So I already explained the history of the social graph, its misuses and exploitations especially in malicious reputational damaging. Of course, there's an easy way to prevent this -- don't join Facebook, don't blabber on Twitter, or use alts and proxies.
But let's imagine the balloons in the hands of the NSA. I truly would rather have them in the hands of the NSA than Will Wright or Jacob Appelbaum, to be honest.
None other than James Risen, who himself is being put under surveillance by the government for his stories, and who wrote about the NSA in 2006 famously, and the notorious Laura Poitras, partner-in-crime in the Snowden escapade with Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum, have now delivered the "Snowden's Next Leak" about which some have speculated.
And of course, it is about trying to get more ordinary Americans to worry more (because they aren't going to worry about alleged manipulation by the NSA of encryption algorithms for the industry or even about Verizon phone metadata).
Yet because at least James Risen is a "real journalist" working for the mainstream New York Times, the story is forced to contain caveats in it -- and that undoes any activist point that Poitras was trying to make.
First, the story states clearly that the social graph is examined when the government needs to go after a criminal suspect -- after all, the operation of intelligence is used on foreign countries that engage in enemy actions or are enemies; suspects in terrorism, money-laundering, piracy, credit-card theft, child pornography, illegal drug sales and so on:
Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.
The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011.
Intelligence targets. Not everybody. Not you and your cat pictures. Intelligence targets.
Each time this story is told, the activist writers behave as if the government behaves like one of their own malevolent, cynical, nihilist and hysterically hypothetical hackers -- you know, like Edward Snowden. They act as if they sit on top of a pile of data and mine it at random or with provocative key words or "just because they feel like it" or they plug in dissident names like Michael Moore or Glenn Greenwald to spy on their every move over their writings (and not over their appearing to collude with a major-league hacker).
They never concede that the government starts with the need to track proven enemy countries, and proven enemy actors like Al Qaeda.
They never, ever concede that the NSA's activity therefore is legitimate and lawful because those enemies are seriously bent on harming the United States.
Risen is also forced to admit that the social media information is in the public domain. So yes, the government, like the press, like nonprofits, like political campaigns, like researchers, like bloggers, gets to gather it and analyze it. And yes, they combine this with their own internal data they already gather because they are governments and that's okay -- i.e. tax data:
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
Yet as before, they are still hysterically finding fault, because they don't trust the government, don't think it's legitimate and think it can only do wrong when it has these powers and this information.
Once again, they have not provided a single, concrete individual case with a human face showing wrongful surveillance, let alone wrongful arrest or even sentencing. None:
N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.
The difference between this article and any shrill scribing activity by Poitras and Appelbaum of whatever Snowden spews is that Risen at least tried to behave like a real journalist. He found other sources -- former NSA officials who I trust are not merely Thomas Drake and William Binney (who would mention their names) -- to try to corroborate the information.
Gosh, even former officials declined to say something for which they had no proof and were merely pushed into trying to speculate about by activist journalists.
Risen is at least able to explain honestly that even if something has been wrongfully collected here -- and his own article doesn't explain if that was done or how -- it hasn't been shown to be used wrongfully.
So I realize that even though Marcy Wheeler is probably having ten cats about this (I'll have to go see), there isn't a story here.
The NSA does what it is paid to do and hired to do by the American people. It has not been shown to do anything wrong, and even if this is implied as a capacity that might be misused, it has not been proven to harm individual people with wrong-doing.
What these authors seem more afraid of is the power of the social graph itself -- for which we have a generation of coders and social media platform providers who started experimenting with the power of this graph in games and worlds and moved on to social media, where you are recommended as a friend the current wife of your ex-husband because Facebook doesn't know everything, or whether you are presented a relative as a business contact on LinkedIn, because LI has raided your email address book and spewed around suggestions to you, or whether you are offered books you'd hate merely because you looked up a book you disliked to quote it in a blog.
Translated into NSA terms, if you deliver pizza to terrorists, or you are a friend of a friend of a spy (like I could find about a half dozen people one or two degrees of separation from Anna Chapman in my various friendship or business networks), you could be watched. Good! Friends don't let friends commit terrorism...
Orin Kerr is here to tell us why he doesn't want the government to have this capacity to track people in crime stopping, and would cut them off from this capacity if it were up to him and his ideological friends in power:
“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”
Oh. You mean you people who want "offline freedoms to apply online" don't want offline criminal justice methods to apply online to address the criminalization that comes with licentiousness? Only some things get to go from offline to online, and criminal prosecution isn't among them?
Why is it okay -- and necessary -- for a plainclothes police officer to track gang members in real life around a basketball court in a park, but the NSA can't look up the same people's Facebooks?
If you wonder how the tech press spreads FUD about the NSA, and hysteria about all things hypothetical from "G9" -- just read AllThingsD in which no qualifications are mentioned that the data being mined is public and legitimately gathered from government sources, and that not "all Americans" but intelligence targets capable of hostile acts or suspected of crime are what is tracked.
Ultimately, Risen and Poitras come up with nothing. Here is what they are compelled to say (in the Times, because it's a real newspaper):
In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists.
Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.
They can go on and on -- and do so -- about millions of dollars in budgets and millions of pieces of data collected, but they haven't come up with any cases of wrongdoing.
They conclude reiterating concerns about the volume of data collected, the buffering of data that is then kept for search later but they do not come up with a single case of someone harmed by any wrongdoing.
How can that be in a system that supposedly does so much that is disturbing?
Leave aside the fact that you are forced to pick five people to follow when you join Twitter -- and they offer Alicia Keys or Barack Obama but not anybody who might fit with your tastes or views (Tim Tebow is the one Christian exception) -- then THIS is all you get to chose from the tech world -- and this explains why some people have high numbers of followers and others don't -- the Twitter devs have been building this into Twitter since the beta days, ensuring some pigs are more equal than others.
I'm not surprised to see that Alex Howard, Zeynep Tufekci and the others in the Internet guru gaggle are once again stumping for selective Twitter censorship -- because once again, the situation we all face, who are far less cool and PC, is in the news because somebody more famous and more PC is hurt by Twitter.
It's funny that it took a politically-correct story of women being harassed even with rape and bomb threats (!) for wanting to put women's pictures on currency or other feminist causes to get Twitter to "do something".
Other things like the use of an antisemitic hashtag in France don't get the juices flowing for the devs in quite the same way.
Or the outrageous of swarms of Anonymous accounts during the Steubenville rape trial who harassed critical journalists and bloggers questioning their vigilantism. That wasn't popular for the "progressive" devs who think Anonymous is a lovely social movement that raises awareness.
Sometimes Twitter is good with abuse reports. When I've had accounts impersonate me not in a parody way (like @grumpcatfitz), but a
stalking way like @ca_fitzpatrick, now deleted, using a version of my name and picture and retweeting my
tweets only mangled, I've gotten them removed by faxing my license and a
letter.
I spent months fending off the most vicious, nasty, misogynist attacks on me by Anonymous in the KnightSec op around Steubenville; I was repeatedly doxed, showered with the most vile obscenities, and had films personally threatening me on Youtube (since removed). I had people threatening me violent attacks and claiming they were coming to my house personally to harass me. (Lee Stranahan of Breitbart, who also covered the Anonymous vigilantism in Steubenville, had even more nastiness because he has a high profile.)
None of this "stuck" for the moderators at Twitter -- at the most, if somebody used the @ sign at me too many times, like a spammer, that might get them suspended. The really obscene freak would be deleted from time to time -- but that was more likely for alt abuse, as he had been banned before originally. But people who doxed me and threatened to come to my home could do so with impunity because Twitter mods just don't care to rein in Anonymous and its spinoffs, and just don't think doxing is a thing.
I would periodically try to reason with the customer service people to no avail. It was my belief that if people were threatening to come to my home to harass me AND knew my home address; if they were constantly doxing me and linking to reams of stuff like the addresses of me and my relatives, some culled from online, some purloined through various triangulations and pestering - that they should have their accounts suspended or at least those tweets deleted. After all, Pastebin honours all requests to remove the doxes as fast as they are made and re-made -- it's really automated at this point.
I totally get it that free expression is a great thing and I uphold it. I draw the line at incitement of violence, and doxing because doxing exposes people to harm. It's no good saying "it's out there" or "it can be obtained" or "you put it there yourself". Few people concentrate all their personal data into one easy package for stalkers -- and they don't get to opt out of privacy-outing data-scraping sites like Spokeo. Few people put their direct phone line online or their personal email -- if someone gets that by persistent sleuthing and even calling around people with your name listed in the phone service until they hit you, that's harassment. The literalism and word-salading on this doesn't make it less so.
And automation is one thing that in a way saves us all from net nannies. These services like Twitter are so big and huge that they can't get to all the reports and they dump a lot of them for lack of matches to a set of criteria they have.
Basically, I think that the solution we should all have to everything we are unhappy about on Twitter is to block people we find annoying and not look at them. That way we can't show up in their feed -- unless we or they do vanity searches in the search box, as distinct from clicking on CONNECT to see people you want to see.
If you do vanity searches, and you see @ communications you don't like, it's your problem. Don't do vanity searches or ignore those people. You can be a wuss and report them for @ abuse, but that only feeds the entire misguided Twitter approach to all this by making it seems as if this is a legitimate thing to oppose.
Because all of us must retain the right to refer to others on Twitter by their Twitter names, and address them critically if we wish, especially if they are government officials and public figures and people of influence with clout. This is the right to assemble and seek redress of grievances from government, which I think has to extend to those in power increasingly which are other public actors.
In the early days of Twitter, I had a huge fight with Steve Gillmor about "block track" -- he wanted people to have the ability to block people they didn't like from appearing in their vanity searches. Track was a command in those days that now isn't used. I opposed this because I felt it increased the siloization of those big thought leaders like himself and Scoble, and let them get away with being radio stars and using Twitter like talk radio with only a few people able to call in. Twitter was not supposed to be that. Gillmor had me on his talk show and then shut off the microphone the minute I said something he didn't like. These people are AWFUL. They weld into the Internet and its culture the horrid intolerance they have for dissent as Silicon Valley technocommunists and technolibertarians (both are equally bad in this regard by merely dubbing as "trolling" anything they want to censor and thereby delegitimizing it as something akin to spam).
But I do think that when you have massive movements of harassment -- like the antisemitic hashtags in France, which aren't just a few objectionable tweets but hordes of people finding and amplifying each other with hate insignia -- and when you have hordes of Anonymous heckling you and doxing you and linking to that doxing to harm your privacy and incite harassment of you in private life, I think Twitter should act. It doesn't. It does when it feels like it when the news heat is turned up on it or when it finds a cause to its own personal liking.
So now all of a sudden we have the Twitter abuse report button to report individual tweets, not just accounts. If you have ever tried to do an AR on Twitter, it's quite cumbersome and annoying, requiring many screens and answering questions in ways that don't "fit" using boxes that have to be filled out in a certain way -- or else.
