“What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated.” Jaron Lanier
In the September issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Joseph Gross writes:
Lying there in the junk-mail folder, in the spammy mess of mortgage offers and erectile-dysfunction drug ads, an e-mail from an associate with a subject line that looked legitimate caught the man’s eye. The subject line said “2011 Recruitment Plan.” It was late winter of 2011. The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA. RSA is the security division of the high-tech company EMC. Its products protect computer networks at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, most top defense contractors, and a majority of Fortune 500 corporations.
The parent company disclosed the breach on March 17 in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The hack gravely undermined the reputation of RSA’s popular SecurID security service. As spring gave way to summer, bloggers and computer-security experts found evidence that the attack on RSA had come from China. They also linked the RSA attack to the penetration of computer networks at some of RSA’s most powerful defense-contractor clients—among them, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications. Few details of these episodes have been made public.
The RSA and defense-contractor hacks are among the latest battles in a decade-long spy war. Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits. Because virtual attacks can be routed through computer servers anywhere in the world, it is almost impossible to attribute any hack with total certainty. Dozens of nations have highly developed industrial cyber-espionage programs, including American allies such as France and Israel. And because the People’s Republic of China is such a massive entity, it is impossible to know how much Chinese hacking is done on explicit orders from the government. In some cases, the evidence suggests that government and military groups are executing the attacks themselves. In others, Chinese authorities are merely turning a blind eye to illegal activities that are good for China’s economy and bad for America’s. Last year Google became the first major company to blow the whistle on Chinese hacking when it admitted to a penetration known as Operation Aurora, which also hit Intel, Morgan Stanley, and several dozen other corporations. (The attack was given that name because the word “aurora” appears in the malware that victims downloaded.) Earlier this year, details concerning the most sweeping intrusion since Operation Aurora were discovered by the cyber-security firm McAfee. Dubbed “Operation Shady rat,” the attacks (of which more later) are being reported here for the first time. Most companies have preferred not to talk about or even acknowledge violations of their computer systems, for fear of panicking shareholders and exposing themselves to lawsuits—or for fear of offending the Chinese and jeopardizing their share of that country’s exploding markets. The U.S. government, for its part, has been fecklessly circumspect in calling out the Chinese.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes:
Anders Behring Breivik’s world view seems to have been shaped by online fantasy games and the anti-Islamist blogosphere – a recipe for national fragmentation.
There is a reason why the Norwegian police have not been overly concerned with rightwing extremism in recent years. It is plainly not very visible. An estimated 40 Norwegians currently belong to self-proclaimed extreme rightwing groups.
However, anyone familiar with the darker waters of the blogosphere would for years have been aware of the existence of a vibrant cyberscene characterised by unmitigated hatred of the new Europe, aggressive denunciations of the “corrupted, multiculturalist power elites” and pejorative generalisations about immigrants, targeting Muslims in particular.
Contributors to these websites, blogs and chat groups cannot merely be labelled “rightwing”. One member of the Norwegian “Forum Against Islamisation” was also a member of the Socialist Left party. Others see themselves as the true heirs of social democratic values, or as the last carriers of the torch of the Enlightenment. Many talk about gender equality, some about social injustices and class. Others hold more conventional rightwing views, ranging from downright racism to paranoid conspiracy theories about Muslims plotting to take political control of western Europe. Some are online daily; others drop in once a month. They constitute loose networks and cannot easily be counted.
What the denizens of this blogosphere have in common is, first and foremost, a resentment of the defenders of diversity. These “elite” are often described as “traitors”, “sellouts” or just “naive multiculturalists”. They also share the conviction that Islam is incompatible with the democratic values of the west. This view is problematic in a country where the Muslim population is over 150,000 and growing. Nobody knows how widespread such views are, but they can no longer be written off as harmless.
