Wired State: U.S. Policy

U.S. Policy

09/05/2019

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

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

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

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

Not a Conservative

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

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

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

Benghazi Was Not Spontaneous But a Planned Terrorist Attack

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

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

Liberal Do-Good Mindset

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

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

Declared Unsafe by the UN, Attacked Before Benghazi

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

Not the Marines, But the Martyrs

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

The "Police"

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

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

EVE Online

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

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

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

Conspiracy Theory About Sean

Johnson writes:

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

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

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

CIA Cover?

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

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

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

Bragging In-Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real vs. Virtual

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

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

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

Jeremy David Johnson Got It Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 09:04 PM in Academics, MIPS, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (1)

05/31/2014

HOW Snowden Came to Work with the Russians -- Via WikiLeaks and Tor

John Schindler, the former NSA officer, a Russia expert and now former professor at the Naval Academy, asks WHEN Edward Snowden came over to the Russians. THAT he is on the Russians' side now is obvious not only to anyone who is in the intelligence community, but anyone who has had to deal with Russia for years who is honest about the nature of the Kremlin's regime and not constrained by ideological blinders.

Glenn Greenwald and the other Snowdenista enablers always try to deflect this question by asking for "proof" -- one suspects that even if Snowden were to get on heavily pre-packaged Russian state TV, which he was happy to use to pitch his softball question to Putin, and even hold up a GRU identification card, and confess that he'd been recruited by the Russkies back at an anime convention in Ft. Meade when he was 20, no one would believe him.

Really, there is no proof that Greenwald would ever accept, so let's not worry about what he thinks because he's not the one you need to convince. It's journalists who are willing to be a bit more critical of Snowden than he is -- and there are more of them now as not only Business Insider and Newsweek have reported critically on Ed, but Daily Beast and Venture Beat.

To me, the question to study is HOW, because THAT is not at issue for me -- and those for whom it is are not easily pursuaded -- and WHEN is not something I can discover.

If you focus on the HOW and keep digging eventually the story will break -- that's my conviction. But it's the piece of the story journalists are most reluctant to tackle because they feel it will ding them or some civil right they cherish by casting a spotlight on radical groups whose civil rights to speech and association they want to protect. I agree with none other than Slate's Michael Kinsley that journalism is not an endlessly capacious and elastic concept that includes seriously undermining national security in a liberal democratic state with impunity. I think it's fine to ask that a line be drawn between civil rights and crime, you know, as it was done with Occupy, where First Amendment protected speech was not elasticized to include months on end of overnight urban camping in a city park, spawning rapists, drug addicts and rats.

Schindler must know that by explaining that Snowden just can't walk in to a Russian consulate and be accepted as an agent on the spot, that in a way he is pouring water on the mills of the argumentation of lawyers Greenwald and the ACLU's Ben Wizner that he was never an agent (recruited long before Hong Kong). For Schindler, that set of facts only means you have to look harder at Ed's past, but for the Snowdenistas, it means they've been proven right. That's why examining the HOW becomes really important.

It's my thesis, spelled out in my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee, that WikiLeaks, Tor and Chaos Computer Club anarchists and hackers recruited Snowden so the Russians didn't have to.

Maybe at one time, in the Soviet era, the Russians were really strict about coalition work -- they wanted to fully control all the popular fronts or radical movements they worked with, if not create them out right themselves and run them.

Today, with budget cuts, confusing and debilitating in-fighting among Russian agencies, the receding of the Russian empire borders even though they are encroaching again right now in Crimea, Russian spies are more willing to do coalition work with anarchists or jihadists because in part, they can set a pot to boil and then let it boil over and cause mayhem without them and still gain overall by degrading the West.

WikiLeaks goes way back in their acceptance of Moscow as their vector, not only the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" concept -- they hate America and specifically the US and work aggressively against it by all available means. It's also their True North ideologically, whether you chose communism in the 1970s, as the Chaos Computer Club recruits did, or fascism today, as the later WikiLeaks collaborators did in selecting a creep like Israel Shamir to work with and continuing to avoid any authentic criticism of Putin.

WikiLeaks thinks they are being independent but opportunistic in collaborating with the Kremlin; the Kremlin is happy to let them go on feeding that delusion.

The WikiLeaks attempts to frustrate US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with leakages that hurt America and helped Russian interests didn't accomplish much, in part because they dumped the raw materials online and few people bothered to make sense of them.

So they were more strategic when they came to Cablegate in 2010, picking and choosing and tying cables to world events for maximum damage, and working with journalists -- well, up to a point, they ended up with quarelling with nearly all of them. Poitras remains in good relations with them -- but she's really an activist, not a journalist, although she does blackmail mainstream media into putting her by-line along with mainstream journalists -- in order to gain access to the Snowden documents.

At this point, Greenwald has distanced if not cut his ties to WikiLeaks, as the recent flap over the "fifth country" illustrated, although the issue of the Tor revelations already clinched it. Greenwald was done with Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks representative in the US, and Assange's stand-in at the hackers' HOPE conference in 2011, after that. He didn't even give him a mention in his book, reducing him to the term "tech helper" -- although he's likely the guy who sent him the FEDEX package per Poitras' instructions. [Update: Actually, it turned out that it was not Appelbaum, but Greenwald's tech guru at Intercept now, Micah Lee who is willing to take elaborate credit for this.]

WikiLeaks responded by committing the ultimate shun of modern times -- they unfollowed Greenwald on Twitter.

That WikiLeaks and Tor go together requires no special guessing, because not only is Appelbaum in both; so is Laura Poitras, and other characters like Runa Sandvik of Tor have never opposed WikiLeaks. James Ball, both at WikiLeaks and the Guardian, can play both networks.

Whether WikiLeaks used its considerable network of anarcho-hackers and crypto kids to reach Ed in the US, Japan, or India (and then later set up his operation in Russia) can be explored -- in my book I follow the travels of both the WikiLeaks and Tor characters who go to all those countries when Ed is there. Ed has been to lots of places, including the UK, where Sarah Harrison was, and Bosnia, where anybody could be.

But to be more specific:

1. In 2012 or even earlier, WikiLeaks establishes a presence in Moscow where they can obtain visas for foreigners, funding, cars, permits of various sorts, etc. through Russkiy Reporter, a Russian news site close to the government whose reporter, Dmitry Velikovsky has visited Assange while under house arrest and who has maintained close ties with him.

This Russian journalist Velikovsky then helps a discredited journalist, Johannes Wahlstrom, the son of Israel Shamir, the notorious antisemitic provocateur who has long done business with Russian intelligence and writes for the pro-government press, to film a movie for WikiLeaks called Mediastan.

The media company that owns Russkiy Reporter is Ekspert or Expert. It is owned by an oligarch loyalt to Putin, Oleg Deripaska. Shamir has written for Pravda, Zavtra (ultranationalist paper), Izvestiya, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, which are all pro-government. He's also a regular contributor to Counterpunch.

The ostensible purpose of Mediastan was to discredit the US and any independent media in Central Asia that appear to have US help or which refuse to report the WikiLeaks cables for their country. But that despicable operation itself is, in my view, a cover for the setting up of the Snowden Operation, to get a visa and legend for Sarah Harrison, to get apartments, etc. needed for operations, and make it appear as if Snowden is a WikiLeaks freelance project, not scripted at the GRU/SVR/FSB.

2. Runa Sandvik, then at Tor Project, now -- to gain that critical distance -- just moved to Center for Democracy and Technology, was first beamed into a panel in Moscow in November 2012 with Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov at the Sakharov Center, but obviously her connections go back before that.

3. Greenwald ostensibly hears from Snowden the first time on December 1, 2012, according to his book, but he's told the story six different ways, one of which might have made that date as early as November 2012. Poitras also hears from Snowden in December 2012 or earlier, not January as she claims -- that story has also been changed or questions about it dodged.

4. Runa Sandvik travels deliberately to Honolulu, ostensibly "on vaction" and attends a Crypto Party organized by Cincinnatus, who is none other than Snowden, on December 11, 2012. She finds out that he runs Tor nodes (servers through which Tor traffic can run) -- either right at the NSA or off campus in his own home, it's not clear. He tells her that he is recruiting other NSA agents (!) to run Tor nodes and that he needs a pack of Tor stickers as "incentive" to get them to do this. She mails him the pack of stickers later, she says.

5. Greenwald makes more serious contact with Snowden in March or April 2013, as he once admitted, and later changed his story about, and gets public keys with Poitras and Appelbaum and possibly one other NSA contractor to contact Snowden. When I later ask questions on an ACLU Facebook page of that NSA contractor what he was up to, the ACLU deletes the entire conversation.

6. Appelbaum claims he first begin communicating with Snowden in May to vet and interview him with Poitras, but more than likely he's been in touch long before that because he has long helped Poitras with comms. One possibility for direct contact for either or both or them or their cutaway friends is at the Spring Break of Code in late March-early April when Snowden could have plausible attended right before he flew to Ft. Meade for training.

These earlier contacts matter, because this is BEFORE Snowden steals some of his make documents (he began stealing in April 2012, we're told, and maybe earlier but some items date later like the Verizon court case documents would have to be stolen in April 2013).

7. Runa Sandvik goes to Hong Kong April 24-29, 2013.

8. Poitras, Greenwald, McCaskill and maybe Appelbaum (we can't rule out) go to Hong Kong to meet Ed on June 3, 2013 (or May 31 or June 1, there are multiple versions). His time-table has been misread or misreported numerous times so here's the most accurate version I can establish. He reveals his identity on June 5, 2013, the same day that Tor nodes in Russia found to be compromised and reporting to the Russian government show activity in Hong Kong.

9. By this time, Snowden has met with Russian diplomats and Russian enablers of some sort locally (journalists, human rights activists, lawyers of some kind) and of course Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks arrives in mid-June, just in case you forgot that it is WikiLeaks, not Glenn Greenwald running this op.

10. They leave for Moscow June 23, and supposedly stay in Sheremeytovo airport in a broom closet for 6 weeks, but Kommersant reports that they were picked up by diplomats from Ecuador, which has provided refuge to Assange in their embassy in London, and Venezuela. He is granted one year asylum in Russia. Harrison stays with him until Revolution Day November 7, 2013, comrades, and then goes to Germany as "she can't go home again."

