The Breaking Time

The drones will wait until the stars are right

Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth, Associated Press

So this is real:

Yes, the Argus is the world's highest resolution camera, and the system is capable of monitoring and coordinating the information it receives more effectively than ever before. If this trajectory continues, one day you'll be standing at a street corner, texting a friend, and someone in a facility will be able to read your message from orbit.

Notice the ending discussion about UAVs that will stay aloft for years at a time, paired with blithe acceptance that people will be constantly monitored. Coincidentally, I saw this video a year to the day after Tim Maly coined "argus" as the collective noun for a group of drones.

As if the skies weren't already turning into something out of an early '80s sci-fi novel, DARPA is also proposing military robots in the ocean, using the seas as a "vast area for concealment and storage" until the stars time is right.

Together, this puts some strange tools in the arsenal of an established government, any established government. Imagine a crumbling regime's leaders stockpiling hundreds of machines, sleeping in the air or the ocean, ready to avenge their masters if someone ever ousts them.

Oh well. We can always hide in our drone-proof cities.

History repeating: some fears about Newtown's aftermath

Confiscated guns packed into Philadelphia's evidence room, which can't hold them all. Photo by David Miailetti, Daily News.

Unless some of my readers are just emerging from a cave, I don't think I have to tell anyone about the horrific shooting at Newtown. If you're looking for some practical ways to help that community, here's a list.

In the days since, just about every aspect of gun violence has come up for discussion. As NSFW Corp editor-in-chief Paul Carr rightly predicted after the news broke, we've been subjected to perspectives "smart, trite, academic, contrarian, annoying, brilliant and all variations between."

But there's still a few assumptions worth tackling.

For context, I've covered crime in my city for over five years. I've seen cases where firearms stopped murderers and where they enabled them to do terrible damage. I'm also a gun owner who feels the black helicopter crowd is a cultural cancer that makes mature discussion of issues of violence and self-defense in this country nigh impossible.

Further, I believe it's possible to craft laws recognizing a basic ability to own a firearm (not military ordinance or a damn arsenal) while making it more difficult for violent maniacs to walk around with machine guns. Perfect systems are impossible, but we can have a far better one.

But my fear — and I hope to hell I'm wrong — is that we come out of this with some unenforceable mess, more surveillance, the return of zero tolerance at schools, a stigma against autism, another push to ban violent video games, and nothing that solves any real problems.

From drug epidemics to Columbine to 9/11, our country's track record for enacting sweeping measures in the wake of tragedy is terrible. There were real problems in all of those situations, but the attempted solutions didn't fix them, or even made things worse.

In the discussion of gun control after Newtown, there's too often an assumption of the efficiency of the legal apparatus, that it's simply a matter of deciding to enact properly strict laws, and we'll get down to the low levels of violence seen in other nations. I don't think that's merited.

Practically, we're not the UK or Japan, where civilian guns were never pervasive and laws restricting weapons date back centuries. We're not Australia, which had about 3 million guns for 18 million people when its government put major restrictions in place back in the mid-90s.

Instead, there are 270-310 million guns in the United States, almost one for every man, woman, and child. This isn't just a situation that no other industrialized nation has ever encountered, it's never happened in human history.

Whatever your opinions on gun control, whether you own a firearm or find them disgusting, that's the reality: 300 million guns is a hell of a foundation for a potential black market.

Don't believe me? Last year, over 100 guns went missing from Asheville's evidence room. A few years before, the same happened under county Sheriff Bobby Medford, who ludicrously claimed he'd buried some assault rifles in the walls of the local jail. Medford's currently doing a 15-year stint in federal prison, but the guns are nowhere to be found. My area ain't alone in this problem.

My fear is that sloppy policy creates a larger opportunity for corruption, including among some of those charged with enforcing any new rules. Many evidence rooms already can't handle the volume of weapons they take in, and that situation means it's easy for them to disappear.

