just let any old thing into their branded corporate browser.

And among the rules are this:

Content Policies

Our content policies apply to your Product's content, including any ads it shows to users and any user-generated content it hosts or links to. Further, they apply to any content from your developer account that is publicly displayed in Chrome Web Store, including your developer name and the landing page of your listed developer website. Products that include content that may not be suitable for all ages should be marked "Mature" on the Developer Dashboard.

Sexually Explicit Material:
    We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites. Google has a zero-tolerance policy against child pornography. If we become aware of content with child pornography, we will report it to the appropriate authorities and delete the Google Accounts of those involved with the distribution.

That sure sounds to me like an extension that gets around a governent filter to get at porn, and helps drive traffic to porn, would be contrary to that policy.

And it's not without its new set of problems, as someone named Oh Please helpfully explains:

This story is truly funny. Yes, using a proxy outside of the UK will circumvent things, but it also opens you up for all sorts of other issues, such as data harvesting at the proxy, man in the middle attacks, and so on.

The cure is worse than the cause, which is the point.

For those using Tor, just remember, at some point, that "technology" will be looked at and defeated as well. The traffic patterns of someone allowing a Tor portal is different from normal web traffic, and those portals could end up getting cut off or have inbound connections limited so as to make them useless. It flies under the radar right now because it's not as big a deal as torrent traffic, but increased usage via things like the "pirate browser" will likely expose it and make it a huge target for authorities and ISPs.

My guess is that, in the next 24 months, you will see many countries adopt laws that create direct liability for users and companies who provide proxies or allow their computers to be used as Tor style outlets.

Now wouldn't that be fascinating!

A commenter said that only some "very twisted" interpretation of Google's third-party extension rules would yield a judgement that this extension violates them. I think it's only a "very twisted" interpretation of the rules that enables a judgement that it does *not* violate them, but I take the point, that geeks will edgecase this to death.

I don't think trying to block porn on the Internet is a "fool's errand," any more than blocking pirates. You don't need perfection. Even 60% will do. It's okay to try to block some of the worst so that people don't have it shoved in their faces. It doesn't have a chilling effect on political or other speech. Indeed, what actually has a chilling effect on speech is the endless capacity of radicals to obstruct the legitimate pursuit of criminality.

The standards for what is illegal porn in the UK may be higher than in the US, I don't know.  But no geek in any of the articles below or anywhere else has been able to explain to me why Google, in its wisdom, can have language barring content like this: "We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites" and yet if Cameron adopts the same language for the state, that's wrong.

Yeah, I get the difference between a browser accessing all kinds of content, and what you might have in terms of content showing on that browser interface, and the content itself, which is a separate thing. But so what? Let me say it again: Google think it has to ban explicit sexual material from its content. So why can't the people of England?

Related articles

Go Away Cameron: UK's porn filters foiled by Chrome extension

Yes, Porn Predates the Internet - Bloomberg

Simple Chrome Extension Already Bypasses UK Porn Filters -

Glyn Moody on GNU GPL Against Software Patents and Microsoft Racketeering

Germany, Brazil, and the Hypocrisy and One-Sidedness of UN Privacy Resolutions

Colum Lynch -- a respected columnist and one of the few journalists to cover the UN and make it interesting -- has a scare headline posted today at Foreign Policy in The Cable:

Exclusive Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere

Oh, my.

My response:

I keep thinking how Brazil and Germany were never motivated to mount a resolution like this when the Russian opposition's cell phone conversations or the Belarusian opposition's cell phone and Internet conversations were put online by the secret police and a hundred other things like that even inluding the open Russian plan to capture all metadata during the Olympics to oppose terrorism but also any anti-Kremlin protest. None of that moved these diplomats before because they know the UN, and didn't want to go up against Russia or China.

The US is a softer target.

So hence this resolution, really opposing the US and nothing else.  By invoking it as a backlash against Snowden, they can get even Russia and China to tacitly agree because those authoritarians know that like all UN rights agreements, they have absolutely no intention of implementing them. And few countries -- least of all Germany or Brazil -- will ever have the guts to hold them to account around it, even though their privacy disruption is far worse.

Then there's the fact that the claims Snowden has made about the NSA have never been validated with actual cases and court decisions.

What I've been saying about the "Snowden revelations" and in particular the case of the alleged bugging of the Brazilian president's telephone conversations is that Rouseff should bring her case to the Human Rights Committee, the treaty body of the UN that actually already has plenty of privacy language to work with in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

She doesn't need a new resolution. Let her bring an actual case -- something that has been non-existent throughout the Snowden saga anywhere, in any venue (there is already one failed court case against the NSA run by the ACLU, which is having another run at it). And see if it could even be adjudicated! Merkel, too. Or, if they are concerned about never having had interstate complaints on the ICCPR (although there's no reason not to try one), let individual citizens of Germany or Brazil brings cases where they prove their privacy was eroded.

I wonder even with the tendentious review this might get in the HRC, if they could make their cases, given that...the content of their talks has never been revealed nor has it been confirmed that their calls were eavesdropped on in real time. No one has ever come up with a single case of an individual who can show his personal privacy was deliberately violated such as to harm his rights.

I'd love to be there when the HRC examines a case involving an indignant complaint that somebody listened in on...a Brazilian oil company -- the kind of oil company that NGOs usually scream about as a terrible violator of indigenous rights and environmental rights. Imagine, the HRC, at the UN, admitting that oil companies, of all things, have privacy rights. Go ahead, I'll wait, as they say...

As for the "global privacy right" -- I am hoping this isn't going to turn into a "global blasphemy law" which it could all too well become in the hands of certain UN members. As I wrote, be careful what you wish for, Germany...when you re-open freedom of expression language for negotiation at the UN.

No one would want extra-territorial *anything* nor making the US compelled to uphold it if it weren't for this anti-US campaign triggered by WikiLeaks and Snowden's hacker and activist-journalist friends. As we know, if they made an extra-territorial push for an end to reprisals for human rights advocates, as states at the Human Rights Council attempted to do yesterday, that would be killed by South Africa -- yes, South Africa! -- because they were mad at the ICC's "excessive attention" to Africa's mass murderers -- the ICC has tended to prosecute African tyrants rather than tyrants from elsewhere around the world. Maybe the others are harder to reach, i.e. like, oh, Russia, over its mass murder of Chechens and Dagestanis -- Russia, where Germany has vested business interests and a friendly foreign policy, or Iran, where a decided international lobby antagonistic to Israel wants to friend up this tyrant on the basis of promises, not performance.

(No, those countries haven't ratified the ICC statute, but then neither did some of the African states -- they got Security Council referrals that would be impossible on other regions of the world given the Russian and Chinese vetoes.)

Look, if you think this resolution is really in good faith, and really about privacy, you don't know how the UN works.