11. Right before that, they are visited in Moscow by German leftists including the lawyer for the Baader Meinhof gang AKA Red Army faction, himself once jailed along with them. Yes, there are many fingerprints of the KGB's long-time coalition partners in this story, and German KGB enablers, including Putin, who served in East Germany when he worked for the KGB.

12. Greenwald and Appelbaum have an open falling out on Twitter over WikiLeaks' and Tor's challenge to Greenwald that he is sitting on Snowden revelations regarding the NSA's efforts to crack Tor. In fact, Greenwald is in the process of replacing Appelbaum temporarily with Bruce Schneir as his tech advisor, vetting the material and getting the Guardian to publish it. Greenwald leaves the Guardian over the same kind of accusations ultimately, because he now has Pierre Omidyar to fund him, but he never forgets being dissed publicly by Appelbaum.

13. Greenwald's book is scheduled to come out in April 2014, but is delayed until May. Meanwhile in April, some chapters are published and some people get copies of it. The fact that Snowden used the name Cincinnatus gets out, likely without the realization that it hooks up to the Crypto Party in Honolulu in December 2012 attended by Runa and in which Electronic Frontier Foundation is also referenced.

14. In April 2014, Runa Sandvik goes to Moscow. Fortuitously, she tears the RFID off her Norwegian passport. She meets with Soldatov and human rights activists, but that's the cover, although by this time, Soldatov may be a witting facilitator. She likely meets with Snowden and discusses how they are going to deal with the fact that Greenwald's book outs not only Cincinnatus, but Sandvik, i.e. Tor. There may have been an effort to get this scrubbed from the Internet in time, but due to mirror sites and such, it couldn't be done. Greenwald may have leaked this to get back at Tor and WikiLeaks (Appelbaum) for calling him a presstitute when he supposedly "sat on" the Tor revelations and they didn't appear right away in the Guardian.

15. While in Moscow, in April 2014 Runa gives some press interview, but declines to answer slon.ru directly whether Snowden still runs those Tor nodes or works for Tor; she says they don't discriminate and lots of people contribute (!).

16. In May 2014, Wired publishes a sanitized and reworked story of Runa Sandvik's role in the Crypto Party by Kevin Poulsen that can accentuate Runa's innocence. It never mentions that she went to Moscow the month before, although Runa was careful to leave a very public trail of her trip to dispel any sense of secrecy. Even so, you can tweet about trips and still have secret meetings, i.e. with Snowden.

17. In May 2014, WikiLeaks also orchestrates the "outing of the fifth country as Afghanistan" to try to embarrass Greenwald, and also outs the role of Jared Cohen supposedly in getting telecom towers moved to US army bases where supposedly they are then opened up to the NSA to monitor everybody's conversations.

18. Soldatov (who hosted Runa twice, once via Skype and once in person in Moscow), publishes a critical review of Greenwald's book, in which he slams Edward Lucas, reiterates that he thinks NSA revelations of spying on people is a good thing, but says Greenwald isn't telling us anything about Snowden's Moscow adventures in his book. The purpose appears to be to slam Greenwald on behalf of, in concert with WikiLeaks, while raising some questions about Snowden to appear plausible. Or perhaps the crypto-crypto kids are done with Snowden now, too.

Update:

2. Soldatov has written this sarcastic tweet, which I take to mean he does not wish to be called a WikiLeaks agent or a Russian agent and that heaven forfend, even to raise these questions is to engage in "conspiracy theory."

I've not called him either, of course, but since he seems to take objection to the "on behalf of" here, I'll cross that out, but I stand by "in concert with" - because it is. WikiLeaks is engaged in an avid campaign now to discredit Greenwald but preserve the value of Snowden. Soldatov thinks Snowden is just dandy for challenging Greenwald and starting the Internet debate in Russia. I disagree strenuously.

Soldatov has been a critic of WikiLeaks, i.e. here back in 2010, but in doing so, he's also conveyed his critique of Western journalism as "in a crisis" and his belief that American military reporting that Iran supplies Iraqi insurgents can't be trusted.

19. A privacy and security conference convened in Sweden demonstratively does not invite Assange, Appelbaum, Snowden or other Snowdenista, and they squeal about blacklisting. Carl Bildt is involved. Europeans are letting it be known that they will oppose the NSA, but not by joining ranks with the radicals of WikiLeaks and Tor.

20. Runa publishes in Forbes on May 28 a highly-viewed story about the sudden shut-down of TrueCrypt and warnings that it is no longer secure -- a story that was already racing across various nerd fora and social media -- ensuring maximum panic mode. TrueCrypt was Snowden's favourite program inside Tails, which he used on a USB to ensure that his encryption wouldn't be hacked by the NSA, or so he thought. He is famous for claiming:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

Well, not just endpoint security, Ed.

21. UPDATE And my later discovery of another account very likely used by Snowden -- @OahuCryptoParty on Twitter, now "suspended" -- illustrates that Runa Sandvik, Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins and others all were speaking to Snowden in December 2012; in January 2013 and via the list serve for CryptoParty, even in May 2013.

So...what next?

If Greenwald leaked the Cincinnatus name so that Runa could be found by Cryptome or anyone, then he may be willing to do more to throw Tor and WikiLeaks under the bus. He may find it convenient even to let them appear to have wholesale recruited and deployed Snowden even with the Russians -- because it will no longer matter.

He may feel that if the outing of the Russian connection -- so blatant and so staring at us all this year anyway -- is the price he pays for discrediting WikiLeaks, so be it. He will have sequestered himself behind the wall of journalist privileges, and he can say "even if" WikiLeaks and the Russians worked to recruit and deploy Ed, so what? The main point is that revelations were made, and reforms, even if weak are being made, and it's all good.

In other words, I think the Russian role and the exploitation/collaboration with WikiLeaks will just keep seeping out like blood from a bandage, and soon it will be the least-kept secret and something "everyone knows" so that "everyone" doesn't care about it. Snowdenista resources will work overtime to make the point that NBC's star source of the year can't be wrong, and even if he worked with the Russians, so what, that's what it took. And besides, the Russians aren't so bad anyway.

We're all waiting for some big Philip Agee sort of confession or revelation on this story or thinking it's going to be a long-term but ultimately inevitable process like Alger Hiss. But in our modern times, everything is always online and always leaked and always visible, so it's more about the attention economy and good search capacity.

Eventually, it's all on Cryptome or WikiLeaks or even Twitter, and people put it together, but by then, it's been saturated into the background to denude it of its revelatory power.

Time and again, Greenwald and others have already set up this proposition: even if it turns out Snowden is a Russian agent now, it doesn't matter, he did a good deed. If it turns out that he was a Russian agent before, well, that reduces some of his support, but for many people, still doesn't undo the fact that he did a good deed. Many will continue to see Russia in the same "progressive" light that they saw the Soviet Union, despite its support for mass murder.

Here's the thing: This is not a game that will be won in the end merely by exposing Snowden as a Russian agent. Those who know such things knew that already, and those who aren't ideologically twisted get it soon enough.

It's rather a game of exposing the whole apparatus -- WikiLeaks, Tor, Foundation for Freedom of the Press, Electronic Frontier Foundation -- in their higher meta game in which Snowden is only one operation in the war for maximum encryption, a war that is only to their advantage, and not to that of liberal democracies -- and ultimately to Russia's advantage.

The arms war in encryption they have unleashed and continue to unleash through many rounds may be deterred by things like the feds shutting down Lavabits -- Ed's email, which he used under his own name and"Cincinnatus" -- and the shutting down of TrueCrypt -- one of the encryption programs he relied on -- possibly with a National Security Letter. Let's hope! Maybe Tor will be next (and it will be next).

But until society gets a grip on the war of encryption itself and what it means, we will see many more rounds of this.

Posted at 03:52 PM in Adversarial Journalists, Hackers, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (5)

05/29/2014

Snowden is Like Humpty Dumpty -- "A Word Means Just What I Choose It To Mean"

Here's the internal email from Snowden that the NSA has just revealed today to expose Snowden's lie on NBC that he "used the appropriate channels" for his "whistleblowing.

A lot of people looking at it took it at face value, saw him as merely asking a know-it-all-question from an instructor about his training, and saw it as merely as exposing him as a liar in just that simple fashion -- i.e., he didn't complain about any violations or expose any wrong-doing in this email.

As soon as I read it, I realized "where he was going with this" as that he was in the "meta" mode of all the hacker anarchists and technolibertarians, trying to play "gotcha" with literalisms to entrap his superior into saying that "yes, executive orders are supposed to be equal to federal statutes, therefore, gosh, I guess the president went AWOL there on some national security directive."

That's what it was really all about -- and in his megalomania, he imagines he's doing heroic legal work and establishing that authority has run amok and the Rule of Law Must be Restored. Except...he doesn't really believe in the rule of law or he would use proper procedures and also not harm national security.

As you can see from not only this post, but my time-line filling up with heckling idiots, hackers love to get away with hacking and then try to get it blessed as "not" hacking. They want to be the ones to define the word, and they insist it means what they say it does.

In that, they're like Humpty Dumpty and the Red Queen and some of the other Alice-in-Wonderland characters. Remember this?

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Through the Looking Glass.

“There is no use trying, said Alice; one can't believe impossible things. I dare say you haven't had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

"The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."

In each one of these examples, language and meaning are being perverted -- the rule of law -- and some arbitrary pernicious misrule and chaos is put in its place -- arbitrary tyranny. That is what Snowden wants -- he and his friends decide what words mean.

Hackers inhabit this world of perversion of language naturally and almost obliviously. At some level, they do know what they are doing is wrong -- you can see that implied when they brag about their exploits which they admit are exploits -- but they are always trying to get away with murder.

Snowden is the quintessential case of this. He keeps trying to speak things into being just by lowering his voice and taking on a knowier-than-thou attitude -- in that swaggering macho tone of the slight, thin nerd boy so well captured by a Second Life blogger who said early about Snowden -- "He probably deliberately lowers his voice because he thinks it impresses women."

He never went through the proper whistleblowing channels, and what he's doing now is prevaricating -- pretending that some literalist email he sent trying to play gotcha with some NSA instructor over the levels of legal authority in the US -- is "whistleblowing". He pretends merely by invoking and referencing this meta concept that he has "done what is right".

