Wired State

"Lone Wolves" and "Zero Deaths from Terrorism"

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Post from February 8, 2017 which was unpublished for some reason.

The Weekly Standard had an interesting article about the problem of two unreliable narratives -- those of the media and those of President Donald Trump.

Of course, on either side is a demand to see these debates in binary terms of true/false, like the geek culture that bends its mind to machines of 0/1 and true/false in code.

I don't find those terms very meaningful because in my view, there is the overarching problem of the inability of the human mind to know absolute truth. The recognition of that inability, which is a core belief of religions and philosophies actually leads to freedom and tolerance of a variety of expression in the liberal mind, or should.

But there are those who believe the human mind is infallible and can know "truths" about "science" like "climate change". I can know truths about climate change, too, when the waters of the East River come up past the second floor of my apartment building and I am evacuated, then return to live in the dark and cold with rats for two weeks. Yet this "truth" I have apprehended has not carried over to establishing a "truth" about the various policies that are devised to combat this problem, some expensive, like planting water-absorbent flora and shoring up shores, other less expensive, like building sea walls. (And that's what a lot of claim of the left is about: not a denial of climate change but a refusal to follow a socialist versus capitalist solution).

The competing narratives of "true" and "false" this past week revolved around three memes:

o the Bowling Green massacre

o the "zero deaths" from terrorist attacks since 911

o Trump didn't include countries in the list to ban where "he had business".

Now there's a new week and another meme to be added:

o the absence of comments from Trump on his Twitter feed about a terrorist attack on a certain day

That the commentator himself didn't have any tweets on that day about a terrorist attack, either, is never researched or noticed. That in general he speaks about terrorism only in the most biased way isn't noticed either. We're to be seized with paroxysms of indignation that on a particular day, Trump was tweeting frivolous things instead of concern about terrorism.

Each one of these enthusiastically promoted memes was false in its way if for no other reason that they were a product of the culture of gleeful "gotchas" that so permeates our lives, notably promoted by Jon Stewart on his Comedy Central "news channel". 

To my mind, Scott Shane's piece in The New York Times is exactly what elicits cries of "fake news" on the right -- and in my view at least a questionable bias and willingness to bend facts to fit narratives.

He and Huffpo and Washpo and others all made the same meme-ist point:

"There are zero deaths from terrorist attacks from people from those countries."

But...as Reason magazine explains (and Cato, which funds Reason, was the study Shane and others selectively referenced) point out that 24 Americans have been injured in a spat of attacks by people from some of those countries -- Somali, Yemen for example.

Why don't they count? Why can't we report this in deciding this public policy matter?

The "zero deaths" meme is creepy, because it implies that if a terrorist attacks and fails, or attacks and only maims some people as the one in NJ and NY recently, even seriously, "it doesn't count".

But of course it counts and its appalling not to report that. In the Chelsea attack, 31 people were injured. On that day, local news covered it, in the case of more liberal outlets, rushing to point out that there were "no international groups" attached to it, and that included "our local newspaper" the New York Times and our senator Chuck Schumer who said on September 25 there was "no proof" of an international/terrorist group angle. But an awareness of this attack and similar ones, a matching of it to patterns never occurs. It drops down the memory hole.

Most creepy is the 538 style of literalism on this answering Trump's claim that "the press didn't report the attacks" (they didn't) with claim "But the local news did" -- as if that's enough, and as if this exonerates the problem of national news not reporting it *this week, amidst their enthusiasm with their memes about "zero deaths" and "Bowling Green massacre."

Sorry, but in a week of NATIONAL liberal news coverage we never got wrap-ups of what LOCAL had published before -- and THAT MATTERS.

The "Bowling Green Massacre" is to my mind one of those concoctions such as Jon Stewart was famous for -- there are even creepy t-shirts saying "I survived the Bowling Green massacre."

Yes, Conway was mistaken. There's even a theory that she is nefariously and deliberately mistaken because she's said it more than once. I actually don't believe that, and in any event can't accept the same media that ridiculed her mistake as a source on this matter.

Because lost in this gleeful gotcha is some awareness that if two Iraqis bent on terrorism don't attack *us* in America, and only escape to say, Europe, to work for Al Qaeda and kill people there, are we to be content that some people will have t-shirts that say "I survived the Istanbul Airport massacre" or "I survived the Brussels Airport massacre" -- when not everyone was so lucky?

What's especially awful in my view here is the myopia that goes with taking delight in somebody being wrong about a massacre, but not caring the slightest that the people involved might go and commit one elsewhere, at home or abroad. We had an "Orlando massacre," after all, committed by a US citizen with heritage in Afghanistan who showed all the signs of being inspired by and devoted to ISIS. So while there isn't any "Bowling Green" massacre, there sure as hell is an "Orlando massacre". Yes, this perpetrator, like the one in Chelsea was a citizen of the US but with Afghan heritage. Shouldn't Trump have included Afghanistan in the list? But there isn't a good-faith examination of that issue, merely repetition of the mind-numbing meme that "zero deaths" occurred by people from the 7 countries.

Then there's the meme which I find particularly atrocious that Trump "didn't include countries where he had business".

Er, leave aside the fact that Trump didn't appear to have business in Afghanistan, imagine that, there was ZERO awareness even by people like Ian Bremmer who enthusiastically pumped the "business" meme although he should know better that the countries from which terrorists come -- Turkey, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia for example -- are all large recipients of US military aid. Some are in the top ten, even. They are "allies" up to a point in that we give them this aid and then hope that bribes them, I guess. Pakistan isn't a place where Trump does business but it wasn't put on the list, either -- that suggests you have to be a little bit more intelligent about this matter.

If a country is an "ally" or gets huge amounts of military aid, putting them on a ban list would not be prudent. US diplomats work hard to have some kind of alliance with these despots all of whom help spawn the terrorism from which they themselves suffer.

I think this executive order was wrong and that we already had heavy vetting of people coming from these countries. Obviously people who already came from those countries and already here could be tomorrow's perpetrators. People who originated in those countries and somehow obtained citizenship elsewhere could also come in to this country to commit terrorism.

Indeed the "country" approach in fighting terrorism that spans regions and isn't isolated to countries isn't really the most effective.

When Trump says there is "fake news" and even liberals who should know better say there is "fake news" about terrorism this week, and that "it is in fact reported," they aren't grasping that Scott Shane and a score of other liberals simply didn't report those terrorist attacks NOW, when the topic is in front of people. Shane made absolutely no reference to the fact -- which he could have drawn from the same Cato Institute he used to get his "zero deaths" meme -- that people did get hurt and there were terrorist attacks, just not deaths.

It's pretty chilling and cold-blooded to decide a matter only based on deaths. The proposition to debate is whether a threshold of 23 people injured in a few terrorist attacks is too low to warrant opening up entry to people from that country. Say that then, and don't sugar coat it with "no deaths" and "no massacre in Bowling Green".

The first article I've ever seen in the New York Times, or really anywhere I can think of, that explains that social media pages and applications mean that the "lone wolf" theory no longer applies is this one.

That is, author, Rukmini Callimachi, an authority on terrorism (later reassigned by the NYT after a highly-publicized interview of hers with an alleged terrorist turned out to be fake) who was often the voice of reason on Twitter had a headline (or her editors' have a headline) "debunking" the notion of "lone wolves," although she doesn't quite say that in her piece.

Even so, she illustrates with much detail how terrorists use Telegram and Tails (Edward Snowdens' app of choice) and other programs to recruit, train and deploy operatives in terrorist groups, and  evade detection and plot bombings. All awful stuff. And heaven forfend that it lead to any monitoring by governments of these apps or even banning of them if they refuse to cooperate with police.

What shines through for me is the call -- go and kill people with knives or drive cars into them if you can't assemble a bomb. This was the message I happened to first hear on an ISIS propaganda video in Russian featuring jihadists from the Russian North Caucasus. They explained that the message from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, their leader was to go and kill infidels with knives or axes if they were too poor or too unskilled to make a bomb.  Indeed, this message has been disseminated everywhere in multiple languages and accounts for the rash of attacks around the world with just this MO: driving cars into crowds, stabbing multiple people at malls, sometimes with devastating effect.

