#the NSA has an entire department to study social media | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

simonalkenmayer · 2 years

Text

Bullies choose to be bullies. Everyone deals with difficulty. Some even deal with abuse. Bullies choose to wrap their entire identity in hurting people who could actually be their allies, if they put aside the insecurity that makes them lash out. By bullying, they aren’t helping anyone, least of all themselves. Instead they are building huge architectures to explain why their hypocrisy isn’t. Why it’s alright for them to treat people in a way they’d never let people treat them, to ignore their laws, their faith, their stated purposes.

Is it really that bad, or do you need it to be that bad to justify how you treat people? That’s the question that the victim asks, that the bully cannot answer. To them shame and humility are the same. Humility is to be feared. Everything has to be a battle, especially the battles they can easily win, so that they appear to be bigger and stronger than they really feel. To the point that it becomes painful to watch. I see it again and again and again and again and they never see their own patterns, because they’re too busy being imprisoned by them. You can’t explain the pattern because that’s an attack. So they simply continue to live in it, alienate people, hurt people, break down groups, destroy communities, be either feared or ignored. And the saddest thing is, they almost never actually disagree with the people they target. They’d be on the same side. But everything has to be a battle, and no one can be trusted, and everything is a plot, and all defenses are acceptable.

Bullying is a disease. It destroys people. Like a carcinogenic chemical. Like acid. Even if they always win, they won’t win. Because people just let them win, so that they can walk away. They make themselves irrelevant and hated. They become ignored. And because no one will acknowledge them, they have to continue to burst into spaces they aren’t welcome, and bully.

It’s extremely sad. Just terribly terribly sad.

The internet is a limitless space. People can be who they are, without having to obey the laws of physics. And yet, the insecurity pulls itself out of the mud and rears its ugly head, and the disparities and trivialities of the real world, duplicate and replicate in this sterile space. Only it is much much worse. Trolling becomes a fun game. One person’s narcissistic pleasure becomes the goal of a group. People invert their weak and strong actors and take serious cues from people with only the barest of ideas of a plan built around control and causing suffering. The internet has done good things, but if you want to survive this century, you need to build etiquette online. Trolling, bullying, drama farming, all of that nonsense…it has to stop.

You will tear yourselves apart.

You can’t create spaces where learning is canceled and changing is a gotcha. You cannot create spaces in which bullies become leaders because of how well they tell you who is to blame. What I’m saying to you is, the way online discourse refines and rarifies communication, you construct the exact type of mind most susceptible to misinformation and manipulation.

You cannot let this happen. Right now it is literally at a tipping point to destroying the world, when a president can bully a child, or a senator can get play picking on a puppet and gain platforms.

Back when DNA sciences began to become very easy, I realized something profound. There were no laws forbidding a man from buying a PCR machine. There were no laws regulating what people can do in their garage. A person with enough knowledge can still to this day, but the machines needed to craft a deadly virus and release it into the world, and not one single law exists to stop them. But this is true of social media too. Memes and the way they replicate across minds tells us this quite easily.

I didn’t plan for the pandemic, but it became an organic experiment testing precisely what I have been worrying about. It became a catalyst for the exact kind of online activity that started me on this. The leader of the opposition to fascism posts selfies of his face dyed green by the caustic chemicals thrown in his face and gains marchers. Fascist uprisings and propaganda bred on Facebook by a company so corrupt it removed the failsafes to its algorithm to get engagement. People making social media posts to organize abortions for those who cannot get them because the Supreme Court wants likes from Trump’s Twitter rip-off parlor. We have wars being advertised alongside pharmaceuticals that health insurance won’t pay for. Climate change activists climbing coal cranes and posting videos to TickTok. A video of a man being murdered goes viral and triggers mass protests, and the opposition uses their hashtags to sow discord. People storm the capitol building for the first time in two centuries, and the FBI uses their own facebooks to hunt them down. People literally defy a deadly disease by advertising the ingestion of horse anti parasitic and toxic mud on tiktok. Elections being compromised by misinformation think tanks PAID FOR by revenue-generating farms like Five Minute Crafts. History being rewritten in cute memes and alpha male indoctrination. All online. All in your brains. All the time. In the palm of your hand. And one thing we’ve proven time and again is that the more a person sees or hears something, the truer they think it is, especially if it fits their latent bias.

This is not a joke. This is serious. Deadly serious. The human race ran out of battlegrounds, so it recapitulated them in metaphysical space. You can’t continue to treat it like it doesn’t matter, as if what happens here stays here. The bad guys certainly aren’t.

Online bullying is a gateway to extremism. It’s a precursor for programming the worst kind of people using the tiny computers in their hands.

Ask that question: is it that bad, or do I need it to be so I can justify how I treat them. Be honest. Don’t fight any and every battle, because the space is too large. Find the one you know how to fight and focus in. Understand what manipulation looks like and identify it openly. Identify the behavior. Target that, not the person. Let people change. Give them freedom to. Stop playing discourse.

TL;DR This isn’t a game. The internet is not a playpen anymore.

#the NSA has an entire department to study social media #that ought to tell you something #long post #text #essay #bullying #group dynamics

31 notes · View notes

socialjusticeartshare · 5 years

Text

Border Agents Can Now Get Classified Intelligence Information. Experts Call That Dangerous.