The fact that Breivik was Made in Norway, a homegrown terrorist with a hairdo and an appearance suggesting the west end of Oslo, and not a bearded foreign import, should lead not only to a closer examination of these networks, but also to a calm, but critical reflection over the Norwegian self-identity itself. It would come as a relief to many if the leadership of the country were to state unequivocally that religion and skin colour were irrelevant to membership in the Norwegian nation. King Haakon VII, who reigned from 1905 to 1957, famously said that he was “the king of the communists, too”. King Harald V could hardly do better, in the current situation, than pointing out that he is “the king of Norwegian Muslims, Sikhs, Jews and Hindus, too”. Perhaps it goes without saying, yet a statement of this kind would cleanse the air in a situation where extreme xenophobia and religious prejudice have been the source of inspiration for unspeakably atrocious acts.
Every country needs some degree of cohesion. Just how much is a legitimate matter of dispute. Some believe that cultural pluralism is a recipe for fragmentation and the loss of trust. This may be the case, but not necessarily. So long as common institutions function impartially – education, housing, work etc – a society can live well with considerable diversity. However, the moment we cease to speak to each other, something serious is under way. This is exactly what happened with Breivik and many of his co-believers: they developed a parallel reality on the internet.
Nancy Messieh writes:
Ask any Egyptian how much of an influence the Internet was in the nation’s uprising, the first thing they’ll probably do is roll their eyes at you. I’ve certainly mentioned it countless times – International media found the perfectly convenient package of the Facebook revolution fueled by a Google executive. A better lede couldn’t have been written if they had made it up themselves.
But the thing is, there is as much fiction in that phrase as there is fact. Yes the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said, created by the Google executive Wael Ghonim, was instrumental in mobilizing a certain demographic in Egypt. But long after Hosny Mubarak was toppled, figures have emerged to prove that calling the uprising in Egypt in any way, shape or form, a Facebook Revolution, is almost as ridiculous as the short-lived name, the Lotus Revolution, a name which had absolutely nothing to do with the movement.
In case you’re curious, the Lotus Revolution was a name that followed the just as ill-thought out name for the Tunisian uprising, the Jasmine Revolution. Both names were no doubt dreamed up by journalists who had visited the countries once upon a time, and were enamoured with the exotic, oriental, incense-filled alleyways of Cairo and Tunis. The reality of these uprisings couldn’t be further from the Orientalist postcard snapshot that is continually forced down our throats.
The reality of the uprising in Tunisia is that it was sparked by a young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire, because that was the only form of protest he had left to use. The reality of the uprising in Egypt is that it was sparked by a young man, Khaled Said, who was brutally beaten to death in an alleyway, while people watched, helpless as he begged for his life.
So with that in mind, it’s no surprise that the Wikileaks parody ad that seemed to be taking a bit of credit for the Egyptian revolution has sparked outrage among Egyptian activists.
Adele M. Stan writes:
It started with a phone-hacking scandal at a British tabloid, but the scandal now engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire encompasses several of his newspapers, including the once-venerable U.K. paper, the Sunday Times, and points to malfeasance by Murdoch’s top lieutenant, Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International who is now based in New York in his current role as CEO of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. News International is the News Corp division that comprises all of Murdoch’s British papers.
Although yesterday’s revelations are rich in new details, those details simply reinforce a narrative that has long defined the company ethos of News Corp, an ethos we describe in four points:
- The targeting of Rupert Murdoch’s political enemies
- Lying to public officials in official investigations
- Buying the silence of troublesome employees
- Lack of full disclosure of conflicts of interest
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports:
Thousands of online protestors used Facebook and Twitter to urge others not to buy The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times or even to watch Sky.
One Facebook group called ‘Boycott News International’, which boasts nearly 8,000 members, insisted its members should to refuse to buy the company’s newspaper titles.
It added that cancelling subscriptions to Sky would also send a clear message to the troubled 80-year-old chairman.
Meanwhile, a similar twitter campaign registered the domain name boycottmurdoch.com yesterday, with the intention of creating a site to bring “anti-Murdoch campaigners together for effective action.”
