Wired State

No, Jeremy David Johnson, "Sean's Smith's Last Words in a Game" is Not a Conspiracy Theory

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I'm always fascinated that anyone quotes my little blog in their article or book, let alone scholarly dissertation -- and often, given their wild prejudices in the Silicon Valley milieu so uncritical of tech and the Internet, they get it absolutely wrong.

So let me refute the many errors in this thesis by Jeremy David Johnson, published in 2014 regarding my own blog. It's scary to me that an academic could get a degree based on false reading like that, and today, be teaching others, and it doesn't matter. It's yet another indication of how people don't read online; they only scan for search-strings that fit their limited preconceptions .

Not a Conservative

There author is puzzled why "the conservative writers" for this site would quote the left-wing Guy Debord. Well, that's because I'm not a conservative writer (PS, there is only one of me, and no other authors here -- most people don't click on "about me" and they feel articles are "anonymous," which is silly, given that my name is under "about me," but that's why I try to remember to put in a by-line.) How did Johnson get the idea there were "conservative authors"? Because he didn't bother to click on "about me" and discover there was one. But more than that, he assumed that if somebody said something -- anything! -- critical about the Obama Administration's handling of the Benghazi tragedy, they "must" be conservative -- or worse! If they raised gamer Sean Smith, who died serving his country in Benghazi, as apparently Glen Beck has (although I hadn't seen anything from Beck at the time or now), my blog "must" be a "conspiracy theory". It's a very good example of force-field interpretation. If you say something "like" what someone has said in some other political grouping, regardless of what you actually said on that point or numerous others, you "must" be associated with that same political grouping. It's called "cluster thinking". I'm not a cluster thinker.

I'm a registered Democrat; I voted for Hillary Clinton. Some of my criticism of Russia, socialism, technology, open-source culture, etc. feels like it is "conservative" to some readers. I would suggest then that they do not have a very grounded understanding of the humanities and particularly human rights principles; I think my critique is liberal, not conservative, but ultimately I don't care, as I read conservatives as well as liberals and leftists every day and don't feel compelled to defend an identity. But clearly for Johnson, anyone criticizing any Democratic official, even someone who voted for the Obama Administration, must be "conservative". There can't be criticism!

But I don't have a conspiracy theory about Benghazi, and don't think it's a cover-up by Democrats.  I do think it was a planned attack, not a spontaneous riot reacting to a movie that offended Muslims -- it seems the planned nature of Benghazi on the part of the terrorists is not in dispute now, but was at the time.

Benghazi Was Not Spontaneous But a Planned Terrorist Attack

THAT was the issue at the time I wrote the blog -- a "version" of the story put out initially by some elements of the Obama Administration, consistent with their beliefs, that the attack was "spontaneous". It was not. And that is no longer in dispute today. I voted for Obama for his first term (and voted for Romney because of Obama's awful policies on Russia and Iran). I'm as critical of Victoria Nuland as anyone (including most bashers of "neo-cons," which I am not, either -- although I have absolutely no problem with her handing out bagels to the demonstrators on Maidan). I fail to see why we can't question statements coming out of the Obama Administration then or now, regardless of our political persuasions.

As I've made clear in another blog post, I think the tragedy of Benghazi isn't about what most people debated -- whether or not President Barack Obama was soft on terrorism and he and the State Department failed to hear warning signs or covered up the true nature of the tragedy. Yes, there are debates to be had about what happened in Egypt and the US Embassy there, and in general about Obama's reluctance to condemn terrorists, but that's separate from the facts on the ground about Benghazi as such. Yes, Rice gave out a version of the story based on her own internal briefings that does not seem a full account of the indications of the planned nature of the attack, which you can later read on CNN, if you don't want to hear it from me.  Eventually, Obama's own director of national intelligence said that in his report that the attack wasn't a spontaneous mob, as initially believed (due to events in Cairo) but was a planned, terrorist attack. So what? State Department briefings, like journalism, are a first draft of history.

Liberal Do-Good Mindset

I personally think the tragedy is rooted rather more specifically in the ambassador's -- and State Department's -- liberal culture of do-goodism and better-worlding. There is not enough understanding of evil and evil actors in the world, and too much assumption that these evils are fixed with improved nutrition, one laptop per child, Internet access, and clean water.  Meanwhile, the reason the UN calls a situation like Benghazi a "complex disaster" is because it is complex, i.e. man-made as well as natural, planned as well as random.

And it is a tragedy -- a story of human error -- and not a conspiracy, as far as I can tell. I myself have some insight into the "do-good culture", because I have been immersed in it in the human rights movement my whole life. Few want to blame the ambassador or his immediate superiors -- they wanted to blame Hillary Clinton or Susan Rice -- neither of whom are to blame whatsoever in my view, despite their roles at the time. (The lawsuit by the victims against Hillary failed, and that's as it should be.) Nor is Obama -- except to the extent that he is part of this overall culture of misplaced optimism about foreign places at war.

Declared Unsafe by the UN, Attacked Before Benghazi

It is much more about the local story, and what shaped the perception of local factors. If you thought you could ignore the UN in Benghazi, whose staffers explained that it was not safe there and their convoys had been attacked in April (5 months before the September 11 Benghazi attack), then you either hate the UN (a common position among US conservatives) or you are more liberal or less informed than they (it happens). The ambassador went out jogging alone in a place where Ian Martin of the UN said was not safe -- I know Martin and have the utmost respect for him. (Later Martin said the attack on the compound and the murder of Amb. Stevens and others was a "wake-up call" -- but he had given the "wake-up" call earlier when he was there himself to discuss the "transition to democracy" and his convoy was bombed). If you thought the war was over, and it was time to have hospital wing openings (Amb. Stevens was to attend one, but ended up a deceased patient there), it was because your belief in the ability to have democracy-building trumped the reality of reports -- including UN reports -- on the ground.

Not the Marines, But the Martyrs

The single most telling factor in this tragedy, to me, is that it was not the Marines guarding this American compound, which was shy of a consulate or embassy, even with an ambassador.  Normally, Marines DO guard embassies abroad. Why weren't the Marines there? Because Libya did not allow the Marines into the country to provide this duty; they did not want US troops there. I've been to many US Embassies abroad and heard many UN briefings about UN missions abroad, so I have some understanding of this issue. While sub-contracted to a Wales group, the guards included members of something called the 17 February Martyrs' Brigade who, not surprisingly with a name like that, turned out to be related to Al Qaeda.

The "Police"

My point in the blog about Sean's last words is that he describes his doubts about these guards -- he called them "police" in quotation marks in game chat, and noted they were taking pictures. That was suspicious behaviour, surely. Why were they taking pictures? They may have used them to plan the attack later. MY ONLY POINT is that Sean flagged the suspicious nature of these guards in his game chat. That meant he (and possibly others) had developed qualms about that. There's nothing in his words, or my reporting of them, that suggests any government conspiracy! How did Johnson pull that out of my blog?!

Because he had a default set to combing the Internet for writings that he felt fit his thesis about conservatives who engage in conspiracies and thus misunderstand personas online.

EVE Online

I asked questions about why Sean was playing EVE Online instead of doing his job -- that's perfectly normal, and not about a conspiracy. But I also pointed out that we cannot be sure of the time he was playing and I delved into all the mechanics of the date stamps, which are meaningless because they can be set to game time, i.e. where the developers are located; your local time, or just a random date stamp set when you make an account which you are supposed to change but may never have done so. It's not forensic proof of anything. There's also the fact that Sean could have talked on Jabber literally at any time, on a computer or phone (although cell phones were less ubiquitous then) without actually being logged on to the game -- that is common gamer's behaviour.

At no time do I suggest that this game chat constitutes proof that Sean was "playing a game" DURING the attack. We do not know that, and can't know that without internal data like his log-on times that his compound's computer systems might show. It seems unlikely he would be sitting a computer DURING an attack. In fact, his chat, if anything, internally, points to a time hours before the attack, in the morning or afternoon. Sean writes grandly if ominously, "assuming we don't die tonight," suggesting that "tonight" is still some time in the future. It's the sort of swaggering thing people in RL government and law enforcement say in games all the time -- it's a personality type. Let me suggest that if Sean was actually already in a position where he was under attack and could die, he would be running for his life, not sitting at a computer.

I make it clear, from my extensive delve into the time stamp details and so on that WE DO NOT KNOW when his chat was. ALL we know is that he was suspicious of the police. And you don't need a conspiracy theory to accentuate that point -- it merely bolsters the facts of the story that are not disputed, that the guards hired by the US for their compound in Benghazi turned against them, and that their idealized understanding of their mission in Benghazi as already in the "transition of democracy" phase instead of the "war-stopping" phase got them killed. There's no conspiracy or cover up here, nor did I claim there was one; these are the facts on the ground.

Conspiracy Theory About Sean

Johnson writes:

The insinuation here is that Smith was actually a plant for the State Department (or CIA if you ask Glenn Beck) who helped to fan the media flames by talking about the attacks within the game. In the strangest part of the death of Sean Smith, EVE Online becomes, at least for some conservatives, a tool
through which the United States government enacts fraud and treachery. Smith's death and his conversations in EVE Online are, for them, evidence of a conspiracy to fabricate an attack. EVE, then, is not so separate from the “real” world—it is a tool of politicians to shape world events.65

I don't make any such insinuation, and I really am baffled how Johnson could pull this out of my straightforward blog -- except that clearly he started with a deep prejudice. At the time I wrote about Sean Smith's words in the game, NO ONE had covered the topic. I did not see it in any news reports or anything at the time. I don't think as much attention was paid to games and gaming culture at that time -- this was pre-GamerGate. People forget how news progresses and information and conspiracies form. I didn't see anyone making any such claim about Sean nor did I make one; if they came later, that's on them.

Sean was an employee of the State Department, and not a "plant" for anyone, and I make no claim whatsoever that he is a "plant". He is merely a personality type who brags in games about RL, which may not be quite as glamorous (information officers are not CIA commandos) and who happened to say a telling thing about the "police". The ONLY point I wanted to come out of this was that Sean had an important piece of evidence about these "police" -- and studying them, their suspicious behaviour, their provenance, etc. was the direction the investigation should take. 

CIA Cover?

Is there some indication that Sean was working a "cover" position and in fact was in the CIA? I don't see any evidence of that, nor did I say that. If anything, a real CIA agent would be more trained in tradecraft and wouldn't brag about his RL position in a game.