I predicted that within hours of Snowden getting punked with this NSA revelation, Marcy Wheeler would appear -- like the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty -- and claim that the thing meant what she meant it did. Sure enough, she did.

The Guardian told the story the same way.

As did Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake Dissenter.

As did Bart Gellman of the Washington Post. All the inner sanctum. According to the same script.

The usual suspects.

Marcy is the most famous concern troll of the blogosphere. As a lefty, she really could care less if a CIA agent's name was revealed. The "progressives" and left are the LAST people to care about how well intelligence agencies do!

In fact, if it were up to her, if a CIA person's name was revealed in some war zone, she'd be glad because she'd say the US was illegitimate and the war was unlawful and therefore the "higher law" prevailed. She has no basic concern for protecting the CIA, which she scorns.

But WHEN she can turn a CIA name leakage into a club to beat liberals or conservatives not of her political camp, why, then she suddenly becomes gravely concerned about what it means to have revealed Valerie Plame's name. Suddenly, it's of world-historical importance because she needs to show that the people she hates are *like the thing they hate*. (Saul Alinsky method -- and before him, Leninist method) They are the real ones to care about the CIA and worry about leaking -- they are for the security state and she is not.

So if she can catch them out in leaking the name, why, she's undermined their credibility. This legalistic gotcha is what it's all about, and it gets dull and annoying quickly because it's not a substitute for insight or analysis.

Marcy, who isn't a lawyer and has a Ph.D. in literature with a focus on the feilleton, then spent years flogging the Plame story -- and similar stories -- although as we know from her celebration of Snowden and her failure to condemn Jacob Appelbaum's threats to reveal agents, she cares not one whit about exposure of intelligence services. That's why all this is so fake.

So not surprisingly, like the Guardian and Kevin Gosztola at Firedog, she has a "legal analysis" as to why Snowden's seemingly mundane quiz question -- pretending to be a suck-up student while really attempting to create a gotcha paper trial -- is actually "whistleblowing."

As I point out, these issues she thinks constitute legal violations have never been found as such by a court of law, to my knowledge.

Maybe they will be, but they haven't been. Separation of powers and the rule of law matter, and of course if the government violates our own laws and sanctions torture, you want the policy to change, the legal interpretations that sanctioned this to be repudiated, and those responsible punished.

Except, Marcy is stuck in third gear on this and has been for 20 years. She wants to kep showing that the law is always violated, the powers never separated and executive power and agencies are always evil. You wonder when the end state will come. What perfect state would arrive for her where separation and balance of powers would exist?

In fact, for a lot of people who read and retweet @emptywheel revolutionary executive power in anarchist movements is actually what they seek, nothing like a complex and fluid and dynamic separation and balance of powers. Too complex for them.

I'll say it again: Snowden, for all his fetishizing of the Constitution, and keeping it on his desk, in fact deeply scorns the Constitution.

In his book, Glenn Greenwald quotes a telling email from Snowden where he perverts the quotation from Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson said this:

Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

Snowden said this:

Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of encryption.

That's awful. That means "code is law" for Snowden -- as it is for all in the hacker tribe -- and it means encryption -- which is a weapon -- might makes right -- is to be used in favour of having the rule of law over the government -- and frankly coders and pretentious "whistleblowers" as well who imagine that they have to do the work of the courts and Congress because they "aren't doing their jobs".

Worse, while Jefferson had in mind human nature -- which isn't perfectable -- and the need for laws to guide the individual man, Snowden is revising this to imply that the state is by nature mischievious and individual men need to have maximum encryption to hide from this ostensibly unruly state. See how perverse this gets?

Really, pay attention to this because it's vital. Encryption is force -- math used to keep law-enforcement out. That's it's actual usage by the crypto-anarcho movement. They are overthrowing man for machine here -- because encryption is self-executing code concretizing the will of the coder. When you have the Constitution, you don't have self-executing code, you have a system which provides for a constitutional court which interprets the law by a set of premises of the rule of law. The rule of law is over man.

With code, you have the rule of some men over other men, using code -- it's a very definite premise. Code is force, only; it's not law -- it's primitive sets of 0s and 1s meant to execute like a weapon, every time. That's not what the Constitution is, which is more organic and works by reason and logic, not just logic.

Again, this is hortatory. Snowden, again and again, thinks he can exhort things into being by just appearing on TV and pronouncing them. He needs to be a spy to appeal more to the Germans to get asylum, why, then he'll be a spy, even though he was really only a sysadmin. He keeps his hosts mesmerized in these cases, but people need to break the spell.

If there is some executive order that trumped a federal statute when it was supposed to be subordinate to it, then let a court decide if this is the case. I would hope this would be done lawfully and not tendentiously or in a politicized manner. But this wasn't proved yet.

And perhaps laws have to be changed, you know? Hackers are all for changing laws their way, but if you point out that maybe we need to revise the law that makes Americans who are communicating with terrorist suspects abroad as somehow exempt from surveillance due to their First Amendment rights and such, that infuriates them because they want "freedom". Here's the thing: it has to be debated, and not imposed as a fait accompli by hacking.

As a brilliant fellow noted on Twitter, Snowden stole all those documents -- whether 200,000 or 1.7 million -- a lot! -- yet he didn't take out copies of his own exonerating email? What??? That's crazy. Most people who have a beef with a company keep a "crime file" and bring it out with them when they leave.

I suspect that the reason he can't give these names is because some of those people might be accomplices.

Posted at 11:20 PM in Hackers, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (3)

05/28/2014

Even if Greenwald Finally Does Name Names, It Will Not Persuade Me to Oppose the NSA

So Glenn Greenwald is now blustering that he will "name names" and this will be like the "finale" of the fireworks -- you save the best for last.

Hey, does that mean he will stop leaking our national secrets?!

I've been dogging this point for an entire year, pointing out that Greenwald and the Snowdenistas never, ever name names of specific people -- specific victims of this "massive surveillance" they claim is going on. It's always a hysterical hypothetical. That really undermines their credibility. And they know that.

No, LOVEINT doesn't count, as that is an aberration, a job discipline issue, not a systemic issue. And no, extremist Muslims monitored for their porn habits is not the "individuals" smoking gun, either, because their Islamism created the need to monitor them and there is no evidence their rights are violated if efforts are made to neutralize their influence in this fashion. Better that than a terrorist attack.

Bring the suit if you think you've got it, good luck. And anecdotal stories about Doctors without Borders or Human Rights Watch being monitored in the field utterly fail to move me: these groups consciously, deliberately deal with armed movements, terrorists, Al Qaeda, you name it, for the sake of their humanitarian work or human rights monitoring goals, and therefore they have to accept that they will be monitored along with the terrorists whose rights they are concerned about.

HRW is particularly arrogant in this regard just like Snowden, thinking they are above the morality of the common man and can form coalitions and collaborations because of the ostensibly higher issue of documenting torture. That they could do this and still condemn the violations of rights terrorists themselves commit never seems to occur to them.

So that doesn't count. Nor does the complaining of a law firm doing business with an authoritarian country with a terrorist problem like Indonesia. Sorry, no go.

The ACLU knows this, because when I challenged their representative at a panel at NYU Law School last year, they conceded it -- and bemoaned the lack of individual victims that would help "personalize" the Snowden case and "build the movement". Sigh.

They worry that the American people aren't upset enough about Snowden's revelations because there isn't any Martin Luther King, Jr. who has been spied on...like COINTELPRO.

But this isn't a movement that cares about individuals. Like the communists, the anarcho-hackers only care about the masses, the crowds, the hypothetical, not the real person. Supposedly Manning was "converted" to join "the movement" by seeing Iraqis unfairly imprisoned, and yet, he never saw to it that those documents got leaked via WikiLeaks; Assange dismissed them as unimportant (!).

Maybe because they wouldn't show what he claimed, i.e. maybe they had used or advocated violence and weren't the innocents believed. We can't know until we see them. Snowden was the same way -- never any care for any individual except that one story about "the hacker's girlfriend" who is probably somebody like Quinn Norton or a friend of Jacob Appelbaum's who was rightly examined by the authorities. Let's have the name, and let the public judge!

My guess is that Greenwald will leak the names of people already in their inner circle -- the Snowdenistas themselves. They've been trying to make themselves victims the whole time - and it doesn't fly because whereas once they'd be questioned at borders, and even pretended they couldn't come home again, when it came to a prestigious journalism award that will help them keep their cover as "journalists" and not activists and bloggers, they were willing to come back. And they weren't questioned. Whoops, no victimhood.

Then they weren't questioned. Probably because they are already followed. Good! They should be. Anyone helping Snowden should be a subject of investigation and this won't prove any wrong-doing for me. not at all.

If Jacob Appelbaum, for example, is on the list of persons under surveillance by the NSA, I can only approve. People who threaten to reveal the names of agents; people who have already leaked a catalogue spy gadgets used to spy on enemies and keep them in check -- such persons SHOULD be under surveillance, and how! The NSA wouldn't be doing its job otherwise. If the point is that only the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security should do this job of investigating American suspects, I could say, sure, except...Appelbaum has readily collaborated with Germans -- and Russians! -- in WikiLeaks, not to mention the Australian Assange and the Brit Sarah Harrison, so he's a legitimate target of foreign surveillance because he's in touch with foreigners undermining security. The list goes on through their entire inner circle.

Micah Lee, a college drop-out and hacker who helps Greenwald manage and hide the Snowden trove should be interrogated. He is an accomplice, not to journalism but to espionage.

And the lines that Greenwald would draw more broadly away from criminal prosecution aren't trustworthy, either. Michael Kinsley is absolutely right to question whether journalists should be this special class of people who get to determine national security for us undemocratically, arrogantly, and dangerously. They shouldn't. Nor should hackers.

But wait, what if the names on Greenwald's list were my fellow church members, merely working on immigration for Latin Americans? Or what if they were my fellow human rights colleagues, merely critical of Guantanamo? I wouldn't want them to be targeted by NSA surveillance, would I?

Possibly not, but given how, over the years, I have seen people like this, seemingly such innocent church ladies, helping the murderous Communist Party of El Salvador through its front groups, or the murderous Soviet regime even directly, or given how I've seen them gloss over and dismiss some of the very real problems of terrorists let out from Gitmo who commit terrorism -- I'd have to say, sorry, but live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak. Justify violence and help those who are violent because of some other goal (liberation theology or revolutionary or socialism or whatever), then face the fact that you will be under surveillance. Whining doesn't cut it for me.