Certain things just don't fit. For example one of the Anon's heckling me was -- outrageously -- using the picture of a dead man in America whose common name he had adopted -- and he claimed to be in Liverpool and helping a gay rights center. Imagine how terrible that young man's relatives would feel if they saw their dead relative's picture on a complete stranger, and one heckling other people. I couldn't be sure he even was what he said he was. He had a LGBT center following him so I im'd them and say, hey, that guy's using a dead stranger's picture, that's awful. They said "thanks for letting us know". Meanwhile, trying to send this in as an AR to Twitter was fruitless. They replied that they couldn't do anything about it. It was free expression. I think nothing less than lawyers FEDEXing real letters to Twitter about the misuse of their dead relative's picture would work. Me as good citizen doing this doesn't work because it's not my account or my relative.
Tufekci thinks that what we need for these automatic situations and the inability sometimes to tell what is frivolous or malevolent means we need MORE HUMANS. I'm not at all sure that's a good thing. Automation in a way saves us from the hordes of people like herself who block and report people over nothing -- like Cory Doctorow not only blocked me, but tried to get me removed from Twitter merely because I criticized him and called him out for his repeated claims that people can give away their books and still get paid as he does (because he makes a living from lecture and consulting fees, not book sales). He then got his tech-thug friend Charles Arthur of the Guardian involved, and these two copyleftists filed a false report on me to Typepad claiming that pictures I had of Doctorow on my site, taking of *his avatar* in SL at *a public meeting* about his book release -- therefore a legitimate journalist activity -- meant that I was stalking and/or violating copyright and they should be removed. They were (you can see the empty album). I never bothered to challenge this, too difficult and expensive.
MORE HUMANS merely means more arbitrary adjudication and giving more power to these nerds they hire to do social media censorship who really have no grounding in law or human rights or for that matter, basic common sense and reality. Links to doxing should not be acceptable, which you can see with one click on the link; links to dead man's pictures should not be acceptable which you can see with one click on the obituary. But someone, even though we do have HUMANS on this already -- they answer you individually, in real time, with names -- it doesn't help.
The customer service state -- as it has been aptly called -- is expensive and a kind of Xenon's paradox proposition -- it's an endless tide of rising expectations as people get an appetite for making platform devs do their governance for them instead of using real-life law or even the common sense that communities can develop in handling situations like this.
The reality is, I don't see anything changing here. By making it easier for the script kiddies to push their stubby little fingers on the AR button and hold it over and over again -- an abuse of its own -- they are just going to flood the system as we've seen in every other social media or online community situation.
The serious cases will get drowned out. Getting attention to serious cases will still take old media or new media attention in other quarters -- just as it did from the very dawn of Twitter when the community leader of a competing platform whined over heckling and got the devs to function -- without first telling everybody that she was from a competing service.
Each time this issue services, Tufekci claims that authoritarian governments -- Turkey is the obvious example for her -- are deliberately filing false reports on activists. I actually think there's a lot less of this than she thinks, or we would see more activists shut down. Most of them seem to do just fine, especially on their anonymous accounts, you know? Which I think makes them far less accountable when they are running revolutions in the square.
But just because these governments file false reports doesn't mean we should take away the ability to file ARs or try to devise a set of complex protocols to defeat them.
What I hope Twitter will evolve into doing is to be more transparent and more effective in this entire endeavour. They should publish the number of accounts they ban, and by country, and by reason. If a pattern develops, say, in Turkey, that too many people are banned for critical speech for no reason, they might act. Except...they can't, because Twitter has a policy now of "sovereignty of censorship" whereby each country gets to censor Twitter and ask Twitter Central to help them do that. Did Zeynep forget that? She was a big booster of it at the time...
The piece which appears in both German and English portrays the US as a decrepit data addict reduced to sucking up data for a living, something like the meth addict Wendy in Breaking Bad.
It might be funny even if weren't for the horrible, vicious barb -- NSA did all this slurping, but it couldn't even stop two brothers who had big social media profiles and bombed Boston.
IT'S NOT FBI FAILURE TO GATHER DATA BUT FSB FAILURE TO GIVE DATA
Of course, there are two real reasons why the Tsarnaev brothers could succeed at their deadly plan:
a) Evgeny's beloved Mother Russia did not help the FBI as he and others duplicitiously claim but in fact witheld crucial information. While ostensibly warning the FBI about the behaviour of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Moscow Central failed to deliver the most important news they had about him -- which they revealed only much later -- that he was in the company of a jihadist that they assassinated, and that two other jihadists they assassinated were also believed to have been in contact with him. Hey, that's pretty important metadata, you know? And the FSB held it close.
b) When the FBI did get the tip at look at the terrorist brothers' Youtubes, with its celebration of 9/11's losses, its extremist Islamic preaching, it's Russian-language jihad trainers, it's hate-fulled arguments in the comments, it decided it had no grounds for arrest. That's because a general hatred of America or even incitement of terrorism in a general kind of way are protected activities under the First Amendment. In fact, the FBI didn't violate the Tsarnaevs rights, even after getting the tip to look at their media, which is something that anti-American antagonists like Evgeny can never concede. The FBI didn't try to get a wiretap, or install one illegally or put an illegal GPS on the car, where they might have found Tamerlan going to buy explosives from a firecracker warehouse in New Hampshire, or might have found Dzhokhar testing them. No, they did none of these things they are forbidden to do by law and court cases without probable cause.
Russia could have given them that probably cause; it didn't. Evgeny is silent about that glaring factor, as so many "progressives" are, starting with Glenn Greenwald.
So while Evgeny might want to portray America as an old crack hag with meth mouth to boot, in fact her toothlessness, if we're going to call it that, is actually a function of exactly the kind of activism that Greenwald represents, civil rights crusades that ultimately stick in law and affect police practice.
EDWARD'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE OR HOW MOROZOV AND SHAMIR SAY THE SAME THING
With his trademark dry humour, Morozov mildly reprimands Snowden for having "poor trip planning skills." Of course, that's to pretend that he is tacitly conceding that going to Moscow makes no sense for freedom-lovers, but it's also to distract us from really asking why the lad never went to Venezuela in the first place, or didn't stay in Hong Kong after he kindly leaked helpful information about America's response to Chinese hacking to the Chinese government. The whole Moscow thing seems to be WikiLeaks/Assange's idea, and given how Assange has his own TV show on Kremlin-supported RTV and relies on a notorious Russian agent provocateur to do some of the circus-acting around this entire big-top performance, it seems like Moscow was the plan all along. I suspect it was for Edward, too, as I think the ideology he embodies -- technocommunism -- and its Bolshevik methods like hacking states to make a point -- inevitably wind up in the home of those ideologies, which has only shorn their outward form and continue to make heavy use of their methods.
And Morozov calls Snowden's felonies -- which he admits to -- and his defection a "noble mission" -- so you really can't have any doubt about his agenda -- to defeat America in its present form and turn it into something else. And of course that was his mission back when he began whacking away at Clinton's Internet freedom program in the most unseemly way -- given his purported at least Internet freedom seeking credentials. Yeah, Morozov was all about debunking Silicon Valley utopian hucksterism and gloatingly telling us that the authoritarians of the world were the real ones making use of all this social media and all this free data, but he was supposed to be for freedom, too, right?
Well, no, because he starts barking this nonsense, straight out of the Moscow agitprop handbook with its eternal lament of the Unipolar World ruled by evil Amerika:
Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.
MOROZOV'S LONG CAMPAIGN AGAINST AMERICA'S INTERNET FREEDOM PROGRAMS
So of course Morozov belongs there because as I've said a 100 times before in numerous posts, Morozov is always doing the regimes' work for them, cynically demolishing any hopeful plan for cyber-freedom by "helpfully" pointing out that some regime will exploit it so it's not worth trying (that's always his message and this piece is no exception with it's call to "forget Internet freedom"). That, when he's not busy trying to convince skittish liberals that they are harming the very people they want to help -- the Secret Policeman's Ruse (yes, you need to go back to 2010 when Morozov first began viciously attacking Clinton's Internet program in the strangest way).
This part of the typical active-measures manual is one that both Morozov and Sami Ben Gharabi used to ill end when they hystericallycampaignedagainst Haystack (a circumvention program devised for deployment in Iran by an outside coder that the State Department in fact didn't use) and the prospect of trying to do circumvention work in Iran. At the same time, WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum joined the chorus on the Mighty Accordian by dumping on the Chinese dissidents who used VPNs that were not his Tor to try to discredit them in the community and with the State Department, their funders. All of this highly concerted effort led not only to disarray and loss of funding for some; it led to a planned hearing about help to cyberdissidents being cancelled -- and this was before the Arab Spring.
Google the term "Haystack" and see the enormous deluge of tech media that piled on here -- joining the frenzied hate of the State Department and its programs ostensibly because this experimental software was going to harm people. The reality is that it wasn't accepted by the State Department, wasn't used, and no one was harmed. But you would never know this from the hysteria wall that prevented rational discussion. What this was really about was the gang of thugs like Appelbaum demanding that people who had proprietary software projects they didn't want to reveal "share" (be collectivized) in the open source movement because this was "better". That the thousands of eyes working on the bugs include secret police and Appelbaum didn't trouble Morozov and others screeching about this. It was one of Morozov's most successful active measures.
See, there was a very strenuous effort by some Arab bloggers and Jillian York and others around the Berkman Center to try to derail the US from helping opposition forces -- and some of these people were either coopted by regimes or simply of anti-American and anti-Israeli political persuasion. In the end, they couldn't stop US involvement in the Arab Spring, which has been a wild tiger to try to ride in any event, with the US damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. The main take-home here is that the kinds of programs and connections and lessons learned that might have taken place got dented at least in part by this vicious campaign against Clinton's program -- one that the Russians also waged on their end by blocking passage of an Internet freedom resolution in the OSCE and hysterically launching a "foreign agents" witch hunt among NGOs, starting with one that they said was "sponsored by Hillary" which monitored elections -- and found them to be fraudulent in Putin's controled space.
All of this strenuous tactical work Morozov and co. were waging in bureaucratic battles in Washington and intelligentsia magazine blog posts and such seemed to fly under the radar of his "larger" intellectual work debunking the sillier concepts coming out of Silicon Valley. There were so many people eager to see some of these inflated egos punctured like Jeff Jarvis or Clay Shirky that they seemed oblivious to how much damage the ultimate message was causing: don't really try to win the Internets because the very process of doing so enables tyrants -- hey, your companies that make stuff only wind up having it accidently sold to the bad guys, boo, hiss. America could never do right.
People in the State Department would laugh when I would point out this was going on. Are they laughing now? But then, some of these people were the same ones funding Jacob Appelbaum well past the sell-by date -- until finally those WikiLeaks grand jury subpoenas on his email and such forced them to realize that they had to let it go.