The Trump administration is creating a center that will give immigration agents access to information from U.S. intelligence agencies. Migrants and others denied entry will be unable to see the evidence against them because it is classified.

by Melissa del Bosque

Pushing further toward its goal of “extreme vetting,” the Trump administration is creating a new center in suburban Virginia that will allow immigration agents to access, for the first time, the sprawling array of information scooped up by America’s intelligence agencies, from phone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency to material gathered by the CIA’s spies overseas to tips from informants in Central America.

This classified, potentially derogatory, information will eventually be used to screen everyone seeking to enter the United States, including foreign vacationers seeking travel visas, people applying for permanent residency or immigrants requesting asylum at the Mexican border.

Legal experts worry that immigration agents could potentially use this secret data to flag entire categories of people that fit “suspect” profiles and potentially bar them from entering the U.S., or prompt them to be tracked while they’re here. It could also be nearly impossible for those denied entry to challenge faulty information if wrongly accused, they say, since most of it is classified.

In an interview, the director of the new National Vetting Center, which is being overseen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was vague about the types of classified information that may be shared with immigration agencies but said the vetting center’s privacy and legal experts will make sure it conforms with the law.

“Right now, we’re still trying to get off the ground and are still focused on counterterrorism information which has already been used for vetting in the past,” said Monte Hawkins, a former National Security Council staffer who now works for CBP. “But as we fold in new types of derogatory information, yes, there’s potentially places where that type of information was never available before to make decisions.”

Hawkins, who helped write President Donald Trump’s February 2018 national security memo calling for the center’s creation, said that’s when the center’s lawyers will step in to “make sure” agents with agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP “are allowed to use that information or have the proper authority to do so.”

Spokespeople for the CIA, NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence all declined to comment and referred questions back to the Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent agency, which did not respond to a request for comment.

The creation of the vetting center, particularly under the control of CBP and DHS, has alarmed civil rights and privacy experts as well as some who work in national security. They worry that CBP and ICE will use classified information to justify the surveillance of whole populations. And they worry that the center, once fully up and running, could allow the agencies to create their own de facto immigration policies through selective enforcement.

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, said the mere fact that the directive to build the center came from the same memo that called for the “Muslim travel ban” is cause for concern. “I think there’s a real worry about this new center expanding and growing,” she said. “Especially since it’s been created with the same discriminatory animus that’s behind extreme vetting and the Muslim ban. It’s not hard to see where this might end up.”

Levinson-Waldman and others also questioned putting classified intelligence information under the control of an agency like CBP, which has been criticized for a host of troubling behavior, including the targeting of activists, lawyers and journalists, and DHS, which has had three secretaries in three years and is currently waiting for Trump to appoint a fourth.

“You have an acting secretary who could be gone in an hour by tweet,” said Carrie Cordero, a senior fellow with the Washington-based bipartisan think tank Center for a New American Security. “The general counsel for DHS, who ultimately has the responsibility for making sure that oversight rules are followed, was just fired. So, there’s real questions as to what kind of management decisions are being made.”

Brian Katz, a former CIA analyst and now a fellow with the foreign policy think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, said some members of the intelligence community are wary of DHS overseeing such a program because the agency is largely run by political appointees, who can be influenced by whatever agenda is being pushed by the president. “I think that’s particularly acute in this administration given the policies that DHS leadership has either been advocating or executing,” he said.

Both DHS and CBP, as well as ICE, have been scrutinized by a number of media outlets for their increasing reliance on algorithm-driven analytics and big datamining for immigration enforcement.

In August, ProPublica wrote about a 36-year-old Salvadoran man seeking asylum who was separated from his two children and thrown in jail for six months based on faulty gang intelligence provided by a State Department-funded fusion center called the Grupo Conjunto de Inteligencia Fronteriza, or GCIF. The center, which gathers information provided by police and the military in several countries, including El Salvador, shared the intelligence with CBP agents who were vetting asylum seekers at the border. The man’s attorney only learned of the existence of the fusion center after several months of litigation. But the exact nature of the faulty evidence provided by GCIF — or where it came from — has never been revealed because the government maintains that it is classified.

The case is exceptional because a team of high-profile law firms volunteered to litigate the complicated asylum case, which forced the government to provide at least some answers.

In the future, the new vetting center also could be used by CBP to vet asylum-seekers at the border, disguising even further the source of any faulty information.

“They’ll have no idea where the information is coming from,” Levinson-Waldman said of individuals trying to appeal their cases. “And this new vetting center will be artificially invested with this patina of accuracy that it may or may not deserve.”

Years after quitting her job as an attorney for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Laura Peña returned to the fight — defending migrants she’d once prosecuted. Then, a perplexing family separation case forced her to call upon everything she’d learned.

The drive by CBP and ICE to collect large amounts of data began under the Obama administration, but it has grown exponentially under the Trump administration, which has pushed aggressively for the continuous monitoring of immigrants. Budgets for each agency have increased by more than $2 billion since Trump took office, according to a new report by the international think tank Transnational Institute. A substantial portion of this funding is being used to carry out new extreme vetting initiatives, such as the National Vetting Center.

CBP and ICE already collect vast amounts of unclassified personal information through intelligence gathering, social media web scraping, the collection of biographic and biometric data, and by purchasing access to local government or corporate databases that include information such as license plate numbers or whether someone receives food stamps.

All of this data is analyzed by computer programs that search for “contextual information” to help analysts build a profile on whomever they are investigating. A number of recent media reports have illustrated in detail how ICE and CBP have tracked and targeted immigrants for deportation using these methods.