But wait. What if my name is on the list? Won't I care then? After all, I've been critical of the US prostration before Central Asian tyrants over the NDN; I've been critical of the war in Iraq and the Obama Administration's disgraceful Russian "reset". Shouldn't I be on the watch list?

Well, I'm fine if I am on the list, and if part of watching the terrorist organization, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, means watching some of their offshoots and fronts that I might have written about or even met -- watch away, NSA, do your job.

It's at this point the Internet warrior usually tells you snottily, "Oh, you people who say you don't care if you're watched, you have nothing to hide. How would you like it if I leaked all your email online? You say you don't care if the NSA snoops."

To which I can only say:

But the NSA, unlike YOU, hackers, unlike Anonymous, doesn't leak emails on line. In fact, these gentlemen may read other people's mail; they don't dump it online like WikiLeaks or the Russians.

Here's the difference between the Kremlin and the FSB/GRU/SVR and other intelligence agencies of Russia, and our side:

When the Kremlin orders the conversations and meetings of opposition leader Alexey Navalny to be monitored, they are spilled online on TV or in the news. Giant billboards even go up to vilify him around town.

When the Kremlin monitors Victoria Nuland's conversation with the US ambassador to Kiev, it is leaked online, and harms US foreign policy and embarasses the US in its delicate relations with Ukraine -- to the Kremlin's advantage.

When the Kremlin monitors the EU's Catherine Ashton or the Estonian Foreign Minister discussing Ukraine, it goes up on Youtube and spreads like wild-fire through the old Soviet press and NGO networks that still make the left today -- and discredits Ukrainians.

Compare and contrast what happens when the NSA monitors Merkel's phone.

Crickets.

Do you know what Merkel ever said on that phone?

You don't. In fact, we can't be sure - as it is the duplicitious Appelbaum who has told us! -- that anything more than having her number in a list as a potential "watch" was the case -- and with good reason, given Germany's craven relationship with Putin.

None of these people who have been described as "watched" by the NSA, whether lovers of employers, Human Rights Watch, or Muslim extremists, has had their email leaked on line, you know, the way Gen. Petraeus email was. Oh, wait. It wasn't. Just the fact of it's penetration by the FBI was reported. Wasn't that the case?

So bring on the names -- because we know that you will either a) only be trying to advertise your own selves once again as "victims" to escape accountability; b) not have the content to go with them or c) may have it, but will be too embarassed about what the public might actually think of people fraternizing with enemies and undermining security.

You still won't have a case.

Posted at 08:50 PM in Hackers, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (3)

02/25/2014

Should the US Use Cyberwarfare on Other States or on Hacker Movements?

This is the question preoccupying the New York Times in today's thumb-sucker.

Mainly because of the war in Syria -- which is backed by Iran and Russia -- and the consequences of trying to take on these vicious states directly or indirectly, in reality or in virtuality.

Typically this debate devolves instantly to the implications of making and using -- and losing control -- of Stuxnet, which was used by the US against Iran's nuclear system - and never looks at the larger problem of the rogue nuclear state under theocrats who are willing to mass-murder their own civilians who protest against their oppression, and assassinate their critics abroad.

THE CAPITALIST TOOL IS HACKED

There might be reference to the Syrian Electronic Army, which hacked Forbes last week. (Note in reading that piece how organized, cadre-like, rigidly ideological and extreme that organization is, i.e. showing signs of training, far from the "looseknit group of hackers" people sometimes claim it is "not affiliated with any government". And note the chatty and friendly journo who friended these hackers in order to understand their sad childhoods, seemed utterly gullible on this point: "He said they are self-funded, not supported by an outside group or the Syrian government as has been alleged." Right. Then see Andy Greenberg's enthusiastic account of his own employer's hacking, which I had hoped might make him sympathize with hacker victims more -- except I think he just finds it too intellectually exciting to follow their antics.)

Maybe you can start to see the problem here.

As always, it's hard to have this conversation about Syria and cyberwarfare meaningfully in the liberal "arms control" strait-jacket that myopic anti-Americans want to put it into.

A HELSINKI ACCORDS FOR CYBERWARFARE?

This concept has been cropping up more in recent years, and you can see it in blog posts like this, asking for a "Geneva Accords" for cyberspace.

I immediately note that the East West Institute is not an honest broker for this process, in my view. It was pro-Soviet in the 1980s and remains under the exact same leadership as it had then, and is rather uncritical of Russia today -- it's a think tank that has to maintain access to the Kremlin to stay in business. That means it isn't getting to the heart of the problem that would have to precede any accord: candid admission that the real problem originates in Russia's awful human rights record in meat-world, first; its propping up of the tyrannies of Iran and Syria; its cyber attacks on Western Europe and the US which are overwhelming in number by contrast to whatever dirty tricks might be put on the Western docket; and the Kremlin's unwillingness to admit this, obviously.

It's great that 40 think-tankers self-selected in this process tilting toward the Kremlin are making little rules about spam that even Russians might sign, but that is beside the point -- and lumping together that process with NATO in Tallinn really is disingenuous (these initiatives come from very different places with different goals).

Sure, it would be nice to have a kind of new "Helsinki Accords" of cyberwarfare, where states got together and solemnly pledged not to use these new and powerful and unpredictable forms of warfare against each other.

I used to talk about this more hopefully a few years ago - I remember a year ago or so at one of the Brussels Forums special sessions on cybersecurity, my tweeted question about the possibility of "Helsinki talks" like this even got on the list, and was even discussed by people like Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. But here's the thing -- and I believe he was the one to make this point at the time -- it's kind of hard to have a new Helsinki Accords sort of agreement on something this complicated when the existing Helsinki Accords and its institutional framework --the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- have such a very difficult time getting Russia to concede to basic principles of human rights and even arms control these days.

Russia has been very, very busy crippling the capacity of the OSCE in recent years by doing everything from challenging its human rights budgets to demanding re-negotiation of its principles in a new "security charter" that would benefit its Eurasianist take on life, ruining all the progress seemingly made in the last 35 years on these principles. (Russia is also busy trying to kill the UN treaty bodies' system in exactly the same way, with little publicity or pushback.)

In a climate where Russia is being as bad as it can be at home, say, to NGOs or demonstrators, as well as abroad, in backing up the Syrian tyrant and pressuring Ukraine and even supplying help with some of the deadly force used by the Yanukovych government against demonstrators, how could you possibly open up a new treaty (or "non-binding agreement") process with them on cybersecurity?! You couldn't. The same factors that make for insecurity in cyberspace -- Russia making the overwhelming lion-share of attacks on Western Europe in both political and commercial hacks - are the factors that make a poor climate for negotiation. The problem starts with Russian denial of the problem -- and Western European reluctance to call out what the real issue is -- the Kremlin.

So, hey, in the absence of any Realism from the Kremlin, or Realism from the EU regarding what the real source of the problem is -- Russia -- let's by all means just myopically focus on the US, mkay? Hence the New York Times, fretting about all this.

You can see how all this has been nicely set up by America's enemies:

The head of the N.S.A., Gen. Keith B. Alexander, said in an interview last year that such weapons had been used only a handful of times in his eight-year tenure.

But Syria is a complicated case, raising different issues than Iran did. In Syria, the humanitarian impulse to do something, without putting Americans at risk or directly entering the civil war, is growing inside the administration. Most of that discussion focuses on providing more training and arms for what are seen as moderate rebel groups. But cyberweapons are in the conversation about stepping up covert action.

Part of the argument is that Syria is a place where America could change its image, using its most advanced technology for a humanitarian purpose.

“The United States has been caught using Stuxnet to conduct a covert cybercampaign against Iran as well as trawling the Internet with the massive Prism collection operation,” Mr. Healey wrote recently, referring to the N.S.A.’s data-mining program. “The world is increasingly seeing U.S. cyberpower as a force for evil in the world. A cyberoperation against Syria might help to reverse this view.”

Of course, Iran has been caught ruthlessly suppressing its population, arming local insurgents and terrorists, propping up the mass crime against humanity in Syria, pressuring Israel, and receiving Putin on a mission to resume arms sales from Russia. Not to mention obstructing the Internet and hacking enemies. But do let us keep that focus on the US as the "force for evil in the world."

Let me suggest that Obama is really not the one to be adjudicating this entire debate, given that his premises and principles, drawn from his days in and around the Democratic Socialists of America, would not give him the intellectual framework to do anything else other than Blame America First.

THOSE NASTY TACTICS AGAINST HACKERS BY THE NSA!

There's another interesting context to this "agonizing" debate on Syria surfacing now in the New York Times -- i.e. being leaked by some participant in it in the Administration who wants to force Obama's hand in one way or another - and that's the diabolical work of First Look, Glenn Greenwald's new blog funded by Pierre Omidyar.

Over there, we see that this week, the story is about those evil creatures, the NSA and the GCHQ, using these awful, unethical methods on hackers.

Interesting how these two topics -- US contemplating cyberware on Syria and Iran and the Western tactics said to be used on Anonymous -- come together in Leak-land this week, eh?

And there, too, to hear Glenn tell it, there is absolutely no past to this story, and nothing ever occurred before these slides were created.

THE DISCUSSION WE'VE BEEN HAVING ON THIS FOR YEARS, YOU KNOW

Of course, if you followed my blogs for the last 10 years -- my, it's been a long time -- you'd know that the issue of the hackers came first. THEY used these awful methods FIRST.

And, as Gus on Twitter has pointed out, the hacker methods are the "Saul Alinsky methods". Except, Saul didn't invent them, they came ultimately from Lenin and anarchist and communist movements a hundred years ago, and percolated their way into the Students for a Democratic Society, and the more radical Weathermen, and other groups and movements that drew on these ideologies. These methods include things like freezing a target and assaulting him with one-sided attacks, particularly trying to show that he is not what he seems because he does something that is at odds with his supposed public stance, especially if that is perceived as moral.

So, for example, in modern terms, if you are in Moveon.org or one of these moronic leftist online movements, you will take something like a corporation, which you hate for ideological reasons because you hate capitalism, and then pick out something that it does which is at odds with its purported public persona, i.e. capitalist. So you accuse it of receiving "corporate welfare" or getting tax cuts or benefits from the state -- at oddds with its belief in go-it-alone hard-scrabble can-do free enterprise.

