More regarding the SOPA protest

The Democracy Now interview above with Corynne McSherry is from Tuesday: 'Wikipedia, Reddit to shut down sites Wednesday to protest SOPA'


Presently the Obama administration is making vague noises against SOPA and PIPA, but their track record suggests the president will eventually sign a bill that's substantially the same as what they're looking at now, as he did with NDAA.

Technorati: List of sites going dark today

Google re sopa

Below, NO SOPA: 'American Censorship Day'
Uploaded by The AlyonaShow on Nov 16, 2011

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on their version of the bill known as SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act. The Protect IP Act would allow the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites they see as engaging in infringing activities, to be blocked by ISP providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks all without a court hearing or trial. Numerous groups have come out against it but will Congress listen. O'Reilly Media's Alexander Howard discusses.




Per Rob Payne's suggestion, here's what I wrote in comments yesterday:

As is so often the case, the devil is in the details. In practical terms, SOPA and PIPA negate the rights of the accused, and create a set of conditions which privilege larger corporations over smaller ones, and the more politically connected over the less powerful, whenever there might be a copyright dispute.

SOPA allows a complaining party to have content they don't care for removed from a website and the web site shut down, just based on filing a complaint, skipping court hearings and trials and such.

Part of the problem is the real-world selective nature of enforcement. In all likelihood most people have potentially illegally obtained copyrighted material in their possession, in negligible quantities. Most blogs that feature quotations or images from elsewhere probably are in violation of copyright, at least in a small way, even if they don't actually cause any tangible harm to the copyright holder, and the copyright holder is generally unlikely to go after you are me or your pal Digby, etc.

But imagine if, for example, a copyright holder can shut you down outright, without providing proof.

Presently the complainant(if that's the right word) has to ask a court to compel you to remove the offending material, which might just be a few lines of text or an image on one article at a blog, out of dozens or hundreds of posts, and usually demonstrate that they've been harmed if they also want to collect financial damages. Because of this requirement, generally big companies just send letters from their lawyers to the offending party(who may not know he's violating copyright), and the thing in question is often removed without legal proceedings, etc.

Let's say that a major establishment news portal is scooped by some small-fry blog or indie news site, like Counterpunch or Consortium News or even Free Republic, and "CorporateNews.com" decides to just ask a judge the Justice department to shut them down, alleging that they stole a story, without proof.

Or a songwriter wants to sue a major recording act, alleging that they stole an obscure song of his, and the big label turns around and makes a counter-claim, because they know they don't have to prove anything, and the judge is more likely to favor the better known and therefore more respectable party.

(Actually, SOPA borrows a page from the war on drugs in that respect, because it creates an incentive to shut people down so you can take their stuff, or at least eliminate the competition.)

I wish I could post an image of the KFO-signal, a lá a certain old time comic book superhero, and then maybe he could better evaluate the scenarios I offer regarding SOPA, but naturally I don't want DC comics to get on my case.


And finally, Hitler reacts to SOPA.

Wiki blackout

Maybe you've seen this. Wikipedia explain their actions here:
Wikipedia’s community calls for anti-SOPA blackout January 18

Now Wikipedia is a huge web presence, and this blackout may call more attention to the nefariousness of SOPA and PIPA than the mealy-mouthed and vague descriptions of them that you'll get from most major journalistic media portals.

From their statement:

It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.

In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

I've written about this before, here and here. My impression is that a lot of people just don't understand the gravity of the threat. Possibly this is partly due to a general unease people have with the rapidly changing pace of technology, and they revert to an "if in doubt, better trust authority" mindset.

...

4 December 2011

via Skeptical Eye, "75 Years in Prison For Videotaping Police"
[the youtube link is here.]

(I've discussed this trend before: "The right to be forgotten.")


Thomas Rogers, in Salon: The Internet: Triumph of human evolution
The Web is more than just a powerful tool, it's our greatest adaptation. An expert explains why

The Internet allows us to do all kinds of things we never imagined possible. It lets us communicate with people across the world. We can learn whatever we want at the click of a button. We can navigate roads using our iPhones, and translate languages within seconds. It makes us smarter, and more versatile, and faster than ever. But the Web isn’t just a truly extraordinary invention, it is the apex of human evolution — and the ultimate evolutionary adaptation.

It may seem strange to think of the Web as part of the process of natural selection, but Raymond Neubauer, a professor at the University of Texas, doesn’t think so. In his far-reaching new book, “Evolution and the Emergent Self,” he argues that technology should be seen as part of our planet’s grand evolutionary narrative.