As for some conspiracy about EVE Online and the US government, I find this preposterous, and I've never claimed anything remotely like it, and if someone has, I wonder how they could concoct it. I made a character in EVE Online years ago, but I never got beyond the spaceship -- I am not a war gamer and couldn't figure out how to do battle and just gave up, bored. EVE Online was sort of a niche game that did not have a lot of players -- while larger than, say, "Tale in the Desert," it was a more elaborate social game than World of Warcraft or other MMORPEGs.  I thought EVE had some elements of mining or strategy that might be compelling (I had read about game properties trading for huge amounts of money); EVE was discussed a lot in the Second Life circles where I was at the time and some of my friends played it. But it's a game created by a developer from Iceland, who I think playfully called his company "CCP" (Star Wars? USSR in Cyrillic? Something else?) and who has nothing to do with the US government -- quite the opposite. (EVE Online was sold last year to a South Korean game company). Did the CIA or DoD use EVE Online unbeknownst to its makers or players to do some kind of nefarious spying or RP games? I don't see any evidence of that, either, although it is always speculated about all games.  And absolutely nothing in my text made any conspiratorial point like this -- it is merely Jeremy David Johnson "reading into" it with a set of knee-jerk prejudices.

Was Sean somehow "narrating" or "anticipating" some dark, manipulated event by making his comments about his RL situation in-game, as Jeremy implies I have said (wrongly) or some conservative at all? No, not at all, and I don't say it. He's merely chatting because for him, these worlds are seamless; his friendship and socialization are real, even if based in a fictional world. So he talks about RL, as all people in such situations do. Perhaps young Jeremy has never been in a game.

Bragging In-Game

Regardless, there is only one subject here for me, and it's a narrow one, and my blogs made that clear: Sean Smith said something in game chat that indicated the attack was planned, and not spontaneous.

Johnson also writes that the following paragraph from my blog is "bizarre":

It's clear that Sean Smith was inured to danger, and his game buddies even bragged about how he told them of his dangerous assignments, which added to his allure -- it's typical in these anonymous virtual scenes that people use the coin of real life or "RL" as it is known to trump game-acquired skills and amplify them. Through the acceleration and amplification of virtuality, somebody who is an information officer can become Kissinger
or Brahimi.64

Why bizarre? Anyone who has played games, or merely studied them at least somewhat, understand this dynamic all too well, and I shouldn't have to explain it or defend it -- Johnson is the one misreading this and out of step here.

Indeed, real life is often used as the coin of the realm in virtual worlds to trump various things inside the virtual worlds. If someone is a "real" musician or "real" author in real life, they get more respect than those who play music or write stories only in Second Life. If someone is a real-life law-enforcer or military veteran, they are viewed as "better" in World of Warcraft, which may or may not be true. It also seems clear to me that Sean was inured to danger because he was in Benghazi! Hello! He had served in Iraq! Yes, State Department officials can be under great pressure to go serve in Iraq, for example, or see their careers stalled. But they can say "no". Someone who writes "we may die tonight" is somehow who has a somewhat valiant and idealistic view of both the danger of his situation and his role in it as a brave person.

I actually think that while Sean was uneasy seeing those "police" take pictures -- everything he knew about war zones and embassies would tell him that, and he was experienced -- he didn't think really they would "die tonight" at that moment. He said it merely as speculation to relieve his anxiety. After all, he hadn't been under constant gunfire at that point, like a combatant in Afghanistan. He was an information officer in a temporary US compound.

Why is this "bizarre" to assess his behaviour in this way? It's simply basic assessment of human nature. BTW, it's not a slam on Sean that he went into this situation, likely believing he was doing good and doing his duty, and that he played EVE. It's a type -- a common type in our world, to such an extent that people talk about how casually dropping that you are a Paladin in WoW or whatever can help you in certain types of job interviews. Critiquing this isn't "bizarre"; what's bizarre is not finding anything troublesome about it. THAT is what I mean about professors of communications these days, and how biased they are, and how uncritical of the Internet and Silicon Valley they are -- tending to ascribe any such criticism as "neo-con" or "the GOP" -- or worse!

Yet I'm just not following this strange thesis of Johnson -- my blog doesn't make claims for any fabricated attack designed in games by the US government or any of its officials -- that's insane. I merely pointed out that Sean's game chat is important to take seriously as indication of the true nature of the "police" -- a point which isn't about any conspiracy, but more about all the factors that went into this compound, which was not viewed as "permissive" for the US Marines. Let me suggest that such an environment that cannot stand US Marines is not one that is really in a "transition to democracy". I hope the US government, whether Democrat or Republican, understands that better now.

If Glen Beck picked up this theme of EVE Online, I didn't notice it at the time -- Benghazi was not an obsession of mine. I will have to go and study this at some point. But I assure you at the time I wrote -- which is clear from my blog and its links, and my other post about Benghazi -- Sean's "last words in a game" are only about his last words, and not the game, and not a conspiracy. The games are only a setting. We even have these words because he bragged to his pals in a game -- he was a type of personality that does that. It's normal and natural.

Real vs. Virtual

Johnson goes on at length debating whether Sean Smith the real human person was "like" his character "Vile Rat". Well, in the literal sense, no, because, um, he's a character in a game. He's like an author's fictional character, although a game is different, because the "typist" as they are often called is a real person wielding the character in real time in an immersive 3D environment -- that's not like a book or a movie experienced more passively.

But my blog isn't about the exploits of Vile Rat. It's about Sean, on Jabber (in or out of EVE Online) in which he was "OOC" or "out of character" talking about his RL job and compound security. My focus is only that, and that's not about his character. I don't have the patience to study "Vile Rat" as he is not material to this story; yes, people make characters that are extensions of and expressions of themselves, but the only thing relevant to the Benghazi investigation would be if he happened to give any other clues about the security or personnel at the compound, and it appears that he did not. End of story.

Johnson's 174-page thesis appears to be about how we "shouldn't" accept various writers' online personas as "the same" as they are (he goes into detail about Edward Snowden and his persona TRUEHoohah). I don't have time to read it now but I suspect I may disagree, as I treat game characters with much more skepticism and don't indulge in breathless and idealized theories about their "transgressive" nature that somehow decouples them from real-life responsibility. it doesn't.

Jeremy David Johnson Got It Wrong

I'm just setting the record straight on this one misread of his regarding my writings on Sean Smith. He got them very wrong, and it was because he started out with a deep prejudice not uncommon among those in his field, and suffers from "search-stringitis" common to people cruising around the Internet and clipping things that "fit" and not reading seriously for context. Today, he, as we can find on his web page, he is a lecturer on communications at the University of Pacific in Stockton. His Twitter feed contains some things I agree with, some things I'd like a second opinion on, and others I don't agree with, like the idea that the GOP "deliberately" freezes upward mobility -- which sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. This accidental online encounter has only deepened my sense that such academics, like journalists with similar prejudices, are not honest brokers in devising policy about Silicon Valley; no, I don't have a copy of Rhetoric as Posthuman Practice handy. Sigh.

To re-cap, for the tl;dr crowd:

1. Jeremy David Johnson claimed I was a conservative merely on the vague sense that if I said ANYTHING critical about Benghazi I must be conservative. I'm not. I'm a Democrat and have voted straight ticket pretty much forever. Understanding my text shouldn't depend on my political categorization, and I shouldn't have to invoke it to defend myself, because:

2. Nowhere in my post do I espouse any conspiracy theory about Benghazi, having to do with any cover-up, or even some sinister master plan somewhere in which the victims are mere puppets and "Hillary" or "Obama" the puppet-masters. They aren't. Nothing of the kind can be found in any of my text. Instead, I said that do to a certain ideological mindset of do-good liberalism -- a mindset perhaps not unlike Johnson -- the parties to Benghazi tragedy did not heed the signs of danger and a decided "not transitioning to democracy" environment. 

3. Nowhere in my post did I say that Sean Smith was a CIA agent, or in some kind of conspiracy or was some kind of hidden actor in a staged drama carried out through an online game-- what I say is that he is a gamer and a law-enforcement/government type who tends to emphasize his valiant nature -- and that he did when he said "assuming we aren't killed tonight".  Nowhere do I say that he was chatting in the game at the time of the attack because I explained we don't know that, and it seems unlikely.

4. The only point to be gleaned from Sean's speech in a game is that Benghazi was planned, and not spontaneous, and the work of terrorists, not irate townspeople. He was suspicious of "police" who were taking pictures of their compound. And that's a fact, and that got more attention later.  Since Johnson is writing in 2014, two years after Benghazi, surely he could concede this.

5. Nowhere in my post do I make any "bizarre" points but merely point out that a certain type of male who goes into danger zones in the military and plays war zones tends to brag about his exploits -- a normal point, and not "bizarre" unless you think there is no male bravado culture at all in reality or virtuality. I said that people brag about their RL to increase their reputation in games -- and in this game, Sean Smith played an intergalactic diplomat while in reality, he was an information officer in a remote US compound, to be sure, a war zone, but one in which the parties did not seem to fully assess as a war zone.

6. There are no references to any conspiracies, figures like Alex Jones or Glen Beck or anything of the sort in my blog. At the time I wrote it, I was the only one writing about his words in a game outside his gaming buddies. 

So that's all there is to it. Instead, my search-strings have been harnessed to the cause of trying to prove how conservative narratives online distort reality, and how (to compress what Johnson likely feels is a very precious and nuanced thesis) people's characters in games should not be taken as who they really are. So what have we learned here, once again, as we did with the Covington boys and a host of other stories? Liberal/leftist ideological blinkers funnel the world their their prisms and distort reality as much if not more as conservatives.

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.

 

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

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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?

Hypothesis: Is @LibertyLynx Conservative Writer Rachel Marsden?

@LibertyLynx on Twitter

Rachel Marsden

As I've been documenting, I've been under vicious attack by Prof. Craig Pirrong at the University of Houston, and his close Twitter buddy, @LibertyLynx who he claims is not his alt, but is a separate person.

It's been a puzzle to figure out why they are so driven to attack me, given that we are supposedly on the same side of many issues, particularly Russia and Snowden, but there it is, they have turned on me like vicious junkyard dogs.

Some people think Craig Pirrong *is* LibertyLynx, but he vigourously denies it, even as he says that he knows who it is. The two do indeed seem very close -- in views, and in friendship, i.e. they seem to have met each other in real life.

Ordinarily, I don't have any "need to know" who LL's real identity is, but when it reaches this level of sinister crazy, with a person constantly writing nasty and false things about me, and even threatening me with lawsuits (!) I think it's important to keep publishing my findings.

I would like to think that in harassing me in this wild fashion, both Craig and Liberty are consumed with some kind of falsely-planted information, that they have a case of mistaken identity. They both have outrageously charged me with being the stalker Mr. X (senorequis776) who in fact harasses both of them -- and me. They keep reiterating this theme that they think I deliberately "grief myself" as some kind of plausible decoy. But that's insane -- I don't have time for such nonsense and have never done such a thing in my life. I'd like to hope that if only the facts were found, they'd back off. Now I have to wonder if they are simply contriving this merely out of spite or ideological difference.

