A7.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.7.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
32.Computers.
33.Corporate psychology.
34.The Octopus.
35.Early Japanese Animations.
36.Hacking.
*
32.Computers.
Our economic system is now run by competing algorithms trading stocks against each other at hyper speed, guaranteeing that the people who need resources the absolute least are rewarded an increasing amount of them for reasons that are morally dubious at best. Make no mistake, these profit gouging algorithms are daemonic to their very core. They do not give a shit about us because we programmed them not to. It?s not that they don?t do cool shit from time to time, it?s that they only care about numbers going up and rewarding the hell spawn that is corporate psychology, where inhuman entities are deemed people with rights. People who are legally obligated to fuck everyone over in the name of profit for investors.
*
33.Corporate psychology.
It?s not that they don?t do cool shit from time to time, it?s that they only care about numbers going up and rewarding the hell spawn that is corporate psychology, where inhuman entities are deemed people with rights. People who are legally obligated to fuck everyone over in the name of profit for investors. It?s not me man, it?s the money. Let us never forget that corporate psychology is more dangerous than ISIS, Ebola, Global Warming, or whatever the fuck threat the media is trying to sell us at whatever moment you happen to be reading this. Fuck, corporate psychology is pretty much the cause of all those threats in the first place.
*
34.The Octopus.
Chronicle of ?80s-era efforts to uncover government-led conspiracies and their consequences? A ?web of thugs and thieves who roam the earth with their weapons and their murders, trading dope and dirty money for the secrets of the temple.? Nicknamed ?The Octopus,? the plot connects shadowy private-security contractors with an international criminal bank, government piracy of law-enforcement database software, a corrupt Native American reservation where experimental weapons are developed, and even Reagan?s October Surprise.
*
35. Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931)
Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo?s Akira to Mamoru Oishii?s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done.
Anime has a far longer history than you might think; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan?s furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), dates back to 1917, though much of the earliest animated movies were lost following a massive earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. As with much of Japan?s cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form.
Above is Oira no Yaku (Our Baseball Game) from 1931, which shows rabbits squaring off against tanukis (raccoon dogs) in a game of baseball. The short is a basic slapstick comedy elegantly told with clean, simple lines. Rabbits and tanukis are mainstays of Japanese folklore, though they are seen here playing a sport that was introduced to the country in the 1870s. Like most silent Japanese movies, this film made use of a benshi ? a performer who would stand by the movie screen and narrate the movie. In the old days, audiences were drawn to the benshi, not the movie. Akira Kurosawa?s elder brother was a popular benshi who, like a number of despondent benshis, committed suicide when the popularity of sound cinema rendered his job obsolete.
Then there?s this version of the Japanese folktale Kobu-tori from 1929, about a woodsman with a massive growth on his jaw who finds himself surrounded by magical creatures. When they remove the lump, he finds that not everyone is pleased. Notice how detailed and uncartoony the characters are.
Another early example of early anime is Ugokie Kori no Tatehiki (1931), which roughly translates into ?The Moving Picture Fight of the Fox and the Possum.? The 11-minute short by Ikuo Oishi is about a fox who disguises himself as a samurai and spends the night in an abandoned temple inhabited by a bunch of tanukis (those guys again). The movie brings all the wonderful grotesqueries of Japanese folklore to the screen, drawn in a style reminiscent of Max Fleisher and Otto Messmer.
And finally, there is this curious piece of early anti-American propaganda from 1936 that features a phalanx of flying Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) attacking an island filled with Felix the Cat and a host of other poorly-rendered cartoon characters. Think Toontown drawn by Henry Darger. All seems lost until they are rescued by figures from Japanese history and legend. During its slide into militarism and its invasion of Asia, Japan argued that it was freeing the continent from the grip of Western colonialism. In its queasy, weird sort of way, the short argues precisely this. Of course, many in Korea and China, which received the brunt of Japanese imperialism, would violently disagree with that version of events.
*
36.Hacking.
Hacking is what this generation does, after all, or at least what we aspire to. The hacker archetype both celebrates the mythology of the dominant high-tech class and nods toward the specter of an unsettling and shifty subculture lurking in the dark.
If 1990s cypherpunk, like the broader tech culture that it was immersed in, was a little bit giddy with its potential to change the world, contemporary cypherpunk finds itself on the verge of ?a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible.?
How did we get here? The obvious political answer is 9/11. The event provided an opportunity for a vast expansion of national security states both here and abroad, including, of course, a diminution of protections against surveillance. The legalities involved in the US are a confusing and ever-shifting set of rules that are under constant legal contestation in the courts. Whatever the letter of the law, a September 2012 ACLU bulletin gave us the essence of the situation:
Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans? electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.
