+1<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Riaz K Tayob <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:riaz.tayob@gmail.com" target="_blank">riaz.tayob@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div> the coming extinction of the Kantian
enlightened individual, one of the bases of the US
constitution... of course some are of the opinion this has
happened already...?<br>
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<h1><span>Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We're Headed for an
Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets</span></h1>
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<p> POSTED: <span>March
22, 10:53 AM ET </span></p>
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<div> <img alt="Bradley Manning" src="cid:part1.06000101.03010504@gmail.com"> </div>
<div style="width:598">U.S. Army Private
Bradley Manning</div>
<div style="width:584px">Alex Wong/Getty
Images</div>
</div>
<p>I went yesterday to a screening of <i>We Steal Secrets</i>,
Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's brilliant new documentary
about Wikileaks. The movie is beautiful and profound, an
incredible story that's about many things all at once, including
the incredible Shakespearean narrative that is the life of
Julian Assange, a free-information radical who has become an
uncompromising guarder of secrets.</p>
<p>I'll do a full review in a few months, when <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfbsKbivmY0" target="_blank">We Steal Secrets</a> </i>comes out, but I
bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we
keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I
think we're headed for a major confrontation between the
government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale
than even the Wikileaks episode.</p>
<p>We've seen the battle lines forming for years now. It's
increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks,
universities and other such bodies view the defense of their
secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much
so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish
and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across
the informational line.</p>
<p>This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks – and especially
the real<i> </i>subject of Gibney's film, Private Bradley
Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is
being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and
could, theoretically, receive a <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fworld%2F2011%2Fmar%2F03%2Fbradley-manning-may-face-death-penalty&ei=zEdMUbeAIMen4APU-4DgAQ&usg=AFQjCNFEfqS0zlcfCbhqQnUsXn6iYSApOw&sig2=pN7A58jmg-Fhoe9OSgMfZQ&bvm=bv.44158598,d.dmg" target="_blank">death sentence</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/did-the-mainstream-media-fail-bradley-manning-20130301" target="_blank">Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?</a></p>
<p>There's also the horrific case of <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaron-swartz-20130215" target="_blank">Aaron Swartz</a>, a genius who helped create
the technology behind Reddit at the age of 14, who earlier this
year hanged himself after the government threatened him with 35
years in jail for downloading a bunch of academic documents from
an MIT server. Then there's the case of <a href="http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2012/09_-_September/Ex-Goldman_programmer_rejects_plea_deal_with_NY_-_lawyer/" target="_blank">Sergey Aleynikov</a>, the Russian computer
programmer who allegedly stole the High-Frequency Trading
program belonging to Goldman, Sachs (Aleynikov worked at
Goldman), a program which prosecutors in open court admitted
could, "in the wrong hands," be used to "manipulate markets."</p>
<p>Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was convicted,
had his sentence overturned, was freed, and has since been
re-arrested by a government seemingly determined to make an
example out of him.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaron-swartz-20130215" target="_blank">The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron
Swartz</a></p>
<p>And most recently, there's the Matthew Keys case, in which a
Reuters social media editor was charged by the government with
conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to alter a <i>Los
Angeles Times </i>headline in December 2010. The change in
the headline? It <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2013/03/16/social-media-editor-charged-in-hacking-conspiracy" target="_blank">ended up reading</a>, "Pressure Builds in
House to Elect CHIPPY 1337," Chippy being the name of another
hacker group accused of defacing a video game publisher's
website.</p>
<p>Keys is charged with crimes that carry up to 25 years in
prison, although the likelihood is that he'd face far less than
that if convicted. Still, it seems like an insane amount of
pressure to apply, given the other types of crimes (of, say, the
HSBC variety) where stiff sentences haven't even been
threatened, much less imposed.</p>
<p>A common thread runs through all of these cases. On the one
hand, the motivations for these information-stealers seem
extremely diverse: You have people who appear to be primarily
motivated by traditional whistleblower concerns (Manning, who
never sought money and was obviously initially moved by the
moral horror aroused by the material he was seeing, falls into
that category for me), you have the merely mischievous (the Keys
case seems to fall in this area), there are those who either
claim to be or actually are free-information ideologues (Assange
and Swartz seem more in this realm), and then there are other
cases where the motive might have been money (Aleynikov, who was
allegedly leaving Goldman to join a rival trading startup, might
be among those).</p>
<p>But in all<i> </i>of these cases, the government pursued
maximum punishments and generally took zero-tolerance approaches
to plea negotiations. These prosecutions reflected an obvious
institutional terror of letting the public see the
sausage-factory locked behind the closed doors not only of the
state, but of banks and universities and other such
institutional pillars of society. As Gibney pointed out in his
movie, this is a <i>Wizard of Oz</i> moment, where we are