Both of them seem particularly pre-occupied with my known avatar Prokofy Neva, linked to my real-life name for the last 10 years, which they think is some dark, mysterious and sinister figure. That's insane, because my blog under the name Prokofy is an open book, as is everything else I do. The people I criticized in Second Life were hackers and griefers and people with ideologies antithetical to liberal governance and human rights -- I stand by my critique.

So in an effort to get this harassment to stop, I've written to Pirrong and asked not only him, but LibertyLynx to stop their false accusations and to remove them from their website. This has only made them double down, and go further to claim that my very emails or communications are somehow "forensic proof" that I am their stalker Mr. X.

So I've tried out various hypotheses about who this could be, and tried to understand the motive. And I think I have a good hypothesis now about the real identity of @LibertyLynx:

Rachel Marsden, the columnist for the Chicago Tribune, conservative writer, former Fox News commentator. (See also the Wikipedia talk and a list of articles here.)

I came to this conclusion finally yesterday, when various factors came together and I noticed, looking at various feeds and common re-tweets that there were three simultaneous attacks under way on Twitter yesterday all day--

1) against me and Edward Lucas, by Cryptome, Jacob Appelbaum and the other Flying Monkies (such an apt term -- h/t Tom Nicholas) from the hacker set;

2) attacks just on me from @streetwiseprof (Craig Pirrong's account) and @LibertyLynx; and

3) attacks on th3j35t3r (the Jester), a popular Twitter hacker character, who tweeted that Rachel Marsden, with whom he had clashed in the summer of last year, was trying to "climb up the flagpole of his followers" close to him to out his real identity.

Now, comments, as your mileage may vary:

th3j35t3r has me blocked. I don't care for this figure. I have no idea who he is, I forget to read his feed for months at a time and I'm not "up" on all his lore lately so someone else can bring me up to date if they like. I get the general gist. I'm aware that a lot of effort goes into finding out his identity -- including by Rachel Marsden, who wrote what seemed to me at the time to be a fairly valid and candid column -- although now, I'm not so sure. This led her to make police reports which he claims are false.

My own communications with th3j35t3r have been sparse, but I've asked him some hard direct questions, like why he appeared, like a law enforcement agent, to have pictures of the Boston Bombing within minutes of the first eye witness' report, and why, on the day before the Boston Bombing, he said he suspected Al Qaeda might infiltrate Anonymous push it to direct action attacks offline like terrorist bombs.

th3j35t3r has been declared to be Tom Ryan -- I simply have no informed opinion on this subject. I think it's unlikely, as Tom Ryan (whom I don't know, either) looks to be smarter than the th3j35t3r. Hey, note that this article written in May 2012 has Ed Snowden as an author -- yuck yuck. But it's tied to a banned Twitter account that impersonated him AFTER the real Snowden revealed his identity on June 9, 2013, and was ultimately banned; I don't think the real Snowden wrote for chronicle.su (sigh) back in 2012, but I think some prankster put that name in later.

th3j35t3r spends endless hours poking at and skirmishing with various script kiddies and the stay-at-home moms on the IRC channel playing Wendy to the Lost Boys and endlessly planning attacks on his enemies or cackling at their failures. I don't find this the most effective way to fight hackers. th3j35t3r is supposed to be fighting hackers, but I suspect he is/was one of them and uses their same methods -- except not quite, and its the fact that @AsheraResearch and others called him out on that reality that has made him angry.

Here's the discussions about and th3j35t3r and Rachel Marsden.

I have no idea why Rachel Marsden took up writing a column about the th3j35t3r, but there it is. At the time, it seemed to say more about him than her -- but if it is made up of falsehoods, it wouldn't, it would say more about her. I have no knowledge to confirm or deny any of this. Thoughts?

Rachel Marsden's columns, taken alone without the fable of her colourful life, seemed normal and within the realm of the conservative/libertarian right to me. She is productive and writes about all the topics that definitely need writing about -- Syria, attacks on capitalism, Russia and the Olympics. I never saw anything terribly "off" on them, i.e. loony, but some of them were "not for us" as they more conservative. Being a Fox news commentator as she was wouldn't be a disqualifier for me, although I don't watch Fox News (and only two million people do).

The string of accusations made against Rachel Marsden about stalking might be true, but look where they come from -- the left.

They might have some basis, but might not, as one of the most common things that hackers do when they stalk and harass women is try to turn the tables with an Eddie Haskell routine and claim that they are the ones being stalked, and then cry "victim." I've seen this numerous times. On the other hand, there's at least one case in her public record of her stalking an ex-boyfriend that has court papers that go with it, although it appears not to involve a conviction but some kind of warning for a period of probation or something.  Then there are several others -- and it's a case of he-said, she-said.

th3j35t3r has compiled a lot of this, judge for yourself.

As noted, Rachel Marsden's life has been very colourful -- she had an affair with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who is a certifiable ass -- his Randian Objectivism and manipulation of people and the horror that is the creation of Wikipedia all speak for themselves.  Her affair went sour -- no surprise there. Apparently she was trying to get her Wikipedia entry fixed or de-vandalized -- hey, I know what's that like, as mine is constantly vandalized.

In re-reading Wales' entry on Wikipedia, I was struck by something interesting -- he was in Chicago, and working in a company doing finance, when he wanted to contribute an entry to the precursor of Wikipedia, Nupedia, and was embarassed to do so, because he feared that his peer reviewers, real finance professors, would show him up. Doesn't that say it all? At the very heart of Wikipedia is an insecure Objectivist asshole's desire not to face the music with his inadequacies and accept someone might be more of an expert than he, so he decided the entire system had to be constructed on anonymous fucktards writing tripe about people and events about which they aren't experts -- and no one can fix it, because of the pseudo-science of the arcane editing process itself, in which you must "be an expert."

But that brings me to the touchpoints on Rachel Marsden and LibertyLynx: Chicago and finance. Rachel doesn't live in Chicago, but she writes for the Chicago Tribune regularly, so maybe she travels there. And somehow, she may have come into contact with Craig Pirrong in person, when he taught there  -- or maybe they merely met on line. Perhaps they simply go to the same conservative talk shows or conferences or meet-ups.

She's a widely-travelled journalist, and has been everywhere, evidently even to Moscow. So let's go through the list of clues that have been compiled (and many of them in fact not by me, but others just as disturbed as me at the whole LibertyLynx persona and its viciousness):

o has lived and worked in Russia and has Russian relatives

I have no idea if Marsden has any relatives in Russia -- I don't see any reference to it -- but she seems to have gone to Russia to interview or write about people. Except, she could have done this from Paris.

@LibertyLynx has made repeated references to relatives (in-laws? Distant cousins?) in Russia but does not appear to be Russian herself, and almost never makes links to Russian web sites as if she doesn't read Russian.

It does not seem readily apparent that Marsden went to Russia, although she has written about it a lot.

Marsden worked for the Free Congress Foundation in 2002, headed by Paul Weyrich. She was said to be fired when her harassment law suit in Canada came to light (we have no idea if this is true given propensity of the left to oppo-research the right).  The FCF was involved in a conference in 2002 in Moscow. Weyrich himself did not attend a forum in Moscow, but he sent a "stand-in". Was that Marsden, and is that when she took the photo of herself on Red Square in the Russian hat? Or did she go some other time? Who knows? Some people think that photo is "photoshopped" from an Angelina Jolie movie. Maybe it's actually Marsden with a scarf over her mouth and a hat pulled down so you can't readiliy recognize her? The nose looks the same (if looked at from a certain angle if her head is tilted down -- otherwise, not the same. The eyes are also similar -- but it depends on the angle. Any of the photos may have been photoshopped as well.)

o has been to a Russian closed city

@LibertyLynx's tweets about visits to a closed city were deleted but have been archived. It's not easy for foreigners to get into closed cities, i.e. places where traditionally classified/secret work has gone on, or near sensitive military installations or borders, and if she did this, that alone could get her in trouble with the authorities and earn her warnings from the FSB. @LibertyLynx has repeatedly invoked threats from the FSB as a reason for her pseudonymity -- but we don't know that this is even true for that typist, or even for Rachel Marsden.

o obsessed with the Snowden case -- of course @LibertyLynx writes about Snowden constantly and Marsden she has written numerous columns like this one.

o critical of Russia and Putin -- but doesn't love overly love opposition

Most of LL's tweets are anti-Putin. Marsden, too, is critical of Putin's PR blitz.

Here Marsden criticizes Pussy Riot in much the same way I would.

I don't recall @LibertyLynx criticizing Pussy Riot, however, she seemed to retweet the news about their imprisonment like every other critical Russia watcher.

o Ukraine

@LibertyLynx has been steadily obsessed with the Maidan protests for weeks. But Rachel Marsden seems to be jaded about Ukraine - and makes some good points about how you can't manufacture revolution off Facebook.

o attended or covered the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and had some incident related to Canada house

A clue that @LibertyLynx  has dropped a number of times is that she was at the 2002 Sochi Olympics and followed skating closely, and hung out with people by Canada House one night.

These tweets may have been deleted, but here is one, and  and  you can see some of the people having conversations with LL about this still. In Google cache, you can see the reference to the "bad experience."

Since Marsden is Canadian, and wrote an article about the 2002 Olympics, and was reported as travelling to the US in 2002, this seems to fit.  This very specific clue that doesn't fit for a lot of other Russia hands, emigres, pundits, etc. who might seem to be LL -- but it fits for Marsden. As noted,  LL seems to have deleted some of these tweets; we recall them. There's this, too.

o dislikes Wikipedia and the Silicon Valley culture

LL frequently makes comments against various figures, notably Elon Musk, the electric car inventor, and has also said she has lived in, or visited San Francisco, and happened to go to a funders' dinner where there were some big Silicon Valley people she met

This could be consistent with Marsden's soured romance with Jimmy Wales. That might be Marsden meeting Wales or others related to him.

o concerned about hackers attacking infrastructure

The last fight that I had with @LibertyLynx and @Streetwiseprof last was about his claims that hackers are attacking the stock market and infrastructure, and my skepticism not about the fact that hackers do this -- of course they do -- but skepticism that Jacob Appelbaum/Snowden etc are the ones specifically doing this; and then @LibertyLynx's fury at me for disagreeing somewhat on this point.

As it happens, Rachel Marsden wrote a column recently this month about hacker attacks on infrastructure.

o Boston terriers

Neither LibertyLynx nor Rachel Marsden appear to have written about Boston terriers.

There seems to be enough there of a "match" to make a hypothesis that Rachel Marsden is indeed LibertyLynx (and there are other very similar "Liberty" accounts like @LibertyTango and @LibertyImages and they even talk to each other that sound the same).

There are a few key details that LibertyLynx herself has told me about her ostensible life experience that can't be matched, but not everything is on the Internet, she may not be telling the truth, and there may be an effort to drop false clues. For example, the bit about the tennis -- when maybe the issue is that Marsden was a swimmer, not a tennis player.

