Google Destroying Blogspot?

or just making my life more difficult. We blogspotters have been forced onto an interface that looks more like Wordpress, which as far as I can tell is clunkier and gives us less control. I've considered migrating to Wordpress before – I could host my blogs on my own server and have greater privacy, etc. – but rejected it because the blogspot user interface was superior. Google has chosen to trash that advantage.

Testing image control and positioning with the image right.

Ok, maybe I can get used to this, but where the h*ll do I enter labels? 

Wozniak: Cloud Computing Will Cause "Horrible Problems"

"Wozniak didn't offer much in the way of specifics . . . . [but said, 't]he more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.'" Steve Wozniak was the inventor of the Apple I and Apple II computers.

More at Business Insider. You can find more re- the kinds of problems I worry about by clicking on the label, "Worldbeam," at the bottom of this post.

A Few Headlines: Facebook & Other Big Bros., & the Nasher v. Museum Tower

More at the links.

1. What Facebook Knows. "[O]n 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group . . . . the company is not above using its platform to tweak users' behavior. . . . By learning more about how small changes on Facebook can alter users' behavior outside the site, the company eventually 'could allow others to make use of Facebook in the same way' says Marlow."

(Rough translation of image at left: "I give the secrets of big companies to you, and I am a terrorist – Assange; I give your secrets to big companies, and I am Man of the Year – Zuckerberg.")

2. Three NSA Whistleblowers Back EFF's Lawsuit Re- Gov't's Massive Spying on US Civilians. "Three . . . former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) . . . have come forward to . . . confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the 'secret room' at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006." (Link added.)

3. US Nat'l Reconnaissance Office's Castoff 'Scopes Beat NASA's Hubbell. "The U.S. government’s secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes . . . . [d]esigned for surveillance [and] no longer needed for spy missions . . . . These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble . . . . NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class space telescope might do if used for national security: 'With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument.'"

4. A Modest Proposal. In case you missed it, Dallas's latest addition to housing for the 1%, Museum Tower, is frying everything within its line of sight on the Nasher Museum premises. "So [writes Christina Rees in Glasstire], one of Dallas’s more admirable enfant terribles, Erik Schuessler . . . came up with an early solution, and so far I haven’t seen one to beat it." (Link added; click on the images for larger versions.)

From a tweet

(Sorry I've misplaced the source; pls let me know it, if you do.)

Shell Rig Malfunctions at Posh Party (the Yes Lab Strikes Again)

This was a send-off for Shell's arctic rigs at the Seattle Space Needle. The actual rigs were visible outside the window. Incredibly, there was a malfunction of the model rig that was supposed to pour drinks for guests.

Per HuffPo,

The device which sprayed Rainey's face was a model of Shell's drill rig, the Kulluk, which is set to soon depart Seattle for the Arctic. The Kulluk was built-in 1983 by Mitsui, the same company that, two decades later, built the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon. . . .

* * * * *
[T]he Yes Lab [also] sent out a press release on Shell's behalf, threatening [legal action against the activists and] attacking . . . the activists' brand-new ArcticReady.com website [, which looks like a Shell site, and] which includes a social media ad generator and a dangerously addictive children's video game called Angry Bergs. The fake Shell release generated additional media coverage.

Earlier this year, Shell obtained a legal injunction stopping any Greenpeace activist from coming within 1km of any Shell vessel. To thank the company, Greenpeace teamed up with the Yes Lab to plan a promotional advertising campaign for Shell's Arctic drilling efforts, which Shell prefers to keep quiet. Besides the ill-fated ceremony and the website, the campaign includes a number of other elements that will shadow Shell's summer Arctic destruction campaign.

(More at HuffPo and YouTube. For more Yes Men or Yes Lab actions, click on those labels below.)

Corporate Media's Campaign Coverage ATM

From an interview of Bob Mcchesney, Prof. of Communications at U. of Illinois, at the Real News Network, by Paul Jay:

JAY: So your piece to a large extent is about political advertising, partly as it has been affected by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which allows practically unlimited corporate spending on television advertising, and . . . . you got this crazy system whereby the entities that benefit most from this money in politics are the . . . mass major news organizations that get all this and billions of dollars of paid advertising, and then they report in what their – supposed to be their journalism on – mostly on poll results, poll results affected by TV buys which they're benefiting from. . . .

MCCHESNEY: . . . . You know, most democracies in the world have nothing like the United States in terms of this huge amount of money that gets spent by television ads, most of which are attacking the other candidates, not promoting your own candidate. And the reason for that is that it's driven in the United States by commercial broadcasters, the commercial television stations. And really we're talking about less than a dozen companies that own the vast majority of the stations that participate in selling TV ads. They are making a killing from this cash-drenched system. Literally between 18 and 25 percent of all the revenues of a commercial TV station this year will come from selling TV political candidate ads. And, you know, this is a profit center for them that's beyond belief. . . .

