Category Archives: Secrets

Links 20 August 2013

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During my time in the labyrinth of footloose youth, I’ve barely had time for other Internet reading. However, current affairs did manage to poke through a bit in the past couple of days. The themes of interest for me were the detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda while passing through London (Greenwald is the journalist who receieved Edward Snowden’s classified documents about NSA spying); a call for Swedes, men and women, to wear hijabs in solidarity with a pregnant Muslim woman who was assaulted in the street for wearing a hijab; and testimonials from Egyptian revolutionary youth showing how torn, angry, disgusted, and betrayed they are by the horrifying turn toward authoritarianism their country has taken. Here are the links.

The Guardian, “David Miranda’s Detention at Heathrow ‘Extraordinary’ Says Senior MP“:

    “David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8:05 a.m. and informed that he was to be questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was held for almost nine hours and officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.
    “‘It is an extraordinary twist to a very complicated story,’ [Kenneth] Vaz [chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee] told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. … ‘What needs to happen pretty rapidly is we need to establish the full facts — now you have a complaint from Mr. Greenwald and the Brazilian government. They indeed have said they are concerned at the use of terrorism legislation for something that does not appear to relate to terrorism, so it needs to be clarified, and clarified quickly.’ …
    “Miranda was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under Schedule 7 — over 97% — last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours. …
    “Widney Brown, Amnesty International’s senior director of international law and policy, said: ‘It is utterly improbable that David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian national transiting through London, was detained at random, given the role his partner has played in revealing the truth about the unlawful nature of NSA surveillance. David’s detention was unlawful and inexcusable. … There is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government.'”

Washington Post, “U.S. Had Advance Notice of Britain’s Plan to Detain Reporter Glenn Greenwald’s Partner“:

    “White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that U.S. officials had received a ‘heads-up’ that London police would detain David Miranda on Sunday, but he said the U.S. government did not request Miranda’s detention, calling it ‘a law enforcement action’ taken by the British government.
    “‘This was a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement and not at the request of the United States government. It’s as simple as that,’ Earnest said. …
    “Greenwald, in an e-mail on Monday, said his partner had been questioned about a variety of subjects including ‘what stories we were working on at that moment.’
    “‘David was asked mostly about the work Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I were doing on NSA stories…’ Greenwald said. ‘He was also asked about Brazil, the political situation in Brazil, and his friends and family.’ …
    “Greenwald declined to respond to a question about whether Miranda had served as a courier for classified material related to the paper’s NSA coverage.”

BBC News, “David Miranda Detention: MP Asks Police for Explanation“:

    “‘I remained in a room, there were six different agents coming and going, talking to me,’ Mr. Miranda said. ‘They asked questions about my entire life, about everything. They took my computer, video game, mobile phone, my memory cards, everything.’
    “In Germany, Mr. Miranda had been staying with U.S. filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has also been working on the Snowden files with Mr. Greenwald and the Guardian, according to the newspaper.
    “His flights were being paid for by the Guardian. A spokesman said he was not an employee of the newspaper but ‘often assists’ with Mr. Greenwald’s work. …
    “Mr. Greenwald said the British authorities’ actions in holding Mr. Miranda amounted to ‘bullying’ and linked it to his writing about Mr. Snowden’s revelations concerning the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). …
    “He told the BBC police did not ask Mr Miranda ‘a single question’ about terrorism but instead asked about what ‘Guardian journalists were doing on the NSA stories.’
    “Mr. Greenwald said he would respond by writing reports ‘much more aggressively than before.’
    “‘I have lots of documents about the way the secret services operate in England,’ he said. ‘I think they are going to regret what they did.'”

The Guardian, “NSA Files: Why the Guardian in London Destroyed Hard Drives of Leaked Files“:

    “Guardian editors on Tuesday revealed why and how the newspaper destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some of the secret files leaked by Edward Snowden. The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents. …
    “The initial UK attempts to stop reporting on the files came two weeks after the publication of the first story based on Snowden’s leaks…. Two senior British officials arrived at the Guardian’s offices to see [Editor-in-Chief Alan] Rusbridger and his deputy, Paul Johnson. They were cordial but made it clear they came on high authority to demand the immediate surrender of all the Snowden files in the Guardian’s possession.
    “They argued that the material was stolen and that a newspaper had no business holding on to it. The Official Secrets Act was mentioned but not threatened. …
    “After three weeks which saw the publication of several more articles on both sides of the Atlantic about GCHQ and NSA internet and phone surveillance, British government officials got back in touch and took a sterner approach. ‘You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back,’ one of them said.”