Germany has many other more effective ways of displaying its wrath, if it thinks its complaints about the encroachment by its long-time partner, the NSA, are founded. For example, yesterday we learned of the billions Germany has harvested in  Internet business - they had a banner year in sales. A good chunk of their revenue comes from amazon.de -- hey, an American company, with servers located in America, whose innovation and cost reductions due to scale they can utilize to make profits. You don't notice Germany shutting down amazon.de or demanding that Amazon suddenly place all servers with German data on German territory under German control -- or it may come to that, and even Jeff Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post and considerable lobbying clout may not stop it.

But nary a word, because that's business, and that's money, and Germany and the US are heavily intertwined there.

Instead, what we get is this ding at the UN, which "doesn't matter" in a sense that it is just rhetoric," even though people like Dianna PoKempner, who has decided to make Human Right Watch's crusade against the NSA an aggressive personal project, think this is "soft power" that NGOs can manipulate via international fora to get their way. That's because they might fail at more more mundane work through democratic institutions at home with factions that oppose their anti-Western positions and leniency  with tyrants like Russia and China.

BTW, I'm one of the human rights advocates who learned about these private negotiations before Lynch's article, but it didn't seem appropriate to leak the negotiating position of the US. Nowadays, there's a determined lobbying clique of NGOs starting with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, and other radical Internet activists who don't believe in private negotiations by states -- in fact, they don't much believe in states, period. They whined and whined about the secret negotiations of the TPP -- even after hackers got ahold of the secret documents somehow, we're not told -- either a bad-minded state party or leftist political party faction in a state leaked it, or it was actually hacked, we don't know.

But negotiations should be secret because that's how states can reach accommodations and compromises. The time to get your country to have a position you can support is before the international conference, at home, through the democratic process.

International negotiations, particularly those involving undemocratic states or states with very different positions, have to be done in secret to reach agreement. That's an axiom of international diplomacy that works -- and it works on the Disability Rights Treaty as much as the TPP.

It's ok to have secret negotiations in a hostile world where there are numerous enemies to basic universal human rights and values. The animus driving this issue about "secrecy" isn't really based on any value of transparency because it's more about anarchy -- these radicals do not accept that elected, legitimate liberal states like the US and Germany or even for that matter Brazil, whose record as a demoracy is not as good, should be able to negotiate in good faith on behalf of their citizens -- because they are elected.

The elected part bothers the anarchists because it goes against their brutal, nihilist grab for power themselves (anarchists who always oppose governments and try to make you think they are against big government and just for lovely little local collectives always forget to tell you the PS to the memo -- that in overthrowing others, they get in power, and are far less accountable or transparent themselves because they don't believe in voting or due process or democratic procedure -- they are all about coercive, collectivizing takeovers and pretend "consensus".)

At the UN, the leftist forces in Germany and Brazil in particular  -- where parliamentarians wear Snowden masks and Glenn Greenwald has safe haven -- have succeed in pushing the Snowden backlash into the complicated and dull procedures of UN committees.

This is actually a process that long preceded Snowden, as this same concerted claque that pushes the extreme "Internet freedom" agenda at the UN -- against copyright, against intellectual property, against trade, against sovereignty of states, against any criminal oversight of the Internet to oppose terrorism and crime -- has been very busy already trying to undermine what they see as an "unacceptable' historical US control over the Internet and force through various measures.

When Elaine Donahoe, the ebay president's wife, an Obama campaigner and fund-raiser, was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the UN Human Rights Council, these radical NGOs leveraged the obvious interest in Silicon Valley in defeating pro-copyright and anti-piracy legislation (SOPA and PIPA) and under the guise of "Internt Freedom," got various measures put in -- here's the background on the "Internet Freedom" resolution. This let in dangerous wording that in fact brings in more state control under the invocation of the concept of "development" (i.e. in the technocommunist model, by states, or in the technolibertarian model, also by states they capture).

If this wife-turned-ambassador was getting her appointment in the Bush era, as a Bush fund-raiser, and her husband was the head of some less beloved Silicon Valley corporation, imagine the furor of the NGOs that business was using international fora to get its way in the marketplace. Not so when it's ebay -- as we're seeing about ebay founder Pierre Omidyar's support of Greenwald and others in a new radical media project.

There's a lot more boring background to this at the UN that few people have been paying attention to, which basically involves this same gang, with mainly Soros and other "progressive" funding, going to the UN to get language favourable to their ideological positions into various resolutions and mandates -- mainly because no one else bothers to show up and give some pushback to their blatantly sectarian maneuvers.

They have been particularly active at the international bodies that have aspirations to control the Internet -- the International Telecommunications Organization and the Internet Governance Forum. Brazil has pushed the latter heavily, just hosting the meeting, to get its own brand of socialist control over Internet affairs -- gathering all the usual anti-American fans in the process.

The IGF feigns support of what they call the "multi-stakeholder approach" -- as long as the stakeholder are things they like and control -- and it's important to note that ALL these NGOs are UTTER HYPOCRITES because FOR YEARS they've been in the Global Network Initiative with the likes of Google and even Facebook claiming to promote Internet rights. They were never, ever bothered by Google's massive data-vacuuming and Facebook's privacy-busting all those years. Instead, they sat by quietly while the GNI secretariat was mainly silent about things like the Internet being entirely shut down in whole countries or Internet journalists being jailed -- real freedom issues. Instead, they pushed for things like the right to keep a Youtube of a disabled boy being humiliated and bullied online in Italy despite a court action -- in the name of "freedom of expression" -- which was really a business issue for Google to keep their California Business Model intact (let everyon upload freely, chase over copyright or legal issues later, after the ad revenue is scoopd up). You don't hear so much about GNI anymore... in fact, EFF dramatically left it, funny...

This gang has promoted Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, through various Soros-funded evenings like this one at NYU, and its his decidedly anti-American antagonism which has driven the Internet resolutions at the UN seeking a) absolute encryption for non-state actors, regardless of whether they commit crimes  b) rejection of law-enforcement access to the Internet in the legitimate pursuit of crimes c) blessing of non-governmental human rights groups forever as never being involved in crime and worthy of such power -- a position that comes out of Frank's understandable but not universal experience of being a leftist activist lawyer in oppressive Guatemala in the 1980s.

Which brings us to Germany -- where Merkel, as I've said acidly a number of times, still hasn't gotten over the fact that the NSA didn't disclose the content of phone conversations that we have not verified they monitored.

Yes, it's hard to believe -- although CNN did ask the questions of the leftist German journalists who broke this story in the first place -- that this is not verified. We don't have any sample conversations. We don't know what she thought or what her position was internally on the even of important events like NATO summits. We haven't learned of any fact other than that her number was in a list of numbers held by the NSA which they may have scanned for meta data.

BTW, few noticed part two of the story of Norway, yesterday, where first Snowden's adversarial journalist-activist supporters Laura Poitras an Glenn Greenwald claimed there was a purported NSA scanning of millions of Norwegian phone calls (or phone transactions -- we never are told accurately if these "millions" in fact contain the thousands of back-and-forth "calls" that a person typically engages in during a week of texting, liking, sending links, etc. on his cell phone).  But...Come to find out even later in the day that it was Norway itself scanning its own conversations, then sharing them. Even the Kremlin's RT.com had to correct this. (Or, especially RT.com given that the anti-Norway campaign by Russia has gone on for awhile unrelated to Snowden, as part of a hate-on-the-West strategy).

