Wired State

How to Fix Silicon Valley -- And It's Not How You Think

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

There's a flurry of solutions offered for how to fix the real or perceived evils and woes of Silicon Valley's takeover of our lives, from breaking up monopolies to more training in the humanities (or not), to conservative legislation to remove reported bias in news offerings to libertarian protection of the controversial Section 230, supposedly the "26 words that gave us" this Internet. And while some or parts of all these solutions may actually be implemented, I never see one obvious one, that might seem counter-intuitive:

Make social media platforms charge for their services.

Carpet Bazaar, Cairo, 1887 by Charles Robertson

This idea flies against the core belief of technologists that you "can't" charge for social media, whether chat systems or blogs or picture sharing, because people won't pay it and you'll never make enough to sustain the platform anyway. Everyone knows that subscriptions don't support media -- investors and ads do. More and more, you find the awareness that if you are not paying for social media, you are the product -- and the customers are really the ad buyers, or even more, the VCs.

Ads Without Subscriptions, Content without Conscience

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden Artist Thomas Cole 1828 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston -Wikimedia

This partial borrowing by Silicon Valley of the news media's profit formulas -- investors (venture capitalists) and ads -- (partial because generally there are no subscriptions at all) is really at the root of its evil, though few conceive of it that way. Subscribers have kept mainstream media honest -- when they lose them, they know they are doing something wrong. This conscience was lobotomized with new media.

The Internet became more than an exchange device for scientists or a bulletin board for counterculturists when it liberated paid newspapers -- and later music files -- as the loss leader to get engagement and to disguise the costs of coders and engineers, not to mention servers and their infrastructure. But also when it sneered a subscriptions - which is public accountability, like it or not.

The scorn for privacy and one's private data is rooted in the scorn for private property involved in copyright, which more than the "26 words" is what gave us the Internet.  Craigslist could undermine the classifieds that formed a pillar of media support by ads for amateur sex and prostitutes - its founder was simply less scrupulous than newspapers of record that see themselves as pillars of society, not playing on the customers' basest culture. And the stakes grew higher for social media, requiring more and more extreme content to keep interest.

Having ceded privacy along with artists' private property and allowing non-transparent ads to undermine democracy, it's hard to turn back. Voluntary moves like "making ads more transparent" don't take into consideration that even the CEO of a major Internet sales company like Overstock can fall for Russian blandishments and a sizable chunk of people will keep claiming Butina isn't really a spy, but merely a pro-state interest group.

Diagnoses Without Solutions

I've noticed lately that certain articles that seem to promise solutions only make more sophisticated diagnoses -- like Prof. Paul Musgrave's How Not to Fix Silicon Valley - "the problem isn't whether tech entrepreneurs read the humanities, it's how they think. Or Ramesh Srinivasan's "Yes, Google is Disrupting Our Democracy But Not in the Way Trump Thinks". Musgrave is right that having tech leaders read Plato -- or I would say something like Martin Buber's "I and Thou" -- isn't going to fix their essentially nihilist thinking. He doesn't use that word -- I do -- because I think it captures that self-interested, cut-throat, bullying take on the world that has no humility before anything greater than himself -- God or beauty or country. They got that way for all sorts of reasons involving the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and decline of parenting and education but most of all, I think, they got that way because they trained themselves to become more like machines in order to communicate with them and make computers work.

This is about literalness but also about an ardent, religious belief (in non-religious people) that the Internet has no value or evil or good -- the way a hammer or a nail do not. They are just tools, "able to be used for good or bad". I'm hardly the only one who has come to see this as riotously false -- an atomic bomb that was supposed to be used "surgically" and killed hundreds of thousands of people and altered the course of history and politics and civilization forever isn't just a "tool".  If social media's propensity for falsity even undermines elections, the tool is way out in front of the wielder. Yes, people are the ones who wield such tools, but the unanticipated outcomes in part engineered heedlessly into the tools due to technologists' hubris are increasingly revealing the agency of non-agency evil. No one thought sharing pictures of your cat would create a tool which could be used to bring a lout and liar like Trump to power.

Let me get right to my solutions then.

1. Silicon Valley should charge subscription fees for social media.

These fees could be $2.99 or $29.99 and based on number of uploads or posts or special features but they need to be in place. They will still have free accounts on the freemium model, that free gives you X features but for Y more, you incrementally add them. Let's say with a free account on Facebook, you can upload photos, but not videos. Or the follower cap on Twitter (currently 2,000 until others follow you, an insidious system) can be broken not by illegally buying batches of followers, but simply paying a subscription fee that mechanically lets you follow more people.  Even likes could be capped with fees, as they have inflated beyond all bounds! There is a deep-set belief that you "can't" charge subscriptions and that it is "fatal" for media.

But look at the New York Times, and how it has literally added subscriptions by creating more and more diverse and niched content. Washington Post and New Yorker as well. Miraculously, it can be done. TechCrunch grudgingly admits that the old media dinosaurs are making money now -- much more than TC itself, which won't move to a subscription model although their core reader base -- programmers and other tech -- have some of the highest salaries in the country and could pay for their news. I should note that it is not merely compelling content that achieved this. The first thing that the Times, Post, New Yorker and others did was make it impossible to put a link into Google search, and pull up a story past a paywall by doing this. The Google trick was broken about two years ago, I think. I've never seen any reporting on this, but it was vital. I don't know whether the Snowden helpers that the Times brought in to do tech, or whether some treaty with Google achieved this, but it is now impossible to read past a paywall by using the Google cache trick. It simply doesn't work anymore. And that forced people to pay. Mechanical blocks like to force payment are as vital as fresh and compelling content, and this was achieved, despite legions of techs always saying it "can't" be done because of the Internet's copyable nature. Sure it can, when you set your mind to it.

The book by Jill Abramson Merchants of Truth also explains this phenomenon of new media like Vice or Buzzfeed failing and having to lay off journalists who formerly swaggered over the demise of old print media. To be sure, this reality still hasn't encroached on the deep-set belief against subscriptions, not only for new media but social media But it must. And it will. Something has to be done to wean these companies away from ads which they sell next to your free content by exploiting your privacy and your emotions. And undermining civil society in the process.

When you're a paying customer, the attitude changes. Newspapers change their tenor when they reflect on what subscribers' responses might be. Even razor companies trying to rely on "viral social media" can only indulge in their ideological follies for so long before the bottom line corrects them.

After all, Apple, HBO, Netflix and so on charge subscriptions for streaming content. Spotify has the free and the premium version. Why shouldn't social media, that serves us up the most content of all, daily, hourly, even by the minute?! Think of how much people look at their phones -- and what percentage of that content is free! CHARGE for some of it!

Wallets and Customer Commerce

Such a subscription system should also have "wallets" so that people can go around and award pennies or dollars to friends for posts they list or journalists for articles they like. Technologists could feasibly put in such a system, but defiantly don't, as they know it will undermine their own control and power over the ability to milk the Internet for revenue.

Once you could sell your photos on Instagram, Instagram can't make money from them in any way. If a payments system is installed by a third party like PayPal or Venmo, whereby the platform provider is bypassed and there are peer-to-peer transactions easily using the interface of the platform, money isn't flowing into the hands of those who provide the service -- UNLESS they decide to work it that way.

In fairness, platforms that enable your commerce through social media should get reasonable compensation, and they could charge a fee -- but not only due to reluctance to enable customer commerce and take on the headaches of payments systems (which include fraud and hacking and security) they don't even start such a plan. They should. BTW, the online virtual world Second Life, which is mocked by techs, is a good example of how this works. Facebook, with its 3 billion users, only enables a tiny handful of engineers who create apps related to it to make money from it directly, and of course takes payment from individuals, groups, or companies for ads. This segment of its income is likely its largest, and why it would not move to a subscription plan only reluctantly.

But Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, itself makes a profit of $75 million, and enables $60 million or more a year to be made by its users who sell various virtual goods or server space or service to a relatively tiny population. I think can't be more than 500,000 or 600,000 these days, without about 30,000-50,000 concurrency (these figures used to be released, but when SL began doing poorly after its initial boom in 2007-2008, it stopped publishing them). The point is, if you give people a service they pay for as a subscription ($11.99 a month, less than some massive online games), while allowing free accounts as well, and allow people to use the platform to make money, get tokens for their creations or services, and then cash out those tokens in a carefully-managed exchange system, you have sustained yourself and the customer. That's what we need to be thinking about as jobs become automated -- how to enable people to make money online with creation as well as service.

I think likely the content companies rather than the platform will be the one to institute wallets, so they can control the rake of fees from them. Imagine if the NYT made a way for you to pay pennies to clip one article or tip one journalist -- they benefit, we benefit. They won't want to cut into their revenue stream from full-fledged subscriptions -- but I suspect they will hit a wall eventually and will have to buckle as the only way to grow.

There could be a war over this. But wallets/micropayment systems will go in eventually and they will be a way for both platforms and content providers to make money other than ads. I don't pretend this will be easy -- Facebook or Instagram would rather let game devs make money from fees collected for addictive farm games or letting influencers with high followers take brand endorsements than let the user decide with micro-currency payments what he or she "likes".

And the game devs and top influencers themselves would constitute a block against the democratization of making and receiving payments as they would see their income undermined. As more and more people get on social media, the opportunities for making money with it seem to increase, according to the gurus who make a living teaching you how to do this. But it's only possible to make a living for a few, and it has become harder as companies like ebay and Amazon (through which you sell real goods ) are taking more and more percentages and instituting more rules; YouTube only lets those with a defined number of higher followers sell ads, and Instagram has thresholds as well.

Real Identity Curbs Abuse

There are advantages to taking this controversial and even arduous path, however. If you have a subscription system, you have to have a form of payment, which generally means a real identity, a credit card or a bank card. Real identities tend to lesson -- although not entirely remove -- bad behaviour online, people are conscious of their reputations (and sadly a part of this is job loss over social media indiscretion, which I think is wrong). But the bottom line is, if you put your real name on a Twitter account you paid even $5.00 a month for, the chemistry changes. When something is free you don't respect it, nor do you respect the anonymous. It's always possible to make a pseudonymous account on top of an account in which a real name is provided. The screaming that usually accompanies the debate about "nicks" is that we "can't" have it because all kinds of vulnerable groups from battered women to Iranian freedom fighters will not be protected, given how hacks of personal data take place all the time. Yet that's something not just dissidents under oppressive systems but ordinary bank customers in Western democracies have to worry about, and that has to be fixed on a larger scale.

