Wikileaks: What's Shown When the Barn Door's Closed

In case you hadn't heard . . . .

• Per The Christian Science Monitor, "[t]he US State Department has directed its staff around the world not to surf the WikiLeaks website . . . ."

• Per WaPo, the Office of Management and Budget has ordered federal employees and contractors not to look at classified info published by Wikileaks, and the Defense Department issued a similar order.

• The Guardian reports, "[t]he Library of Congress tonight joined the education department, the commerce department and other government agencies in confirming that the ban is in place. . . . Although thousands of leaked cables are freely available on the Guardian, New York Times and other newspaper websites . . . the Obama administration insists they are still classified and, as such, have to be protected. . . . [Employees were warned,] '[a]ccessing the WikiLeaks documents will lead to sanitisation of your PC to remove any potentially classified information from your system, and the [sic] result in possible data loss.'"
  

• Per The Wall Street Journal, "The Air Force said it had blocked [from their personnel's computers] more than 25 websites [including The NYT 's and others] that contained the [leaked cables] . . . . The Office of the Secretary of Defense has issued guidance against visiting WikiLeaks or downloading documents posted there . . . ."

• Per The Christian Science Monitor, "[t]he US State Department has directed its staff around the world not to surf the WikiLeaks website . . . ."

These efforts on the part of our Fearless Leaders (call them "FLs") to close the barn door after the horse was gone struck a lot of observers as ludicrous. We can't stop the rest of the world from reading the stuff, but dang it, we've got to blindfold somebody, so we'll just blindfold our own! At first glance, "[i]t's like kids covering their eyes and thinking that this keeps other people from seeing them" (quoting Curt Cloninger in an entirely different context).

But additional inferences are worth teasing out.

1. If our FLs' main concern were to carry out their mission of furthering the US's welfare, surely they would want their (our) own employees and contractors to be fully aware of whatever the rest of the world knows, rather than being handicapped by ignorance. If you're a company, and your competitors and customers got hold of info about all the glitches in your product, would you send your sales force out without any preparation for the questions and challenges they'd likely face? If you're playing football, do you want to be in a situation where the other side knows your team's strategy, but your own players have no clue? Of course not.

I'm not among those who believe our FLs are simply stupid. So, what else might motivate our FLs to order their own people to keep themselves in the dark?

(a) To the extent the secrets are embarrassing to other countries – ok, those countries might stop sharing their secrets with us; but will keeping US employees and contractors ignorant of what everyone else knows likely fix that problem? Like, yeah, the world knows that secret I told you last week, but I'll trust you with a new one if you make your servants promise not to read the old one? I don't think so.

(b) To the extent the secrets are embarrassing to our own FLs – aye, there's a motive that makes sense. Because the FLs' employees and contractors might stop obeying them, if they realize the extent to which the purpose of the secrecy is merely to hide crimes and corruption. Our FLs certainly don't want more Bradley Mannings.

(c) The rationale for the ban actually stated by our FLs is that the documents are classified, and the fact that they've been leaked doesn't automatically declassify them – i.e., it's the principle of the thing. Note that upholding the principle, even at the risk of handicapping our own people, does accomplish one thing: it sends the message that unquestioning obedience to the secrecy rules is required, even when it's senseless or even harmful. (Too bad our FLs aren't so concerned to make this point when it comes to the rules applicable to banks et al.) (UPDATE: I didn't bother disputing another, even flimsier pretext given for the policy, that info downloaded from WL might contain malware. And now the Pentagon's issued a memo confirming that Dept. of Defense "employees who downloaded classified documents from Wikileaks . . . may delete them without further 'sanitizing' their systems or taking any other remedial measures" {via Secrecy News}.)

In sum, the explanation for the ban that makes the most sense is that it is motivated by our FLs' desire to maintain their own control over those beneath them and thus their power over all of us – and that that goal is more important to our FLs than the goal of furthering our welfare through diplomacy, etc. (which would be better served by making sure our employees and contractors were fully informed about all relevant info).

2. Assange's strategy of provoking FLs with too many of the wrong kind of secrets to tighten security, thus degrading their own organizational I.Q. and possibly hastening their own demise, may be working. (For more about Assange's overall strategy, which few others seem yet to have discerned, see my earlier post here, among others.)

Homeland Security – Psyops on US?

We now have two reported instances of trolling traced to Homeland Security IP addresses:

Homeland Security Trolling We Won’t Fly Blog (comments on a blog re- TSA's illegal scannings and gropings).

Racist Web Posts Traced to Homeland Security (comments on a local newspaper article re- detention of Mexican immigrants).

Operation Bling

By embedding this video, we do not necessarily endorse any activity suggested therein to the extent, if any, prohibited by applicable law.

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.