Its home page claimed the media mogul’s companies “propagate a false image of the world, exaggerate news stories, and spin an agenda which fits Murdoch’s business interests.”
Carne Ross writes:
On the internet, as elsewhere, information is money, and information is power. So why have we given it away so lightly?
Something extraordinary has taken place over the last few years. Voluntarily, and without coercion or, indeed, payment, internet users have handed over vast amounts of highly personal data – their preferences, where they live, who their friends are and what they do – to private companies, whose primary goal is to profit from that data. And every day, we hand over more, willingly.
On Facebook, we think we are sharing only with our friends the information – the news, the messages, the photos – that we place on “our” pages. But thanks to Facebook’s confusing privacy settings, users are propelled to default and “recommended” settings that make public almost everything – and in so doing, also permit Facebook to make use of your information. Yet more obscure are the complicated and multi-caveated user and privacy agreements most never bother to read. It is only here that Facebook admits that the content (your “intellectual property”) belongs to the company. They own it; once it’s on the site, you don’t.
Google’s professed aim, apart from its famous motto to “do no evil”, is to organise and share all the world’s information. Less loudly avowed is its parallel objective: to make large amounts of money from that venture. This is not a cynical view: profit is – and must be – the goal of all share-held enterprises. If Google did not promise good returns to its shareholders, its share price would collapse and it would cease to exist. (Facebook has not yet been floated on the stock market; it is widely assumed that it soon will be, for perhaps $50bn.)
Both Google and Facebook offer their services to users apparently for free. But the services are not of course free. Both companies sell the information that users provide – in search data, or personal profiles. Apparently, these companies mostly sell their (your) information to advertisers who mine the data in order to target consumers more effectively. But, despite fervent declarations about transparency, in fact, it’s very hard to find out exactly to whom they sell the data or what the “data miners” do with it. McDonald’s or the CIA? We’re not told, even though it is information about us that they are trading.
Robert Mackey writes:
While restrictions on independent reporting inside Syria make it difficult to say for certain what is going on in Hama, video posted online in recent weeks appears to show that Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city, has emerged as a center of the current uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
A generation ago, in 1982, before YouTube and ubiquitous camera phones, Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez, also used military force to crush an uprising in Hama, away from the world’s eyes. Before journalists were eventually allowed into Hama that year, after the bombardment was complete, at least 10,000 people are thought to have been killed.
That history makes every video clip showing tens of thousands of protesters packed into Hama’s central Assi Square somewhat remarkable. Among those clips is this video, said to have been filmed in the square two weeks ago, as a singer named Ibrahim Kashoush led the crowd in a rendition of his protest anthem, “Yalla Erhal Ya Bashar,” or, “It’s Time to Leave, Bashar.”
Johann Hari writes:
The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.
In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he “became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read”. He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. “What I’m struggling with,” he writes, “is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there’s something out there that merits my attention.”
I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.
No, don’t misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn’t going to turn into an antedeluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there’s a reason why that word – “wired” – means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate”.
In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: “The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can’t afford to lose.”
We have now reached that point. And here’s the function that the book – the paper book that doesn’t beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.”
Barrett Brown writes:
For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals. And with expanded intelligence capabilities by which to monitor Arab populations in ways that would have previously been impossible, those same intelligence agencies now have improved means by which to provide information on dissidents to those regional dictators viewed by the U.S. as strategic allies.
The nature and extent of the operation, which was known as Romas/COIN and which is scheduled for replacement sometime this year by a similar program known as Odyssey, may be determined in part by a close reading of hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. Other details may be gleaned by an examination of the various other firms and individuals that are discussed as being potential partners.
Of course, there are many in the U.S. that would prefer that such details not be revealed at all; such people tend to cite the amorphous and much-abused concept of “national security” as sufficient reason for the citizenry to stand idly by as an ever-expanding coalition of government agencies and semi-private corporations gain greater influence over U.S. foreign policy. That the last decade of foreign policy as practiced by such individuals has been an absolute disaster even by the admission of many of those who put it into place will not phase those who nonetheless believe that the citizenry should be prevented from knowing what is being done in its name and with its tax dollars.