So you have – the commercial broadcasters are to campaign finance reform what the National Rifle Association is to bans on assault weapons. They are the number-one lobby to promote massive amounts of money in politics, because our electoral system in America has basically converted into a system where billionaires and corporations give tons of money to politicians, who then give most of that to commercial media to buy inane ads. And that's really what we have for our system. And the beneficiaries immediately of this are the commercial broadcasters [crosstalk]

* * * * *
It is – you know, and I think the point that's got to be understood by your viewers is that the companies that get these monopoly broadcast licenses – you have television stations or radio stations, cable systems – they get these monopoly privileges at no charge from the government in exchange for doing something in the public interest. In every major definition that's ever been given of what the public interest requirements ought to be of commercial broadcasters, number one on the list is always that they should do outstanding campaign coverage above and beyond what they would do if they were just out to make money, that basically that's where they put all their emphasis, to draw people into public life as voters, as citizens, to understand the candidates and the issues. And what we've seen is just the opposite. In the last 20 years, as the percentage of revenues going to commercial broadcast stations has gone from around 2 percent 20 years ago on average to 20 percent on average today, if not more. We've seen the amount of journalism covering campaigns on commercial television plummet. Lots of races get no coverage anymore. It's not any better, really, in newspapers. And what coverage that does remain is appalling. . . . It's like going over polls. It's sort of like reviewing whether an advertising attack ad is successful at manipulating people, not, you know, discussing how inane it is in the first place.

(Emphasis supplied.) More at the link above. (Infographic from the U. of Minnesota via The Angry Bureaucrat; click on the image for a larger version.)

That's a lot of cash going into a "hopelessly unproductive works."

How JPMorgan Chase Has Proved We Need to Break Up Big Banks & Bring Back Glass-Steagall

From Robert Reich at Nation of Change:

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said [Jamie] Dimon [current CEO of JPMorgan Chase and former Dir. of the Board of the Federal Reserve], a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.” Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

Dimon argued that the financial system could be trusted; that the near-meltdown of 2008 was a perfect storm that would never happen again. Since then, J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule — creating exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes that effectively allow any big bank to go on doing most of the derivative trading it was doing before the near-meltdown. And now — only a few years after the banking crisis that forced American taxpayers to bail out the Street, caused home values to plunge by more than 30 percent and pushed millions of homeowners underwater, threatened or diminished the savings of millions more, and sent the entire American economy hurtling into the worst downturn since the Great Depression — J.P. Morgan Chase recapitulates the whole debacle with the same kind of errors, sloppiness, bad judgment, excessively risky trades poorly-executed and poorly-monitored, that caused the crisis in the first place.

In light of all this, Jamie Dimon’s promise that J.P. Morgan will “fix it and move on” is not reassuring. The losses here had been mounting for at least six weeks, according to Morgan. Where was the new transparency that’s supposed to allow regulators to catch these things before they get out of hand? . . . . Let’s hope Morgan’s losses don’t turn into another crisis of confidence and they don’t spread to the rest of the financial sector. But let’s also stop hoping Wall Street will mend itself. What just happened at J.P. Morgan – along with its leader’s cavalier dismissal followed by lame reassurance – reveals how fragile and opaque the banking system continues to be, why Glass-Steagall must be resurrected, and why the Dallas Fed’s recent recommendation that Wall Street’s giant banks be broken up should be heeded.

More at the link.

The Yes Lab Strikes Again, in Dallas

Re- the Trans-Pacific Partnership "trade" agreement:



From the Yes Lab's press release:

DALLAS PARTY ENDS BADLY FOR U.S. TRADE REPS AND FEDERAL AGENTS
Dozens of rogue "delegates" disrupt Trans-Pacific Partnership gala with "award," "mic check," mass toilet paper replacement

* * * * *
Two dozen rogue "delegates" disrupted the corporate-sponsored welcome gala for the high-stakes Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations yesterday with a fake award ceremony and "mic check." Other activists, meanwhile, replaced hundreds of rolls of toilet paper (TP) throughout the conference venue with more informative versions, and projected a message on the venue's facade.

The first action began when a smartly-dressed man approached the podium immediately after the gala's keynote speech by Ron Kirk, U.S. Trade Representative and former mayor of Dallas. The man (local puppeteer David Goodwin) introduced himself as "Git Haversall," president of the "Texas Corporate Power Partnership," and announced he was giving Kirk and other U.S. trade negotiators the "2012 Corporate Power Tool Award," which "Haversall's" partner held aloft.

The crowd of negotiators and corporate representatives applauded, and "Haversall" continued: "I'd like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits, regardless of what the public of this nation—or any other nation—thinks is right."

At that point, the host of the reception took the microphone back and announced that the evening's formal programming had concluded. But Mr. Haversall confidently re-took the microphone and warmly invited Kirk to accept the award.

Kirk moved towards the stage, but federal agents blocked his path to protect him from further embarrassment. At that point, a dozen well-dressed "delegates" (local activists, some from Occupy Dallas) broke into ecstatic dance and chanted "TPP! TPP! TPP!" for several minutes until Dallas police arrived.

Fifteen minutes later, another dozen interlopers from Occupy Dallas interrupted the reception with a spirited "mic-check." Outside, activists projected a message on the hotel, and throughout the night, delegates discovered that hundreds of rolls of custom toilet paper had been installed in the conference venue.

The activists disrupted the gala to protest the hijacking of trade negotiations by an extreme pro-corporate agenda. "The public and the media are locked out of these meetings," said Kristi Lara from Occupy Dallas, one of the infiltrators. "We can't let U.S. trade officials get away with secretly limiting Internet freedoms, restricting financial regulation, extending medicine patents, and giving corporations other a whole host of other powers allowing them to quash the rights of people and democracies, for example by offshoring jobs in ever new ways. Trade officials know the public won't stand for this, which is why they try to keep their work secret—and that's why we had to crash their party."