I think RevMagdalen got it right in the comments to one of Morozov's many Haystack blogs in which among many dubious points he claimed Haystack had attracted politics around itself but Tor had not (false):
Many readers have noticed that this blog seems to be entirely about
Haystack these days, and it didn't take them long to Google and discover
that you, Mr. Morozov, have been a longtime and very vocal proponent of
the idea that the internet cannot and should not be used to promote
freedom. With that background, I'm sure it would be hard to resist
crowing over Haystack's demise. Some authors would consider it
unethical to fail to disclose that history to readers who might be
unfamiliar with your past, but hey, it's their lookout if they can't be
bothered to research people's motives on their own, right?
CYBERSPACE EXISTS LIKE ALL HUMAN MENTAL CONSTRUCTS
Finally how Evgeny so fussily obssesses with scholarly punctiliousness abuot the existence or non-existence of the Internet or "the Internet" or "cyberspace". Of course these things exist; he's soaking in it. What is not cyberspace if it is not his endless afternoons indulging in his net addiction while he refrains from locking up the Internet in a box and throwing in the screwdriver (which he actually claims to do to get work down)? His tweets are a case study in virtuality: the Sage of Soligorsk as witty salonista and flâneur dropping mot after mot, some of them no doubt written by interns.
From two hours ago: "Advice to budding theorists: When in doubt about the originality of
concepts you've just coined, just capitalize them. Or use Latin." From three hours ago: "Now we know why the Mayans died out: They ran out of hackers." Or another from three hours ago: "Evgeny Morozov
@evgenymorozov3h
Excellent essay title in search of excellent content: "Luther Was a Hacktivist."
I think you could probably string these all together at some point and make a book like "Shit My Dad Says".
A MISREADING OF MICROSOFT?
And do we chalk it up to non-native English or just ill will when Morozov takes a statement like this -- which could just as well mean that Microsoft realizes it will have to offer customers more protection because of the enhanced government interest in tracking people -- and pulls this out of it?
Buried in Microsoft’s non-denial is a very peculiar line. Justifying the
need to make its digital products compatible with the needs of security
agencies, Microsoft’s general counsel wrote that “looking forward, as
Internet-based voice and video communications increase, it is clear that
governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal
powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or
tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over
the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels
of privacy and security.” Read this again: here’s a senior
Microsoft executive arguing that making new forms of communication less
secure is inevitable – and probably a good thing.
If we have less security and privacy on the Internet than imagined, let's not forget why: the inherent flaws welded into it by one of its chief architects, Tim Berners-Lee, who wanted the Internet deliberately to be open, free, copiable, nonprivate and non-commercial. The very same piracy and copying functions that undermine intellectual property rights are what make it impossible to create a world of privacy, too; the technolibertarians and the technocommunists both failed to realize this.
I do have to say I chuckled when reading today how Cory Doctorow, a vicious copyleftist nerd who has campaigned aggressively against any kind of cybersecurity or anti-piracy regulations, has now come around on DRM in a funny way, as we learn from libtech; finally gets that the same features that protect easy copying of content might come in handy to protect grabbing of data and invasion of privacy, too.
SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE REDUX
Now comes the Secret Policeman's Ruse again -- making Americans feel guilty for their sins not because they might hurt themselves -- oh no (because they might have trouble believing because, you know, there's no case; WikiLeaks has no case). No, it's about their troubles harming someone else. You know, getting that dissident in trouble if you visit him or contact him.
The secret policeman wants to grab hold of your liberal guilt and gullibility and convince you that if you help a dissident hack out of a dictatorship, why, you might harm him. Better not to. Better to wait. Better not to help. Mission accomplished!
So, we want to catch all the terrorists before they are born? Fine, Big
Data – and big bugs in our software and hardware – are here to help.
But, lest we forget, they would also help the governments of China and
Iran to predict and catch future dissidents. We can’t be building
insecure communication infrastructure and expect that only Western
governments would profit from it.
Except -- that thinking is circular and ridiculous. We never said, "Because the Soviets had tank superiority in Europe, let's not have tanks, and let's not even have Cruise missiles". Just because they can use the same infrastructure for ill doesn't mean we abandon it -- it's a fight. And wait, who said Microsoft is building deliberately insecure infrastructure to let governments in the back door to fight terrorism? Evgeny has frankly pulled that out of his ass. I really want a third and tenth opinion on this because the paragraph he's cited out of context reads like in fact it may say the opposite. Does anybody else dare say this? Does everybody just swallow this shit whole?
Evgeny couldn't be more delighted about "information sovereignty" -- in fact he practically wets himself welcoming Iran's foreward-thinking policies that ensured it could control, dissidents, sure, but more importantly, be protected from that awful evil NSA that Snowden has brought ill tidings about. Hmm, and maybe that was the idea all along with this defector and his Kremlin-friendly hacker pals -- to enable Russia and China and Iran and other autorcrats to tell their people that in order to protect their social privacy from the Man -- GosDep! -- they have to have sovereign Internets filtering out everything that could harm healthy living and right thinking. Yes, that means snaring some dissidents along the way, but privacy is so important, it's worth it.
It's like one old peacenik recently told me on Facebook -- she'd be happy to have 9/11 repeat every 20 years (!) if only our privacy could be ensured. Imagine! 3,000 people are to die every generation just so that her email with her addle-headed ditherings about evil American capitalism and imperialism can be hidden from, um, Big Brother.
But, you say, if Morozov is explaining how people will suffer from information sovereignty, how can you claim that he is welcoming it? Because he's making it seem inevitable. Because he's not explainIng how in fact people fight it, at home and abroad. Because he is deadly cynical -- and his description of everything in this deadly cynical tint is then invoked as diktat. You see, now, we should just go along with what they want at the WCIT.
LIVE JOURNAL WASN'T DOWN
Morozov makes it seem like he's savvy -- and concerned -- about maintenance issues on Live Journal seeming to crop up at strategically important times.
But...it's not true. I was on LiveJournal all night for two nights running in the days before Navalny's verdict; in fact I was reading his LJ; in fact I was translating his LJ and a few others and refreshing the pages and reading comments. There was no maintenance problem. I didn't hear anybody else claiming there were. Sure, there are at times, not only because it's big and slow but because the Russian government probably really doesn't interfere. But it hasn't in fact gotten in the way of a huge outpouring of expression around the Navalny trial. Therefore, how are we to understand Morozov's strange claim: as a threat?
See, that's the sort of thing that must be asked about this man, so I ask it.
THE SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE FOR REAL
Now here come the nut graphs -- and Morozov could have saved us the other 3500 words that are rehashes of his dyspeptic views already spun for years now:
This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s
going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the
hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning. America has managed to
advance its communications-related interests by claiming high moral
ground and using ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” to hide many
profound contradictions in its own policies. On matters of “Internet
freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America
enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds
of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on
matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or
Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in
neither.
Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of
specific evidence has allowed America to buy some time and influence.
These days are gone. Today, the rhetoric of “Internet freedom agenda”
looks as trustworthy as George Bush’s “freedom agenda” after Abu Ghraib.
Washington will have to rebuild its policies from scratch. But, instead
of blaming Snowden, Washington must thank him. He only exposed the
shaky foundations of already unsustainable policies. These policies,
built around vaporous and ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” and
“cyberwar” would have never survived the complexities of global politics
anyway.
But nothing about these paragraphs is true. The Internet freedom agenda of America stands. The job of protesting when anti-corruption bloggers like Navalny go on trial remains -- along with other bloggers in Russian and elsewhere who have been silenced, beaten, jailed or even killed. These are very, very basic human rights causes that America will continue to take up and continue to be appreciated for when it does.
US officials will have hard explanations to make, especially due to the riotious uproar of agitprop that Snowden himself has concocted and perfected with Assange's and Poitras' assistance -- and amplification courtesy of the Kremlin. It takes awhile to explain to people that no one has actually read their mail and that their real problem is their governments that in fact do -- and published them in the paper as Evgeny's homeland does.
But I doubt any dissident getting a grant or equipment to help with Internet freedom is suddenly going to reject the financing due to Snowden. Oh, there may be a few who will be whipped up by Jillian Yorke or something, but not really. Abu Ghraib definitely tarnished America's reputation and undermined its ability to advocate for human rights. Yet it did press on in world fora, and among those people it helped and those rights it advocated were Egyptian and other Arab NGOs, despite whatever objection Morozov and Sami had. And Morozov and his likeminded nihilists never have a good explanation about terrorism -- the terrorism that continues in Iraq after we leave and will continue in Afghanistan after we leave; the terrorism that led to 50 people killed in marketplaces and schools and mosques again and again and again in Iraq to the point that most of the 100,000 people killed there were killed by terrorists, some backed by state, not US troops. And the same is true of Afghanistan. The anti-anti-tyranny club Morozov gleefully commands never has a way of coping with these realities -- they are de-rendered.
HOW THEY DO IT IN BELARUS AND RUSSIA
One of the most irritating features of this whole NSA hysteria deliberately unlished by Edward Snowden and his hacker pals at WikiLeaks is that Americans and West Europeans discussing this don't seem to realize what real surveillance of a real totalitarian state with real consequences is. And so as always -- with SOPA, with CISPA, with CFAA, with a host of other Internet legislative issues -- they take the hysterical hyperthetical and the breatheless edge-case over the actual sense and meaning of real practice.
In Belarus, the government simply jumps in -- actually, with the help of an Austrian telecom as it happenS -- and exploits features of Skype -- that were present even before Microsoft, actually -- or just makes use of Firefox's handy feature to save passwords -- and grabs everybody's email and chat and online footprint -- just because they can.
They allow some websites to thrive just to capture everybody going to them. As a Belarusian trade union leader told me even 25 years ago before the Internet, "Glasnost is a cowbell around our necks they use to find us." That's how it works.
So they get everybody's yammerings, then they just dump it into the main newspaper, still called Sovietskaya Belarus, just like the secret police are still called the KGB, and the materials are not only used to embarass and tendentiously frame opposition leaders, it is used to prosecute them. They actually go to jail because their government has a huge surveillance component; they don't just spout hysterically on Twitter about how someone is seeing their cat pictures; they really go to jail.
In Russia, an opposition leader like Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny will find the transcripts of their cell phones and their emails spilled out in the press -- by a murky process that no one every seems to investigate too closely -- and the whole world gloats at their petty squabbles or nasty characterizations of each other -- or in the case of Navalny, is actually surprised not to find much of a scandal.
WHAT'S THE BIG DATA SCRAPE REALLY ALL ABOUT?
This sort of thing is all too common in these countries -- and people in the West don't seem to get it.
That is, they get the process when it happens to somebody like Anthony Weiner, a mayor candidate exposed once again as sexting on the Internet with young women despite already supposedly apologizing for this electronic ego-pumping addiction and vowing to reform. The government didn't get in Weiner's mail, but perhaps some right-wing group did and then they become suspect.