The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general?s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of ?pen register? and ?trap and trace? surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government?s surveillance power.
?In fact,? the report continues, ?more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.?
Beyond the political and legal powers vested in the US intelligence community and in others around the world, there is the very real fact that technology once only accessible to the world?s superpowers is now commercially available. One example documented on WikiLeaks (and discussed in Cypherpunks) is the Zebra strategic surveillance system sold by VASTech. For $10 million, the South African company will sell you a turnkey system that can intercept all communications in a middle-sized country. A similar system called Eagle was used in Gadhafi?s Libya, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2011. Sold by the French company Amesys, this is a commercial product, right down to the label on the box: ?Nationwide Intercept System.? In the face of systems designed to scoop up all electronic communication and store it indefinitely, any showcase civil libertarian exceptions written into the surveillance laws are meaningless. But the threat isn?t limited to the surveillance state. There are more than a few self-interested financial players with $10 million lying around, many of whom would love to track all the private data in a several thousand mile radius.
If, in 1995, some cypherpunks had published a book about the upcoming ?postmodern surveillance dystopia,? most commentators would have shrugged it off as just a wee bit paranoid and ushered them into the Philip K. Dick Reading Room. Now, it is more likely that people will shrug and say, ?that ship has already sailed.?
And then there?s David Brin. The author of The Transparent Society is well known for his skepticism regarding the likelihood of maintaining at least some types of privacy as well as his relative cheerfulness in the face of universal transparency, although to say that he is unconcerned about individual privacy would be a mistake. In an email, I asked him about the cypherpunk ethic, as expressed by Julian Assange: ?privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.?
Brin?s response was scathing. The ethic, he says, is ?already enshrined in law. A meek normal person can sue for invasion of privacy, a prominent person may not.? He?s just getting started:
But at a deeper level it is simply stupid. Any loophole in transparency ?to protect the meek? can far better be exploited by the mighty than by the meek. Their shills, lawyers and factotums will (1) ensure that ?privacy protections? have big options for the mighty and (2) that those options will be maximally exploited. Moreover (3) as I show in The Transparent Society, encryption-based ?privacy? is the weakest version of all. The meek can never verify that their bought algorithm and service is working as promised, or isn?t a bought-out front for the NSA or a criminal gang.
Above all, protecting the weak or meek with shadows and cutouts and privacy laws is like setting up Potemkin villages, designed to create surface illusions. Anyone who believes they can blind society?s elites ? of government, commerce, wealth, criminality and tech-geekery ? is a fool?
In other words, cypherpunk may be doing a disservice by spreading the illusion of freedom from surveillance.
I posed a similar question to Adrian Lamo, who reported Bradley Manning to federal authorities. Not surprisingly, Lamo is even more cynical.
?Privacy is quite dead,? he responded to me in an email. ?That people still worship at its corpse doesn?t change that. In [the unreleased documentary] Hackers Wanted I gave out my SSN, and I?ve never had cause to regret that. Anyone could get it trivially. The biggest threat to our privacy is our own limited understanding of how little privacy we truly have.?
In Cypherpunks, Assange raises an essential point that at least partly refutes this skepticism: ?The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.? And while Appelbaum admits that even strong encryption can?t last forever, saying, ?We?re probably not using one hundred year (safe) crypto,? he implies that pretty good privacy that lasts a pretty long time is far better than no privacy at all.
Assuming that some degree of privacy is still possible, most people don?t seem to think it?s worth the effort. The cypherpunks and their ilk fought to keep things like the PGP encryption program legal ? and we don?t use them. We know Facebook and Google leak our personal online habits like a sieve and we don?t make much effort to cover our tracks. Perhaps some of us buy the good citizen cliché that if you?re not doing anything wrong, you don?t have anything to worry about, but most of us are just opting for convenience. We?ve got enough to deal with day to day without engaging in a privacy regimen. Occasionally, some slacker may lose his job because he posted a photo of himself cradling his bong or the like, but as with civil liberties more generally, as long as the daily outrages against individuals don?t reach epic proportions, we rubberneck in horror and then return to our daily activities.
Beneath this complacent surface lies a disquieting and mostly unexamined question. To what degree is the ubiquity of state surveillance a form of intimidation, a way to keep people away from social movements or from directly communicating their views?