I'm trying to have some hope too. For well over a decade, violent crime in America has declined rapidly. Hell, it's one of the only positive social trends we have. While firearms aren't going anywhere, the culture around them can change.

Paranoids who want to keep loopholes open, allow drunks to go armed in bars, and prevent doctors from informing people about gun safety don't represent many — even most — gun owners, and it's far past time more of us said so. The crazier parts of gun culture grow because they all too often find reinforcement instead of stigma.

It doesn't have to be this way: a country where gun ownership is viewed with adult responsibility instead of adolescent power fantasy will be a less violent place. That sort of cultural shift is trickier than passing a law, but it's essential.

While we're at it, let's look at halting the mental health system's decades-long free-fall. Let's look at why the legal system doesn't take domestic abuse and rape seriously, letting violent scumbags out repeatedly until the day they finally empty a clip into someone.

And yes, let's look at gun laws. But let's do so carefully, without pretending that fixing violence in a sprawling country with a mess of social issues is just a matter of writing a rule, and remembering the limits of law enforcement.

The urge to do something in the wake of a tragedy is laudable, but getting this shit wrong has consequences. I hope this isn't just history repeating.

Open Notes: Rural cyberpunk

2011 fire in the Great Dismal Swamp, seen from space. The fire was caused by drought, making the swamp's peat especially flammable. Image from NASA.

Awhile back, I made an off-the-cuff comment on Twitter about "rural cyberpunk." Visiting where I grew up this week (map above), I think there's a lot more there than initially met the eye, and it's time for some open, if haphazard, notes on this particular theme, mixing past, present, and twenty-minutes-from-now future:

• Landscapes full of abandoned buildings from variety of eras. Half-built bedroom communities, unfinished suburbs down the road from generational family homes.

• Relentless salvaging of old machinery to feed or mix with newer. Creative rigging of second-hand or "outdated" technology into rough but extremely reliable forms. Abandoned industrial equipment as resource. Constant repair/re-use.

• Blackwater. The world's most infamous private mercenary army, founded and originally based in Moyock, NC. Original training grounds on 3,000 acres of the Dismal Swamp.

• Farms as ground zero for backyard/grey market gene splicing. After all, it's not that different from what farmers have done for centuries: adapt technology and natural processes to alter forms of life. Use to find workarounds on killer seeds, etc. (farmers are also adept at slipping around central authority that gets in their way).

• Pervasive personal weaponry and a higher-than-average number of ex-soldiers from a variety of wars.

• Backroads dotted with towns largely ignored by larger governments. Weak or non-existent official social safety networks.

• Same lack of bigger institutions or gov, along with lack of attention from larger cities/culture providing appealing haven for people that want to be ignored — plenty of opportunity where no one's looking. Widespread surveillance is nigh-impossible in rural areas.

• Historical role of Northeastern NC (and many similar rural areas) as refuge for fleeing slaves, indentured servants, remaining natives during country's early history. Pockets of deep anti-Confederate/government sentiment during Civil War. 

• Juxtaposition of international ports and nearby complete wilderness. Revival of old smuggling routes along canals, inlets, and sounds. A lot of homes in this area have a small dock by a waterway. Evolution of decentralized black market distribution network for areas increasingly left out of "the future."

• Infrastructure neglect and the brunt end of climate change.

• Interesting things emerging from the area's "everyone" is ignoring or dismissing.

• Last, but not least, 'ol William Gibson's Twitter handle is, coincidentally, GreatDismal. The Dixie Flatline lives. ;-)

Feel free to add your own contributions or thoughts on this theme in the comments.

This is big: censorship-cracking "internet in a suitcase"

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a tech innovation legitimately worth getting excited about:

In response to the government suppression of Internet access during the Arab Spring, "Internet in a Suitcase" will allow citizens to bypass censors and help them reconnect in times of government imposed shutdown. A "suitcase" can be transported to dissidents in a repressive country and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet, thus undermining the despotic governing powers. To track the project, you can follow the Open Technology Initiative on Twitter @newamericaoti.