But the public can't seem to grasp that when there's something like the last phone call Trayvon Martin made to his friend, the reason why we can't really pin it down today, and have to rely on the words of a flustered teenager changing her story, is precisely because the government doesn't store and retain and make accessible the content of your phone calls. Hello! If they did, we'd know much more about what happened that night.
As I've always explained on this blog, the big IT companies scraping data not only for marketing but for political campaigns (as we discovered with Obama's successful campaign) are the source of the problem, and blaming one of the end-users, the NSA, is merely to succumb to the grand distraction these very cunning WikiLeaks hacksters have created in a kind of open-source active measure along with the Russian and Chinese governments -- and anyone else who wants to pile on.
The slurping up of metadata by Verizon is meaningless because it doesn't scrape the content of your call; they don't have your call's sense and meaning, it's content. Duh, we get it that the various proximity data points and social network and location data points might yield some sort of profile about you, but so do your Four-Square check-ins and tweets.
When Google scans your g-mail to pick out keywords and sell you ads for Geico, you don't complain even though every word of your communication had to be stored and analyzed for that to happen; when the government peels off the top layer of this data packet to match it to known information about terrorist groups or other criminal activities, you whine that your privacy is invaded. How childish.
Given how much hysterical hype there is on this now, I'm simply not going to yield to all the facile talk about FISA courts and such and will keep demanding findings and cases. We haven't had a single case of anyone claiming their rights were violated by this big NSA dragnet, and meanwhile the constant whining that we can't know because the FISA courts are secret doesn't cut it -- when there are clients whose lawyers are concerned they've been nabbed only on the basis of a secret FISA court review of such electronic information, they complain. Maybe they don't keep complaining becuase they know the government has a case. Or maybe they have another strategy. If there were a person who really could point to a false arrest on the basis of invasion of his metadata, we would hear about it in the country that has produced Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, journalist, friend to hackers, threat-conveyor, and who knows, possible defendant in some future case hinging on the decision of a judge that journalists who know about crimes committed and refuse to testify about them cannot expect immunity from prosecution. Whether that judicial decision is right or wrong actually depends on whether there really was ever any good will or sincerity on Greenwald's part -- and I remain unconvinced to date.
INTERNET OF THINGS DRIVES MOROZOV TO THE STATE FARM
Morozov plays his hand here more clearly as a statist in the end -- despite his endless derision of weak Western states faced with cunning Eastern tyrants -- because he lauds European regulation of the Internet and thinks it was a mistake to "go into the cloud". Here we will learn anew the difference between sovkhoz and kolkhoz.
He converts this old-fashioned bureaucratic centralist statism of his, that went out with Brezhnev and Tito, into a faux anarchy fighting the machine -- fighting the capitalist bourgeois Internte of things with a revolutionary plan to turn it into a state arm.
Yes, why, just like me, (although I've been writing about IOT for years before he did) he begins to warn of the Internet of Things and how dangerous this is. But here's the difference: for me, every threat that comes from the Internet in the form of people or companies or governments has a remedy: a free market in levels of service -- in our case, First Amendment levels and Fourth Amendment levels, if you will. The Internet is merely another human artifact and the laws of humanity apply to it; maybe Morozov's problem is that he isn't a technophobe but a misanthrope. What has made the Internet -- and yes, it's a real thing, very real, and will bite Zhenya in the ass some day -- is that it is diverse and pluralistic -- made of individuals, companies, nonprofits, governments, and multilaterals. These represent competing interests and that's ok. It isn't the end of the world if some companies demand that you show your real identity and use a phone to sign you up and end your unaccountable anonymity but also sell your data to make a living; if someone wants unaccountable anonymity, or no data sales, great, they can live on a darknet but then they can't then expect to organize 20,000 people on Facebook, they'll have to make do with Twitter. And so on.
GOVERNMENT FIRST
For Morozov, like others in his jetset, only blanket police changes will do -- he implies that the entire Internet has to be run from Geneva by UN bureaucrats who have read Zizek (although he's sly enough never to really come out with a detailed positive vision, you have to etch it in like a batik). Even so, he gives away the store at times: He pictures the smartness of yours shoes or your umbrella or your toothbrush as somehow *first* being available to the government.
But that's arrant nonsense. The government is the last in line for the dregs. Like the dystopia envisioned in the sci-fi novel Snowcrash, which prefigured the Internet and virtual worlds, we're in the world of Mr. Lee's Hong Kong (already visited by Snowden!) and the US as a kind of diminished postal services island. So the real people who first have this data are corporations and mafias and of course hackers. They already control us and already find us and know where we live. Gen. Alexander explained the threats to the Internet are hostile governments and hackers like Anonymous, and that tells you who already really controls the Internet.
The hackers that Morozov seldom chastises (because they're thrilling! because he's still hoping to harness their revolutionary fervour to create the state farm!) are the ones that already thrive in this and can plan to hack into your pace-maker and shut if off if they don't like your blog -- unless of course they die first testing zappers on themselves or snorting heroin, because that's what hackers often do.
The government in fact is what you will want to have to keep you from being persecuted by these other entities; they will be the protectors of civil rights, not a bunch of drugged out Silicon Valley start-up freaks or the goofball script kiddies and sinister and seasoned anarcho-communists trailing behind them.
And there he goes again -- glibly claiming that because Google scrapes our g-mail to pitch ads -- which troubles him not one whit, though it should -- that the NSA has access to our content. It doesn't. It has access to metadata that no one has yet proven was misused to violate a real individual's real civil rights.
LEGAL NIHILISM
Oh, and here it comes, Bazarov-style legal nihilism!
Laws Won't Be Much Help
As our gadgets and previously
analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere.
One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that
will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost. In
other words, you get your smart toothbrush for free – but, in exchange,
you allow it to collect data on how you use the toothbrush. It’s this
data that will eventually finance the cost of the toothbrush. Or, for
objects with screens or speakers, you might see or hear a personalized
ad based on your use of the device – and it’s the ad that will
underwrite the cost. This, for example, is the model that Amazon is
already pursuing with its Kindle ereaders: if you want a cheaper model,
you simply accept to see advertising on their screens. Amazon’s ultimate
Faustian bargain would be to offer us a free ereader along with free
and instantaneous access to all of the world’s books on one condition:
we will agree to let it analyze everything we read and serve us ads
accordingly.
But...the world already works that way. And if anything, in the wake of the Snowden-induced hysteria, Verizon is now sending out emails asking customers if they want to opt out from data sales.
And laws will be of help -- and hey, that's what CISPA was before you all hacked it to death, remember? It regulated relations between the government and private Internet companies so that privacy could be protected while crime could be fought -- but you didn't like that. You wanted Obama to be able to issue edicts instead -- and get James Rosen's emails for real.
THE BIG DATA BAZAAR
Like Jaron Lanier and Eric Schdmit and Jaren Cohen, Morozov climbs on this crazy bandwagon of predicting the sale of services like medical care based on big data in some actual marketplace. They don't seem to realize that human services are really still not replaceable by bots (especially in hospitals, in fact) and that the data is terribly devalued and is only kept artificially inflated by the fiction of the social contract of "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" that social media now gives us -- we provide content they can copy and scrape and sell and they give us a crappy platform.
This is going to be changing as increasingly the idea that content has to be sold catches on -- in fact already some of these pioneers are speaking of this now even as they scorned it in the era of Farmville or Groupon when they thought they could just keep getting time-suck in exchange for ad-clicks -- ad-clicks that never gave any ROI, as finally they found out. Morozov must not have noticed the revelation at TechCrunch from one of the Facebook execs that click ads just don't work for anybody to pay anything seriously -- especially on mobile. The model -- and the world will change as a result.
That is, the marketplace that Morozov hysterically invokes as a violator of rights -- big sales of big data by evil exploiting capitalists -- isn't going to happen that way -- and where it does exist it is waning, but instead, individuals and small and medium business will at least find its place as the bigger Internet monopolies like Google are forced to break up. A facebook will be something your local phone company puts on for you.
Fumes Morozov, however, behind the times, "Market logic has replaced morality" -- as if commerce and capitalism is by definition immoral. Who says? Sour post-Soviet socialists? But market logic -- a willing buyer and a willing seller -- is what freedom is all about. Why is that so distasteful to this post-communist East European scold? As he admits, people willingly turn over data and time to these gadgets and aren't horrified by either corporate or government intrusion as much as the tech set thinks as they are scared by their own shadow on Twitter.
When Morozov invokes the notion of "political latency" (what a term! worthy of Zizek!) i.e. that if the environmental cause is making progress -- lights now go off when no one is in the room -- then the efficiency of "scientific" notions of "betterworldism" deciding what is "best" for us now works to collectivize ourselves and our property. He must not have looked out the window in any big city. Loads of people never turning off lights; many of the lights are the little screens of gadgets. The reality is, the gadget revolution that made so many millions spend millions and put further stress on the electrical grid as a result completely undid whatever advantage you might have gotten from conservation in the pre-Internet days.
Then Morozov winds up as dishonestly as any of his targets of derision like Shirky or Jarvis. He completely manufactures a model -- that "we're all" going to make this Faustian bargain where in exchange for having "smart gadgets" we will sell the data they scrape to either the highest commercial bidder or the government or both. But who said we were going to do that? Who said anyone values our data beyond a one dollar one-time sale -- when they already got most of it for free?! It would be great if it goes as I'm hoping-- with more access to a more diversified market for content and services on the Internet. I'm more hopeful than Morozov and I think it will. Humans usually correct the monsters they make.
ALL POWER TO THE CODERS
But...The power is in the hands of the coders, not yet in the digital commodity which has been devalued -- and in fact, what the Internet of Things does is not commodify data but collectivize everything and put it all in the hands of the technocommunists -- not the user with his scraped data. In fact, it may be too late to imagine yourself as an economic actor on this scene. We'll have to see what cartels and what hacker attacks occur, in fact, and then there's this: all these wired gadgets will work like ass. Tech stuff always breaks down.
The people who will above all possess the data -- completely left out of Morozov's equation and no accident, comrade -- are the coders. They're a ruling class that Morozov hopes to work along side (like Joshua Foust does) because he will understand them and understand them so well that he will like them and imagine they are some bulwark against the depradations of the exploiters. But it is this New Class that will be the problem for us all, not "commercialization".
So Morozov's solution is actually to demarketize -- to get rid of markets -- because markets are horrors:
As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data
shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from
the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would
simply buy – on the open market – what today they secretly get from
programs like Prism.
But in fact, a free market of Internet services, including data protection, including making the stuff work, including user-generated content, is what will enable freedom, not destroy it. That's because of the plurality of actors and the free determination of value. Like so many Soviets, Morozov fears commerce -- hates it. That blinds him from seeing that markets, like the one that enables his books and lectures to sell, are good things. Right now, in fact our information isn't very useful, and it is being scraped to feed a threadbare and dying model --the click ad. In the future, the other models of individual users assigning value and marketers emerging to aggregate and harvest this will change things.