Social media companies will still have to sell ads. But they will sell ads to buyers who must reach people who not only gave real names and locations but to whom they now have an obligation as paying customers. They aren't just sheeple to be fleeced with addictive "freeness". The era of free is not sustainable and will change. So better to do this in a planned and staged manner than close down in bankruptcy.

On one of the Silicon Valley episodes, there is the regurgitation of the received wisdom you can't charge money for a service -- and then the telling comment from a tech titan that the value of a company isn't in its product but in the company's stock. Literally, in the shareholders' shares, not the actual thing that gives them revenue -- which seems remarkably shortsighted and even crazy. That's why the paydays of these ephemeral companies, whether unicorns or badgers mainly come from VCs trading them around to each other. You "take money off the table" not because the public is buying a product or service -- only another VC is. Facebook users were not offered shares of stock like employees -- although they should have been, since they made Facebook successful. When there are subscriptions and real customers, there is more focus on what the product is and how to sell it, and less on dark exploitation.

I don't pretend it's a total solution, but the job here is to tame evil as it cannot be eradicated. Still, there is more to be done:

2. Government regulation. Ironically, one of the very things that may have to be forced on social media is the demand that they charge money for subscriptions. That seems hilarious and counter-intuitive, but think about it. Since when can the government force a company in a free economy to charge money? They can't. Although if you think about it, there are laws regulating contests, sweepstakes, and lotteries -- giving away things for free -- why not accounts? But by taxation and tariffs, they bring this about, as the companies need to have a reliable revenue stream. 

If ads are regulated more heavily -- first and foremost by insisting on the same transparency that radio and TV elections ads must have -- subscriptions may look more attractive. 

I think Section 230 has to be revised to make platforms responsible for specific crimes, like the incitement of imminent violence -- not protected under the First Amendment.  Companies already have Terms of Service and sometimes also additional Community Rules that are not at the level of the First Amendment but which they only passively or irregularly enforce. Only legislative demand that redacts or even removes "the 26 words" will get them to enforce their own TOS. This cannot be decided by the companies and their lawyers only, although media is tending to give only them the voice, and castigate critics as Trumpians, which is foolish.

Already the anti-trafficking legislative effort was successful, and there will be more. Admission that it "didn't end the Internet" even if some liberals dislike it as law is the first step toward awareness that virtuality has to be regulated as much as reality because it is human and therefore flawed. The Internet as a substance is not perfectability always in motion, that "Better World". The current climate has helped bring this vital change about more than anything, ending the stale arguments' stalemate, as Lawfare explains:

At first, tech companies lined up in lockstep against the bill. But then the seemingly impossible happened: The platforms’ opposition receded. Perhaps because the climate on the Hill was increasingly inhospitable to the major social media companies given their role in L’Affaire Russe and perhaps because the writing was on the wall, the Internet Association (which represents Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies) endorsed the legislation after Senate staff changed the bill to head off some of its excesses.

If platforms are faced with the need to become responsible for removing content in violation, they have more incentive to have subscriptions -- because payment information must be supplied. I think we will see this in the future. A lot of things in Silicon Valley started out for free, then had to charge or go out of business. Social media could be the next big thing -- because it's rational for companies to charge for a service and irrational to keep relying on damaging their very customers to make money from them. To ensure your privacy, you have to have some privacy to ensure -- that means identity.

Impact Litigation and Good Corporate Governance

Traditionally, capitalism has solved the problems of companies harming their own customers through fraud or environmental pollution or health damage by litigation. So tobacco companies are forced to put labels from the Surgeon General, or Big Pharma may finally face the music for its contribution to the opiod crisis with the town and county lawsuits. Boards of companies are an even greater force for reforming abusive companies -- Overstock's Patrick Byrne had to go when he got too loony, and Elon Musk got his wings clipped.  Of course, the experts and legislators will take a look at anti-trust law and see if any of it fits with big tech, especially things like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. But I don't think the solution to Silicon Valley is to favor Elizabeth Warren's socialistic animosity to capitalism period in this popular form. It's to treat these companies like any companies and demand from them the board control, adherence to regulations and customer care that "meatworld" companies have to exercise whether they manufacturer car-seats or fast food. 

Here I'll mention the claims that Facebook and others unfairly favour liberals. Of course they do -- just as mainstream media is dominated by liberals. One obvious cure for this is never to look at the news feed Facebook provides you, and make your own news feed by going to sites directly or using Google news or other feeds you can set up and control yourself. Google famously hides behind users as the reason certain content surfaces instead of others. Yet this is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if users surface antisemitic content, others then lazily click on it simply because it's there. Nothing to be gained by denying this bias, even if the solution for it is not so easy.

Try to Chomsky test -- type in "Noam Chomsky" and you will not find anything critical about this leftwing extremist hugely critical of the US and capitalism on the first page. You'll find pages from Truthout, a leftwing watchdog, Chomsky's own page, and Wikipedia -- which is the chief way all searches skew left, because it really is dominated by a few lefty and libertarian techs.

So it's a thing. Yes, it isn't fixed by Google skewing its algorithms. But it has the big old blank landing page, which unlike Yahoo, has no curated news on it, either of "real" or "paid" type. Why can't it start a curated news feed on its big old blank page? The solution to the discontents of search is outside of search, in curated content which yes, this company could provide, and yes be a publisher/editor responsible for its content under revised Section 230. It can be done!

Its Soviet Knowledge Society-style object lessons of obscure scientists and techs (the Google doodle which doesn't always show up), with way more representation of women and people of colour than in the actual RL Google itself -- can't carry that load alone. Let Google hire journalists to select news and you know, make the world a better place. It could be only real news, unlike Yahoo, which has a lot of paid and sensational junk on it. Then, when there's a search box next to their modest news feed (they could still leave a lot of blank space on that big old blank page so we can admire the inspirational lesson for the day and the primary colours against that blizzard white) so providing a good news feed will help their search, as people are inspired to look up things in the stories.

Also, they need to have subscriptions, too. Search is so heavily used for the Internet's very functioning to have Google subscriptions just for search (even just to go from one page to another -- I wonder if other people don't use bookmarks but use search to bring up pages like "Yahoo" or "Facebook" if they aren't landing pages). But they could charge subscriptions for those of us who use Google Ads. Why not? The people placing the ads have to pay, obviously. Why shouldn't those who provide free content and put those ads on their blogs or corporate pages not have to pay a subscription, too? And if we could pay a subscription, we could finally demand customer service from this most outrageously abusive product of Google's. Everyone knows how arbitrarily they remove accounts and how hard it is to get them back (I've had to do that, after people used fake complaints about ads as a way to shut down my criticism they didn't like). There are other Google services like this with zero customer service. Twitter is terrible that way, too. Charge subscription fees. And do the customer service -- use some of your billions to pay for jobs for people you are automating into poverty.

3. Moral Leadership. It's funny how this is a public demand of sorts -- many people think Silicon Valley titans don't give enough to charity, don't help communities enough, ship jobs abroad and avoid taxes by taking revenue abroad and it all has a corrosive effect. But yet despite several decades of Big IT, the evolution that took place with the Vanderbilts or the Rockfellers still hasn't occurred (and we should expect it to be speeded up like everything else in our time).

I don't really care for Bill Gates, but his corporation (which mainly sells hardware, so it is more rooted in the real world than Google or Facebook) provides jobs and he gives to charity causes from AIDs treatment to clean water. Sergey Brin is mainly known for giving to the research of the disease from which he is genetically predisposed. Does Jack of Twitter give to charity? I don't even know. Craig Newmark gives to trendy progressive causes he likes -- wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if he were forced to have some kind of subscription service for classified ads, which might widen his philanthropy beyond just his lefty favourites.

Robert Scoble

I think there also need to be tech leaders who present a more caring and concerned face to the public. When I think of the better face of tech, I think of Robert Scoble, who was once the "evangelist" (a top PR outreach guy) for Microsoft, and went on to represent a variety of companies including Seagate before morphing into an independent consultant who now specializes in "spatial computing," which basically means anything 3D -- virtual reality, augmented reality, panoramic photos and such.

He went through a trial in the wilderness, first admitting his alcoholism and going on the road to recovery, then apologizing for his abuse of some women in tech, and continuing to hone his devotion to his wife and children, working at home and doing childcare while his wife takes a demanding Silicon Valley job outside the home.

I've always admired Scoble's ability to explain tech and be excited about it and draw people in without scorn -- a rare talent in the tech world. Most of the people who follow him are techs themselves and I suppose he isn't super famous, but I always found him to provide an enormous amount of information and insight. He takes the time to answer ordinary people on Facebook (like me). He is upbeat and positive without being smarmy about the tech, and calls it out when it is less than great. To be sure, his endorsement of products is often paid (as it was for Google Glass, which ultimately was a failure and which cost him some ridicule - he famously showed himself taking a shower in the Google goggles).  But there is an organic quality to this endorsement which comes from enough commentary that is unpaid. And really "eating the dogfood" -- he has valiantly taken his family, which includes a son with special needs, on trips to Yellowstone in a driverless car. I will never get into one of those vehicles and I believe they are mainly about putting truck drivers out of work, but I do recognize that they likely are the wave of the future. If you have to have such a wave, you want it to be explained and guided by someone who has faced the worst of his own personal demons as well as those of technology. We need more people like this, and far less of the types satirized in Silicon Valley, the scourge of Twitter and politics, Anil Dash, who not only got a fellow tech who was politically incorrect fired from his job at Business Insider, he threatened him with blocking his funding in the world of start-ups forever (this denizen of the White House could do that). Despicable! 