When the left attacks people it doesn't like, it's happy to drum up all kinds of vicious falsehoods or exaggerations about them. This type of article about Marsden is typical, from the Daily Kos. So I'd be inclined to cut this person slack, simply because I know what leftists and hackers do to females they don't like on the Internet, I've been through it.

Even so, the viciousness of LibertyLynx to me for no reason merely because I disagree on a few points and don't care for her harassment of ideological opponents; the curious recurring obsessiveness that Marsden appears to have for her targets;  the pictures' striking similarity; the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics coincidence; and a few other things stand out for me. I think we have a match.

Yet, I pose this only as a question and a hypothesis simply because I've seen it happen before where things seem to match -- and then fall apart. You can select out characteristic information from anyone, and then match it selectively to other information and it seems to "fit."

I also can't rule out that the enemies of Marsden who see her as a stalker might then decide she "must be" @LibertyLynx who has been harassing me, and thus pin LL's bad behaviour on this Canadian columnist for the Chicago Tribune. And no doubt, in order to preserve her pseudonym, if LL *is* Marsden, Marsden would simply ignore this post or any speculation about her relationship to Pirrong or would deny it.

Ultimately, if any of these characters claim to have some "kompromat" on me, they should publish it rather than merely invoking it as a threat or threatening lawsuits. Then we could judge what it is. They could also contact a reputable journalist about it, if they really believe in their material, and subject it to scrutiny. They don't seem to be willing to do that.

 

 

Prof. Craig Pirrong AKA @streetwiseprof Continues to Harass Me Online for My Views

I don't think I've ever been harassed so much in my life before as I have been by Prof. Craig Pirrong and his alt or sock puppet or "associate" LibertyLynx, an anonymous account on Twitter. There is a vicious, creepy edge to it that I don't think I've ever seen, and believe me, I've seen lots of harassment online as a female blogger criticizing the largely male tech world.

Unlike people in various online communities like Twitter or Second Life who have harassed me only there in virtual reality, Pirrong/LibertyLynx have tried to discredit me in real life and try to completely blacken my reputation in real life to undermine me with colleagues and generally in the communities I write in. That's really spooky. Why?

I've had people in my field -- the Registan bunch -- attack me if I criticized their views, and relentlessly harass me and even complain to a boss -- but it is nothing like the venom, the energy, and the persistence -- for weeks on end -- that Pirrong and LibertyLynx have brought to this task. Why?

I can't imagine why that would be necessary for an only moderately well-known professor at the University of Houston and his alt or associate, who is known for his foul-mouthed blogging even in his own field to go after me -- especially if his libertarian views would supposedly be protective of free speech. I'm not in his field and pose no threat to him; he blogs further afield on other topics like Russia, but there, too, my little Minding Russia blog probably gets less readers than his does, even if Wired State probably gets many more. Still, it is no big deal. None of this makes any sense.

Yes, we're supposed to believe that LibertyLynx is a different person than Craig Pirrong, but I am not the only one who thinks they are likely the same person.

LibertyLynx tells us that there are "all these people" who knows who she is and it's just that *I'm* not being told, so that she won't "become my victim" -- as if my only purpose in publicizing their harassment is to out her real identity.

Pirrong, who blogs by the name Streetwise Professor (@streetwiseprof) has constructed an entire set of myths that he is using now to endlessly heckle and harass me and attempt to discredit me to other people. These outright falsehoods are:

o that I am in fact Mr. X or @senorequis1776 or @Fire20Committee or other sock puppets that have been harassing him, me, John Schindler and others.

o that I'm jealous of other people who are cited or publishing on Snowden, and therefore I've set up these attack accounts

o that I have some sort of discredited past in Second Life as someone who ran various sock puppets harassing other people

o that I have been "doxed" or "outed" on my Second Life accounts and have "made lemonade out of lemons" with this situation.

To this, add the heckling of LL:

o that I had a good career "30  years ago" (when I was 27? lol) but then "something happened to me".

o or I have "spent the last 10 years living a virtual life as a man in Second Life"

o that I have "misrepresented my work record" or somehow haven't been properly "vetted" and am "not who I seem".

o that I "hounded into death" a hacker who was dying of AIDS and somehow did something wrong in covering his story on my blog.

And lots more in this vein.

The reason why I keep this section  of my blog regularly updated and include a very long biography is to address and refute handily these recurring concoctions that hackers make against me -- and the opportunists like LibertyLynx who pick up their silly themes.

So let me refute these insane, vicious smears once again:

1. My life is an open book, my work life is online in my publications. I haven't misrepresented anything at all about my work life. Everyone in my community of Eurasia watchers knows me, my employers, and my colleagues. I have never been fired from any job except a waitress job about 35 years ago. I've always moved from one job to another voluntarily and have always been fully employed.

2. I have never committed any crime, I have never been investigated for any crime, and this insinuation is particularly damaging to my character.  I don't drive and have no driving offenses. I pay taxes on an installment plan. I have never incurred any fines. In Second Life, a group  of anonymous people who used to harass me claimed falsely I was guilty of plagiariasm because they had a case of mistaken identity -- it was a journalist with the same name, no relation to me.

3. I don't have sock puppets used to heckle or blog furtively without accountability whatsoever. I want all the credit on my own name. My Second Life avatar is linked to my real name and has been for 10  years of its existence.

4. As everyone who has followed my popular Second Life blog for years know, before I had the name "Prokofy Neva" in Second Life, I had the name "Dyerbrook" in the Sims  Online (2002). I made a critical comment to the New York Times under my real name about Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar), a professor of linguistics with a constantly changing history of universities, who is an avid supporter of hackers in movements like Anonymous. He detected I was the same person because I wrote for his newspaper, the Alphaville Herald, back then. Since Dyerbrook and Prokofy were always linked between the two worlds, he then gave my identity to others and they published my real name, occupation and location on the Second Life forum because they didn't like my criticism of hackers and favoured insider geeks. The mods -- Linden Lab employees -- who colluded on this on the IRC channel as was later discovered, did nothing about this grotesque violation of my privacy against their terms of service, and I continue to be harassed a decade later by people because I use my real name.

I preferred to blog about virtual worlds under the name Prokofy but there was never any mystery about my identity, and it was always linked.

5. I have not lived the last ten years somehow "lost in a virtual world". I had a small business in Second Life and was active in the community to follow the issues there with are replicated in the wider Internet. I'm proud of my tenure in virtual worlds and very happy with the knowledge I have gained from them and interacting with some of the most important technologists of our age from Philip Rosedale to Will Wright. There is no shame in having an avatar and participating in a virtual world whatsoever. It is a creative and interesting endeavour. While I have had this avatar, I've raised two children as a single mother and always stayed fully employed and involved in my own community. The volumes of books translated and articles written and human rights causes I have taken up over this time speak for themselves as real, not virtual.

SWP's and LL's obsession with my avatar Prokofy and my blog is odd. Perhaps it's because he/they, too, fear they will be outed? I have no need to learn the identity of this person and hey, Craig, no one is going to out your little toon. When you persist in such outrageous behaviour, however, attacking me, I'm not the only one who wonders what is really going on and what this is about and who is behind it.

6. As noted before, I didn't harass any AIDS "journalist". A hacker and griefer in Second Life named Deadly Codec (Joshua MacCracken), who used to fly around with a group called the Patriotic Nigras (4chan offshoot) and spew racist, anti-gay spam and textures, and who used to crash servers and harass people for years, claimed to have a change of heart. He then revealed his real name, and revealed that he was in love with the supposedly female editor of the Alphaville Herald, Pixeleen Mistral, who was eventually outed as a man, a famous Internet pioneer named Mark McCahill (who, BTW, has been silent about this entire story for years). Joshua MacCracken claimed that when he discovered Pixeleen was a man, he decided that he might be gay, and began going to gay and trans clubs and contracted AIDS.

Given how quickly he then died of AIDS within months of this revelation. we have to wonder if his story of the beginning of his gay experimentation and the timeline of his contraction of AIDS was true. But more to the point, reporting on his antics was normal and legitimate, distrusting his narrative was required. I expressed doubts about the sincerity of this man -- who used to spew banners against blacks and Jews and claimed they were weeping about AIDS at the Wailing Wall -- and rightly asked if in fact he was making up stuff. It was legitimate. It was necessary in a virtual world where people lie and hide their identities -- you know, like LL is doing now.

Interestingly, the Wrong Hands, a group of SL griefers related to the old 4chan and said to be associated with LulzSec, picked up one of their fake themes of "the outing of their privacy" the fact that a member of the JLU (who used to abuse-report their violations of the TOS and keep a database about them) contacted the sister of McCracken to express condolences. She had an open Facebook account, with an open notice about her brother's death, and yet this was somehow trolled into "a violation of privacy" which TWH endlessly manipulated as they did my "harassment of an AIDS journalist."

This person made a video claiming that I was terrible for not believing him, in which other people (who had harassed me and crashed my servers) joined in, in order to create a fake story of me as some kind of persecutors of gays -- in the manner in which hacker movements do culture jamming and use psy-war on people. Of course I support gay rights and have nothing but compassion for those with AIDS and donated to the Gay Men's Health Crisis for years. It's an insane accusation and only in the madness of Second Life and Twitter could you find such a false and contrived claim.

It only got more weird, as this man then refused to take his medications for some reason, and then was falsely reported as dead when in fact he was not dead, but only very sick. Precisely because of the false reports and rumours, I behaved completely like a normal, legitimate reporter and called up the funeral home to make sure that the ad online was real, and not a hack, to confirm there was a death. That's all. It might distress his family that their relative was a notorious griefer and teller of tall tales in Second Life whom people didn't believe, but he was a public figure (he published a few articles in the local free shopper, advocating for medical marijuana and also telling about his sad Second Life love affair). I didn't do anything wrong except report on a story of a colourful figure in SL, just as I had done with scores of others -- some of whom didn't like my critical reports. The end.

7. That brings me to other cases that LibertyLynx images are cases of me "stalking" or "harassing" people. This is truly bizarre. In fact, there's been a handful of people stalking me from Woodbury University's digital arts department. Several of them have aged out of that university by now, but the dean, who was among the griefers -- yes, he thought it was a great idea to practice "transgressive behaviour" in order to study it -- may still be there. Everyone in the Second Life community gets it about these people -- they were banned multiple times from SL as they kept returning on alts; their servers were seized 4-5 times over as many years, and they finally had lawyers to deal with. The reasons they were banned is because they harassed not only me, but others in the community and also engaged in all kinds of offenses from copyright theft to unleashing malicious scripts and crashing servers. My abuse reports of their bad behaviour were among many filed by numerous people in that community. I was never banned from SL and remain in good standing. While I was banned for a period of about two years from the company forums when some of the employees colluded with the hackers, after they were let go I was restored and remain in good standing.