To persist in calling these people "lone wolves" is folly when they are foot soldiers in a mass movement, a war on the West. It is a war. And it's not only okay to call it that; it's necessary in order to stop having illusions about it.

There are a lot of reasons why the liberal mind without the toe steel grasps at these memes and shies away from the realizing of patterns and the conclusion that because of the Internet, it is no longer possible to ascribe attacks to "lone wolves" in quite so large numbers.

Part of it is the binary thinking and literalism that afflicts so much Internet discourse, but it's also unwillingness to tell the facts which will lead to unpleasant conclusions that may involve suppressing civil liberties, at least in their fears. 

The reality is, the president does have a lot of discretion under the law to block people from entering the US -- a privilege, not a right. There isn't even any global mandate, like the regional Helsinki Accords, affirming the "free flow of information and people". Many would like this liberal good to be a fact everywhere, but because of uncivil society it cannot be. The "free flow of information and people" as an international accord works best among parties that affirm all the civil rights and liberties that go with that.

When Trump says that "the press didn't cover" his list of terrorist attacks, the politically-correct and literalist will object to it because of their general contentiousness against Trump -- understood -- but then they set themselves up to perpetuate the cycle. 

 

 

So the Capitalist New York Times Fires Abramson, Won't Hire Socialist Guardian Editor Gibson -- Good!

(c) Beth Cortez-Neavel/Knight Center. Jill Abramson, at a conference organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Pierre Omidyar's Network was among the sponsors.

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I've been waiting to see what this whole Jill Abramson deal was all about. Now Politico has helped explain it better for me.

I thought perhaps it really was some kind of feminism thing -- this is a real issue and I've experienced it myself in different workplaces even at the most "progressive" outfits.  The number of perfect West Side liberals who deliberately pay women less in this town, and ask them intrusive and sexist questions like whether they plan on having any more children or not would make your hair curl. I do get that.

But I still felt as if there was something else "up" here in this story. After all, when we're in the half-million a year salary category, the numbers going up or down $50,000 aren't that big a deal -- it isn't fair to compare Phil Taubman with Abramson because Phil had served in foreign postings and had more seniority -- unless, of course, you call Washington, DC a foreign bureau. Abramson had never been abroad.

Like anyone close to journalism in New York, I had heard she was bitchy and also lefty. I worried after Bill Keller left because he held the line against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and wasn't uncritical of Snowden and was there when the Times did some critical reporting, with CIA sources, of Snowden's tenure in Geneva and later his seminar in India.

Then Keller left, and things changed for the worse. Charlie Savage, who went from a Manning critic to a Snowden booster, was allowed to run loose with the stories, all pro-Snowden, and some of which reprinted Foundation for Free Press press releases -- even though he is way too smart for that.

Not a single critical thing has been said about Snowden all this time, and glowing coverage is given to Greenwald's prizes (the prize really went to the Guardian, not him), his new book, etc. -- and worst of all the ombudsperson, Margaret Sullivan, who is supposed to be impartial, has absolutely gushed and fawned over the Snowdenistas.

There's a story in Glenn's book about how Sullivan privately apologized for an article that went out early in the Snowden affair in which two experts on China from the intelligence community were quoted as saying they thought it likely that Snowden's laptops had been copied by the secret police in Hong Kong. Greenwald bristled that there was "no proof" of this.

Well, what would he accept as proof? China is a police state and copies people's stuff all the time -- they hard-wire it into their computers for sale in the West. I'll never forget how the former political prisoner Wei Jingsheng once called out the West at the UN for selling the very equipment that enables China to do this surveillance better, too.

Not that they can't surveil on their own. I once watched in horror as Lenovo computers were gifted to all the winners of prizes one year at the Overseas Press Club. China hacks everything, including, BTW, the New York Times, whose people were threatened with expulsion. Of course anything Snowden had was copied, if nothing else, over that state-controlled wi-fi at his hotel and other means.  It doesn't matter if there was "nothing" on his laptop but the means by which he reached his stashed documents -- they still might get something. Greenwald has no proof that they didn't.

Although Sullivan was appalling on this incident conceding in a column that it wasn't fair reporting, and appalling in another one conceding that the extremist loon Kevin Gosztola had a point, it wasn't enough for Greenwald, he still knocked the Times for not completely removing the offending lines about the theory of Chinese penetration. Imagine! Unless the field is completely sanitized of wrongful thinking, the Snowdenistas are never satisfied.

To be sure, the relationship between the Guardian and the Times has been cosy, although not completely without some mysteries (such as why the Guardian stole away Robert MacKey, another tendentious "progressive", but then he abruptly quit soon after making the move -- whereupon he came back to the Times again.)

The Guardian gave the Times all their Snowden stache when the British authorities came calling with a buzz-saw to destroy all the stolen documents. The Guardian also collaborated on WikiLeaks.

Abramson may have thought she could pull off this Guardian-splicing maneuver without anyone noticing it if she just kept it on the down-low and eased Gibson in as an "innovator" who was going to fix the Times lagging digital edition -- but it was caught, and that compiled with other problems meant she had to go.

Seldom at a place like the Times is the issue of "socialism" versus "capitalism" ever actually debated out loud, with terms like "technocommunism" ever being discussed -- that would be absurd. These things have to be articulated in "the personal is political terms".

But it's clear as a bell to me. Sulzberger, a capitalist, and his various editors, are liberals who want certain socialist things, and backed Obama for that reason. But they don't want socialism completely for themselves, and don't want to be overthrown, obviously. They like Snowden because he helps batter away at a Washington that they feel still hasn't "reformed" enough and doesn't welcome them sufficiently, and he is for "transparency" which they as newsmen like in theory (although not about themselves). They like the whole anarchy thing because it's a useful tool to get rid of enemies.

Yet they're not going to go to the mat for the revolution -- for example when Natasha Leonard, an Occupy operative who got away with pretending to be a Times stringer for awhile, was outed when she got arrested for refusing to disperse at the Brooklyn Bridge, she was out of the Times in a New York minute. That's how it is, and that's a good thing, because Leonard is a vicious radical socialist ideologue -- as you can see where she is perched now, salon.com.

Perhaps this near-death brush with socialist revolutionaries will be a sobering experience for the Times. Maybe the coverage of Snowden will come back and I will subscribe to the digital edition again.

 

 

 

My comment at Politico, "under moderation":

Oh, I get it now! This isn't at all about feminism, glass cliffs, salary discrepancy, or even a bitch female management style that wouldn't rankle if a man had it.

It's about whether or not the Times, which is liberal and capitalist, is going to hire away the stage manager of the Snowden operation, Janice Gibson, from the radical and socialist British Guardian's American edition.

And the answer is: no.

Abramson thought she could wrangle this by not keeping people informed, by making it be about women or digital or something else.

But it's about radicalization of the Times, and the owner saw it for what it was, saw that it was being put over on him and their colleagues, and said "no".

And I'm glad he did because I don't want the Times to be the Guardian. Indeed, I stopped subscribing to the Times precisely because of their poor and uncritical Snowden coverage which is way too enthusiastic about this felon and hacker.

Had they brought in Gibson, who authorized and engineered the Snowden operation in Hong Kong with Greenwald and edited the stories, under the guise of "modernity" we would get even more horridly skewed news. No thanks.

Watch to see Abramson get picked up by Pierre Omidyar for his "Intercept" or related projects -- although really, she's likely too expensive and too high-class for that operation that has filled up with bloggers like Greenwald. I can see her going to some other mainstream liberal paper or news magazine, perhaps. On the other hand, Marcy Wheeler has abruptly quit Intercept, they don't have any other women except Laura Poitras who is a mouse, so maybe Pierre will step up.

