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