Wired State

ChatGPT Stole My Jobs -- Just Like That. And They'll Steal Yours, Too

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

So, like everyone, I first fooled around with DALL-E and Midjourney (on the sample version) and didn't do very well myself, and saw that what it really was all about was: a) the prompts -- what flowery and detailed directions you give them and b) your ability to edit it afterwards. Both a) and b) are functions of actual artists; that would not be me. So I tabled it as an issue, although I was more than willing to hear my artist friends complain about it. I didn't especially like the AI art that some of them began doing, which I felt was kind of in the "fractal art" category.

Full of Fakes and Errors

When I first tested ChatGPT, it couldn't generate either my RL or SL biographies because I'm not famous or important enough. When I got it to generate a review of a musician friend, it attributed to her a song she had in fact never written. Where did it get the idea?! It sort of sounded like something she could have written -- and here's where the mobius strip of reflexivity enters in -- now she's going to actually write a song with that title, and even sampled a bit of it at one of her shows. 

I got it to write the history of the Battle of Ilovaisk -- it was credible, accurate, but rather dull and didn't really center the most important point: that Putin offered a "green corridor" for Ukrainians in a kettle but then, of course, was lying from the start, and they were picked off like sitting ducks the minute they lay down their arms and attempted to use the corridor. 

I had it write a review of Second Life -- it was adequate, not going to win any essay prizes.

I tried it again a few times on my own biographies -- finally it ginned them up, likely because there is actually a "mechanical Turk" behind the machine, real people goosing it when it sees Chat stuck. It then rendered a biography of me that simply made up some of the works I had translated, claiming I had translated authors I in fact had never even read much, let alone translated, in one case, and in another, had actually translated, but Chat had no way of knowing that because the information was not public.

My sense of Chatty is that it is scraping not from the wide world of Google, but only from Twitter. Or only from set of stock data bases somebody made up that aren't updated or corrected in real time. Nothing much is ever said about its sources (I have seen articles saying it doesn't access all of Google), but clearly it doesn't have the wide world to scrape that Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have. How long before Google itself puts in the equivalent of robots.txt to stop other companies from poaching on its turf?

Yeah, I get it about the "training" -- which also, to me, gives the lie to any notion of "artificial" intelligence. It's scientists and engineers, using tech themselves to get power over people, then claiming that tech is neutral. It isn't.

So here is how I lost two gigs to the damn thing.

Web Site Copy

The first few gigs with this company involved writing happy copy for the client's web site, and also in one staggering session, writing a humongous marketing document that also had tasks and equipment specs in it. It was in a field with which I was not THAT familiar, so that I had to look up a lot of stuff or ask what it meant. Hours were spent with the client while he tried to explain his ideas. He wasn't a very good writer; he, like a lot of millennials, he never learned to write in school or anywhere else, and mainly texted or chatted on his cell phone.

He had trouble organizing his thoughts and getting them down in a coherent way. He would sometimes be able to get a good outline started, but couldn't seem to work it or it would take forever. So the way he found that what worked best with me was to get me on the phone, talk about the thing, and then I would jot it down in real time on a screen in front of him in Google docs, and then we would both edit it. I would then work it some more on my own, and turn it into him for tweaking. Needless to say, this was time-consuming. At first I charged my regular rates; I ended up not doing this because of the time involved.

I churned out a number of these pieces over some time; some of them brought in more business as clients were very happy; some of them didn't seem to do anything; but since none of them had any negative impact, we kept going.

The client then mentioned to me one day recently that he had heard of ChatGPT, he tried it out with a task he had involving writing descriptions of both a company and various activities -- and was very pleased with the result -- and used it. Oops, there went one of the jobs I would do for him -- just like that.

I cautioned him that the problem with ChatGPT is that it can spout nonsense; it can make up stuff. It puts falsehoods into biographies, reviews, scientific papers as I had witnessed myself or seen others describe. Especially if you had paying clients, they would expect your copy about them to be factually correct and not bring them lawsuits. You had to be really, really careful! Maybe not use it?

How About a Lesser, Low-Paying Job?

Whereupon my client asked me if I now wanted the lesser job -- a much lower-paying job -- of vetting ChatGPT's rendering of a web site. I started looking at it -- and then said "No." It was a painstaking and boring job -- worse than fact-checking a news article others have written, which I have done numerous times, or copy-editing someone's news article, which I have also done endlessly.

That's because you know you are dealing with someone who doesn't care about the facts, feels no sense of liability, and will just say what they need to say. You have to become super vigilant, and also do a lot of your own research, if you knew nothing about the client or subject. It's almost like you'd have to research and write an article or write web site copy yourself, in order to vet ChatGPT's work. No thank you.

