| Subject: Re: new column |
| From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 3/3/11, 01:48 |
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Barrett Brown
<barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
We're working on a solution the problem of concentrated power and should be ready to deploy that solution soon. Trust me, it's something we're worried about as well.
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:08 PM,
<SkeptInq@aol.com> wrote:
Thanks, for the link. First scientology, then
governments. I don't mean this as a flippant remark, because it is a
serious issue: I hope Anonymous doesn't get pissed at Burger King some
day. By this I mean I worry about concentrated power in the hands of a
concentrated number of people, who have their views of right and wrong and the
ability and potential to yield their power broadly and perhaps
indisciminately. It is breath-taking to see the changes that are going on
around the world (and in particular the Middle east) and I am all for the
fall of dictators and tyrants. But I don't want to see them replaced by
dictators and tyrants.
Barry Karr
These are, of course, my personal views and not those of any
organizations I may be involved with.
Great,
thanks. Also see this: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201121321487750509.html
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:32 AM,
<SkeptInq@aol.com> wrote:
Barrett,
the column went up on the website today.
We also posted a link from our Facebook page (which goes out to
our twitter page as well)
Barry
I
know, and I appreciate you guys letting me verge off to the side of the
topic. If you see the ongoing Bloomberg series, NYT piece on Egyptian
website being taken down by hackers, NPR story, etc, you'll see that I had
a lot of explaining to do. Will return to more traditional fare starting
with next column.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 10:05 AM,
<SkeptInq@aol.com> wrote:
Hi Barrett,
The column is in editorial now and I imagine we'll post by
tomorrow.
I liked the column and I have read about your exchange with
Morozov. But I can't help thinking that the column is a bit far
afield from our usual fare for
csicop.org.
Barry Karr
Skepticism
in the face of evidence is no virtue
In
the space of its short life, this column has emphasized the dynamics
of the information age as of extraordinary and poorly-understood
relevance to skepticism as both a system of thought and a movement
within society. Ongoing events require that this now be explained in a
bit more detail.
Since
2005, I have been involved in various extents and capacities with the
Anonymous movement. For the last year, I’ve been in communication with
several of its most active participants, including one who had been
outed by the Church of Scientology after helping to launch Operation
Chanology, a global campaign intended to remove that organization’s
grip on lives and government agencies alike. And for the last month,
beginning with the movement’s assistance programs to Tunisias,
Algerians, and Egyptians who seek to win their freedom, I’ve become
more actively involved in tactics, messaging, and now legal defense
for some of my fellow Anons who have been raided by the FBI and other
agencies, which in turn have been investigating a campaign involving
DDoS attacks against financial companies that had given in to
government pressure to deny their customers the ability to donate to
Wikileaks. All of this is now in the public record, and I confirm it
here as a prelude to the subject of this column and in the interest of
full disclosure.
We
are coming to the close of a two-decade debate over whether or not the
explosion of communicational possibilities brought to us via the
information age are sufficient to allow a subject population and its
supporters to overthrow a government and perhaps establish a freer
one. In light of the demonstrably key role that the internet played in
Tunisia and Egypt thus far and in a certain small sub-Saharan country
soon enough, that debate should be coming to an end. Nonetheless, it
will go on forever, because certain people are impossible to defeat
via argument alone because they are invincible, at least in a
rhetorical and professional sense.
A
few months back I
argued
that Foreign Policy editor Eugene Morozov was not qualified to assess
the above dispute, being incompetent on the subject and having at any
rate committed himself to a certain position which was silly even
before recent events rendered it sillier still. “Tweets don’t
overthrow governments; people do,” Morozov proclaimed then, thereby
dispensing with those who have presumably gone around claiming that
Twitter will gain sentience and begin liberating populations into a
Greater Social Networking Co-Prosperity Sphere. Out of fairness to
Morozov, I’ll note that he does make somewhat more cogent arguments;
out of fairness to everyone else, I’ll note that his arguments tend to
be of the following caliber: “Neither the Iranian nor the Burmese
regime has crumbled under the pressure of pixelated photos of human
rights abuses circulated on social networking sites.” Thus it is that
the infancy of the information age has not yet brought down two of the
world’s most repressive regimes.