Neubauer's book sounds interesting, but I doubt I'll read it because of my limited time and budget. Although it occurs to me from what I gleaned from Rogers's article, that the prof is more likely channeling Hegel than Darwin, because I see several decades of devolution likely to be in store for us.

see also Ian Welsh, "Public Opinion is Irrelevant"

Battlefield USA

photo: Steve Rhodes


Monday, Nov. 28th : Robert johnson, Business Insider: Secret Bill To Be Voted On Today Would Allow The Military To Sweep Up US Citizens At Home Or Abroad

Either Monday or Tuesday the Senate will vote on a bill that allows the US military to imprison civilians with no formal charges and hold them with no trial.

The ACLU reports even US citizens wouldn't be immune as the legislation aims to declare national territory part of the "battlefield" in the War on Terror.

Termed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and drafted behind closed doors by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.)

Tuesday November 29th: Dave Dayden, Firedoglake: Udall Amendment Fails, Setting Up Showdown on Defense Authorization Bill | FDL News Desk

Mark Udall’s amendment to strip out indefinite detention provisions from the defense authorization bill failed today, and the bill will likely pass.


Senate rollcall for the Udall amendment:
Which reads, "To revise the provisions relating to detainee matters."


Incidentally, voting against the Udall amendment included

Bob Casey (D-PA)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
Kay Hagan (D-NC)
Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Carl Levin (D-MI)
Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Ben Nelson (D-NE)
Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Jack Reed (D-RI)
Jean Shaheen (D-NH)
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

While Republicans Rand Paul(KY) and Mark Kirk(IL) voted for the amendment.

And FDL commenter wrote:

Dayden: If Obama follows through with the veto, there will have to be some change to the bill, if the 37 voting for the Udall amendment hold out. I smell an unsatisfying compromise.

There really aren’t 37 votes it’s all staged when the chips are down. That’s why they have cloakrooms to decide who’s the hero and who’s the Goat . And the waiting for the “peoples” president to veto it Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha .

Over at the libertarian Daily Paul, another commenter wrote:

Cowards Udall and Ron Wyden both voted FOR warrantless wiretaps – twice this year, but got favorable publicity for coming out against warrantless wiretaps.
In a nutshell, this bill will provide a loop-hole to our legal system, effectively nullifying the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th amendments.

I'll admit that BHO saying he'll veto doesn't reassure me. And as far as the second comment goes, I'm reminded of how back in the '90s Phil Gramm supposedly took credit for social programs he'd voted to ax beforehand, and how some New Republic writer referred to it as Gramm-standing.

I note also that neither senator from Alaska voted.(the vote was 60-38.) Maybe they were fishing.


Politically engaged bloggers and others often think Americans are especially dense, and certainly too many are. But I note that if you rely on major news portals to tell you what's been going on today, you're far more likely to have heard about Ann Coulter cursing on a talk show or Conrad Murray being sentenced than any of this, so it's not all the fault of ignorant people that they're ignorant. We often hear of "low-information voters," usually referred to disparagingly. Maybe another part of the problem is "medium-information voters", who are led by CBS, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, et al, to believe that they are in fact high-information voters and getting all the information they need. Ironically, Fox News as a reassuringly nutty counterpoint probably helps reinforce this impression for some. And if you are one of those medium-information voters and somebody tells you about these things, after such a convincing portrait of the lay of the political land has been offered to you, what must you think?

"Oh, what a whack-job."

Yes, a lot of people are goons who if they knew about this would cheer it on. While still others might feel squeamish about such a development, but would try to reassure themselves that the purpose is to protect us, and surely "they" wouldn't abuse it, etc, not because they necessarily believe it, but because it makes not fighting and just ducking your head and abiding with how things are a bit more bearable.(I have a feeling this group is much larger.) But how many people who would oppose this will even know?

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win."

Yeah, sure. If you like the Gandhi quote, there's also this:


"The incestuous relationship between government and big business thrives in the dark"- Jack Anderson

I've never once seen that on the bumper of an automobile. Why, I don't know.



see also Information Clearing House, Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window
(via Mr Pez)

Fort Worth Star-Telegram/AP "Senate panel pushes defense bill with detainee provisions White House opposes"






...

Oakland, October 2011: Scott Olsen

Huffington Post, Oakland Police Critically Injure Iraq War Vet During Occupy March

The local police's use of force seriously injured an Occupy activist and Iraq War veteran. Scott Olsen, 24, remains sedated on a respirator, in stable but critical condition at Oakland’s Highland Hospital after being hit in the head with a police projectile. Olsen's roommate, Keith Shannon, 24, told The Huffington Post that Olsen is still in the emergency room.
[...]
Activists staged Tuesday night’s march through downtown Oakland in response to a violent police raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment earlier that day, during which officers rained tear gas and rubber bullets on the activists in an effort to clear the camp. Police arrested scores of protesters during the eviction.

When reached at her Wisconsin home, Sandra Olsen, Scott's mother, told HuffPost that her son's condition was serious. "He has a head injury," she said. "They are still trying to figure it out with him. I don't want to tie up the phone line. He's not in the best shape."