But why wasn't the story *reported* from the get-go by journalists being skeptical of the usual Snowden Team active measure, and asking questions directly about it?! Is Richard Orange going to run a correction?

Norway -- let alone Germany -- were never moved to launch privacy resolutions at the UN over their own activity, all these years, including sharing with the NSA.

So here we all are. A tendentious portrayal of the US as some "killer" of privacy that Russia and even Germany and even Norway killed long ago, without a whimper from the NGO gotcha-gang all this time -- but suddenly, when WikiLeaks and their Russian supporters have an opportunity to exploit Snowden backlash even further in pursuit of their anti-American goals, they obviously seize it.

 

In the Cloud, in the Cloud, Where the Sun Never Shines

 

So here's my Storify on a recent argument with the geeks on the issue of cloud encryption.

@Dymaxion (Eleanor Saitta) is bitching because the tweets are "taken out of context" (i.e. she couldn't win the argument in 140 character tweets) and are "out of order".

I'll certainly plead guilty to "out of order" because it's a bitch trying to get the tweets out of search and into Storify to reflect a Twit-fight. No service has perfected the art of making publication of twit-fights easier. Even Twitter's new Custom thingie just doesn't cut it because the moving widget is clunky, you can't just drag and drop but have to grab the little move icon and drag and drop (like on Scoop.it where it is also slow and clunky). You can also only do one tweet and a time and you can't see more than a stack at a time easily on Tweetdeck, which it forces you to use, because you are stuck with that UI. Oh, well. Here's my Wired State curation of geek talk, such as it is, I am not likely to keep using it as Scoop.it at least sweeps up more stuff to use.

But hey, you guys are all about "math" and you are all "math whizzes," so go and put the order correctly, like one of those school exams, using the time stamps. I will do this myself when I have like three hours to waste on it. Meanwhile, the gist is there.

And here's the gist:

Zeynap Tufekci, no technologist she, but merely a sociologist of technology from the "progressive" and even radical/anarchist side, whined that AWS, the Amazon servers, do not encrypt in the cloud.

Ever since we saw that funny little yellow sticky type sketch of the supposed NSA stripping of SSL layers to get at clear text in the cloud, I've had to wonder. What, Google has clear text in the cloud? How? Why? Really?

So I've been Googling around and reading this and this that explain from the business and government perspectives (they're both fine with me) that in fact you can encrypt in the cloud, but it will require things like you guarding your own keys or entrusting a key manager (presumably separate from the cloud vendor) or realizing that if your data is to be manipuated for various purposes you might need, like sorting or computations or whatever, that means there may be limits. Or you may have to concede that the vendor has to have a copy that you trust him with because he has to manipulate your data -- and that means he gets to scrape it to serve ads or improve his product.

All that sounds reasonable, because a lot of government data isn't sensitive, but mundane and even opened up now (hospital infection rates), and many businesses don't worry about the NSA (vacuum cleaner sales people who put their inventory in the cloud).

See, the crypto kids won't concede that there are a range of use cases and a sliding scale of what can and should be encrypted reasonably or not.

They start with the absolute stark paranoid anarchist crazy use case of themselves, and their need to escape accountability for their radical views and anarchist shenanigans. I've never seen a person demanding ultimate encryption who didn't also advocate overthrowing capitalism and Wall Street, redistribution, socialist programs like "net neutrality," copyleftism, etc. (or the antithesis, absolute escape from government as radical libertarians without any responsibility to society.) As I've just explained about Lavabits, I'm unimpressed; to me, the ability of law-enforcement to access a cloud service isn't a bug, but should be a feature. We need to fight crime -- hey, including THEIR criminality when they hack. They don't concede that.

Hence this debate.

Except even the ACLU's guru Chris Soghoian, who has me blocked on Twitter and always dodges my questions about Snowden's files, suddenly appears and one-ups @Dymaxion by saying essentially that she's wrong, that what I'm referring to is the ability to encrypt inside the cloud (double encryption) in these articles and that you can manipulate some data even when double-encrypted in this fashion.

See, even when "math" is involved, you can always find one geek to argue with another even about code which is supposed to be written in stone. I long ago learned that, which is why I am never, ever afraid to challenge a geek on their "math".

She had made it sound like a) no vendor can be trusted as they will "tell you anything,"i.e. lie because they have a profit motive -- she's the consummate technocommunist here -- and b) you can't move data that is encrypted without a key and "that's that, and it's math".

Her little nerdy friends chime in and cry "it's math" too -- and I'm told to take advanced math classes before I can have this debate.

Bullshit. Normal people who aren't math geniuses (I'm sure not -- I suffer from the discalcula that often goes with synesthesia, which I have) -- can demand of the geniuses that they explain themselves in laymen's terms and have some accountability.

After all, lawyers, doctors, teachers, are not allowed to encrypt themselves fully from the public and carry on their affairs in secret without oversight from professional boards and have to answer to society with ethics and good behaviour. They have to explain themselves and not scream "brain surgery" or "torts" or "TERC" every time you demand accountability.

Why would computer programmers be an exception?! Always and everywhere, they say "because math" or "because Internet" and demand an escape clause for themselves. Again, I cry: bullshit. You don't get that.

@Dymaxion is an exemplar of the adage that the unencrypted life is not worth living, to mangle a proverb. Everything she is and does is about secrecy -- she claims even to live permanently in airport lounges like Edward Snowden.

And I can only repeat what I always say: unimpressed, not interested in creating absolute encryption for scofflaws and criminals.

Meanwhile, some of her nastier little friends keep pestering me about "math" and I'm told I am "paranoid" because I have concerns about these people. Funny. They're the paranoid ones who want to encrypt themselves to death.

It's not about "not needing" encryption even at the level of a password for your bank account or email or health or school records, duh. It's about a demand that not even law enforcement can penetrate your citadel.

 

Related articles

Crypto Kids Try to Beat NSA

Mikko: "I'd much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother"

NSA revelations show need to encrypt data

CipherCloud Introduces Cloud Encryption for Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift

Make your cloud backups NSA proof.

I'm Sorry, I Can't Cry About AT&T Selling Terrorism-Related Phone Data to the CIA

In Which I Confront Bart Gellman at WashPo on the Snowden Claim of NSA Tap Into Google

Now Twitter Lets You Make Multiple Timelines

The Crypto Kids and the Rubik's Party: Signal to Snowden?

Mikko: "I'd much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother"

When the Guardian claimed, based on the stolen Snowden files, that the NSA was tampering with the very standards of encryption, they won over many more conservative geeks who weren't wild-eyed and rabid like Jacob Appelbaum and those in the hacker set. They tapped into a sense of both superiority and paranoia that all geeks have about themselves and code -- it was a brilliant social hack (I continue to maintain that most of what Snowden has produced is a giant social hack, from the con of 25 of his fellow employees to give him their passwords (!) to providing single slides or partial documents or plumbing sketches or outlines in lieu of hard, solid content deliberately, so as to incite hysteria that is hard to then shut up while the facts are parsed.