8. There are a few other people I've written about critically in Second Life, some of whom mercilessly harassed me for years (Benjamin Duranske, and Dale from IBM, for example) merely because I continued to criticize the geek culture they purveyed and tried to use as a grounds for online governance. I've always just taken the attitude that such harassment is something you just abuse-report, document, and move on. I do believe in publicizing it rather than "not feeding the trolls" because I think it helps create the record needed to defeat it. Given how these characters delight in Fisking and word-salad and culture-jamming, it's just useful to keep documenting what they really do. One of their classic claims is that someone who criticizes them stalks them, when in fact, they are the actual ones harassing people. The hate-page that Duranske and his supporters maintained to harm my Google results for year and years is testimony to the pettiness of mediocre minds on the Internet that become entranced with Big Ideas like the Singularity.

9. In the context of the Central Asian field, where I have also been writing for years, LibertyLynx also repeatedly mentions two people she has befriended from somewhere, Joshua Foust and Sarah Kendzior (Nathan Hamm is another one) and claims falsely about me that I stalk, them, too, and have "ruined their careers." Neither of them have made this claim themselves and are now employed. If they were let go from previous jobs, it had nothing to do with me, or even their bad behaviour or dubious ideological positions, which others noted, but because the funding for the field of Central Asian studies has been shrinking.

In point of fact, it wsa Sarah Kendzior who went to *my* employer to completely hysterically complain about *me* because I criticized her theses in academic papers. No kidding. These thin-skinned geeky Internet kids can dish out the hate, often behind sock puppets, but they cannot take the most basic criticism of their own work. It really does boggle the mind. Both she and her colleagues Katy Pearce and Nathan Hamm spent months on end heckling me and undermining my writing for EurasiaNet -- it was a sight to behold. The energy and vehemence that Foust, Kendzior, Hamm and Pearce put into their attacks on me seemed orchestrated by something beyond their own force. I've never been able to understand it, or who/what LibertyLynx is then in hooking up with this particular gang.

I repeatedly criticized their blog posts because I felt they were justifying the regimes of Central Asia and denigrating the opposition and human rights movements in a sophisticated but creepy way. I didn't start my blog Different Stans to "stalk them"; I started it to create a record of criticism against this particular school of thought, International Relations Realism. This is a perfectly legitimate, legal, and necessary activity. My blog is filled with many kinds of posts, some about their views, some about the people in the countries themselves, some about the US government's poor positions -- this is all on the record and easily evaluated.

10. Both SWP and LL claim that they have "forensic evidence" that they are going to use to "get me". I can't imagine what they are talking about. A page that LibertyLynx keeps linking to is one called "Invalid Interlocutors" which actually, I need to update and republish, it's a great page! It explains the methods and means by which various hackers and their enablers argued -- i.e. the "fallacies" argumentation -- in order to suppress criticism and dissent.

Among the ways in which LL says she has "forensic evidence" is that she claims to have a script -- a new "styology" program that examines semantics and determines whether two people writing under different names are the same person or not. This program, a version of others that claimed the same thing in past years, was presented at 30c3 -- which lets us know something about its legitimacy already. I can't imagine that a program of this nature could be reliable, or be admissible in court, but I can only say: bring it. I'd be curious if I fed in the texts of a wide range of people whether they'd all come out as the same person merely because they were all from the mid-West or all Americans born in the 1950s or some category like that.

Apparently SWP and LL also claim to have some other "forensic evidence" (URLs?) that prove I am Mr. X. I can't imagine how this could be, and I can only state again that I turned over all the URLs I had for Mr. X to Craig when he said his university was investigating the attacks on him. They may prove nothing or they may be helpful, who knows. At that time, he claimed that "he knew who it was" and made no claims that it was me. Very odd.

It's also odd that SWP was so eager to be my friend, that he reported to me in a personal email that Foust had lifted my blog ideas and insights. Since I couldn't read the text, SWP ended up buying a $50 a year subscription to Talking Points Memo, then sending me a paste-up of the text of Foust's article so I could see that it copied me. THAT is evidence of how he friendly he was to me back then -- too friendly? -- and how he viewed Foust at the time (and may still view him, I have no idea; meanwhile, his sock puppet or sidekick LibertyLynx is friendly to Foust and claims I "stalk" Foust).

11. Unfortunately, the relentless ranting and raging of these two printing falsehoods day after day about me on Twitter and on SWP's blog, has gotten some of their Twitter friends to accept lies about me.  They lie on big things, i.e. claiming I've misrepresented who I am or have been involved in some dark activity in SL, and little things i.e. claiming I must be "drunk" or "crazy" if I just happened not to notice a certain blog post was in August, not January (!) -- a fact I quickly discovered myself when I began googling for information about stock market attacks -- duh.

12. Most ominously, both SWP and LL claim they are going to sue me and tie me up with litigation with their "forensic" evidence. LL claimed that she had files of "ten years of evidence" and SWP said that this was due to my own "graphomania." Sigh.  It boggles the mind. I don't know how people can be this sick and creepy -- perhaps it is out of fear?

Craig Pirrong has been under enormous stress lately because the New York Times  has criticized his academic work -- a far more serious critic than me about his little blogs unrelated to his job per se. And I think that's part of what is making him frenetic when he thinks his LibertyLynx alt could be facing having her cover blown. I think either LibertyLynx is important to him as an alt, or, if actually a real, separate person, important to him as a soul mate who can be even more candid and vulgar than he can on various issues under his own name.

I can only say -- keep your little toon, Craig, or keep your little mysterious "associate". Leave me alone. I will go on feeling as free as I always have to criticize your blogs on Snowden and any other issues just as I do with any other blogger.

False accusations of stalking and harassing -- when in fact there is a real stalker and real persecutor out there harming people -- is really over the top. I don't know what is driving this, but it should stop.

What is this REALLY about? I try to figure out what "incorrect" view I have in the libertarian monoverse than has to be "stamped out and discredited". Or is it merely provincial spite and jealousy over the fact that I self-published a book that got a few nice mentions from journalists? Surely someone who is a respected professor with multiple publications could not be jealous in this fashion? It makes no sense.

I can't spend too much more time on this, especially because my "About Me" and "Advice to Google Witch-Hunters already has lenghty rebuttals to the idiotic falsehoods purveyed about me by hackers mad at my critique of hacking in the pass.

 

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

The Week in MIPS or The AIDS Duck Has Landed?

Duck landing by Tony Riley

I don't have a TV, and haven't had one for ten years, so I didn't know what "Duck Dynasty" is. I had once seen a poster for the show on a bus shelter, and thought it was a one-time movie. Apparently, somebody decided to give it a far longer shelf-life so it's a sit-com or a series *shudder*. So I'll leave that one to others to dissect - Cathy Young has a particularly good piece about all his on RealClearPolitics.

Justine Sacco's saga, however, I watched unfold on Twitter, which is my main news source. That is, it isn't the things people say on Twitter that is my source, but merely the links it provides in a steady stream to all the major news stories in the world from a variety of perspectives.

MEDIA INDUCED PSYCHOSIS SYNDROME

Both these stories are, of course, text-book cases of what cube 3 (Larry Rosenthal) calls "MIPS" (Media Induced Psychosis Syndrome). You can read about it here on his blog. You can even order book bags and mugs with that great logo (and I've been meaning to get the book bag.

 Yes, we get it that this wretched woman Justine tweeted something completely assanine, stupid and yes, racist. And because she worked for a gigantic public relations firm, she was fired instantly and the company fell all over itself to apologize. Then she apologized. Loads of people got to beat their breasts in wild self-aggrandized self-justification with life-ruination as the goal. But when "the world" (which means that tiny percentage of people on the planet who a) have cell phones b) have Twitter c) get involved in "progressive causes") becomes involved in a story like this, it's mass hysteria and never ends well.

NO ONE SHOULD BE FIRED OVER A TWEET

Generally, I don't believe people should be fired from their jobs over Twitter. The engineering of the firing of the Business Insider CTO by Wired State apparatchiks Anil Dash and Jillian York was utterly reprehensible and shrinks freedom of expression ever smaller. If an employee tweets something incapatible with the company line, you should make sure he isn't on the company account, that his own account carries a disclaimer -- and then just not follow him if you don't like what he says. Make your own policy clear to your followers, and call it a day. When enough people start doing this as a matter of course, we'll get past this very bad period when a few very bad, very oppressive people are trying to control the speech of everyone for no good reason.

To be sure, I thought that the firing of @natsecwonk was appropriate because he was a government official anonymously tweeting, and tweeting government information that was not on the record, and that's simply incompatible with good government or oath of office. I don't think government officials should get to make anonymous accounts and then fire off nasty tweets about their colleagues and various tid-bits out of context to vent their spleen. If you want to do that, don't work for the government. Fortunately, @natsecwonk has found a second life as a consultant somewhere else and survived his ordeal.

But I don't think people in the private sector should be fired, however, because speech offenses should not be grounds for losing your very livelihood. There are a variety of penalties, from suspension, to compelling an apology, to doing community service, to making amends, to be shifted to another position, short of taking food off someone's table.

I REJECT TWITTER GAGS

Hey, I get to say this because I know what it's like to get a Twitter gag at work, and not for anything I've said on Twitter, but fear of what I *might* say on Twitter, merely because of what I said in criticism in the comments of the Registan.com blog, in response to some really vicious tweeters who then worked mightily to try to get me fired because they didn't like my legitimate and much-needed criticism of their reprehensible views slyly favouring Central Asian dictators: Joshua Foust, Nathan Hamm, Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce.

Each one of these people is responsible for real harm to me and my family by literally removing food from my table by urging that I be fired -- and then hastening events whereby I quit anyway, because the conditions of work became unbearable. Interestingly, three out of these four themselves lost their jobs within a year, and probably their vicious tweeting had at least some role in their fates. I've recovered (although please do hit my tip jar), but I will never, ever work for anybody who says I can't tweet what I want on Twitter or will fire me over something I say on Twitter. If you don't like what I say on Twitter, don't follow me. Don't make it hard for me to feed my children. Thank you.

FIRST AMENDMENT SPIRIT

So again: I'm for people being called out and condemned if they say something either contrary to company policy or in poor taste or abusive and discriminatory. But bad speech should never be something that causes people serious injury like loss of employment or fining or jailing. That's contrary to the First Amendment in spirit, even if non-state actors can make policies falling short of the liberalism of the First Amendment because it only applies to government (although no one has ever tested the oppressiveness of government web sites that suppress speech exactly like any Silicon Valley social media provider in exactly the same ways with exactly the same language).

WHAT THIS REALLY IS ABOUT: POLITICAL WARFARE

The issue with Justine isn't just about the First Amendment and her theoretical right to say whatever crazy racist damn thing her airheaded whim moves her to say while drunk on Twitter. We get that her employer isn't bound by the First Amendment and for its own reputational integrity feels they have to fire her. 