I suggested the client could ship this chore to Nigeria -- where he once had had a very competent copy writer for web sites, or Greece, where he has a good marketing guru generating ideas. Argentina, Venezuela, and Vietnam are the countries he sends photo and film editing -- people are desperate for work, and you can find very talented people willing to turn over jobs quickly for less. This is the global economy, and there's nothing you can do about it, really.

What I think may have happened is that no job got shipped. That's because nobody really sits and reads reams of web site copy. Like a lot of things in life, it's there to provide the "look" of something professional; it's filler; it's there to serve SEO in Google searches mainly, and get people to the page to see the offer as such -- everything arrayed around it is really fluff. That's why ChatGPT is perfect for this job. If some error crops up -- eh, you'll correct it.

My client could let it go, and not worry if something fake was in it, because basically, the job of providing fluff was accomplished, with superb SEO to boot.

YouTube Translation

The second gig was translation of a video for a YouTube training session. Translating videos is something that I have made into a certain specialty because I have had to do a lot of it. It can take twice as long to translate a video as it does to watch it, because you often have to go back and replay something. I don't mind the chore.  You often had to make the translation fit as sub-titles on the relevant screen -- something that is always hard to do with Russian, because it is about 75% shorter than the English translation needed to render it. The Russian language has no definite articles and other parts of speech as we know them, and instead are simply attached to a verb or participle or inflection in the voice.

I got into practice doing that shoe-horning of translation copy working with a caption-maker program for TV where we had to take Russian TV and squeeze it into American TV, dropping stuff along the way. Occasionally a grandma in New Jersey might call and complain about it, but it was, as our boss often said when we pressed "send" on the broadcast, it was "good enough for government work" (in this case, city public TV).

But this client's gig, oddly enough, was a task to go from English to Russian, which isn't the norm for me; usually the source language is your non-native language, and the target language is your native language. I can do it adequately, but don't like doing it and it takes longer. The reason for this was that it was a real estate video with the agent providing training to others and describing the meaning of English terms for the real estate business, some of which simply don't have a ready equivalent in Russian. That's because of the years of Soviet state control of land -- although today you find some English terms are now incorporated into the Russian language "as is". So this had the added annoyance of having to decide whether you used the Brighton Beach Angrussky for this purpose, or the actual formal term, i.e. in Russian, "real estate" is literally "non-moveable thing".

Done and Done -- And You're Fired

So I was starting to fuss with this silly thing, when all of a sudden the client came back and said it was finished. He had fed the English into ChatGPT, and it instantly created a very credible Russian text. This text I was willing to take the time to vet at least for a few rounds -- all the terms were correct. I didn't volunteer to check the rest of it because, as Loren Feldman's tag line in his podcast explains, "It doesn't matter."

No one will care. Russian emigres attempting to get real estate licenses need to learn the terms in English, and if they have only a vague idea of the Russian equivalent, well, "good enough."

ChatGPT is just the ticket for the generation that grew up reading "nothing bigger than their hand."

But imagine! I was screwed out of two jobs by ChatGPT, just like that. I didn't even know it could translate. Did you? When did it learn to translate??? It was better than Google Translate -- I checked. 

In this case, the loss was palpable, but not devastating -- this client is the kind of person who, if I am starving, will buy me some groceries or loan me $100 on PayPal, unlike most other cruel employers. 

Why???

This situation came about because children who were never taught to write didn't like writing, and made a thing to do their writing for them. They also were never taught foreign languages, and added that, too.

Why? No one valued it -- or gave up, in the face of the first TV-saturated and then Internet-saturated generation, and here we all are. I can see this not only in general; I watched it up close and personal with my own children, despite my best efforts, and their friends, and I have to say that the difference in ability really has to do with how long a child was able to stay in Catholic school, with its old-fashioned methods, and how good their public school was -- and that decides everything. 

There is absolutely nothing that can be done about this because it's too late; you can't isolate children from the culture they are saturated in, or remove the mobile phones from their hands.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph

Fifty-six years ago, I sat in Sister Sylvester's fifth grade class with my marbleized collegiate notebook, pen in hand, poised for yet another composition lesson.

As this was Catholic school, we always had to start by writing "JMJ" on the top of the page. This stood for "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph". Apparently the Holy Family, versus the Holy Trinity -- preserved for higher functions -- was good enough to get grade-schoolers to focus on the task at hand. They were to provide the inspiration for the job and make sure it got done. Even Catholic schools today have dispensed with this quaint practice, but it never hurts to think of some inspirational or higher power, no? 

Next, came the title of the essay -- this would set the scope and tone and really complete the job for you, if you got it right (which is why editors always change journalists' article titles because they never do the job right). 

So you might put: "The Foundation of Bolivia's Economy: Manila Hemp". Or you might write "Manila Hemp: Powerhouse of the Bolivian Economy" or whatever you managed to devise, as a 10-year-old, with a nun's pointer at the ready to rap your knuckles.