Then you compare and contrast what conservatives say about "welfare queens" or "spongers on public dole" -- poor people, the jobless, minorities without access to good jobs -- and then apply that rhetoric to your frozen target. Voila. That these are very different types of support with very different outcomes doesn't matter; the point is to pervert the meaning of language and use it in a bad-faith manner.

Greenwald tunes into this issue with his Snowden-leaked document as if there was no history of even the cheer-leading tech press documenting the massive assaults by hackers on government, corporate, nonprofit, and media websites, not to mention individual blogs. As if something like the Syrian Electronic Army attack on Forbes never happens.

It's a good time to remember some of the discussion even of only three years ago about the assaults caused by WikiLeaks and Anonymous -- which, after all, attacked the US government *first* with, um, WikiLeaks itself (my, how quickly people forget the basics!)

So:

My BloggingHeads debate with Robert Wright about WikiLeaks, and the use of the DDoS as a means of "civil disobedience" (I said it was illegitimate).

The vicious attack on me from the old Alphaville Herald (Second Life press) for getting such high-profile attention by being on Wright's show, and debating him directly. This is of course the work of Peter Ludlow, the linguistics professor who supports Anonymous and WikiLeaks ardently, and his sidekick Mark McCahill, Internet pioneer and lover of hacker mayhem himself.

Along the way I published an open letter to invester Ken Lehrer questioning his support of Moot, the founder and owner of 4chan.org -- a site where a lot of hackers are recruited and trained for attacks.

If you read the comments at the Herald, I am mercilessly ridiculed and heckled for taking this position, and even accused of somehow queering a job prospect for some kid (a start-up genius who got millions of dollars -- who then failed, and got more funding -- yeah, right). But do read the comment there from mercury which sums up my position and its ramifications very well.

Then let's go over to Nancy Scola, who took a supportive stance re: the legitimacy of the DDoS and I debated her at TechPresident.

I've had to constantly explain over the years why the DDoS is NOT like the lunch-counter sit-ins -- which were peaceful, non-coercive, and not disruptive.

I've had to take on people like Deanna Zandt, inspired by the hacker chaos of Berlin in her education, who is pro-DDoS.

And note that I'm not alone in this -- Andrew Keen of course takes this position against the DDoS.

Morozov on Slate naturally defended the DDoS -- Slate was happy to publish this as they are radical revolutionaries celebrating violent movements like Occupy. And of course, Morozov was quite cunning in his actual defense of the DDoS despite the critics -- which I called him out on.

I won't even get into the entire discussion that occurred around the *mere plans* for HBGary to use hacker methods on Anonymous, the counter-attacks that pre-emptively assaulted HBGary with a merciless hack; the hack on Stratfor; the arrests of hackers like Jeremy Hammond and the turning of Sabu -- and entire chapter in this story of hackers doing this first, as the NSA or FBI only began to get its act together to try to counter it -- and to plan using its own methods on it.

Don't forget that this a lot like Russia buying South Koreans or Brazilians to win the Olympics: the agencies in our country feel they "have to" have hackers on their teams to win, so they bring them in -- and suffer the consequences (Snowden).

So again, the question I have for Greenwald and all the Snowdenistas: how come you're tuning into this topic YEARS LATER, after the hackers HAVE DONE THIS FIRST?

I mean, even the last three years of this debate, given the links I've just provided, would clue you in. Lots of people discussed Anonymous' use of the DDoS, very much backed up by WikiLeaks (and we now know they even recruited hackers to help them fight their enemies like PayPal) -- and the usual suspects like Morozov and TechPresident and Slate and Zeandt all endorsed the use of this awful method of crashing other people's servers. Where were you?

HACKERS ATTACK SNOWDEN CRITIC

And this isn't somehow an abstract notion that happens to other people, oh, those corporations like PayPal that have phalanxes of engineers to fix their hacker problems in a few days.

It's a very real climate of intimidation that Snowden critics really live with (as I can testify myself -- one only has to look at the drive-by assaults on my book on amazon and the type of methods used in making "reviews" to understand that).

We discover that Lawfare Blog has been under assault for its criticism of Snowden and has had its server crashed and disabled repeatedly.

Ken Anderson, who is my old colleague from Human Rights Watch in the 1980s-1990s, has an interesting article about this at the Washington Post, which I comment on there.

And because comments can get so drowned out there, let me reprint here my thoughts on the hacking of Lawfare:

I don't wish this experience on my worst enemy, but in a way, Ken, I'm glad you are finally seeing up close and personally the strength, ugliness, persistence and sinister nature of the hacker movements that otherwise libertarians tend to dismiss as mere "trolls" or "kids". It's important to see that these are hard-core, echeloned cadre organizations sometimes even with hostile state backing. And they really are determined to make sure that no one uses the Internet in any way that they don't approve first. I say this after blogging for 10 years.

One way to try to combat these movements is to use commercial blogging sites, so that the headaches of these attacks and subterfuges go on the engineers at these sites who are more experienced. But the problem is the hacker culture is among them, too. And large and busy commercial sites don't always understand not to respond to falsified DMCA takedown notices on fake grounds which are merely meant to chill speech. Or to realize that malicious inclusion of your blog site in a malware list on sysadmin's lists when of course you have no malware is very hard to undo. Another technique is to deluge your site with porn or commercial spam to force you to close or remove comments -- I have found it not uncommon to get 20,000 pieces of spam injected on my site by bots in an hour just to stop me from being able to keep comments open or from posting as the site hangs.

The only way to address this is to start documenting and fighting it like the human rights abuse that it is. But you have to change your mindset about it first. It's not really so much about cost, as you can get a commercial site for $14.95 or $21.95 a month. But it's about combating on a systematic basis and constantly documenting and reporting.

So when Glenn Greenwald is ready to concede free speech for thee and not just for me, and concede that Lawfare shouldn't be hacked by his friends, then maybe we can talk. Except, I probably wouldn't even begin the conversation with them since the entire thing is in bad faith.

As usual, all these slides and documents from the NSA are context-free and we don't know the most important thing: were these concepts used?

Is there a list of actions taken as a result of these concepts?

Or is it more like HBGary planning to hack Anonymous but not getting to it?

IF these methods were used, then surely we can get *some facts*. You know, names, dates, places, wind chill factors. Details.

Of course, all these hacker movements are "injured if not innocent" at best -- and I'd love to have a conversation about how everyone thinks they will be stopped -- along with the Syrias of the world -- if we are supposed to adhere to an ethics charter that no one else has signed or implemented.

That conversation can only start with a conversation about where the problem started and who is to blame.

BTW, read the obnoxious Christine Fair's timeline, if you want to see some Twitfights recently on the "who started it theme" in Central Asia, where everybody naturally blames the US for the Taliban (false), and she helpfully points out to a debater that aid to the Afghan rebels went through Pakistani intelligence -- which props up the Taliban even today. Then her various insincere and anonymous interlocutors rant about CIA dirty tricks in the 1950s in Latin America or Africa or Asia, to which I can only say: two wrongs don't make a right, i.e. moral equivalence is wildly out of order here given the mass crimes of humanity perpetrated by the Soviets from the 1900s through the 1940s in particular -- which help set up the Cold War.

The Helsinki Accords, begun before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and persisted in negotiations with Kremlin henchmen even as they prosecuted this war in the 1980s, eventually was a framework that bore fruit in terms of the free flow of people and ideas. But while it was helpful in breaking up the Communist bloc and saving some countries for the EU -- and bringing Central Asia into a context of care that it really has nowhere else -- it has suffered terrible reversals in the last 10 years in particular. I guess I would have to conclude for now that the cybersecurity issues cannot be successfully grafted on to OSCE (although that's likely where some will graft them) and that a new Helsinki Accords of any kind, least of all on cybersecurity, will not work.

Meanwhile, I don't plan to become a booster of American use of cyberwarfare any more than I am a booster of drones -- I just expect to remind those raging about these issues that they are horrificially onesided in their approach.

Posted at 06:21 AM in Anonymous, Authoritarian States, Hackers, Human Rights, International Bodies, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/30/2014

"Privacy for Me and Not for Thee": My Book on Snowden is Out at Amazon and Scribd

Cover of my book. Art work by Hallie Shatravka.

My book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack is now available on Amazon for Kindle.

For a limited time I also have my e-book available on Scribd for 99 cents with photographic illustrations.

Next week I will upload it to Smashwords premium, i-Tunes, etc. and it will be professionally coded, with illustrations -- and yes, some typos corrected hopefully.

This book grew out of my blogs here, but it is not a mere reprint of these blog posts; indeed it doesn't have any reprints but is newly-written with new material, and only some posts included that were substantially rewritten. It has a lot of new facts that haven't appeared before on my blogs.

I went over all my posts and all my findings and in the course of doing so, corrected time-lines, improved arguments and made new findings which I've incorporated. I have put in hundreds of links to primary sources and news articles so that others can follow along.

These include information about the handling of Snowden in Russia; the background and activities of Jacob Appelbaum; the movements of WikiLeaks and their hacker friends in Russia and India; the period of Snowden's stay in Hong Kong; the controversies surrounding Tor.

More than ever I am convinced that what we are seeing here isn't so much a story about "leaks" and the embarassment of US intelligence -- although that's obviously important -- but a story of the latest round in the encryption arms race that began with phreakers and continued through Clipper Chip and went on to PGP and consists now of The Snowden Hack. (If you don't know what any of the events in that sentence were about, use your Wikipedia -- a biased source -- and read my book -- critical of hackers.)

I tried to make a coherent if lengthy narrative fitting these pieces of the puzzle together to explain my thesis: that we can't necessarily find a direct recruitment of Snowden by Russian intelligence, but we can find collusion with figures associated with Russian intelligence who may have served to nudge Snowden and his hacker and journalist comrades toward aiding the Kremlin's interests.

I can only encourage everybody to buy my book -- it's the price of a latte! -- and engage with my thinking. That's my hope!

And write a customer review on Amazon.