PIRATE PARTY IS 'NONSENSE' -- EXCEPT, NOT REALLY
Morozov pretends that he advocates not leaving everything to those young coders, and even the sectarianism of the Pirate Party. But listen to how diabolical he is with this:
What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their
ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever
will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just
another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and
hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it. Rather, we
need more topical domains - “privacy” or “subjectivity” to overtake the
domain of the network. Forget an ambiguous goal like “Internet freedom” –
it’s an illusion and it’s not worth pursuing. What we must focus on is
creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and
preserved.
Note the message here really is this: forget Internet freedom, it's an illusion. Sublimal it's not! Before he would hammer this message subliminally, by constantly having water wear away the stone, telling us the tyrants were really winning the Internet, so we should give up. Now, he's saying airily that the Pirates are has-beens and he envisions a world of topicality like "privacy" to be above the mechanics of the Internet and the corporations that run it. How? By taking them over with a network of elites and/or an agency in Washington that regulates them? In one of his essays for the New Republic in fact Morozov advocates just that to deal with the problem of uneven Apple "innovation".
But aren't we saying the same thing, if I'm saying we need to enable free markets in goods and services and Morozov says he is for "creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved"? Not at all. For Morozov, that environment is a state farm, at the end of the day, run by the smart people, like him. (So, the coders want a collective farm; Evgeny wants a state farm. You know the difference.)
Morozov is right that the Pirate Party's utopian vision of remaking governance by Internetizing it is bunkum -- but I would say it's because they follow the same rules of the Benevolent Dictatorships of Open Source which are antithetical to liberal democracy.
And what he would do is spout incoherent nonsense himself, after saying the Pirate Party's notion of running parliament like Wikipedia (the horror!) was nonsense:
But the good thing that did come out of the Pirates was the nudge to get
everyone else thinking about digital matters and their impact on the
future of democracy. This is the content – rather than the process –
part. That project must continue but, perhaps, be reoriented from
pursuing the faux goal of “Internet freedom” to thinking about
preserving real freedoms instead.
Er, just having a "national conversation" are we -- and "thinking about digital matters"? what the hell is the content behind that? That's not concent, that is in fact content-free process waiting to be filled with some prefabbed ideology just like the technocommunism that always seems to be lurking behind Morozov's door. Faux Internet freedom? Is that like Marxist "false consciousness"? Real freedoms are preserved by law -- but Morozov gave that up many paragraphs ago when he said it would do no good against the Internet's tide of anarchy. Oh, we'll see about that.
And finally, the Grand Insight:
Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.
But by that, Morozov means that anybody wanted to make money from the Internet and data and content anyway, when it should have been all a selfless subbotnik. Pretty soon we will be told not to consume because that is so bourgeois. He's forgetting that there are consumers and buyers -- but also prosumers, and that the buyers cannot harm their consumers or they don't have customers anymore.
SNOWDEN UBER ALLES
And finally, there's this: why in Germany, why now? I'd love to know who and how this piece was commissioned, eh? All of a sudden? In Germany? Now? Where Jacob Appelbaum has decided to remain indefinitely, after publishing his sensational interview, along with Laura Poitras, of Snowden in Hong Kong? After Snowden was awarded a whistleblower's award? When Snowden has become an item of domestic warfare for the SDP against Merkel?
In the end, Morozov has said nothing more original than "information wants to be free". But it doesn't. As any consultant or writer like Morozov will tell you, "your information wants to be free; mine is available for a fee."
Jared was his colleague with whom he DM'd on Twitter, but Jared then sent an anonymous (later easily discovered) comment about Keys' firing to the media.
Then they had a fight. (BTW, Keller's repeated reference to the line in the Godfather, "This is the business we have chosen," is awfully creepy.) I'm curious what group they were in. Is this Journo-List? Is this Paul Carr's NSF? What is it exactly? Anyone?
Keys then waited for weeks -- for reasons that aren't clear -- stewing in his spite and then exposed Cullen as the culprit for the leaked remark AND exposed his own disgruntled comments about his employer.
Needless to say, Bloomberg let him go the next day -- or he quit before he was fired?
Reuters should have done the same thing when they first discovered that Keys had decided to be defiant about his indictment, and not acknowledge the journalistic ethics involved.
Keys was said to be fired for violating Reuters ethics requirements -- but you have to wonder why he wasn't fired then on day one after his indictment not because he's "innocent until proven guilty" and his employer could in theory stand behind him, but because he simply failed to acknowledge that *yes*, there were ethical considerations involved in disguising his identity, hanging out in the IRC channel with the Anonymous hackers as they plotted hacks, and then not telling the authorities about this -- and even appearing to join in one "prank" against his own former employer -- and gloat about it.
Keys has never said "those acts were wrong" but instead has said "I didn't do it" -- and we're all waiting to see what rabbit he's going to pull out of which hat to make this lame claim -- likely it will be along the lines of "I wuz hacked" or perhaps even "I was depressed and taking medications". The font of hacker excuses is bottomless.
Do they teach ethics at Columbia School of Journalism any more?!
My comment on their website:
Does the Columbia School of Journalism still teach journalism ethics?
The Trust Principles are basic ethics like not misrepresenting yourself
to get a story, and that's what Keys acknowledges he did in the IRC
channel with Anonymous. Although he learned of crimes being planned and
executed and is even shown to participate in hacks of media outlets, he
didn't report the crimes to authorities and seemed to make himself part
of the story. He both admits he was the person in the account leading to
him and then implies his legal defense will somehow prove it wasn't
really him, that he was "hacked".
Then you have the obvious discrepancies in Keys' account of the
Boston police scanner story; elsewhere, he says he would have complied
and stop tweeting had he known authorities had made this request, but
got the notice hours after it was made -- but then complied with it.
Here, he implies you don't have to comply if you're a fabulous social
media editor.
Then, if you criticize Matthew Keys legitimately for his questionable
lack of morals, his defiant bragging of breaching journalistic ethics,
white-washing of Anonymous, he heckles you, as he has been doing to me:
Keys wasn't fired for tweeting a police scanner report that multiple
other journalists and bloggers tweeted, myself included, but because he
had already built up a record of nasty defiance of management and of
rules by then.
One shouldn't require "training" in basic principles that should be
part of your character before you are hired. When we see the gushing
treatment Keys gets in this piece, we can see where the problems are
rooted -- in journalism schools that in the rush to be part of the fad
of social media seem to have discarded their long-established
foundations for credibility.
***
I want to note again that I tweeted the exact same Boston police scanner information that Matthew did. THAT I don't see anything wrong with -- and not merely because I did it -- if these scanners are open to the public (and I'm not sure they should be, or least, not for every operation), then they have to be reported.
If they locked down the city of Boston while they were trying to capture this suspect in the bombings, why didn't they also cite public safety and block their scanners? Isn't that possible? Because it does affect their ability to capture someone if he has helpers listening to the scanner (it's not about him listening himself).
There's also the issue of Matthews changing his story -- which is definitely the case, as first he said on his open Facebook he didn't see the warning the BPD made to the public to stop tweeting the scanner, and claimed he would have heeded it if he had seen it in time -- and *did* hours later:
C) When people became upset, I said on Twitter I hadn't seen the CBS News report that everyone was sourcing in which the Boston Police supposedly asked people not to publish scanner traffic. With a focus on four different video streams, several Twitter lists and, yes, dispatch audio, it slipped by me. But once I became aware of it, I stopped. In fact -- having been awake well over 24 hours, with 10 of them covering the overnight event -- I closed the computer and went to bed.
But now for the CJR interview, he's doubling down and saying that it's okay to tweet it anyway:
As far as I’m aware, there was no request by law enforcement on social
media and no request by law enforcement by way of a press release or
media statement asking for people on Twitter to not tweet emergency
scanner traffic.
He's since deleted his tweets from the scanner.
When you see how Matthew contorts himself and gives two difference versions of his behaviour and beliefs about what is right on the Boston police scanner incident, you can see how untrustworthy he is on the Anonymous issue (where his story has also...morphed).
Cory Booker is insufferable -- I really don't care for him. He's a populist blowhard, always distracting from the hard questions with feel-goods. Right now he's using Twitter to fund-raise to run for the Senate. He's endlessly "leveraging" social media where he has gadzillion followers, many of them gushing fanboyz and fangirlz, and it always feels like a concoction.
He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat,
so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He
balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to
what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many
consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called
the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow
vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital.
Honestly, Cory! Being mayor of Newark, NJ is hard enough -- you should just concentrate on that and do that right rather than exploit this poor town and its problems as a springboard to more power in the Senate!
In Newark, a local foundation established by Zuckerberg and the state
have spent more than two years deciding how to best create a schoolyard
revolution with $100 million dollars. At first, the "Facebook money," as
it's called in Newark, helped the state hire consultants and establish
several new charter schools. But the reform effort has floundered at
moments: The first million dollars went towards a poorly conducted
community survey that had to be re-worked
by Rutgers and New York University, and criticism was fierce when a
foundation board established to decide how the Facebook money was spent
included only one Newark resident: Cory Booker. ("Yes, it's their money.
But it's Newark's kids," an op-ed that ran in the Star-Ledger read.)
Then last November, nearly $50 million of Zuckerberg's money went to pay for a new teacher's contract,
the first in New Jersey to offer performance pay for teachers who are
deemed as "highly effective." The contract offers up to $12,500 in
bonuses for the teachers rated as the best in the district. It's the
first contract in New Jersey to offer performance-based pay, a policy
that's been instituted in a few cities such as Washington, DC. In DC,
the plan was so controversial that it might have cost
Mayor Adrian Fenty his job. "I think it helped—I know it helped—to be
on our side of the table and have deeper pockets," one school district
official said about the Newark negotiations.
Somehow, I'm not surprised that the teachers' unions got their hands on this to pay themselves more.
Hey, Booker may plan a run at the presidency some day so the stakes are higher -- who knows, perhaps he is the One Obama might annoint, as we know there will be *somebody* he will annoint and give the word to for Obama for America, now renamed Organizing for Action, that has all the coveted -- and locked-up -- data bases of drilled social media data that helped Obama win the elections, and will be turned over to his choice in 2016.
So....I was a bit surprised to see Bruce Sterling mention this -- and I don't know whether it was with a bit of archness because what amounts to the Alec Ross or Anne Marie Slaughter wing of the party is still likely to the right of him, where he's located, which is far more to the technocommunist extreme. I figured Bruce Sterling roots for the hackers, and therefore inevitably does Google's business.
But perhaps Google isn't close enough to its hacker roots for Bruce anymore, I don't know. His account is on private, so you can't tell. Rayne, an Empty Wheel blogger is one of the lucky ones (along with some 25,000 verified special persons) allowed to see his closed account, which is how he focused on this -- and seems to take a further response from Sterling (which we can't see) as meaning he still doesn't "get it" -- about oh, that evil Democratic Leadership Committee which "coopted" the party (even though Rayne himself seems to be fighting to interpret Booker on his side).