They claimed that through secret partnerships with commercial firms like Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Intel, the NSA was exploiting vulnerabilities or getting themselves private keys to decode texts:

But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users. "Cryptography forms the basis for trust online," said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "By deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to eavesdrop, the NSA is undermining the very fabric of the internet." Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at "defeating network security and privacy".

Once again, it's only Bruce Schneier -- the cybersecurity expert who always leaned toward defense of hacker culture and objectives and who has now fully embraced them by joining the board of Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The long Guardian article never supplies anything like proof -- and hasn't learned -- like the Washinton Post's Bart Gellman and his geek sidekick Ashkan Soltari -- to make impressive, complicated geeky diagrams. They do claim there was something in...2006:

Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.

"Eventually, NSA became the sole editor," the document states

That was when the New York Times published their famous article after waiting on it for some time.

Yet we're not told what it was, exactly. What kind of weakness? Where?

Something like that TLS handshake issue with the mobile app data heading first before the handshake? (No doubt that was devised to reduce latency -- after all, it's only communicating information about the phone and the app, and most users aren't going to find that a big deal -- so the handshake to validate the ID and the server comes later, so what? Only a geek could care if the lag meant the NSA could jump in the middle, because most people don't think they'll be bothered by the NSA.)

Despite the absence of any real proof, or any explicit walk-through of any actual case of weakening, this is now taken as an article of faith.

In a talk for the Silicon Valley cult agitprop factory TED, the famous Mikko Hyponnen, the Finnish cybersecuity dude, claims that the NSA has deliberately sabotaged encryption algorithms, in order to weaken them.

He postures on stage that he is angry, or rather, tells people they should be angry, and that the NSA is "wrong" and "rude" (like...a schoolboy who has been caught at a prank?). @TedChris is thrilled to pieces and tries to amplify the "anger" motif.

But Mikko cites no proof of this claim that NSA tampered with the algorithms. (He also fails to mention the hacking of his own country by Russia -- his reply to me about this -- that the news story I cited from November 8 came after the taping of his TED talk -- is singularly lame, given that a guru like him should have known of such a huge hack of his country ages before the news came out.)

Again: I haven't seen a single second source (outside the Snowden Brotherhoold) validate this claim of tampering. I totally get that it is possible, and a concern. What I don't see is replication of the claim. A couple of slides and a few Googlers do not constitute validation -- that's partial and speculative, like Greenwald's initial story.

The reason I don't buy it is simple: I see that Matthew Green is still not conceding it. All the Snowden geeks can do then is call him names; Greenwald implies he's a pussy because he then won't take the same set of Snowden materials they are all looking at and comment on them. But you know, that's because he isn't a journalist, and couldn't hide behind journalism, doing that...

Mikko spouts the theory that the USG deliberately spread malware to undermine Microsoft -- a country hacking itself, he says. Oh, come now. You're not worried about the Chinese and Russians?!

Mikko makes the outrageous claim that Skype was secure before it was sold to Microsoft, that it had end-to-end encryption and was safe. But that's ridiculous. One of the top cybersecurity gurus in NYC whom I happened to discover used to be horrified years ago, long before the sale to Microsoft, that I let Skype on my system because he found it full of flaws and vulnerabilities -- everyone knew about its backdoors. The Belarusian secret police had Skype conversations before the Microsoft sale. Please. Let's not be children here.

It's really annoying when people like him who are technical experts then spout political nonsense wrapped around it and think that their scientific knowledge is enough to validate their political views and manipulations. For example, his silly notions of the "existential" problem of the war on terrorism as being fake. He needs to check in with Madrid, or London or Moscow just on his continent if he doesn't want to contemplate our 9/11.

Then he says this -- which is very appealing to the countries of Europe: "I'd much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother" -- i.e. the US, running the cloud industry or search, via Google.

It's actualy especially appealing to countries with big powerful neighbours like, oh, even Russia, but not only Russia -- under the pretext of saying they need to hide from the Great Satan America, they can actually do the hiding from the places they really need to hide from -- Russia and China. Say, if that's how they have to sell it to domestic audiences, let them.

Despite Eric Schmidt's touching faux belief in old-fashioned borders remaining after he gets done Internetizing things, and even land valuation, the reality is that there aren't borders as there once were, that lots of artificial distinctions get made, and in fact, there's a very real question of whether absolute encryption by each individual government will become a demand that countries of the world will get met, on their own, if international bodies won't accept this.

That is, international standards may remain, but there will be encryption with locally-devised algorithms that keep out others like barbed-wire fences and mined fields. Will this be possible?

I'm not sure it's the worst idea at all --- and at this point, if we're talking Big Brothers, I'd rather have EU countries that are individual Big Brothers than a global Big Brother that Russia and China invade, and I'd rather have individual EU Big Brothers than groups like Anonymous or WikiLeaks or Occupy become the absolute-encrypted Big Brothers (they call themselves Little Brothers; they'll be big in a heart-beat with that unaccountable power -- and in fact already are.)

Obviously, if the global contenders for Big Brother role are China or Russia or America, I'd pick America because I think it will have far more freedom and accountability (as it already has running the Internet; one could argue, if you accept Snowden (and I don't), that the free American system produced a Snowden which then remedied the unfree aspects of the system -- no Snowden would appear in China or Russia. So there.)

Really, it's a war about encryption. Would you rather have script kiddies encrypting, or the EU? I'll pick door no. 2.

Mikko makes a nod to the rights of law-enforcement to pursue crime. But he think this is wildly exaggerated, and he thinks that a) NSA is dredging ALL communications of everybody everywhere and therefore b) this harms privacy and doesn't.

There's no concept of the combing of selected streams as being "not intrusive."

"You show me your search history, and I will find something incriminating in five minutes," he says, and yet doesn't take his laser-stare off the NSA for all that, and put it on Google, which is of course, at fault for retaining these searches -- something that the EU privacy tsars are always fighting Google about in lawsuits and deals.

So, what to do about this awful thing with this big Orwellian over-reaching monster called the NSA which has done these terrible things? Why, Snowden isn't to blame for harming the US cloud industry (which we don't know is ruined yet, actually) any more than Al Gore is to blame for global warming. (He like those cheering in the audience obviously think not only is there nothing to debate about global warming, even if everyone agrees, that there's nothing to debate about what the response should be.)

"The solution is open source," he says. Ahh, there we go. The cult of open source. And let me remind you of the distinctly authoritarian culture that comes with that cult, even if you are forced to use open source on this very Internet, just like you can't get away from American-manufactured cloud stuff -- although Mikko urges everyone to try.

Except...the standards of encryption of NIST are open and any eyes can see and complain about them. So have they looked and found then those evil back doors and weakenings they think exist? Well?

NIST noted that it has worked closely with the NSA to help develop encryption standards, due to the NSA's expertise in this area. NIST is also required to consult with the NSA by U.S. legal statute. But the agency noted that its process for vetting encryption algorithms is an open one, in which anyone can review and comment on the work being done.