The techs cannot be taught a moral code out of Plato or even C.S. Lewis but they can be humbled by losing customers and revenue, facing regulation and lawsuits and realizing that what is good for business and and should be what is good for Americans and the world.  There isn't anything like the ABA or AMA for technologists and should be, where their "Better Worlding" is not merely outwardly directed toward their own arrogant engineering of the world by their leftist/libertarian tastes, but where they pledge to do no harm themselves. This wouldn't just be them deciding what harm is, or their former execs now with "harm reduction" consulting gigs. It would have to be done by denouncing the DDoS and ceasing to characterize hacking as "cool"; where they cooperate with government and military in a liberal democracy instead of letting tiny factions of anarchists rule; where they draw the logical conclusion that protection of privacy and private property -- personal data and copyright -- should be their hallmarks instead of scorned in their "California business model." This can be done with a move to subscriptions, some regulation, and some selfless and real moral leadership.

 

@sarahkendzior is a Political Provocateur and Three Reasons Why Her Rape Threats Lament is Wrong

First, let me tell the story in three quick tweets:

@catfitz I hope you’re getting ready to kill yourself because you’re ugly old and fat— Andrew Auernheimer (@rabite) April 18, 2014

@catfitz Catherine, ppl have recommended I call the police b/c you've threatened me so many times. They are shocked by your behavior, not me — Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) February 16, 2012

"I want people to stop sending me rape threats. I want to do my work." http://t.co/LjWKKCGP6k— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) June 9, 2014

 

So this should establish:

a) I know what it's like to get nasty, vicious misogynous hate tweets from creepy males on the Internet -- most women bloggers do -- there's a sample of just one of thousands, by the creepy hacker Weev (@rabite). I don't have a problem with calling out and condemning this kind of behaviour, but I don't think it's merely a feminist problem; I see it as an anarcho-hacker culture antithetical to human rights and civil society in general for all of us, women, men and children.

b) Sarah Kendzior has a long history, in different settings, of causing provocations, stirring up raging controversies, and then when anyone debates her dubious theses and shifting premises, pretends they are guilty of incivility, harassment, sexism -- and as you can see, even imagining she needs to "call the police" (!) etc. Read my blog Different Stans to get an idea.

c) When I see her latest provocation based on rape threats, I keep this history in mind, although of course I condemn any such threat delivered against any women online. That's not the issue here -- but by once again creating a cocoon of sensitivity taboo and political correctness around a topic, counting on the fact that most gawkers at her provocation don't know her history, Sarah has obscured her active measure and promoted once again a peculiar, oppressive, non-documentary and arbitrary way of addressing the wrongs of the Internet.

Needless to say, I've never made any threat against Sarah Kendzior whatsoever -- it's preposterous. As the record shows, all I've done is...criticize her academic articles or blog posts. It's wild. I've never written her any emails and my tweets or blogs criticizing her don't contain anything remotely resembling a threat. Yet she herself complained about my legitimate criticism of her to my boss at a job to try to create an atmosphere of intimidation for me -- creepy!

Does that mean maybe her claims about these rape threats are fake as well? Oh, they may be very real, but it's her manipulation of this situation that should be examined here as it follows a historical pattern.

First, if you've been in a cave and missed all the Twitters (I did, too, for most of it), here's a summary from the libertarian right and a summary from the loony left -- and here's another summary from the liberal left and the sectarian left.  So already you can see the problem.

Trigger warning: no actual rape occurred, and the rape threats that occurred didn't occur from any of these parties but some other (invisible) parties, but people disagree what it all means. Basically, in the course of trying to knock the use of the term "bro" about certain figures that deserved a critique (or conversely, worship, I'm not sure, given that it's Piketty they're talking about as the "bronominist"), the link was made to Sarah Kendzior's tweet about rape threats from a "brocialist," and the Jacobin article seemed to fit that usage of "bro" as one of the cases of trivializing serious things.

Well, you might say no good deed goes unpunished, but it was an odd thing to do to accuse the target of the rape threats of doing something trivializing about her own rape threats to make a point only about "bro" linguistics -- not to get too meta about all this. But then, it's Jacobin. And that's just it. All of these people are sectarian weirdos.

Hence, Sarah's active measure around vilifying the left's various sorry manifestations. Whatever their sins, like good little PC children in the fierce re-education camp that is Twitter, they've deleted their Tweets and links and have written ardent apologies and thoughtful recantations. So that's all good, except, Sarah is now on a rampage and wants blood -- both she and her sidekick Joshua Foust falsely accused Jacobin editors and writers of issuing rape threats against her -- something that even all the sectarian leftists parsing this had to denounce as mendacious because they had done no such thing.  But here's the thing:

Sarah Kendzior's purpose in life is to disrupt social movements, to pick out sectarian topics that she can use to pit people against each other, and to promote a "line" that can be shifting, but which generally tends to a) favour authoritarian Eastern governments and oppose Western governments b) favour ideological premises over rights and the rule of law c) favour networks of approved cadres over principles.

In her career on the Central Asian scene:

o She became famous for standing up to a widely-respected but pro-regime professor in the Central Asian studies field by chronicling the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan, but in the process, both minimalized violent Islamism and created a cover for many more reports later that in fact challenged dissenters or questioned the role of opposition movements (instead of challenging the regimes themselves) and favoured the status quo;

o Once flogged the cause of an Uzbek female student who committed suicide after making a Facebook profile and getting arrested by the secret police  -- a story that turned out to be a hoax; then went on to disparage the woman human rights activist who uncovered the hoax with due diligence as well as me as a blogger covering the topic. She joined male academics and think-tankers heckling and ridiculing an establishment woman academic whose views were actually closer to their own than they admitted, and a Russian lesbian investigative journalist because she reported on a higher death toll in a massacre by government forces of workers (the Zhanaozen story is complicated -- and it's one Mark Ames has used to blast Foust but with errors, so if you have questions, just ask.)

Then, unrelated to her academic work, Kendzior:

o bullied, harassed and pilloried a single mom of an Asperger's patient who frequently became violent who wrote a famous article, "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" -- and so pressured her that the woman finally agreed to write a joint statement with her -- although Kendzior accused her of violating her son's privacy and of being a bad mother -- merely for speaking the truth about her situation.

On another front, related to her obsession with unpaid internships, she:

o bullied, harassed and vilified a nonprofit organization working at the UN on violence against women, publishing falsehoods, displaying ignorance about how the NGO system works at the UN, and peddling a sectarian line supposedly about worker's rights, but really much more about naming and shaming her academic colleagues and peers.

Notice a pattern here?

Each one of these stories involve women's rights or human rights in some form or another, but yet in each instance, Sarah uncannily finds something politically incorrect about the women involved, and diguises her own assault on them as some sort of mission on behalf of higher principles of feminism -- even though concepts like women's rights aren't really what she supports -- what she supports is bureaucratic, authoritarian little cabals of only certain women and men bullying others and arrogating to themselves the power to decide what is "right". You know, Bolshevism.

When I saw her consistently backing up and excusing and running interference for the men at the Registan collective (she was the only woman), I called her the "office wife" because that's exactly how she behaved -- without any respect for women's rights and basic due process and decency and without any solidarity. That got me called "sexist" by her partner in crime (and protector in this current dispute, as in past disputes), the former DoD contractor Joshua Foust -- although the original problem with sexism started with her inability to stand up to bullying men -- and men writing awful stuff about women in the field and in general treating others terribly and taking utterly cynical positions on behalf of programs like drones.

It's odd -- and it doesn't make sense until you see it happen enough times over and over, and you realize that she is either a patholitical Internet persona engrossed in some sort of version of Internet hystrionics syndrome -- or working on behalf of some cadre movement or some other sinister power (she writes for Al Jazeera, a state news service of Qatar, which for me is not journalism but propaganda). When you see this pattern happen enough times, over enough years, with ever more publicized results and divided people, you realize there's something "up". Investigation is indeed required.

The three things she has done wrong on this particulate episode with the "rape threats," in my view, although your mileage may vary, is as follows:

1) She has treated the threats and the links to the threats or the casual attitudes toward the threats by Jacobin and Salon writers as somehow specific to these individuals and their superiors at their publications, but not to the leftist Marxist/socialist/radical ideologies they represent.

Imagine, being involved in any incident with something called "Jacobin magazine," and never pointing out that this is a radical movement celebrating Jacobinism, that is, overthrowing the state, and along the way, killing off class enemies with the guillotine. And whatever Salon's liberal genesis, is it now home for many Occupy-style radical ideologues like Natasha Leonard, and the real issue here isn't just their casual response to violence speech or acts against women, but their entire violent revolutionary ideologies that make the end justify the means, and the means coercive and destructive. (In a separate post, I will explain how the extreme, sectarian left ultimately diminishes rape by making it a mere subset of the problem of capitalism.)

The entire story in fact began with a casual remark on Twitter by the notorious Aaron Bady @zunguzungu - he's exactly what I mean by violent sectarianism.

This neglect of the deeper problems of the "movement" to single out only some aspect is what she does with the problem of women in tech -- it's about feminism, and not about hacker culture -- which she wants to preserve for its usefulness in breaking up bourgeois Western states, especially America.

2. She has implicitly denigrated the act of reporting on and publicly documenting one's rape threats or any kind of mistreatment as some kind of "privacy" act that is to be discouraged -- but which she herself is to be allowed "this one time" -- and then, of course, only partially. There's a lot of mystery surrounding the whole thing.

In her manipulative blog post, she lays out those parameters -- (the sectarian Firedog Lake was her Greek chorus in this regard) -- we must never demand that she publicize her e-mails or document her threats because to do so would be to indulge in "rape culture; worse, if anyone else decides to use the route of documentation and publicity, they must be attention whores -- because she's taking the high road by "never" talking about her personal life (the way the woman did who wrote that she was like "Adam Lanza's mother" -- who was first burnt at the Internet stake then sent to re-education school.) 

Further, we are treated to the dubious thesis that "to talk about rape threats is to make them happen again or make more happen therefore we must never talk about them or link to them" -- a position that puts us not into feminist empowerment but submissive cultdom or frightened omerta.