But no, it's about what kind of society we get when the consequences of misguided tweets are like Soviet Russia -- the GULAG -- and when we let virulently hateful politically-correct movements take over all politics and stamp out all dissent.

"The Internet" went wild, of course, in the way only "the Internet" can, with memes and fake accounts and "get her" posse antics. The smug sense of self-satisfaction was palpable everywhere.

And nowhere was it as bad as with Sam Biddle, the ValleyWag guy who is sometimes viciously funny, and sometimes funnily vicious and sometimes just uninteresting (I forget to read him for weeks at a time.)  Drinking deeply of that Silicon Valley Better Worldism bullshit himself even as he always skews others, Biddle turned in this idiotic tweet:

No one cares that I was first but I will know I united black and white twitters. Welcome to post-racial twitter, you're welcome, god bless

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) December 21, 2013

Sam caught this woman because she was with the big PR agency (otherwise he might not have bothered) and there is nothing more that Silicon Valley types HATE with the passion of a thousand suns than PR firms, especially the East Coast type. Amanda Chapel had a long run taking down Edelman, until her enemies savagely outed her and slapped a libel suit on her. I can remember the Crayonistas calling every other company flak "fucktards" on the the Alphaville Herald. It's new media hates old media on this one and the skewer is sharp and twisted endlessly.

Um, post-racial Twitter? Really, big guy? You spear-head a movement of politically-perfect persons who have scrubbed racism entirely from their souls? You're sure?

But here's what this stuff is REALLY about, and why I happily push back hard against it every time I get a chance.

IT'S NOT ABOUT RACISM, BUT EXPLOITATION OF THE RACISM SMEAR

It's not really about stopping racism, or making a nicer social media environment, or a better post-racial world where everybody can hold hands and sing Kumbahah.

It's about using the racism card in a hard left or "progressive" or socialist movement to eradicate any opposition to the left by tarring it with the racism brush.

It's exterminism.

It's not about countering bad politics with good; it's about eliminating a rival that is sometimes correct in calling out the hypocrisy of the left.

Example: what did everybody miss on Twitter because they were obsessed with the drama of one ditzy white girl who was going to get a whallop when she landed in now black-ruled South Africa? (She herself was originally from South Africa in the minority, obviously).

They missed, oh, things like Ambassador Samantha Power, the US envoy to the UN, flying to the Central African Republic, which is the scene of a terrible bloodbath now with hundreds massacred, as Christians and Muslims clash around corrupt government leaders and abusive rebels struggling for power. Now, Teja Cole might whine that this is white saviour industrial complex but I don't care. I think it's fine for white people to care about Africa and try to help.  Yes, we can all have a debate about how aid goes wrong in Africa. But hey, I don't notice African governments clicking REFUND on any of the aid -- hardly sufficient -- the rich world does dispense to Africa because the donors aren't politically correct enough or neo-colonialists.

Here's where I really get angry with this stuff though: when I see it is about completely demonizing the right. No conservative group, the Republic Party, anybody on the right, is legitimate unless they toe absolutely up to the line of what the hard left believes is the proper set of beliefs on race and sex and many other topics. And they get to decide. And it's not about demonizing the right, ultimately, it's about demonizing pluralism, period.

There's no universal standard they concede, like the idea that "racism" really worthy of getting "the whole world" involved would actually be advocating barring people from equality, or actually inciting mass crimes against humanity, not tweeting something idiotic to your few followers (I don't know how many she had before the scandal, but it wasn't the thousands she got after).

What kind of racism would that be? Well, aside from the speech racism that already gets enormous amounts of attention (of the ineffectual kind) on Twitter, how about the kind of racism that the World Conference Against Racism didn't care to focus on, like the hatred of the Dalit or "untouchables" in India, that caused so many people to take the side of an Indian diplomat in New York City who got the standard treatment of all detainees over her exploitation of her domestic worker, and not the worker, who is Dalit.

Bigoted or hateful talk is easily fixed - you push back and you let the person know how wrong they are, how out of touch they are, and how unacceptable they are in decent company. Taking food off their table in spite and vindictiveness hardly accomplishes these goals; indeed it sets us up for a worse situation where we have no pluralism or true equality and tolerance of differences in society.

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE BULLIED AS A 'RACIST'

I know what it's like to be endlessly bullied and harassed for my critical blog with the false use of the "racism" card. I've had my Wikipedia constantly vandalized; I've been smeared with the false accusation of racism; I've been deluged with thousands of spam or hate messages and I endlessly get attacked by a small group of sectarians plus a few high profile Silicon Valley "thought leaders" because of this blog entry.

Um, no, I didn't say that "Romney lost the election because black people deliberately sabotaged his digital work and put bugs in his code" (!). Derp. That's just loony and insane. Romney didn't lose merely because his apps crapped out -- there were many other reasons for his loss, notably the bugging of his lunch-time quip about "the 47%" (not to be confused with "the 99%") which he could never overcome -- and a concerted campaign to discredit  him as "Richie Rich" although he was no George Soros. One ad even accused him of causing the death of a woman of cancer because her husband lost a job in a factory he bought out as it was failing, which then later laid off people -- something happening in the steel industry all over the world.

What I did say was that the people who did Romney's digital work did not have their hearts in the job; they included Obama's 2008 digital manager (!) and Al Gore's 2000 campaign digital manager (!) in a shop with people clearly voting for Obama, not Romney. And that's the case. They didn't have the enthusiasm that keeps you working late into the night, and they can't be expected to. And the result  -- due to the kind of "geek sabotage" that doesn't involve literally building bug bombs but mainly involves cynical negligence -- two of his apps failed, and his GOTV software failed spectacularly. People paid to do a gig like any other gig as if this didn't require utmost dedication didn't produce. I notice some of them aren't with the firms involved anymore, and I bet we won't see Republicans hire gently-used Democrats for digital work ever again, just like Obama didn't hire Republicans for his computer nerd work. It's not about race or ethnicity; it's about what you believe, and who you will do for.

Yet because I reported the obvious, and made a legitimate point which had nothing whatsoever to do with advocating racism -- and it involved calling out lefty geeks as not very loyal to their clients -- I was bombarded savagely. And Paul Carr was the latest to join this insanity just on the strength of reading outageously fake Wikipedia vandal quotations and one tweet pointing out that yes, Mandela did embrace communism -- which is true -- and that in fact likely delayed the end of apartheid, a point you can read on the pages of the very liberal Foreign Policy web site if you don't want to hear it from me.

THE EXTERMINISM OF THE LEFT

But see that's just it. We cannot criticize the left anymore. Not from the slightly-less-left or left-of-center or liberal middle or right-of-center that might share similar views with the Nation on a variety of topics like abortion or NSA. Not at all. Because criticism -- any criticism of the left is "racism"or -- a topic for another day, "the war on women".

And here's where I found this exterminism getting really awful: in Sweden: The Brown Scare in Sweden: Anti-Fa Hack Disgus to Out Internet Commenters.

The Anti-fa crowd (I've come to find them always and everywhere intolerant, hateful, and liars in a variety of countries and settings; maybe someone can convince me otherwise) decided to savage people whose views they didn't like and out them by hacking Disqus.

Disqus, unfortunately, is too leftist itself and filled with the Silicon Valley technocommunism ideology (I've had a number of arguments with them even though I do use my account their regularly) to step up to the plate on this vigorously. They've said nothing (as far as I can tell).

But boy is this wrong, and everyone should push back hard on it. And you can see from the handiwork of these creeps in Sweden that it isn't about stopping racism really, or making a better world; it's about taking power aggressively by eliminating critics and political rivals through the smear of racism.

ANONYMITY, PSEUDONYMITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

I personally don't advocate anonymity on social media. I use my real name, and my avatar name is linked to my real name. I just like it better that way because I think people should be accountable for their words and they do by and large behave better when not anonymous and can build up a reputation, for better or worse.

I don't buy the arguments of AWFUL people like Jillian York of Electronic Frontier Foundation who insists on anonymity mainly as an organizing tool for revolutionary movements of the left she personally supports with her politics, mainly in the Middle East, none of which are very critical of Islamists and embrace the Palestinian cause while rarely condemning violence.

York like others falsely concern-troll with invocation of dissidents in trouble, or victims of domestic violence as requiring anonymity as a deadly necessity. Well, yes and no.

You know, Nelson Mandela used his own name; so did Andrei Sakharov; and for that matter, so dod Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot and Farea al-Muslimi, the Yemeni anti-drones activist.  Yeah, I totally get it that activists in Iran, China and many other places risk their lives if they give their real names. But that's no reason to enable a zillion assholes from Anonymous to harass people online with impunity. And why should you get to turn out 100,000 on a public square while hiding behind a Guy Fawkes mask or a nick on Facebook or Twitter? Say, the Ukrainians didn't run their revolution that way.

It's possible to have pseudonymity, which is the use of a pseudonym and presentation of real-life ID on social media to create a better environment.

No, this shouldn't be mandatory everywhere but I do think it's more than fine that Facebook makes it a requirement (yes, often violated) and Twitter doesn't. It's good to have a pluralism of environments so you don't have to live only with abusive anonymous assholes online everywhere. And no, I don't have illusions that unmasking these people makes them better. Often it doesn't. But I do see the comment section of Techcrunch got a lot better when they put in Facebook for commenting, and worse when they changed it.

Here are Phil Baumann's very wise words on the subject:

What the Justine ruckus demonstrates is not that there are racist people. We know that. 

What it reveals, in fact, is that the reaction is precisely the kind of behavior that led to racism in the first place: the innate reactivity of shallow-thinking people to prove they are better than someone else.

The way the tweet-mongering crowd attacked an incompetent PR girl with lame sarcasm skills exemplifies the horrifying superficiality of thought that ramifies digital networks. Rather than taking on racism, we will have more of it - the racists now have even more fuel for their assaults because they see the vapidity of their enemies. 

You will see more assassination of avatars while the cunning manipulators who daily strip the soul out of civilization continue to work their plans without chirping a single hashtag

Why am I writing so much about this now?

Because I think we will see LOTS LOTS more of this as the 2016 campaign gets going -- it's already going with vilification of the Clintons as in Ken Silverstein's hit job on CAP (more to come on that later).

I'll never forget when I tweeted a few tweets to Steve Gillmor at the dawn of Twitter and he went into a rage fit and demanded the company created search/block so that he would never have to see anyone who disagreed with him ever in his feed when he did vanity searches on himself. I continued to debate him strenuously and he actually invited me on his podcast show but then shut off the microphone as soon as I expressed the opinion that some of Obama's ideology was socialist. Shut off the microphone.

My original crime? I pointed out that his claims that Obama's pastor's outrageous remarks weren't anything to be complaining about just wasn't true, it was going to have huge ramifications. Obama himself wound up apologizing, so I tweeted to Gillmor that even Obama was criticizing this "America's chickens are coming home to roost" and "God Damn America" stuff of the pastor.