"If vulnerabilities are found in these or any other NIST standards, we will work with the cryptographic community to address them as quickly as possible," the statement read.

And the geeks are still debating about what this really all involves and really, there isn't proof from Snowden and Greenwald. All there is, is a lot of advocacy group hysteria, not facts.

Even in making their hysterical pleas, Global Voices is forced to say they don't know:

These revelations imply that the NSA has pursued an aggressive program of obtaining private encryption keys for commercial products—allowing the agency to decrypt vast amounts of Internet traffic sent by users of these products. They also suggest that the agency has attempted to put backdoors (well-hidden ways to access data) into cryptographic standards designed to secure users’ communications. Additionally, the leaked documents make clear that companies that manufacture these products have been complicit in allowing this unprecedented spying to take place, though the identities of cooperating companies remain unknown.

Many important details about this program, codenamed Bullrun, are still unclear. What communications are targeted? What service providers or software developers are cooperating with the NSA? What percentage of private encryption keys of targeted commercial products are successfully obtained? Does this store of private encryption keys (presumably procured through theft or company cooperation) contain those of popular web-based communication providers like Facebook and Google?

I really do highly recommend reading the geek Twitter interchanges with Matthew Green et. al. closely to see the dynamics involved. Note: Appelbaum is no longer working with the Guardian (small wonder there, as he accused them of sitting on Snowden stories). We don't know if that means if he is still working with Greenwald (seems not) or if Snowden has ditched him (I'll bet he has.)

Some are using the argument now -- trying to appeal to what they think are "a state's best interests," that you can't allow the NSA to introduce back doors, and industry should resist this, because otherwise terrorists and criminals exploit them.

Well, sure, every day, spammers and virus-spreaders exploit software and make everyone's life miserable, even outside the dynamics of Snowden/NSA and the US cloud industry versus people like Mikkol and his consulting clients in the EU.

I'm not buying this argument now because:

o you haven't proved that the NSA did this tampering

o you haven't proved that non-state actors have this capacity

o you haven't indicated any other way for law enforcement to do its legitimate duty.

It's that last part that troubles me more than anything -- Mikko like so many is far too casual about how exactly the police can track hackers like Snowden if the Lavabits of the world deny even federal agents with warrants, and even judge's orders. What is the plan now?

We're supposed to let the Lavabits of the world decide who they think are criminals and who aren't? Really, guys? Again, door no. 2.

 

Eric Schmidt's Virtual World

Land in Second Life. You can rent this waterfront for L$1600/wk. i.e. about US $6.00.

This was a very interesting piece in the National Interest, although they got it wrong about any real "anger" from Google over the NSA. (They're probably mainly angry that the NSA got hacked in the first place, really, and brought all this on them.)

But are Schmidt and his customers really surprised that the NSA looked for such a hole in Google's infrastructure and asked its foreign allies to exploit it? While Schmidt and many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs likely share the civil liberties concerns of many of their fellow citizens, the last several months of Snowden disclosures may be more troubling to leading internet firms for another less obvious reason: what they say about the role of technology on the world stage.

Indeed.

It's a tale that Schmidt and his coauthor Jared Cohen—a former advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and now head of Google's internal think tank—retell at length in the book they released earlier this year, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. Schmidt and Cohen are careful, as they gaze into their crystal ball, not to see a utopia. New technology, they acknowledge, can be used by authoritarians and terrorists just as easily as democrats and human-rights campaigners. Still, they are clear that the arrival of the internet age signals no less than a new epoch of history—in which a virtual world must simultaneously exist as a new testament alongside the old one. As they write, their vision is "a tale of two civilizations: One is physical and has developed over thousands of years, and the other is virtual and is still very much in formation."

I've been reading The New Digital Age by Schmidt and Cohen very fitfully -- I hate it, and periodically have to throw it across the room, which makes it hard to find then the next time I tackle it.

But speaking of virtual worlds, one of the appalling things about their ideology is the ardent belief that a mammoth virtual world -- the Internetization of things and everything -- is being built on top of this one, that we will all "have" to live in. And that real life will be "mapped" to this monstrous entity that will of course be run by coders (and PS not the NSA) and that such mapping/integration will make things "better" instead of being a God Awful Mess.

I begin to see why Schmidt is so fascinated with shall we say "distressed" states like North Korea or Somalia or Iraq. It's like the way doctors used to learn about the brain if there was, say, a train conductor who lost part of his brain and then lived in the eternal present.

By studying these dislocated war-torn or authoritarian societies that aren't the norm, he gets a better idea of how to destroy real countries and then put them back together on the Internet.

Hence, his discussion about post-war Iraq:

A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict intsability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of prtoection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, likea fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.

I feel like Schmidt should have spent even a week in Second Life, let alone Iraq, or some place like Belarus, to get the sheer folly of all this.

For one, I think he has no idea that when all land is virtualized, and all value starts to shift to its virtualization, it will start to lose value.  There will be the Anshe Chung problem as the wealthy can just open up Google maps and bid on any parcel on the map all over the world that is shown in yellow "for sale" as on the map of Second Life. There will be the flipping problem. The abandoning problem. The griefing problem. The 16 m ad lot problem. The Impeach Bush sign problem. Ok, I'm going to run screaming from the room soon at this thought... I think probably only about two readers will understand what I'm talking about.

For two, I think Schmidt knows perfectly well that the Internetization of Everything will erode national boundaries and put him and his company in charge -- but he pretends that's not so.

BTW, Google had a short-lived virtual world experiment called Lively which died.

Schmidt never mentions that or Second Life or any existing experience of virtuality on line, but in a way, his entire book is about how the Internet will penetrate and virtualize everything.

Schmidt loves the idea of exile communities -- the Tibetans -- rebuilding virtual countries online that are poised to come back some day. Except they don't. The Chinese move in Han settlers, wipe out monasteries, control education, jail monks and nuns and dissenters, force more refugees, and Tibet as an actuality grows more dim. He doesn't put that bit in.

In Belaus, Lukashenka just turns off the electricity. No electricity, no computers. Or turns off the cell towers. No mobile phone, no demonstrations organized. You could have exquisite exile governments -- and they have them -- but then they founder on the rocks of the reality of dictatorships that Schmidt seems to leave beyond the frame of his thinking. He just barrels ahead planning how all these good exiles (secessionist SiliconValley, anyone?) will build wonderful virtual governments online and impose them on reality -- uh, easily. No one will object, surely.

Well, and then there's the virtualization of everything, really.

I really must try to write my book about how Second Life predicts the awfulness of the Internet of Things, including your home and even your government.

Try to think of your home as a server in Second Life, and all the delights that will come with it:

o bans and ejects

o autoreturn

o group membership -- open and closed groups

o stripping of IP addresses to out alts

o griefing with particles

o mapping and stalking.

And that's just the beginning. Wait until they take away the vote completely!

Land records were among the first things the Lindens jettisoned when they moved from making the world the product to, well, just making the product the product, in about 2008-2009 after the big boom in interest and membership.

