<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">'...Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all “gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents.<br><br>'These thumb-fingered acts of totalitarian comedy are entirely familiar to anybody who has read Russian literature. The pigs in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” have more suavity than the US government is demonstrating now. Their credibility is below zero....'<div><br></div><div><div class="post-field image image-picker-wrap background-size-contain" data-url="https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/max/700/0*eT5LwH4rOihgpThm.jpeg" data-id="0*eT5LwH4rOihgpThm.jpeg" data-image-style="contain" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="333"><div class="post-header-image-wrap" data-load-img=".post-header-image-cover"><img class="post-header-image-contain" src="https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/max/700/0*eT5LwH4rOihgpThm.jpeg" alt="richard stallman (left), julian assange and photo of edward snowden / CREDIt: WIKILeaks" height="466.2" width="700"></div><div class="post-field caption" data-action="dummy">richard stallman (left), julian assange and photo of edward snowden / CREDIt: WIKILeaks</div></div><header class="post-header"><ul class="post-meta"><li class="post-meta-item"><span class="divider-word"> in </span><a href="https://medium.com/geek-empire-1" data-collection-slug="geek-empire-1" title="Go to Geek Empire">Geek Empire</a></li><li class="post-meta-item post-meta-reading-time"><span class="reading-time">13 min read</span></li></ul><h1 itemprop="name" class="post-title">The Ecuadorian Library</h1><h2 class="post-field subtitle">or, The Blast Shack After Three Years</h2></header><div class="post-content"><div class="post-content-inner"><div class="post-field body notes-source"><p class="" name="f3a0">Back
in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about
Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy
essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully,
like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy.</p><p class="" name="63e8">In
that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before
they got any better. Sure enough, things now are lots, lots worse. Much
worse than Cablegate ever was.</p><p class="" name="c181">Cablegate
merely kicked the kneecap of the archaic and semi-useless US State
Department. But Edward Snowden just strolled out of the Moscow airport,
with his Wikileaks personal escort, one month after ripping the pants
off the National Security Agency.</p><p class="" name="f7dd">You see, as it happens, a good half of my essay “<a href="https://medium.com/p/f745f5fbeb1c">The Blast Shack</a>” was about the basic problem of the NSA. Here was the takeaway from that essay back in 2010:</p><blockquote class="" name="feee">One
minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit
like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to
democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of
elementary principles of constitutional design. The NSA is the very
antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and
free expression, and separation of powers ― in other words, the NSA is a
kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And
we’re used to that. We pay no mind.</blockquote><p class="" name="061b">Well, dear readers, nowadays we do pay that some mind. Yes, that was then, while this is now.</p><p class="" name="c0fe">So,
I no longer feel that leaden discontent and those grave misgivings that
I felt in 2010. The situation now is frankly exhilarating. It no longer
has that look-and-feel of the Edgar Allen Poe House of Usher. This
scene is straight outta Nikolai Gogol.</p><p class="" name="9ef0">This
is the kind of comedic situation that Russians find hilarious. I mean,
sure it’s plenty bad and all that, PRISM, XKeyScore, show trials,
surveillance, threats to what’s left of journalism, sure, I get all
that, I’m properly concerned. None of that stops it from being
hilarious.</p><p class="" name="47d5">Few geopolitical situations can ever give the Russians a full, free, rib-busting belly laugh. This one sure does.</p><p class="" name="5546">If
Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed
editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao
Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed
Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the
up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector.</p><p class="" name="e193">But
Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans
don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the
American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage
like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all
“gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all
while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents.</p><p class="" name="dc0d">These
thumb-fingered acts of totalitarian comedy are entirely familiar to
anybody who has read Russian literature. The pigs in Orwell’s “Animal
Farm” have more suavity than the US government is demonstrating now.