Next, came a big capital Roman number I. This was your main thesis -- this was the "say what you're going to say" out of that magic trio "say what you're going to say, say it, and say what you've said".

So here you might say: "I. Manila Hemp:  40% of Bolivia's Domestic Revenue".

Then there would be A, B, C, where you would explain that Bolivia had the perfect climate conditions for manila hemp and through innovative irrigation practices and ample population for menial labour had caused the crop to flourish (let's say -- I'm making all this up and if it was ever faintly true 50 years ago, today, in fact it's not true, just as a fellow classmate once made up an entire fake essay on Ceylon's main export -- manganese -- and got a "D" on the paper. His outlining technique was excellent, however).

You might describe how the hard-working people of Bolivia adapted to adverse climate conditions (we didn't know about "climate change" in those days) and persisted.

In II, you might describe the actual facts of the crop's component in the economy, citing sources, elaborating, etc. What are the uses of manila hemp? Well, rope-making is one of them. 

In III, you would summarize what you've said and analyze it in some way -- Bolivia was now poised to move into foreign exports; the crop, while not expanding rapidly, appeared to be a stable source of income; migration to big cities by young people might create labour problems. OK, this wouldn't be the scope of Fifth Grade, but you get the idea. And frankly, I believe we took on more in Fifth Grade  back then, than what children tackle today.

I will never forget walking into my son's Fifth Grade public school classroom and seeing a sign that showed all the ways you could spell "dolphin". They were all equal. They were all good. We shouldn't judge any of them. Children generated them out of their little brains; they got "A" for effort. With that brand confusion around the word with an "ph" -- in the absence of any phonics teaching whatsoever -- I wonder if the kids ever did learn to spell dolphin. Probably not.

Like diagraming sentences -- another Catholic school forte still taught today -- these lost arts weren't really valued or needed, so they atrophied.

Google Translate Didn't Take My Jobs - Why ChatGPT?

Google Translate did not put me out of a job as such, because I translate lots of different kinds of things -- books, catalogues, articles, memoirs, historic letters, legal documents, and generally I'm always going to be better -- and clients and publishers and editors know that.

But at one time, bread-and-butter translation work would involve simply writing letters for people or translating the letters they received back, in business and in personal matters like bride-buying abroad (after doing a few of those gigs, I quit because they were so horrible and exploitative -- often by both parties). Today, that sort of thing is accomplished more or less with Google Translate or Yandex (which is a lot better). I myself will pop a text in Google I need to write, translate it roughly, then take it to Yandex to type in what I know to be accurate. I will never help Google because I don't believe in doing unpaid work for tech behemoths.

A most despicable practice of Google is to go to a place like Kyrgyzstan, and recruit a lot of eager young people looking for high-paying tech jobs who have learned English, and get them to help fix up Google translation of their language into English for no pay. The tech world often treats translation as a subbotnik and won't accept that it should be paid like their programming is paid.

But ChatGPT instantly took me out of a job by having a better interface; by being willing to take longer texts in its box; by having different AI functions at work, I guess. I don't know the mechanics, but clearly it's a genius. Sure, we should see how it does with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but few people are going to pay you to retranslate them; the bulk of the jobs today are in news, technical, and legal translation. I get the feeling ChatGPT isn't so much fetching and carrying as "translate" literally means, but is manifesting the inherent English in a Russian text -- if that makes sense. Different.

Goat Herds

I have a vivid image before me of Elon Musk's demo of a robot recently, that was put to work on a Tesla assembly line. It lumbered out to the shop floor and went to work picking parts out of crates, then setting them up and assembling them on a conveyor belt.

But nearby was a man with a big hook like a goat herd. The robot would sometimes wander out of its designated path or get stuck or even start to fall over -- it's top heavy. So the robot herd would prod it back into place with the big stick.

And that's the kind of job that will be available to us with ChatGPT, which is yet another kind of robot, a robot in the hands of humans who want to take power over other humans and cloak it with the terms "fun" and "science" and "enterprise". You'll get to poke and prod the machines, being careful not to get stepped on yourself.

One of the jobs I saw go by on Upwork (which is an atrocious, low-paid slave labour place) or some other job ads service involved literally going over AI-translated texts and fixing them up. And not even with the full, coherent text in front of you; you would work with a huge stream of CAPCHA like nonsense texts.

Foxes in the Hen House

There is a tsunami of articles generated by tech journos who are totally craven to the industries -- they amount to payola. They assure you that ChatGPT (probably) isn't going to take your job. That's not how to cover this subject. It's like having foxes assess how secure the hen house is, and how well the hens are going to do in their presence.

Rather, send out queries about people who already lost their jobs, full-time or contract gigs. Fact-check the self-reporting with their employers. Ask people how they used GPT and see if it took away a job. Of course it did, and there will be more.