This position is very much similar to her odd thesis in Central Asia studies journals that people who talked about the gross human rights violations and oppression of the regimes of Central Asia or the Caucasus were "scaring off" more ordinary Internet users and "ruining it for all of us" and thereby preventing a more moderate and incremental Internet space to be created. Fortuntately, activists in the region paid not the slightest attention to her.

3. She has favoured suppression of free speech over the old principle of displacing bad speech with good speech, thus joining the ranks of the PC and those who seek brow-beating and self-criticism circles on the open Internet, "trigger warnings" and removal of speech or forced apologies or shunning (in this she is just like her dear friend Jillian York who, counter-intuitively, is a program director at the Internet freedom organization Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

I had never heard of some of the newer feminists Kendzior has allied with or conversely attacked, although of course I know of Katha Pollitt and have gone to hear her speak in New York on a number of occasions and read her in the Nation.

Few women who read Mikka Kendall have actually laid in critical condition, bleeding on the operating table with a fetus with placenta abruption. I have. So I can look her dead in the eye and say I'm sorry for your terrible experience, I've had it, too, but here's the thing -- pregnancies at the stage of late-term abortion/premature birth are very hard to manage, but in our country with advanced medicine they usually don't end with the death of the mother, and all but a handful of Catholic hospitals (which make up 12% of all hospitals in the US) are not going to have second thoughts about abortions at this stage (if they really can establish it is 20-22 weeks). (I was offered an abortion, although also only after hours of painful waiting, but opted to have a very premature baby and have her treated in the NICU. She died a month later.) So I'd like to hear some more eyewitnesses to this story.

I usually don't favour Pollitt's own sectarian old-style socialist politics that have trouble finding fault with violent Islamist movements dominated by men and her embracing of the atrocious Anonymous provocation around the rape of the student in Steubenville.

I think what Sarah is doing now is a lot like the Anonymous disruption in Steubenville, which actually led to further vilification and shaming of the rape victim, the exposure of her name, the unjust persecution of innocent people, and obstruction of justice by making it difficult to gather testimony and get court witnesses.

Nothing that Anonymous was doing there was really about stopping rape culture -- a rape culture they themselves embraced before, during and after Steubenville in some of their outrageous statements on women, including against me, as a blogger covering their antics.

Rather, it was about disrupting the justice system as an institution of society and helping to break up society so that anarchy could prevail.  There is some evidence that forces like Al Qaeda and foreign governments like Russia infiltrate and manipulate these hacker movements (the Snowden hack is only one very big and obvious example), and this is how they succeed -- while appearing to be an ordinary protest movement of the sort that has had legitimacy in American society.

What is the end result of what Sarah Kendzior is doing with this latest outrageous caper of hers? Is it really about pushing back against the outrageous behaviour of especially male techies and hackers online against women, and trying to create a safe space for women to excel? Not really, because that's not the result. The result is:

o splitting an already divided left even further -- although to be clear, the problems of the left's cohesion is not my problem and they will be doomed to division as long as they embrace radical and even violent ideologies over the rule of law;

o establishing only certain online figures as authorities on how to interpret the issue, and quashing dissent and the due process of publications and debates;

o discouraging the documentation and publication of human rights abuses, including online threats, under the guise of "privacy", and refusing to submit to due process and the rule of law to address the issue of violence against women; instead of building institutions, enabling networks to run roughshod over others who step out of line.

Trust me, the problem of violence against women, which is very big on the Internet even if it is cyberspace and injuries are psychic and not physical, does not get solved by creating a cabal of a few bullying, coercive females to rule the roost and discourage not only dissent, but calls on themselves to be accountable.

It's like the problem of misogynist men in tech is definitely not solved by having Anil Danish threaten, bully and get fired a coder who happened to make a tasteless rape joke on Twitter -- and then vow to run him out of the field all together. No women were raised up by Dash's Bolshevik tactics, and we don't want to live in a society where people like Dash, using those methods, prevail by force over others using positions of publicity and power.

The problem of hatred and misogyny is not solved by discouraging documentation and publication and thwarting the steady building up of movements of rights and solidarity. These methods sound old-fashioned in a world where we are supposed to achieve justice by getting links removed or tweets deleted or people blocked or banned. They only recur because those digital solutions do not change or curb human behaviour.

 

 

Related articles

Uh...

#YesAllWomen is/are important

Why is Sarah Kendzior Attacking a Human Rights Group at the UN?!

Linking Without Consent: The New (Imagined) Tragedy of the Twitter Commons

The Dog That Hasn't Barked Yet About Snowden: Google

Cooling pipes and servers at Google Data Center in Dallas. Photo by Burning7 Chrome.

You know who has barely complained about Snowden or said a thing about Snowden?

Google.

The New York times did a story "Angry Over US Surveillance, Tech Giants Bolster Defenses" but it had no substance.  The story has basically only two sources. One is part of the Snowden Brotherhood:

“The companies, some more than others, are taking steps to make sure that surveillance without their consent is difficult,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But what they can’t do is design services that truly keep the government out because of their ad-supported business model, and they’re not willing to give up that business model.”

Soghoian is a former Soros fellow and now at the ACLU, he's the most quoted "progressive" "privacy expert" in all these stories, and only represents one school of thought -- absolute encryption for the hackers, maximum transparency for the government. Oh, and hatred of capitalism -- as you can see from the sneer at the business model.

Oh, I complain about this business model, too, but it exists not because of techno-libertarians and techno-neo-liberalism of the sort Evgeny Morozov loathes. It exists because of technocommunism, and the unwillingness of people like Soghoian to couple private property and privacy -- and indeed the entire hackers' support movement spawned by John Perry Barlow and Electronic Frontier Foundation, which mainly disavows intellectual property and commerce online.

The other source is:

A tech industry executive who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities around the surveillance, said, “Just based on the revelations yesterday, it’s outright theft,” adding, “These are discussions the tech companies are not even aware of, and we find out from a newspaper.”

Oh, and there's this PR flog:

Even before June, Google executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirming that their suspicions were not just paranoia.

In response, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, issued a statement that went further than any tech company had publicly gone in condemning government spying. “We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping,” he said. “We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone.”

That doesn't count. (Because it's just transcribing a press release, not really scouting out real Googlers to get the story.)

The reality is, Google started hiding key word information long before Snowden. I've been noticing for ages that on my blog's list of the referring addresses, there is only "google.com" and no key words when you hover over the URL -- there's only the blog's URL itself. It used to be that I could tell that when somebody typed "Jacob Appelbaum" and "unaccountable" -- that's what brought them to my blog -- many of my hits were precisely from that combination and I presume still are because those stories are among the most popular on this site. But like other bloggers, I can't tell what the key words are anymore. I don't care, because I can more or less figure the subject matter, and I'm uninterested in tying any writing to what those key words are, I write simply what concerns me at the time.

But there is a whole science of search-engine optimization where people try to divine what those key word searches mean, and then fashion blog posts to fit them and get more traffic. These are empty calories to me. I know if I post to Reddit there will be gadzillion hits. And certain subjects get huge hits. But those aren't people to talk to and think along with -- they are drive-bys, gawkers, and they don't interact on Twitter or leave comments. What's the point?  Even so, I think Google shouldn't have hidden those key words. I can't possibly see how this relates to privacy because when we saw those referring addresses and words, we didn't see WHO was making those searches. Some URL addresses will refer back to some specific blogger or news article that linked you, but Google searches don't show you anything but the country of search.  Why can't they show those words? Isn't more information better?

Perhaps the mechanics of it are that when people's search terms become known even in aggregate or even disconnected to their identity, there's still some kind of leakage that eventually does trace back to them -- well, at least Google knows! And it's not as if Google is stopping itself from knowing this!

There can only be one reason really behind this, and that's the desire of Google to sell this information that before came free. So if I want to be an SEO guru, I have to pay. Little blogs like mine then wouldn't pay, but some giant site with lots of traffic would, as they would for the ads themselves. I feel Google is lying about this, and using Snowden as a cover. Maybe they had to invent Snowden...

Seriously..There's this entirely false impression that Google is "angry" or "has spoken out repeatedly" -- but that's not true. They aren't. The Washington Post reported that two Google engineers contacted informally by a reporter swore when they saw a drawing of the NSA stripping away the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) of their server traffic. But that's not Google being angry. I asked a Google engineer what was up and got...silence (that's Brian Fitzpatrick, no relation, on G+, who posted the Washington Post story without comment -- he's someone who works on the soi-disant "transparency report".) Shouldn't the real response be laughter?  Because the real question is "how". The little smiley face doesn't say.

Trust me, when Google is mad, it can do a lot more than amount to a couple of swearing engineers. When it wants to, it knocks laws out of Congress completely -- like SOPA, and CISPA. With a single post on its big front page under "take action," it can produce 7 million petition-signers and more. Google has paid for a lot of Congressional campaigns.

So for Google and the other Big IT folks to write  this ridiculously wimpy letter, you have to wonder what's up.

I mean, look how short that thing is, and how lame:

Recent disclosures regarding surveillance activity raise important concerns both in the UnitedStates and abroad. The volume and complexity of the information that has been disclosed inrecent months has created significant confusion here and around the world, making it moredifficult to identify appropriatepolicy prescriptions.

Before you snooze, ask yourself...does this sound like an angry letter to you?

This sounds like a fluffy kitty cat. Not even a Grumpy Cat.

Google et. al. are asking for...something they already do:

Our companies have consistently madeclear that we only respond to legal demands for customer and userinformation that are targeted and specific. Allowing companies to be transparent about the number and nature of requests will help the public better understand the facts about the government’s authority to compel technology companies to disclose user data and how technology companies respond to the targeted legal demands we receive.

I mean, this sounds like one of those big magazine ads or video ads on the side of a web page that blink and have smart looking people giving earnest-sounding talks:

We look forward to working with you, the co-sponsors of your bills, and other members on legislation that takes into account the need of governments to keep individuals around the worlds afe as well as the legitimate privacy interests of our users around the world.

You almost get the feeling that journalists WISH Google were more mad, and is trying to desperately hype the little it has to make it come true.