There is mounting criticism of the U.S. role in pushing the negotiations forward in secrecy, despite the public's overwhelming disagreement with TPP goals. ("Buy American" procurement preferences are supported by over 85% of Americans, but U.S. trade negotiators are preparing to accept a ban on such preferences. Two weeks ago, 69 members of Congress sent a letter to President Obama asking him not to accept that ban.)

Many are calling the Obama administration duplicitous: while the administration publicly hypes a plan to revitalize American manufacturing and create jobs in the U.S., U.S. trade officials push for new "investor rights" that would make it easier for American companies to lay off domestic workers and open plants overseas.

"The TPP has been branded as a trade 'negotiation' by its corporate proponents, but in reality it's a place for big business to get its way behind closed doors," said Pete Rokicki of Occupy Dallas. "This anti-democratic maneuver can be stopped if the public gets active—just look at the movement that killed the ill-advised SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) law a few months ago. That's why Obama's trade officials lock the public, the press and even members of Congress from the trade negotiation process."

"We're really happy to know that even in their most private moments, US trade reps are reminded that a vast majority of the public stands opposed to corporate-friendly, closed-door trade deals like the TPP," said Sean Dagohoy from the Yes Lab, who assisted in the actions.

Here's a summary of the provisions of the TPP; more at Public Citizen Global Trade Watch.

UPDATE: F.w.i.w., some people are starting to notice that maybe there's a problem with allowing 600 megacorps to write our treaties while everyone else including Congress is kept in the dark.

Google vs. Bloggers

A new user interface is being forced on us bloggers. My and others' experience indicates it's harder to use and offers much less control over the look of posts. Presumably it's also designed to facilitate greater incursions on our privacy. So far, we've been allowed the option to continue to use the old interface, but that's supposed to end soon.

Tenuously related UPDATE: Google's now getting heat from regulators for its collection of people's emails and other private data in the course of its street view photography – invading our privacy without our permission or knowledge – and then lying about it to regulators; more at Wired.

Update Re- Genetically-Modified Foods

As explained in a 2009 post and by others before me, "insect-resistent" GM plants have in fact been engineered to produce food that's literally full of poison.

Lately I'm hearing stories on public radio (the only traditional-media news product I regularly consume) about "good" GM – how spider genes have enabled silkworms to create stronger silk, and how sunflower seeds have been engineered to produce more cooking oil.

I hope this surfacing of the GM discussion results from an independent, journalistic initiative on the part of public radio – that seems possible, since I believe I also heard mention that the use of environmentally-hazardous pesticides or other chemicals has actually increased with the use of GM crops. Alternatively, the coverage may arise from a p.r. initiative on the part of the GM industry.

Regardless, I welcome the discussion, since I think genetic engineering is here to stay and does in fact offer the potential to help us build a better world quicker than natural selection might otherwise do.

But for purposes of the discussion, it would seem useful to distinguish between GMOs that deploy different kinds of strategies – e.g., for starters, to distinguish between poisonous and non-poisonous GMOs (since creating organisms that produce intrinsically poisonous food would seem more obviously likely to give rise to undesirable consequences).

To do that, we need new, clear terms – and we should expect that any terms the industry might propose will not be clear.

So let's propose some ourselves. Here's an initial attempt:

"Poisonous GMO": a GMO engineered to cause death or illness in any living organism, or to impair or inhibit the reproductivity or functioning of otherwise healthy, normal or typical living organisms.

"Non-Poisonous GMO": a GMO which is not a Poisonous GMO, as defined above.

Alternative or additional suggestions welcome.

Update on Media Ownership

Thanks to Frugal Dad for this updated chart. (For an even bigger version, click on the image to see it in a separate page, then click on it again.)

The bright spot has, of course, been the internet; but the 1% is fast closing in on controlling that as well (click on the "media consolidation" label for a bit more info on that, and assume that things have gotten worse since those posts).

UPDATE: Some additional charts re- media ownership at freepress.net, also, I believe, fairly recent.

Speaking of Systemic Problems . . . (for Those New to "Corporate Psychopathy")

As the Boston Globe reported in a blurb on a paper by Babiak, P. et al., “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk,” Behavioral Sciences & the Law (March/April 2010), "[o]ne of the authors of [a recent] study was hired by companies to evaluate managers . . . for a management development program. It turns out that these managers scored higher on measures of psychopathy than the overall population, and some who had very high scores were candidates for, or held, senior positions. In general, managers with higher scores were seen as better communicators, better strategic thinkers, and more creative. However, they were also seen as having poor management style, not being team players, and delivering poor performance. But, apparently, this didn’t prevent some of them from being seen as having leadership potential. The authors conclude that 'the very skills that make the psychopath so unpleasant (and sometimes abusive) in society can facilitate a career in business even in the face of negative performance ratings.'”

Fast Company has an excellent article with more info.

Opportunity Cost: What the US Gave Up for 10 Years of Tax Cuts

"ThinkProgress, using data on various social spending projects from the National Priorities Project – which does these calculations for the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars – has estimated ten other possible policies we could’ve paid for at the same $2.5 trillion price of the Bush tax cuts. . . . For the same price as the Bush tax cuts, which did little to help the economy, we could’ve sent tens of millions of students to college, retrofitted every household in America with the capacity to generate alternative energy, hired millions of firefighters and police officers, effectively ended our national shame of having kids who lack health care coverage, or put millions of more teachers into classrooms. . . . " Details here.

Projected, Potential Distribution of Radiation from Japan

(Gif below right from EURAD.)

Student Thwarts Facial Recognition Software

"CV Dazzle" is based on the original camouflage from WWI and targets automated face detection and recognition systems by altering the contrast and spatial relationship of key facial features.