Their credibility is below zero.</p><p class="" name="7528">The
Russians, by contrast, know all about dissidents like Snowden. The
Russians have always had lots of Snowdens, heaps. They know that Snowden
is one of these high-minded, conscience-stricken, act-on-principle
characters who is a total pain in the ass.</p><p class="" name="707d">Modern
Russia is run entirely by spies. It’s class rule by the “siloviki,”
it’s Putin’s “managed democracy.” That’s the end game for civil society
when elections mean little or nothing, and intelligence services own the
media, and also the oil. And that’s groovy, sure, it’s working out for
them.</p><p class="" name="c7f5">When you’re a professional spy
hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these
conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in
their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles
somehow. They’re a drag.</p><p class="" name="96e2">See, dissidence is
like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy,
built you a hydrogen bomb. This eerie device straight from hell even
works, so it’s all good. Then all of a sudden he’s like: you know what?
The noble science of physics shouldn’t harm mankind!</p><p class="" name="8e40">What
kind of self-indulgent, fatuous gesture is that? Look here, Dr Labcoat:
why was the public’s money given to you, if not to “harm mankind”? If
physics was harmless, you wouldn’t have a damn salary!</p><p class="" name="a766">That’s
what life feels like for the NSA right now. That is the shoe Snowden
laced on their foot. If you’re NSA, as so many thousands are, you’ve
known from the get-go that the planet’s wires and cables are a weapon of
mass surveillance. Because that is their inherent purpose! You can’t
get all conflicted, and start whining that Internet users are citizens
of some place or other! That is not the point at all!</p><p class="" name="6d84">Citizens
and rights have nothing to do with elite, covert technologies! The
targets of surveillance are oblivious dorks, they’re not even newbies!
Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator
knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the
dashboard knows about internal combustion.</p><p class="" name="12de">So,
yes, the wry and mordant humor here has not escaped me. But let’s
change perspective a bit. Yes, some time has passed, and the smoke of
2010 has lifted from the scene. The cypherpunk blast shack was blown to
smithereens for good and all.</p><p class="" name="213b">It’s now clear
that the NSA has created its own dissidents. The closer they get to the
actual living fully functional NSA, the bigger, and hairier, and more
consequential these dissidents are.</p><p class="" name="0ff1">First
let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA.
Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a
zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.”</p><p class="" name="f2a8">The
authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some
randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is
already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage
to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo
creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma,
they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.</p><p class="" name="8379">At
least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his
feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement
that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war
martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power
who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.</p><p class="" name="366e">Some
future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to
admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has
failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.
There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and
a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no
matter how much they leak.</p><p class="" name="9d46">Thanks to the
modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a
lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to
them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like,
persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not
dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence
again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience.</p><p class="" name="94ef">However,
unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for
passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went
into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe
it’s worth it.</p><p class="" name="07d4">Then there’s Julian Assange.
Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian
Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky
clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the
NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.</p><p class="" name="0b3b">If
you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian,
it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got
the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even
the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own
vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and
haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).</p><p class="" name="0cb9">Julian
has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention.
He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing
Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still
got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.</p><p class="" name="3b40">There’s
nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty
machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest
has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling
himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has
calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through
ardent political struggle.</p><p class="" name="62b4">Julian Assange is
still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t
have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy
doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore
without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade
from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area
of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.</p><p class="" name="daaf">More
astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker
myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody.
Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also
faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.</p><p class="" name="f44d">Assange
liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced
contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.</p><p class="" name="5666">It’s
incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on
the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them
could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks.