Al Jazeera, “Swedes Don Hijab to Support Muslim Woman“:

    “Scores of Swedish women from various faiths have posted pictures of themselves wearing hijab, or traditional Muslim headscarves, in solidarity with a woman attacked in a Stockholm suburb, apparently for wearing one.
    “Police spokesman Ulf Hoffman said an unknown assailant had attacked the pregnant woman in the suburb of Farsta on Friday by banging her head against a car.
    “Hoffman said the man shouted slurs which have led police to believe the attack was motivated by the woman’s religion. …
    “Using hashtag #hijabuppropet (hijab outcry) women posted their photos in headscarves on the social networking sites Twitter and Instagram. …
    “In an opinion piece published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on Sunday, the organisers of ‘hijabuppropet’ urged Justice Minister Beatrice Ask to ‘ensure that Swedish Muslim women are guaranteed the right to personal safety and religious freedom, without being subject to verbal and physical attacks.'”

A few of the hijab photos posted to twitter, from the “Traveler in Time” tumblr account.

More photos from BuzzFeed, “Women in Sweden Wear Headscarves After Muslim Woman Is Assaulted.”

Jack Shenker in Mada, “Beyond the Voice of Battle“:

    “What is happening in Egypt at the moment, and what is being lost? Lives, above all else; hundreds of them….
    “But beyond people, something else is being lost, too — just as those most invested in the old Egypt intended. For me, the most powerful expression of Egypt’s revolution has never been anything tangible, but rather that state of mind when the world seems to tip on its head and bevel with possibility, where the landscape of imagination is recast. I first encountered it on January 25 2011….
    “The deployment of the police across the road in front of us was a signal that…we would come a stop, engage in some minor scuffling, and then be herded into a harmless protest pen so that the capital could get on with its day. But on this occasion, with reports of mass unrest spreading throughout the city, something was different. Nobody among the marchers slowed, nobody broke ranks, and instead they just kept on going, right towards those shields, chanting and glaring mutinously into the eyes of those that held them…. In the end, the troops simply gave way. And as we pushed past them and onto the empty street behind, several protesters broke into a run — or more accurately a skip, a dance, a hodgepodge of hops and jumps — and many began whooping and hollering and even kissing the ground. …
    “That newfound sense of agency, of an ability to shape the world around you in ways you never knew existed — that gave me my definition of revolution…. Nothing can pose a greater threat to elites wishing to preserve their political and economic privileges than that sense of agency, and since Egypt’s revolution began, not a single farm, factory, classroom or college in the land has remained entirely immune from its influence.
    “Which brings us to the scenes on Egypt’s streets today. The relentless imposition of state violence creates binaries as well as bodies: You are either with us or against us, pro-military or pro-Brotherhood, an Egyptian or a terrorist. And binaries from above achieve the opposite of imagination from below. … How Egypt’s defenders of the status quo, forced onto the back foot by a revolution that struggles against authoritarianism and state violence, have longed to [undermine the independent thought of the people]. In their current ‘war on terror,’ as the strapline on state television puts it, they finally have the enemy, the fight and the stage on which to do so. Thus far, their efforts are meeting with spectacular success.”

Yasmin El Rifae in Cairo, again, “Dispatches“:

    “Egypt has given me a life-changing political education in the last two and a half years. … It’s hard, now, not to feel like something has been stolen from me. As I write this, I am deeply aware of how many others have had the much more devastating loss, the theft, of a loved one or a limb.
    “The past days have left me with a feeling of uselessness and alienation. I condemn both the Brotherhood and the security forces in their inter-locking cycle of violence and lies. There is no place for me in the street, or in a national conversation determined to start and end with chauvinistic nationalism. So I stay in and watch the city descend into silence, the streets emptying of life as military curfew approaches.
    “This is not the first time the state has pushed us to the edge…. It’s not the first time, but it might be the bloodiest and the scariest – and the one receiving the loudest applause. I do not know how we will move forward from here, or when we will stop flaunting our cruelty as a source of pride.”