Chinmayi Sharma, a former software developer who worked on government contracts and is now a lawyer specializing in technology and privacy, said what Trump is doing — through a series of presidential directives — is rapidly transforming immigration enforcement from a largely human interaction to computer analytics-based enforcement. Sharma wrote about the National Vetting Center and technology’s impact on enforcement for the national security blog Lawfare.

Ultimately, she said, the vetting center could usurp much of Congress’ oversight over immigration. Based on information from the center, immigration agents and consular officials could unilaterally grant or deny entry to the United States, perhaps excluding groups of people without having to account for their reasoning. “A lot of the president’s executive orders talk about ‘risky populations’ that aren’t even necessarily country related,” Sharma said. “Is it age group, is it religion, is it someone who identifies a certain way politically?”

“Someone who was legally in the country might not be allowed back into the United States now because they’re part of that risky population,” Sharma said. “All of a sudden something that used to be based on an individual assessment is now a population-based assessment.”

In an interview, Hawkins said the ways in which agents with CBP, ICE and other agencies ultimately use the vetting center is speculative at this point, since it’s currently only working on one program with CBP. But he said the agencies have legal guidelines they have to abide by before they can deny someone admission. “We’re giving them more information that might help them meet that bar, but there’s still a legal bar that has to be met.”

Also unclear is whether the nation’s intelligence agencies will welcome CBP to their community. Congress has previously said CBP and ICE are domestic law enforcement, not spy agencies. But Trump’s memo requires even the most sensitive intelligence agencies, including the NSA and the CIA, to share classified intelligence with the CBP-run center. It also requires the center to expand vetting beyond counterterrorism into new areas such as transnational crime and counterintelligence.

Some security experts like Katz, the former CIA analyst, are skeptical that it will succeed. “Obviously, this is an ambitious project on paper,” he said. “But counterintelligence is some of the most sensitive information the U.S. government collects, and there’s going to be reluctance to share that information.”

Katz wonders whether the vetting center is being created to solve a problem or merely to fulfill political ambitions. “If this is truly an intelligence or law enforcement-driven operation, then that bodes well for the idea of actually achieving its mission,” he said. “But if it’s not, and it’s just being built to sort of cherry-pick intelligence to achieve certain political goals, then this project will be ineffective and likely doomed to fail.”

Hawkins said that the intelligence community has been supportive, but that he couldn’t discuss the scope of their participation, since much of what the center does is classified.

“We’re not getting pushback in terms of the concept, really,” Hawkins said of the intelligence community. Most of the conversations have been about funding because their resources are limited, Hawkins said.

Another concern, he said, is what vetting will look like once it expands beyond counterterrorism.

In the counterterrorism world, analysts identify terrorists and then prevent them from coming in, Hawkins said. “But in counterintelligence that’s probably not the answer. Maybe you allow them to come in and track them or whatever,” he said. “So, we have to define for folks what we mean by vetting, because it’s different from counterterrorism.”

For now, he said, the vetting center is focused on counterterrorism and assisting CBP’s National Targeting Center in vetting applicants in its Electronic System for Travel Authorization program. Travelers from countries that don’t need a visa, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, must apply to ESTA before coming to the United States. In June, CBP began asking these visitors to list all of their social media accounts for the last five years. At the moment, the requirement is optional. But for travelers from countries that require a visa, it is already mandatory.

A look at the ESTA program provides a glimpse of how the center could work in vetting migrants on the nation’s borders.

Hawkins said the center takes the information provided by ESTA applicants and sends it to intelligence agencies, which then return any derogatory information they find. “That might be an ESTA applicant’s phone number that matches a phone number in a cable that [the intelligence agency] wrote and here’s all this bad stuff around that phone number that we think might be the same person, for example,” Hawkins said. “And they give us that cable to look at. Or it might be a link to a [terrorist] watch listed record … and so they say, ‘OK, you know this person seems to be this person on the watch list, here’s the link to that.’”

The center doesn’t have its own analysts, nor does it collect its own intelligence. For the ESTA program, CBP analysts are on site to receive the information. Hawkins said the center is designed to vet large numbers of applicants on a daily basis, which requires some automation but not entirely, he said.

“What we target are entire populations, or entire programs. We’re going to be looking at every single applicant … we’re not looking at subsets. So that our customer, be it ICE, CBP or USCIS, comes to us to get that classified information in real time or near real time to support their operation.” But, he said, “there’s always people looking at it, so it isn’t based on computers deciding who is good to go.”

Still, as these categories of information and potential threats expand, so does the number of people under suspicion and surveillance. “We know that DHS has targeted domestic protests and people providing legal services at the border,” Levinson-Waldman said. “As the scope of the National Vetting Center expands, it will be interesting to see whether it has a hand in the targeting that we know DHS is doing.”

Hawkins acknowledged that as the center takes on more vetting programs, privacy and civil liberties issues will need to be reviewed, especially if the center is allowed to add counterintelligence to its vetting pipeline by next summer. But, he said, before each new program is rolled out, the center’s lawyers will examine the program’s legality and release a privacy impact statement to the public.

Patrick Toomey, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said that because everything is assessed by the center’s own attorneys, there’s no way to truly evaluate the impact it will have on the privacy of U.S. citizens and noncitizens.

“It really raises a lot of questions, because there’s so few specifics,” Toomey said. “What type of classified information is being shared for instance? None of that is explained.”