San Jose Mercury News, Marine Scott Olsen injured during Occupy Wall Street confrontation in Oakland

Yahoo/AP: Iraq war vet injured during Oakland protests
(also here: Boston Globe)

Scott Olsen, 24, suffered a fractured skull Tuesday in a march with other protesters toward City Hall, said Dottie Guy, of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. The demonstrators had been making an attempt to re-establish a presence in the area of a disbanded protesters’ camp when they were met by officers in riot gear.

It’s not known exactly what type of object struck Olsen or who might have thrown it, though Guy’s group said it was lodged by officers. Several small skirmishes had broken out in the night with police clearing the area by firing tear gas and protesters throwing rocks and bottles at them.

What hit him? Who knows. Who threw it or launched it? Also unclear. But evidently the protesters definitely threw rocks and bottles. It's plausible that they did, or at least some of them did, but still.

Oakland: 25 October 2011

The first clip, from RT, seems to be from earlier in the day, while the second was posted around 11 pm or midnight Pacific Time.

Yahoo/AP: "Patience with protester waste, crime wears thin across U.S." MEGHAN BARR - Associated Press

Also here: Boston Herald, ABC News

Whose patience is unspecified, at least in the headline. Possibly it's unimportant.

Tuesday, Oct 25, 2011
Justin Elliott, Salon: "Police in riot gear raid Occupy Oakland And tear down protesters' tent city"

Alternet.org: An eyewitness account of the protesters' eviction from Frank Ogawa Plaza


2 things from Facebook:

2. somebody else: Incredible!!! I just listened to the audio of an Oakland TV station talking about the crackdown there tonite. So why, one flak asked, do you think the violence started here in Oakland when there are so many other locations?Was that jerk kidding? He's got the most violent police force in the country, with that track record established over many YEARS, and he wants to know why the violence started there? Here's a clue, jerkwad. Look for the guys wearing uniforms. They're the perps.

Also, the jerks on that TV station were all agog over what they said were tear gas explosions, and how much further they were being launched this time. I could only hear what they were seeing, but that crap wasn't tear gas. That was the percussion bombs, and those dorks didn't even know the difference. No wonder the public ends up stupid.

I don't know what teargas canisters sound like when they discharge, nor what percussion bombs sound like, but it's definitely true that the Oakland P.D. has a bad reputation. Maybe it's ironic that I hear a helicopter overhead as I type this. Maybe police forces all over are a bit nervous right now.


see also
"Oakland police Sgt. Derwin Longmire sues city" April 7th, 2010

"Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts quits" October 11th, 2011

Suburbanites of the World Unite; you have nothing to lose but your supposedly good credit

update below

RT: "Police Use Excessive Force Against Mentally Disabled"

via skeptical eye


and, an interview with economist Raymond Lotta, below. There is something peculiar about his affect. Maybe he's uncomfortable being interviewed, or maybe he's concerned that she thinks he's actor Ray Liotta and doesn't actually know anything about economics. Certainly the clipped, impassive quality of the interviewer's demeanor makes him seem all the more antic.

(also via S. E.)



see also BBC, "A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism"

Actually, it seems there are quite a few articles and op-eds like this one above. I recall a similar item in Marketwatch fairly recently. What do you want to call it, the Late Capitalism meme?

"the right to be forgotten"

BBC: Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales criticises injunctions

The online encyclopaedia has fallen foul of UK privacy law in recent weeks, with details about those using super-injunctions appearing on the site.
[...]
Mr Wales said his personal view was that privacy laws were "grave injustices and human rights violations". "They should be done away with as quickly as possible. There should be no law constraining people from publishing legally obtained, factual information," he said. Exceptions to this would be information that was life-threatening, such as troop movements.
"But we aren't talking about that. This is embarrassing facts about politicians and celebrities".

I didn't know they were called "super-injunctions" in the UK. Actually, I was meaning to write about this topic a few weeks ago when I saw a dubiously titled Yahoo News/AP item [also here] about "the right to be forgotten" which smelled to me like one of those news items that is spun to make it seem like it was about the rights of 'the little guy' when in fact it was advocacy, via an ostensibly non-editorial, straight news story, regarding the rights of the wealthy and elites generally, and the presumptive rights of the encroaching security state, here and elsewhere.

Internet 'Right to be Forgotten' debate hits Spain:

MADRID – Their ranks include a plastic surgeon, a prison guard and a high school principal. All are Spanish, but have little else in common except this: They want old Internet references about them that pop up in Google searches wiped away. In a case that Google Inc. and privacy experts call a first of its kind, Spain's Data Protection Agency has ordered the search engine giant to remove links to material on about 90 people. The information was published years or even decades ago but is available to anyone via simple searches.