To be sure, Politico called the letter "vague," but the fact that they even wrote a news story about it and pretended in the first sentence that "Silicon Valley has stood firm" lets you know what a con this is...

This is all so fake.

See, what's happening is that lobbying groups are speaking as if they are the tech industry and are getting mad on their behalf, but they are REALLY unconvincing because we know what the big dogs can do when they are really mad -- or even just see an opportunity, and that's NOT happening. Here's the usual suspect barking:

“The NSA has finally done something so egregious that the U.S. Internet industry can do nothing but respond with demands for reform of the law to protect their systems and their users,” said Kevin Bankston, who’s helped spearhead the Valley’s message to D.C. while at the Center for Democracy and Technology and is now headed to the New America Foundation.

Well, yeah, where else.

Supposedly, the tech titans should be worried because Snowden is hurting business. Supposedly. But I never hear any real tech people actually saying this (like Robert Scoble, whose company, Rackspace, endorsed the Stop Watching Us fizzled demonstrations last weekend).

And here we get a government guy talking again -- speculating that there is loss to the cloud industry, and yet...he's not actually from that industry any more and not actually giving us any numbers:

The disclosure of U.S. spying on allies may temporarily undercut efforts by American companies to sell technology overseas, according to a former official with the Department of Homeland Security.

“We are going to go through a period of substantial skepticism abroad about any technology we’re selling people,” Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who headed the department’s policy directorate, said today at a forum on cybersecurity hosted by Bloomberg Government and Symantec Corp. (SYMC)

Then there's Gen. Alexander:

Alexander said government must work with private industry to find ways to improve cybersecurity. President Barack Obama met with chief executives of consumer, utility and defense companies yesterday to discuss proposed voluntary security standards for computer networks.

But you know, we had this in CISPA, and the geek goons inside and outside of government lobbied the president to veto CISPA -- and he did. In fact, I always argue that they should have passed CISPA which would have put those dinner relations under the rule of law.

Look, guys. Who forced the click-ad model on us? Tim Berners-Lee and his architecture choices. That Internet he made which is anti-privacy (to be "collaborative") and resists intellectual property and commerce online as counter to such collaboration. He did not want the commodification of information or knowledge -- which means any form of code to these people - and here we are all with digital goods having a tough time getting paid.

Still, the human marketplace routes around the Cathedral -- to borrow a set of metaphors that the open source cult wanted to be about something else entirely LOL. So a lot of buying and selling does get done on the Internet.

I'd like to think we will move out of the click age, and DRM in HTML5 is maybe one sign of that, but there will have to be a complete rethinking. Or rather, a concerted battle because it is a war -- and it means a war against Bruce Schneier.

Basically, Google already encrypts stuff on their servers, but if this is true, then the NSA just got at the pipes between where vast amounts of data is routed. So, it's like the way Turkmen shepherds who are dirt poor in gas-rich Turkmenistan poke holes in pipelines to get some for free because only a certain amount is rationed by the state.

There's a lot of this story we are just not getting and what is being passed off as barking is not that at all. Stay tuned to the next post.

P.S.

Here's an interesting statement from a Googler posted on G+. Hat tip Nuno Maia.

Oct 31, 2013

 

"I can categorically state that nothing resembling the mass surveillance of individuals by governments within our systems has ever crossed my plate. 

If it had, even if I couldn't talk about it, in all likelihood I would no longer be working at Google.

Whatever the NSA was doing involving the mass harvesting of information, it did not involve being on the inside of Google. And I, personally, am by now disgusted with their conduct: the national security apparatus has convinced itself and the rest of the government that the only way it can do its job is to know everything about everyone. That's not how you protect a country. We didn't fight the Cold War just so we could rebuild the Stasi ourselves." -- +Yonatan Zunger 

 

My comment:

+Nuno Maia Thanks. But then the question is, if he didn't see anything like that, why is he disgusted with a government that wasn't doing that, as far as he knows? See, that's what's so weird about all this. Either he's right and the government didn't do this, in which case he should join the effort to expose Greenwald and Snowden as manipulating perceptions for their own agenda. Or he should find proof of what he know believes the government is doing. But he's trying to have it both ways.

 

Stop Watching Us? Ok, Maybe We Will!

Live stream web page for stopwatchingus shows a wan social media uptake.

I think we can safely conclude that the Stop Watching Us rally in Washington, DC Saturday was a flop. Says Reuters:

Estimates varied on the size of the march, with organizers saying more than 2,000 attended. U.S. Capitol Police said they do not typically provide estimates on the size of demonstrations.

AFP was a little more generous, reporting 4,500, but then, they think their president is bugged by the NSA, and they tilt left. Even so, the numbers as paltry.

Good!

One participant tweeted enthusiastically that there were already 1,000 people there even before the buses arrived -- oops, that means not that many people showed up for the buses from New York, and even a few followers told him this was a poor turn-out.

So they want us to stop watching us, maybe we shouldn't. Or maybe the Congress in particular needs to stop thinking these people represent some big force or constituency -- they don't. They have social media amplification but it's not really all that much.

9030 retweets of a livestream web page -- the main one for the event -- is a shockingly low number for something that was hyped for weeks and had all kinds of big name adversarial journalists and leftist icons and companies like Ben & Jerries pumping it - and the Libertarians as well. G+ is once again revealed to be a geek ghetto with just 1787 hits -- and there, we have to figure something else is at stake here: the great iPhone jail-breaking geek masses (1.7 million) did not rise as one to this anti-NSA cause. Maybe because too many of them work for government and related corporations and want to keep their jobs? Or maybe because they aren't convinced there's such a spy problem here and it doesn't matter?

27,000 Facebook likes is better, but still pretty small beer, given that these Facebook groups have been active since June (liberals and lefties still use FB more than other services, which must drive some of the more PC anarchists crazy).

In fact, Restore the 4th, one of many such groups with this name in different cities on FB, as one sharp-eyed twitterer named Geranimo noted, was founded on June 8th, seemingly before the Snowden affair broke into the news. Actually, Glenn Greenwald's first article based on this leak was June 6, but it wasn't until June 9 that Snowden burst into the news by revealing his identity in Hong Kong in the videotaped nterview made by Laura Poitras. Suspicious?

Well, it's one more data point that needs study, but I think the explanation is simply that the people doing Restore the 4th are the same old cadres who have been at this radical transparency/absolute encryption game for a decade -- also attacking copyright and cybersecurity -- except when they run it. That's Electronic Frontier Foundation and their related front groups like Fight for the Future, Demand Progress -- all front groups that all trace back to the same activists and donors. If they are claiming to be "grassroots" now and representing some kind of authentic public backlash over Snowden, there's the evidence that they are not:

There were signs of trouble one could see before hand, like the fact that the chair of the Restore the Fourth chair Ben Doernberg had so few followers on Twitter (about 1500), and wasted his time battling critics like me instead of being persuasive to a larger circle. And that's a good thing, when hard leftists sink of their own sectarianism, I'm not complaining. As you can see, Ben also whined about a Reuters reporter saying there were "hundreds" and not "thousands":

Ben himself barely made a tweet all day, until he started in with the browbeating. That's how you know that things went wrong. People aren't going to tweet about low turnout. Try as they did to make all the shots close-up, to disguise the lack of people, we could all see the same puppets in each shot, and see that the turn out was extremely weak -- a few thousands. Even with the ACLU paying for the busses.

Possibly Tom Watson's protest on Slate that the left had hooked up with the libertarians on this one might have cost some attendance, but I don't think so.

Still, there was a certain amount of negativity around this that cost support. Ben tried to disassociate himself from a sign that was reported on the news and on Twitter of someone carrying a sign with Obama as Hitler. Look, once they stoop that low and become that crazy, you know they can't get followers. Good! But as you can see, Ben argues that these coalitions were necessary. This is supposed to be "mature politics" unlike Occupy weirdness and freaky cultism. Except, it still comes out the same because it's just too transparently what it is: socialist agendas trying to pretend they are something else.

The good news is that Tom Watson now declared himself as a *social democrat* which is indeed a form of socialism, so that this denial that these progs are socialist can maybe begin to subside. Better that they be straight about it.

Reuters tags and descriptions on Yahoo -- not the headline -- spoke of "hundreds" and the "far left and far right" getting together. That's not what social media spinners like Ben want to see --- they use the word "progressive" so they can sound like "everybody" from Democrats to McCain Republicans.

I think that a key reason this demonstration didn't have more people is that neither Google or Jon Stewart or anything with any real mass power got behind it. If Reddit the company endorsed it, Redditors themselves didn't.

And there's another strange thing -- Glenn Greenwald only had one tweet about Rep. Russ Holt speaking ats the rally -- he didn't live tweet it or send it any greetings or boost it in any way. Other lefties like David Corn said nothing or weren't even on Twitter. Well, it's a Saturday, even the progs like to take a break with their families. Katrina  vanden Heuvel also had only one re-tweet of RT.com the Russian Kremlin-supported TV station (what else) which live-blogged it all day - she had nothing to say, either. Look at all the other "stars" on the top billing and they also just had little to say. Maybe this was because of the Libertarian thing. Maybe because of poor turnout. Or maybe they don't actually care what happens on the ground.

And yet these were the people who, starting in the summer, threatened to turn every vote against Amash's initiative to defund the NSA into a "yes". Scary!

Come to think of it, Ron Wyden didn't seem to be speaking at this jamboree. Why? Too hard left/right even for him?

Was it just poorly organized or too riven with sectarian differences, or is it that in fact most Americans aren't on the hard left or hard right and just don't care?

I think there's a larger theme here which is 2016. Soros funds a lot of these groups that run "Stop Watching Us" -- millions of his budget go to national security issue nonprofits (which means making there be less of national security in the name of "open society" -- which is what I have come to see merely means the solid "progressive" line, not real openness and pluralism). But Soros is now looking ahead to Hillary in 2016. She is not as hard left as Obama -- she is not anti-business as he is, with his socialist "community organizing" training and Chicago lefty circles. And surely the Soros operatives know something maybe not so apparent --there is a huge backlash against Obama. Over so many things. Benghazi -- even the now-dismissed prog @natsecwonk questioned the narrative with his insider's knowledge -- the weird Syria whiplash, and of course the NSA and Rosen and Risen. All of it. That backlash might translate into a conservative or libertarian candidate that could prove wildly popular. Indeed, the EFF isn't stupid, either, and is building those political bridges now.