But keep that barf-bag handy, because here's what Rayne thinks Magical Cory produces for the People:
What both NYT missed, besides categorizing Booker as belonging to the “Googly-Facebook” portion of the Democratic Party:
— Booker’s efforts with regard to his one-on-one interactions with
constituents do not compare with a considerable portion of the party to
which he belongs;
— His actions are highly transparent, his words sync with his deeds right there in the public forum of Twitter;
— Booker uses “big data” to make and justify decisions; “big data” is
merely a contemporary expression of polling data used in the near-term
past and present.
Rayne seems unburdened by the need to prove any of these claims.
My comment on Empty Wheel (before Mother Jones!)
The extraordinary efforts put in to denying Sterling’s apt comment
about Booker and then Lanier’s valid critique let us know just how deep
the sickness is.
I marvel how you could get through this entire piece and never
mention Mark Zuckerberg’s huge gift of $100 million to the Newark
schools — a gift that Cory Booker no doubt benefits from in reputational
enhancement value and in having pots of money to manage as he wishes,
if not personally. Booker is essentially a fake, in my view. He uses the
“community managing” populist technique of appearing to be “down with
the people” on Twitter, but it’s highly selective. He does star turn
after star turn engineered for its retweet value, shovelling snow,
running into burning buildings, living on food stamps. But the big
picture issues he ducks.
Time and again I’ve asked him how that $100 million is doing, and if
we can get some serious report on the abysmal schools in Newark, and
whether any improvement is actually coming out of throwing all that cash
at them, and I never, ever get an answer. I ask whether it was in
Facebook stock and whether that is now devalued and there isn’t any $100
million and I never, ever get any answer. And he never talks about this
subject at all. As you don’t. Why? Of course he’s Googly and Facebooky —
I’d be Facebooky too, if I had $100 million to play with on the schools
from FB.
Then there’s the remarkable — eye-popping, really — refusal to here
to criticize Harper Reed and company and the huge, awful Obama data grab
that went on — which is now all locked up in a private nonprofit with
big spenders that is not the public political party that ran the
candidate, and is not available to that party — the DNC. That’s wrong.
That’s unethical. That’s been questioned by many including the Sunlight
Foundation.
And to think that elections aren’t decided by big data and its
drilling! Come now, we’re not children. The entire gambit with the 47%
is exactly an example of how social media (Youtube and Twitter) were
galvanized and manipulated to turn public opinion into a seething frenzy
of hate. In fact, there wasn’t factually anything untrue about the
statement Romney made, as louche as it was. In fact, the bartender who
taped him didn’t even focus on that remark, but thought the bigger
scandal was moving the factory to China. In fact, David Corn and other
“progressive” journalist operatives made hay with this often by not
really quoting the original statement accurately — Romney didn’t say
people were welfare mooches, he just said they were dependent. The
entire story then became a “story” pushed relentlessly through all the
social networks, emails, DMs on Tweets, etc. etc. It’s *that* use of
weaponized social media that is troublesome.
I've never gotten an answer about the Zuckerberg $100 million when I directly asked Mr. Transparency, and never heard from anyone. I figured it probably got pissed away buying computers, gadgets, ed-tech consultants, etc. etc. and probably had little or no effect. Now we're learning finally from the ACLU's probe and Mother Jones that it went to paying teachers' bonuses -- without sufficient community input to determine how effective that is.
The comments at Empty Wheel are filled with critiques of Booker, in fact, accusing him of corruption because he has "privatized" schools (i.e. gone with school vouchers) or he has ties with "private equity" which they find "evil," of course, being socialists. I don't know the facts here, but for me, Booker is largely a fraud -- there's nothing about him that's "transparent" just because he's tweeting inanities on Twitter, if he doesn't answer about the big questions -- and frankly, that $100 million is one of them (not to mention questions about how well the entire school system is doing, given the controversies over vouchers and such).
Now I can see more clearly the issues around Booker -- the leftist anti-corporate socialist wing of the Democratic Party doesn't like him and they will try to sink him around the $100 million and other issues. I questioned the same thing, but from the liberal center, where the more Googley-Facebooky Democrats are still to the left but not as left as Empty Wheel -- they are Hillaryland, not Obamaland, but I don't want them to become worse than they are. It's a terrible thing when your support of free enterprise in the Democratic Party has to hinge on these sorts.
Regardless of the outcome of the trial of Matthew Keys, the Reuters deputy editor for social media, the ethical issues will remain for "new journalism" with social media as a heavily politicized and manipulated tool.
Matthew Keys is heckling me now right on the pages of the once-defaced Los Angels Times about my legitimate blog posts questioning his innocence here, here and here. Speaking of journalistic ethics, it's okay for me to post that I don't buy his alibi, and it's okay for him to heckle, I suppose, although I think most employers would tell their employees not to heckle the customers. News is a business. That's okay, too. When it's a business, it has certain quality-control issues and standards to maintain that blogs are not burdened with.
WHY DO SOCIAL MEDIA WRANGLERS GET CALLED 'JOURNALISTS'?
And that's fine in an open society -- or should be, unless, of course, journalists of the new format intimidate bloggers who criticize them. Not for the first time. My challenges to Anthony de Rosa, Matthew Keys' boss (above) regarding his portrayal of the Occupy protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, led him to block me on Facebook -- which is a creepy function of Facebook that I find has a horrible effect on the "town hall" claims of these private platforms. But in my view, if Reuters is to be ethical, the public feed of Anthony de Rosa -- as a public figure, performing a public function casting the news from his "progressive" perspective for Reuters, really like a columnist -- should not be blocked from the literal view of members of the public who don't agree with them and have expressed dissent against the very process they are slyly engaging in. I don't buy the "in my living room" logic that these sly dogs invoke to keep the mindshare tilted their way.
It would be one thing if the owner of such a feed blocked *from commenting* someone he didn't like, who rained on his vanity parade. That would be irresponsible and also worthy of a call-out, but it would be something that the Facebook "social" notions would support -- Facebook is supposed to be for "friends" -- and only friends who "like" things (and that's why social-activist news corps love them). Friends who don't like things are unfriended. That's its devious premise, of course, which makes it unfit for political work -- or actually, very fit, for those who are adept at manipulating the public, as the Obama team has done in the last elections. But it's another thing when they block you as a person totally on Facebook, removing their *public* feed completely from view. That's really wrong -- but of course, the platform, also bent on social "progress", lets them do that.
I note that Twitter doesn't admit that kind of vanity manipulation of public figures. When Anthony de Rosa or Matthew Keys or other thin-skinned media geeks block me there, I can still look them up in search and read what they say, or use Google or Topsy.
Not so Facebook -- or I might add G+ -- which turn me and my statements into non-persons -- and makes those people who blocked me invisible to me as if they were non-persons, too -- an innovation on the old Stalinist airbrush trick -- so that we can all be cushioned in the cocoon of our same political beliefs with other "likers". Note that Anthony blocked me not for some kind of "TOS violation" -- there wasn't anything rude, hateful, racist, etc. There was just critical speech. But that's too much for them.
IS SOCIAL MEDIA WORK 'ANALYSIS' OR 'OPINION' OR POLITICAL PROPAGANDA?
The entire role of the social media manipulator that these news companies hire is to be questioned, which is the focus I took in first discussing the indictment of Matthew Keys. This post may be what he believes to be a "conspiracy" theory but it certainly isn't -- I've observed time and again how the person playing the social media maven at either nonprofits or news organizations or corporations (Andy Carver at NPR, Lara Kolodny at Fast Company and Alec Ross while at the State Department instantly come to mind) is used for political organizing. It's used to push one perspective -- the "progressive" line. It's not for the sake of real engagement as in "dialogue with the public" or "debate," but a way of purveying a line and getting massive cheers for it from a manipulated public -- or in some cases, an activist public that needs no manipulation as it is already subject to the propaganda flow of various cadre organizations like Moveon or Daily Kos.
I really think the people in these roles step out of all kinds of professional and ethical bounds as they perform them -- they should have a box around them labelled COLUMNIST -- but are forgiven for this under the guise of "innovation" and the ecstasy of "the new". And I constantly see it in operation. Matthew Keys describes himself as "breaking news," and believes he even provides professional tips about how to "break news" (i.e. this gem -- look up key words to find amateur videos on Youtube!). But the feed is always selective, beyond the very top stories that no news organization can afford to pass. It's always delivered with the snark on certain hate targets on the right, and with amplification of the left's own beloved story. It's worse than the liberal establishment media, however, precisely because it purports to be "of the people" and "authentic" and engaging -- yet blocks and mutes and ignores those that dissent from the left-of-center perspective. There's no letters section for the social media editor, you know? No op-ed column where you get to dispute his "authentic stream".
UNDERCOVER JOURNALISM OR UNDERHANDED ALIBI?
But of course, the ethical problems with Keys go far beyond the Twitter newscaster function, into consorting with a thuggish anarchist hacker collective, Anonymous, and pretending now that this was just news-gathering.
First of all, the question I had about this alibi was: which news organization gave the assignment to cover Anonymous? These events came before Matthew worked at Reuters, but certainly Fox TV didn't give him the assignment. He tells us on his Tumblr blog that in fact he did this in his capacity as a "freelancer". Some news corporations have strict rules about what their employees can do as freelancers, some don't; it's not clear if in fact Matthew was on a 1099 type contract relationship even when he did his social media chores for the Fox affiliate so that they may not have bound him with a clause that he couldn't write for other publications -- and they may not have even had a social media policy that would have provided some check on him as he went and cavorted in the IRC channels with Anonymous.
The sketchy freelance status of his original coverage of Anonymous as an "undercover journalist" is covered up by his later posting on the Reuters news site (while employed for Reuters) of a retrospective article about Anonymous featuring Sabu and his cooptation. Obviously, Reuters editors at that time didn't have any qualms about the nature of this piece, or that it was obtained by "undercover journalism" of the sort they should have had more questions about.
WITH ANONYMOUS, IN THE IRC CHANNEL
Second, I question the ethical implication of hanging with criminals for so long. By Matthews' own admission, he spent two months or more in the Anonymous interfeds IRC chat room -- an invitation-only chatroom that you would get to first by friending up the b/tards in other more open settings -- this is how their very rigid, hierarchical cadre organization in fact is structured. It is anything but the looseknit network over-eager liberal journalists -- and their lying propagandist sources in Anonymous -- always portray them to be.
During that time, he heard about operations even involving the theft of credit cards from people. Shouldn't he have reported that to the authorities? He didn't. If anything, in his statement on his own blog about this, he even amended what was apparently a typo in an early blog post to make it absolutely clear that he did not go to the authorities with what he heard in these chatrooms -- an act he took so that no one would start calling him a snitch, as they do Adrian Lamo, for reporting Bradley Manning's activities, or Sabu, a LulzSec operative who was turned by the FBI to cooperate with them -- and who may even now be the source for the indictment against Keys -- and maybe motivated to set him up or trash him after the fact, as we obviously realize.