Hawkins acknowledged another conundrum at the heart of the new center: In the future, he said, if asylum-seekers, migrants or even visitors to the U.S. want to challenge decisions based on allegedly faulty intelligence provided through the center, they’ll have to appeal to the original agency where the information came from. Trouble is, the name of the agency providing the intelligence will likely be classified.

The National Vetting Center doesn’t have a redress system in place, he said. “We want to plug into whatever exists at these agencies. But we aren’t creating our own.”

None of this is reassuring to privacy and civil rights experts or to immigration attorneys and advocates.

“Right now, it’s a black box,” Levinson-Waldman said of the new center. “It’s hard not to be skeptical. Because there are plenty of examples from the past on how this could go wrong.”

Article Source

#ICE #border patrol #separated families

0 notes

how2to18 · 6 years

Link

WE FACE a crisis of computing. The very devices that were supposed to augment our minds now harvest them for profit. How did we get here?

Most of us only know the oft-told mythology featuring industrious nerds who sparked a revolution in the garages of California. The heroes of the epic: Jobs, Gates, Musk, and the rest of the cast. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, hawker of neo-Esperantist bromides about “connectivity as panacea” and leader of one of the largest media distribution channels on the planet, excused himself by recounting to senators an “aw shucks” tale of building Facebook in his dorm room. Silicon Valley myths aren’t just used to rationalize bad behavior. These business school tales end up restricting how we imagine our future, limiting it to the caprices of eccentric billionaires and market forces.

What we need instead of myths are engaging, popular histories of computing and the internet, lest we remain blind to the long view.

At first blush Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018) seems to fit the bill. A former editor of The eXile, a Moscow-based tabloid newspaper, and investigative reporter for PandoDaily, Levine has made a career out of writing about the dark side of tech. In this book, he traces the intellectual and institutional origins of the internet. He then focuses on the privatization of the network, the creation of Google, and revelations of NSA surveillance. And, in the final part of his book, he turns his attention to Tor and the crypto community.

He remains unremittingly dark, however, claiming that these technologies were developed from the beginning with surveillance in mind, and that their origins are tangled up with counterinsurgency research in the Third World. This leads him to a damning conclusion: “The Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today.”

To be sure, these constitute provocative theses, ones that attempt to confront not only the standard Silicon Valley story, but also established lore among the small group of scholars who study the history of computing. He falls short, however, of backing up his claims with sufficient evidence. Indeed, he flirts with creating a mythology of his own — one that I believe risks marginalizing the most relevant lessons from the history of computing.

The scholarly history is not widely known and worth relaying here in brief. The internet and what today we consider personal computing came out of a unique, government-funded research community that took off in the early 1960s. Keep in mind that, in the preceding decade, “computers” were radically different from what we know today. Hulking machines, they existed to crunch numbers for scientists, researchers, and civil servants. “Programs” consisted of punched cards fed into room-sized devices that would process them one at a time. Computer time was tedious and riddled with frustration. A researcher working with census data might have to queue up behind dozens of other users, book time to run her cards through, and would only know about a mistake when the whole process was over.

Users, along with IBM, remained steadfast in believing that these so-called “batch processing” systems were really what computers were for. Any progress, they believed, would entail building bigger, faster, better versions of the same thing.

But that’s obviously not what we have today. From a small research community emerged an entirely different set of goals, loosely described as “interactive computing.” As the term suggests, using computers would no longer be restricted to a static one-way process but would be dynamically interactive. According to the standard histories, the man most responsible for defining these new goals was J. C. R. Licklider. A psychologist specializing in psychoacoustics, he had worked on early computing research, becoming a vocal proponent for interactive computing. His 1960 essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis” outlined how computers might even go so far as to augment the human mind.

It just so happened that funding was available. Three years earlier in 1957, the Soviet launch of Sputnik had sent the US military into a panic. Partially in response, the Department of Defense (DoD) created a new agency for basic and applied technological research called the Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA, today known as DARPA). The agency threw large sums of money at all sorts of possible — and dubious — research avenues, from psychological operations to weather control. Licklider was appointed to head the Command and Control and Behavioral Sciences divisions, presumably because of his background in both psychology and computing.

At ARPA, he enjoyed relative freedom in addition to plenty of cash, which enabled him to fund projects in computing whose military relevance was decidedly tenuous. He established a nationwide, multi-generational network of researchers who shared his vision. As a result, almost every significant advance in the field from the 1960s through the early 1970s was, in some form or another, funded or influenced by the community he helped establish.

Its members realized that the big computers scattered around university campuses needed to communicate with one another, much as Licklider had discussed in his 1960 paper. In 1967, one of his successors at ARPA, Robert Taylor, formally funded the development of a research network called the ARPANET. At first the network spanned only a handful of universities across the country. By the early 1980s, it had grown to include hundreds of nodes. Finally, through a rather convoluted trajectory involving international organizations, standards committees, national politics, and technological adoption, the ARPANET evolved in the early 1990s into the internet as we know it.

Levine believes that he has unearthed several new pieces of evidence that undercut parts of this early history, leading him to conclude that the internet has been a surveillance platform from its inception.