The Democrats won't be able to win again by moving to the left -- they've gone too far and are starting to meet the hard right coming round the corner. So to appeal to demographics within the Party and disenchanted GOP members, they will tack more toward the center. That's what I'm guessing. I'm not an expert on national politics though, just commenting.

I do hope we are seeing the Snowden movement fizzle out, just as we saw Occupy fizzle out. That's good news. Our country has a lot of damage to repair.

Of course, even if these people only turn out a few thousand, I still think it's worth tracking and opposing them because they are antithetical to human rights and think that ends justify means (like forming coalitions with some pretty creepy people). What I do hope is that Congress does not feel whiplashed by them and doesn't cater to them or accommodate them and realizes that Wyden from Portlandia isn't the nation.

P.S. I forgot to mention that Edward Snowden (or some facsimile) piped in a stilted message to the rally. It was yet another strangely-written piece that didn't sound like the guy we used to read on Ars Technica.

 

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...

 

 

"The core Internet institutions abandon the US Government" -- and then there's that infantile Latin American leftism

Soldiers guarding the Guanabara Palace during the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état on March 31, 1964. And now the sides are throwing up their sandbags on new Internet barricades.

This development is a bad thing all of its own, and is at the center of many other bad things -- I wish I had time to cover it all -- for now, I'll just flag it.

Milton Mueller is a very thoughtful and smart man about the Internet, but I've debated him a number of times because he tends to that collectivist, anti-US attitude that all the Internet freedom fighters seem to adopt in order to obtain "independence."

Yes, surprise, surprise, all those alphabet bodies with the humming engineers are now going to flee the US. And...end up right in the arms of Russia, like Edward Snowden, you know, in the end?

He said "don't tell me I didn't warn you" and has all kinds of smart arguments and I get it. But...as I pointed out, these agencies were never so independent anyway with their special interests (US military in the virtual worlds section of IETF, anybody?!) I can guarantee you that even with seething hate and fear of the USG among these organizations, the US military will cling like a bath-house birch leaf to the virtual worlds section and we won't see them go...

People blather about conspiracy in the comments, and I say:

“Conspired” is exactly the word to use here.

And these non-governmental agencies that you claim were in the pocket of the US never really were under US control but under control of factions anyway. Would that they *were* under control so they could have some hope of remaining liberal and democratic and transparent. indeed, given that the major Big IT companies are US based, like Google, it would make sense.

But no, you anarchists had to push for the fake “multi-stakeholder” model which is utter baloney because only some holders get to stake, the rest are fictions.

And you’ll see how this lovely third-world veneer of the lovely Brazilian president is just a cover for Russian and/or Chinese takeover. Enjoy.

To which I get one of those typical perfectly idiotic Latin American leftists ranting about evil Amerika -- these types were all over Occupy, BTW.

October 13, 2013 - 08:34 Gabriel Dread

I’m Brazilian and I never heard of any foreign influence over Brazilian government except from US. Can you clarify what do you mean about your claim that we have bonds with Russia and China?

Do you know that your beloved US sponsored a Military Coup in Brazil and was co-responsible for the death and torture of thousands of innocent people during a 20 year dictatorship that ruined our country?

You Americans think you are better that the rest of the world. You support your fascist State and want to own the whole planet, think your laws apply to us and think you deserve more and better because you have an economic system that you imposed to the rest of the world.

How can you sleep with the blood of só many millions of lives in your hands?

My reply:

October 15, 2013 - 02:42 Catherine Fitzpatrick

Have you heard of BRICS? Do you know they meet and coordinate? Have you ever been to the UN and seen how Brazil behaves, how it votes, how it backs Russia and China? Did you notice how your president just snubbed the US? Of course you have bonds with China and Russia when it comes to sticking it to the US. These don’t have to be some literal blatant collusions, but they can be seen.

Yes, my country is beloved, and no, that doesn’t mean I endorse all its coups or help of military juntas in Latin America. But hey, a lot of those brutal coups and wars were caused by these governments reaction and over-reaction to communism. How could you and your leftist movements never understood the nature of the Soviet Union where the real millions and millions were killed, eh? What kind of disreputable left did you have there that could make common cause with those butchers? ! You made it possible for oppressive right-wing governments to have an argument. There was never any need for that. Cuba was never progressive and harmed many, many people with its alliance with Moscow and the communist ideal.

You leftists think you’re the most pure in the world, but truly, the blood of tens of millions are on your hands because of those years when you blindly ignored the reality of the Soviet Union and blindly ignored the suffering of millions. Shame on you. How can you sleep at night?

International human rights laws are what apply to all of us. As for economic systems, I don’t notice the enormous flow of immigrants from South America to North America ever letting up – and that’s a good thing, we’re a nation of immigrants. Meanwhile, you sulk, and you cannot seem to make that better world your socialism promises. People are right to flee it.

***

Read up on the coup and US involvement here. Needless to say, there aren't "millions killed," but the US played the usual unsavoury role backing right-wing governments against communists -- and I stand by my contention that the root of this problem here is Soviet communism, its infiltration of revolutionary movements in Latin America, and their refusal to make a politics separate from Soviet communism -- you know, like Edward Snowden also refused to do.

This is a hopeless argument to try to fight. It's the new Cold War, and people are taking their sides behind the barricades -- and let them.

I hope they are happy -- as I said -- when they end up in the arms of Russia. They may never know what hit them...

I know it becomes boring when I tell people that all of this was prefigured in Second Life years ago. Yes, truly. First, gadzillions of Brazilians joined Second Life. They love social media. They overran Orkut and Google closed it down for the rest of the world but let them have it...or something like that.

In SL, they opened fabulous islands with amazing nightclubs and talented car and clothing designers, but also some of them became known as the most elaborate and cunning scammers. I must say that some of the scammers I dealt with were so brazen, so bold, but so ingenious, that you had to appreciate them at some level... I think there are less of them than there were, but the funny thing is that during this Brazilian boom in SL, the president of the country appeared in SL at a panel -- some conference in Mexico about the Internet or something. I remember getting into strenuous debates there. This president was for copyleftism and Internet freedom all mangled together and I figured it would not end well...He was supposed to be very progressive for his time -- but I have to say, give me the president of Estonian instead, any day, he has his head on straight about copyright, cybersecurity, and what is really needed for a truly free Internet.

Guys, enjoy your Internet run from Brazil with Glenn Greenwald as advisor, truly... Interestingly, Freedom House rates Brazil's level of press freedom and Internet freedom as only "partly free."

Related articles

Hello, President Rousseff...I told you so.

An Evening with the Snowden Apologists at NYU -- EFF, ACLU, Soros

Brazil To Host Global Internet Summit In Ongoing Fight Against NSA Surveillance

The Internet's Losing Its Freedom, in America and Beyond

Report: Internet Freedom Declining

Please Do Feed the Trolls -- But Go Beyond the Feminist Issues

This is a great piece -- Please Do Feed the Trolls -- and a great step in fighting the hegemony of authoritarian geeks on the Internet.

I'm a big believer in fact of fighting back -- I call it pushing back. I push back, as everyone knows. Then people accuse me of being complicit in my own harassment. They say I should keep the silence of mafia-like omerta and never, ever talk about harassment by griefers, hackers, Anonymous, etc.-- that it "glorifies" them and they "feed on attention" and do it more to get glory.

Nonsense. You don't do that offline with terrorists and other criminals -- of course the news reports on their evil deeds. There are always debates about whether coverage "glorifies" them and there are several obsessives in the field who constantly claim that TV coverage is only manufacturing more mass shooters. I tend to think that a) access to guns b) violent video games c) narcotics d) autism spectrum are far more likely to be culprits than copy-cat impulses, but in any event, you will never get the free media to stop reporting on crime.

My beef with "uberfeminist" not surprisingly, however, is how she has converted this all into a "feminist" issue.

It's not, really, because the authoritarianism of male geeks is a threat to everyone, male and female and is a larger problem than can be fixed by just various PC solutions like "sensitivity training".

All you're doing by taking the "feminist" approach to the boorish nerd online is then creating a new set of problems which is the boorishness of speech minders.

There's quite the backlash now going on in the tech world about women in tech being harassed. I get it, truly I do; all you have to do is look at my vandalized Wikipedia entry to see the visible work of male geek trolls trying to silence my critical speech about tech and their bad behaviour by trying to ridicule me and print falsehoods about me.

But I don't see this as merely an issue of feminism. So far, I merely see that feminist sort of response as mirroring the authoritarianism of the geeks who spawned the nastiness in the first place. You get things like this:

o in the "dongle" story, some guys who made a tasteless joke between themselves are fired, and the crusading feminist tech gal who overheard them and made a huge ordeal out of it also gets fired and everyone in that narrow tech media sphere obsesses endlessly, trying to make "rules" to control spontaneous jokes and speech at conferences -- which is anti-science and anti-freedom;

o in the story of the CTO of Business Insider, "the Internet" (actually only that major-league douche Anil Dash and the irritable sectarian Jillian Yorke of EFF) got this guy fired -- truly appalling when his crime consisted also of a few off-colour jokes

o TechCrunch had to contort itself into a pretzel over yet another tasteless presentation by some app builders -- and those fellows got themselves banished from tech-land and VC land probably for life

Throughout all these manufactured ordeals, we've had to endure enormous net-nannying and rule-making that -- again -- is contrary to a free society, which of course means it is contrary to the innovation that tech supposedly needs to thrive on.

Now, I totally get it that when people make a hostile and threatening environment, they drive out OTHERS' free speech and then it isn't a free society.