Scores of Spaniards lay claim to a "Right to be Forgotten" because public information once hard to get is now so easy to find on the Internet. Google has decided to challenge the orders and has appealed five cases so far this year to the National Court. Some of the information is embarrassing, some seems downright banal. A few cases involve lawsuits that found life online through news reports, but whose dismissals were ignored by media and never appeared on the Internet. Others concern administrative decisions published in official regional gazettes. In all cases, the plaintiffs petitioned the agency individually to get information about them taken down.

Why, for example, should a surgeon get the law to help him hide the fact that he was sued 18 years before? If one must regulate searches for court decisions, wouldn't a statement that automatically pops up reminding us that they may be subject to appeal be sufficient?

Some people get this and some people don't. Perhaps ironically, traditional, non-whackjob conservatism was supposed to be against this sort of thing. You know, before Freidman and "the Chicago Boys", before Thatcher and Reagan, etc. But that was then, and the expansion of the security state is very much an establishment, bipartisan project most places nowadays.

I remember a few years ago when "COPS" was really popular, before the digital 'blurring" technology was widely available, thinking they wouldn't dare do any of that crap with a camera crew if it was somebody in a nice neighborhood, but they take it for granted that they wont get into trouble with videotaping poor people. This is especially true as their privacy is being violated concurrently with their brush with the law, which for a poor person generally means a major economic hit, because while bail and attorney's fees of a few hundred or a few thousand may be a manageable irritant if you live in a tony suburb, but financially devastating if you're scraping by at eight or nine bucks an hour, and may take years to recover from.

In the early 90s I also saw an article about how threatened and intimidated one semi-anonymous participant felt, feeling she had to co-operate with the COPS people or she would face more grief from the actual cops, especially because of how chummy they seemed. I learned from the article* that they did in fact have the subjects sign waivers, but the narrative painted a picture of very difficult circumstances that suggested the very situation was inevitably coercive. Nowadays of course they blur their faces with digital editing, although there are questions that arise from that too. For example, the blurring of images will make it easy for people to think something is not being hidden from us when it is, and people will be more complacent about it. The edit is quicker than the eye.

More recently I remember hearing of a motorcyclist making the news with his helmet cam video [see video above; the autoblog.com link also includes a longer version of the video] which recorded a plainclothes Maryland state trooper stopping him and pulling a gun on him. He posted it on Youtube and shortly afterward the cops came with a warrant for his computers and camera, per a Md. state law against audibly recording someone without their consent. (It's a felony.)

I'm guessing the Maryland law has been on the books for a while and was originally intended to target surreptitious telephone recording, but clearly it was being utilized in Anthony Graber's case to quash his attempt to embarrass the state troopers. Graber was speeding and riding recklessly, no question, but the idea that it should be so easy for the authorities to be able to confiscate such recordings should sit uneasily with anybody who cares about the law protecting against unlawful police behavior and such.

I don't know what the answer is, and clearly the technologies are developing pretty rapidly. Maybe, for example, shows like "COPS" are a necessary evil in an open society, even as seem to exist to demonize and dehumanize poor people in the eyes of the viewers. I also wonder if the writing is on the wall, and the US may find itself becoming more like Spain and the UK in the future. Whatever happens, it pays to be skeptical when you see an article or program about privacy rights, and the courts and media purporting to be "looking out for the little guy."

more from the BBC article:
Experts warned that the lawyers of celebrities could turn the tables, pressing for ISPs and firms such as Twitter to hand over the details of who is publishing comments on the site.
To do so they would need to obtain what is known as a Norwich Pharmacal order from a judge, the same process used by rights holders to force ISPs to hand over details about alleged illegal file-sharers. "Celebrities could apply for Norwich Pharmacal orders against ISPs, Twitter or other parties holding data that may lead to the identification of a defendant," said solicitor Michael Forrester of law firm Ralli. "The position is much more difficult when dealing with companies based in the US, such as Twitter and Google.

see also Farhad Manjoo, Slate
"Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four: How Amazon's remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning's digital future"
Jul 20, 2009

BBC: Facebook smeared Google on privacy

Nikhil Pahwa, Medianama.com,
"India’s CyberCafe Rules Finalized; Foundation For Harassment"

via
Manan Kakkar, ZDNet,"India's new Internet laws go against fundamental right to freedom of speech"

*I don't remember the title; the article appeared in either Harper's or The Atlantic, I think this was in the latter part of 1993.

Good boys and girls abhor violence, but...

I kid, but I do recognize Pinsky is in an awkward position. I'm not clear what the law student is doing there. Maybe he was there to offer superficially patriotic blather about how children need to transcend or avoid certain distressing emotions and just study hard so they can go to Yale like him, or to kill time before the psychologist was on so she wouldn't have too much screen time in the segment lest she discuss something awkward.