By Adam Harvey; more info at cvdazzle.com. (Thanks, Ben! Note: looks like you have to cut your bangs funny, too.)

SWF Seeks Mr. Right, Inc.

Per The Utne Reader,

The U.S. Supreme Court decided in the widely condemned Citizens United case that corporations enjoy the legal status of people – so a Florida woman is seeking the hand of a corporation in legal marriage.

Sarah “Echo” Steiner of Lake Worth, Florida, will hold a press conference on Saturday, January 22, to announce her search for a suitable corporate spouse, reports the Undernews blog of Sam Smith’s Progressive Review, citing a Facebook press release put out by Steiner.

One of Ms. Steiner's Facebook friends comments, "[s]omeone mentioned being satisfied on the consummation night, and I am thinking 'Too Big To Fail' might have a whole new meaning." Another suggests, "[i]f the courthouse won't issue a marriage certificate, there is another option. When the baby is born, list the corporation as the father of your child. The father is responsible for disproving parenthood . . . . "

Or perhaps a civil union . . . .

Utne also embeds this video about a corporation running for Congress:

Wikileaks Update 2010-12-31: Wired Hung Out, Assange Dis-Implicated, Theories of System Collapse, & What Happens When You Steal a Hacker's Computer

During the last week, there's been a furious exchange of articles and tweets in/re- the Greenwald-Wired fight over the Manning-Lamo chat logs, which at present constitute the only evidence outside of the participants' heads that might either implicate or exonerate Assange of any accusations that he actively conspired to bring about Manning's alleged leaks. The issue is seen as critical because (1) Wired has published only about 25% of the logs, and (2) Manning's been incommunicado in solitary for over seven months, while (3) Lamo's been talking rather freely to the media, with the result that The NYT reported that he said Manning said Assange was actively involved in setting up special arrangements for Wikileaks' receipt of Manning's leaks, including a dedicated FTP server, which might or might not suffice as a basis for the US to charge Assange with conspiracy, although that's a whole 'nother issue.

The dust now seems to be settling, with Wired personnel confirming that the unpublished portions of the chat logs contain no reference to any such special facilities; which means there's no such reference in any of the logs except for one reference to an FTP in the portions of the logs that Wired's already published; and the consensus seems to be that that one reference cannot fairly be construed to prove anything amounting to conspiracy on Assange's part – i.e., Lamo's been misremembering or misreported. Sean Bonner and Rob Beschizza at boingboing have the best summary of the spat I've seen to date, plus additional info; and there's more background here (worth reading for its characterization of Assange as "international man of demystery," among other things.) UPDATE: The Guardian now has its own summary.

More great work at emptywheel by Marcy Wheeler, who originated much of the research/analysis relied on by Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald re- inconsistencies re- the Manning-Lamo internet chats. In "Lamo's Two (?!) Laptops," she highlights additional, disturbing discrepancies in Lamo's statements (worth reading for yourself), and in "Assange Alerts His Hostages!" she spotlights the fact that his "insurance file" probably contains the names of top Arab officials alleged to have close ties to the CIA – info the US is probably just as interested to keep secret as are the Arab officials named.

Floyd Abrams, an attorney who represented The NYT in its battles over the Pentagon Papers, has, to the surprise and disappointment of many, put out a piece attacking Wikileaks. There have been a number of good rebuttals, but Marcy Wheeler may have shredded him best.

Lynn Parramore at HuffPo has an informative and eloquent essay decrying the lengthy detention of Manning under inhumane conditions, "Tortured Until Proven Guilty." And Kevin Carson has defended Manning as "One Soldier Who Really Did 'Defend Our Freedom.'"

Here's another list of "How Wikileaks Enlightened Us in 2010."

Apparently, Western Union has joined the effort to execute Wikileaks through financial strangulation without due process of law. Lasers_pewpewpew responded, "[s]o they are only too happy for you to send money to an African prince who will give you a cut of his fictional $20 million (ala 419 scam), but not to Wikileaks? . . . f*cking Epic!"

There's a fascinating new piece, "The Transparency Paradox," at colayer, re- what I've called Assange's theory of "the cost of tightened secrecy to organizational I.Q.," or as Volatility puts it more succinctly (see below), Assange's "secrecy tax." The author at colayer makes the point that, while greater transparency maximizes efficiency and profits for a group as a whole, individuals within the group profit most when they're not transparent while others in the group are. Just like, when you're negotiating, you have an advantage if you know what cards the other parties are holding but they're ignorant of yours. And the internet and other technologies now available have greatly reduced the cost of transparency.

Re- the big, "systems" picture, there's a great article at Volatility on "racketeering":

According to Joseph Tainter’s theory of imperial collapse, as societies become more complex, they must expend an ever greater portion of the energy they have available simply on maintaining their complexity. Although social and technological advances may achieve profitable returns for awhile, once a certain level of complexity is reached, diminishing returns set in. Eventually, at the late imperial stage, the complexity of the power structure, the military infrastructure, the bureaucracies, all the rents involved in maintaining an ever more bloated parasite class, their luxuries, the police state required to extract these rents and keep the productive people down, and the growing losses due to the response of the oppressed producers, everything from poor quality work to strikes to emigration or secession to rebellion, reaches a point where the system can only cannibalize itself and eventually collapse.

Julian Assange’s theory of the secrecy tax he’s trying to impose through Wikileaks is one example of these diminishing returns on imperial complexity. All the indications are that Wikileaks has been successful in this.