In accordance with the United Nations decision that Internet access should not be denied to anyone, this project is the Obama administration's attempt at harboring democracy in these repressive countries while exercising a push at furthered free speech practices.The project is funded by a $2 million grant from the State Department.

This is huge. While people get far too excited over apps or augmented reality, this is the exact kind of durable infection that stands a chance of furthering actual, substantial change: reliable, easy to replicate and fulfilling a basic need, in this case communicating in the face of repression.

This segment from Al-Jazeera has more information:

Credit where it's due: for all the terrible government-funded things, this one is really beneficial. Of course, like the AK-47, this is going to spread far beyond the control of the government that started it. These tools need to be widespread, in the first world as well as the third, in slums, countryside and rust belts too. The more of them there are, the more resilient future social movements will be against attempts to totally shut down communication.

Mark my words, these suitcases will inevitably end up used against repressive governments of many stripes, including ones the US supports. That's for the good, and with this development, I think the ability to bring the hammer down on online communication just suffered a major setback.

Fragmented plurality: An interview with Gabriella Coleman

Gabriella Coleman moves between a lot of different worlds. She's an assistant professor on media, culture and communication at NYU, a writer on digital culture, and an anthropologist by training. Her work, specifically on the (in)famous collection of hacktivists known as Anonymous, combines an admirable skill for tackling new trends while bringing the best traits of an academic background to bear, better placing the cutting edge in a larger context.

In this interview, she discusses the multifaceted beast that is Anonymous, and how digital culture and political activism collide.

How did you first become interested in Anonymous and hacktivism?

I've been working on computer hackers and software informally since 1998, more seriously since about 2001.

How I started to work on Anonymous was really accidental. I started to do research on free software, and during that time period people would raise the question of Scientology quite a bit. It always intrigued me, but I sort of didn't know what to do with it. People had mentioned that they would protest the church or were on some BBS critical of the church . Then I went to the University of Alberta for a year as a post-doc, and there's the largest Scientology archives in the world. Now I understood why they protest the Church of Scientology, it's kind of a perfect nemesis.

When Anonymous in 2008 began to protest the Church of Scientology, I followed them there, because it was in that lineage of geek and hacker protest against the Church of Scientology.

You originally come from an anthropological training and background, how do you think that helps you undersand the evolution of digital culture?

I think it helps quite a bit. While there's technical forms of organization and power — those with technical knowledge often have more authority — when you have a grouping like Anonymous that is really premised on this anti-leader, anti-celebrity ethic, certain cultural and behavioral norms are the ways in which you can find consistent order. If you don't have an eye towards that, you might miss some of those dynamics at play.

Driven by norms instead of leaders; it almost sounds like a tribe

No, not really. In academia we're also driven by norms, and certain types of ethics and so it's kind of implicit in so-called modern forms of life that are not tribal, we just choose not to think about those elements in modern society because there's such a commitment to individualism that we tend to not focus in on them, but they exist. They exist in the workplace, they exist in religious organizations, they exist in unions, they exist in many places.

I don't like the language of "tribal" because it makes it seem like it's lower on the totem pole, and makes it seem like so-called modern society doesn't have some of those elements as well.

In your perception, what's the biggest misconception the general public has about Anonymous?

The biggest misconception is that they're kind of angst-ridden pre-teens who are socially isolated who are working out their anger, born through their isolation, through forms of juvenile politics.

What enemy?

Today the Army finally hit Bradley Manning with 22 additional charges, including a potential capital crime:

WASHINGTON — The Army announced 22 additional charges on Wednesday against Pfc. Bradley Manning, the military intelligence analyst who is accused of leaking a trove of government files to WikiLeaks a year ago.