There used to be records of every land auction (simulator, or server or part of a server), with those who participated, what they bid, and who won. Then this was blacked out -- in fact, when, of all things, they moved to using ebay auction software instead of their own custom solution (Pierre Omidyar was an early investor in SL).

They did this because land began to devalue, the more there was mapping, information, and records of it globally -- and of course, there constant printing of new land.

Then they finally got rid of the auctions pretty much completely -- now only used odd lots on the mainland are auctioned.

I will have to explain all this another day...

 

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No, We Don't Want the Internet Governance Forum to Govern the Internet, Either

A screenshot of a powerpoint slide by Fumi Yamazaki from a presentation on child issues and the Internet at the IGF

I've been too busy with other things to check in on the Internet Governance Forum in Bali (where else). The IGF is essentially the ITU all over again in disguise (few every seem to realize that its a subsidiary body of the ITU, mandated by the UN Secretary General to "carry out" the agenda of the World Information Society Summit -- which was state controlled). As you might well imagine, the IGF is the usual cabal of Soros-funded NGOs, Big IT lobbyists,  bad governments also in disguise in the form of GONGOs (government-organized NGOs) and other assorted international jet-setter cadres who aspire to rule the Internet just as much as the ITU. The ITU is a known bad quantity anyone can agree on as bad for the Internet because it has Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc there with a vote as states.

The IGF purports to be "better" because it represents that other fuzzy bullshit thing called "the multi-stakeholders" which -- as I just indicated above -- is really just a cover for Soros-funded NGOs, Big IT corporate interests (Google is all over it), etc. etc. to do the same bad things that the bad countries do, which is take over.

In addition to opposing almost exclusively what the US government does, the IGF NGOs like the "progressive engineers" have a hard time conceding corporate and commercial interests in general as valid on the Internet -- and of course the Googles of the world at these things try to cover this up with reputational laundering, as they are doing right now by rolling out various do-gooder helper things like Uproxy

(More on that later, not surprisingly, Libtech is going wild over this because it's not Tor -- my quick take on this, even given my suspiciousness of all things Google, is that it's great if Tor now has a real competitor by real smart people who are in a corporation that likely won't tolerate crime the way Tor has -- but let's see. No circumvention/encryption tool is safe from hostile governments or even good governments, nor should it immune to legitimate law-enforcement. Hopefully Google will do better than Tor on this but neither is an honest broker).

I'm afraid to look at what's going on there now because if I do, days will go by while I fume -- I got into a Twit-fight with Jillian York, which dragged in even comments from her pal Jacob Appelbaum (!) and I assume she's there, in spirit if not in body. More on that later if I have time to Storify or just look in my timeline, it's hilarious.

But since I can't cover this now, I give you Nitin Pai. God bless Nitin Pai. I always like his tweets. I have no idea of his back story. Perhaps he's some technolibertarian or conservative or Hindu nationalist or who knows what but he seems fine. And here's what he says -- which indeed, is the right thing for Indians to be saying if they want to keep on coming to the US -- and have a US to come to! -- that can help their best and brightest thrive and eventually help their country (always a debate with brain-drain, but let's have it.)

As Pai says:

New Delhi, with its habit of going with the flow of international multilateralism, is willy-nilly throwing its lot with China, Russia, Brazil and others that are leading the charge against the US for their own reasons. This enthusiasm is fashionable and popular with activists, but misplaced in the context of our national interests.

Both principle and realpolitik suggest that India is better off with continued US preponderance in internet governance.

The US Constitution, political system, civil society and media are better guardians of online free speech and privacy than some UN outfit. Yes, the US is massively spying on us, but it also produces the Mannings, Snowdens and Greenwalds that rightly or wrongly, but fearlessly, tell us what is happening. In a way, the rest of the world vicariously benefits from the US' commitment to liberty.

Amen.

I would add that it's not just that India "goes with the flow" -- they were recruited by the Soviet Union back in the day, and never really left the Kremlin ambit.

Now, I'm for leaving the Internet alone. It's actually pretty healthy, running with not the multi-stake holder approach, which is fake, but the free market and the free flow of ideas, goods, and services, such as they are. The Internet more or less is free in the US and actually much ohf the world, despite all the craziness you read about surveillance and chills on speech in the US -- they don't exist as you can tell by reading Glenn Greenwald leaking Snowden every day. Hello! And the Internet gets better every day even in places like Turkmenistan or Iran.

Yes, the Internet is in trouble in places like Russia or China or Iran. But some of these countries also produce capitalist corporations -- even if crony/oligarch capitalism -- that represent a challenge to Google and that's a good thing.  On the Russian Internet, I can click on a button and tip a blogger (if I have a Russian electronic wallet attached to a Russian bank). I can easily do things like donate to political prisoners or Navalny with that wallet. Why can't I do that in America?! These countries' citizens would rather have their own services in their own languages and culture even if they still want access to Facebook or Twitter as a supplement given state controls, so it's all good. The Internet freedom gang should spend less time fussing about the US spying on Merkel and work on freeing up the Internet for the people behind the electronic Iron Curtain.

Does leaving the Internet free meaning it has US dominance? Yes and no, as I've just pointed out, and I'm also not persuaded, as Pai obviously isn't, that this is a bad thing.

I wonder how much the standards bodies like IEEE and IETF now fussing about US dominance really matter. These entities get packed with "progressives" and outright technocommunists including from the US Department of Defense who are happy to suppress commerce, intellectual property -- its bastion -- and insist on copyleftistism. But hey, they lost on the struggle over DRM and HTML5. Good! that is a little sung progress story that I wondered whether would be lost with the likes of Cory Doctorow beavering away against it constantly. But it prevailed. Because business requires it. Good!

Eventually I will go take a peek at the damage of the IGF meeting -- but ultimately, it doesn't matter, in the words of Loren Feldman. The Internet routes around...

 

 

STOP HACKING US!

So a hodge-podge of hackers, anarchists, crypto kids, Occupy, Anonymous, ACLU operatives, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff, other Soros-funded non-profiter -- plus a bunch of libertarians, Ron Paulers, Von Mises gold buggers and God-knows-what-else are going to converge on Washington, DC for something called "Stop Watching Us" which is essentially an anti-NSA demonstration.

These are not people who are about "reform" and "making a Better World" within the system, they want to overthrow it. (And the ones claiming they aren't doing that are either stupid or lying and haven't realized who they have in their movement really running things, yet.)

All the usual suspects -- supreme cadre Eli Pariser and the loathsome Internet gatekeeper Anil Dash -- mainly the "progressives" to hard left, with a sprinkling of libertarians -- are listed as individual supporters of the action. Note that "journalists" Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum are on the list and of course  Glenn Greenwald is on the leader board!  Xeni Jardin, who arguably at least does real journalistic beat covering as distinct from the endless blogging of Greenwald is also on the list.

Not a single one of these people are in local or national politics. They are all radicals. Some of them have really loathsome ideologies -- I've written repeatedly about Anil Dash, who believes himself to be in charge of deciding who gets to keep their job in Silicon Valley and who doesn't, and who gets VC funding and who doesn't -- when he isn't busy policing speech and behaviour to fit the Better World utopianist ideal of political correctness. Gabriella Coleman -- can you imagine! She's not just a griefer-scholar, but a radical demonstration leader -- awful.