Right now the free version is over capacity and cannot be used. So I tried one of its competitors, Character.ai which has a persona to ask your questions from. The results are terrible and don't reflect the nature of the historical characters at all.

I can't see any mitigating factors here. That the free ChatGPT is "down" and can't be used is meaningless, as people will pay for it. That these Characters are silly and stupid is meaningless as people might even pay for that entertainment, too, and it will get better. 

Meanwhile, I assure you I will go on writing my blog posts myself, without robots, and you will go on not reading them.

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

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

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

My comment at Politico, "under moderation":

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

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

And the answer is: no.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Related articles

Report: Abramson salary $100K below male editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naturally he didn't see it that way.

Excerpt of my blog post from 2010:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is John Perry Barlow in the comments:

Mr. Neva,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With all due respect,

John Perry Barlow

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Why I Oppose NSA Reform or Snowden Clemency Until Ten Other Important Issues are Decided

Look, short form:

Could we please have a different process and more kinds of people decide this great matter of national security than this guy:

(this was fake album cover art for a fake punk band Snowden dreamed up back in the day)

and these people (the Silicon Valley titans who met with Obama to make a deal as to what they will find acceptable in all this).

Photo by Pete Souza, The White House, December 17, 2013.

and this guy?

[picture of Glenn Greenwald in flip-flops and barking dogs and screaming monkeys in the trees if I had one]

There is a debate about clemency for Snowden, or what sort of punishmen is appropriate, and it's a sterile one, and one I think disingenuous. 

It distracts from the real issues of why does Snowden get to decide reform, why do his journalist activists get to decide reform, and why Obama has to be rushed into reforming something that in fact may not need reforming -- and wasn't democratically decided.

 I also don't think this very light and rushed "consultation" with these people such as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee is cutting it either. Why the rush? Just in time for Obama's State-of-the-Union Address?

The RUSH to reform the agencies in the US -- unseemly, given that only six months have passed since Snowden's hack -- is one I am not in favour of.

I don't see that the NSA needs reform. Sorry, I will buck the tide here. That is, I don't see that it needs reform through these methods which I find suspect.

I think there are ten other things that have to be decided first, conceptually. They are:

1. Is Obama destroying the state? Obviously, you wouldn't want to do a delicate and hard thing like fix the NSA if that's what Barry is really up to. The elements of the state that make up national security -- the Department of Defense (Pentagon), the military, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Attorney General's office, Homeland Security -- not to mention the NSA and CIA -- they all seem under terrible assault under Obama (see "Why is Our Military So Screwed Up?). I would submit in all clear seriousness not as a conspiracy theory that Obama is undermining all these bodies as institutions. Just by paying attention to everything from how Swartz's case undermined the justice system, not only Holder but liberal attorneys general; the cases of WikiLeaks, Snowden and Manning of course; Petraeus and all the rest; even things like failing to fill all the top posts at Homeland Security and now also making other controversial hires. Robert Gates new memoir seems to make something like this case.

I say it's not a conspiracy theory but a genuine investigation that has to be had. Obviously, there are all kinds of reasons why governments are undermined in our time -- the Internet, demographic booms of young people, the recession, global warming, bird flu -- whatever. I'm interested in examining closely what Obama is up to here.

I really think thoughtful journalists need to lay out a timeline of Obama's actions, starting from when he didn't do anything with the DoD and CIA and kept Bush's people at first -- as almost a feint and a dodge -- leading to the most methodical and destructive demolition of the armed forces I've seen since Stalin -- this is a post for another day.

So that's question number one. If we are not dealing with a sincere president but dealing with one who, for stealth socialist/ideological reasons, however sincere (and I don't think for a minute they are), then his "reform" efforts have to be looked at with a really weather eye.

2. Is a little commission of Obama's cronies, that is not good enough for Marcy Wheeler, nor me, even if for wildly different reasons, really the way you reform a giant, complex, wounded thing like the NSA, post-Snowden? I'm sorry, I don't think so. And yet, supposedly, that's our only process -- they rush out a really rather thin report, for all its length; Obama ponders it and rushes edicts? Why?

Reason: because when we reformed these agencies post-Clifford Case's revelations and all the rest in the COINTELPRO years, which, as the FBI itself admits, was opposd by Congress and the American people; we had CONGRESS do this. You know, those people we elected? I'm much, more more in favour of having them, through the democratic political process, do this. I don't care that you think Congress people aren't technical and don't understand the issues, that's bullshit, of course they do, Google has bought quite a few of them. They just don't always understand them your way. I don't care that you think Congress is irrelevant, or, as the Tor developer put it, "should go die in a fire" or should be "routed around" or is "broken". What geeks mean is that it is democratic in ways they don't like. I'm not for indulging their anarchic political monopoly here, I'd like to keep Congress as the pluralistic, representative thing it is, whatever it's flaws. I really don't think we can solve this with an app where only get to "like".