 

Related articles

Report: Abramson salary $100K below male editor

New Yorker: Abramson fired as New York Times editor because she demanded equal pay

Jill Abramson's move to hire editor spurred termination from N.Y. Times

Jill Abramson's Exact Salary and What the New York Times Thinks Is Wrong with the New York Times

Two women editors ousted: badasses or just doing their job?

Abramson angered Baquet by trying to bring on a co-Managing Editor

Vanity Fair on Their Prize, Snowden

 I found this video just awful.

As you know I've provided two long blog posts  here and here with a thorough thrashing of the Vanity Fair piece on Snowden, knocking it as a cut-and-paste job with a few self-serving quotes phoned in from Snowden. I'm totally unimpressed.

What I hope for in a report like this -- even though I know in advance I won't agree with their take on Snowden -- is actual new news or new insights. I don't feel they were there.

So in this show, we get Suzanna Andrews contributing editor of Vanity Fair, extolling the wonders of not only Snowden, but Laura Poitras, who she thinks is the unsung heroine of the hour -- after all, Glenn Greenwald blew off Snowden because he was too geeky asking for encryption, and Bart Gellman - and Suzanna is frank on this as I am -- wimped out of going to Hong Kong.

So what else does she think? She is struck that Snowden "has no plan B" -- "maybe kinda go to Iceland, maybe kinda go to Cuba". Because she says this with an air of New York shrewdness, it seems convincing.

But it's nuts, and comes from not asking the most basic questions about this case, as those of us critical have been saying from word one, jumping up and down and asking why nobody is asking about the Cuban visa, or the Russian visa -- even if a transit visa - or Sarah Harrison's visa to stay there -- after all, she didn't ask for asylum. We're not being told the truth about it, and we don't buy the story of the expired passport "passing" or the flimsy Ecuadorean travel document being accepted.

The only way it was possible was that it was pre-wired by the Russians. It took meetings with Russian diplomats in advance; it took planning; it took conspiracy with Russia. The Chinese were happy to wash their hands of Snowden; the Cubans were under pressure (although Castro denies that they would have caved to US threats if Snowden actually arrived), but the Russians *wanted* Snowden. Putin offered him to apply for asylum on June 11. That is so often overlooked. You can't take a situation where the head of Russia offers you asylum on June 11, where the US doesn't file its extradition request until June 21, and say that for 10 days, you had no choice, you "just had to" be forced to go to Russia, and had no options.

Suzannah also decides -- again, in her infinitely shrewd magazine editor's wisdom -- that he is not a traitor -- and has a good chortle with the TV host about Rep. King who has called Snowden a traitor -- aren't these conservatives backward?! Blah blah.


I look out the window and think to myself: this TV studio is only 30 or 40 blocks away. I live in the same city with this woman. Yet we have such diametrically opposed views -- and she claims to be more worldly-wise because of her position in one of the most glossy magazines on the planet.

What sustains me when I see how stricken the media empire is with Snowden-mania is that ultimately, the veils will fall away and we will get the story. Maybe it will be in 50 years. But it will come out -- and I suspect it will come out from either Snowden himself -- he's an awfully vain creature -- or one of his comrades like Jacob Appelbaum who just wants to chatter and get the limelight -- and maybe some sort of plea-bargain.

 

Related articles

Vanity Fair on Snowden: A Change in the Narrative About Snowden's First Leak

Edward Snowden Partied with the Russians in Hong Kong on His 30th Birthday

No, Snowden Was Never "Forced" to Flee to Russia and WikiLeaks and He Chose to Go to Moscow

Snowden: NSA lies about me not trying to spur internal investigation

Snowden asks Putin LIVE: Does Russia intercept millions of citizens' data?

The Limits of Impunity for Activist Hacker "Journalism" and Jacob Appelbaum

 Jacob Appelbaum speaks at 30th annual congress of Chaos Computer Club December 2013. The official videos are here if you don't mind those hacker creeps getting your URL: 

Jacob Appelbaum's blockbuster talk at the aptly-named Chaos Computer Club's 30th annual Congress (#30c3) has stirred up a lot of interest in him which was missing before -- I guess it takes stepping on the Apple fanboyz tails to get them to focus.

Hackers Hack Apple Gadgets

Of course, this is not a new war story; those with short memories about these hackers may have forgotten how the CCC bragged that they had hacked into Apple's shiny new fingerprint-ID touch phone inSeptember.

Of course, when the CCC vandalizes products and accesses them in ways the manufacturer never intended -- that's called hacking, by the way -- it's only in the public interest for "privacy" and it's publicized only as a public safety bulletin, right guys? *Cough*.

But the Apple stuff tackled by the cosmically-named Appelbaum isn't really the news story here, although it guarantees that we'll see it through a few more news cycles for sure.

And the list of (now very outdated -- it was 2008, remember) used gadgets that the NSA supposedly has to spy on people -- which are now likely available on the international illegal arms black market for Bitcoins after Jake's talk -- aren't even the news although we can talk about that later. Like what hacking tools are in Jake's own tool box that are little different than these toys?

If Not from Snowden, then...From Whom?

The real news story of this talk as I already blogged here and here is that these are not confirmed Snowden documents. Nowhere in the Der Spiegel article are they claimed to be; Greenwald emphatically says on Twitter that they are not claimed to be and he didn't give them to Appelbaum. Later in his TL you can see him commenting with a knowier-than-thou remark to the effect that geez, everybody thinks hacking only gets done by Snowden, like he's the only one."

And maybe they are Snowden documents (an even closer reading of Greenwald indicates that he doesn't say they aren't Snowden docs; he just says he wasn't involved -- clever! and that they don't say they are Snowden docs) -- and  maybe they aren't. Maybe Jake has direct access to Snowden and maybe Snowden didn't give everything to Greenwald and maybe Snowden still leaks or maybe Appelbaum got their own set of documents from other hackers, maybe even in their midst. We may never know, but it pays to ask.

Jake Has His Own Source in the NSA

A shocking point in Jake's talk that no one seems to have noticed is that he claims to have his own source within the NSA and other intelligence agencies.

Gosh, the rot goes deep if that's the case -- that there are actually people in the NSA who aren't already working for the GRU willing to talk to Jacob Appelbaum. Of course, this isn't THAT far-fetched to conceive -- the Navy has still-employed developers that still work on Tor and even presented a paper on Tor's vulnerabilities (sorry kids) at the same conference in Berlin that Appelbaum gave a paper at and no doubt they talked (I haven't confirmed that they actually went and gave the paper but I'm trying to; they were listed on the program.) Tor is still getting 60% of its funding from the Department of Defense, even though it has snotty little employees who say things to me on Twitter like "Congress should go dire in a fire" and casually offer pro-tips and biz dev ideas for how Silk Road --one ofTor's biggest customers! -- should have better secured itself better from the feds.

We don't know if these are fresh and current contacts Jake claims to have in the NSA -- how could they be if the manual is from 2008, guys? We also don't know if in fact Russian intelligence is using the same caper they used in the CCC's old KGB collaboration case of the past, where they deployed their own moles within US intelligence to double track the German hacker they had coopted to check his work -- and also pin everything on him, one might add. Snowden could work that way too. But we can only get so far with this part of the story today, so let's press on to the other news value of this talk:

Anarchists Call for Sabotage, But is Someone Fighting Back?

The WikiLeaks/Snowden saga dynamics and Jake's claims of protection for his brand of "journalism" are an important part of this story -- for my money, more important than this or that claim about this or that gadget that might do this or that thing -- remember, one of the claims is that the NSA can transmit bursts of energy to zap people ("What if I told you that the NSA had a specialized technology for beaming energy into you...") . We're all doomed -- PS that zap is what killed Hugo Chavez.

And those dynamics, as we saw, in a separate appearance at 30c3, involved a Wizard-of-Oz like big-screen appearance from The One (Julian Assange), with properly reverant introductions from Appelbaum and Sarah Harrison (who spent nearly five months in Moscow with Snowden, then fled to Germany, remember, and says she can't go home to the UK for fear of questioning unde the anti-terrorist act).