To the extent that the actions of a government are divorced from the informed consent of those who pay for such actions, such a government is illegitimate. To the extent that power is concentrated in the hands of small groups of men who wield such power behind the scenes, there is no assurance that such power will be used in a manner that is compatible with the actual interests of that citizenry, or populations elsewhere. The known history of the U.S. intelligence community is comprised in large part of murder, assassinations, disinformation, the topping of democratic governments, the abuse of the rights of U.S. citizens, and a great number of other things that cannot even be defended on “national security” grounds insomuch as that many such actions have quite correctly turned entire populations against the U.S. government. This is not only my opinion, but also the opinion of countless individuals who once served in the intelligence community and have since come to criticize it and even unveil many of its secrets in an effort to alert the citizenry to what has been unleashed against the world in the name of “security.”
Likewise, I will here provide as much information as I can on Romas/COIN and its upcoming replacement.
Although the relatively well-known military contractor Northrop Grumman had long held the contract for Romas/COIN, such contracts are subject to regular recompetes by which other companies, or several working in tandem, can apply to take over. In early February, HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrote the following e-mail to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, a company which until recently had been owned by Northrop and which was now looking to compete with it for lucrative contracts:
“I met with [[[Mantech]] CEO] Bob Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is looking to expand a capability in IO related to the COIN re-compete but more for DoD. He told me he has a few acquisitions in the works that will increase his capability in this area. So just a thought that it might be worth a phone call to see if there is any synergy and strength between TASC and ManTech in this area. I think forming a team and response to compete against SAIC will be tough but doable.” IO in this context stands for “information operations,” while COIN itself, as noted in an NDA attached to one of the e-mails, stands for “counter intelligence.” SAIC is a larger intelligence contractor that was expected to pursue the recompete as well.
Pisani agreed to the idea, and in conjunction with Barr and fellow TASC exec John Lovegrove, the growing party spent much of the next year working to create a partnership of firms capable of providing the “client” – a U.S. agency that is never specified in the hundreds of e-mails that follow – with capabilities that would outmatch those being provided by Northrop, SAIC, or other competitors.
Several e-mails in particular provide a great deal of material by which to determine the scope and intent of Romas/COIN. One that Barr wrote to his own e-mail account, likely for the purpose of adding to other documents later, is entitled “Notes on COIN.” It begins with a list of entries for various facets of the program, all of which are blank and were presumably filled out later: “ISP, Operations, Language/Culture, Media Development, Marketing and Advertising, Security, MOE.” Afterwards, another list consists of the following: “Capabilities, Mobile Development, Challenges, MOE, Infrastructure, Security.” Finally, a list of the following websites is composed, many of which represent various small companies that provide niche marketing services pursuant to mobile phones.
More helpful is a later e-mail from Lovegrove to Barr and some of his colleagues at TASC in which he announces the following:
Our team consists of:
– TASC (PMO, creative services)
– HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO)
– Akamai (infrastructure)
– Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning)
– Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics)
– Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services)
– Cipher (strategy, planning operations)
– PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic
partners)– Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development – long
list of strategic partners)– Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list of strategic partners)
We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.
From these and dozens of other clues and references, the following may be determined about the nature of Romas/COIN:
1. Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.
2. There’s discussion of bringing in a “gaming developer,” apparently at the behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of “a social gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc.” Lovegrove elsewhere notes: “I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.”
3. Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a “Hostile to Privacy” rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a “bug.”
4. The program makes use of several providers of “linguistic services.” At one point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist. Elsewhere, Barr writes: “I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have to have the cultural relevance as well.”
5. Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as “businesses to contact.” The former specializes in “social media monitoring tools.” The latter uses “sophisticated natural language processing methodology” in order to “process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily” while also employing “researchers and media analysts on the ground;” its website also notes that “Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before – exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products.”