The new charges included “aiding the enemy”; wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the Internet, knowing that it was accessible to the enemy; multiple counts of theft of public records, transmitting defense information and computer fraud. If he is convicted, Private Manning could be sentenced to life in prison.

It doesn't look like the Army will pursue the death penalty for the "aiding the enemy" charge. This is comforting to Manning, I'm sure.

Which "enemy" did Manning aid? Is Wikileaks an official enemy of the United States? If not, what enemy is the army alleging he helped?

The charges mention the word repeatedly, and add that Manning's alleged assistance was indirect, but the exact name and nature of this enemy is not mentioned, nor specifically how Manning's actions assisted them in some material way. That seems absurd to me.

Because when someone is placed in solitary confinement for 10 months, without a conviction and under extremely punitive conditions, you'd at least think his prosecutors have an obligation to spell that sort of thing the fuck out.

ID'd: Why should you trust Silicon Valley?

Well, this couldn't go wrong at all:

To help solve the modern nightmare of trying to control your online identity and keep track your passwords, the government came to Silicon Valley Friday and said it was here to help.

But rather than propose a big government initiative, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and the White House cyber czar Howard Schmidt made clear the feds want the private sector to take the lead.

“Just to be clear: We’re not talking about a national ID card,” Secretary Locke said in a speech at Stanford University. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system, but we are talking about enhancing online security and reducing the need to remember a dozen passwords.”

---

The government’s proposed solution is what the administration calls a “trusted-identity ecosystem.” The idea is to create an environment with a wide choice of trusted-identity providers that individuals can use to log in to a wide range of websites, including ones that handle sensitive data, using a single login.

Smart people have written a number of good pieces on this topic already, so I won't repeat too many of their points. In short, it's not hard to see this creating a very limited number of gateways to the biggest online services. Something like a Google ID could, by stumbling steps, become a required form of verification much like a Social Security number.

Here's another wrinkle: to put it nicely, Silicon Valley's record on privacy isn't stainless. From Facebook to Apple, the default response seems to see users' info as a tool for profit and their own as untouchable. Its biggest players generally act much the same way large, amoral corporations in any industry do.

The recent events of the Wikileaks battles don't bode well either. With no formal charges filed, major online companies happily shut down accounts, turned over information and failed to challenge gag orders. Twitter alone showed some spine in this department.

So there's precious little confidence when these entities are set to cooperate with government on something as volatile as identification. If these plans advance, the backlash will be like nothing Silicon Valley's faced before.

Imagine the following scenario: online identification for most major services is shuttled into a few trusted providers, who profit heavily off their role in the "ecosystem." Given their relative power, said companies could then exploit much of that data as they saw fit. Sure, tech-savvy people will figure ways around, but most people aren't tech-savvy. 

Furthermore, the government (or a company) could simply have that trusted identification turned off, regardless of whether the person in questions has been convicted — or even charged — with anything. 

Don't think that's likely? Look how drastically asset forfeiture is misused. If history is any lesson, the incentives here are not on the side of the angels.

Then, of course, all this is a boon for the very hackers and spies it's supposed to deter. Even if it's better guarded, now only one stolen identity is needed to open up a treasure trove of connected information. Hell, a smart thief won't even need any particular expertise; just bribe a low-level employee.

To avoid violating this blog's motto, I should note that "Silicon Valley" is not a monolithic entity. Plenty within its ranks differ widely in philosophy and practice. But the major actors are primarily out for their own gain.

Should you trust them to handle a matter this ripe for abuse? I don't.

WikiWar, round 2: Burn and pillage

 

Oh my, what an eventful few days. Last night saw the WikiWar heat up further, as Anonymous' offensive went into full-bore burn-and-pillage mode, taking down PayPal, Mastercard, Visa and a few other sites (Swedish prosecutors and a Swiss bank) just for good measure.

This is essentially the "unleash the hordes" tactic, though, of course, there's no organized leadership on the Wikileaks' "side." Anonymous is not Wikileaks, but an independent network that's decided to act in vengeance for the Govs' attacks.