John Perry Barlow must be fuming -- he's not listed in the big names at the top of the marquee but put in the list below with the likes of Appelbaum, even though he's likely more famous the all of those people except Tim Berners-Lee - for whom we have to blame for the leaky boat of the Internet in the first place, as he welded into the Internet's architecture: communism (no respect for private property), lack of privacy (which goes along with no private property), and hatred of commerce (without which people don't respect such conduits and trash them).

A lot of the businesses supporting this anti-government rally are of the socialist kind like Upworthy and Ben & Jerry. But there's one business I thought was "real" -- Rackspace, where Robert Scoble is the start-up liaison and the most prolific social media presence. I always thought he and they were more moderate, and since I don't see him jawing that much about Snowden, that they weren't radicals. Yet they're in the list, possibly because they've decided that unless they position themselves with this gang, their cloud business could be hurt, i.e. they have to make customers feel they won't turn them over to the feds.

The letter is never something I could sign -- it calls on Congress to finish the hacking job Snowden undemocratically began by exposing even more. Stupid. It makes completely unverified and even false statements like these:

The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by an intelligence contractor showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments.

Nothing sane here, nothing explaining what really goes on, which is that legitimate activity against intelligence targets, i.e. terrorists, goes on with warrants and with checks and balances, and yes, with the cooperation of American businesses who do so because they are good corporate citizens.

Outwardly (although there's lots behind the scenes), the anti-government action is being coordinated by a quintessential cadre kid, Ben Doernberg, who in the summer ran something called "Restore the Fourth!" which is supposed to be "restoring" the Fourth Amendment that is supposedly "lost" with Snowden's hack. Well, yeah. It is. Because Snowden and his adversarial journo and hacker friends unreasonably searched and seized our national security and hijacked it, bringing enormous sabotage, embarassment misery, expense, damage on the US. And NO, the US is not going to "prove" this to these malcontents because to do so would harm further what little firepower they have left to fight enemies like Al Qaeda. Oh, and the Russian and Chinese. Oh, and spy on the French, who sell weapons to the Russians, and the Germans, who harbour all kinds of radicals in their midst -- including some of Snowden's helpers, like Jacob Appelbaum.

You may have guess how I feel about this demonstration which is: I'm totally against it and call on people not to go to it because it's destructive and stupid.

I'll be interested if these paid-for cadres are able to muster anything like "real people," however. My bet is even with the ACLU and others paying for the buses from New York (and various other rich folk will show up to buy people in from here and elsewhere), and even with lots of media interest and support in certain lefty and progressive quarters, and even with Twitter, it's just not going to do well.

I sense that it's a football weekend, college kids won't care, it's too cold to hang out doors, the Shutdown is over and people have to catch up on their work -- and with any luck at all, it will rain.

I think it will be something like Jon Stewart's rally for sanity or whatever it was called -- supposed to be an antidote to the Tea Party, but itself a flop. I think that the reason the Fifth Estate is flopping in the box office is not because Assange's propaganda against it or for his hacking accomplice enterprises are so successful -- but because they are not. People don't care. It's just too boring. Remember we only counted 27,000 Cryptocat kids around the world, yesterday. Lavabit had only something like 4,000 custeroms, including Edward Snowden and his alts. So meh.

I live in hope -- the Wired State is not yet upon us (because to me, the NSA is not the Wired State, although parts of it may ally with it, and that's what made the wikification of government possible and Manning and Snowden possible.)

The other goods new is that Tom Watson, who has now described himself cleanly as a "social democrat" (socialist) underneath that tag "progressive" they always fakely use, has denounced the organizers' making common cause with the Libertarian goons. Good! A disunited rally is a rally that can't become more of a threat to liberal democracy.

And really, if technocommunism bothers you, even the Lite form that produces Tom Watson, social democrat, who is against DDoSing and writes for the Capitalist Tool Forbes (which is more of a social democrat now, too) -- wait until you see the loons on the libertarian right -- they're like Intlibber Brautigan in Second Life. They're the kind of people who say government should move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and only take care of roads -- oh, and maybe some missiles to fend off the Russians, but maybe not even that. They are pro-gun but also tend toward other creepy things as we've seen with some of Glenn Greenwald's far-right pals and the folks Julian Assange hooked up with when he ran for election.

I don't like Libertarians, and some of them are blamed for the Shutdown, but ultimately I blame Obama and the hard left for the Shutdown. Obama refused to trim Obamacare and brought this on. And no, I don't accept this silly meme that "it's the law" -- or "you have to pay for what you funded". Just because it's law doesn't mean it will get funded 100% when expenses are greater than income in an ongoing recession. The Farm Bill didn't get funded. And you can't always pay for what you planned to fund, either. Things have to be cut. The refusal to do this and the willingness to keep putting out paper is disastrous. Anyone can tell that if they are normal and not out of touch with reality. This is not "Tea Party"; it's normalcy. That's why there wasn't the outrage about the Shutdown, even from those who don't like Ted Cruz or find others on the Hill to be caricatures. Because Obama caused this from the get-go by swinging to hard to the left for the country's good, which only induced backlash.

Which brings me back to Ben Doernberg. Like all the Saul-Alinsky (Leninist) progs, young Ben claims he is "organizing the grassroots". Because he's so young, like 20 or 21, he may really believe this fiction. But it's an ancient DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) fiction from the 1980s before he was born. Pick single issues. Pick populist issues. Then run campaigns around them, and gradually ease in the full-blown socialist agenda. Soften people up for the socialist shill with their single issues. Use them as cover. Stealth socialism. I really hate it. If you're going to be a socialist, why, say you're a "social democrat" like Tom Watson, I say.

Ben thinks he is organizing "real people" and the "roots" -- but they are the grass tops. The cadres. The nonprofiters. The people in paid-for organizations with organizers' salaries or the children of affluent parents who can pay for their kids to hang out in movements like Occupy. Most Americans are NOT overwrought about the 4th Amendment somehow being "shaken".  They got used to being spied on by Google, you know? And the news that the NSA takes too from the big firehose of the Internet doesn't really bother them that much. They keep doing their thing. Their are cameras in buses and at intersections. You wish they were on every one when you have an accident, believe me.

Ben of course is in touch with Occupy, which he covered. So he wasn't born yesterday and didn't spring from a cornfield. He became well known for Storifying Occupy right at the right moment when some lazy editor needed copy and didn't want to have to waste staff running down to Zucotti and covering the mess down there. So Ben's Storify, with its cool graphics and edgy social media look with its embedded tweets appeared just at the needed time. But Ben had an instinct for what sells at a time like this. Obviously *my* storifies exposing the nastiness of Evgeny Morozov or Katrin vanden Heuvel on the left aren't going to be picked up by anybody because the media is primarily liberal/leftist and the battles too arcance even for the right to pick up normally.