Omar Robert Hamilton in Mada, “Everything Was Possible“:

    “I mourn the dead and I despise those killing them. I mourn the dead and I despise those sending them to their deaths. I mourn the dead and I despise those that excuse their murder. How did it come to this? How did we get here? What is this place?
    “There were moments when we could have broken the army’s grip on the country. We should have stayed in Tahrir after Mubarak was ousted. … But we left. Everyone said they would be back the next day and then, somehow, they weren’t. People wanted to shower and to sleep in their own beds. Then spontaneous cleaning brigades of earnest patriots spread through the city and by midday everything was nice and tidy and gone. …
    “Had all the forces that were supposedly against the military — the revolutionaries, the liberals, the Brotherhood and the Salafis — ever truly united where might we be today? Dead, possibly. But maybe not. Maybe somewhere closer to a civilian state. A real, ideological alliance was never possible. But a tactical, practical one might just have worked. But rather than work together each party repeatedly met with and made deals with the army, consistently placing the generals in the strongest tactical position. Everyone was to blame. …
    “It was transformative: the belief we all shared, for a moment, in each other. In an eternity of disappointment and greed and malice that moment…in which having a community was preferable to being alone with a book, had a value that will never be lost. You cannot underestimate how important these two and half years have been for people, how empowered, how unafraid people were. The existence of the revolution should not be confused with the existence of a political leadership and process. The revolution is dead when we say it’s dead. The revolution is dead when we will no longer die for it. …
    “I cannot stand up to death today. Today I am a coward who can only write. I see the revolution being dragged away to be shot over a shallow grave and I don’t know what to do. But I do know that, before it’s too late, we will grab it, we will fight for it. We have to, or we will never be able to live with ourselves.”

Lee Smith in Tablet, “What’s Wrong with Egypt’s Liberals? For Starters, They’re Not Liberals“:

    “If some observers mistakenly predicted that the Twitter-friendly liberals who thronged Tahrir Square two and a half years ago would become the new face of Egypt, almost no one could have guessed that those same liberals would soon find themselves demonstrating in favor of military rule. Now American journalists, analysts, and Middle East experts all want to know what happened to a political movement whose ostensible goal was to overthrow an authoritarian leader in order to usher in a golden age of Egyptian democracy. …
    “Seen through modern Western eyes, none of this makes sense. Just because the anti-Morsi camp allegedly put millions of people into the streets to demand the elected president’s ouster doesn’t make the army’s action ‘democratic.’ But for some observers in the Middle East, the strange bedfellows that Egyptian liberals seem to prefer are not so shocking: The coup is merely the latest inflection of a longer historical arc that unites authoritarians and liberals in a profound ambivalence about Western values and the West itself. ‘I’m not at all surprised this was the work of what we’ve come to call the liberals,’ said Samuel Tadros, author of the newly published Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity….
    “Tadros…told me in a recent interview that they were never liberals in the first place, or at least not as the term is usually understood in Western political communities. ‘In Egypt, liberalism didn’t start as it did in Europe with the emergence of an independent bourgeoisie that sought to limit the powers of the state and other entrenched institutions like the church and the aristocracy. In Egypt, there was no crisis pitting the individual against the state because liberalism was born with the rise of the civil-servant class in the mid 19th century. Since civil servants are a part of the state, this liberalism is not at all interested in limiting the role of the state.’ …
    “Because the civil-servant class owed its advancement — education, employment, rise in salaries — to the state, it came to see the state as the agent of change, he explains. And not surprisingly the liberals came to worship the institution that embodied state power in its purest form, the ruler. ‘It is the job of the ruler to impose modernity on a reluctant population,’ said Tadros. Arab liberals understand themselves as members of an elite class that shares little in common with the unwashed masses. If the ruler can’t modernize the masses, at least he must protect the advantages that the state lavished on the liberals.”

David Kenner in Foreign Policy, “How 36 Egyptian Prisoners Suffocated to Death in the Back of a Police Van“:

    “Of all the ways to die, this was one of the most horrible. On Monday, the Egyptian government acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamist prisoners the day before…. Security officials said that the prisoners had rioted while in a prison truck and captured a guard, causing the officers to respond by firing tear gas and the prisoners to die of asphyxiation. If that’s the case, crowd control experts say, the prisoners perished in agony — gasping for air and incapable of resisting their guards. …
    “Lawyer Ossama ElMahdy visited the morgue on Monday…and tweeted extremely graphic pictures of the bodies. He wrote that the dead men’s faces were so blue — almost black — that the families assumed they were burned, but they were not.
    “It is possible to kill 36 people with tear gas, but it is extremely difficult…. ‘It would be an agonizing death as well, with a burning sensation on all the wet areas of the body, a gasping and even gagging sensation, coughing, tightness of the chesta gasping and even gagging sensation, coughing, tightness of the chest,’ said Sid Heal, a former officer in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and expert on crowd control techniques. … Whatever happened in that prison truck, however, did not convince the police officers to let in fresh air and save their prisoners’ lives.”