This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even
pack his own suitcase without having a fit.</p><p class="" name="a70a">I
wouldn’t ever have picked Assange as a travel agent, but then just look
at the fellow-travellers — the solemn signatories of the recent
“International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to
Communications Surveillance.” I’ll toss a few in as an ideological bloc
here, just to memorialize their high-minded indignation.</p><h2 class="" name="bb3f">SIGNATORIES</h2><blockquote class="" name="4668">7iber
(Amman, Jordan), Access (International), Africa Platform for Social
Protection – APSP (Africa), AGEIA Densi (Argentina), <a href="http://Agentura.ru">Agentura.ru</a>
(Russia), Aktion Freiheit statt Angst (Germany), All India Peoples
Science Network (India), Alternatif Bilişim Derneği (Alternatif Bilişim)
– Turkey (Turkey), Alternative Law Forum (India), Article 19
(International), ASL19 (Canada/Iran), Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y
la Justicia – ACIJ (Argentina), Asociación de Internautas Spain
(Spain), Asociación Paraguaya De Derecho Informático Y Tecnológico –
APADIT (Paraguay), Asociación por los Derechos Civiles – ADC
(Argentina), Aspiration (United States), Associação Brasileira de
Centros de inclusão Digital – ABCID (Brasil), Associació Pangea
Coordinadora Comunicació per a la Cooperació (Spain), Association for
Progressive Communications – APC (International), Association for
Technology and Internet – APTI (Romania), Association of Community
Internet Center – APWKomitel (Indonesia), Australia Privacy Foundation –
APF (Australia), Bahrain Center for Human Rights (Bahrain), Bangladesh
NGOs Network for Radio and Communication – BNNRC (Bangladesh), Big
Brother Watch (United Kingdom), Bits of Freedom (Netherlands), Bolo Bhi
(Pakistan), Brasilian Institute for Consumer Defense – IDEC, (Brasil),
British Columbia Civil Liberties Association – BCCLA (Canada) Bytes for
All (Pakistan)…</blockquote><p class="" name="5428">Just look at them
all, and that’s just the A’s and B’s… Obviously, a planetary host of
actively concerned and politically connected people. Among this buzzing
horde of eager online activists from a swarm of nations, what did any of
them actually do for Snowden? Nothing.</p><p class="" name="6a28">Before
Snowden showed up from a red-eye flight from Hawaii, did they have the
least idea what was actually going on with the hardware of their beloved
Internet? Not a clue. They’ve been living in a pitiful dream world
where their imaginary rule of law applies to an electronic frontier — a
frontier being, by definition, a place that never had any laws.</p><p class="" name="b9e6">The
civil lib contingent here looks, if anything, even stupider than the US
Senate Intelligence Oversight contingent — who have at least been
paying lavishly to fund the NSA, and to invent a pet surveillance court
for it, with secret laws. That silly Potemkin mechanism — it’s like a
cardboard steering wheel in the cockpit of a Predator drone.</p><p class="" name="b809">While
Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if
he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how.</p><p class="" name="9014">However,
Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna
stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is
pretty easy to see.</p><p class="" name="c66d">The inconvenient truth
about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as
stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other
inconvenient truths.</p><p class="" name="9848">Snowden told the truth
to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore
lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth
is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is
absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their
owners.</p><p class="" name="201c">The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street
any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes
no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark
assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go
on.</p><p class="" name="e153">And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple,
Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in
China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial
operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in
order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal
computers can have users, but social media has livestock.</p><p class="" name="5253">Even
the NSA is humiliated by the billowing clouds of ongoing pretense. Why
pick on the NSA, anyway? They’re quiet professionals, well-trained,
well-educated, they’re discreet. NSA guys don’t even know what the guy
in the next NSA office is doing.</p><p class="" name="fb93">So, who made
the NSA the scaly Godzilla, besides one loose civilian contractor who
ran off to Hong Kong? What about the National Reconnaissance Office? The
NRO never gets outed for their gorgon-stare cameras that can pick out
the font on any license plate, anywhere from pole to pole.</p><p class="" name="06aa">What
about all the other national cyberwar players, like the Chinese units,
methodically spearphishing every Microsoft vuln on the planet? What
about those truly ferocious coders who wrote Stuxnet, burned up Iranian
atomic factories with raw malware, and who have never been glimpsed
since? They’re a hundred times scarier than the kindly and gentlemanly
NSA.</p><p class="" name="9b0e">But can the NSA speak up for themselves,
by leveling with the stakeholders about what really goes on, in the
NSA’s actual, lived experience? Nope. Not even. Before Snowden, their
mouths were duct-taped; after Snowden, it’ll be duct-tape, plus
handcuffs and electronic ankle bracelets.</p><p class="" name="d6f0">So,
the truth is out there, but nobody’s gonna clean up all that falsehood.
There is no visible way to make a clean break with the gigantic,
ongoing institutional deceits. There’s no mechanism by which any such
honesty could be imposed. It’s like reforming polygamy in the Ottoman
Empire.</p><p class="" name="4749">Even if the proles rise up in a wave,
busily Twittering away, you’re gonna get an Arab Spring, followed by a
regretful military coup once people figure out that networks just aren’t
governments.</p><p class="" name="cebc">Even the electronic civil lib
contingent is lying to themselves. They’re sore and indignant now,
mostly because they weren’t consulted — but if the NSA released PRISM as
a 99-cent Google Android app, they’d be all over it. Because they are
electronic first, and civil as a very distant second.</p><p class="" name="2b5e">They’d
be utterly thrilled to have the NSA’s vast technical power at their own
command. They’d never piously set that technical capacity aside, just
because of some elderly declaration of universal human rights from 1947.