Assange's purpose seemed to be to convince everyone he's still really behind everything, but since the video link kept cutting in and out (sabotage?) it sort of undermined his thesis. No matter, because there were two news pegs:

1) Assange, and Appelbaum, call on all systems administrators of the world to sabotage their networks which are all part of the mass surveillance security state with which Big IT is in bed (remember these people are anarchists; they are not "transparency activists"; they are not "privacy activists," they are anarchists. It's funny how Appelbaum's recruitment of people out of intelligence agencies to turn against their employees of last year at 29c3 (which worked great -- he got Snowden!) -- is never mentioned, and this even further call not just to hack and leave -- but sabotage too -- will also never get notice.

Jake in his own talk openly calls on programmers not just to leave the CIA or NSA, but to actively hack it -- "get the ball and bring it out" he says, to wild applause. Like it's a game of football.

2) Some wag in the audience (and "the Internet" will surely tell us who soon enough) asked him a provocative question:

"How did you get Snowden out of the US?"

Business Insider -- one of the few papers to be critical in covering the Snowden story -- was quick to pick up that odd locution which may have been a CIA-planted provocation, or maybe just a clueless git who didn't realize that Snowden was smuggled from Hong Kong, not the US; he got from Hawaii to Hong Kong on his own steam, without apparently Sarah doing his trip planning.

Assange didn't miss a beat and pronounced this a loaded question, and indicated that there legal questions related to answering it. Michael Kelley of BI seemed to think this was an indication of Assange's awareness of his culpability -- that Grand Jury inquiry into WikiLeaks is still open and running -- that if he were seen to move Snowden around here and there that might be booked as more than "journalism," especially if from the US -- but I think the reference is to *Snowden's* own legal protection -- Assange always likes to style himself as a big protector of sources. Of course, that didn't work for Chelsea Manning, and lots of other people he never redacted out of the cables.

The Thin Line Between Hackers and Journalists

There are lots of technical issues to pick over in Jake's talk, but let's come to where I think the really big challenge is, and the long-term news value that won't go away: a defiant bid for moving the goal posts even further for journalistic impunity in anarchist attacks on the US government.

Appelbaum puts forward a number of theses that Greenwald tries to style  -- in his approving tweets -- as great altruistic deeds that are a model for all those working with hacked materials.

Nonsense.

(BTW, it seemed that Appelbaum publicly broke with Greenwald when he accused him of sitting on stories from Ed -- stories that in fact later got published, but without Jake as the tech byline, and other tech specialists like Schneier as the byline. Oopsies. Jake also seemed to be in the WikiLeaks gang accusing Greenwald of selling out and commodifying Snowy's stash to millionaire ebay guy Pierre Omidyar. But nothing is ever what it seems with these people, and it may be that they patched things up, or Greenwald knows that Appelbaum is such a cunning reptile with such l33t skills that he is now praising him to keep on his good side. No matter.)

Real adults who care about the rule of law and liberal democratic states that aren't so open that they are enabling their own hacking to death by anarchists bent on their destruction have to begin asking some questions now about this so-called "journalism" which we are hearing so much about, especially from Jake, who is a hacker but tells you 10 times in this talk about his "investigative journalism" and his article that appeared (with two other people having to help write it) in Der Spiegel so as to invoke the journalistic "Pentagon Papers" cover.

Jacob Appelbaum, True American Patriot!

o Appelbaum says that he has "very large editorial process" redacted out the names of NSA spies and their home addresses and telephone numbers which were in this material [wild applause from the audience] (!). Gosh, thanks. (And don't think that wild applause is about his civic-mindedness it's that the NSA was pwned by this kid.)

o But he had a really, really hard time doing this because he didn't really agree that this was the right thing to do. "When we redact the names of people who engage in criminal activity in drone murder, we are not doing the right thing, but I think we should comply with law in order to continue to publish," he says. So look out! This is blackmail. Political blackmail. Thuggish coercion to try to impose an anarchist movement's will -- not for the good of society.

o Appelbaum also has the names of the alleged victims of the NSA's surveillance. But he won't let all those script kiddies who think they can get validated this way know if they're on the list (sorry to disappoint) just in case any of the targets are legitimate. This made him very uncomfortable (he assumes they are all innocent) but just in case there was that rare case of a terrorist the NSA legitimately pursues, "we didn't want to make that decision" to expose the fact that they were targets. Gee, thanks Jake.

To put these bursts of civic decency and generosity *cough* into perspective, I invite you to read this very interesting debate between Jeremy Duns, the author who has been critical of the Snowden case and confronted Appelbaum (@ioerror) on Twitter. He marvels -- as all decent people in the humanities of good will should marvel at the criminality of the machine-induced hacker mind should marvel -- at how casually Appelbaum rejects basic principles of civilization.

Here's one:

 

http://t.co/srQPSeHQqI A great piece on why, even though we need spies, we need better oversight of our spy agencies.

— Josh Myer (@xek) October 6, 2013

@xek @rezendi I read that and thought: wow, this guy still thinks we need spies? Doesn't he get that he can't have it both ways?

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) October 6, 2013

The utopian ideal that we should live in a world with "no spies" is presumably going to include him, and his friends, right? And his kit of surveillance tools which he uses to keep tabs on people he thinks are keeping him under surveillance, perhaps pre-emptively, right? And we're to unilaterally close down our spy shops even though Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Sudanese etc. intelligence aren't going to be doing this, let alone Al Qaeda.

So here's where I take a stand.

The Rights of Journalists Are Not Limitless

Many liberals and specifically liberal journalists are really scared of saying -- or even asking questions about! -- that anything that Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum --- and for that matter Bart Gellman and James Risen -- are doing is wrong ethically, let alone legally,  because then that might lead to what they view as a chill on free expression and free media, and even legal repercussions.

They also may fear the terrible backlash from activist-journalists and their anarchist hacker helpers who try to bully and shame and heckle and harass them to death if they raise an eyebrow about any of the ethical or legal ramifications of their facilitation of hacking.

So this very thin membrane has developed were the rules work like this: -- as long as you don't physically do the hacking, you are safe in journalism land (and note that "hacking" is a word that hackers themselves like to very narrowly define and dumb down so that it is never evil). Also, as long as you don't actually tell the hacker what would be useful to hack, you are safe in journalism land. As long as you don't get involved in moving those files around -- that after all, do contain the names of agents and their home addresses and phone numbers, and their victims and their identifying data, too, as Appelbaum confirmed -- you're also safe in journalism land too. Well, in the UK, were laws against terrorism are stricter and libel laws are stricter, you can't move and possess those files with impunity or you will be arrested like David Miranda was at the airport, or you will be questioned and told to destroy files like Alan Rusbridger was at the Guardian.

But you can spirit out those files to the US, where there is a looser interpretation -- at least so far -- about possessing the work files of your leaker that you ostensibly only need to do your journalism -- as long as occasionally you have lunch with an intelligence official and pretend you're cooperative.

If you threaten a dead man's switch -- that if you are put in jail someone will spill all these beans -- as Greenwald has definitely done although he denies to furiously -- then you are still safe in journalism land, although you might be branded finally as an activist journalism.

Stretching the Definition of Journalism to the Breaking Point

But what if you thin out this membrane even further, stretching it to the breaking point, by saying that you've kept to the letter of the law -- barely, for now -- but you really don't believe this law is just. Why should you keep private the names of people from a system that does drone killings? Why, isn't there a higher law that suggests you should name all these representatives of the Stasi-like mass surveillance state? (Notice how these hackers always speak of the Stasi, the now-defunct East German police, and never the KGB, whose agent is still head of Russia. Wouldn't want to hurt any feelings now, would we...)

Now, this is where I think you are not only firmly in activism land and far from the borders of ethical journalism, and not in a place called "ethical hacking" because it's not ethical to harm the intelligence agency of a liberal democratic state. That's my position.

And that's why I think your investigation, and even arrest and interrogation would be in order. You have gone too far. You can't keep hiding behind the cloak of journalism. You can't keep invoking the Pentagon Papers decision forever.  Crime is crime. Food Lion established that you cannot commit offenses -- lying on your employment application, trespassing, secretly videotaping without consent and so on -- for the supposed greater glory of your journalism. There are other cases.