Links 15 July 2013

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Rami G. Khouri in The Daily Star, Spare Us Your Intellectual Disneylands:

    “Arab citizens, who now can express their identities and mobilize in the millions for mass political action, represent the agency of the individual citizen that remains, in my mind, the single most important development in the country since January 2011. …
    “Egyptians are not mobs who must choose only between democracy and army rule; rather they comprise thousands of citizen groups that rise and fall according to the times and conditions. Some go to public squares, some give to local charities, some stay home and watch television and vote when they are given that opportunity, and many millions do some or all of these things. This historic assertion of citizen agency in the past 30 months has resulted in indigenous political movements whose fortunes rise and fall. Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, the revolutionary youth, Salafist Islamists, the National Salvation Front…all have only one thing in common: They are accountable ultimately to the will of the Egyptians, and cannot try to impose a system of rule or national policies that the citizenry does not accept.”

Baheyya, Fashioning a Coup:

    “It’s soothing to believe that a popular uprising ejected an incompetent Islamist president. It’s not comforting to point out that a popular uprising was on the cusp of doing so, until the generals stepped in, aborted a vital political process, arrested the president, and proclaimed their own ‘roadmap’ for how things will be from now on. …
    “With their July 3 coup, Egypt’s new military overlords and their staunch American backers are playing an age-old game, the game of turning the public against the ineluctable bickering, inefficiency, gridlock, and intense conflict that is part and parcel of a free political life, so that a disillusioned, fatigued people will pine for the stability and order that the military then swoops in to provide. …
    “As the recently self-designated ’eminence grise’ Mohamed ElBaradie summed it up, ‘Without Morsi’s removal from office, we would have been headed toward a fascist state, or there would have been a civil war.’
    “And that is the essence of the anti-political doctrine that worships order, fears political struggle, mistrusts popular striving, and kowtows to force majeure.”

Associated Press, Edward Snowden Has “Blueprints” to NSA:

    “Edward Snowden has highly sensitive documents on how the National Security Agency is structured and operates that could harm the U.S. government, but has insisted that they not be made public, a journalist close to the NSA leaker said.
    “Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian newspaper who first reported on the intelligence leaks, told The Associated Press that disclosure of the information in the documents ‘would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.’
    “He said the ‘literally thousands of documents’ taken by Snowden constitute ‘basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.'”

The Hill, Greenwald Warns Snowden Holds NSA “Blueprints”:

    “Greenwald’s latest comments come days after he warned that Snowden would release damaging information if he was not granted safe passage to asylum in a third country or if harm came to him.
    “‘Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the U.S. government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States,’ Greenwald told an Argentine newspaper last week.
    “‘The U.S. government should be on your knees every day praying that nothing happens to Snowden because if something happens, all information will be revealed and that would be their worst nightmare,’ he added.”

Washington’s Blog, The Government Is Spying On ALL Americans’ Digital and Old-Fashioned Communications.

James Fallows in The Atlantic (quoting a reader), The Impending Senate Vote on Confirming Nominees:

    “‘On the procedural level that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly gridlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s…. As a consequence, Obama cannot get anything done; he cannot even get the most innocuous appointees in office.
    “‘Yet he can assassinate American citizens without due processes…can detain prisoners indefinitely without charge; conduct surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant; and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called insider threat program). At home, this it is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal law enforcement agencies and their willing handmaidens at the state and local level. Abroad, Obama can start wars at will and pretty much engage in any other activity whatever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, to include just recently forcing down a plane containing a head of state. And not a peep from congressional Republicans, with the exception of an ineffectual gadfly like Rand Paul. Democrats, with the exception of a few like Ron Wyden, are not troubled, either….
    “‘Clearly there is government, and then there is government. The former is the tip of the iceberg…which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part is the Deep State, which operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. The Deep State is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies, key nodes of the judiciary…cleared contractors, Silicon Valley (whose cooperation is critical), and Wall Street.
    “‘This combination of procedural impotence on the one hand and unaccountable government by fiat on the other is clearly paradoxical, but any honest observer of the American state must attempt to come to grips with it.'”