3. Should reform ever be undertaken by force? There are smug wags saying about the NSA, "Some people are born with openness, some acquire openness, and some have openness thrust upon them" and so we should just be grown-ups and proceed anyway. I disagree. I don't like the way any of this smells. It is not right. It is wrong.

I don't think Snowden "started a national conversation" and "raised important issues" because it was not done legitimately, openly and democratically -- liberally. It was done BY FORCE. By a handful of anarchist thugs and activist journalists with a huge beef with the US that in some cases just comes down to their personal sad childhoods without good fathers, and in other cases is very well organized subversion, maybe with some hostile help from Russia and others.

What kind of conversation is it, where we don't get to object? Where we can't say, hey, who are you, you haven't answered 100 questions about yourself and your flight to Moscow, who do you think you are?

Stealth socialists always talk about how so-and-so with his violent or anarchistm movment, in the SDS or Occupy, "started a national conversation" -- I've heard this phrase uttered in movement meetings for years. What they mean is that they presented forceful facts on the ground through coercion. When you try to change society that way, it doesn't work. There is resistance. And you yourself are thuggish and illegitimate.

4. We the people are not in charge of this process -- only a few anarchists and "progressive" politicians are. Snowden think's his mission is accomplished because he wanted to see if the American people would reform if he started this. Now he thinks they have. Why? Merely because he;

o started an international mass hysteria making everyone hate America and fear its intelligence operations

o got saturation media coverage by liberal and libertarians that pretty much define the media;

o got a few lefty Congress people like Ron Wyden to speak out and had a few hearings where the NSA people were grilled;

o got Obama to have this little crony commission  to discuss things;

o produced two contradictory judicial decisions under duress from law-farers of the extreme left and extreme right.

Um, what? That's not the American people. That's just Jameel Jaffe, Glenn Greenwald, Cass Sunstein, Ron Wyden, some truthers and some bloggers. It's not me, and it's not even you even if you disagree with me. This is not a public process. It is not democratic. It doesn't have ownership.

There have only been a few hearings on this subject, one of which produced -- under duress -- this supposed "lie" of James Clapper. I definitely support the way the NSA has responded to this -- that it is not an intentional misleading -- and I don't believe it is a lie.

My point is that this is not enough. We need more hearings. We need things even on why Tor is developed and allowed to be used by criminals to the damage of US security. LOTS more hearings. Congressional commissions. Other panels of distinction that aren't this crazy thing Obama put together.

In my view, the best thing Gen. Alexander, Michael Hayden and these sorts of people could do is not disappear from view, but fight. Make a think tank. Make a Committee for the Clear and Present Danger. And put forth their knowledgeable views.

5. We have not achieved agreement on what should be put under surveillance. To hear Jacob Appelbaum, Snowden helper and Tor developer, we should not have any spies. Glenn Greenwald might tolerate one small spy shop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that just makes sure incoming missiles don't land on American territory from North Korea. So we need to have a debate -- and that starts with a really full and frank awareness that Snowden's operation is not about civil liberties, but damaging relations with allies, as this list helpfully explains from Jim Geraghty.

6. We have not achieved agreement on what is metadata or whether collecting it violates privacy. Extreme civil libertarians -- civil rights activists aren't really what they should be called anymore -- think the government shouldn't be able to collect data, under law, and then task it when looking for suspects, under a set of rules. I think they should. I'm immune to scare tactics by Glenn Greenwald who says that if I think that, I should give him my email archive. Nonsense. The government doesn't read my email archive -- let alone dox it on Pastebin like Glenn's little script-kiddy friends would. There's no comparison. The MIT nerds trying to make people think that reading headers and making social graphs from them with their scare program is the same thing are also incorrect. The government doesn't make massive social graphs and mine them indiscriminately for no reason. They follow suspects. Our names are in the telephone book. Unfortunately, our addresses and phone numbers, whether we like it or not, are on Spokeo. And our metadata is at the NSA. Too bad. That''s life in the big city.

7. We need to decide what signals are. In the old days, when the NSA got started in 1975, a signal that they should track was just a thing coming from a Soviet submarine, an enemy radio communications, foreign broadcasting, stuff like that. SIGINT wasn't HUMINT because humans, by and large, didn't emit signals.

It wasn't your teenager's Snapchat on Android phones or your IMs on your iPhone the way it is now. We are all now producing signals; before only governments and various broadcasting entities and various combatants and such produced signals. Now each and every one of us is a little telegraph station, broadcasting our me-shows 24/7.