* * * * *
This is a welter of parasites battening on the same host. They’re in a zero sum game, not only against the people, but among themselves. Each has an interest in just exploiting the host, not killing it. But together they are killing it and therefore themselves. It’s clear none is capable of organizing or regulating the others. The federal government isn’t capable of doing it. If one big bank tried to do it, it would be subverted by the others. Each racket, from highest to lowest, is going to maximize its bloodsucking until there’s no blood left.

Note that, theoretically, so long as the system as a whole remains mostly transparent, it's not a zero-sum game (or at least, its productivity growth would be subject only to such physical limits as peak oil or climate change), because problem-solving and efficiency are maximized by pervasive info-sharing, and everyone's equally incentivized. In contrast, where transparency has sufficiently deteriorated, workers become less productive, both because of reduced info-sharing and because they're disincentivized – i.e., those not sharing info are still incentivized to continue to exploit the others, but once those who are being exploited figure out what's going on, they're discouraged from sharing and working hard just to enrich the exploiters. At this point, the competition devolves from who can produce the most of the best, into who can loot the most the fastest.

To this analysis, Assange adds the dimension of time and the role of foresight, in his 2006 essay for counterpunch, "Of Potholes and Foresight." To put part of his point in other words, a stitch in time often saves nine, and transparency makes that kind of foresight possible, which otherwise tends to give way to political pressures to allocate resources in more near-sighted ways.

Here's an article on governments' moves to control the internets. Not the most precise writing I've seen, but pulls together a few items of interest.

Here's a list of cables published in the Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, and not elsewhere. It was not one of the original Wikileaks partners, and everyone's mystified as to how they got the full cable cache. One observer says there are impt. revelations in there that the original partners haven't yet published.

Here's a good discussion of the nature of the Anons and how they view the evolution of collective intelligence. Roughly speaking, they believe their non-authoritarian, open (transparent), emergent mode of collective info-processing and action should and eventually will supplant the authoritarian, top-down, constricted mode common among big corporations and governments.

The FBI has seized a server allegedly used in some of the Anons' DDoS attacks.

And here's a presentation about what happens when you steal a hacker's computer:



Happy New Year, everyone! And remember, "the truth shall make you free." – John 8:32, the Bible, King James Version.

Living in Post-Reality (Re- Wikileaks)

This post unpacks and explores a bit further some thoughts I first touched on here.

The Infowar

As I've long said, knowledge is power, and a balance of power requires a balance of information.

As I've also said, at present, there's a serious imbalance, in that governments and big businesses know everything about us, and we know nothing important about them.

In 2009, Assange gave one of his many good speeches. Below is a transcript of a portion of it (I'm probably including a bit more than necessary for purposes of this post, but I'm not aware that this much of the speech has been transcribed elsewhere, and it may be of interest):

Censorship is actually an opportunity. That censorship is some form of arbitrage, to keep information concealed in a limited market from a bigger market. But politically, what does censorship reveal? It reveals fear. So, China has a lot of fear of freedom of the press. Iran . . . China and Iran do actively censor us [Wikileaks]. Both these countries have a fear of freedom of the press. That means that they perceive that if information is released, it's going to have some kind of reform effect. Now, depending on your position, if you're in that authority or your outside it, you may say this effect is positive or negative. But it does show that their perception, and they probably know best because they are the author of these documents, is that those documents are politically powerful.

In the West we do have a bit more of a problem, in that the basic structural relationships in highly developed Western countries are fiscal, they are not political, and it's much harder to affect fiscal relationships through free speech than it is to affect political relationships. So, is freedom of speech free in the West because the West is so enlightened? Or, is freedom of speech free in the West because . . . relative to China . . . is it free in the West because perhaps it's hard to do much with freedom of speech, that the basic power structures that exist in the West are fiscalized and hidden from social opprobrium?

I think maybe speech is free like the birds and the bees when they have no chance of political impact. Now of course there's many counter-examples; but I think, you know, these fiscal relationships have been structurally engineered in such a way that they're complex and opaque, and so that when we, operating with The Guardian, have revealed information about complex structural arrangements that Barclays Bank takes to push money through thirteen or fourteen different countries, to 'rob,' if you like, the United Kingdom and other countries of the money that they need to sustain their social system, but it's so complex, how can people become angry with information that's that complex? Well, it's hard; you have to work a lot harder as a journalist to turn that into an emotionally impactful story. So that's a kind of 'tax' on powerful revelation.

But anyway, when countries and organizations fight to suppress things, you know you have a foot in the door, you know you have a chance for reform. In other countries where information seems to be free, maybe actually the basic structures are so locked up that it’s going to be hard to make an effect. Anyway, I encourage everyone to try.

[Assange is warned his time's run out.] On these USB keys is 573,000 intercepted pager messages from September 11th, that haven't been released yet . . . . So, that's a lot of information . . . . We will release this tomorrow on the web, but I will give this to people here who want it now, and you can go and explore it and investigate it. Remember, it's 573,000 messages. We can't do it alone; the idea is that you do it. We spend our efforts getting it to you and allow you to publish it. But you've got to turn it into a story and make it moving to the population.

(Emphasis supplied; from a speech at the New Media Days 2009 conference, Denmark.)
Note that Assange speaks of information as a commodity for which there are manipulable markets; i.e., among other things, knowledge is a form of wealth. This makes sense; perhaps the very definition of real wealth is, after all, power.