But then Dave Winer, the famous geek of Scripting News (and Firesign Theater) said -- I'll never forget -- "Everyone in the Northeast is racist."

Right. Everybody. Even the non-white folks, too.

And that's when I realized that the leftists, the technocommies, the "progressives" were going to endlessly race-bait and race-hustle to get their way in that election, and it would never end.  Indeed, I began to suspect that some of them had deliberately decided to back a black candidate precisely so they could use this brilliant weapon endlessly keeping everybody silent for fear of being non-PC.

Obviously, "everyone in the Northeast" wasn't so racist that they couldn't vote for the first black president (including me). But Dave knows better.

So Justine did a dumb-ass thing and is paying for it dearly. She didn't actually do any harm because a million smug white dudes starting with Sam Biddle swooped in to save black people from suffering hate virtually on social media from someone that...they didn't have to follow and would never have heard of if Sam Biddle hadn't invented the scandal. Nobody complained that he and his enthusiastic meme-wranglers were part of the white savior industrial complex then. And there was a deluge of response with most pictorial comments consisting of some very tough and very angry black ladies from various TV sit-coms and movies (and nobody complained about their stereotyping then).

It's like the "Streisand effect," where if you try to stop the paparazzi from photographing you due to your desire for privacy, as Barbara Streisand once did, they just follow you worse.

The Biddle Effect is when something that wouldn't have been a scandal on its own (not enough people would ever see it) is artificially pumped up and used to incite action by cynical meme-handlers to enhance their own reputation and power. Biddling is when you heckle somebody to death using this method.

"Post-racial" Twitter and the Anti-Fa won, and they will proceed to stamp out all others' thought crimes who cannot admit the error of their ways. Unless you start now calling their bluff.

 

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Your MIPS for the Week

La Arena. Photo by Eneas.

WHAT IS MIPS?

MIPS is a theory devised by cube inada (c3) of Second Life and other virtual worlds (Larry Rosen is his real name) who was a pioneer of virtual reality and 3D design in the 1990s.

"Media Induced Psychosis Syndrome" is the description he gives for people completely caught up in some manufactured media reality that leads them to become crazy. It's been a long-running gag on his blog, where he urges, "Please donate to find a cure".

Of course, serious MIPS is when you get somebody watching a Halloween movie and killing their family.

But you also get this media hysteria of people manipulated by the meme-du-jour on a milder level where people just can't think or analyze or reason or question, they just knee-jerk.

So two recent stories:

SWAGGERING INTERNET BULLY REZA ASLAN

 

First, the Muslim scholar and "historian" Rezva Aslan and the "horrible" Fox News journalist who interviewed him.

The media and blogosphere and Twitter were absolutely convulsed with this one, because the progs felt it was absolutely perfect as a "teachable moment" and "ideal exemplar" of Islamophobia at work that would discredit Fox and amplify the meme of persecuted Muslims in America.

Why the scare quotes? Why aren't I politically correct?

Because as Matthew Franck on First Things explained, Reza Aslan is not a trained historian; he is currently an adjunct professor of creative writing and has no degrees in history. He's a sociologist -- sociology being that cover of a multitude of sins that enables many a revolutionary and radical and anarchist to pretend he's objectively studying the thing he's trying to get away with revising. He is not a historian or an expert of the history of religions so his study of the historical Jesus is very political. It's not about him not having the right to do that, duh. It's about us being brow-beaten by the MIPS-infected not to have the right to question his  credentials and his motives for his revisionism.

Because the show wasn't really about the bumbling attempt of this FOX news caster to interview a controversial figure about his sensational book, and stumbling into a scandal.

The show was about what a fraud and a bully this guy is tweeting obscenities at anyone who disagrees with him, if anyone just panned out to Twitter and the rest of the Internet. That put it in context. Green's effort on Fox to try to bell this cat wasn't very expert, but the basic thrust of her question -- "what's up with this, really?" -- wasn't illegitimate or improper given the context.

MSN was among the many that smugly piled on and took Aslan's claims at face value. He said he was a "professor of religion" when he is not. He said it was his "job" to criticize historical religious figures. Well, he's not a professor of history, either.  As a political act, clothed in the versimilitude of scholarship, he engages in revisionism of Christianity. That's his right. When the FOX newscaster says, after his pompous recitation, "It still begs the question -- why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity" she leaves herself open to charges of narrow-mindedness and intolerance.  Of course, anyone can write about anything, and they don't need credentials. On the other hand, she has struck home to the truth: why are you doing this provocation? What's up? What's your real story here?

We know how Islamists try to frame the narrative and constrain the debate by what you can and cannot say.

So it is somehow to be accepted that no one can ask why a Muslim scholar has crossed the street to dis Jesus, though in his case, he has left many stories around the Internet that make us ask why he has done so.

Trust me, when cartoonists cross the street to dis Mohammed, we hear about it -- and how. When Muslim womenlike Irshad Manji or Mona Eltahawy who break with tradition and write books or articles that get Muslim men mad and get themselves denounced as apostates, we hear about it. If a Jewish intellectual like Bernard Henri Levi supports a ban on burquas in the name of a secular space, obviously those who believe otherwise question his motives as  Jewish intellectual. If he were to appear on Al Jazeera with this call, the announcer might get in his face.

In fact, I can't think of an Al Jazeera show where a Christian or Jew who had written about the Prophet critically, or Islam critically, was interviewed -- in a bumbling matter or not. There wouldn't be such an interview. That's just it.

And as a footnote we can point out the nasty indulgence in racist and misogynist comments directed at this black female Fox program host. All that PC posturing done with the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case was a strain for such progs, and now they had permission to let it out. They were disgraceful.

PROVOCATEUR MARIA CATALANO:  BIG BROTHER IS IN YOUR GOOGLES!

The second story was the Boing Boing journalist Maria Catalano who thought she could get away with making us all think the police were now able to get into our Googles. Atlantic Wire had this garish story posted on Yahoo and elsewhere and it got a zillion re-tweets. It took awhile for the lefties to get this corrected and even when they did, they had trouble admitting that there really wasn't the issue they claimed here.

When I first saw this breathlessly reported on Facebook by friends, I said, wait a minute, that's a woman who writes for Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow, copyleftism) and Forbes (technolibertarianism in the service of Darwinist capitalism -- to give you an idea of how Forbes has fallen.) She has an agenda here! (Like Reza Aslan has an agenda.) There's GOT to be more to this story!

And sure enough there was. It wasn't that the police accessed her private, log-on Google records. It was her husband's former employer at a computer company. Oh, so this was a case where it was the geeks' own! Her nerdy husband, possibly to make some kind of "point" or just out of boredom at work was typing in the phrases "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks". We don't know the circumstances under which the guy was fired, perhaps for loafing at work, but then his employer looked at the search list easily accessed for that work station. Then he called the police because he was worried.

What's quite suspicious about this contrived story is that Catalano claimed *she* was searching for "pressure cookers" to buy one (I don't believer her) and separately, her husband was googling "backback" to buy one, and that they converged and then got SWATed. Yeah, right. I wonder if they both kept googling as hard as they could to try to tripwire something as a test.

I had theorized that the Boing Boing net and other publications that are so anti-government and so filled with loathing for America might be part of police profiling but it turned out likely to be more mundane.

Fast Company was one of the many tech press echo-chamber meme-mirrors that took this story on faith without any journalistic checking.

"In the new America," Fast Company piously intones as if we all live in the GULAG now, "a woman and her husband were questioned by their local police department when two separate Google searches converged in an unpleasant way. But how did the police find out what they were Googling?"

They finally updated the piece to explain that their nerd bro had his work station searched when his boss called the police, but that doesn't end the story for them, because in their ideal world, nobody ever has to be asked what they're doing online, ever, and never tracked.

CNET's Declan McCullagh pointed out that other online tracks this provocateur had left might be the reason for a police call -- and he should know as he Google-witch-hunted her digital trail and dug up something others hadn't, the firecrackers on Flickr with the provocative comments.

Michele, who has put her photo on "all rights reserved" despite writing for Cory Doctorow, notes:

I don't know what's with these M66 things, either. When I was young , we played with M80s. You know, toss them in a garbage can at 6am. Throw them in a neighbor's mailbox. Wait until that bitch next door is just about asleep on her sun deck. Big bang, baby.

See, I was always like this. Did I ever tell you about the time I made a molotov cocktail? I'll see if the statute of limitations has passed on that one before I go ahead and tell that story.

Lovely.

This is yet another story about itself. It could never have gotten legs pre-Snowden.

P.S. I wonder if Catalano was already married or dating Pinnell when she quoted him as her main source in a story for PJ Media.

 

 

Why WikiLeaks is No Different than the NSA (Only Worse) -- and Snowden's Snow Job

Film by Laura Poitras. A rare moment when poker-faced sober-sides Snowden smiles in the film, when asked if he had in fact planned to burrow into the NSA as a mole via his job at Booz, Hamilton Allen.

I've been a long-time critic of Tor, going back to 2009 and earlier even before I heard of WikiLeaks and its use and championing of Tor. I've criticized Tor and its government origins and its evolution in the hand of unaccountable coders (and the arrogant and ethics-free coders are both inside and outside of government, and that's why the phenomena of Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden happens).

You can read my back pieces here (on Jacob Appelbaum's assistance to WikiLeaks in shameful propagandizing); on the murky business of Tor, the Navy, the State Department, and Jacob Appelbaum (who was once a grantee of the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, but who wound up being wanted for questioning by the WikiLeaks grand jury); on Appelbaum's shameless bashing of his rivals in the granting process; on Appelbaum's paranoic and rabid pursuit of the NSA even before the Snowden affair, calling for sabotage of the NSA's cables; on his shameful display at a public meeting at Open Society Institute where he heckled an FBI agent saying he could hack her phone; and recently on his strange contradictions regarding the Snowden story;  and his admission that the data trail places him in Hawaii with Snowden at the same time in April 2013, earlier than he originally claimed -- and that perhaps he's the "suspected hacker" in Snowden's story of the "suspected hacker's girlfriend".

THE TROUBLE WITH TOR AND JACOB APPELBAUM

Even back in Second Life, when I first began strenuously debating Shava Nerad (whom I came to call "the Tor crone" for her vicious defense of Tor and attacks on me), I had heard from some ethical coders that Tor had a bad reputation because its people had taken advantage of its users and sniffed the packets of Chinese dissidents.  That seemed pretty sleazy, but par for the course in the world of arrogant nihilist hackers with which I first became acquainted with in 1999 in the Sims Online beta, and then observed more closely later in the early days of Second Life in 2004, where I found the first versions of Anonymous harassing critics of their vigilantism like me, and planning their attacks on Scientology even before they surfaced in real life.