"What I Learned from the Army": Killology

What I learned from the army about language and dehumanization

It's hard to get people to shoot other people when they aren't in imminent danger. People have the unfortunate habit of seeing other people as fellow humans. They hesitate, they start questioning the ethics of what they are doing. It eats them up and ruins them for battle.

We do two things in basic training to compensate for that. We work on instincts, training people to shoot faster and view their targets as a video game or a measure of our own skill, rather than personalizing them. Silhouettes pop up and down so fast, and they look like people but they are paper with aiming circles printed on them. We start categorizing our targets as not fully human. Colonel Grossman is somewhat of an expert on that [http://www.killology.com].

The other thing we do in basic, in military culture in general, but it's very specifically started in basic training, is we use language to normalize the dehumanization of others and assert our own supremacy. We use slurs against whoever is the enemy de jour, and we do this because normalizing their characterization as lesser than fully human, based on their group identity, is an important step in making violence against them more acceptable.

Haji, the word when it's owned by the people who truly own it, it's nothing offensive. It's people on a pilgrimage. But we use it in the army do identify them as The Other. Commanders understand the importance of Othering the enemy. When Mattis said "It's fun to shoot some people," that wasn't an accident. It's part of normalizing the enjoyment of violence because the people committing that violence need to believe it's normal, in order to stay sane while doing it.

He went on to add: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

That's a great statement if you know your men are going to be killing Afghan civilians in the course of their normal business. It uses language to mark them as different because they are muslim, and it marks them as Lesser Than Real Men. They don't have any manhood, so they are lesser than fully human, in the default (male) sense.

It's genius, really, because he can claim it's about defending women even as he's upholding and appealing to male supremacy.

And it's genius because it shows he understands dehumanizing language as a sort of gateway drug to violence without remorse.

(Thanks, noamnety!)

Guess It'll Be a While Before We Take a Decent Prez for Granted Again?

You can now buy "Ojamas" to help you "[s]leep soundly and awake to a brand new day for America!"

ok well we did just get a non-housetrained puppy,

like we had nothing else to do; and have been desperately watching Cesar since . . .

On Iraq, the Patraeus Report, and the 2008 Elections: Three Things to Remember

One. How our Congressional reps. voted on the resolution giving Bush authority to invade Iraq is likely to come up (as it should) during the run-up to the next elections. When your candidates try to justify their vote by saying, "everyone thought Hussein had WMD's," please point out: that wasn't the issue (though it turned out he didn't have them). The issue was, was the threat that he'd use them against us not only so real but also so imminent that we could not afford even to let the U.N. inspectors complete their work? I mean, like, Hussein had to have had the ability and desire to drop a major WMD on us within months, not years.

Whatever the evidence of WMD's (and plenty of us recognized it as tenuous at best), no one ever presented credible evidence that Hussein would have the capability, let alone the desire, to deliver that kind of attack any time soon.

I supported Kerry in the last election, but since then I've realized, it simply is not plausible that he or other Dem leaders were actually hoodwinked by the Bush Admin. I don't know what they thought they were doing, but they failed in what may have been the most important decision of their career.

So for me, it's a litmus test: any candidate who voted for the authorization should be fired, and certainly should not be promoted. This alone disqualifies Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Edwards.

Two. We will soon have General Patraeus's report on the results of the surge. No one expects the Admin. to admit it's not working. The alleged "success," such as it is, will be attributed in part to Petraeus's new strategy of trying to win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqis by showing them that we are there only to protect them from the insurgents (such insurgents being described by the General, as quoted in The New York Post, as "foreign" and "al Qaeda"). While this approach has to be better than what came before, I wonder how effective the implementation will be so long as we insist on controlling Iraqi oil.

A new Iraqi law being pushed through notwithstanding opposition from the majority of Iraqis "would transform Iraq's oil system from [the existing] nationalized model [, which is] all-but-closed to U.S. oil companies, to a commercialized model, all-but-fully privatized and opened to U.S. corporate control. . . . As a result of the invasion, . . . U.S. oil companies will emerge as the corporate front-runners in line for contracts giving them control over the vast majority of Iraq's oil under some of the most corporate-friendly terms in the world for twenty to thirty-five years" (per HuffPo).

Not to mention that under our watch, by the most conservative U.S. estimate as reported on May 12, 2007 in The New York Times, at least 146,000,000 barrels worth at least $7,300,000,000 have simply vanished, without any benefit to the Iraqis (not to mention the U.S. taxpayers, despite Bush Admin. suggestions that Iraqi oil would pay for this war).

Three. Whatever the report says, it'll also have to support the argument that we can't leave any time soon. But the fact is, we have no hope of "winning" in even the most limited sense unless we stay there at least ten more years. And by all accounts, our supply of soldiers is too broken to continue the job past this spring. Will they reinstitute the draft? They won't talk about any of that any sooner than we force them to.

Some say "the campaign to keep us in Iraq is . . . linked to the campaign to justify a war with Iran . . ."