We're now witnessing an infowar. It is a war not just using info as a weapon but also about who will control it. In Assange-ist terms, the powerful have been conspiring against the rest of us, in the sense that they've been keeping secret things that were being done to us or in our name and that they feared we'd object to if we knew about them. W.r.t. these things, the powerful have not been giving us all the material info, and/or they've actively fed us disinformation or distractions. The struggle currently led by Wikileaks is to give the rest of us access to the truths that those to whom we've entrusted power have hidden from us.

As Robin Bloor put it, "This is an info war and info wars take place between power structures not countries. It’s the US power structure, not the US itself, that currently has a side in this war. Info wars are, by their very nature, civil wars between groups of citizens that live under the aegis of a given information control structure. One side wishes to conserve it, while the other wishes to change it."

In other words, it's a class war, with "class" defined by wealth measured not in terms of money but in terms of information.

In my prior analysis, I suggested that part of Assange's strategy may actually be to provoke the powers that be to tighten their security. This suggestion was based on Assange's own writings, in which he describes organizations such as governments as computational systems and proposes that, when their secrecy is threatened, they tend to try to tighten their security, throttling down the flow of information internally as well as externally. In that event, as a result of this throttling down, the system becomes "dumber," since those within it become less able or willing to share all the info and ideas needed in order for the regime to act as effectively in its own behalf as it otherwise could. Provoking such regimes to tighten their security should therefore weaken them and hasten their downfall or reform. If this is in fact part of Assange's strategy, the "throttling down" seems to be proceeding like clockwork.

(One might infer that the more corrupt the organization, the more secrets it needs to keep, the more throttling down required, the dumber it becomes. If the corruption gets bad enough, the regime must either get so dumb, or its corruption become so open a secret, then the regime will no longer be able to rely solely on secrecy to maintain itself but must resort to brute force.)

The P.R. War

As I've also suggested, Assange's insight into the cost of tightened secrecy to organizational I.Q. sheds new light on why the inventor of "public relations," Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, was such a godsend to the the powerful – because p.r./propaganda help them manipulate populations through their basic instincts and emotions, rather than through secrecy.

To fully grasp the situation, one has to understand the kind of p.r. being used. We're not just talking about packaging, or looking at the bright side of bad news; and we're not just talking about any old lies. We're talking about techniques designed to reach deep into the most primitive parts of our psyches and stimulate our most basic, powerful instincts – fear, anger, greed, and lust – in ways such that our higher faculties are completely bypassed (see Adam Curtis's excellent Century of the Self, here or here).

When this kind of p.r. is deployed successfully, the truth simply no longer matters. Thus, e.g., revelations in recent years of US propaganda illegally directed at its own citizens (see here and here) have had little effect.

It's clear from Assange's speech above that he recognizes that it's not just info that counts; it's also the art. The initial, non-trivial challenges faced by Wikileaks are to get the information while ensuring the confidentiality of leakers, to verify it, redact it, and get it published. But the next, no-less-vital challenge is – to edit one of Assange's phrases into another – "turning it into an emotionally impactful story." Wikileaks needs not just potential leakers and fellow journalists and publishers, therefore, but also literary and other artists.

For some time, I've had a few quotations have been bouncing around in my head:

I am constantly haunted by a quote from Harry Overstreet, who wrote the following in his 1925 groundbreaking study, Influencing Human Behavior: "Giving people the facts as a strategy of influence" has been a failure, "an enterprise fraught with a surprising amount of disappointment."
– David DeGraw, "Wall Street's Pentagon Papers," Global Research [I haven't located the text referred to online]

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
– attributed to Marshall McLuhan

And this:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.". . . "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove) . . . .

From Wikipedia's entry on the phrase, "Reality-Based Community." (Emphasis in the foregoing quotations supplied.)
So part of the challenge for Wikileaks is that this is not just an infowar; it is also a p.r. war. Because, among other reasons, theoretically, within a sufficiently powerful and immersive p.r. environment, efforts such as Wikileaks' to publish truth might simply be rendered moot.

And not just in the sense that most people might no longer care about the truth. But it would also be the case that the regime in power, even if corrupt, would need no longer be so concerned with secrecy. It would have to invest some of its resources in creating and propagating p.r.; but it would not have to reduce the flow of information internally or externally – meaning that it wouldn't have to make itself dumber, and thus needn't hasten its own demise.

(Again, one might infer that if the corruption got bad enough, the regime might need to use brute force to maintain itself. But it would seem that the combination of a moderate level of secrecy with a lot of p.r. might enable a regime to maintain itself longer while engaging in a higher level of corruption than might be possible if it relied on either secrecy or p.r. alone, without relying too heavily on brute force. {Not to mention the fact that since the regime now knows everything about us, it's well-prepared to take out any troublemakers.})

Post-Reality

The onslaught of p.r. aimed at neutralizing the threats posed by Wikileaks and Assange has been extraordinary, even in our p.r.-saturated times.

It's interesting to speculate about what it is that prompted the oligarchs to bring out the big guns against Wikileaks and Assange. Was it the content of the US State Dept. cables? Was it that material leaked from within a major US bank is expected to be published next? Or was it the fact that the info is now being reported not just by a lone, rebel website but by the great newspapers of the world?

Because it was when Wikileaked stories covered half the front page of The NYT that citizens began to sit up and pay attention.

But The NYT isn't exactly independent from the powers that be. What if sufficient numbers of people won't listen to the truth unless it comes through outlets like The NYT? What if The NYT et al. refuse to continue to publish it (as it's done so often before)? Are we about to find out that we are, in fact, living in a post-reality world?