If any CNN staffers were twiddling their thumbs prior to Operation Kill OBL, clearly this isn't the case this week. Kill OBL has been a productivity bonanza for the network:

• Navy SEALS, 'quiet pros', got bin Laden
• Military families on bin Laden's death
• Bin Laden celebrations 'overboard'?

• Will the Taliban make peace now?*
• 7 questions after bin Laden's death
• Maps: The bin Laden compound
• Why bin Laden was buried at sea
• How U.S. forces killed bin Laden

health
How bin Laden's body was identified

tech

• Bin Laden's death sets Twitter record
• Osama Facebook page goes viral
• Pakistani tweeted bin Laden raid

travel

• Humbled by kindness in Pakistan
• Bin Laden death prompts travel alerts

• Poll: How Obama fares in 2012
• President Obama: Juggler-in-chief
• Photos: The tense, final moments
• The father of U.S. Islamophobia
• Can the U.S. trust Pakistan?
• U.S. anticipates 'threats of retaliation'

opinion
Obeidallah: Bin Laden, Islamophobia

• Glick: Child asks: Are the wars over?
• Faddis: Can U.S. trust Pakistan?
• Chaffetz: Time to leave Afghanistan
• Victim's dad: I'm not celebrating
• Borger: Bin Laden killing long-planned

sports
Fans united by patriotism

Why young people cheer this death
Poll: Most Americans say bin Laden in Hell

Pakistan students doubt bin Laden dead [video]

Raid's impact for U.S. in Afghanistan

Obama 'death stare' photo draws notice [video]

*Why the onus is on the Taliban to make peace, as opposed to on the US to leave, is not explored. In fact Hillary Clinton saying "you'll never defeat us" sounds like she's saying we'll be there forever.

Daniel Ellsberg on Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks

'"Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg weighs in on the case of U.S. Army P.F.C. Bradley Manning, who currently stands accused of leaking over 260,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the website WikiLeaks. "I recognized someone who was in the same spirit as I was forty years ago," says Ellsberg. "He's a hero of mine."'

6 December 2010

update: Politico (via BDR): Ron Paul stands up for Julian Assange

Teresa Nielsen Hayden "Holding US journalism in contempt"

BBC: Wikileaks: Swiss bank freezes Julian Assange's account

The Swiss post office's bank, PostFinance, has frozen the accounts of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.The whistle-blowing website says the freeze includes a defence fund and personal assets worth 31,000 euros.

Rob Payne, "Dumping Assange"

BBC: China leadership 'orchestrated Google hacking'

Senior Chinese figures were behind the hacking of Google earlier this year which forced the search engine to quit the country, leaked US cables suggest. One cable, released by whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, cites a "well-placed" contact as saying the action against Google was "100% political". A politburo member is said to have been angered after Googling his name and finding critical comments online.

Richard Seymour, "Spanish government uses martial law to force strikers back to work"

the government, determined to crush the strike, declared a state of emergency and imposed martial law. And under martial law, the strikers could be subject to prison sentences for up to six years for sedition if they didn't return to work. Quelle surprise, the workers have felt compelled to return to work. In fact, just in case the threat of prison wasn't sufficient, the workers were actually rounded up by military escorts and marched back to work at gunpoint. This is not the first time that fascist-era legislation has been used against airport workers. But employers across the continent will be looking on in admiration and anticipation.

Ian Welsh, "Wikileaks And The End of the Open Internet"

Wikipedia's cablegate article: United States diplomatic cables leak

quote of the day-
from Ethan, regarding his bête noire:

You'd think that the motives of a bunch of millionaires deciding not to raise taxes on millionaires would be pretty easy to figure out, but apparently not!

(OK, this is from a few days ago, but I'm slow)

2 December 2010

Regarding Cablegate and Assange:

BDR

Silber (also here)

Greenwald, "The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics"

Karen Kwiatkowski, "The Proper Response to WikiLeaks"

Pepe Escobar, "Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors"

To some he is a traitor. To others he is the tool of a subtle propaganda campaign hatched by a spy agency. But what Julian Assange is really up to with WikiLeaks is more radical: crashing the carefully maintained information system that dominates our lives with its lies

And, less brightly:
re silber "okanogen" at Corrente, "Getting played"

An odd work of spin from Fareed Zakaria,
"WikiLeaks Shows the Skills of U.S. Diplomats"

A remarkably broad consensus has formed that WikiLeaks' latest data dump is a diplomatic disaster for the U.S. While there are debates over how the Obama Administration should respond, everyone agrees that the revelations have weakened America. But have they? I don't deny for a moment that many of the "wikicables" are intensely embarrassing, but the sum total of the output I have read is actually quite reassuring about the way Washington - or at least the State Department - works.