The rights of journalists are really important to protect in a liberal democratic society under the rule of law. I'm a big believer and practitioner of the First Amendment and I think we have to go a long ways not to jail reporters. Glenn Greenwald, even with his talk of dead man switches and his aggressive adversarial stance to the US, does journalistic work protected by law.

But Jacob Appelbaum and others like him who show up at the CCC, which has openly hacked Apple products and has a history of KGB collaboration and an openly antagonistic stance of war against the NSA; who brag about their direct ties to NSA agents; who show manuals they got from who knows where of gadgets they claim (without proof) are used for some mass surveillance and not legitimate targeting; AND who say that they have names and information about agents and their supposed victims that they really think they should leak, but are kind enough not too for now -- I think they've gone too far.

I'm not afraid of the damage to press freedom to stake out that position because the ramification of letting it continue is that then we turn over press freedom to the whim of thugs -- and the aggressive heckling I am undergoing now by Appelbaum's hacker thug pals on Twitter now, threatening me with libel suits because I call out the criminality of Tor -- is proof enough of that harsh reality that deserves it's own Homage to Catalonia.

If we accept that hackers get to endlessly hack liberal states -- the Obama Administration is the most liberal state we've had in our history -- then we don't get to have liberal democratic states that we have chosen democratically, with checks and balance and separation of powers, with oversight by elected representatives and the courts. Instead, we have thuggish and brutal anarchists working by the Bolshevik "ends justify the means" to get their sectarian way.

Appelbaum thinks that by skating up against this very, very thin ice but not quite breaking through that he is a hero, and Glenn Greenwald and thousands of people wildly clapping in the CCC hall agree. I don't. I think it's beyond the boundary and it's time to call it.

What, you should depend on the good will of someone whose "Your Personal Army" Anonymous friends and hacker thugs on Twitter endlessly heckle bloggers like me and threaten us with libel suits for telling the truth about their lack of ethics and even criminality?

 

 

Why I Am Unsubscribing to the New York Times -- Snowden Mania

This is awful -- this Times editorial on Snowden urging clemency.

It's why I cancelled my subscription.

I'm all for a variety of views. I read everything from the Nation to the Amercan Spectactor and everything in between and beyond. I don't mind alternative views and views that aren't my own. I want to pay for content. But at this point, I won't pay for content by people who won't use the most rudimentary common sense in covering this story. I just can't. Yes, it means I will miss out, and I keep finding stories blocked as I use up my "free quotient". But eventually they are retweeted and clicking on the link delivers them, or if I'm desperate, I can search in Google and read them from the Google link. Yes, that's the hole in the paid content model, and I'd be happy if it were blocked, because I want newspapers to thrive. But I am cutting costs, and I won't pay the $14 a month or whatever it was for the Times. I'm also finding that if I occasionally buy a hard copy at the news stand, I get more out of it.

My comment:

The views of this Times editorial, rivulating through all the coverage of Snowden by journalist-activists and cadres from WikiLeaks like Laura Poitras, shockingly given a byline on a "news story," are why I have cancelled my subscription.

There is no proof for the sensational claims here, least of all provided by any actual Times investigative reporting.

There has been a shocking mass hysteria around Snowden preventing even the most common sense from functioning, with not even the most basic questions asked about who organized, helped and funded Snowden -- and who were active in anti-NSA activities long before Snowden surfaced publicly.

Not a single case has been produced of an actual violation of civil rights of a concrete person in the United States.

The Times seems to feel it can pick and chose judge rulings and reject those it doesn't like as "unfortunate."

Even the Supreme Court cannot decide this issue at root, however, as it really is about who gets to encrypt absolutely -- a band of anarchist thugs, or an elected liberal democratic state. That's all there is to it, in the end, and I know which one I choose.

Related articles

No, Snowden Was Never "Forced" to Flee to Russia and WikiLeaks and He Chose to Go to Moscow

Hey! I'm Really Tired of this "Chilling Effects" Bullshit Around Snowden's Leaks

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

NYT Wants Clemency For 'Whistle-Blower' Snowden

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

The Absurd Times Tha TAO of NSA

Snowden offer to Brazil on spying

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

Who's on first?

And who is really controlling the Snowden documents -- or is anarchy ensuing?

There's a new story out realated to a Snowden leak involving Jacob Appelbaum, Snowden's hacker helper, even though he broke with Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian.

Forbes even breathlessly headlines it "Appelbaum's Latest NSA Revelations from the Edward Snowden Documents" as if this is the latest in a series, although that headline is something that has never been done before by Forbes. It's based on a report in Der Spiegel.

Says Forbes, about this NSA document cataloguing types of equipment:

This is not a list of backdoors into equipment that the manufacturers have allowed the NSA to insert. This is instead a listing of the hacks and hardware that the NSA has developed in order to get into kit that the manufacturers have no intention of allowing them into. It is not, absolutely not, evidence of collaboration in any form at all. It’s actually evidence of how good the hackers working for the NSA are.

Both Forbes and The Verge make it clear that computer manufactures themselves didn't knowingly build in or allow these backdoors -- the original Der Spiegel story doesn't front this aspect as much (although concedes it). Of course, Forbes is in the business of covering business, and Verge is in the business, as a tech publication, of selling gadgets to make a living. So both of these publications are motivated (some would say cravenly) to portray the story with more nuances.

At the bottom of the story, you learn that what Snowden got ahold of was an old, outdated copy of a catalogue from 2008. You wonder why the genius hacker couldn't get a more up-to-date version but there it is...

What's important about all this, however, isn't just the story of the backdoors, but the provenance of the documents, who got to leak them, and the timing.

How did Appelbaum keep getting documents, and does this mean that a) Snowden still leaks documents b) Appelbaum had access to all or some despite whatever break he might have with Greenwald c) Greenwald doesn't control the leaks.

This is something to watch closely.

In our last episode (so I thought, but I may have lost track) over the summer, I thought that Appelbaum quarrelled with Glenn Greenwald. He called him out publicly on Twitter and accused him and Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, of sitting on Snowden stuff because they were chicken...or something.

He claimed that there was some sort of story about Tor they were sitting on.

Boy, did Jake look stupid when just a day or two after that, the Guardian published a story on Tor, and with Bruce Schneier as the techie expert, not Appelbaum. The story was odd, because on the one hand, we know the FBI took down Tor with two big cases this year, one involving a child pornography ring in Ireland, and another the Silk Road drug mart, and half the nodes, i.e. 2,000 were said to be shut down or "had purple dye" put on them to out them. Schneier didn't even mention the Silk Road bust. Earlier, Jake had been publically vilified by "the community" for not keeping watch over the exploits in Mozilla, and not warning users in time of vulnerabilities, when he bundled Tor and the Firefox browser together in order to attrack lots of newbie Tor users an make it less wonky and hard to use, so that only nerds used it. Oops.

Could that have been why they cut Jake, the Tor King, out of the loop on the story about Tor?

It then seemed that Appelbaum publicly broke with Greenwald and The Guardian, and seemed to advocate that the Snowden stash should just be "put out there" although they didn't themselves "put it out there" the way WikiLeaks has done with other things like State Department cables or Stratfor emails. That suggested they didn't have it. Right around this time Cryptome and other sites began to bitch about how Greenwald was making bank on these documents and personal gain was corrupting his vision and work for "the cause" -- and the documents should just all be posted, like WikiLeaks. They weren't.

Just so there's no confusion about this -- the cause isn't transparency. No. This is the cause of crypto-anarchy, of course, which, as we were reminded about with Assange's Wizard of Oz Big Screen appearance this week at the 30th annual convention of the aptly-named Chaos Computer Club, involves consolidating the anarchist left which openly calls for wrecking and sabotaging systems, and openly recruits systems administrators not only to wreck and sabotage, but to spill files into the, um, "knowledge commons" i.e. leaking classified government files so that enemies of liberal states can use them to defeat democracy. Truly, a lovely bunch.