6. At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron and others, “Can we name COIN Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.”
7. A diagram attached to one of Barr’s e-mails to the group (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/7/pmo.png/) depicts Magpii as interacting in some unspecified manner with “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web.” Magpii is a project of Barr’s own creation which stands for “Magnify Personal Identifying Information,” involves social networking, and is designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although details are difficult to determine from references in Barr’s e-mails, he discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.
8. There are sporadic references such things as “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” “specialized linguistics,” and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.
9. Barr asks the team’s partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him as being from the company’s Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to provide him “a contact at Pixar/Disney.”
Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.
Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN, the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the “CO [contracting officer] for COIN.” “The current procurement approach is cancelled [sic], she cited changed requirements,” he reported. “They will be coming out with some documents in a month or two, most likely an updated RFI [request for information]. There will be a procurement following soon after. We are on the list to receive all information.” On January 18th of next year, Lovegrove provided an update: “I just spoke to the group chief on the contracts side (Doug K). COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey. He says that it is in the formative stages and that something should be released this year. The contracting officer is Kim R. He believes that Jason is the COTR [contracting officer’s technical representative].” Another clue is provided in the ensuing discussion when a TASC executive asks, “Does Odyssey combine the Technology and Content pieces of the work?”
The unexpected change-up didn’t seem to phase the corporate partnership, which was still a top contender to compete for the upcoming Odyssey procurement. Later e-mails indicate a meeting between key members of the group and the contracting officer for Odyssey at a location noted as “HQ,” apparently for a briefing on requirements for the new program, on February 3rd of 2011. But two days after that meeting, the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in retaliation for Barr’s boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the movement’s “leadership;” 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.
Along with clues as to the nature of COIN and its scheduled replacement, a close study of the HBGary e-mails also provide reasons to be concerned with the fact that such things are being developed and deployed in the way that they are. In addition to being the driving force behind the COIN recompete, Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.
That such firms will continue to target the public with advanced information warfare capabilities on behalf of major corporations is by itself an extraordinary danger to mankind as a whole, particularly insomuch as that such capabilities are becoming more effective while remaining largely unknown outside of the intelligence industry. But a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better “situational awareness” on entire populations while also being able to manipulate the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations. The idea that such power can be wielded without being misused is contradicted by even a brief review of history.
History also demonstrates that the state will claim such powers as a necessity in fighting some considerable threat; the U.S. has defended its recent expansion of powers by claiming they will only be deployed to fight terrorism and will never be used against American civilians. This is cold comfort for those in the Arab world who are aware of the long history of U.S. material support for regimes they find convenient, including those of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and the House of Saud. Nor should Americans be comforted by such promises from a government that has no way of ensuring that they will be kept; it was just a few months ago that a U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered a military intelligence unit to use pysops on visiting senators in an effort to secure increased funding for the war, an illegal act; only a few days prior, CENTCOM spokesmen were confidently telling the public that such other psychological capabilities as persona management would never be used on Americans as that would be illegal. The fact is that such laws have been routinely broken by the military and intelligence community, who are now been joined in this practice by segments of the federal contracting industry.
It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing segment of the world’s population. The powerful institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the process of creating them.
Barrett Brown
Project PM
Barrett Brown is a contributor to Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post and Skeptical Inquirer, and is author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, as well as an upcoming book on the deficits of the America media. He is the founder of the distributed thinktank Project PM. Barrett can be contacted at barriticus at gmail.
For more on Aaron Barr, read “How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price.”
“There was no person more feared by the company [the CIA] than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America.” Philip Agee
“On October 9th, 1967, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was put to death by Bolivian soldiers, trained, equipped and guided by U.S. Green Beret and CIA operatives.” Peter Kornbluh
The Guardian reports:
Hillary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation at the US state department has lauded the way the internet has become “the Che Guevara of the 21st century” in the Arab Spring uprisings.