It's interesting that both Edward Lucas, author of a new book called The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster, available on Amazon Kindle, and John Schindler both have used the term "Snowden Operation". As that implies that there really is a conscious Russian "op" behind it, i.e. a government intelligence, I haven't used that term because I myself don't have any direct proof of that. That's not because I don't believe Snowden could have been turned into an agent for the Kremlin's purposes. Indeed I do.

Rather, I use the term "Snowden Hack" instead, and even indicate there's a movement directed precisely toward the Snowden Hack because I think that's how it works more cunningly and more indirectly: that anarchist coders, some of whom have colluded with Russian or other hostile intelligence, wittingly or through "false flag" operations, have planned and executed and assisted this NSA hack over a period of time.

I don't think it happened spontaneously with young Ed sitting at his desk at the NSA one day and saying "Gosh, I could wiretap anybody on the planet, even President Obama, isn't that awesome sauce" and then deciding humbly and selflessly that he sh0uld leak this terrible capacity in order to prevent a "turn-key tyranny." Whatever Snowden's actual early associations, whatever the claims that he "acted alone" (something all law-enforcement rushes to say about any major crime to allay public fears), I think he was fitted into an older plan, as part of a long-term war on the NSA conceived by WikiLeaks, Tor and the Chaos Computer Club.

While I have a lot in my book on Russia and some new insights and material, I focus even more on the hacker movements because they've received almost no critical scrutiny from the media.

I began writing this book actually as a "long form journalism" magazine article about six months ago. I was frustrated at the lack of critical coverage on Snowden, then annoyed at the journalists who did occasionally cover it with criticism -- but not willing to reference my blog, or any blog (this was partly because of the long period in which Michael Kelley of Business Insider was talking to Joshua Foust, who casually lifts and takes credit for other people's blogs all the time).

I then submitted this manuscript to a half dozen online publications, one after the other. It seemed as if the manuscript only got longer with each rejection -- I found some editors just didn't understand anything about the hackers and crypto kids and I had to go into long explanations. I got some encouraging readings in some quarters and was invited to submit other articles, but a critical piece on Snowden and his fellow hackers just didn't seem to be one that any editor was prepared to publish at that time, in a climate of overall hysteria and adulation of Snowden. I decided to just keep putting it together and maybe make a book out of it.

When Edward Lucas contacted me about his own e-book about a month ago, I urged him to make me his co-author. He was not interested in doing that. For one, his book was mainly all written at that time. For two, we really had different perspectives and didn't agree on some main issues. Lucas, as a European concedes a criticism of NSA that I'm not willing to concede because it comes from this warring hacker movement coercing us into an undemocratic process. He's concerned about that, obviously, but the threat of the big USA looms larger.

For Lucas, the eavesdropping on Merkel and other key moments are unforgiveable, and understandably so. Edward also delves more into the world of espionage with his knowledge of history which I don't have -- there is a lot in his book about the methods of espionage, similarities in this operation to others, and the damage that Snowden has caused. His book is especially strong in calling out the fact that Snowden can't really be said to be a mere civil rights whistleblower if in fact his hacks amount to help to the Russians and Chinese and are really unnecessary for the purposes of reform.

I think it's great that Lucas' book can create an intellectual home for people who want to be critical of the NSA and reform it, but still have a lot of qualms about Snowden. That's a home that liberal Democrats and conscientious Republicans can have in Washington and can help address this crisis sanely. I know his book is getting a very serious reading in the right places.

But...It's not my intellectual home because I think the entire thing is suspect and has to be opposed at its root. No one has proved to me that the NSA needs reform; my findings only prove that hackers need reform -- as in reform school.

No matter -- I think it's important to have a variety of perspectives on Snowden competing in the debate, because so far, it's been controlled largely by Ron Wyden and the Snowdenistas.

Posted at 08:29 AM in Hackers, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Muhtorov Case, the NSA, the ACLU, Joshua Foust, and Me

I've noted how the Muhtorov case was heating up to become nationally prominent and would get a lot more attention now that anti-NSA agitators can use it as an emblem of their struggle.

Not surprisingly, none other than Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU litigator about whom I've written critically in the past, is taking up the cudgel on this case to bang on the US government for using the secret FISA court and "warrantless surveillance" in prosecuting's Muhtorov's case.

In the motion filed in federal court in Denver, Jamshid Muhtorov also requested that prosecutors disclose more about how the surveillance law was used in his case. Muhtorov denies the terror charges he faces.

"We've learned over the last few months that the NSA has implemented the law in the broadest possible way, and that the rules that supposedly protect the privacy of innocent people are weak and riddled with exceptions," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said in a statement Wednesday. The ACLU called the filing the first of its kind.

I began writing about Jamshid Muhtorov, an Uzbek refugee who was active in movements in his homeland, soon after he was arrested and summed up everything we knew here, and wrote about it again when the NSA angle began to be used. Along the way, I've had to refute persistent smears of me by the notorious Joshua Foust claiming falsely that I deliberately tried to get this man kept in jail.

First, I have to point out, regardless of the premises the ACLU will bring to this case about "unconstitutional" actions, the program of meta-data collection with secret FISA courts which the NSA ran is and was legal. Whatever Snowden's claims, whatever this or that panel or commission claims, they are lawful and remain so and were at the time of Muhtorov's arrest. Jameel did not yet prove this program unconstitutional; indeed, his lawsuit in Manhattan Court was found without merit by Judge William Pauley and the constitutionality of the NSA's program was upheld.

This will go all the way to the Supreme Court, as another suit on the same issue led to a different decision from Judge Leon.

Maybe through the enormous NGO and media pressure that only the ACLU and EFF and company can muster for cases like this serving their interests, they will manage to get this case thrown out of court and get Muhtorov's release.

But that doesn't change the legitimacy of the program as it functioned -- that when the NSA picked up a domestic source contacting a foreign source known to be associated with a terrorist group, the Islamic Jihad Union, they had grounds under the law to examine and probe Muhtorov's phone calls and lawfully arrested him when they suspected he was providing material aid to jihadists.

The case isn't proven yet, and the "unconstitutionality" issue may wind up getting it thrown out, or, closer examination of the conversations and his behaviour may turn out not to merit sentencing and he will be declared not guilty. The trial hasn't begun yet.

I'll be particularly interested to see the conversation -- both its original and translation -- where Muhtorov says "I'll see you in heaven" to his daughter -- prompting an interpretation that he was prepared to die in jihad. As I've said in the past, I wonder if the word was "na nebe" or "na nebesakh" or "s neba" in Russian or the Uzbek equivalent, which would mean "I will see you in the sky" or "I will see you from the sky" -- something every parent tells their child as they are flying away somewhere - that they will look down and see them from the sky in their airplane as they pass over.

Obviously there is a lot more that the case hinges on than that one statement, and there seem grounds to make the charges of material aid because he had been in telephone contact with this jihadist group, and was bringing cash and phones and a GPS on his trip. Muhtorov had followed a checkered course of first becoming active on his sister's case, where he believed her charge of complicity in murder of taxi cab drivers by local mafias was unjust; then moving on to become involved in various local human rights groups and distributing Human Rights Watch reports critical of the Uzbek government's human rights violations; then joining a more radical group seeking to overthrow the government; culminating in his flight to neighbouring Kyrgystan, and ultimately his re-settlement in the US -- where he became more religious and extremist in his views and is now charged with helping a terrorist group in Turkey related to another terrorist group on the list of US foreign terrorist organizations that has attacked our troops in Afghanistan and other targets in Europe and Uzbekistan.

I think the ability of the NSA to discover people who are maintaining ties with known terrorist groups abroad by collecting metadata at home is a good one, and one that should be maintained, and the bulk collection metadata program should not be discontinued. The world is very interconnected now by mobile phones and the Internet and this simply has to be watched and the suspects followed when there is probable cause.

It might be that political forces like the ACLU and EFF and various Congress people manage to get this overturned and declared "unconstitutional" and I accept that. We'll see. But that doesn't mean that I will think it is right or advisable.

I also reject Edward Snowden's claim -- completely tendentious and manipulative -- that there is "no" success with this program and no cases where terrorism has been stopped.

First, we don't know that because not everything about the successful "hits" with this collection programs has either been leaked by Snowden or declassified or shown up in a court case. Some cases are still in the investigation and pre-trial stage -- Muhtorov's case, those of other Uzbek exiles both related to him and not related, and I suspect other cases we haven't heard about (because they are from secret FISA courts). And it might be tomorrow or next month that the very hit that the NSA makes with this program will be one that saves a city from something like 9/11 -- then everyone will be glad that the NSA dredged millions of phone header data to get such a "hit."

Even if Muhtorov's case is thrown out, that doesn't mean this program isn't doing the right thing and isn't making arrests on valid grounds.

Secondly, Snowden, like all hackers, follows a literalist, culture-jamming approach to these issues to try to put over his version of reality -- it's all part of the social hack in which he and his comrades are always engaging in to win. We can't know, for example, that this program helps deter terrorism -- it might well do that, and for that reason alone is worth retaining. After all, the purpose of law-enforcement -- one that tendentious geeks eager to exonerate themselves from computer crimes never accept -- isn't merely to literally prosecute on solid evidence, but also to deter crime by making a credible threat of prosecution. That is a legitimate purpose of law enforcement, too.

Now Foust is at it again, reiterating the smear of me, even as he lifts my blogs where I'm the one who found the sources, found the WikiLeaks cable (two years ago!) and wrote about it, analyzed the case -- none of which he did at the time all of us were discussing this.

Foust's purloining of blogs is notorious, as we saw constantly in the Snowden case -- he constantly swipes people's insights and findings and claims them as his own, being careful not to look like he is "plagiarizing" with actual copying of text.