THE SOFTWARE AUTOCRACY

I spent a lot of time blogging about the Software Autocracy for years then because I found these people really menacing and disturbing, and the implications of how they would abrogate all our rights through our increasing dependency on their coded artifacts a real concern. I had no idea that some of these people I met in Second Life would actually end up advising the president of the United States in real life (Lawrence Lessig); that they would even be in office in the White House and have influence over Congress (Beth Noveck -- who is out of office now but continues to have deep influence). I could never have dreamed that the people like Julian Assange or Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, of the hacker types that I encountered in Second Life all the time crashing my Sims, or trying to throw the devs in the early days of Twitter, would wind up wrecking havoc in real life; that the prototyped incidents I saw of document hacking and privacy hacking and destabilization of authority in Second Life would have their real-life counterparts in the hacks of Cablegate, Stratfor, Sony, the Pentagon, the CIA, and now the NSA (with one infamous hacker, Barrett Brown even connected both the Second Life and real life).

WIKILEAKS HAPPENED DUE TO WIKIFICATION OF GOVERNMENT

These people are all part of a movement; they are all part of a continuum; they are all in a tribe or network. WikiLeaks couldn't happen unless first, a group of arrogant hackers in government, and their academic and corporate counterparts began having Wikipedia weekend seminars and wound up wikifying the entire US government, to its doom. (And what has to be understood about this isn't just some literal wiki with some mundane useful stuff on it, but the mentality of the software autocrats). Snowden's hack could happen if it weren't for the casual arrogance and neglect and even sabotage with which most systems analysts and programmers and coders do their work in government and outside in contractors.

DEFCON

Some people think that the message about the ethics-free nihilist hackers inside and out of government, inside and out of corporations, is that this persona, especially its most remedy-resistant forms, is the problem -- male machismo, if you will, and the arrogance of the Anonymous hacker heckling and doxing someone is no different than the arrogant NSA analyst who spies on people and pulls their files.

And that's true enough, although not a complete description of the problem. But let's look at it in this most basic form first. DefCon is one of the places where that is on display. I remember a friend of mine went to DefCon in the year that HPGary was hacked by Anonymous and the government's efforts to try to do something to combat Anonymous, and combat the destructiveness of Glen Greenwald, the activist lawyer-blogger and ardent hacker supporter, ultimately blew up in their faces (unless it was a sting?). This friend -- with deep concerns about unethical hackers -- felt that HPGary and Anonymous were no different in their nasty methods and their dubious methods like creation of personas on line to fool the public. DefCon was always one of those conference watering holes where spooks and contractors and script kiddies in mom's basement would all mingle and exchange shop talk, because ultimately, their tribe is where their loyalties lay, and not their various affiliations -- which are fungible as they are bid out and bought by the highest bidder constantly among the Big IT firms, all of which have a revolving door into government.

Then recently, one DefCon organizer announced that NSA was not welcome this year (they had come covertly, or semi-covertly in the past, and many people found it titilating and it added to the enjoyment for some of the civilian hackers). Interestingly, at Ars Technica, one of the top nerd forums, a contributor in the forums under this piece objected to the undemocratic way in which this announcement was made, as he didn't agree that NSA should be blocked from the conference. I wonder how that will pan out.

In any event, while Jacob Appelbaum goes to great lengths in his Chaos Communications Club speech in December 2012 to define a dividing line between the "unethical" hackers inside government who have "gone to the dark side," and himself and his friend whom he believes are the "ethical" ones on the "light side" (it's actually just the opposite), if you look at how WikiLeaks and Appelbaum's role in it evolved, you would have to conclude that WikiLeaks is really no different than the NSA in its philosophy of "collect 'em all".

THE ORIGINS OF WIKILEAKS IS A BIG DATA HACK

Just as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which many perceive as some bastion of free speech and online freedom actually got its start in legal defense and edgecasing and lawfaring for phreakers (phone exploiters) and hackers facing criminal charges -- i.e. originated in criminality -- so did WikiLeaks.

I've been reading the book by Luke Harding (who is also a great reporter on Russia) and David Leigh, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. This book came out in 2012 and I meant to get it but it slipped my mind with everything else -- and now I see it's a must buy.

The authors describe Tor:

Tor introduces an uncrackable level of obfuscation. Say Appelbaum in Seattle wants to send a message to Domscheit-Berg in Berlin. Both men need to run the tor program on their machines. Appelbaum might take the precaution of encrypting it first using the free-of-charge PGP system.

They then describe the "onion-layer" mode of encryption which you can read about on Wikipedia or Tor's site or other locations -- basically, to simply if it, by splitting up packets of data and spreading them over nodes, no one person accessing the system can see the whole story and therefore obfuscation encrypts your communications. But the people with the top-level view of the system who know where the nodes are or who can access the end points can snoop on you.  And of course, as ethics-free hackers with a sense that they are right and everyone else is wrong, they do so with no sense of shame and even with a sense of entitlement -- you know, just the way they claim US government agents do. And if we were ever to submit to the encryption regime that the crypto kiddies like Jacob Appelbaum and their enablers like Rebecca McKinnon envision, we'd merely have them as the coders in charge with the top-down system-wide view, with far less checks and balances than the NSA (which is why I chose the NSA over them any day).

We knew this story of the unethical origins of WikiLeaks, but Harding and Leigh in fact have pulled it all together very coherently so you can really see it starkly:

"Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," Assange told Rolling Stone, when they profiled Appelbaum, his west coast US hacker associate. But Tor has an interesting weakness. If a message isn't specially encrypted from the outset, then its actual contents can sometimes be read by other people. This may sound like an obscure technical point. But there is evidence that it explains the true reason for the launch of WikiLeaks at the end of 2006 -- not as a traditional journalistic enterprise, but as a piece of opportunistic underground computer hacking. In other words:  eavesdropping.

On the verge of his debut WikiLeaks publication, at the beginning of 2007, Assange excited messaged the veteran curator of the Cryptome leaking site, John Young, to explain where his trove of material was coming from:

"Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inexhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We're going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new... We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, opec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and falun dafa associations and...russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We're drowning. We don't even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1TB [one terrabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes]."

A few weeks later, in August 2007, a Swedish Tor expert, Dan Egerstand, told Wired  magazine that he had confirmed it was possible to harvest documents, email contents, user names and passwords for various diplomats and organisations by operating a volunteer Tor "exit" node.  This was the final server at the end of the Tor system through which documents without end-to-end encryption were bounced before emerging. The magazine reported that Egerstand "found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the UK's visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organisation in India's Ministry of Defence. In addition, Egerstad was able to read correspondence belonging to the INdian ambassador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama's liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong. "It kind of shocked me," he said. "I am absolutely positive that I am not the only one to figure this out."

The speculation was largely confirmed in 2010, when Assange gave Raffi Khatchadourian access to write a profile. The New Yorker staffer wrote:  "One of the WikiLeaks activists owend a server that was being used as a node for the tor network. Millions of secret trnasmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers form China were using the network to gather foreign governments' information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction h as ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site's foundation, and Assange wa able to say, "We have received over one million documents from 13 countries.' In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a 'secret decision', signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China."

The authors then proceed to describe how WikiLeaks also grew out of the anti-capitalist radicals movements and a WikiLeaks stall was first set up at the World Social Forum in 2007 -- as I said -- must read!

Now, what can we draw from this? Yes, that WikiLeaks is just like the NSA. Or rather, just like the way they claim that NSA is.

The Cargo Cult of Better Worlding with Mobile

Tina Rosenberg at the New York Times has a piece about the, well, less-than-fabulous results from apps and programs and such for mobile phones and health care delivery.

Oh, this is like a a cargo cult! Cargo-cult science.

The world now has 5 billion mobile phones – one for every person over 15.  Africa has a billion people and 750 million phones, and mobile is growing so fast there that in a few years there will be more phones than people.   In some countries this is already true — South Africa has 47 million people, but 52 million SIM cards.

The mobile phone is doing more than revolutionizing communication.   It has the potential to improve many aspects of life in poor countries:  commerce, health, agriculture, education.  As we say repeatedly in Fixes, there are a lot of great new products that poor people can use to improve their lives.  The problem is that it’s very difficult to get those out to people who need them.  The same is true with information.  It’s there, but people can’t get it, because they lack Internet service and electricity and the electronics that require these things. Delivery is the problem.  It’s almost always the problem.

So, my comment:

I think it's fitting that Tina Rosenberg, who has done so much over the years to write thoughtfully exposing communism or Nazism, has taken on this area of the fake Cargo Cult of the Better Worlders of Silicon Valley.

The Internet and smart phones aren't going to help people that don't have the infrastructure for them, but more to the point, they aren't really democratically designed with the people to be "saved" having input about what they really need. Maybe they'd rather have better salaries, with doctors getting better salaries, and if they need to buy some technical trinket, they can buy it themselves. Just laying it on them is really like an external Cargo Cult.

I saw this with all the crazy app engineers around the Haiti earthquake, with Google also cashing in on it, trying to "help humankind" by having "maps of clean water". Of course, if someone was to the technical point and physical stability point to have a smart phone to hold in their hand, and the leisure to pull up a Google map to find water, they'd already be in the one hotel for foreigners with the limited clean water. Real people in the real world are going to be drinking dirty watcher from ditches and using word of mouth or older technology like radio or thorayas.

And gamification! Good Lord, that's nuts. I don't want computer engineers handling my health care, and I don't want strangers seeing if they can guess the disease I have using the law of averages. I want real doctors. And that means costs.

***

Of course, it's hard to be heard over the din there in the comments, from people like:

Delia (Boylan) Lloyd
Senior Policy Manager, BBC Media Action (once of ODC)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/publicationsandpress/policy_mhealth.html

-- because media is media action, you see, when you start from the premise of socialism. She insists that mobile phones have saved lives. So don't you dare argue.

Maybe they have. Look, I'm not going to "go there". I'm not going to link to "Obama phones".

I do have to say that I went to a new doctor, or rather my old clinic had a new doctor, and she had the latest phone with the altest apps. She must have taken an extra 10 minutes struggling with her iphone (as distinct from a computer terminal with the Internet right next to her on her desk) to try to pull up some list of medications and their different side effects and costs. I was like "Hey, I gotta go, I'll just ask the pharmacist" or "look, I'll look it up later" or "Why don't you just check online over there on the computer" but no, she had to have that app load and work as her "sidekick" -- or else! And this isn't in Africa. This is in Manhattan. Hey, stop looking at the screen. Look at me! Do I look a bit feverish and peaked, like I might have strep throat after all? And so on...

When we get the nanobots, as Ray Kurzweil has always assured us, I'm sure it will be all fine...

Economist Bryan Caplan has referred to Communism as "the largest cargo cult the world has ever seen", describing the economic strategy of the 20th-century Communist leaders as "mimicking a few random characteristics of advanced economies", such as the production of steel.^[8]

It was then that I realized that the entire Internet is a cargo cult!