The first piece of evidence he cites comes by way of ARPA’s Project Agile. A counterinsurgency research effort in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, it was notorious for its defoliation program that developed chemicals like Agent Orange. It also involved social science research and data collection under the guidance of an intelligence operative named William Godel, head of ARPA’s classified efforts under the Office of Foreign Developments. On more than one occasion, Levine asserts or at least suggests that Licklider and Godel’s efforts were somehow insidiously intertwined, and that Licklider’s computing research in his division of ARPA had something to do with Project Agile. Despite arguing that this is clear from “pages and pages of released and declassified government files,” Levine cites only one such document as supporting evidence for this claim. It shows how Godel, who at one point had surplus funds, transferred money from his group to Licklider’s department when the latter was over budget.

This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Given the freewheeling nature of ARPA’s funding and management in the early days, such a transfer should come as no surprise. On its own, it doesn’t suggest a direct link in terms of research efforts. Years later, Taylor asked his boss at ARPA to fund the ARPANET — and, after a 20-minute conversation, he received $1 million in funds transferred from ballistic missile research. No one would seriously suggest that ARPANET and ballistic missile research were somehow closely “intertwined” because of this.

Sharon Weinberger’s recent history of ARPA, The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, The Pentagon Agency that Changed the World (2017), which Levine cites, makes clear what is already known from the established history. “Newcomers like Licklider were essentially making up the rules as they went along,” and were “given broad berth to establish research programs that might be tied only tangentially to a larger Pentagon goal.” Licklider took nearly every chance he could to transform his ostensible behavioral science group into an interactive computing research group. Most people in wider ARPA, let alone the DoD, had no idea what Licklider’s researchers were up to. His Command and Control division was even renamed the more descriptive Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).

Licklider was certainly involved in several aspects of counterinsurgency research. Annie Jacobsen, in her book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency (2015), describes how he attended meetings discussing strategic hamlets in Southeast Asia and collaborated on proposals with others who conducted Cold War social science research. And Levine mentions Licklider’s involvement with a symposium that addressed how computers might be useful in conducting counterinsurgency work.

But Levine only points to one specific ARPA-funded computing research project that might have had something to do with counterinsurgency. In 1969, Licklider — no longer at ARPA — championed a proposal for a constellation of research efforts to develop statistical analysis and database software for social scientists. The Cambridge Project, as it was called, was a joint effort between Harvard and MIT. Formed at the height of the antiwar movement, when all DoD funding was viewed as suspicious, it was greeted with outrage by student demonstrators. As Levine mentions, students on campuses across the country viewed computers as large, bureaucratic, war-making machines that supported the military industrial complex.

Levine makes a big deal of the Cambridge Project, but is there really a concrete connection between surveillance, counterinsurgency, computer networking, and this research effort? If there is, he doesn’t present it in the book. Instead he relies heavily on an article in the Harvard Crimson by a student activist. He doesn’t even directly quote from the project proposal itself, which should contain at least one or two damning lines. Instead he lists types of “data banks” the project would build, including ones on youth movements, minority integration in multicultural societies, and public opinion polls, among others. The project ran for five years but Levine never tells us what it was actually used for.

It’s worth pointing out that the DoD was the only organization that was funding computing research in a manner that could lead to real breakthroughs. Licklider and others needed to present military justification for their work, no matter how thin. In addition, as the 1960s came to a close, Congress was tightening its purse strings, which was another reason to trump up their relevance. It’s odd that an investigative reporter like Levine, ever suspicious of the standard line, should take the claims of these proposals at face value.

I spoke with John Klensin, a member of the Cambridge Project steering committee who was involved from the beginning. He has no memory of such data banks. “There was never any central archive or effort to build one,” he told me. He worked closely with Licklider and other key members of the project, and he distinctly recalls the tense atmosphere on campuses at the time, even down to the smell of tear gas. Oddly enough, he says some people worked for him by day and protested the project by night, believing that others elsewhere must be doing unethical work. According to Klensin, the Cambridge Project conducted “zero classified research.” It produced general purpose software and published its reports publicly. Some of them are available online, but Levine doesn’t cite them at all. An ARPA commissioned study of its own funding history even concluded that, while the project had been a “technical success” whose systems were “applicable to a wide variety of disciplines,” behavioral scientists hadn’t benefited much from it. Until Levine or someone else can produce documents demonstrating that the project was designed for, or even used in, counterinsurgency or surveillance efforts, we’ll have to take Klensin at his word.

As for the ARPANET, Levine only provides one source of evidence for his claim that, from its earliest days, the experimental computer network was involved in some kind of surveillance activity. He has dug up an NBC News report from the 1970s that describes how intelligence gathered in previous years (as part of an effort to create dossiers of domestic protestors) had been transferred across a new network of computer systems within the Department of Defense.

This report was read into the Congressional record during joint hearings on Surveillance Technology in 1975. But what’s clear from the subsequent testimony of Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense David Cooke, the NBC reporter had likely confused several computer systems and networks across various government agencies. The story’s lone named source claims to have seen the data structure used for the files when they arrived at MIT. It is indeed an interesting account, but it remains unclear what was transferred, across which system, and what he saw. This incident hardly shows “how military and intelligence agencies used the network technology to spy on Americans in the first version of the Internet,” as Levine claims.

The ARPANET was not a classified system — anyone with an appropriately funded research project could use it. “ARPANET was a general purpose communication network. It is a distortion to conflate this communication system’s development with the various projects that made use of its facilities,” Vint Cerf, creator of the internet protocol, told me. Cerf concedes, however, that a “secured capability” was created early on, “presumably used to communicate classified information across the network.” That should not be surprising, as the government ran the project. But Levine’s evidence merely shows that surveillance information gathered elsewhere might have been transferred across the network. Does that count as having surveillance “baked in,” as he says, to the early internet?