In re-telling the story whose elements I discovered, Foust distorts them -- and introduces new distortions:

o He implies Muhtorov fled the Andijan massacre. He didn't. He was no where near it. He was not a victim in these tragic events. His own public record does not claim that as his story; he was elsewhere then. His "well-founded fear of persecution" stemmed from his activism -- itself somewhat dubious -- not from having been at the site of the massacre or related to it.

o He implies that Muhtorov was on his way back to Uzbekistan (via Turkey), where his sister was in jail on what he believed were false charges. I can't believe Muhtorov, whatever his shortcomings might be, would be stupid or reckless enough to attempt to return to Uzbekistan. Everyone knows that any politically active person who returns winds up getting followed, arrested and then -- if they are lucky -- expelled. Having gained political asylum and refugee status in the US, he would stand out with authorities and of course they would track him. It just doesn't make sense that he would have returned to Uzbekistan.

o Foust cites David Walther, who lived in Uzbekistan when Muhtorov was there and who posted at Registan, as evidence that the authorities in Jizzakh, the town where Muhtorov lived, were more likely to charge activists with Islamism than financial improprieties. But Uzbek authorities everywhere use any and all methods to trump up cases against their critics -- sometimes common crimes like assault or robbery; sometimes embezzlement or financial mismanagement; sometimes extremism associated with Islamism. There isn't enough evidence to suggest that authorities in this or that town "always" did it one way and even if there is a pattern, isn't by itself proof of anything. The reality is, Vassila Inoyatova did at first help Muhtorov and involve him in her human rights group, but then came to accuse him of financial mismanagement -- a fact that she mentioned in a conversation with the US Embassy staff -- which led to it winding up in a WikiLeaks cable -- one I first wrote about here.

Yet another example of a source of an activist not redacted by the lovely Assange and team, eh? And Foust joins in further bashing of Inoyatova here by implying -- through selective quotation of Muhtorov -- that the real problem with her wasn't her legitimate scrutiny of finances in the branch led by Muhtorov, but Muhtorov's criticism of her as not being willing to be activist enough against the government. Sigh. This is Uzbekistan. Inoyatova has had a very tough time keeping her group open, fending off constant inspections, raids, fake libel lawsuits, etc. and naturally she tried to keep the books straight to remove this as an avenue of harassment by authorities.

o Foust softens the description of the farmer's group that Muhtorov joined. He said it advocated for "regime change" -- a vague term which can mean many things. What they advocated for was overthrowing Karimov and that was on the record.

o Foust invokes Muhtorov's distributing of the Human Rights Watch reports as somehow exonerating. If anything, this is one of the elements of his story I find opportunistic. I believe he was doing this to try both to gain cover from HRW's reputation and also to set up his asylum story. Why? Because this is an extremely common phenomenon in this region as anyone who has worked on asylum cases knows. HRW is not an activist organization that has mass membership or encourages leaftleting and pamphlet distribution. That's not how it operates. To be sure, it has reports translated into local languages. But that is to notify the authorities of its concerns, and also to work with other like-minded human rights groups in advocacy -- a more specialized activity than activist pamphleteering. HRW did not mandate or encourage Muhtorov to distribute their reports.

o Yes, Uzbek authorities use all kinds of trumped-up charges on activists -- Islamism, embezzlement, and in Muhtorov's last arrest, sexual harassment. To be sure, he tells this same story differently and that opens up legitimate questioning about it. And even more, we have to wonder how he was able to get smuggled out of Uzbekistan so easily. This is not an easy thing for any activist to do once the authorities have them in their clutches. So questions have to be asked about this.

o Foust cites the picture he claims was "scrounged up" by uznews.net and other emigre news sites but it is his picture. And those news sources didn't merely say that his beard was a sign of Islamism; they said that that the bruises on his forehead from repeated banging of his forehead on the ground in prostrate prayer was a sign of very devout Islamic practice. Foust has repeatedly left out that detail each time he writes about it.

o Foust cites the tell-tale use of the word "wedding" in conversations Muhtorov had with a website supporting terrorists -- this is believed to be a code word used by Al Qaeda. But he never points out some real family wedding that Muhtorov could have been doing to -- and he used the word repeatedly over many months suggesting that it might have been code.

o Despite being told by the current manager of Registan, Noah Tucker, that the Islamic Jihad Union is "pretty hard-core" and that they "want to be the Al Qaeda of Uzbekistan," Foust nonetheless engages in his typical minimizing of this alarming information:

All things being equal, the public evidence in government affidavits against Mukhtarov is pretty thin: it amounts to exchanging emails with the website admin of a terror group, having some coded phone calls, and buying a plane ticket. He is not accused of trying to bomb anything or kill anyone, just “materially supporting” the IJU though providing either himself or by carrying to them a some cash he was reportedly arrested with.

o Again, material support is a serious issue -- other cases that civil libertarians hated got prosecuted despite their invocation of the First Amendment because judges and jurors recognized the line of imminence was crossed. Foust also misrepresents the story once again -- he didn't just buy a ticket, he was arrested at the airport preparing to leave. He didn't just have some cash, he had phones and a GPS; he didn't just exchange emails, he made plans to meet up with them and quit his job and left his family.

o Foust raises a new issue that has appeared in the case, charges that Muhtorov was going to fight in Syria with Al Qaeda:

Yet in the nearly two years Mukhtarov’s arrest, his plight had gone largely unnoticed by the public until last month, when the government gave official notice it was going to use NSA-collected information to prosecute Mukhtarov. In doing so, they levied a new accusation to journalists, claiming he was going to travel to fight for al Qaeda in Syria — something the IJU, as best as anybody can determine, has never done (they fight exclusively in eastern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan).

I agree that this seems like a "fashionable" addition, as the Uzbek-related terrorist groups, while turning up in Afghanistan, have not seemed to have turned up in Syria. That doesn't mean the situation stays static and they don't cross over into fighting in Syria. We'll see what comes out at trial. So far, Foust quotes Muhtorov's lawyer as saying that the indictment in fact hasn't been expanded to include the Syria charge. (She also said he was never charged with going to Afghanistan. But that's not the issue with Afghanistan; the issue there is that the IJU is related to the IMU, the same terrorist group that has attacked soldiers in Afghanistan.)

o Foust implies falsely that I have "spent years" attacking all sorts of journalists and academics. Nonsense. I engage in legitimate criticism of public figures whose public writings merit criticism. He implies there are scores of such people, what he means is just himself, Sarah Kendzior, at that time an academic, Katy Pearce, her colleague who remains in academic, and Nathan Hamm, the Regist web masters.

o Foust, Kendzior and Hamm have all left Registan and turned it over to other people. All of them have left their jobs. As it is frequently claimed falsely by LibertyLynx that I "ruined their careers," let me reiterate that this is utterly false. They themselves do not make this claim, which would be absurd in any event, given that it would mean that a minor blogger who polemicized with their much more highly trafficked website was somehow capable of influencing their careers. Each of them made career moves on their own, in part because the entire field of Central Asian studies is shrinking and becoming de-funded as our troops being withdrawn from Afghanistan.

It's a new game on the Internet to claim that if someone criticizes you on their blog, why, they are "stalking" you or "harassing" you. Ridiculous. I'm engaging in First Amendment protected speech about critical matters of public policy.

o Foust implies that I adopted a contrary position on Muhtorov merely as part of some longer "stalking" or "harassment" campaign against him and his web site. Again, stuff and nonsense. I began my blog to write freely about Eurasia, to criticize the regimes of Central Asia, US policy regarding these countries. Yes, that includes criticism of Registan's writers, the gaggle of Peace Corps workers suffering from clientism with their host countries, shadowy defense contractors, academics soft on the regimes -- and the hordes of trolls, regime tools, and out right intelligence agents from the Central Asian regimes and our own country that they attracted with their "open source active measure," as I came to see Registan (i.e. their site was free and available for multiple agendas).

o Foust implies that I have deliberately somehow contributed to putting this man in jail (!) as part of some diabolical operation:

Worse still, it seems the prosecution had relied on random blogposts to try to cast doubt on whether Mukhtarov was really a human rights activist. In describing Mukhtarov as too violent to release, it appears the prosecution tried to say he had faked his experience as a human rights worker in Uzbekistan:

A prosecutor also asserts that Muhtorov may have misrepresented himself a human-rights activist and that he may have received refugee status on fake grounds…

Holloway writes that some online articles say Muhtorov was an “opportunist who was dismissed from the Ezgulik Human Rights Society because he supported violent extremism.”

Another, Holloway wrote, “claims the defendant acted as an informant for Uzbek intelligence and received refugee status on fake grounds.”

Those articles come from Catherine Fitzpatrick, who is active in online circles and has a history of personally attacking those she disagrees with. She has spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer, and took to her blog to then try to defame Mukhtarov because people she disliked had expressed skepticism of his case (that full story is here).

The prosecutor obviously had plenty of other regions to authorize the extension of Muhtorov's detention than my blog. To suggest otherwise is to fly in the face of the realities of the indictment and the case as it has progressed.

And again, as I've patiently explained repeatedly, I published *translations of other people's articles with those claims*. That is legitimate activity. Those claims vary, as I indicated, from a respected human rights activist to a refugee official in Kyrgyzstan who might be less credible. I discussed these knowledgeably as a person who has written about the Eurasian region for years and evaluated them. That is legitimate activity. The prosecutor cited my blog in his statements -- and he's welcome to do that, just as the lawyer is welcome to cite whatever they want to site in making their case.

This is America. The case will come to court. Each side will have ample opportunity to make their case, and the judge and jury will decide. Meanwhile, the public, the media, and bloggers have the right to discuss their hypotheses about this case. It's completely preposterous -- and sinister -- to claim that a blogger translating and discussing news articles about the case is somehow engaged in some illicit or unethical or even actionable activity.

Far from being some contorted contrivance -- Foust is projecting too much on his own methods -- my taking up critical discussion of this case is done on its own merits. I have long been a critic of the school of thought prevalent in Washington, DC think-tanks and the State Department that minimizes the terrorist threat, and implies this is a hyped-up construct created by conservatives and "the Jewish Lobby". I reject that idea. I think the terrorist threat is real, that Islamism is a threat to civil society anywhere, and that documenting it and opposing it is not equivalent to hatred of Muslims or hype. This is the same "anti-anti" issue we saw with communism historically and now see with the Snowden case.

I've also long been a critic of the extremists among the emigre and domestic human rights movements as well, and not limited to Muhtorov's case.

So ultimately, I have to say that in reviewing this material again something jumped out at me and the tumblers clicked.

I've never been able to understand why Foust was so zealous about insisting on this person's innocence and claiming he was a victim of an over-aggressive US justice system that was prosecuting "thought crime". The grounds for arrest seemed legitimate and very far from any "thought crime." To be sure, he could be doing this merely as an ardent proponent of the International Relations Realist school, to score points with the influential members of this school in Washington in particular.