But that's why I'm for fighting back hard -- and that requires the net-nannies and moderators and troll-suppressers themselves to stop and quit saying it's the fault of those who fight back. Nine times out of ten, when I have seen flamewars on forums or Twitter, it's because people are not allowed to fight it out. They are stopped by oppressive little mods who stack the deck against those they like, their friends, the in-crowd, the PC. With everyone able to press the "report abuse" button on these services, the fight can never be fair because some mod can enter it late in the last round and not realize who is truly to blame and ban the victim not the perpetrator.

The uberfeminist post degenerates into a lot of inside baseball from wars on Twitter that I didn't follow and have more to do with the agendas of feminists or atheists or whatever.

But I can't emphasize enough: the threat of bullies that these feminists are identifying as only misogyny simply has to go further in its analysis.

Otherwise it's like the Cat in the Hat in your house making messes -- you get the Business Insider CTO guy fired, but then humiliated and trounced and threatened by Anil Dash never to see another VC dollar in his life -- and that's just plain wrong. Because then you're left with Anil Dash. Who the hell is Anil Dash? He's a PC douche with an enormous ego and sense of righteousness and a thin skin and neuralgia about "progressive" topics that make him unsufferable. He actually made his fortune as a developer of this very blog platform. Bully for him! But that doesn't entitle him to go around being king of the world on other people.

Why should I have to trade the brogrammer's off-putting talk for Anil's bullying? I shouldn't. The  punishment should fit the crime. Tweets are not a crime; they are merely speech. Getting up with an off-colour act in a conference shouldn't lead to job loss but merely an expression of disapproval. When the punishments are made so harsh, you just get more backlash, I suspect.

 

In Whose Hands Do You Want Your Internet Communications?

Hearing on FISA review, September 26, 2013. C-SPAN.

NSA chief Gen. Alexander slams "sensational reporting" here -- and I couldn't agree more. Why aren't there more journalists questioning this narrative and doing more investigation of the principles involved in making the claims against the NSA?

Once again Mike Masnick is printing tendentious bullshit.

Like Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler and others of these "progressive" or libertarian writers, he is in such a bubble of antagonism that he can never see any nuances or turn off the hate and snark machine. You never feel as if there is intelligence there on Tech Dirt, just reptilian cunning.

One of the favourite things of the snarky geeks to do is pretend that the government or some politician has done something "illegal" or "the same thing" as some figure like Snowden or Manning whom they are targeting or prosecuting -- as if to say, "See, they get away with it because they are privileged elites, but the hackers can't" blah blah.

Their absolute favourite is to try to witch-hunt and then call-out with malicious glee some political leader who seems to be violating secrecy while themselves complaining about hackers. Much of the time this is sheer ridicularity.

DID FEINSTEIN LEAK LIKE SNOWDEN? OF COURSE NOT

This story about Dianne Feinstein is so typical claiming she "accidently gave away" the story that NSA taps the Internet backbone. But scrape away all the geeky rant here and look at what the NSA even in its redacted form, wrote, as referenced in this story:

Back in August, when the FISA courtdeclassified its ruling about NSA violations, the third footnote, though heavily redacted, did briefly discuss this "upstream" capability:

The term "upstream collection" refers to NSA's interception of Internet communications as they transit [redacted] rather than to acquisitions directly from Internet service providers such as [redacted]

Then look at what Feinstein said in Congress (covered on C-SPAN) per Kevin Bankston

Upstream collection... occurs when NSA obtains internet communications, such as e-mails, from certain US companies that operate the Internet background, i.e., the companies that own and operate the domestic telecommunications lines over which internet traffic flows

So what's the big deal?

Either the NSA gets the communications from the companies "directly," i.e. they go to them and give a request to get it and deal with them directly although they don't get it by jacking directly into their servers or they get it from the backbone -- again from companies by going to them with requests.

BACKBONE IN BACKGROUND ISN'T SURFACED

Even if there is some notion here that the NSA is tapping directly into the backbone to get overseas Internet traffic -- and there isn't in actually that crude way -- you have to say: so what?

They are tapping in order to find certain things for which they have "probable cause" to put under surveillance between they are trying to monitor and stop terrorism and other crimes. Good!

There is no evidence that they take the entire firehose of the entire Internet into their hands and dredge it arbitrarily leading to actual civil rights violations. IF a machine does this and collects certain data, it's to a grid that fits a certain mandate that is in fact overseen by internal reviews and the FISA courts.

Naturally, there are the mandatory guffaws from the geeks because Feinstein said "backround" instead of "backbone". Since "Internet backbone" is not some special technical phrase but used widely, it's obvious she simply misspoke, but no, we have to turn it into a "teachable moment" when we insist that Congress is "too stupid" to legislate about technology (a notion I resolutely reject, as there are plenty of experts available and the principles of law involved are basic and not rocket science; usually what hackers mean when they say this is that this or that congress person isn't doing what they want or isn't like their famous extremist Ron Wydall.)

But I don't see that Feinstein is "leaking" anything or that in fact there is some smoking gun or some scandal. The NSA spies. Good, that's what it's supposed to do! It spies by dredging communications pipelines in some fashion to track terrorism, crime, etc. Good!

The challenge them to the civil liberties gang and hacker hysterics is to find actual concrete cases where the NSA somehow actually wrongfully put someone under surveillance for no good reason, or even gave information that got someone arrested unlawfully in the end. Bring it. Not seeing it.

WITTES PUSHES BACK

Fortunately, there's Benjamin Wittes of the Lawfare blog and Brookings Institution to push back on all this Greenwald and Masnick Snowden hysteria. He has produced many good articles challenging the hacker take on this with careful review of the legal principles and facts as they are known so far.

Read his lastest post, for example, related to this hearing. Wittes counters most of the bad argumentation on this from all over with these sorts of eloquent statements:

I have gone through the declassified documents very carefully, and these disclosures to my mind show no evidence of any intentional spying on Americans or abuse of civil liberties.  They show a remarkably low rate of the sort of errors that any complex system of technical collection will inevitably produce. They show robust compliance procedures—as DeLong’s quip in the aisle yesterday accurately reflects.  They show earnest and serious efforts to keep the Congress informed, notwithstanding some members’ protestations that they were shocked to learn that NSA—having repeatedly informed Congress that it was engaged in bulk metadata collection—was actually telling the truth. And they show a remarkable dialog with the FISC about the parameters of the agency’s legal authority and a real commitment both to keeping the court informed of activity and to complying with the FISC’s judgment. The FISC, meanwhile, in these documents looks nothing like the rubber stamp that it’s portrayed to be in countless caricatures. It looks, rather, like a serious judicial institution of considerable energy.

To the extent that members of Congress agree with this analysis—and many members of the intelligence committee do—the principal task in the current environment is to defend the existing structures, publicly and energetically, as both Feinstein and Chambliss have done. It is not to race to correct imagined structural deficiencies in the system and thereby to appear to be reforming what one actually supports—and thereby contribute to the delegitimizing of those structures. To be sure, there are reforms that would be valuable in the way of increasing transparency, increasing accountability, codifying now-public standards, and even tightening those standards. But to my mind, we must pursue these reforms in the context of a defense of the basic oversight structures themselves. And the defense of these mechanisms necessarily involves a defense of some degree of limitations on transparency. In other words, the challenge of transparency here is a really subtle one: It is to inject transparency within the basic confines of an oversight system that is actually designed to protect secret

TRUST THEM, THEY'RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT

He then looks hard at the Big Data collection issue -- the firehose of data, the strict rules for the use of only parts of this data, and the internal legal restraints.

And he comes down with the perspective of trusting a liberal democratic state under the rule of law:

The first is law. Unless you believe that the intelligence community is a lawless enterprise that will not follow the rules, this puts a premium on the substantive content of the law Congress writes to govern this area. In other words, the reason it matters what the rules are is that we assume that the law actually will constrain NSA.

And then he doesn't just leave it as blind and dumb trust in one's government -- which leads the Marcy Wheelers of the world to call you a Stasi lover and other twitterers to call you Obama bots or Sheeple or worst -- he specifies why you can trust the government -- because there are checks and balances and consequences:

It is really important to distinguish between the technical capacity to do something and whether that thing is actually going to happen. The D.C. police could easily raid my house today.  They have the technical capacity to do it. Yet I have near-total confidence that it will not happen. The FBI could wiretap my phone. It certainly has the technical capacity to do so, yet I have a near-total confidence that it will not happen. The reason for my confidence is two-fold: the substantive law would not support either action, and there are robust compliance measures that mean that were lawless action were to take place, there would be accountability at many levels and I would have a remedy.

Yet the EFF and ACLU gang keep squawking that everything is secret, we "can't know what is done in our name" blah blah. Well, if you have elected officials and they monitor this, you have to trust them to some extent and the notion that Congress "wasn't informed" has been pretty well debunked at this point. This isn't being Sheeple, it's acknowledging that division of labour is what you have in a modern society -- and that intelligence activity cannot be transparent in the maximum way the hackers want it.

WELL, WHO WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE CONTROL YOUR PRIVACY?

And really, Wittes finally cuts it down to this proposition:

In the era of Big Data, the compliance regime is a big part of the whole ballgame. If you believe the compliance regime inadequate, after all, the government already has the data. But one thing we have learned an enormous amount about is the compliance procedures that NSA uses. They are remarkable. They are detailed. They produce data streams that are extremely telling—and, to my mind, deeply reassuring.

And here’s the rub: I believe that my liberty is more secure with NSA collecting this material subject to these rules and this compliance regime than it would be if NSA declined to do so.

Of course, Greenwald and the gang don't see it this way, and if it were up to them, this collection would be entirely shut-down, unless miraculously law-enforcement got data from some other technique that the hacker crowd is willing to approve (real-life trailing of suspects?) and then tasked a phone or Internet company -- with a warrant -- to look at specific records.

Here's how I see it even more starkly. We have a choice in whose hands and under what authorities the firehose of all communications are going to be, and how these communications are accessed. It can involve:

1. Governments, for better or worse, who possess the physical infrastructure and capacity to hold and tap the Internet and are under rules, laws and oversight internally and by Congress;

2. Private companies, that are directly interfacing with the public as they produce the content that affects privacy and who are not subject to outside oversight and often don't even have fair internal procedures;

3. Hackers who hacker data on a whim, at will, and themselves remain secret, and demand maximum encryption -- and who are subject to absolutely no accountability.