Wikileaks also faces financial and infrastructure challenges – a variety of brute force.

To those who predict the internet and hackers will save Wikileaks and us, I can only say, don't be so confident that you fail to do all you can to help.

Wikileaks Update 2010-12-18: Greenwald v. Wired, Infowar as Civil War, WL Copycats, & More

I've updated "The Case for Wikileaks" here. It lays out the arguments and includes lots of links to sources and resources; please use and share it.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon has been pounding on Wired. US Army PFC Bradley Manning is the accused leaker of the cables to WL, allegedly having outed himself to Adrian Lamo, who turned him in. Lamo is a convicted hacker and just two weeks earlier had been released from involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. "For more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed – but refuses to publish – the key evidence [i.e., the complete internet chat logs between Manning and Lamo] in one of the year's most significant political stories." Meanwhile, Lamo has continued to talk, and his descriptions have contained certain inconsistencies, as shown in analyses by Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake. Poulsen's continued refusal to publish the complete chat logs, Greenwald writes, "has long ago left the realm of mere journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of active truth-hiding by a 'journalist' I've ever seen." Most of FDL's analyses and other resources can be found here. (UPDATE: Poulsen and Wired's editor, Evan Hansen, respond here, both attacking Greenwald in return. In addition, Hansen suggests they've held back the full logs because they contain Manning's non-relevant, "sensitive personal information," and Poulsen says the stories published in Wired have already "either excerpted, quoted or reported on everything of consequence Manning had to say about his leaking.")

(The Hired and Apocaleaks Now images are from the right hon. exiledsurfer, whose works all reward attention.)

At some point one has to wonder, is the US holding Manning in solitary just because they're trying to make him talk, or also because they need to keep him from talking while the US spreads its own disinfo?

There's a great piece by Robin Bloor on the big picture, "Wikileaks: This Is Just The Beginning," comparing the current situation to the conflict between Pope Leo X and Martin Luther, which she says arose from the invention of the Gutenberg press. I disagree on a few of her points but think she nails one important aspect of the situation: "it’s a mistake to see the US government as a specific side in this war. This is an info war and info wars take place between power structures not countries. It’s the US power structure, not the US itself, that currently has a side in this war. Info wars are, by their very nature, civil wars between groups of citizens that live under the aegis of a given information control structure. One side wishes to conserve it, while the other wishes to change it." The whole article's well worth reading, including her list of virtual infrastructure needs highlighted by developments in the current conflict.

Great essay by Robert Meerpol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg:

I view the Espionage Act of 1917 as a lifelong nemesis. My parents were charged, tried and ultimately executed after being indicted for Conspiracy to Commit Espionage under that act.

The 1917 Act has a notorious history. It originally served to squelch opposition to World War I. It criminalized criticism of the war effort, and sent hundreds of dissenters to jail just for voicing their opinions. It transformed dissent into treason.

Many who attacked the law noted that the framers of the Constitution had specifically limited what constituted treason by writing it into the Constituton: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort” (Article III, section 3). The framers felt this narrow definition was necessary to prevent treason from becoming what some called “the weapon of a political faction.” Furthermore, in their discussions at the Constitutional Convention they agreed that spoken opposition was protected by the First Amendment and could never be considered treason.

It appears obvious that the Espionage Act is unconstitutional because it does exactly what the Constitution prohibits. . . . To this day, with a few notable exceptions that include my parents’ case, it has been a dormant sword of Damocles, awaiting the right political moment and an authoritarian Supreme Court to spring to life and slash at dissenters.

More at the link.

Here's the script for a fascinating speech by Rop Gonggri at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress of hackers, referring to his contacts with Wikileaks: "WikiLeaks could well come out victorious in a new generational conflict, mentioned in the same line with the suffragettes and the Vietnam protesters. But as it stands today, my friend Julian is potentially facing prison time or even assassination for what essentially amounts to practicing journalism." He also notes, "[t]here’s a new American proposal to make all providers of any kind of online service provide the authorities with cleartext of everything that happens." Gonggri's main focus in recent years has been electronic voting machines around the world; specifically, demonstrating how easily they can be hacked. (As I've feared, easily-manipulated machines are already in use in many countries.)

In case you hadn't heard, the CIA has launched a "Wikileaks Task Force," a.k.a. W.T.F.; more here.

The NYT has published an op-ed, "Banks and Wikileaks," making a point similar to the one I raised eight days earlier under the heading, "Payment Process Usurps Due Process" – that the payment processing services performed by banks are in the nature of an essential public utility, and banks should not be allowed to financially strangle individuals or enterprises just because they're exposing embarrassing truths.

Indeed, it should be obvious by now that there are a number of essential services in the nature of public utilities that should not be entrusted entirely to private control. The trend, however, has been in the opposite direction; i.e., to privatize more and more. To the extent that trend prevails, there will be nothing to stop people like Dick Cheney from acquiring control of our financial system, prisons, roads, military, media, elections, schools, social networks, internet, etc., and running them like Halliburton for their own personal benefit and that of their buddies, at the expense and to the detriment of the rest of us.

The Anons targeted Bank of America yesterday (because of its refusal to process payments to WL), achieving intermittent outages; I haven't checked on that situation today.

A highly-plausible explanation for Amazon's decision to terminate service to WL: per Amazon, "the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments," utilizing Amazon's web services for its Recovery Accountability and Transparency website. More here.