being warned not to look behind the curtain.</p>
<p>What will we find out? We already know that our armies <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/8082605/Wikileaks-Civilians-gunned-down-at-checkpoints.html" target="_blank">mass-murder women and children</a> in places
like Iraq and Afghanistan, that our soldiers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0" target="_blank">joke about smoldering bodies</a> from the
safety of gunships, that some of our <a href="http://wikileaks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/13/wikileaks_and_the_tunisia_protests" target="_blank">closest diplomatic allies</a> starve and
repress their own citizens, and we may even have gotten a
glimpse or two of a banking system that uses <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axYw_ykTBokE" target="_blank">computerized insider trading programs</a> to
steal from everyone who has an IRA or a mutual fund or any stock
at all by manipulating markets like the NYSE.</p>
<p>These fervent, desperate prosecutions suggest that there's more
awfulness under there, things that are worse, and there is a
determination to not let us see what those things are. Most
recently, we've seen that determination in the furor over Barack
Obama's drone assassination program and the so-called "kill
list" that is associated with it.</p>
<p>Weeks ago, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul – whom I've previously
railed against as one of the biggest self-aggrandizing jackasses
in politics – pulled a widely-derided but, I think, absolutely
righteous <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-rand-pauls-filibuster-matters-20130307" target="_blank">Frank Capra act</a> on the Senate floor,
executing a one-man filibuster of Obama's CIA nominee, John
Brennan.</p>
<p>Paul had been mortified when he received a letter from Eric
Holder <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/us/politics/brennan-vote-by-senate-intelligence-panel.html" target="_blank">refusing to rule out drone strikes on American
soil</a> in "extraordinary" circumstances like a 9/11 or a
Pearl Harbor. Paul refused to yield until he extracted a
guarantee that no American could be assassinated by a drone on
American soil without first being charged with a crime.</p>
<p>He got his guarantee, but the way the thing is written doesn't
fill one with anything like confidence. Eric Holder's <a href="http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/WhiteHouseLetter.pdf" target="_blank">letter to Paul</a> reads like the legal
disclaimer on a pack of unfiltered cigarettes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dear Senator Paul,</p>
<p>It has come to my attention that you have now asked an
additional question: "Does the president have the additional
authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not
engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer is no.</p>
<p>Sincerely,</p>
<p>Eric Holder</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You could drive a convoy of tanker trucks through the loopholes
in that letter. Not to worry, though, this past week, word has
come out via Congress – the White House won't tell us anything –
that <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/how-many-americans-are-on-the-kill-list-zero-20130320" target="_blank">no Americans</a> are on its infamous kill
list. The <i>National Journal</i>'s report on this story
offered a similarly comical sort of non-reassurance:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The White House has wrapped its kill list in secrecy and
already the United States has killed four Americans in drone
strikes. Only one of them, senior al-Qaida operative Anwar
al-Awlaki, was the intended target, according to U.S.
officials. The others – including Awlaki's teenage son – were
collateral damage, killed because they were too near a person
being targeted.</p>
<p>But no more Americans are in line for such killings – at
least not yet. "There is no list where Americans are on the
list," House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers told National
Journal. Still, he suggested, that could change.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>"There is no list where Americans are on the list" – even the
language used here sounds like a cheap Orwell knockoff
(although, to be fair, so does <i>V for Vendetta</i>, which
has unfortunately provided <a href="http://images4.alphacoders.com/798/79894.jpg" target="_blank">the model for the modern protest aesthetic</a>).
It's not an accident that so much of this story is starting to
sound like farce. The idea that we have to beg and plead and
pull Capra-esque stunts in the Senate just to find out whether
or not our government has "asserted the legal authority" (this
preposterous phrase is beginning to leak into news coverage with
alarming regularity) to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without
trial would be laughable, were it not for the obvious fact that
such lines are in danger of really being crossed, if they
haven't been crossed already.</p>
<p>This morning, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/opinion/obamas-nixonian-precedent.html?ref=opinion&_r=0" target="_blank">an Emory University law professor named Mary
Dudziak wrote an op-ed in the <i>Times</i></a><i> </i>in
which she pointed out several disturbing aspects to the
drone-attack policy. It's bad enough, she writes, that the Obama
administration is considering moving the program from the CIA to
the Defense Department. (Which, Dudziak notes, "would do nothing
to confer legitimacy to the drone strikes. The legitimacy
problem comes from the secrecy itself — not which entity
secretly does the killing.") It's even worse that the
administration is citing Nixon's infamous bombing of Cambodia as
part of its legal precedent.</p>
<p>But beyond that, Obama's lawyers used bad information in their
<a href="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf" target="_blank">white paper</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page "white paper," Justice
Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that
international law does not support extending armed conflict
outside a battlefield. They cited as historical authority a
speech given May 28, 1970, by John R. Stevenson, then the top
lawyer for the State Department, following the United States'