Some kids are good in the school play and have a talent, however, and that's Ben. He will go far. He could be another Van Jones or Alec Ross or something. I suspect he will not become more radical as he gets older, but less, and try to get into party/election politics because sectarian politics in little leftist sects like Moveon or EFF or whatever is just too frustrating and wearing. Ben wants to get to power, not sit Storifying for the rest of his life.

But I'm here to explain that Ben is not rounding up the grass-roots. It's Occupy, it's EFF, it's the usual suspects. Perhaps he will pick up some random youths sitting in cafes drinking pumpkin lattes or playing WoW or whatever it is they do and get them on the bus. But as I said, would you want to go on a boring bus ride to DC and then stand in the damp leaves bitching about the government watching you, when -- so what, you knew that?

And really, try to think about it some more. The hackers are really the bigger problem because no one elected them, they have far too much power to undermine our liberal state without our participation, and they are destructive and nasty. You do not want them running your life. Ben will realize this, soon. Unless, of course, he becomes one of them and applies his youthful energy into building the Wired State, in which case, our real freedoms are in danger.

Ben began arguing with me on Twitter, and then started one of those silly lefty gambits of pretending to "engage," then pouting that his target didn't "play" and engage "the way they were supposed to" for his little power trip to work. This is such an old, old story I don't bother to even Storify it anymore LOL.

Then Ben writes a hurt faux polite email to try to "engage" some more:

Ben Doernberg

To Me

Oct 9

Hi Catherine,

Just wanted to say quickly; I really do find it valuable to read your blog posts, as you're clearly doing excellent detective work and critically analyzing a lot of issues I care deeply about. We may disagree on most issues, but I have no desire to avoid being exposed to others points of view.

If you go back and read the timeline of our Twitter conversation, I felt like I was on the defensive the whole time, which is what I meant by "I'm not interested in fighting." I'd be happy to explain why I don't think I'm being undemocratic by planning a permitted protest in the nation's capitol, or talk about my own issues with Anonymous' tactics. From the way you were wording your tweets, it didn't seem like you were interested in having those conversations, but rather wanted to provoke me. I could be wrong about that, that's how it seemed to me.

Happy to discuss further or meet up for coffee or a drink some time in NYC.

Ben

Answer:

No, Ben. I don't need to sit down and have a cup of coffee and be "brought round" to your "progressive" way of thinking. Not interested.

And I saw what you did there. You turned on your self victim-hood (to try to get an edge with more sympathy) by transforming my comment about the undemocratic nature of hacking and Snowden's and WikiLeak's campaign, converting it somehow to your act of demonstration being undemocratic.

Nonsense. I didn't say anything of the sort. Demonstrations aren't undemocratic; they are the practice of democracy. Peaceful assemblies expressing opinions is obviously the heart of democracy.

But hacking isn't. THAT is what I said was undemocratic, because it is. WikiLeaks' enabling of hacking and anarchist unaccountability and harm to people -- that's all not democratic. Snowden is antithetical to democracy and human rights because none of us get to choose to have our nation undermined and harmed in relations with both friends and enemies; it was coercively imposed on us against our will.

Your ilk keep mounting this fake notion of "the national conversation" -- which is an old socialist sectarian term from the 1980s or even earlier. It means provoking a topic socialists can exploit as a lever to wedge in the rest of their radical agenda. This is an old, old story. It is never about "conversation". It is about taking power.

I am absolutely positive if you put this proposition to a vote, it would lose by a landslide:

Members of Congress, would you like to have our national security severely damaged and reputation undermined, our nation split even more, our secret files spilled out for the view of our enemies from China to Al Qaeda, the trust of our allies ruined, the anger and ridicule of the world, damage to Internet businesses, roiling of international meetings with anti-American resolutions, distraction from real Internet freedom and governance issues everywhere?

See, no one would sign up for that willingly, ever. But that's what was forced on us by WikiLeaks, and that's why its members should be arrested and charged with appropriate offenses for the damage and threat to national security and secrecy which they have caused.

They shouldn't be worshipped and emulated and serve as the galvanizers of protests against the NSA in government.

It doesn't matter if you "have issues" with Anonymous' tactics -- you haven't forthrightly denounced them, called for an end to the DDoS as a tactic, and barred them from your demonstration. You'd be happy to have them fill out your ranks, just like the Libertarians, and if you can round up drunks and bums like Occupy did to fill up the place, you'll do that too.

It doesn't matter even if you denounced Anonymous and its tactics and even obeyed Tom Watson's own version of broader sectarianism -- but still sectarianism in the Democratic Party. I will never march with you, ever.

STOP HACKING US!

Crypto Kids Try to Beat NSA

So here hacker Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora), the quintessential crypto kid who now has a gig at New America Foundation, gets in the New York Times as a hero-coder.

The Times invokes The Circle, which I haven't read yet (and I hear parts of it are based on Second Life so I should), and all the Snowden stuff, and says:

Nadim Kobeissi, a security adviser in Montreal who works on an encrypted-message service called Cryptocat, said the security and hacker circles of which he is a part have long suspected that the government is listening in on online conversations and exchanges but “have never been able to prove it.” He added: “It’s been a worst-case-scenario prediction that all turned out to be true, to a worrying extent.”

However, when people get in the Twitter mindshare and the Times and seem to have very influential and wealthy backers, it's important to take a reality check. Here's one:

Most of these services are still relatively small. For example, Cryptocat, the encrypted-message service, typically sees peaks of around 20,000 simultaneous users. In recent months, that number has grown to 27,000. But it’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, that mainstream social networking tools and services can claim.

You know, there may be 1.7 million phone jailbreakers, i.e. a rough estimate of the number of dangerous geeks there are out there LOL. But there are only 27,000 Crypto kids. Be grateful!

So, yeah, that. Most people do not feel a burning need to encrypt their email. It's a cumbersome process and in some places it will draw more attention to you for the mere fact that you're encrypting. And I suspect the lack of sign-ups for Cryptocat is because this is a niche enterprise. Most people are not radical revolutionaries trying to overthrow the state and requiring encryption services.

And in case you missed the point that people like Nadim are not just interested in encryption as some kind of public service, here he spells out his radical agenda:

Tools like Cryptocat, he said, are just the impetus for a larger discussion. “It’s not an answer by itself,” he said. “It is a combination of privacy and technology, democratic movement and political discussion that it is not acceptable to use the Internet as a surveillance medium.”

Well, except the Internet, like telephones and phones and mails and lots of stuff, *can* be used as a surveillance medium when the targets are legitimate law-enforcement targets. Revolutionaries who want to seize power never concede that. Well, some of them are among the criminals, the pirates, the drug dealers and so on.

My comment:

But wait. Nadim Kobeissi has not in fact proved that the government is listening in on conversations of people that are not legitimate law-enforcement and intelligence targets. That's just it. We have yet to get a single bona fide solid case from Edward Snowden's hacks. Kaepora here is merely affirming this as a belief, but he has not made the findings to back it up. As much as the adversarial journalists and their hacker friends have claimed there is a mass surveillance state, they have only shown the hypothetical potentials of machines, not the actualities of cases.

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