Levine’s early history suffers most from viewing ARPA or even the military as a single monolithic entity. In the absence of hard evidence, he employs a jackhammer of willful insinuations as described above, pounding toward a questionable conclusion. Others have noted this tendency. He disingenuously writes that, four years ago, a review of Julian Assange’s book in this very publication accused him of being funded by the CIA, when in fact its author had merely suggested that Levine was prone to conspiracy theories. It’s a shame, because today’s internet is undoubtedly a surveillance platform, both for governments and the companies whose cash crop is our collective mind. To suggest this was always the case means ignoring the effects of the hysterical national response to 9/11, which granted unprecedented funding and power to private intelligence contractors. Such dependence on private companies was itself part of a broader free market turn in national politics from the 1970s onward, which tightened funds for basic research in computing and other technical fields — and cemented the idea that private companies, rather than government-funded research, would take charge of inventing the future. Today’s comparatively incremental technical progress is the result. In The Utopia of Rules (2015), anthropologist David Graeber describes this phenomenon as a turn away from investment in technologies promoting “the possibility of alternative futures” to investment in those that “furthered labor discipline and social control.” As a result, instead of mind-enhancing devices that might have the same sort of effect as, say, mass literacy, we have a precarious gig economy and a convenience-addled relationship with reality.

Levine recognizes a tinge of this in his account of the rise of Google, the first large tech company to build a business model for profiting from user data. “Something in technology pushed other companies in the same direction. It happened just about everywhere,” he writes, though he doesn’t say what the “something” is. But the lesson to remember from history is that companies on their own are incapable of big inventions like personal computing or the internet. The quarterly pressure for earnings and “innovations” leads them toward unimaginative profit-driven developments, some of them harmful.

This is why Levine’s unsupported suspicion of government-funded computing research, regardless of the context, is counterproductive. The lessons of ARPA prove inconvenient for mythologizing Silicon Valley. They show a simple truth: in order to achieve serious invention and progress — in computers or any other advanced technology — you have to pay intelligent people to screw around with minimal interference, accept that most ideas won’t pan out, and extend this play period to longer stretches of time than the pressures of corporate finance allow. As science historian Mitchell Waldrop once wrote, the polio vaccine might never have existed otherwise; it was “discovered only after years of failure, frustration, and blind alleys, none of which could have been justified by cost/benefit analysis.” Left to corporate interests, the world would instead “have gotten the best iron lungs you ever saw.”

Computing for the benefit of the public is a more important concept now than ever. In fact, Levine agrees, writing, “The more we understand and democratize the Internet, the more we can deploy its power in the service of democratic and humanistic values.” Power in the computing world is wildly unbalanced — each of us mediated by and dependent on, indeed addicted to, invasive systems whose functionality we barely understand. Silicon Valley only exacerbates this imbalance, in the same manner that oil companies exacerbate climate change or financialization of the economy exacerbates inequality. Today’s technology is flashy, sexy, and downright irresistible. But, while we need a cure for the ills of late-stage capitalism, our gadgets are merely “the best iron lungs you ever saw.”

Eric Gade is a freelance writer and programmer, previously the project manager of the Declassification Engine project of Columbia University’s History Lab. He is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Recessions and Depressions.

The post The Long View: Surveillance, the Internet, and Government Research appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2lEmpnG via IFTTT

#Blogger

0 notes

marcusfontain-blog · 7 years

Text

Trump, Putin & New Cold War: What The New Yorker gets wrong

The New Yorker made quite a splash with its uber long read on 'Trump, Putin and the New Cold War.' What a shame then the actual product is sloppy, misinformed tosh masquerading as something of highbrow distinction.

When I was a ‘cub’ reporter in Ireland, juggling study with coverage of anything from Barn Dances to Basketball, payment came from lineage. A hideous measure which promoted loquaciousness at the expense of brevity. The compensation was dreadful, set at the measly sum of twenty pence a line. Thus, making a carefully crafted Rugby report worth about the price of a few beers, a pack of Marlboro and a small pizza. That said, if you padded it out, it might extend to a large one, with extra anchovies.

One day my impressionable young self-met an American journalist in Dublin, who told me of a magazine called ‘The New Yorker’ where the generous publishers paid one dollar a WORD. Meaning its sports writers, if it had any, probably eschewed lager, chips and bus journeys for oysters, champagne, and travel by Concorde.

Twenty years later, assuming the title has kept up with inflation, the writers must be on gallons of the fizzy stuff. Because they are clearly taking the piss. How else to explain this March’s lead story, which amounts to a small anti-Russia novella that manages, over 13,000 words, to deliver zero new information to readers. But instead delivers plenty of elementary mistakes and misrepresentations, suggesting the three authors (yes, three!) phoned it in.

This is lackadaisical, trite, obtuse, fallacious hackery at its most inglorious. Penned by a trio of long-winded malingerers, shameless prevaricators and ghastly runtish, repellent, cheerless, petulant gnomes with an ingrained and sophistic loathing of Russia. And here they are trying to push the word-o-meter to its maximum.