MJ Rosenberg, I Can’t Imagine Being the Parent of a Young Black Man:

    “In addition to all the other random dangers teens face, black kids have to worry about the cops too or pseudo cops like George Zimmerman.
    “This verdict only confirms what black parents already knew: it is not safe out there for their boys. The good thing: maybe now their sons understand what their parents are so anxious about. Black parents aren’t paranoid. They know that their boys are at risk. Everywhere. …
    “I am glad I’m not black. I just don’t have the courage for it.”

George Dvorsky in io9, 10 Mindnumbingly Futuristic Technologies That Will Appear by the 2030s.

Erroll Morris in Slate, The Murders of Gonzago:

    “Josh Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing…is an examination of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, in which between 500,000 and 1 million people died. The Act of Killing is truly unlike any other documentary film. … One of the extraordinary things about documentary is that you get to continually reinvent the form, reinvent what it means to make a documentary — and Oppenheimer did just that. He identified several of the killers from 1965 and convinced them to make a movie about the killings. But the film is even weirder than that. Oppenheimer convinced these killers to act in a movie about the making of a movie about the killings. There would be re-enactments of the murders by the actual perpetrators. There would be singing, and there would be dancing. A perverted hall of mirrors.
    “But there is method to Oppenheimer’s madness — the idea that by re-enacting the murders, he, the viewers of the movie, and the various perpetrators recruited to participate could become reconnected to a history that had nearly vanished into a crepuscular past. Oppenheimer has the optimistic thought that the past is inside us and can be brought back to life.”

Links 04 July 2013

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McClatchy: Hints Surface That NSA [Is] Building Massive, Pervasive Surveillance Capability:

    “Despite U.S. intelligence officials’ repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency’s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases. …
    “The administration is building a facility in a valley south of Salt Lake City that will have the capacity to store massive amounts of records — a facility that former agency whistleblowers say has no logical purpose if it’s not going to be a vault holding years of phone and Internet data. …
    “‘What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,’ [columnist Glenn] Greenwald said in a webcast to the Socialism Conference in Chicago. ‘It means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time.'”

Moon of Alabama: The Empire Against the World:

    “Why, do Germans and others ask, does the U.S. need to collect 6 billion (!) German communications each year? What is going on here? Even the Stasi would have settled for 600,000. …
    “But having pissed off major European partners is not enough for Obama. This is unprecedented:
      “‘The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was rerouted to Austria after various European countries refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, Bolivian officials said Tuesday. …
      “‘A furious Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane, claiming that the decision had put the president’s life at risk. …
      “‘In a midnight press conference, Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia…described Morales as being ‘kidnapped by imperialism’ in Europe.'”

Corrente: So Who, Exactly, Re-Routed Evo Morales’s Plane?

Craig Murray: All Law Is Gone, Naked Power Remains:

    “The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy…. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.
    “To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. … I have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
    “I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this ‘secret’ which they have all known for years.”

Ian Black, The Guardian: With This “Roadmap” Egypt Enters Risky Territory:

    “Egypt has entered a volatile and potentially dangerous new phase with the army moving swiftly and decisively against President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to take control — though only temporarily — of the Arab world’s largest country. …
    “Morsi’s overthrow is a hammer blow for Egyptian Islamists who spent the long decades of authoritarian rule under Mubarak and his predecessors building up the Brotherhood organisation and dreaming of the day when they could take power. The worry must be that this experience will reinforce their sense of victimhood — that despite winning a free election they have been betrayed and prevented from exercising legitimate power. It clearly creates a dangerous precedent.”

Amira Nowaira: This Is Not a Coup, but the Will of Egypt’s People:

    “The most dangerous aspect of Brotherhood rule was probably its discourse of fear and loathing. In fact, Morsi wagging menacing fingers against Egyptians has become emblematic of his brief rule. Incitement against Copts, Shias and anyone who dared oppose him was rampant and unchecked. …
    “After an excruciating year of mismanagement, sectarian rhetoric and state violence, it is understandable that Egyptians should rise in full force against a regime that seemed to hold them hostage. Morsi has shown himself to be incapable of governing or even understanding the fundamentals of managing a modern state. What he succeeded in doing was to dispel any illusions that Egyptians might have had about the Muslim Brotherhood as a morally and spiritually superior faction….
    “Morsi and his supporters have argued that his overthrow was a violation of the legitimacy of the ballot box. In his last speech as president, Morsi repeated the word legitimacy over and over again. What he did not realise, however, was that the legitimacy of a ruler springs from popular consent.”