Speaking at the Guardian’s Activate summit in London on Wednesday, Alec Ross said “dictatorships are now more vulnerable than ever” as disaffected citizens organise influential protest movements on Facebook and Twitter.
The US has pledged to back the pro-democracy movements that have swept the Middle East and north Africa since January. Ross welcomed the “redistribution of power” from autocratic regimes to individuals, describing the internet as “wildly disruptive” during the protests in Egypt and Tunisia.
“Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part – but not entirely – because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual,” he said.
“One thesis statement I want to emphasise is how networks disrupt the exercise of power. They devolve power from the nation state – from governments and large institutions – to individuals and small institutions. The overarching pattern is the redistribution of power from governments and large institutions to people and small institutions.”
Ross said that the internet had “acted as an accelerant” in the Arab spring uprisings, pointing to the dislodging of former Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in little over a month. The internet had facilitated leaderless movements, Ross added, describing it as the “Che Guevara of the 21st century”.
The Guardian reports:
The mysterious identity of a young Arab lesbian blogger who was apparently kidnapped last week in Syria has been revealed conclusively to be a hoax. The blogs were written by not by a gay girl in Damascus, but a middle-aged American man based in Scotland.
Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old Middle East activist studying for a masters at Edinburgh University, posted an update declaring that, rather than a 35-year-old feminist and lesbian called Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, he was “the sole author of all posts on this blog”.
“I never expected this level of attention,” he wrote in a posting allegedly emanating from “Istanbul, Turkey”.
“The events [in the Middle East] are being shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.”
The admission – confirmed in an email to the Guardian from MacMaster’s wife – apparently ends a mystery that has convulsed parts of the internet for almost a week. But it provoked a furious response from those who had supported the blogger’s campaign, with some in the Syrian gay community saying he had risked their safety and seriously harmed their cause.
Adam Curtis‘ latest documentary, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” is well worth watching — all three hours — even if by its conclusion he has not neatly tied together all its disparate threads and even if his style of production has a frenetic choppiness — “I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote,” a reviewer joked about one of his previous pieces.
Curtis is perhaps best known as the creator of the BBC documentary series, “The Power of Nightmares,” which examined the politics of fear post-9/11.
His new documentary, just aired in the UK but presumably close to completion before the Arab uprisings began, nevertheless has relevance for every revolution across the region. The prospect of the end of dictatorial rule easily eclipses concern about what might follow — events of the present evoke a sense that the future can take care of itself. The leaderless movements currently reshaping the Arab world have organic features that sometimes seem to imply that social justice might just be a natural fruit.
But the history of self-organizing networks — a topic at the core of Curtis’ film — is that the egalitarian hopes these would-be post-political systems embody rest on an illusory foundation.
This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.
But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has become the model for utopian ideas of human ‘self-organizing networks’ – dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders, as in the Facebook and Twitter revolutions, and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory.
This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counterculture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world.
But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But the dream of the self-organizing network had by now captured our imaginations – because it offered an alternative to the dangerous and discredited ideas of politics. [Source: BBC]
Part One: Love and Power
(Watch Part Two here and Part Three here.)
To hear it from the New York Times (and Hillary Clinton), the US government’s latest efforts to support overseas dissidents are nothing more nor less than the noble expression of the American love of freedom. Perhaps that’s why this article makes no reference to Wikileaks (or Haystack) but does in part rely on information derived from classified diplomatic cables “obtained” by the paper. That presumably means classified information revealed by the administration to journalists who can be relied on to incorporate such information into a government-approved narrative.
The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”
This freedom-narrative gets a bit farcical, however, when we are told that an “independent” cellphone network is being constructed in Afghanistan using towers built inside US military bases. It’s only by paragraph 37 that we are reminded, “The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering.” Indeed.
Which begs a question — a question that the New York Times reporters do not venture to ask: Do the administration’s efforts to provide global revolutionaries with better tools have more to do with enhancing the US government’s ability to monitor these rapidly evolving networks, than with advancing democracy?
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.