Here's an article about other, WL-like facilities now starting up. According to Robin Bloor (see above), at last count there were six such sites: BalkanLeaks in the Balkans, BrusselsLeaks in Belgium, Indoleaks in Indonesia, Rospil in Russia, Tunileaks in Tunisia, and OpenLeaks, in addition to WL itself. More info about OpenLeaks at techPresident. I.m.h.o., the more, the merrier. (UPDATE: Here's an updated list of copycat sites. Note, these sites vary widely w.r.t. what they do, including what kind of security they afford leakers, what they publish, how they publish, what language they publish in, etc.

1. BalkanLeaks
2. BrusselsLeaks (Belgium)
3. Cryptome (existed before Wikilekas)
4. Der Western Recherche (Germany)
5. Indoleaks (Indonesia)
6. Israelileaks
7. PirateLeaks (Czech Republic)
8. Rospil (Russia)
9. Tunileaks (Tunisia; but this just looks like a site re- cables released by WL)
10. Opennu.nl (Netherlands)
11. OpenLeaks
12. TradeLeaks
13. ScienceLeaks
14. Wikispooks)

UPDATE: A Croation version is also in the works.

Here's an article re- WL from Columbia Journalism Review:

[I]t’s quite difficult to see significant legal differences between what WikiLeaks has done and what newspaper, television, and magazine reporters do all the time. . . . The classification system has been established by our democratically elected officials to obscure the hand of the state. Sometimes it rightly keeps us safe, and sometimes it wrongly keeps us in the dark. . . . But the fundamental problem is that the government cannot be trusted to make these decisions for themselves. . . . [T]here’s nothing to say that every future iteration of something like WikiLeaks would [deal with leaked material as responsibly as WL has]. It’s a frightening prospect.

But the idea that the solution to this potential problem lies in uprooting freedom of speech, and the status quo that has allowed the press to be a persistent, comprehensive watchdog of the national security state is frightening, too.

"Wikidrips": per Greg Mitchell at The Nation, The NYT's publications re- the cables have dried to a trickle, and it's been even longer since the gray lady published anything not already published elsewhere. I note that WL did not bother including The NYT among the original, privileged recipients – it was The Guardian that shared; but it's coverage, too, has dwindled. Today Mitchell notes that, although The Guardian had a you-ask, we-search feature on their site, inviting readers to suggest terms for searching the trove of cables, it discontinued the feature six days ago.

Just learned that all the days of Mitchell's "Blogging the Wikileaks" can be found here.

Wikileaks UPDATES 2010-12-24: Lynching the Messenger; Assange-Speak

Another great piece from Glenn Greenwald at Salon, observing,

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them. . . . A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well.

[I.e., let's lynch the messenger.] Greenwald concludes with a partial list of crimes revealed by Wikileaks in 2010.

On a more hopeful note, here are a few quotes from speeches or interviews of Julian Assange:

“Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it. Is there one?” (source)

“The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency.
[O]rganizations that have material and want to conceal it are giving off a signal that they believe there will be reform if that material is released.
So we can do things very efficiently by selectively trying to get that material and stick that into the public intellectual record where it can be used by everyone to inform their decisions.” (source)

“What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.” (source)

"[S]ecret planning is secret usually for a reason, because if it’s abusive it is opposed.
It is our task to find secret abuse plans and expose them where they can be opposed before they’re implemented. Because if they’re exposed by the implementation – by people suffering from that abuse – then the abuse has already occurred and it’s too late.” (source)

“It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they’re going on.” (source)

“[W]e in the West have deluded ourselves into believing that we actually have a truly free press. We don’t. And we can see that in the difference between what Wikileaks does and what the rest of the press does.” (source)

"And now we see that the function of censorship has also been privatized.
And what that means is that litigious billionaires and big companies are able to effectively prevent certain things [from] appearing in public.
Or reduce the number of those things appearing in public by using the legal system or by using patronage networks and economic flows to make it unprofitable to talk about certain things most of the time.” (source)

“We know for sure that one big media company in the US had the ‘Collateral Murder’ video for years and did not release it.” (source)

"In the UK right now there are 300 secret gag orders. Those are gag orders that not only prevent the press from reporting corruption and abuse, they prevent the press from reporting [that] the press has been gagged.” (source)

"[M]ost information that comes to you is targeted at you. It is designed in some small way to manipulate you, so it is a deviation from the truth.
But the internal documents of major corporations and intelligence agencies and governments are designed for their internal use. . . . They’re not designed to manipulate you. And because of that difference in perceived audience you can start to see how major organizations work, and it’s not how people think they work; it’s something different.
And if we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based upon the truth. Because judgements which are not based upon the truth can only lead to outcomes which are themselves false.” (source)

“[T]he basic structural relationships in highly developed Western countries are fiscal, they’re not political.” (source)

"I think fiscal relationships have been engineered in such a way that they’re complex and opaque. . . . How can people become angry with information that’s that complex? It’s hard. You have to work a lot harder as a journalist to turn that into an emotionally impactful story. So that’s a kind of tax on powerful revelation.” (source)

“If tribunals try to hide their sources of funding then at the very outset we have to be suspicious about their conclusions.” (source)

“In this broader framework of what we do it is to try and build an historical record, an intellectual record, of how civilization actually works in practice.” (source)

More at Beginning.

And one from Wikileaks: "Sarah Palin says Julian should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden--so he should be safe for at least a decade." (see www.twitter.com/wikileaks/statuses/11620256778821632 )