Issander El Amrani, Democrats vs. Liberals or Democrats vs. Republicans?

    “The dilemma facing Egypt is that it’s a limited, electoral democracy whereas many want it to be a republic. The difference being that in a republic the individual has guarantees in the context of a socio-political compact, whereas in a democracy the minority has little if any voice. Egypt is formally a republic, and has been since 1956, over several iterations of a compact…. It might have turned into a more democratic republic after 2011 except the new social compact was left to elections. Because elections are not very accurate indicators of national sentiment…and the voting public has still mostly few lasting allegiances in post-revolution Egypt, this was always a bad idea. A lot of people have changed their mind.
    “However Egypt comes out of this crisis, hopefully a republican pact — hopefully based around a bill of rights — will form a more stable base for its political system.”

Mother Jones: Morsi Is Out: Images from the Egyptian Leader’s Final 48 Hours in Power

Stephen Emmott: Humans — The Real Threat to Life on Earth:

    “If we discovered tomorrow that there was an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and – because physics is a fairly simple science – we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth on 3 June 2072…governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet into unprecedented action. Every scientist, engineer, university and business would be enlisted: half to find a way of stopping it, the other half to find a way for our species to survive and rebuild if the first option proved unsuccessful. . We are in almost precisely that situation now, except that there isn’t a specific date and there isn’t an asteroid. The problem is us. Why are we not doing more about the situation we’re in – given the scale of the problem and the urgency needed – I simply cannot understand. … The biggest and most important experiment on Earth is the one we’re all conducting, right now, on Earth itself. Only an idiot would deny that there is a limit to how many people our Earth can support. The question is, is it seven billion (our current population), 10 billion or 28 billion? I think we’ve already gone past it. Well past it.
    “Science is essentially organised scepticism. I spend my life trying to prove my work wrong or look for alternative explanations for my results. It’s called the Popperian condition of falsifiability. I hope I’m wrong. But the science points to my not being wrong. We can rightly call the situation we’re in an unprecedented emergency. We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don’t think we will. I think we’re fucked.”

Shadow State

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Blogger Golem XIV (David Malone) writes in “The New Praetorians and the New Cold War“:

    “There is a New Cold War but it is not like the old one. It is not country against country. It is the shadow state in every nation against its own people, with the collusion of an inner core within the regular State.”

The subject is governments spying on their own citizens, as revealed most famously in recent weeks by Edward Snowden. Malone’s thesis is that all supposedly democratic governments do it, and even help each other to do it, by sharing data with each other in ways that enable each nation to evade its own legal framework of checks and balances. A nation’s spy agencies get around the limits placed on them under the law by spying on the citizens of other nations, then sharing this data with those same nations, in exchange for data on their own citizens. Convenient!

So we are now in a position where we can no longer trust our own governments, which are ruled by what Malone calls a “shadow state” that is unaccountable to, and frequently even invisible to, our elected officials. The elected officials are either kept in the dark, or simply don’t want to know, so they can avoid uncomfortable questions. Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

The NSA Maps Your Brain

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This story on NSA surveillance of Americans, by Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian, contains a quote from Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute:

    “The calls you make can reveal a lot, but now that so much of our lives are mediated by the internet, your IP logs are really a real-time map of your brain: what are you reading about, what are you curious about, what personal ad are you responding to (with a dedicated email linked to that specific ad), what online discussions are you participating in, and how often?
    “Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that’s in many ways on par with reading your diary.”

Also see this story from Business Insider, “The NSA Has Processed 1 Trillion Pieces of Internet Metadata,” which provides background on a program called ThinThread, authored around the year 2000 by top NSA analyst (and later whistleblower) William Binney. To Binney’s regret, ThinThread ended up providing the core functionality for the massive unauthorized data collection of the Bush years. (The Business Insider article, and this one, also include many useful links you may follow for further information.)

For a more in-depth discussion of ThinThread, William Binney, and fellow whistleblower Thomas Drake, see this May 2011 New Yorker article by Jane Meyer. Despite the recent publicity given to the NSA’s data collection by the revelations of Edward Snowden, much of this information has been circulating in the public domain for years!