If the NSA released their heaps of prying spycode as open-source code,
Silicon Valley would be all over that, instantly. They’d put a
kid-friendly graphic front-end on it. They’d port it right into the
cloud.</p><p class="" name="acc8">Computers were invented as crypto-ware
and spy-ware and control-ware. That’s what Alan Turing was all about.
That’s where computing came from, that’s the scene’s original sin, and
also its poisoned apple.</p><p class="" name="1785">There’s not a
coherent force on Earth that wants to cork up that bottle. They all just
want another slug out of that bottle — and they’d rather like to paste
their own personal, prestige label onto the bottle’s glass. You know,
like your own attractive face, pasted on the humming planetary big iron
of Facebook.</p><p class="" name="ecad">Digital, globalized
societies — where capital and information moves, and where labor and
human flesh doesn’t move — they behave like this. That is what we are
witnessing and experiencing. It’s weird because we are weird. We’re half
actual and half digital now. We’re like the squirming brood of a tiger
mated to a shark.</p><p class="" name="997e">You can tell that Manning,
Assange and Snowden are all the same kind of irritant, because, somehow,
amazingly, the planet’s response is to physically squish them. They’re
all online big-time, and their digital shadow is huge, so the response
is just to squeeze their mortal human bodies, literally, legally,
extra-legally, by whatever means becomes available.</p><p class="" name="dec1">It’s
a wrestling match of virtuality and actuality, an irruption of the
physical into the digital. It’s all about Bradley shivering naked in his
solitary cage, and Julian diligently typing in his book-lined closet at
the embassy, and Ed bagging out behind the plastic seating of some
airport, in a jetlag fit of black globalization that went on for a solid
month.</p><p class="" name="918c">And, those tiny, confined, somehow
united spaces are the moral high ground. That’s where it is right now,
that’s what it looks like these days.</p><p class="" name="b4a0">You can
see that in the recent epic photo of Richard Stallman — the Saint
Francis of Free Software, the kind of raw crank who preaches to birds
and wanders the planet shoeless – shoulder-to-shoulder with an unshaven
Assange, sporting his manly work shirt. The two of them, jointly holding
up a little propaganda pic of Edward Snowden.</p><p class="" name="5536">They
have the beatific look of righteousness rewarded. Che Guevara in his
starred beret had more self-doubt than these guys. They are thrilled
with themselves.</p><p class="" name="a516">People, you couldn’t trust
any of these three guys to go down to the corner grocery for a pack of
cigarettes. Stallman would bring you tiny peat-pots of baby tobacco
plants, then tell you to grow your own. Assange would buy the
cigarettes, but smoke them all himself while coding up something
unworkable. And Ed would set fire to himself, to prove to an innocent
mankind that tobacco is a monstrous and cancerous evil that must be
exposed at all costs.</p><p class="" name="04f8">And yet the three of
them together, they look just amazing. They are fantastic figures, like
the promise of otherworldly aid from a superhero comic. They are visibly
stronger than they’ve ever been before. They have the initiative in a
world afflicted with comprehensive helplessness.</p><p class="" name="77f6">And there’s more coming. Lots, lots more.</p></div><div class="highlight-menu"><div class="highlight-menu-inner"><ul class="highlight-menu-buttons"><li class="highlight-menu-button highlight-menu-notes"></li><li class="highlight-menu-button highlight-menu-twitter"></li></ul></div><div class="highlight-menu-arrow-clip"><span class="highlight-menu-arrow"></span></div></div><div data-action-scope="_actionscope_5" class="notes-container"><div class="notes-list-fade"></div></div><div data-action-scope="_actionscope_4" class="notes-markers"></div><div class="post-follow-ups"><div data-action-scope="_actionscope_3" class="follow-ups-container follow-ups-empty"></div></div></div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>