Assange seems to me the perfect illustration of a gestalt public figure. People see what they want when they look at him. I should say this isn't intrinsic to what he's trying to do but intrinsic to the whole situation. Do you wonder how many people , whether here or abroad, actually believe the charges against him have any merit, and are not a political smear? So much for Swedish neutrality, I guess.-JV


Matt Stoller, "End this Fed"

Modern American industrial policy is to push capital into housing, move manufacturing abroad, build a massive defense establishment, and maintain an oligarchic financial sector. This system isn’t a structural inevitability. (via BDR)

Two from Slate:
Timothy Noah, "McSurance"
Crap health coverage wins a regulatory victory.

Ted Conover, "The Pathetic Newburgh Four"
Should the FBI really be baiting sad-sack homegrown terrorists?

BBC: Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood 'faces heavy poll losses'

Rob Payne, "Not Complicated at All"

Terry Greene Sterling, Dallas Observer,"Whose Dole Is It, Anyway?"

The spread of technology: French Taser Death


John Blake, CNN: Is America on the path to 'permanent war'?

As the Afghanistan war enters its ninth year, author Andrew J. Bacevich and others ask: When does it end? They say the nation's national security leaders have put the U.S. on an unsustainable path to perpetual war.

(Richard Dreyfuss says we should call it the war against extremist islam. I guess we should listen to him because he's a famous actor. [video link])

Police seek domain closure powers: "

Domains deemed to be "criminal" by the police could be shut down, if proposals before the overseer of the UK's net addresses come into force."

Austerity stew: Is squirrel the perfect austerity dish?
‘Liberal Clause’ Christmas book boosts tea party candidate

the G20 and the Real News fund raiser

from their website today:

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How President Obama holds himself accountable

As I am sure most DH readers have already heard, Barack Obama said today that he is “accountable” for civilian deaths caused by the U.S. military in Afghanistan:

When there is a civilian casualty, that is not just a political problem for me. I am ultimately accountable, just as General McChrystal is accountable, for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed. And that something that I have to carry with me, and that anybody who is involved in a military operation has to carry with them.

And so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.

Jeremy Scahill responded with a series of questions in the virtual pages of The Nation:

That statement is quite remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is not true. How are President Obama or Gen. McChrystal accountable? Afghans have little, if any, recourse for civilian deaths. They cannot press their case in international courts because the US doesn't recognize an International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over US forces, Afghan courts have not and will not be given jurisdiction and Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear that the Justice Department will not permit cases against US military officials brought by foreign victims to proceed in US courts. So, what does it mean to be accountable for civilian deaths? Public apology? Press conferences? A handful of courts martial?

Actually, Obama and McChrystal both put a dollar into a jar for each dead civilian. They plan to donate the money to the USO.

500 cameras and nothing's on

also from last week: guard tasers kid who ran out on the field during Phillies home game. photo: Stephen M. Falk, Philly.com

in "Portrait of a Patsy," Xymphora writes:

It would be ridiculously easy to set up Faisal Shahzad. New American, a little on the make, with family in Pakistan and big financial problems. Friendly government agent approaches him and appeals to his patriotism and love of adventure, plus offers to pay well (note the history). First mission: infiltrate a 'terrorist' training camp in Pakistan (little does Shahzad know that the camp is really run by the CIA). Second mission: buy a cheap used car on Craigslist. Third mission: buy some fireworks. Fourth mission: stay at home awaiting further instructions. Shahzad, seeing his car on TV, suddenly got that Lee Harvey Oswald feeling, and decided it might be better to get out of the country before he died in a shoot-out.

Despite a gazillion cameras and CCTVs in Times Square, there is not the slightest evidence that Shahzad was actually there with the car. Complete absence of forensics in the car points to a government job. Strangely enough, so does the utter incompetence of the bomb - even without any training, Shahzad could have done better - and the fact that the bomb was modelled after the incompetent car bomb at Edinburgh (which Shahzad couldn't have known to copy - we're supposed to believe it came out of training at the same incompetent bomb-making school in Pakistan!)...

the rest is here. For years, Birchers and Goldwater fans used to go around with the bumper sticker that said, "I love my country but fear my government," and practically everybody agreed it was a right-wing sentiment. I don't know how you would characterize it today-- but I don't think you can characterize it as irrelevant.

The Salt Pit

[this post has been revised and expanded 3.31]

Ghairat Baheer is grateful for his freedom, the US, and Mohammed Karzai.

Is this statement true? I don’t know-- although I suspect while the first part may be, the second and third are probably not so true.Do you like how the pictures go together, with the suggestion that the man in the truck is looking approvingly at Obama, who is visiting his country this weekend? I matched them, like a low-rent, modern day Plutarch. The man on the left was imprisoned by the CIA in 202, and later released.