As
I noted then:
Not
only has Twitter failed to take down either of the two regimes Morozov
lists, but one of those regimes has attempted to use the service for
its own ends. "Indeed, the Iranian authorities have been as eager to
take advantage of the Internet as their green-clad opponents. After
last year's protests in Tehran, Iranian authorities launched a website
that publishes photos from the protests, urging the public to identify
the unruly protestors by name." We are not told how effective this
turned out to be or why this necessarily cancels out the effectiveness
of Twitter in organizing the protests to begin with or how the fact
that dictators use websites shows that they are not being undermined
by the use of Twitter. The fellow's talent is being wasted in
socio-political commentary when he could be writing mystery
novels.
Today,
I have a better and slightly less catty answer to Morozov regarding
the question of whether or not the internet is a greater boon to
dictators or populations. Rather, I have a question, for him and for
everyone else who has spent the last few years building their careers
on this incompetent brand of pseudo-skepticism: If dictators are so
fond of the internet, why did Mubarak turn the damn thing
off?
Former
“President” Ben-Ali of Tunisia did not turn off the internet, of
course, when Tunisian activists began coordinating with Anonymous and
other parties in taking down the government’s websites and in some
cases replacing them with messages of support to the Tunisian people,
thereby proving that their government was not so powerful as it
seemed; when Anonymous-affiliated journalists began bringing attention
to the nascent protests in an effort to alert those around the world
who themselves were in a position to help Tunisia succeed; when guides
were written by experts and distributed by Tunisians and other North
Africans to the many among them who had no knowledge of street
confrontation but who now know as much as any black bloc anarchist; or
when the great and still-growing network of Tunisians, Anonymous, and
other parties began building dark nets and other solutions to the
problem of government censorship and infiltration. Ben-Ali should have
done so, but he didn’t, and even if he had, many of the same
techniques used to reconnect Egyptians during the shutdown would have
been employed in Tunisia with similar results. Tunisia, incidentally,
is not finished with its ongoing troubles, but nor is this coalition
finished with its ongoing work, which will at any rate be ignored by
those whose professional interests coincide with those who would
prefer that we spend less time thinking up new ways by which to aid
subject populations and more time reading about how such a thing is
impossible despite the evidence before our very eyes.
Contrary
to all the evidence, there are two general views on this matter: that
perpetuated by Morovoz and others like him who believe that such
things as Wikileaks, Twitter, Anonymous, and Facebook are not quite as
relevant as many would believe, and that perpetuated by those of us
who have used those very same dynamics to prove that they are already
more relevant than even the most enthusiastic of us were
predicting not long ago,
when we thought in terms of years rather than the mere months it has
taken to proceed to the current situation. Everyone among the
thousands of North Africans and others who poured into our IRC
channels would seem to agree with the latter view, having consequently
watched and participated in those things which are necessary to making
any informed decision on the matter. When you have seen a teenage
Tunisian girl translating into French and Arabic the guides that were
minutes before compiled by activists living five different countries
and then passing them on to her family and friends and then asking
what else she can do to help free her country - and receiving a dozen
answers, all of them good - it is difficult to take seriously
the output of those whose first instinct at such a moment is to
downplay it in accordance with the opinions they already held to begin
with.
This
dynamic will continue and will have in fact already expanded by the
time this is read, this being an age in which events overtake the
quickest of mediums (and the slowest of dictators). Already
a number of this column’s readers have worked to promote such a
dynamic, and we hope that more will join us at this crucial time. Many
operations are run out of irc.anonsops.ru
in #OpTunisia and #OpEgypt; other efforts are hatched at irc.freenode.net
#projectpm. I may be reached at barriticus@gmail.com
or, for secure communications by those facing surveillance, transistor@hushmail.com. Join us for proof that in
such a time as this, one can act against tyranny in the time it takes
to complain about it.
(For
Freemary, who earned her name)
--
Regards,
Barrett
Brown
512-560-2302
--
Regards,
Barrett
Brown
512-560-2302
--
Regards,
Barrett
Brown
512-560-2302
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302