Personally I think it’s exciting, not frightening at all, that the NSA is able to know anything about anyone, anywhere in the world, in real time. In fact, I think they should add face recognition technology from surveillance cameras, GPS data from cars and cell phones, medical records, electronic purchase and ATM records, and so on to the data they already have — though I doubt they’ve been waiting for my advice on this. I have only two provisos: 1) the data collection system itself should be completely visible to the public; and 2) the information it collects on individuals should be freely available to everyone, so we can all track each other in real time! We’re already living in a world where secrets and privacy are no longer possible — or necessary, or even useful — so let’s just make that transparency complete and put all data on everyone in the public domain. In this sense, the NSA is doing us all a public service, in building the tools for us to do this. We just need to liberate them from the control of the spymasters!

The Big Lie Quote

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The following quote is widely attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

But did he really say this? Randall Bytwerk, a university professor whose field of study is German propganda, doesn’t think so. He looked for it in the original sources, and couldn’t find it.

The quote came to my attention today because of this article by David Malone, author of a book called The Debt Generation about the financial crisis. In his article, Malone deconstructs a recent use of the quote by Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative Party in Britain. In a speech, Howard cites the first two lines of the quote to justify an occasional lie by the government to maintain economic or social stability. What prevents the government from abusing its power, Howard claims, can be found in the second line of the quote: a lie works “only for such time as the State can shield the people” from its consequences. Innocent, short-term lies may be thus acceptable, even necessary, so long as they are in the public interest.

Malone refutes Howard by bringing in the third line of the quote, which Howard ignores in his speech. To shield the people indefinitely from the consequences of a lie, the quote says, the State must “use all its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie.” This means there is no check on State power, as Howard claims, because the State will never be held accountable for the consequences of its lies. Indeed, Malone says, in modern times the State no longer needs to repress dissent at all, but simply “drown it out. Media outlets…owned by a few powerful and like-minded friends” define public opinion today, and dissenting voices are never heard.

The meta-level to all this is that we’re arguing about a quote which, itself, is very likely fabricated. The power of the quote comes from the idea that it’s Goebbels who said it — but Bytwerk, in his research, failed to find an original German source. So if Goebbels isn’t the author of the quote, then who is? And how does that change our sense of the quote’s meaning, or its value in any debate?

My own interest in the quote, and the reason I researched it further, comes from a fascination with its final phrase: “Truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” This phrase isn’t emphasized by Malone, and it is ignored entirely by Howard. But what sort of vision of the State did the Nazis have, I wondered, if they saw truth as its greatest enemy? It must have been a deeply nihilistic vision, because Goebbels seems to be arguing (if, indeed, he really said it) that lies are vital to the functioning of the State — that lying, and thus repression, are the very nature of State power. This certainly fits with what we think of the Nazis, but it’s troubling to those of us who believe that power comes from the people, and is only delegated by the people to the State. I wanted to learn more about the quote’s context — what speech did it come from? what did Goebbels say before and after? — but discovered that, on the Internet at least, there is no context. It’s a free-floating quote, nothing more.

So, the Big Lie Quote is itself a Big Lie? And the Nazis never claimed that truth is the enemy of the State? Yet many people today — perhaps even the majority! — seem convinced that State power can sustain itself only through secrets and lies, which are the subject (and the title) of Malone’s article. Indeed, we’ve gotten new proof that our paranoia is justified, in the form of revelations that our private phone and Internet communications are being sucked into vast databases by the surveillance arm of the U.S. government, to be stored, perhaps forever, on servers buried deep in the Utah mountains. (Does this surprise anyone? I thought it was already an open secret!) The degree of fraud and insider dealing, and the lack of subsequent prosecution, in the 2008 financial crisis — or among defense contractors in the Iraq War — are further grounds for a deep and abiding cynicism in our government. The fact that the election of a supposedly progressive president has only strengthened the security state and pushed its secrets deeper underground is the final, ironic twist. It’s over, Joe! No matter how you squirm, the net will tighten.

So is truth really the enemy of the State, whether Goebbels said so or not? If it is, then the State must have nefarious interests of its own, opposed to those of its people. But can’t we imagine, instead, a State dedicated to spreading truth, because truth helps to serve the people’s interests? I refuse to believe that State power, as such, is incompatible with transparency and truth. To say that is to accept that democracy is always and forever a sham. That can’t be! The trouble is that we’ve too easily come to accept a cynical vision of the “necessities” of power, and we’ve got to stop living in that paranoid, nihilistic world. So how do we get from here, to the world as it should be — a world where everyone can see and debate the truth? What steps should we take? What is the first step?