This is not news here in the US, in itself. By now most people here should know we imprison a lot of people in far off places. Regardless of how they may feel about it, most Americans who at least half-way pay attention to what’s going on are aware of this. But Baheer was captured and imprisoned along with a patient of his, and recently revealed documents revealed the CIA kinda killed Dr Baheer’s patient.

MSNBC/AP:"Death shed light on CIA ‘Salt Pit’ near Kabul"

[Gul Rahman] a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound northeast of the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison. Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.
[…]
Rahman was arrested with Dr. Ghairat Baheer, a physician who is Hekmatyar's son-in-law and a leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an insurgent faction blamed for numerous bombings and violence in Afghanistan.
Baheer, who said he spent six months in the Salt Pit during six years in Afghan prisons, said in an interview in Islamabad that he never learned what happened to Rahman. Rahman's family repeatedly pressed International Red Cross officials about his fate, Baheer said.
"If he died there in interrogation or he died a natural death they should have told his family and ended their uncertainty," Baheer said.
Rahman had driven from Peshawar, Pakistan, in the northwest frontier to Islamabad for a medical checkup. He was staying with Baheer, an old friend, when U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces stormed the house and took both men, two guards and a cook into custody.
After a week, Rahman was separated from the others. "That was the last time I saw him," said Baheer, now a member of a Hezb-e-Islami delegation that met this month in Kabul, the Afghan capital, for peace talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Baheer said he was flown to Afghanistan and taken to the Salt Pit, the code name for the abandoned brick factory turned CIA prison. In small, windowless cells, detainees were subjected to harsh treatment and at least one mock execution, according to several former CIA officials.

"I was left naked, sleeping on the barren concrete," said Baheer. His toilet was a bucket. Loudspeakers blared. Guards concealed their identity with masks and carried torches.
Baheer said his American interrogators would tie him to a chair and sit on his stomach. They hung[sic] him naked, he said, for hours on end.
[…]
A CIA medic at the site concluded the Afghan[Rahman] died of hypothermia. A doctor sent later confirmed that judgment. But the detainee's body was never returned to his family, and Baheer said his friend's relatives still don't know what happened.

"The Americans have had enough time," said Baheer. "After nearly eight years, enough is enough."

The commonplace conceit on many lefty blogs is to observe, perhaps sneeringly, that Americans want to be the good guys, but don't want to face up to what their government does. Well, stereotype or not, it's true as far as I can tell. I know I want Americans to be the good guys-- I don't think wanting that is the problem, per se. As far as I can see the problem is deciding that simply asserting we are is weirdly sufficient for some people. This magic trick renders our actual actions as secondary, and easily rationalized as any given situation may require.

(It's an interesting coincidence that the Christian Science Monitor is currently running a story about the supposed resurgence of American Calvinism, because to me the problem described above approximately parallels the difference between justification by works vs. justification by faith, and for the longest time I've felt that one of the problems with our foreign policy has been a reliance on a sort of Calvinist reasoning that undergirds US exceptionalism.)

Mimi often asks how do we change things, and Rob Payne often discusses our complacency before Empire, as he did yesterday. Here I'm saying that people need to discard American predestination, or at the very least decide to make some kind of peace with it, so that it causes no more trouble for ourselves and others. Maybe when we stereotypical 'Godless liberals' tell stories like that of Rahman we need to impress upon the listener not only the sin against Rahman and his brothers but the consequent corruption of the torturer's soul. It may sound strange and even indulgent and I know that justification by works has always made more sense to me, but then again I attended Catholic school through the 4th grade. Still, if that's the key to reach some people, we need to take another cue from Christ and not be too proud to try to reach the reachable by speaking in terms that mean something to them.

*****
some additional thoughts[3.31], per the comments:



Rob, yes, I think manifest destiny is very much an extension of the concept of predestination. It's a concept that I have a hard time with on both the national and personal level.

Mimi,I guess the challenge in this context is to persuade people

"what does it profit a man if his country maintains an empire and he loses his own soul?"

I suppose that sounds a bit mawkish but I think some people think like that, and at least some of them may be persuaded by such an argument.

Maybe you need to show people how the guy in the CIA and his victim were both victims of the Bushes and Obamas of the world in order to help them accept the idea that maybe the great brown horde of 1 billion Muslims might actually be, you know, people.

As an Arab-American it occasionally frustrates me to think that might be necessary, because sometimes I just want to say, "look: if you don't want people saying bad things about the US, then you should want the US to stop doing bad things, it really is that simple."

But I guess many people need illustrations-- I think about how Reagan was supposedly persuaded to put the brakes on the arms race because he watched the TV movie "the Day After."