Throughout its entire history, the FBI has used secret intelligence operations to spy on, disrupt, and otherwise target activists and groups it considered subversive (mostly on the political left). The most notorious incidents occurred between 1956 and 1971, under the umbrella of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). When the FBI?s activities were revealed first in 1971 and later, more fully by the 1976 Church Committee, no politically astute person shrugged it off. It was understood without question that mega surveillance of political activists was an act of suppression period,full stop.
Part of the shock of the COINTELPRO revelations was the FBI?s engagement in illegal activities to destroy political organizations. The government?s violation of its own surveillance laws even trumped the desire to punish the ?symbolic bombings? of the Weather Underground. Since the FBI used illegal breaking and entering surveillance in an attempt to destroy the radical group, the leaders received light sentences when they emerged from underground. The same FBI techniques, once illegal, are undoubtedly so legal now under anti-terrorism laws that US Attorney General Holder could conduct the searches personally, dressed like Elvis and surrounded by the Real Housewives of Orange County in front of the cameras on a popular reality show.
It?s not as though the spirit of COINTELPRO has left us. Jacob Appelbaum, who has never been accused of any crime, has been subjected to relentless harassment, starting in the summer of 2010, when he was held up at Newark Airport where he was frisked, his laptop was inspected, and his three mobile phones were taken. He was then passed along to US Army officials for four hours of questioning. One army interrogator told him, menacingly, ?You don?t look like you?re going to do so well in prison.? Several contacts found on the confiscated cell phones were then also given a hard time at airports and border crossings. In December of that year he was ? along with other WikiLeaks activists ? one of the subjects of a court order that compelled Twitter to let the feds snoop inside his account. (He only knows this because Twitter won a petition to be able to inform the subjects.) He has since been continually harassed by airport security and has been detained at the US border twelve times.
That this harassment is happening to someone who hasn?t been charged with a crime is particularly frightening.
?The Galgenhumor of our era,? Appelbaum told me in an email, ?revolves around things that most people simply thought impossible in our lifetime.? He lists a number of chilling examples, including indefinite detention under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, warrantless wiretaps, drone strikes, state-sponsored malware, and the Patriot Act.
?It isn?t a great time to be a dissenting voice of any kind in our American empire,? he continues. But it isn?t the myriad of ways that civil liberties have been gutted that we?ll look back upon. ?What we will remember is the absolute silence of so many, when the above things became normalized.?
*
Inglish Site.7.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
32.Computers.
33.Corporate psychology.
34.The Octopus.
35.Early Japanese Animations.
36.Hacking.
*
32.Computers.
Our economic system is now run by competing algorithms trading stocks against each other at hyper speed, guaranteeing that the people who need resources the absolute least are rewarded an increasing amount of them for reasons that are morally dubious at best. Make no mistake, these profit gouging algorithms are daemonic to their very core. They do not give a shit about us because we programmed them not to. It?s not that they don?t do cool shit from time to time, it?s that they only care about numbers going up and rewarding the hell spawn that is corporate psychology, where inhuman entities are deemed people with rights. People who are legally obligated to fuck everyone over in the name of profit for investors.
*
33.Corporate psychology.
It?s not that they don?t do cool shit from time to time, it?s that they only care about numbers going up and rewarding the hell spawn that is corporate psychology, where inhuman entities are deemed people with rights. People who are legally obligated to fuck everyone over in the name of profit for investors. It?s not me man, it?s the money. Let us never forget that corporate psychology is more dangerous than ISIS, Ebola, Global Warming, or whatever the fuck threat the media is trying to sell us at whatever moment you happen to be reading this. Fuck, corporate psychology is pretty much the cause of all those threats in the first place.
*
34.The Octopus.
Chronicle of ?80s-era efforts to uncover government-led conspiracies and their consequences? A ?web of thugs and thieves who roam the earth with their weapons and their murders, trading dope and dirty money for the secrets of the temple.? Nicknamed ?The Octopus,? the plot connects shadowy private-security contractors with an international criminal bank, government piracy of law-enforcement database software, a corrupt Native American reservation where experimental weapons are developed, and even Reagan?s October Surprise.
*
35. Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931)
Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo?s Akira to Mamoru Oishii?s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done.
Anime has a far longer history than you might think; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan?s furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), dates back to 1917, though much of the earliest animated movies were lost following a massive earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. As with much of Japan?s cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form.