If this is war, then Anonymous' current path is the equivalent of setting loose raiders in the enemy territory to loot and raze whatever they come across: indiscriminate and far more likely to alienate than accomplish anything meaningful.

But then the very dispersion that makes Anonymous and similar allied networks so hard to crush also makes it hard to do much more than shout "charge!" on any large scale. While more precise tactics like targeting the same companies' offices or internal networks might have both caused more actual damage and wrought less collateral impact, it's not like there's some central command structure to enforce that.

A lot of small businesses, nonprofits and freelancers use PayPal, and there was a distinct moment of panic last night when their website (the PayPal.com part, at least) went down. If it had stayed that way, whatever grander point Anonymous was trying to make would have been completely lost in people unable to pay their bills right before the holiday. As it is, the move hasn't exactly generated much sympathy. 

However, once unleashed, this sort of thing can't exactly be controlled; even Anonymous' own organizers were promptly ousted when they called for a change in tactics. They are learning, like people in conflict throughout history, that the lust to smash a target has a force of its own.

That Babbage piece compares Anonymous' set-up to Athenian democracy. A better comparison is the aforementioned hordes: a chief doesn't promise enough plunder, out they go.

The hackers aren't exactly remaining completely anonymous either, Dutch police just arrested a 16-year-old for involvement in the Visa/Mastercard attacks and I'd wager he's not the last, as the Govs pick off scattered raiders here and there. That side hasn't been any model of sanity either, with crazy-ass calls to dust off the World War I-era (remember what I compared this to?) Espionage Act or comparing hacktivists to child molesters.

The war mentality's setting in, and I can't imagine anything constructive emerging from that.

Meanwhile, Assange is in prison, albeit with limited Internet access, his bail denied. Wikileaks itself has remained neutral on the attacks while setting up alternative ways to donate money, and if you're looking for a way to directly help them, consider doing so. There's chaos in the organization, which doesn't seem as leaderless as it appeared. Nonetheless, Wikileaks seems to have withstood the initial onslaught, and its rapidly increasing number of mirror sites make it even more resilient to future damage.

At the start, I referred to this as a war. That term carries dangers with it. While there are important stakes here — civil liberties chief among them — its worth noting that no one's dead here. In a world where billions struggle to get water and food, while facing conflict of the "you're going to die" kind, that point cannot be lost.

I use the term "war" because that is increasingly how those directly involved view it, because it encompasses a framework of human conflict that serves to help us better understand what lengths they will go to and to what delusions they may be subject. Right now, it's the best word we have, because what we're witnessing, as Jardine points out in the piece above, is something unprecedented.

So the stalemate continues, with ever more caught in the crossfire. I have a sinking feeling that the Govs can make an arrest for every site Anonymous crashes, 'til the sun goes black, and the whole mess will be not one step closer to resolution.

The WikiWar

Anonymous' call to arms here

I lead with Anonymous' plea for volunteers to fight for Julian Assange/Wikileaks because it uses a rhetoric that represents an important crossing point in the emerging brawl between the network of leakers and a number of nation-states.

Anonymous speaks of war.

No, it's not war in the traditional sense of guns and bloodied limbs, but in broken secrets, encrypted "insurance" files, arrest warrants, censorship, financial seizures and even calls for blood, it's taking on all the dimensions of a go-for-broke struggle between two rapidly evolving sides.

For those of us who aren't pro-wikileaks but are also, in the interest of a free, open society, anti-anti-Wikileaks, the dimensions of the conflict seem alarming. I, for one, can see both the wisdom in the Guardian's defense of media using the cables and in Democracy in America's argument that stable institutions play a role in a free society.

But, however chaotic, the "infowar" is not incomprehensible. Technology may have changed drastically, but the basics of human conflict have not.