Ideally, from that flows the notion that the Islamic world is not an intrinsic threat to us, and that resentment towards the US is not them "hating us for our freedoms," but founded on legitimate grievances which we can correct without sacrificing security. Many Americans are already there, and I'm convinced many more are malleable on this point. Besides, it's not a question of convincing every last person who considers himself an Evangelical to no longer support imperial wars without end, just enough of "them" to form a strong bloc of American voters against Empire. (Ironically, at one time back in the day it was precisely that portion of the populace that was most isolationist.)

[Watch "Prelude to War" from Capra's 1940s Why We Fight series sometime. Some of it is blunt propaganda, but some of scenes of the pulse-taking of the US are a revelation of a bygone world.]

If anything, I suspect it's probably upper-income voters, both republicans and democrats, who are the one group least amenable to be persuaded to reject the politics of Empire.

Stack attack

KXAN-TV

Joseph Stack's swan dive into the Austin IRS building is unlikely to result in any change, either in the behavior of the government or people's attitudes, apart from possibly more busy-work type regulations governing recreational aircraft and their pilots, or so I imagine. He obviously understood the Marxist concept of heightening the contradictions, when he wrote,

I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.

He also wrote, "Nothing changes unless there is a body count." One would like to think he is wrong about that-- I know I would. I read Stack's manifesto, much of which, considered apart from his actions, seems like the product of an intelligent and lucid mind. The FBI may have requested it taken down at www.embeddedart.com, but it's available at numerous web sites. To me the statement Stack's ISP has posted there, telling you they complied with the FBI's request and also directing you where to see his statement, reinforces the veracity of Rob's comments here. (And yes, I was struck by the coincidence that I posted Gerald Celente's comments regarding a possible tax revolt the night before.) Anyway, I got his manifesto at the Business Insider, where (if you want another cheap irony) you'll notice that the first 20 or so comments were deleted because of complaints.


I also looked for a second-hand Piper Cherokee online, not wanting to buy one(As if! Me mucho poor.) but curious how much they go for, especially since Stack complained about how much money he was out. They seem to average in the mid 30 thousand dollar range used, although I found one that "needs work" for a quick sale for 15 grand. I suppose if all you need it for is to crash into a building you wouldn't care too much if it needed fixing up, not that I'm recommending that sort of thing. The photos also suggest that the back seat of a Cherokee is pretty cramped, so if he really did remove it to put an additional fuel tank in there it couldn't have been that large a tank. If he really was planning ahead you'd think he would have bought a different plane.


Over at ATR, Jonathan Schwarz described Stack's sentiments as "96 % left-wing", then said he was wrong, and it was "more like 76% left-wing, 15% right-wing, and 9% miscellaneous." (There's a 40 plus comments discussion about this, which is still open as I write this). I suspect that Stack's words and their relative lefty or righty-ness won't be evaluated in the wider world based on any standard intellectual criteria, but simply based on him being a middle-aged white guy and that his beef was primarily with the IRS, and those signifiers will be construed as shorthand for right-wing loon, case closed. Anyway, it's easier that way, in our increasingly tribal age. Why bother with reading, especially if its over 140 characters?

Democracy at work

this just in, like they used to say...

• 
• 
  
• AP sources: Dems reach deal to drop gov't-run plan (AP)

  AP - After days of secret talks, Senate Democrats tentatively agreed Tuesday night to drop a full-blown government-run insurance option from sweeping health care legislation, several officials said, a concession to party moderates whose votes are critical to passage of President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.

• McChrystal backs Afghan plan to skeptical Congress (AP)
• Militants strike Baghdad govt targets, 127 dead (AP)
• Obama urges major new stimulus, jobs spending (AP)
• Gate-crashers to take the Fifth if subpoenaed (AP)
• Fierce winter storm hits Midwest with snow, wind (AP)

A Star chamber

The DMCA, perhaps notably enacted when the last democrat was president, was bad enough. I don't remember the specifics of the progression of copyright law, but I seem to recall that in the 1790s copyright was for just 14 years. Under the DMCA it can be as much as 95 years for corporate-held copyrights, and the lifetime of the artist plus 70 for individuals and their estates, which is undoubtedly why so many dead people like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis are raking it in.

Now there's this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

via Avedon Carol:

In other news, you can kiss Flickr good-bye thanks to Mr. Internet-savvy Obama and his secret copyright treaty, which requires ISPs to go out of their way to police user-contributed material for copyright violations, to cut off internet access too anyone accused of such a violation (and anyone who shares the same net access), and make this insanity international. I just knew they were going to take this thing away from us....

Arthur Silber: "The Internet as You Know It Will Cease to Exist", who links to

Cory Doctorow:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

If you piss off a corporation-- or anybody substantially more powerful than you-- they can acuse you of copyright infringement and law enforcement takes your stuff away, maybe including your means to defend yourself. Sounds a little like the War On Drugs®, doesn't it?

She's a witch!

Incidentally, it's Guy Fawkes' night in the UK.