So after that Tor Story, then, Greenwald announced that he was leaving the Guardian and taking an offer that no journalist could refuse, to work with millionaire Pierre Omidyar on a new media venture, which is being dubbed "NewCo" as if it is out of an economics textbook, but in fact, it has been revealed now (again by Cryptome) as already registered in August 2013 under the corporate name "First Look".

That caused a cascade of further accusations that Greenwald was monetarizing Snowden. Paul Carr, who sold out his NSFW muck-raking outfit (which never did investigative journalism for real, but just raked over the same tired muck) to Pando Daily, was leading the pack of Silicon Valley technocommunists (he constantly publishes Mark Ames of The Exiled who loathes capitalism) raging about technolibertarian Omidyar exploiting the Hero-Geek Snowden.  (I actually would submit that Omidyar is a technosocialist; different lol). Sibel Edmonds, a blogger who claims to represent the whistleblowing issues, has gotten on to this vein, and there's a whole camp now that critique the Greenwald/Snowden thing from the hard left (or the hard...something, one never knows these days as libertarians and commies converge). So that means we have the progs that critique Greenwald/Snowden from the left merely because it hurts Obama; we have the loony right and libertarians like Rand Paul embracing Greenwald/Snowden for their own cause and to fight Obama and the Democrats; and then we have some Democrats, including some congressmen who spoke out this past week against Snowden, who criticize this not so much for Obama's sake but more because they are now what constitutes, for better or worse, the "establishment" that is trying to protect a liberal democracy. I'm telling you, things are in a bad way...

Throughout this discussion, as before, the issue of who has the documents, and what Snowden gave to journalists, keeps coming up, because there are so many contradictory statements. It now seems multiple sets of journalists in different political camps have all or some of these files and are not coordinated in their leakage of them.

So do note what we have now today: an article from Appelbaum and his German media friends in Der Spiegel, not anywhere else.

(Actually, Der Spiegel was the first to get Snowden material even before Greenwald, as Poitras and Appelbaum interviewed Snowden in May and sent their interview to Der Spiegel, which then published it after Greenwald appeared in The Guardian, in probably a timed agreement which probably was fought over).

But wait. How did Appelbaum get new materials that Glenn hasn't released, if he is out of sorts with Glenn? Clearly, Appelbaum, Assange, and Sarah Harrison were all in perfect harmony as we saw from their presentation at 30c3.  They never had any falling out with each other, even if Glenn had a falling out with all or some of them.

Supposedly Snowden doesn't release new materials because supposedly he doesn't have them, but gave them all away to "journalists" in Hong Kong. That was supposedly only Poitras, Greenwald and Ewan McCaskill, whom we never heard from again, he got out of the Snowden business completely for some reason although he remains at the Guardian. My theory has always been that Appelbaum either was in Hong Kong, or met Snowden in Hawaii before Hong Kong, or simply had his own channel to him online and has maintaind it.

Of course there's Bart Gellman, who was recruited by Laura Poitras for Team Snowden -- they had met at the Center for National Security at NYU where they were both fellows.

But how does all this work? Laura and Glenn dole out sets to this one and that one? Or complete sets? Do they agree who does what? Do they fight?

Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw Greenwald come out with any leaks? It's all been Bart Gellman, ProPublica, and The New York Times lately. Greenwald must be on break, and implies he is preparing even more sensational stuff for the new publication. To be honest, I won't be surprised if this publication fails before it is born, or fails within a year of its birth.

What does all this mean? In June, Appelbaum claimed to be in direct contact with Snowden; he represented him in Germany at a prize ceremony. He hasn't publicly made this claim since then the way Greenwald has, who claims he speaks to him "daily," but there's nothing to say he isn't in contact. Given that he likely helped with the comms and set up the archives and transfer, even if there were some channel that GG would be in a position to cut him out of, he'd have retained his own back channels. Given how he gushed about Snowden's private message to him (which he made public), concerned about how Jakey was holding up under all the stress), chances are they remained in touch, despite his odd quip at 30c3 about "Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg who is still Daniel Ellsberg, and Edward Snowden who is still Edward Snowden (hopefully)." You know, that isn't a surprising thing to say given that in the hands of the Russians, anything is possible.

The leak about the online laptops is a minor leak in the oeuvre of Snowden leaks -- it's a nerd's leak that most people won't follow, and seems to have been made just in time for 30c3 to establish Jake's street cred with other hackers and to keep fresh his fake "journalist" credential (that he needs two other co-writers is indicative).

The story claims that the NSA has put trap doors in online sales so that "all our computers" ordered on line are "being watched".

I have long since stopped taking any of these stories "as is" at face value, because so many of the early ones had holes and mistakes and outright tendentious misleading claims in them.

Of course, these "journalists" don't bother to explain that the NSA develops this capacity relating to online sales of laptops to follow suspects; that they are constrained by law and internal regulations and oversight from using this just against "anybody" or "everbody". That's typical of every presentation on this subject from this gang.

In covering this, the Verge at least concedes this:

While the report does not indicate the scope of the program, or who the NSA is targeting with such wiretaps, it's a unique look at the agency's collaborative efforts with the broader intelligence community to gain hard access to communications equipment. One of the products the NSA appears to use to compromise target electronics is codenamed COTTONMOUTH, and has been available since 2009; it's a USB "hardware implant" that secretly provides the NSA with remote access to the compromised machine.

I do feel as if we are in a Wag the Dog situation now, but I can't tell who is doing what to whom.

 

Related articles

Sysadmins of the World, Unite! - Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Sarah Harrison @ 30c3

Hey! I'm Really Tired of this "Chilling Effects" Bullshit Around Snowden's Leaks

Snowden ally Applebaum says his Berlin apartment was subjected to raids

"Snowden Exiles" Paying The Price For Speaking Truth To Power

Snowden ally Appelbaum claims his Berlin apartment was invaded

Pierre Omidyar plunges first $50m into media venture with Glenn Greenwald

Who is Controlling The Snowden Documents & To What Purpose?

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

Anil Dash Silences Nick Bilton at the New York Times in Bullying Article

Wow, this is terrible, the famous Nick Bilton of the New York Times who writes about gadgets had an article up about online bullying -- it was mainly about poor Justine Sacco -- and he mentiond Anil Dash in it and Dash got the mention removed.

Awful, awful.

Shame on the Times for that.

But it's likely to go down the rat hole and no one will ever do anything about it.

Fortunately, this has been documented by the imperturbable Loren Feldman, who is not scared by these people's threats and has always maintained his independence.

Anil has tweets up which Loren Feldman reproduces, expressing outrage that  Bilton wrote about his "anger" without first clearing it with him (!), and he ended up getting himself removed from the column.

Loren wrote a comment about this on the Bilton alticle but it didn't show up. I did, too, linking to Loren's blog, and I doubt it will clear the NYT censors, either, because they hate comments that talk about flaws in reporting itself or start something with the journalist himself.

So that's when you write to the Ombudsman, and I will be doing that, even though I know in advance she will not do a thing about it.

There are some people in Silicon Valley or Alley -- Anil Dash is in the Alley -- who are influential and powerful enough that they just get rid of the criticism about them. Paul Carr is one, as we saw. He could cover for Mark Ames of the old The Exile, who bragged about having sex with a 15-year-old girl in Russia -- bragging in his book that was never described as "fiction" -- and claim that Mark Ames is just telling tall tales. Except Mark Ames himself doesn't claim this, because if he did, then everyone would find his supposed gonzo journalism a lot less gonzo. Even as fiction, it's awful, and the sort of thing that if it were somebody else, Paul Carr and Anil Dash would be going crazy, as would Jillian York. But since it's not, and it's one of their own, they are silent. Disgusting.

One thing that always happens in these cases is that if you keep criticizing, they end up accusing you of being sexist or racist. I've had this slur slung at me from both Carr and Dash. First Dash let me know that he "intervened" to make sure my blog wasn't removed when he was at this blogging platform Typepad (!) -- to let me know I was "on sufferance". Ugh.

