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