So what's it going to be? Which one of these or which combination? Shouldn't it be obvious why I'm for Door No. 1 -- because that's the option that really does have public oversight, unlike the others?

We more or less have no. 1 with parts of no. 2 now, but no. 3 whacking away at both and upsetting the status quo.

But...It's not like you get a *fourth* choice where companies, heeding the most extreme advice of extreme hackers, seal off your privacy from themselves (not when they need it for marketing and management of their platforms!), and don't ever enable government access in any way at any level (but...do they want to be good law-abiding corporate citizens or not?).

And it's not like you would get hackers content with leaving it at that, either.

THE HACKERS OFTEN DO RUN THINGS

Yet no company and no government is going to accept a regime where hackers run things -- in fact, what we have now is a regime where hackers run things and that's precisely the problem. Their damage is rampant and they are ubiquitous. Hackers are fighting hard to bring their Autonomous Unicorn Realm into being, but they are constrained not only by internal fighting or power struggles but capacity.

Corporations are basically the ones with the largest capacity now (Google). And for now, they are forced to be constrained by governments that take them to court (like the US is now on their grab of wi-fi streams which none of the Greenwalds and Appelbaums are complaining about at all, and aren't welcoming the court-case on this at all.)

ARE AMERICAN COMPANIES HURT BY SNOWDEN?

There's been a constant tech press refrain that Snowden's revelations are going to "hurt American business" -- Europeans, especially Germans are going to dump American services because their data "isn't safe". While there are German Internet/email companies running "made in Germany" sort of campaigns now, and Russia has really run with this concept big-time (and held meetings with Google about it as a result), I haven't heard of some big, huge dent in the services' business.

This piece on Facebook's "headaches" doesn't show that there is somehow a drop in Facebook usage as a result.

The claim that Facebook is "dying" is a special, recurring geek myth that has to do with software autocracy, coder culture and such, "progressive" politics that hate what Zuckerberg's lobbying arm is doing now -- and all this leads to the placing negative stories based on skewed spinning of the Pew and other polls about usage - and deserves a special post. Unfortunately, Socialbakers stopped publishing country data on usage so it's hard to know if there is a "Snowden drop"  yet -- but note that even in April before Snowden's revelation, the Guardian was claiming a drop.

And again -- regarding privacy, these companies are on the run anyway, and were before Snowden. In fact, long before Snowden, the EU privacy commissioners were constantly trying to sue Google or deal with Google politically. And some of that is bearing fruit now.

This case questioning gmail scraping in order to pitch ads is indicative of what we are seeing now.

WILL THE PROVIDERS GO AFTER SNOWDEN ON THEIR OWN?

I wonder if there is serious damage to FB or Google or Twitter that rather than fend off attacks in court or "manage perceptions" in governments, they might finally turn around and say, "Hey, we need to get Snowden -- and Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum."

Don't think their corporate board rooms don't have people discussing this, and don't have corporate security people who are examining this. These companies have CONSIDERABLE monitoring capacity of course -- if they want, they can pull Appelbaum's, etc. Google searches and such and use their VAST sleuthing and networking skills -- they are everywhere, all over the world, doing everything and knowing everybody -- to find out what's really up.

My bet is that if they come to suspect that this hack is either a sectarian hysterical hype by the extremists at the Chaos Computer Club, who aren't co-terminous with Google executives although they overlap with Google engineers OR that it is a sinister Russian active measures exploiting WikiLeaks wittingly or unwittingly, they will fight back in their own inimitable way -- planting stories in the tech press which they are masters at doing, planting Youtubes which they are masters at doing, planting Twitter hashtags which they are masters at doing.

If they think Snowden has taken food off their table, they will fight back harder than any government and eventually they will target him and the rest of the G9 crew -- unless of course they admire and love him - which I suspect some do - because ultimately he is about freeing the Internet for more use and more ad clicks and less resistance from firewalls.

I think in fact they will find that the privacy movement is not one that serves their interest, howver, even if they try to play the game of saying they will now provide more of it for their customers, because privacy mitigates against their ability to scrape and tape info for their purposes, too. They can go through somewhat faint motions as they are doing now of tasking the government to have "transparency" on their information requests, but they may find that doing this, and even finding there are only 37,000 of them out of gadzillions of transactions will undermine rather than bolster public confidence.

 

Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends the "Rights" of Sex Offenders

EFF Co-Founder John Perry Barlow speaking at LeWeb2013. Information wants to be free -- except the anonymous handles of sex offenders should be kept from the police.

Just in case it doesn't stand out enough in this other piece about the double standards of Jillian York, let me point it out again:

EFF is willing to protect sex offenders from police scrutiny and enable them to repeat their crimes anonymously -- over their zealous guarding of "free speech" which they understand as "right to anonymity" on the Internet even for predators.

Proposition 35, which passed with 81 percent of the vote Tuesday, would require that anyone who is a registered sex offender — including people with misdemeanor offenses such as indecent exposure and whose offenses were not related to activity on the internet — would have to turn over to law enforcement a list of all identifiers they use online as well as a list of service providers they use.

The Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act would force sex offenders to fork over to law enforcement their e-mail addresses, user and screen names, or any other identifier they used for instant messaging, for social networking sites or at online forums and in internet chat rooms.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed their suit (.pdf) on behalf of two registered sex offenders, say that although the measure is vaguely worded, in practice it likely means that registered sex offenders would have to provide user and screen names that they use for participation in online political discussion groups, forums about medical conditions, and even the comment sections of online newspapers and blogs.

This is dreadful, and you wonder how it happens.

It's not necessary, in the fight for free speech, to protect the ability of predators to go out and commit crimes again online.

Their aliases after all aren't being published to the public, but to police. If they have some legitimate chat on a health forum or a political forum, they can indeed use their aliases to maintain their privacy, but they can't do that AND not report them to police. They have to report them to the police, under this proposition -- which was submitted to a vote and passed.

That's because they are not trustworthy, being sex offenders. As I've discovered from past debates and as I've seen on line with journalists who take them on, there is nothing more tenacious, nasty and horrible than child pornography apologists -- and users and offenders -- in defending their "turf".

Why is this?

The other day I was having a chat with someone who also reflects on Anonymous and follows their antics and undertands the geek culture. We noted how often there seems to be a cross-over offense of use of child pornography or apologies for child pornography on the Internet among Anonymous and other hackers -- despite Anonymous much-ballyhooed fight against child abusers -- which I've noticed is actually a way to enable lots of anonymous people to go into child pornography discussion rooms under the guise of policing them, and also to discuss the subject to death under the guise of fighting it. Clever, that.

There is apparently  the case of a well-known scholar who sides with the hacker culture who was fired for an inappropriate relationship with a minor -- a story that I cannot verify. The EFF position here and the positions taken like it in Second Life by the "ageplayers" are emblematic of this creepy side of geekdom, however.

I theorized that first, the hackers who make themselves binary thinkers and inhumane through constant coding and constant depersonalized Internet communication adopt a nihilist viewpoint whereby child molesting no longer seems like a crime -- because anything goes and there is no more crime online, there is only what morals "we decide," as John Perry Barlow explained to me in person, when I objected to the absence of the rule  of law. So for me, first mechanization and adopting to robot routines, then piracy and persecution through outing other people's privacy, then eventually they move on to accepting child pornography as there is no law. That seemed to me to be the intellectual proposition, so to speak, something worthy of Dostoyevsky and Crime and Punishment.

But my interlocuter disagreed and said no, the people who are child predators and consumers of child pornography start out lawless like this, and then naturally get drawn to the free-for-all climate of the piracy, crypto-kid, Anonymous sort of geek culture on the Internet.

Whatever path it is, and it may be both, it's awful, and to be repudiated. I hope the judge eventually sees the light on this case.

 

 

Barrett Brown Gets His Trial Postponed and Hacker-Enabling Journalists Get a Muzzle

Barrett Browning is not going to get as speedy a trial as some had hoped. But not his lawyers, who are deliberately trying to delay and postpone, citing all kinds of things -- because among other things they can have most of the sentence then disappear in pre-trial time served.

Dallas News reports about the judge's stay on Brown and his lawyers further contacting the media.

Gosh, that sounds like some sort of evil suppression of free media, no? I mean, slamming journalists for doing their jobs, like Russia and the Central Asian regimes do, barring reporters from "divulging the secrecy of the investigation" pre-trial -- and thereby banning legitimate discussion of crimes or state claims of crimes.

But I'm not sure this is going to pass the sniff test as a First Amendment case and I don't see anybody rushing to make it into one.

That's because the lawyers and support committees are deliberately whipping up a media circus which really does then bring into question the ability of the trial to be impartial.

Brown's attorneys are scrambling to make it seem like their client and they aren't the ones getting the story in the media, but that's pretty threadbare.

Not surprisingly, although the court document doesn't mention him by name, one of the articles the judge has found tendentious and prejudicial is the article by Glenn Greenwald -- while in jail, Barrett Browning called up GG and gave him an interview. Not surprisingly, Greenwald tried to make it out that this indicted felon was some sort of persecuted dissident.

It's like the free-for-all that Prof. Peter Ludlow has indulged in trying to exonerate this creep at the Nation.

The idea that you can be in pre-trial detention and get to whip up a media barrage in your defense by getting the hacker-enabling journos like Greenwald and non-journalist linguistic-professor propagagndists like Ludlow to make noise sort of obviates the whole point of jail, you know?

And jail is where Barrett Brown needs to be given the charges against him, which, of course are not yet proven in a court of law.

Is Barrett Brown  a journalist because he started some drug-fueled paranoia-induced database of "facts" on security firms and made a lot of incoherent Youtubes? No, he's just a hacker who blogs a lot. Should bloggers, too, be protected for their journalism, in whatever form it takes?

No, not if it takes the form of linking to pages with stolen credit card numbers and bragging about it, threatening federal agents, obstructing justice -- oh, and hacking into other people's servers to "spill their secrets".

Hacking isn't just lazy journalism; it's crime.

 

 

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