invasion of Cambodia.</p>
<p>Since 1965, "the territory of Cambodia has been used by North
Vietnam as a base of military operations," he told the New
York City Bar Association. "It long ago reached a level that
would have justified us in taking appropriate measures of
self-defense on the territory of Cambodia. However, except for
scattered instances of returning fire across the border, we
refrained until April from taking such action in Cambodia."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But, Dudziak notes, there is a catch:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more
than a year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson
knew this.) So the Obama administration's lawyers have cited a
statement that was patently false.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now, this "white paper" of Obama's is already of dubious
legality at best. The idea that the President can simply write a
paper expanding presidential power into extralegal assassination
without asking the explicit permission of, well, somebody,
anyway, is absurd from the start. Now you add to that the
complication of the paper being based in part on some
half-assed, hastily-cobbled-together, factually lacking
precedent, and the Obama drone-attack rationale becomes like all
rationales of blunt-force, repressive power ever written –
plainly ridiculous, the stuff of bad comedy, like the Russian
military superpower invading tiny South Ossetia cloaked in
hysterical claims of self-defense.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-rand-pauls-filibuster-matters-20130307" target="_blank">Why Rand Paul's Filibuster Matters</a></p>
<p>The Wikileaks episode was just an early preview of the
inevitable confrontation between the citizens of the
industrialized world and the giant, increasingly secretive
bureaucracies that support them. As some of Gibney's interview
subjects point out in his movie, the experts in this field, the
people who worked on information security in the Pentagon and
the CIA, have known for a long time that the day would come when
all of our digitized secrets would spill out somewhere. </p>
<p>But the secret-keepers got lucky with Wikileaks. They
successfully turned the story into one about Julian Assange and
his personal failings, and headed off the confrontation with the
major news organizations that were, for a time, his allies.</p>
<p>But that was just a temporary reprieve. The secrets are out
there and everyone from hackers to journalists to U.S. senators
are digging in search of them. Sooner or later, there's going to
be a pitched battle, one where the state won't be able to peel
off one lone Julian Assange or Bradley Manning and batter him
into nothingness. Next time around, it'll be a Pentagon
Papers-style constitutional crisis, where the public's
legitimate right to know will be pitted head-to-head with
presidents, generals and CEOs.</p>
<p>My suspicion is that this story will turn out to be less of a
simplistic narrative about Orwellian repression than a
mortifying journey of self-discovery. There are all sorts of
things we both know and don't know about the processes that keep
our society running. We know children in Asia are being beaten
to keep our sneakers and furniture cheap, we know our access to
oil and other raw materials is being secured only by the
cooperation of corrupt and vicious dictators, and we've also
known for a while now that the anti-terror program they say we
need to keep our airports and reservoirs safe involves mass
campaigns of extralegal detention and assassination.</p>
<p>We haven't had to openly ratify any of these policies because
the secret-keepers have done us the favor of making these awful
moral choices for us.</p>
<p>But the stink is rising to the surface. It's all coming out.
And when it isn't Julian Assange the next time but <i>The New
York Times, Der Spiegel </i>and <i>The Guardian </i>standing
in the line of fire, the state will probably lose, just as it
lost in the Pentagon Papers case, because those organizations
will be careful to only publish materials clearly in the public
interest – there's no conceivable legal justification for
keeping us from knowing the policies of our own country
(although stranger things have happened).</p>
<p>When that happens, we'll be left standing face-to-face with the
reality of how our state functions. Do we want to do that? We
still haven't taken a very close look at even the Bradley
Manning material, and my guess is because we just don't want to.
There were thousands of outrages in those files, any one of
which would have a caused a My-Lai-style uproar decades ago.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Did you hear the one about how <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/31/122789/wikileaks-iraqi-children-in-us.html" target="_blank">American troops murdered four women and five
children</a> in Iraq in 2006, including a woman over 70 and an
infant under five months old, with all the kids under five? All
of them were handcuffed and shot in the head. We later called in
an airstrike to cover it up, apparently. But it barely
registered a blip on the American consciousness.</p>
<p>What if it we're forced to look at all of this for real next
time, and what if it turns out we can't accept it? What if
murder and corruption is what's holding it all together? I
personally don't believe that's true – I believe it all needs to
come out and we need to rethink everything together, and we can
find a less totally evil way of living – but this is going to be
the implicit argument from the secret-keeping side when this
inevitable confrontation comes. They will say to us, in essence,
"It's the only way. And you don't want to know." And a lot of us
won't.</p>
<p>It's fascinating, profound stuff. We don't want to know, but
increasingly it seems we can't not know, either. Sooner or
later, something is going to have to give.</p>
</div>
<div>
<h3>Related</h3>
<ul>
<li> <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/lists/the-new-political-prisoners-leakers-hackers-and-activists-20130301" target="_blank">The
New Political Prisoners: Leakers, Hackers and Activists</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="text-align:left;overflow:hidden;text-decoration:none;border:medium none"><br>
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