Above is Oira no Yaku (Our Baseball Game) from 1931, which shows rabbits squaring off against tanukis (raccoon dogs) in a game of baseball. The short is a basic slapstick comedy elegantly told with clean, simple lines. Rabbits and tanukis are mainstays of Japanese folklore, though they are seen here playing a sport that was introduced to the country in the 1870s. Like most silent Japanese movies, this film made use of a benshi ? a performer who would stand by the movie screen and narrate the movie. In the old days, audiences were drawn to the benshi, not the movie. Akira Kurosawa?s elder brother was a popular benshi who, like a number of despondent benshis, committed suicide when the popularity of sound cinema rendered his job obsolete.
Then there?s this version of the Japanese folktale Kobu-tori from 1929, about a woodsman with a massive growth on his jaw who finds himself surrounded by magical creatures. When they remove the lump, he finds that not everyone is pleased. Notice how detailed and uncartoony the characters are.
Another early example of early anime is Ugokie Kori no Tatehiki (1931), which roughly translates into ?The Moving Picture Fight of the Fox and the Possum.? The 11-minute short by Ikuo Oishi is about a fox who disguises himself as a samurai and spends the night in an abandoned temple inhabited by a bunch of tanukis (those guys again). The movie brings all the wonderful grotesqueries of Japanese folklore to the screen, drawn in a style reminiscent of Max Fleisher and Otto Messmer.
And finally, there is this curious piece of early anti-American propaganda from 1936 that features a phalanx of flying Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) attacking an island filled with Felix the Cat and a host of other poorly-rendered cartoon characters. Think Toontown drawn by Henry Darger. All seems lost until they are rescued by figures from Japanese history and legend. During its slide into militarism and its invasion of Asia, Japan argued that it was freeing the continent from the grip of Western colonialism. In its queasy, weird sort of way, the short argues precisely this. Of course, many in Korea and China, which received the brunt of Japanese imperialism, would violently disagree with that version of events.
*
36.Hacking.
Hacking is what this generation does, after all, or at least what we aspire to. The hacker archetype both celebrates the mythology of the dominant high-tech class and nods toward the specter of an unsettling and shifty subculture lurking in the dark.
If 1990s cypherpunk, like the broader tech culture that it was immersed in, was a little bit giddy with its potential to change the world, contemporary cypherpunk finds itself on the verge of ?a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible.?
How did we get here? The obvious political answer is 9/11. The event provided an opportunity for a vast expansion of national security states both here and abroad, including, of course, a diminution of protections against surveillance. The legalities involved in the US are a confusing and ever-shifting set of rules that are under constant legal contestation in the courts. Whatever the letter of the law, a September 2012 ACLU bulletin gave us the essence of the situation:
Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans? electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.
The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general?s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of ?pen register? and ?trap and trace? surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government?s surveillance power.
?In fact,? the report continues, ?more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.?
Beyond the political and legal powers vested in the US intelligence community and in others around the world, there is the very real fact that technology once only accessible to the world?s superpowers is now commercially available. One example documented on WikiLeaks (and discussed in Cypherpunks) is the Zebra strategic surveillance system sold by VASTech. For $10 million, the South African company will sell you a turnkey system that can intercept all communications in a middle-sized country. A similar system called Eagle was used in Gadhafi?s Libya, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2011. Sold by the French company Amesys, this is a commercial product, right down to the label on the box: ?Nationwide Intercept System.? In the face of systems designed to scoop up all electronic communication and store it indefinitely, any showcase civil libertarian exceptions written into the surveillance laws are meaningless. But the threat isn?t limited to the surveillance state. There are more than a few self-interested financial players with $10 million lying around, many of whom would love to track all the private data in a several thousand mile radius.
If, in 1995, some cypherpunks had published a book about the upcoming ?postmodern surveillance dystopia,? most commentators would have shrugged it off as just a wee bit paranoid and ushered them into the Philip K. Dick Reading Room. Now, it is more likely that people will shrug and say, ?that ship has already sailed.?
And then there?s David Brin. The author of The Transparent Society is well known for his skepticism regarding the likelihood of maintaining at least some types of privacy as well as his relative cheerfulness in the face of universal transparency, although to say that he is unconcerned about individual privacy would be a mistake. In an email, I asked him about the cypherpunk ethic, as expressed by Julian Assange: ?privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.?
Brin?s response was scathing. The ethic, he says, is ?already enshrined in law. A meek normal person can sue for invasion of privacy, a prominent person may not.? He?s just getting started:
But at a deeper level it is simply stupid. Any loophole in transparency ?to protect the meek? can far better be exploited by the mighty than by the meek. Their shills, lawyers and factotums will (1) ensure that ?privacy protections? have big options for the mighty and (2) that those options will be maximally exploited. Moreover (3) as I show in The Transparent Society, encryption-based ?privacy? is the weakest version of all. The meek can never verify that their bought algorithm and service is working as promised, or isn?t a bought-out front for the NSA or a criminal gang.