Lenin said that the first thing to do in any revolution is to overthrow the telegraph station. And that's what Snowden and Greenwald and their shadowy helpers have done -- overthrown a lot of us with fear and confusion and crazyness. We have to get a grip. We are all signalling. But the government is not picking it all up, and when it does, it's for good cause. Let's define this, please, and stop the madness.

8. Courts are currently divided on this for a variety of reasons -- the specifics of the cases; the left versus the right bringing the suit; the DC libertarian Republicans versus the Democratic Machine in NYC appointing the judges; the more physically devastating experience of 9/11 in New York versus Washington; lots of things. It is what it is. It will go to the Supreme Court. But it will not be decided there, any more than ObamaCare was really decided there. So again, this is too big to be only about any one branch of government, all must be involved.

9. Media must investigate Snowden and his helpers far more than they have. Loud-mouthed and guilt-tripping Glen Greenwald has made it seem to liberals that they can never ask questions about "the indoor cat" in Russia. Why not? He's demanding nothing less than a coercive, thuggish, undemocratic overthrow of our government's vital national security agencies. Why can't we be a little more curious about that, guys? Outside a few journalists like Fred Kaplan at Salon and Michael Kelley at Business Insider, and a few bloggers like frankly me and very eloquently Benjamin Wittes, there's nobody going against the tide. And of course also Craig Pirrong (could the bizarre hugely visible attack underway on him over his Wall Street consulting and his views by the New York Times be related to his principled and persistent critique of Snowden? When I see what has happened with Craig, I feel as if I get a glimpse of what could happen to me.)

What we need is more information about those calling for this undemocratic change precisely because it is undemocratic and was started by them for murky motives. We need more glasnost. We need time for more newspapers, more TV shows like 60 minutes (which got nothing but shit from the "progressives" despite their SATURATION pro-Snowden coverge DOMINATING every single broadcasting media for months on end -- disgraceful). We need more blogs, like this guy's:

So when I hear people arguing about The New York Times editorial stance on Edward Snowden, or read civic-minded freakouts about the National Security Agency violating the civil liberties of "ordinary Americans," I turn away in frustration. 

Sure, we need to be concerned about the power we give to government. Duh. Glad we're finally having that conversation. 

But the public media freakout over NSA data collection misses the primary point of those systems entirely: The NSA's email metadata campaign is designed to efficiently collect and then discard information. Not because the NSA is a civic-minded agency that wants to protect our theoretical privacy, but because your personal email isn't the target of the fucking machine. Your mundane metadata is the shit that NSA machine operators have to shovel in order to find covert organizations.

Simple and straightforward, isn't it? And we have to shut down metadata collection entirely on the strength of one or two progs in Congress, a few progs in the media, and a prog Obama crony commission? Instead? Really? Why? This is America!

10. We have to consult with allies. After all, not only the five-eyes program, but just the interconnected world at large requires that the US not proceed in isolation -- nor be spooked into action by scare headlines manufactured by dubious people.

Some Strange Goings On Around Snowdens' Public PGP Keys

Read my new book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack on Kindle or Scribd.

 

So Cryptome has come up with another page of intriguing PGP key stuff related to Edward Snowden.

This follows up on earlier revelations said to be related to Snowden's PGP keys.

I haven't used PGP in years because it's clunky and frankly didn't always work with every country you need it to work with,  and I don't accept the whole premise, really. But I think I understand the basic idea, and it seems to me that it's a system that can be gamed by the malevolent.

That is, precisely because it's a trust system, and run by geeks who sort of trust each other in a clan-like way but are horribly nasty to each other when they get suspicious and hound dissidents in their ranks, it probably works with a small enough user base (given that nasty peer-pressure brow-beating factor they need it to work) but as it gets larger maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It strikes me that there is little to stop just anybody from coming along and saying "I'm Edward Snowden" and even putting Edward Snowden's email addresses known to the public, like his old lavabits email address (see on his supposed public key of March 2013) and an address like "[email protected]" that seems about authentic as [email protected] -- and saying "here I am, crypto kids, talk to me, I'm Edward Snowden" on the public PGP system. Yes, it seems nuts. But that's how it seems to work.

So as a result of this Cryptome publication, widely reposted, people started doing more searches and came up with more. That got them to thinking that @cryptoron on Twitter must be Edward Snowden then, but the guy using that handle now, Ron Prins, is Dutch, runs Dutch tweets, and that seems a bridge too far for our young globe-trotter who was only yesterday bitching that the rest of the world uses the metric system unlike what we call the "right way" in America (I've even seen references to Snowden speaking Chinese, but I really think that is urban legend.)

I think rather than just re-tweet these things, it's good to ask. So I asked Ron on Twitter, linking to the story (the link provided in a comment on @20committee's blog), is this you? He answered fairly quickly, "It is."