Then, I was given a "test" -- Dash sent me a link to a forum taking him down in the most racist and outrageous fashion. I'm supposed to spend my days condemning that, but I can never speak about "black crime" in our neighbourhood --- we live a few blocks from each other -- he in a lot nicer place than I do -- because, see, I would never speak of "white crime" (so he thinks) and therefore I can't speak about something that even Obama himself, in his speech, discusses, and in critical terms.

Indeed, I'm going to follow up on this soon in a blog post about anti-Indian sentiment that I think is growing in this country as Indians assume more public and powerful positions. And I'm also going to talk about how some of them have really bad ideologies and really bad behaviour and we have to be able to call that out without being charged with "racism".

So Paul Carr picked up the Wikipedia vandalism and the nonsense about my remarks concerning Romney's digital people not having their heart in the job because they were Democrats voting for Obama (um, no, I didn't claim black people put bugs in his software to make him lose, derp) -- and Carr, too, reached for this discreditor of claiming I am "racist".

This is how these people are, and the only thing you can do is keep calling them out, keep documenting, keep trying to name and shame.

There's a good comment on Loren's site, too, showing the sub-tweets that Dash does (his favourite thing to do is put a DM in my Twitter, then unfollow me so I can't answer him).

 

Why Does Paul Carr Make Excuses for Mark Ames? Why Does SiliconValley Keep Having Trouble with Misogyny?

1.  

   CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10h

   So that @markamesexiled bragged abt sex w a 15-year-old pregnant Russian girl is just my "wierd issue with Mark" https://twitter.com/paulcarr/status/409815919913754624 …

    
2. Louise Mensch ‏@LouiseMensch 9h

   @catfitz @markamesexiled where did he do that?

    
3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9h

   @LouiseMensch @MarkAmesExiled in his book http://books.google.com/books?id=Er0eM6BsXggC&pg=PA153&lpg=PA153&dq=%22When+I+went+back+into+the+TV+room,+Andy+pulled+me+aside%22&source=bl&ots=N9POLkFnz3&sig=2ZLj8LJ5UwOWDXliTRA9_choeRs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bgOlUuqJB4_IsAS3ooDwDA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22When%20I%20went%20back%20into%20the%20TV%20room%2C%20Andy%20pulled%20me%20aside%22&f=false … see also http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/beast-in-the-east/Content?oid=902762 …

    
4. Louise Mensch ‏@LouiseMensch 9h

   @catfitz @MarkAmesExiled gross. What a repugnant little shit

    
5. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 2h

   @LouiseMensch @catfitz @MarkAmesExiled Actually, no, it was a satirical piece from the Exile. Not true. @catfitz knows that. A lazy smear

    
6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 2h

   @paulcarr @LouiseMensch What's lazy is your willingness to believe it's satire. @MarkAmesExiled has never said it was.

    
7. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 2h

   @catfitz @louisemensch @markamesexiled I believe it's satire, because I know it's satire because I'm Mark's editor, you fucking halfwit.

    
8. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 1h

   @louisemensch @catfitz: The Exile... http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/exile-201002 …

    
9. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

   @paulcarr @LouiseMensch Um, I know what the eXile is *dumb-ass* Russia is my field, I worked in Moscow. Now stop dodging this.

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   2. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 1h

      @catfitz @louisemensch You and Breitbart and every other fucking nut tries to use that same paragraph to scare Mark's editors. NEVER WORKS.

      1. 1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

            @paulcarr I have nothing to do wBreitbart. That par is in his book, and exemplifies him. He also describes forcing a girl to have abortion.

             
         2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

            @paulcarr I'm not in the business of scaring editors, you fuckwit. I've been a long admirer and even subscribe to your now failed pub.

             
         3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

            @paulcarr But I don't like seeing women treated that way. That's all. And I'm right about this, and you are too readily believing an asshole

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         4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

            @paulcarr All of Anon went wild over Steubenville & you all dutifully applauded despite their vigilantism. But one of your own? Cover-up

            @catfitz @louisemensch It doesn't strike you as odd that the only person to ever accuse Mark of this is… uh… Mark in that one column?

             

            1:21 AM - 9 Dec 13

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            1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

               @paulcarr Here's another story about this from that time http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/beast-in-the-east/Content?oid=902762 … Mark has never said this was "satired". Anywhere.

                
            2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

               @paulcarr If he is claiming this only now, that's just plain fucking scary. But then, we know how powerful asshole journalists get their way

                
            3. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 1h

               @catfitz It's not "another story", it's the exact same quote from the same page of the same book.

                
            4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

               @paulcarr The point is that he is not the only one to write about this, dumbass. Everyone in the field knows he himself bragged about it

                
            5. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

               @paulcarr Now all of a sudden, we're supposed to believe it was a lie? Why? He never gave any indication of that whatsoever.

             
         5. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

            @paulcarr Instead of calling a woman on Twitter a "fucking nut," u shd just ask @markamesexiled whether it was satire. He's never said that.

             

             

    
10. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 1h

    @catfitz @louisemensch You've raised nothing in good faith, you've been trying to smear Mark over his coverage of Greenwald.

     
11. Mona Holland ‏@MonaHol 1h

    @paulcarr @catfitz @LouiseMensch That woman detests Greenwald, and has all kinds of loony notions he/Snowden directed by Putin.

     
12. Tyler Bass ‏@TylerBass 1h

    @MonaHol @paulcarr @catfitz @LouiseMensch I just saw the Edmonds piece, feel the @ggreenwald porn lawyering point was pretty weak

     
13. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 1h

    @TylerBass @MonaHol @paulcarr @LouiseMensch @ggreenwald I don't care about porn lawyering. Porn is legal. Sex w 15 yr old isn't.

     
14. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 59m

    @catfitz @louisemensch Hopefully anyone reading your twitter stream will quickly realize you are insane, and obsessed with Mark.

     
15. Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr 42m

    @catfitz I have nothing else to say to you. You keep reposting the same paragraph/book in different ways as further evidence.

     
16. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 41m

    @paulcarr Because they're true. Ask Mark. He doesn't deny. Then I'll be happy to accept your contrite apology. Truly. I think you mean well.

     

 

Paul Carr ‏@paulcarr

@catfitz I've asked Mark. I'm his editor. He lived under my roof in Vegas. But you know him better based on a para in a satirical book. Ok.

 

 

 

2:15 AM - 9 Dec 13

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1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 20m

   @paulcarr He never said it was satirical. Why believe this now? And this is the first you're hearing about this? You must be biased.

    
2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 19m

   @paulcarr So I suppose this works like those sources you won't turn in, even if they destroy America. U keep him even if he raped a girl.

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3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 11m

   @paulcarr Remember how the CTO of Business Insider got fired for merely telling an off-colour joke about rape? so even if this is satire...

    
4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 11m

   @paulcarr I'm actually not for people losing jobs over their speech. I'm for apologies and distinguishing right from wrong, however.

    

   What an appalling interchange.
   
   Why is it always so hard with these Silicon Valley assholes and their misogyny? You would think with all the incidents and all the scandals, they would at least learn to behave outwardly and not pretend this ok.
   
   All of Silicon Valley was in an uproar over the CTO of Business Insider because he cracked an off-color joke about rape and made a few other misogynist remarks on Twitter. He was not only fired, Anil Dash demanded a meeting with him and then told him "you'll never get funding in this town again."
   
   And here's a creep who tells us in his memoirs --- which are never identified as "satire" as Paul Carr claims -- that he had sex with a 15-year-old Russian girl (actually a mother of a 3-month old baby) even knowing she was under age, and even knowing that the legal age of consent in Russia was 16 (it was later made younger, age 14,but that changes nothing).
   
   Even if this were satire, why is it ok? why do I get called a bunch of names and told I'm crazy, instead of Paul saying "I think it's satire, I agree it's pretty awful stuff but I like Mark's style" he insists I'm the problem.
   