Vorsprung Durch Technik? - To be fair, the magazine’s retro cover has been a hit on social media. Although I find the Cyrillic masthead pretentious. Then there’s the introduction to the essay itself. Featuring hellish black and blood red colors depicting an upside down St Basil’s Cathedral shooting a laser beam into the White House, like a bad illustration from a sci-fi comic book, designed by a dyslexic bat. But, then again, all art is subjective really, isn’t it?

As ever, when Westerners profile Russia expectations are pretty low, but these wordsmiths even conspire to live down to the usual humble prospects. David Remnick, who has been editor of the title since 1998 and is evidently as stale as ten-day-old bread, is joined by Evan Osnos, a new name on the Russia beat. And their man in Moscow is Joshua Yaffa, one of those “fellow” chaps, representing a US State Department-funded concern called “New America.”

In the parallel universe The New Yorker occupies when it comes to Russia, in common with pretty much all its peers, everything Moscow does is nefarious and if America makes mistakes, it’s never intentional. The usual Uncle Sam as an eternal toddler stuff, which must always be forgiven because of its cute smile. As a result, Washington’s open interference in Russia politics is never mentioned.

For instance, a balanced article could draw on 1996 when Americans openly intervened to deliver Boris Yeltsin to victory over the less favorable Gennady Zyuganov. Or the outspoken support of US officials for the 2011-2012 Bolotnaya protests. In this case, the serving US ambassador even invited the leaders to his embassy.

Bad Kremlin - Instead, it’s bash Russia time in an opus riddled with fundamental errors. Like when it pores over “anti-Moscow 'color revolutions,' in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, which deposed corrupt, Soviet-era leaders.” Without apparently realizing how Ukraine’s twice-shafted Viktor Yanukovich was a convicted petty criminal in the USSR and upon its fall in 1991 was a regional transport executive with all the power of a spent light bulb. Or how it claims former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev “made a crucial decision not to veto an American-backed UN Security Council resolution in favor of military action in Libya.”

Because this is just disingenuous, given how Russia agreed to the establishment of a 'no-fly zone' over the unfortunate country, not the full-scale NATO “regime change” operation that followed. At no point does The New Yorker acknowledge Moscow’s subsequent disgust at what it perceived as an outrageous breach of trust by its Western partners.

While these are especially blatant examples, there are many others. But given the length of the text, the easiest way to disassemble is to unravel it piece by piece. Here are the ‘highlights,’ but there were many more to choose from.

NEW YORKER: Five years ago, he (Putin) blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. “She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal,” Putin said. “They heard this and, with the support of the US State Department, began active work.” (No evidence was provided for the accusation).

REALITY: As mentioned above, the then US ambassador, Michael McFaul invited the protest leaders to the US embassy. Which, given the relative support levels and the anti-establishment nature of both movements, would have been precisely the same as his Russian equivalent bringing Occupy Wall Street members to his consulate. Furthermore, the magazine doesn’t consider that perhaps Putin received this information from intelligence agencies? As we have just seen in America, they don’t seem to need to provide evidence for their findings to become accepted gospel truth these days. In fact, this entire article is precisely based on the assumption of how “the DNC hacks, many analysts believe, were just a skirmish in a larger war against Western institutions and alliances” (to quote the intro). As we all know, there is no actual proof of Kremlin involvement in the DNC hacks. Indeed, WikiLeaks itself has said the Russian government was not its source. And its envoy claimed that a “disgusted” whistleblower was responsible.

NEW YORKER: In early January, two weeks before the Inauguration, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, released a declassified report concluding that Putin had ordered an influence campaign to harm Clinton’s election prospects, fortify Donald Trump’s, and “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” The declassified report provides more assertion than evidence. Intelligence officers say that this was necessary to protect their information-gathering methods. Critics of the report had repeatedly noted that intelligence agencies, in the months before the Iraq War, endorsed faulty assessments concerning weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence community was deeply divided over the actual extent of Iraq’s weapons development; the question of Russia’s responsibility for cyberattacks in the 2016 election has produced no such tumult. Seventeen federal intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia was responsible for the hacking.

REALITY: This is not entirely true. As many others have pointed out, the NSA (i.e., the agency most likely to know, because it can monitor communications) has offered only ‘moderate’ support.

NEW YORKER: Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coordinating the interference with the election.

REALITY: Obama’s team had much the same level of contacts. In fact, his chief “Russia hand,” McFaul, even visited Moscow during the 2008 transition to speak to Russian officials.

And there was nothing wrong in what McFaul did. For example, Bill Clinton's point man on Russia and Eastern Europe was considered a source of intelligence information and classified as "a special unofficial contact" by SVR. The man concerned, Strobe Talbot, correctly pointed out how it was an exaggeration of chats he had with the Russian ambassador to Canada, Georgiy Mamedov.

Additionally, Henry Kissinger has maintained intensive contacts with Moscow for decades. Yet every recent American president has sought his advice. And George W. Bush's Russia expert, Elizabeth Jones, actually grew up in Moscow and attended local Russian schools.

NEW YORKER: Russian security concerns were hardly the only issue at stake with respect to the expansion of NATO; Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries in the region were now sovereign and wanted protection… Putin, in his first few years in office, was relatively solicitous of the West. He was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. When he spoke at the Bundestag, later that month, he addressed its members in German, the language that he had spoken as a KGB agent in Dresden. He even entertained the notion of Russian membership in NATO. America’s invasion of Iraq, which Putin opposed, marked a change in his thinking.