 

@cryptoron Hi, is this you? http://t.co/O56yqgQAzG

— CatherineFitzpatrick (@catfitz) January 7, 2014

@catfitz it is

— Ronald Prins (@cryptoron) January 7, 2014

He might as well have answered, "Yes, I am coterminous with myself." But Edward Snowden...Hmm, really? Edward Snowden would do that? I tested [email protected] to see if it immediately bounced, i.e. was obviously fake, and it didn't, but these things can take time.

Meanwhile, when I said, hmm, I think Cryptoron is toying with us, and another twitter person said it seemed too obvious, he favourited her tweet. I think we can conclude that this is that usual Dutch humour taking advantage of the credulousness of gullible Americans. Especially as he joined the gloaters when Anonymous DDoS'd the NSA website. Or maybe it's something more, to be continued.

So I began to check the other leads, and I didn't really bother with the two Booz, Allen employees who made public keys 12 years ago. They seem irrelevant -- it seems like BHA employees could make public keys all the time in the course of their work, much of it would be legitimate and dull and not involve, oh, drone targetting, which is what people like Marcy Wheeler thinks it does, or helping Snowy get his stash out.

But the person of interest on this page is named Mark Eckert, and he made his public keys right at the same time as Snowden did, in March 2013, when Snowden wanted to communicate with Poitras and Greenwald -- that's the claim of the previous Cryptome revelation anyway. (There's the Michael Vario name, of course, and that could be a distraction, a red herring, really him, who knows, but I think it's not yielded much of interest except a constant stream of tweets about weather reports and movie titles watched that sound for all the world like a DEW line for Snowden leaks. You decide. It just doesn't completely track, however.)

There's lots of people in the world named Mark Eckert and we can't be sure which one is the same one that once worked or still works at BHA, in Hawaii. This Eckert seems to have the job of helping enterprises secure their computer systems from hackers. I wrote to that address, too, and it didn't bounce, at least not yet. No answer.

Meanwhile, I found a person by that same name who on several occasions "liked" things that were supportive of Snowden, including indignation at the fact that some vandal was traced to a Congressional address messing with Snowden's Wikipedia page, and  an ACLU fan page on Facebook with an article about Judge William Pauley's decision that the NSA metadata collection program is legal, rejecting the arguments of the ACLU that it was unconstitutional. That decision infuriated the ACLU, of course, and they are appealing it.

That Mark Eckert on the ACLU page earned 117 likes with his comment raising an eyebrow about "efficiency" -- since when is efficiency a criteria? He got the predictable Godwinisms of this crowd who -- just to cut a long story short, are a bunch of idiots who can't seem to grasp even the basics of what is legitimate national security for a liberal democratic state. Here they all are:

I've dropped my ACLU card and donations long ago when the ACLU stopped being able to distinguish between jihad and human rights. All of these people have a right to their views; I also have a right to object to them, too.

So I checked out that Eckert on his part-public Facebook page and found he tracked the Snowden type profile -- snarky posters on his TL against the NSA, Rand Paul fanboy love  (i.e. extreme libertarianism) including attending a Rand Paul rally, tons of comments hating on any goverment intrusion of any type, whether standard testing or banning of Guy Fawkes masks in demonstrations -- the typical "Don't Tread on Me" nerd, complete with that dumb-ass Ben Franklin quote on liberty and security that these nerds always self-importantly and somberly invoke as if they're the first one to discover it.

This is the kind of person I find insufferable and impossible -- and there are hordes of them on the Internet. But so what? He gets to have those views, even if he is a government employee, or working for something like BHA or another firm doing NSA or any kind of government contracting. I sure wouldn't call for anyone who supported Snowden or Ron Paul in the government to be fired -- that's why people rightly criticized McCarthy or Fr. Coughlin. If you fired all those people, I suspect you'd leave a big dent, too, which is a big problem, but a discussion for another day. And what if he was just one of those co-workers whose password was stolen and misused by Snowden?

But I don't think that we must frog-march ourselves into rigid analogies with McCarthyism that suppress our own critical speech about bad ideas antithetical to all our human rights. After all, if someone was a communist, they supported oppression and mass crimes against humanity and likely lied. Later, the VENONA files showed that some of those people who indignantly insisted that they were First Amendment cases turned out to be Soviet spies. And hey, it's okay to oppose the Soviet Union, it's ideology, and the act of spying for it. That really seems to be entirely lost in the frenzy whipped up by the media around things like this NYT piece today which utterly fails to note that hey, the Black Panther ideology was violent and extreme and Black Panthers committed robbery, rape and even murder as well as other crimes. Why can't we condemn FBI overreach and violation of civil rights AND condemn the thing that made them justify that overreach, these bad, violent ideologies? It's always like we can't do part two in these debates.