   But here's the thing. This incident -- and the one right after it where he forces another Russian girl pregnant with his baby to have an abortion -- tell us of the awful character of this man.
   
   And that's why he doesn't have much credibility when he goes after Glenn Greenwald, who was once a porn lawyer and of course is helping a traitor destroy American security (and Europe's, too), or goes after Pierre Omidyar for funding the new media venture with Greenwald.
   
   I'm all for criticizing Greenwald and Omidyar and I do. But Ames' claim that Omidyar is responsible for farmer suicides because he funded a credit scheme for the poor just isn't credible. He doesn't interview anyone or find documents or any facts at all proving this link. He just acclaims it as true as a smear. The thing is, Ames hates big corporations, rich people, and capitalism in general. He's a real little Leninist, as his love of the National Bolshevik Eduard Limonov is emblematic of that.
   
   Since I knew Edik while Mark was still diapers, I've always found Limonov to be a manipulative fraud. Like Zhirinovsky, ultimately he works for the secret police, even if he doesn't literally, by creating magnets and inciting people and shuffling them off to jail as examples.
   
   Nothing I've read of Ames --- and I'm a subscriber -- convinces me that he has done anything but bloviate in his gonzo journo way -- which he thinks if it's hardcore enough, passes as a substitute for investigation.
   
   Carr says Ames lived with him -- I was wondering how on earth he ever brought him on. I don't know the back story, but it seems to have coloured his judgement.
   
   Here's what I know.
   
   I do not deserve to be called names, called a fucking idiot, declared insane, declared "obsessed" with Ames merely because I point out that he bragged about sex with a 15-year-old Russian girl, and that's uber creepy.
   
   Paul Carr should acknowledge that -- whether true or fiction, it's bad. If true, it really is awful that he is part of a cover-up and a denial.
   
   I don't think he should be fired, but I think Carr as the editor should say it was wrong, he gets why people say it's creepy, and he should apologize over it.
   
   Of course, he's done a lot of apologizing masking as enthusiastic stiff-upper-lip boosterism for his failed mag, which now has been rescued by Sarah Lacy.
   
   Sarah should care about this incident involving the rape of a young girl. It doesn't matter if she is drunk, or already a mother, or Russian and it "doesn't matter". It's legally and morally wrong. All of these tech journos went on and on about how wonderful Anonymous was in calling out the rape in Steubenville, heedless and even exculpatory of their terrible vigilantism that only got in the way of justice.
   
   And they make excuses for Mark Ames?
   
   Why?
   
   Because he's one of theirs?

    

 

Hey! I'm Really Tired of this "Chilling Effects" Bullshit Around Snowden's Leaks

Committee to Protect Journalists, a respected non-profit organization where I used to work in an entirely different age (at the dawn of the Internet back in 1995-1997), has kept up a stready drumbeat about the supposed "chilling effect" of the mere discussion by law-enforcers, parliamentarians and particularly UK officials about possible espionage charges against journalists related to Snowden's massive leak.

CPJ even came out with an entire report about how the Obama Administration has been the most chilling on free speech, because it has prosecuted the most whistleblowers and searched the most journalists unlawfully. I tend to agree that Obama is a problem, which I think is due to other reasons than CPJ:

1. His socialist belief system -- stealth socialism covered up with the anti-nuclear movement and "community organizing" single-issue politics meant to cover up a more radical aegnda -- which necessitates not only control of the media, but a robust agit-prop campaign (which he has instituted not only with things like the Truth Team in Obama for America/Organizing for Action and the [email protected], which incites citizens to report on their fellow Americans if they are politically correct.

2. But when the cases involve Iran, I think this is about a concerted pro-Iranian/anti-Israeli faction in the governmentn that Obama tacitly supports and allows to leak.

3. There's also the fact that when you have a left-wing or "progressive" government increasingly moving to the left, those on the hard left and radical movements from left or right see this as an opportunity to lunge and grab as much as they can to weaken the state in general.

But I really think CPJ is disingenuous here today in an editorial in defense of the Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger, and the invocation of "chilling effects," when they can't admit or even mention two really key factors in this story at all:

1. That Rusbridger has revealed agents' names, and has admitted as much. Is CPJ for allowing agents' names to be revealed? Really?

2.  That not enough research has been done - because Greenwald bristles and accuses people of suppressing press freedom tendentiously -- about what this hack was really all about -- as I have done in my compendium of history and relationships.

Hence, my answer to CPJ, still in the moderation queue:

I think CPJ has really got caught up in advocacy rhetoric here and isn't reporting the story accurately. There isn't any "chill" on reporting of the Snowden story and the leaking of the stolen classified documents whatsoever. In fact, coverage has been rampant, widespread, and raucous, all over the world, and in fact the Guardian has taken the lead.

Nothing at all has intimidated any journalists as they keep reporting the story in ever-growing hysterical fashion, despite the fact-checking even by their supporters that has forced them to correct story after story.

As for Rusbridger, he lost his chief activist journalist Greenwald and his adversarial helpers Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum, and they've left him to answer for what really the paper indeed has to take accountability for:  revealing secret agents' names.

Nowhere in this story do you explain that this is the issue; see this blogger Louise Mensch who has assiduously stayed on the story and points out that Rusbridger does not deny that he revealed agents' names, and also admits that when he sent Bamford over as a mule to the States, there were so many documents that he hadn't read them all and didn't know what was in them.

I don't think adversarial journalists (who should be in a political party doing opposition research rather than credible newspapers) are the ones to draw the line where national security is affected. They aren't honest brokers and good judge; they are the ones that directly benefit from stealing documents, both in reputational enhancement and in cash.

Greenwald kept saying that he wouldn't harm ongoing operations, and yet he has consistently harmed US relations with allies and in act in today's leak, harmed needed espionage operations against Russia, a country where journalists are murdered, which the US lawfuly and rightly cooperated on with Sweden. In fact, most of Greenwald's stories, and the fact that Snowden wound up in Russia with the help of the pro-Kremlin anarchist collective WikiLeaks beg the question
of how much this is really journalism and how much it is a radical political platform duplicitously seeking the journalistic cover.

It's as if journalism gets to excuse any act today and in a liberal democratic society, we cannot question why undemocratically, coercively, and in wildly damaging ways, a few hackers get to decide what is a secret or not.

Where's the journalism on *that*? The press corps has been supremely uninterested in investigating even the most basic obvious holes in the Snowden story, like where he was for weeks at a time in Hawaii or months at a time in Moscow.

Myths like "the US forcing Snowden to Moscow" never get pulled apart by a credulous and adulatory press corps although CPJ should know better:

As with the WikiLeaks story, there's a curious moral blindness to examining honestly the damage of this material -- you come away realizing that in fact there will never be a point when any journalist will ever concede that these leaks are harmful because they are so falsely hysterical about losing press freedom.

You might also have mentioned that the Guardian specifically paid Miranda to serve as a mule, and admitted this recently; that's not journalism.

There's no evidence that the British press has been less zealous in covering Snowden; perhaps they are simply less naive. They seem to have a better sense of Russia's obvious interest here.

If CPJ is going to endlessly claim "chilling effects" where in fact they've never gone into effect, it behooves this previously credible organization to establish just what it would accept as the line dividing publication by media and exposure through espionage or incitement of hacking. What most needs to be probed is whether Greenwald and his comrades gave Snowden a list of materials to seek in his hacking that served their past adversarial advocacy and litigation in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Mere journalistic possession of stolen documents isn't an exoneration forever from criminal charges; the manner in which the files are used and the damage they cause can and should be grounds for criminal prosecution. Whatever their public interest role, journalists are not sprinkled with holy water and exempted forever from charges under the rule of law.

Related articles

Snowden leaks 'put lives at risk'

Glenn Greenwald, Pierre Omidyar and the Dangers of Billionaire Journalism

Beyond Flip-Flops: Come on Journalists, Can't You Find Real Questions for Glenn Greenwald?

Are There Cracks in the Snowden Facade Starting to Appear in the Media?

Keller vs. Greenwald Debate

A Press as Deadly as the State

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.