The fight is evolving by the hour, as Wikileaks morphs to adapt to its attackers and various parts of the international political and business communities pile on the pressure. What follows is an attempt to understand the sides, the struggle and the dynamics, in the hopes that the rest of us may learn what the hell's emerging from the maelstrom.

Cables and gates

Wikileaks' latest document dump is over a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, some reaching all the way back to the 1970s. Needles to say, this has provoked some fierce debate and may actually have serious diplomatic consequences.

To be honest, I haven't found any of the revelations (so far) actually shocking. It's been clear for sometime that the U.S. is involved in low-level combat in Yemen. Trying to protect CIA operatives from arrest for wrongful kidnapping is sleazy and wrong, but bullshit like that's been going on since the Cold War. Yes, shockingly, aristocratic tyrants in the Middle East present one face to their people and another to their inner circle. Oh, and turns out U.S. diplomats severely over-estimated their ability to handle the 1979 Iranian revolution. Who knew?

Some of the cables are even reassuring. While wikileaks has successfully dubbed the release "cablegate," implying a whif of scandal, look at some of the initiatives uncovered: U.S. diplomats are trying to stem the flow of weapons to Hezbollah, empty Guantanamo, curb Afghani government corruption, convince Pakistan to scale back its nuclear arsenal and prevent Iran from going nuclear while simultaneously resisting Israeli and Arab leaders' calls for a calamitous war. How terrible.

Just judging from the reaction online and among those I know personally, many of whom are generally sympathetic to wikileaks, this particular volley has attracted probably the most ambivalent reaction yet. Wikileaks' previous dispatches had better justification: revealing attacks on journalists in warzones or exposing how an amok obsession with secrecy is used to obscure even basic details of military operations.

All the same, look at some of the more worthy diplomatic initiatives in the list above, especially those (like the negotiations with Pakistan), that are probably now DOA due to this document dump. For all that the government's botched over the years, I can't help but cringe a bit at endangering the work that's actually constructive. One can be an advocate of openness and still see the need for some information (say, sensitive diplomatic negotiations) to have some level of confidentiality, especially while a deal is still being negotiated.

I also can't help but getting the sense that the shotgun blast approach is less about a screaming need for this information to be public as much as it is a "fuck you" to the U.S. government. Wikileaks, like the nations recorded in these diplomatic cables, is out to protect its own turf and hit its enemies, perhaps more than it would like to admit. It's probably for the best that its next target will be banks, where the battle lines are a little more clear.

This is also where "cablegate" gets really interesting, in the Breaking Time sense. The content is nothing explosive by itself, but the implications certainly are. A major diplomatic bombshell was just caused by a loose, stateless network of hackers and informants. This is possible because the base of secret information grew so bloated, the technology so advanced and the culture so adversarily cynical that a freaking Army private had access to enough material for four serious breaches, along with whatever else Julian Assange has tucked away for insurance.

Secret diplomatic communiques between governments is a pillar of the current nation-state framework. A boring but big, really important pillar going back to the Treaty of F'ing Westphalia in 1648. It is as basic a plank as there is. 

If groups like wikileaks can shake that, repeatedly, then something big just broke, and it won't just damage the ability of states to strongarm others behind closed doors. The treaties and accords that many idealists look to for peaceful international improvement will also suffer a major blow if those negotiations can be breached. Explosions aren't surgical, and it's very possible for the useful and good to take as much damage as the oppressive and wrong.

I've written here before (after the last wikileaks dump) about how transparency is an ammo dump, but it's worth noting that it works best when that ammunition serves an overall purpose: to insure consequences for those who breach some sort of established trust. What's the purpose here? Wikileaks has certainly mastered the art of disrupting the current set-up, but they, nor anyone else, seem to really know what the new rules are.

P.S.- On the bright side, revealing the cables is incidentally a big blow to a conspirational view of world politics. The aggregated stories offer a compelling counterpoint, showing how competing interests, failure, grudges, and personal quirks form the mish-mash that is the international power structure.