Above all, protecting the weak or meek with shadows and cutouts and privacy laws is like setting up Potemkin villages, designed to create surface illusions. Anyone who believes they can blind society?s elites ? of government, commerce, wealth, criminality and tech-geekery ? is a fool?
In other words, cypherpunk may be doing a disservice by spreading the illusion of freedom from surveillance.
I posed a similar question to Adrian Lamo, who reported Bradley Manning to federal authorities. Not surprisingly, Lamo is even more cynical.
?Privacy is quite dead,? he responded to me in an email. ?That people still worship at its corpse doesn?t change that. In [the unreleased documentary] Hackers Wanted I gave out my SSN, and I?ve never had cause to regret that. Anyone could get it trivially. The biggest threat to our privacy is our own limited understanding of how little privacy we truly have.?
In Cypherpunks, Assange raises an essential point that at least partly refutes this skepticism: ?The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.? And while Appelbaum admits that even strong encryption can?t last forever, saying, ?We?re probably not using one hundred year (safe) crypto,? he implies that pretty good privacy that lasts a pretty long time is far better than no privacy at all.
Assuming that some degree of privacy is still possible, most people don?t seem to think it?s worth the effort. The cypherpunks and their ilk fought to keep things like the PGP encryption program legal ? and we don?t use them. We know Facebook and Google leak our personal online habits like a sieve and we don?t make much effort to cover our tracks. Perhaps some of us buy the good citizen cliché that if you?re not doing anything wrong, you don?t have anything to worry about, but most of us are just opting for convenience. We?ve got enough to deal with day to day without engaging in a privacy regimen. Occasionally, some slacker may lose his job because he posted a photo of himself cradling his bong or the like, but as with civil liberties more generally, as long as the daily outrages against individuals don?t reach epic proportions, we rubberneck in horror and then return to our daily activities.
Beneath this complacent surface lies a disquieting and mostly unexamined question. To what degree is the ubiquity of state surveillance a form of intimidation, a way to keep people away from social movements or from directly communicating their views?
Throughout its entire history, the FBI has used secret intelligence operations to spy on, disrupt, and otherwise target activists and groups it considered subversive (mostly on the political left). The most notorious incidents occurred between 1956 and 1971, under the umbrella of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). When the FBI?s activities were revealed first in 1971 and later, more fully by the 1976 Church Committee, no politically astute person shrugged it off. It was understood without question that mega surveillance of political activists was an act of suppression period,full stop.
Part of the shock of the COINTELPRO revelations was the FBI?s engagement in illegal activities to destroy political organizations. The government?s violation of its own surveillance laws even trumped the desire to punish the ?symbolic bombings? of the Weather Underground. Since the FBI used illegal breaking and entering surveillance in an attempt to destroy the radical group, the leaders received light sentences when they emerged from underground. The same FBI techniques, once illegal, are undoubtedly so legal now under anti-terrorism laws that US Attorney General Holder could conduct the searches personally, dressed like Elvis and surrounded by the Real Housewives of Orange County in front of the cameras on a popular reality show.
It?s not as though the spirit of COINTELPRO has left us. Jacob Appelbaum, who has never been accused of any crime, has been subjected to relentless harassment, starting in the summer of 2010, when he was held up at Newark Airport where he was frisked, his laptop was inspected, and his three mobile phones were taken. He was then passed along to US Army officials for four hours of questioning. One army interrogator told him, menacingly, ?You don?t look like you?re going to do so well in prison.? Several contacts found on the confiscated cell phones were then also given a hard time at airports and border crossings. In December of that year he was ? along with other WikiLeaks activists ? one of the subjects of a court order that compelled Twitter to let the feds snoop inside his account. (He only knows this because Twitter won a petition to be able to inform the subjects.) He has since been continually harassed by airport security and has been detained at the US border twelve times.
That this harassment is happening to someone who hasn?t been charged with a crime is particularly frightening.
?The Galgenhumor of our era,? Appelbaum told me in an email, ?revolves around things that most people simply thought impossible in our lifetime.? He lists a number of chilling examples, including indefinite detention under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, warrantless wiretaps, drone strikes, state-sponsored malware, and the Patriot Act.
?It isn?t a great time to be a dissenting voice of any kind in our American empire,? he continues. But it isn?t the myriad of ways that civil liberties have been gutted that we?ll look back upon. ?What we will remember is the absolute silence of so many, when the above things became normalized.?
*
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