REALITY: Protection from what exactly? In the 1990’s, nobody was threatening anyone and Russia was both on its knees and desperately trying to join the Western fold, under the famously pro-American Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, as acknowledged by the magazine, during his early years in office, Putin continued the same posture, before becoming embittered by NATO expansion and the illegal Iraq War. There have been countless academic articles, from genuine experts, backing up this view. And even George Kennan, the most celebrated American Russia analyst of the twentieth century, agreed. Thus, NATO’s overreach eastwards has caused the exact problem that NATO purportedly exists to circumvent: insecurity in Europe. In this sense, it was like employing a team of golden retrievers to clean up shredded canine hair. Also, is it such a big surprise that the illegal invasion of a sovereign country, based on obviously false evidence, without a UN mandate, would affect the thinking of a government which regards its UN veto as an important defense tool?

NEW YORKER: He (Putin) was alarmed by the Obama Administration’s embrace of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. And he was infuriated by the US-led assault on Muammar Qaddafi’s regime.

REALITY: This is presented as something irrational, and comes without proper context. However, given that Russia is home to around 20 million Muslims, and has a history of problems with Islamist terrorism, what’s unusual about Putin being concerned about secular, stable (if obnoxious) regimes in the Middle East being replaced by (obviously even more obnoxious) radical Islamists? Also, he was infuriated about Qaddafi, because as mentioned earlier, the mandate the UN agreed to was for a 'no-fly zone' - not a fully fledged NATO campaign of airstrikes, coordinated with the opposition.

NEW YORKER: Russian television, of course, covered the siege of Aleppo as an enlightened act of liberation, free of any brutality or abuses.

REALITY: Which is more or less exactly how American and British TV covered the “liberation” of Baghdad in 2003. Check out this extraordinary report from BBC’s Andrew Marr. Who later became the channel's political editor.

NEW YORKER: And yet Russian military planners and officials in the Kremlin regarded Georgia as a failure in the realm of international propaganda.

REALITY: It’s not hard to see why. Even to this day, US news outlets (and the aforementioned McFaul who definitely knows better) continue to insist that Russia attacked Georgia. But in actual fact, the EU’s independent investigation into the conflict ruled that Georgia started the war.

NEW YORKER: The United States, meanwhile, had its own notable cyberwar success. In 2008, in tandem with Israeli intelligence, the US launched the first digital attack on another country’s critical infrastructure, deploying a “worm,” known as Stuxnet, that was designed to cause centrifuges in Iran to spin out of control and thereby delay its nuclear development.

REALITY: This admitted act of aggression is given a sentence, but an incident in Estonia in 2007 (never proved to have been Russian state ordered) is highlighted over many paragraphs complete with quotes from the country’s former President Toomas Ilves.

NEW YORKER: Obama’s adviser Benjamin Rhodes said that Russia’s aggressiveness had accelerated since the first demonstrations on Maidan Square, in Kiev. “When the history books are written, it will be said that a couple of weeks on the Maidan is where this went from being a Cold War-style competition to a much bigger deal,” he said. “Putin’s unwillingness to abide by any norms began at that point. It went from provocative to disrespectful of any international boundary.”

REALITY: Even though they have 13,000 words to play with, our heroes never consider other aspects of Maidan. Such as, was it normal for serving US and EU officials to turn up at the rallies and more or less encourage protestors to overthrow their democratically elected government? Indeed, it looked like the rock star style adulation went to their heads. Furthermore, what authority did US official’s Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt have to choose the subsequent regime in Kiev?

NEW YORKER: Bruno Kahl, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, has expressed concern that Russian hackers are also trying to disrupt the German political scene, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is standing for reelection as a stalwart supporter of NATO and the EU.

REALITY: German intelligence recently admitted that it found no evidence of Russian election hacking after insinuations of such activity was breathlessly carried by popular media last year. Notably, the “all clear” given to Moscow was ignored by the same outlets. Also, this whole premise is a bit illogical, seeing as the only realistic alternative to Merkel - the SPD led by Martin Schultz - is even more pro-EU than her CDU party. And Schultz himself has spent most of his adult life working in Brussels, home to both the EU and NATO.

NEW YORKER: While officials in the Obama Administration struggled with how to respond to the cyberattacks, it began to dawn on them that a torrent of “fake news” reports about Hillary Clinton was being generated in Russia and through social media.

REALITY: It’s been proven the “fake news” was primarily generated in America itself and in Macedonia. Not Russia.

NEW YORKER: Russia’s political hierarchy and official press greeted Trump’s Inauguration with unreserved glee.

REALITY: Given Clinton’s aggressive anti-Russia rhetoric, during which she compared Putin to Adolf Hitler, why is this a surprise? Especially when Trump had spoken of trying to mend fences with Moscow? The words “straw” “at” and “clutching” come to mind.

And we shall leave it there. Because I’ve just breached the 2,500-word barrier myself and am in danger of resembling those I reprimand. Meanwhile, dear reader you may well have bitten off all your fingernails by now. If you’ve made it this far.

As for The New Yorker, their approach to covering Russia appears to be inspired by the great Samuel Beckett and his wonderful observation: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." Perhaps they'd benefit from following the philosophy of my late grandfather, Paddy, born the same year as the writer, who used to say, spade in hand, "you may as well do a job properly as do it at all." He was right too.

#Marcus Fontain Fontain Marcus Unimundo UnimundoTV www.unimundo.tv

0 notes