So I wish the NSA would exercise more judgement in their hiring and weed out people like this, because I frankly don't think Ron and Rand Paul make for good liberal democratic governance in this country. Of course, they are a legal and lawful political group and run legitimate candidates, so that's their right. And possibly the government can't discriminate in hiring people in this fashion, but I think it's an open question: why should we have people who think Snowden is a hero and the NSA stinks and government is intrusive like the Nazis running our national security operations? I'm sorry, but I just don't think that's on. Keep in mind also that we don't know if this is the same guy who worked with Snowden or is just some other nerd somewhere else!

And I think I get to say so, and challenge it, and people like this who show up on public fora with their comments and their 117 likes get to have a pushback from me -- they have a right to their views and so do I.

So just because this guy seems like he MIGHT BE (we have not verified this, because he's not in Hawaii but a different state) a former co-worker of Snowden who is rooting for him there's no need to heckle him, just as I'd expect him and his friends not to heckle me.  We disagree.

It's also useful just to ask and check facts in these cases, because remember the Reddit story and those suspects in the Boston bombing? I think Reddit has the right to discuss public figures, including missing people who have been made very public by their families -- they must have the right to be wrong in a free society -- as long as they have the ethics to then correct the record and say they were wrong if proven so. There are a lot of people who want to take their right to be wrong away.

So mindful of all this, I simply asked a question. Did you work with Edward Snowden?

But here's the thing. I checked on that thread today and...it was gone. Deleted. Trashed. Mark and his 117 likes are gone; the Hitler comments are gone; I'm gone with my simple question. There's a gap, showing the posts that were before and after it, but it is down the memory hole. It's only in Google cache still.

Now, anyone who has followed "progressive" social media manipulators on Facebook like former Reuters social media chief Anthony de Rosa knows that they can hide your comment and get rid of you from the view or block you.

But I haven't been blocked, I can still see that page. That means the administrators likely just deleted or hid the comment or Eckert blocked me. But he didn't block me; I can still see his page.

So that means the ACLU administrator, wanting to keep people from researching Snowden critically who won't accept that it is a "civil rights" and "whistleblower" case, simply removed it. Unless I'm mistaken and somebody can see it. But...I don't.

Hmm.

Okay, well following up on this is beyond my pay grade and I hope others will.

 

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

Are you confused about who's on first?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morozov Overshadowed by Snowden

Have you noticed how desperately Evgeny Morozov has been trying to get attention for himself, ever since Edward Snowden's big hack completely eclipsed him?

He has gotten more and more zany with his aphorisms on Twitter, and now the gloves are off, and the mask is off, and he's come clean on his technocommunism -- nore more hiding it behind a "critique of technology" as if he were just a typical university liberal or lefty -- he's become more shrill and edged now:

The Snowden Saga Heralds a Radical Shift in Capitalism

See, anybody who tells you about "radical shifts in capitalism" (!) is a Marxist of some sort -- but only recently, with his Social Democratic sort of articles for the German press, has he been fretting about evil capitalism so openly.

Of course, it's always been lurking in his writings; I recall that awful misreading he made of Vaclav Havel's story about the state store.

God knows what kind of contrived thinking led to putting this together -- we're just shy of Time Cube here.

But this is what we get:

Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly ignored all others.

But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon.

Mr Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US’s surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric – tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform – has been useless. Many foreign leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear.

When Morozov lets us know that he finds this lovely global debate just not producing enough, he shows his hand: nothing less than Marxist revolution would do.

And here he tries to square the odd circle he has created by trying to find connections to his Brezhnevism:

Here the politicians are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but thoughtful public remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he might not be fully aware of what he has uncovered. These are not isolated instances of power abuse that can be corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on spying, building more privacy tools, or making state demands to tech companies more transparent.

Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach and harvest. At the very least, such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But what good are these steps to counter the much more disturbing trend whereby our personal information – rather than money – becomes the chief way in which we pay for services – and soon, perhaps, everyday objects – that we use?

Ah, so that's what this is about. It's realy about the Technolibertarian's technocommunism for us, where "we pretend to work" (we turn over our data and upload stuff) and "they pretend to pay us" (with a badly working and vexatious form of social media).

Morozov isn't content to discover the technocommunism right in front of us, however; he has to get more clever (the Zizek of the Internet set).

I'm all for paying for content online; Morozov isn't, and every time he needs a JSTOR article he can't access he just puts out a call for it on Twitter until somebody sends it to him who does.

From reading Morozov's past books and that really long TNR piece, I bet I know what he'd really like to see: a regime where we are given everything for free and don't pay for it with data, because....our wealth is redistributed as we make it by some central committee...

 

Stop Watching Us? Ok, Maybe We Will!

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

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

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

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

Good!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

STOP HACKING US!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Doernberg

To Me

Oct 9

Hi Catherine,

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

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

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

Ben

Answer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STOP HACKING US!