Two months of pretending to be with the goons -- and then oops, telling us all it was "undercover journalism". Leave aside what this tells us about movement solidarity on the left. It's an ethical problem for journalists that since the Food Lion case really, really needs to be questioned. Since when do you get to hear about crimes and do nothing just to hang with the cool kids and burnish your story as...a freelancer? While working for Fox which you hate? Which is then later hacked?
06:31 PM on 03/20/2013 Really? So when Keys' changed Fox40's twitter handle to SacNewsWire and locked the rest of the station out of it as well as their Facebook page, he was acting as an "undercover journalist" too? Sorry, but I saw his behavior online right after he was fired and still have the emails (and screenshot of the Fox40/SacNewsWire stunt) between myself and a different Fox40 employee discussing his antics online.
Keys should be ashamed of himself for hiding behind the title of journalist and own up to what he did. Otherwise he is just cheapening the profession that right now isn't doing so well. Part of growing up is learning to admit when you screwed up and to make amends for it.
Presumably he knows what the feds know, given the confidence they feel in bringing their case -- that Matthew Keys -- or his account that he's now later after the fact going to tell us "wuz hacked" -- was involved in these email exchanges involved in stealing email addresses, including some of government contacts that this TV station had in their files.
They read the Gawker piece, then contacted Keys directly, and got this damning statement from him:
"I chose to allow myself to be credited as the source of a piece of information in the Gawker article only to lend credibility to their story, but did so fully understanding the risks," he told me in an email.
As for that downside, he says, "During my two month engagement with their group, I witnessed a lot of what Anonymous can do, from harvesting emails of Amazon.com employees to gaining access to jailbroken iPhones to stealing credit card numbers ... From what I've heard, Anonymous hackers have already gained access to my address and phone number."
So what was the risk he thought he took -- firing or arrest? And...two months!
Here's what one of the anonymous commenters has to say under the handle Jerm Deeks:
Jerm Deeks a year ago Also, what's going to happen to the people who turned these chats over to the authorities? If these people in the logs are guilty of what Anonymous has taken credit for, aren't they just as guilty? Not for the things that happened after they left, but everything before? That chatroom was by invite-only, meaning post-HBGary hack, they were still members of the Anonymous "leadership", will they get hit with criminal charges as well? After all, they didn't say they left because the group started committing criminal acts, they left because the group was using kids and other complaints.
Paging Ashera Research for comment...
WHAT WILL KEYS' ALIBI BE?
Matthew Keys denial is categorical -- he says he did not give an account name and password (Parmy Olsen also says he made that statement to her back when she questioned him while writing her book about Anonymous -- but she then didn't use this material and reported on it later on Forces). I have to wonder if this is going to turn out to be word salad -- what he will actually mean is that he gave an account name and password that he was convinced was deactivated after his departure, or even had proof was deactivated, and was then surprised later to discover wasn't. That would be my guess about how this cunning little maneuver will play out. Or he will simply say he was hacked, and who knows, gosh, those IP addresses are so dynamic and variable you just never know....
Keys may even brazenly say that he gave the authentic log on credentials knowing that all they'd do is a minor defacement that took 30 minutes to correct, merely to establish his bona fides in his "undercover journalism" caper. Hmmm. Well, that may be just like, um, helpfully "checking" AT&T's security for them with the i-Pads, and the judge and jury just may not buy it.
And even if Matthew Keys wriggles out of this case, or gets some kind of suspended sentence for something minor, I'll hardly be convinced. Not merely because he seems to have been an online thug for years before that, but because he's crossing the street to harass me merely for expressing my opinion that he's guilty -- and doesn't have a case, because no undercover job merits this amount of consorting with criminals, and the consorting was not necessary to cover the story anyway.
I'm not alone in my concerns about Matthew Keys --even Huffington Post in its headline about "rogue employees" implies Matthew Keys was one when he seemingly turned against his employer. Sure, they put in the word "allegedly," but the headline lets us know what they think about it. The Washington Post, even while clucking about the purported long sentence -- one that will come nowhere near him and is the usual hysterical take on the charges which isn't the same as the sentence -- still says Keys "is no Aaron Swartz".
Interestingly, although Orin Kerr, the former DOJ official and lawyer who writes for Volokh.com, did not take up Matthew Keys case, although on the scale of the trolldom where Keys inhabited for years, he's less of a nasty character than Weev, the hacker Kerr has decided to defend against the CFAA. Here's what the Post says:
But while it’s easy to see the CFAA as one monolithic relic, Kerr says, the law actually has several parts, and Keys was charged under the least controversial one. That’s because the CFAA’s biggest problem lies in its use of the phrase “unauthorized access” — a vague, only loosely defined term that has left prosecutors and courts to their own interpretations. Keys’s part of the law doesn’t mention that term. Swartz’s does.
Aside from the difference in their alleged crimes, there’s also a split in apparent motives. As many of Swartz’s defenders have pointed out on social media, Swartz was a documented Internet activist who fought publicly for freedom of information.
On the other hand, in chat room transcripts released by the Department of Justice, the user alleged to be Keys urges an Anonymous hacker to “go f--- some s--- up.” That isn’t just a public-relations issue: motives can factor into sentencing, too, Kerr says.
“For example, acting with an intent to profit can turn a misdemeanor into a felony,” he says. “Also, acting as part of a broader criminal scheme can lead to a sentencing enhancement.”
Kerr and the Washington Post -- like me -- took the indictment on good faith as the government's belief that it has a case. Of course, the defendant and his lawyers and the geek public are entitled to take a different view. But they didn't see fit to say "but Keys denies all this" (and maybe it was a timing issue, but there isn't an update).
Poynter also asks some questions.Even the lefty Atlantic has suggested that Keys' lawyers should tell him to shut his yap, he may incriminate himself further or make contempt-of-court type of statements showing lack of remorse that could get him a longer sentence, as it seems to have done for Weev. Yet Keys -- and his Anonymous-defending lawyers -- have brazened this out, in the mistaken belief that Keys, as a social media manipulator for Reuters, is expert at handling the media, whereas their other clients they tell to keep quiet are incapable of handling media.
Hmmm.... And imagine this, Ashera Wolf, community journalist for Anonymous that has turned in some loving profiles of their heroes, has asked questions about journalistic ethics around Keys. Naturally, she'll do that because he's harmed her friends and perhaps helped them go to jail.
I wonder....Is the difference the over-enthusiastic tech and liberal mainstream press is showing for Matthew Keys, "progressive" hipster social media wrangler for Reuters who exposed Anonymous, refused to cooperate with authorities, and Sabu, poor unemployed Hispanic programmer with kids to support, did? Did Matthew expose Anonymous for the sake of a news story (for which he had no assignment) or because they humiliated him by kicking him out of the chatroom once they cottoned to his treachery?
The Anonymous-defending lawyers think that you shouldn't go to jail for just a prank. Well, some of us beg to differ that it's just a prank, and we don't know if at trial, only the defacement of the LAT will be at issue. BTW, I'm calling out the lawyers here not because I don't think that people don't deserve legal defense, and the best they can get, or that people can't be viewed as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law -- of course they deserve defense and the benefit of the doubt as far as the court is concerned.
But these are partisan, vocally biased crusaders -- lawfarers trying to change law they don't like. They aren't even nonprofit advocacy lawyers; they are private lawyers with practices where they can pick and chose their clients -- and pick these ones to make their crusading point. Why, in a free society, would they get to advocate through lawfaring, but bloggers like me not get to say we don't buy their story line?
I won't be "apologizing" as Matthew Keys says I will be, as I haven't written anything that's wrong or that I regret. He's the kind of person who might start papering me with warnings of libel suits from his lovely pro-Anonymous lawyers, too -- once lawyers like this start lawfaring, they will stop at nothing to get their way. Hey, see you in court guys. Your clients are thugs.
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.
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)
-- 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!
Alec Ross, State Department's
"innovation" guy and Tweeter-in-chief, speaking at the "The Project
[R]evolution Digital and Social Media Conference" (*gag*) in New
Zealand. Photo by US Embassy in NZ, 2012.
And he's taking his 300,000+ followers with him. After all, his Twitter account formed more than two years ago is just in his own name, it's not the name of a generic office.
And that's wrong. I think that private persons shouldn't be able to privatize social capital that they gained while performing a government job. For that matter, the same applies whether they were in a corporate or nonprofit job. In fact, that's a good reason for institutions to stop letting these big stars who drag all the attention to themselves make and maintain these private reputation-builders that they can't then control.
Sure, those same followers can dump him and then go follow the new guy. But he's got them now to blast out huge messages of lobbying industrial strength to enhance his new position -- at Google, or a Mitch Kapor nonprofit, or some other third-world-go-gooding collectivist operation like the NGO that languished after he went to take up his government job.
The State Department should make an account called @StateInnovator or whatever (@innovator is taken by some goof who wants Ross' job) and then have the picture of the person in that office for now on it, but not enable that person to make an entire fiefdom with his followers that he can then take away.
I first noticed this phenomenon of tribal leaders attracting all the attention to themselves with one-way broadcast accounts and numerous followers when I first came on Twitter five years ago (I joined in 2007 on my account Prokofy and 2008 on my accout catfitz). Some people would gain enormous amounts of followers -- the early adapters like Scoble did it with automatic scripts, in part scripts that automatically followed back other people or automatically said thank you or started conversations.
Twitter banned some of these resource-eating automatic scripts later, but the advantage was clear -- as it still is. When you join Twitter today, just as in the past, it forces on you a list of recommended people that you must chose among to make your "friends" before you can move on to using Twitter -- it's quite coercive and you can't seem to escape out of it. In fact, it forces on you the number of five friends before it lets you out of its clutches. The friends to pick from include Lady Gaga but also a lot of those tech friends of the Twitter devs -- Alec Ross is on there if I'm not mistaken and so is Human Rights Watch and Anne Marie Slaughter and other "progressives" who get a significant boost by having every new member of Twitter (I don't know if it is localized) have to pick from these enforced "friends". The only Republican leader on there is Mario Rubio although there is the now out-of-date Mitt Romney account.
A position at the State Department is not a place for you merely to build your personal resume and gain connections to use in corporate lobbying jobs later. You're supposed to build the institution while serving the public, you know. Serve the public?
Another thing that the rules should stipulate is that people making or operating social media accounts on behalf of the US government should not block critical members of the public on those services. If the services themselves have not found reason to block them for spam, incitement of hatred, or harassment with excessive @ posting etc. then those government officials should not block them merely because they are egomaniacs with thin skins.
Alec Ross muted and blocked me -- meaning he entirely disappeared from the view! -- on Facebook, where he maintains not a personal account to share pictures of his kids and cats, but continues his public, government influence-making.
That is too much power for government officials to have.