But I do wonder if more is driving this. And when I contemplate and discuss possible hidden agendas, that doesn't mean I'm a believer in conspiracies, it just means I think it's appropriate to contemplate and discuss possible hidden agendas.

I noticed in the press releases and in Foust post that the point was made that the US processed claims and brought the victims of Andijan to the US.

Everyone in the community of Central Asia watchers knows that the US was forced out of Uzbekistan when it publicly condemned the massacre -- exactly the right thing to do. We even know from Rumsfeld's memoirs that this was argued about and some advocated trying to keep the presence there for the sake of supplying the troops in Afghanistan.

Some in this community also know that the CIA had assets among the opposition and also helped them escape. That's a good thing -- both as to having assets, as well they should in a terrible place like Uzbekistan -- and as to the humanitarian gesture of getting them out after Andijan. I suspect the CIA or perhaps some more sanitized US government agency is still supporting some of them for humanitarian reasons and also to help them have conferences or web sites -- and that's a good thing, too. Remember, we are dealing with a terrible, murderous regime that tortures large numbers of people, that the US was forced to deal with merely to get food and supplies to troops in Afghanistan next door. But ultimately the US would only be happy to see peaceful democratic change come to this country.

What I can see happening here, however, is this: when one of the emigres they've helped -- either an actual intelligence asset, or perhaps merely one of many in a community of people they helped for humanitarian reasons -- turns out to be charged with terrorism, it taints their operations.

What inevitably happens is that on scores of conservative and Tea Party type of websites -- we've already seen this with the Muhtorov case in Denver -- people start griping and saying "Why are we letting all these Muslims in the country as refugees, they just turn out to be terrorists."

And that's wrong, because the vast majority of refugees from Uzbekistan are deserving of their status and are innocent. The few who have been prosecuted as terrorists, including one who threatened President Obama himself, are a tiny number of exceptions to the rule -- like the Tsarnaevs are the exception to the majority of Chechens given refugee status. There are real reasons of persecution for which these people are rightfully given asylum or refugee status and they have done no wrong.

But the US government knows that they have a public relations problem on their hands, especially if the CIA was involved in helping certain communities of people. Then some among them might be hell-bent in trying to silence the messenger about extremism and even the suspicion of terrorism in the midst. Foust comes from the defense contractors' community and may have been moved to do this sort of discrediting all on his own, or he may be part of an informal operation of some kind. The incredible zeal, aggressiveness, and hate brought to bear here; the financial resources for conferences, travel, web site maintenance, etc. and the sheer determination to keep smearing me force me to ask this question. It actually hadn't occurred to me before.

I've also wondered whether Muhtorov was an asset of the SNB, the Uzbek secret police, and whether they didn't bother to save him once he got in trouble (they're like that). I think we can see from certain strange scandals and incidents over the years in the emigre community that they seed radicalization agents into the community to set up and discredit some people and get them arrested or tar the entire enterprise of opposition to the regime with the brush of Islamist terrorism. The Uzbek regime would love nothing more than to discredit all emigres and all opposition and human rights advocates as extremists. Strangely, the Uzbek press has been silent on Muhtorov.

It's even possible that this SNB asset became known to US intelligence and then they had to get involved in rescuing him out of the justice system and will stop at nothing now to do so (because they once had to make deals with the SNB on things like this). That's a conspiracy bridge too far, but not impossible. Uzbekistan has a cunning and murderous secret police, and our government -- and its intelligence and security branches -- have had to get into bed with this regime for the "higher cause" of supplying troops. Now that we're withdrawing our troops, maybe other operations have to be cleaned up.

Whatever it is that is driving this campaign to discredit me -- that is taking increasingly bizarre forms -- it needs to stop. Surely the US government can thread the needle of blessing the vast majority of Uzbek refugees yet prosecuting any strays that turn out to be rare examples of actual assistance to terrorism. If Jameel succeeds -- and the Denver media taking his side -- and the prosecutor is defeated, then the justice system, such as it is, will have triumphed. That doesn't mean the problem of possible connections to terrorism will have disappeared, and the US will have to go on threading the needle.

Foust claims that Muhtorov's arrest was wrongful:

There is a legitimate and genuine threat from Uzbek terror groups, including both the IJU and IMU. But it is difficult to see how those groups are successfully countered by criminalizing speech and persecuting human rights workers for their associations online.

I don't believe his arrest was wrongful and that it does not involve "criminalizing speech" or "persecuting human rights workers." Muhtorov is not a human rights worker. He was expelled from a reputable human rights group and took up with an extremist group. He did more than just talk -- he bought supplies, collected funds, and set about traveling to meet up with these known terrorists in Turkey. That's not vague or First Amendment protected, and will remain troubling even if the case is dropped because of successful invocation of the NSA issue. It is my right to continue to assert these beliefs sincerely and not be smeared by a person who has worked as a defense contractor and now works for a US government funded assistance organization.

Posted at 05:15 AM in Authoritarian States, Criminal Cases, Terrorism, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/08/2014

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.

Posted at 01:23 AM in Adversarial Journalists, Anonymous, Hackers, Technolibertarianism, The Wired State, U.S. Policy, WikiLeaks | Permalink | Comments (2)

01/07/2014

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.

Posted at 10:29 PM in Hackers, Technolibertarianism, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

Snowden Supporters Aren't Really Debating Clemency, They're Demanding Impunity

So...I realize there's a huge debate on whether or not to give Snowden a deal, or clemency, or a light sentence. I find this discussion really dull and beside the point and don't want to get into its merits now.

That's because it's really not about itself or fact-finding, but about domestic politics, and which faction, hard left, left, progressive, Democratic, libertarian, conservative, etc. gets to "win" on how to do national security -- and who, elected governments or unelected anarchists, gets to encrypt, and encrypt absolutely. Those are the real issues. So I'd rather have this debate in a more pure and essential form.

I will mention -- to try to make my larger points of the conceptual groundwork that needs to be done first -- that one of the particularly DISHONEST ways that this debate on Snowden's clemency is being waged is not surprisingly done by Freedom of the Press Foundation-- which, in case you have the short memory of a lot of reporters is the very same outfit that is raising money for Snowden -- duh.

FPF is a creature of Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose sticker is on Ed's laptop and who have litigated against the NSA for years on metadata and other issues. Their leadership in the form of John Perry Barlow, John Gillmore and others formed the FPF specifically to raise money for the avatars of their anarchist movement like Assange, Manning and Snowden. Snowden is funded under the WikiLeaks account explicitly. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are on the board thereby giving money to their source and possibly themselves, but that's legal; people forget that the IRS doesn't care that you do things that might seem unethical in a perfect world, they just care that you report on it publicly.

Now --hardly a source on which to comment on this credibly, then, Trevor Timm insists that the rightwingers "stop lying" by claiming that Snowden could come home and face trial, and use that trial to explicate his views. Certainly Paul Carr -- no conservative he, but just a libertarian like Glenn Greenwald, if not a technocommunist) -- thinks Snowden can do this.

Indeed, this Pando Daily tech-thug who heckled me and smeared me who is really for Snowden despite simply not liking his ego-driven personality, and has even come up with a smarmy little word for Snowden -- "whistle blowhard" -- as if we're "done" by merely ridiculing Snowden's vanity -- but then we should all just fall into step with Silicon Valley and embrace him and his anarchist plan for American security as inevitable, trumpeting Schumpeter. Creative destruction and all that.

Trevor, a lawyer skilled at law-faring (using law to wage ideological warfare), is to wring tears and discredit liberals and conservatives who don't share his radical views by only focusing on past "whistleblower" judgements that may or may not apply to Snowden's case, even given our precedent system, that deal with whether or not Snowden gets to preach to a jury about how he thinks his acts aren't crimes because of some higher law -- and of course, high and lonely destiny that only he enjoys.

But that narrow question is SEPARATE from the issue of whether Snowy gets to describe acts of the government that he thinks are unlawful. See, that's the difference -- trying to exonerate yourself by saying that what you did wasn't really illegal, versus describing what you think was a crime, and getting a hearing for that.

Now, I get it that the cases Trevor has cherry-picked here seem to make his case that you can't do this in court, but I really, really want a second opinion here, given how BIASED young Trevor is. I once cornered him after a big hagiographic meeting at Fordham Law School on Aaron Swartz and tried to explain the actual violations of the CFAA that Swartz really had committed which were already on the record and to question why we had to accept the guerilla manifesto approach and copyleftism as our "Internet freedom" foundation. Trevor was pleasant and cordial enough, but he basically just parroted the EFF line and blew me off. He's not good at answering hard questions, he just knows his own script and finds ever more charming ways to say it, but it's not hugely bright stuff. Trevor at that time was at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and now he's migrated over to FPF, surprise, surprise.

The fact of the matter is that it doesn't matter what happened to John Kiriakou or Thomas Drake, as relevant as it may seem to lawfarers. If Congressman Schumer wants, he can convene hearings and subpoena Snowden to testify. That's not a proceeding in a court of law, it's a hearing. In fact, maybe that's the thing to do, issue it -- which costs them nothing -- and see where it goes. Perhaps there's some precedent that a sealed indictment cancels out a subpoena to Congress, i.e. a criminal suspect has to be dealt with by the judicial system, not the legislative system, and there can't be any cross-branching, but obviously Snowden is a big and special case, and you can look into this.

There's nothing to stop hearings from being had with this 29-year-old hacker Obama wouldn't scramble planes for, if he is willingto testify. In fact, maybe he has to be brought in handcuffs? Or promised Monica Lewinsky like immunity from prosecution? Let lawyers figure it out.

My point here is that I smell a rat here with Trevor playing victimology, trying to make it seem like his group's grantee/client is going to be muffled and can't have his lovely day in court. Um, it's not as if Snowy hasn't had PLENTY of opportunities to make his message heard, including even special Christmas messages for the kids.

I could point out that Trevor is being sly there mentioning that "Manning couldn't speak until sentencing". Well, yeah, that's how it works when you steal the classified documents of the People of the United States. But he got to make his Last Word and lay out his cause and reasons and beliefs after sentencing, and you have to be honest what you are REALLY after here, guys -- an exposition of the cause, a day in court, an argumentation -- or impunity?

Sounds like you really want impunity.

No sale.

Posted at 02:04 AM in Hackers, U.S. Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

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