He had no business doing that. Any judge in the land would throw it out as a violation of the First Amendment by the state, not only censoring speech but blocking even the view of government speech from the public that is otherwise open to all.
It's no good hiding behind the fact that Facebook is a private company and it can do what it wants -- public officials can't do what they want and have to uphold the Constitution. It's not upholding the Constitution to hold town halls and block people who merely ask questions -- and it's not about swearing, or heckling or disrupting, that in a real-life town hall might bring the security guards or cops. It's about pasting a one-line disagreement on to the high-view page of an ego-infused influencer and arrogant "thought-leader" who is entirely full of himself and unable to take even the slightest mar of his propaganda campaign.
If officials went around behaving like this with the real press in real life, or went around behaving like this in town halls in real life, they'd be criticized severely. Oh, they've started doing that. Look at the ruckus over Woodward and pressure from the White House.
Officials gone wild on social media -- our Russian ambassador Michael McFaul comes to mind -- should be tethered more to their public service functions. And they are getting tethered, as Alec Ross found himself reined in, when State finally decided to do Twitter clearance and make people submit tweets before they blasted them to their huge audiences of 300,000 plus their massive network effect of re-tweeting.
When you see this, you can't help wondering if these accounts will finally be removed all together:
Michael McFaul @McFaul
23:35 in Moscow RT @robbirgfeld Ambassador @McFaul spends a couple of hours a night responding and reading social media. #smwdiplomacy
Ross' feed has always tended toward the anodyne, to the point that you wondered if it was some kind of Aesopian message:
@AlecJRoss
1,476 years ago today, the Ostrogoths began the first siege of Rome. It lasted for a little over a year.
@AlecJRoss
This has long been a key to America's success. We must attract brilliant innovators like Tesla & allow them to make America their home (2/2)
@AlecJRoss
212 year ago today, America's 1st Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated as President of the United States.
Er, what made him think of barbarians at the gates?
And...sucking up to his new boss, implying that he, too, could become president?
Funny that Kerry comes in, and this guy goes out. Why? Just a new broom sweeps clean?
Alec follows slavishly the "progressive" line and the Google line for all the issues. And I suspect Kerry will be no different, but I just don't know yet.
Ross has always dutifully retweeted the line du jour, which is exemplified by a recent one about how "we must all oppose cell phone jailbreaking" and retweet of this link -- and yes, retweets ALWAYS mean endorsement with this gang. The president answered this tekkie flashmob and Ross revelled in it.
Google pushes this line effectively through all its networks and lobbying active measures and agents of influence. Why? Because it wants to erode the power of telecoms, and have people be able to directly use Google and the Internet in general more for communicating.
Hackers and copyleftists who make up the some 7 million people who jailbreak their phones are lobbying to have this wrongful act legalized.
Why is it a wrongful act? Well, because it is a violation of the user's agreement. Why do these mean telecoms want to "lock you in" to their services? Well, because they gave you a ridiculously low-priced loss-leader -- your smart phone itself. Those things are expensive to make. They should cost more than they do. But no one would buy them if they did. So they drop the price of the phone, then tuck that cost into a binding two-year agreement to use a phone service like Verizon or AT&T. You pay ahead something on this contract, then have to keep paying, and if you default, you are billed with a heavy fine that the companies zealously collect.
Well, aren't these telecoms just being greedy? Well, no, they have real costs -- the kind of costs Susan Crawford never calculates in her jihad against them applauded by Google -- capital costs.
When you jailbreak the phone and start using Internet VOIP or various other things like Skype only for calls or free wifi, then you defeat the plan that subsidizes your phone.
This criminality doesn't trouble Alec Ross, Mashable, or the White House, as it responded to a massive engineered outpouring with smug approval. I can only hope the courts will push back. Because it isn't fair or just to the telecoms. How will they get the cost of the phone and its use covered in a world where hackers rampantly engage in theft of services and "liberate" the device?
When I get a cable TV box, I don't "jailbreak" it to get more channels I don't pay for; I don't "liberate" my Verizon modem box to get more broadband or even some other service. Why should I get to do this to my phone?
Apple wants to go on disguising the cost of these phones -- they can be $400 and that doesn't reflect either its real cost or the cost it should be if it had better labour conditions -- to sell more of them and get people hooked then on the apps and other products. They don't like jailbreaking, but I don't know that they are going to lobby that hard against it.
It's wrong of the president to take a position on what amounts to a *business dispute about costs and how to cover them* and weigh in on the side of some businesses and not others. Doing that is not proper to free enterprise and a liberal and democratic state. It's the sort of thing that begins to happen in socialist states with cronyism and state capitalism or oligarchy.
Alec Ross is delighted to be part of that. His entire career as "innovator" exemplifies my constant refrain about the Wired State, that a group of radicals and corporate copyleftists have harnessed their social media inventions to take power and ram through their agenda.
While Ross ignored my question on Twitter, where he doesn't block me for some reason, he confirmed in answer to another person's question on Facebook (which I got a friend to check as he has me blocked) that the position at State is going to remain open.
Who will take over this position?
Probably someone who will travel less -- after all, if the Sequester has to stop Co-dels (Congressional delegations) from going to some of their favourite haunts like Vienna or Paris, then it makes sense that the Innovator guy should stop going to Australia and places like that to boost the copyleftist cause.
At one point I read that Anonymous was planning a demonstration on February 23, which happens to be Soviet Army day, but now I see they seem to have put the demonstrations for the first week in March around the time of a trial hearing -- February 23 was some other "day of rage" about 2nd amendment rights or something.
This is the comment I put at Cleveland.com:
I
hope that justice will be served and that those who assaulted the
victim will be prosecuted. Rape is a serious matter and "rape culture"
is indeed an issue that has to be challenged.
But justice is not served nor victims vindicated and protected by promoting vigilantism. And that's what we're seeing with the hackers' collective Anonymous and some of the celebratory press coverage of this destructive movement that seems to have only tuned into them yesterday and haven't followed their exploits over the years.
First of all, Anonymous
is merely engaged in reputational laundering with their action
#JusticeSec, as their roots are in 4chan, some of the most horrendous
violent porn against women, and they have a long history of years of
tormenting particularly young girls and women on the Internet. So
they're hardly the people to be claiming to be wearing any white robes
here in a crusade against rapists. It sure doesn't diminish support for
real-life rape victims to point out that Anonymous hackers have engaged
in online virtual sexual assault -- neither should be endorsed.
The
Anonymous operatives also replicate the same vicious logic of "rape
culture" when they say that if they disagree with someone, or someone
doesn't share their views about this case, or they suspect someone of
involvement or cover-up, that they're entitled to hack and dox and
harass and embarass them "just because they can" because it is possible
to do.
When someone like me or other bloggers or journalists
question their behaviour, they go after them like junkyard dogs and then
you really see how they talk to women:
I
think the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the other local press needs to
report the antics of Anonymous in harassing and bullying anyone who
tells the truth about their roots and their other hacking and harassment
antics. They do not get to launder their reputation in Steubenville,
and distract from their poster boy, Julian Assange, who refuses to
appear before Swedish police to answer questions on rape charges.
You do not want to live in a world where Anonymous runs your "justice" -- they will come for you next.
And
while some journalists seem to think these amateurs have accomplished
some sort of investigative feats here, real reporters should be the ones
checking the stories and how they are gotten, and they shouldn't
celebrate bullying and vigilantism from these "justice-seekers". And
the real justice system needs to function to bring durable justice.
Chief among our civil rights is the right to face your accuser before a
court of law before a jury of your peers, with an adversarial defense.
When you deal with men in masks, you are unable to do that.
* * *
The appalling treatment meted out to be by gangs of JusticeSec operatives and cutaways has been documented and hopefully serves as a deterrent. I will be interested to see how both justice is served in Steubenville, and how the local media covers or doesn't cover the problem of Anonymous and their harassment of actors in the local drama.
It used to be that some townships forbade demonstrations by people in masks or who had covered their faces -- this was their way of preventing demonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, we can recall the famous case of the ACLU defending the rights of the KKK to march in the suburb of Chicago, Skokie, IL. There's a book by Aryeh Neier, then head of the ACLU, called Defending My Enemy. In any event, I will be interested to see if there are counter demonstrations, better coverage by the press, etc.
I don't have the capacity to research the story itself as Lee Stranahan of Breitbart News and others have done. I realize they are taking up the issue of whether the story is even true, whether the girl was even raped in the legal sense, whether there were even more than two football players and all the rest. I can't get into these aspects of the case, which the conservative press has taken up because I don't have the ability to do the research from here for free as a blogger and no one needs me to do it, it's not my expertise. Just looking at what I've read in the trustworthy media, like the New York Times, I would take the side of the victim. Yes, I may have been duped by the liberal media, but I don't think so. The rape video of the young man boasting about his comrades raping the girl is an appalling artifact of modern Internet life. It's hard to know even where to put such an awful thing. "This girl is as dead as Caylee Anthony?" What to say of such a horror?!
But for a student of Russian culture and world fairy tales and epic poetry, you can see where the bawdy tale takes its place in literature so to speak, if you can prevent from vomiting, and you can see that it is like a faint echo of the rituals of some ancient peoples. I thought for example the Meryans, a native people of Russia, about whom a film was made; after the beloved dies, the widower spends time describing in epic and obscene form the sexual exploits of the woman -- as a form of ritual. Again -- a rough approximation, a flailing effort to try to find the genre for this modern MIPS breakout...
The only redeeming feature of that otherwise horrendous piece of humilitaing phone-video porn is that during the young man's recounting of just how dead the girl is -- "as dead as OJ's wife" and so on -- some of the other boys in the room, admittedly, not very robustly, say, "Hey, don't say that, she could have been your sister". Or, "Hey, that's wrong, you shouldn't say that". It's weak, but even that glimmer of conscience coming from today's Internet-bred youth is still, well, something. What those modern knights of the smart phone should have done, if they were chivalrous -- or just plain decent human beings -- is call the police, as the girl was in danger -- and rape is wrong. Some raise the issue of "where were the girl's parents". Well, where were the boys' parents, too?
If you are the ACLU, however, you'd be compelled to say, if you weren't preoccupied with government snooping or CISPA or anti-bullying (a curious thing for the ACLU to have picked up, given its history as a maxed-out civil libertarian group defending the rights of tobacco companies to advertise -- and taking their money) -- is that as awful as the rape video is, it's protected speech. You can't show that it incites imminent violence -- it is made after the unfortunate girl is taken away by their peers and she is not there. Otherwise, there might be a case.
And isn't that like so much of social media criminality? Otherwise, there might be a case. The speech against me, doxing me, harassing me, revealing private information, speaking obscenely to me, threatening me -- this is all protected speech. Interestingly, Lee Stranahan is now trying to take to court one of his serial, persistent persecutors -- and I wonder if it will get to court, given the great protections for free speech in this country.
When will the Steubenville story get the ProPublica treatment?
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