On the Snowden Revelations and Learned Helplessness

Quick like a bunny: name all the ways your communications are being tapped, tracked, and impounded.

If you said, "Every one of them, probably" congrats! You're a...winner?

Snowden was so, like two years ago, man. (Yea, but despite the fact a Federal Appeals Court ruled the indiscriminate Hoovering of all ALL all telephonic calls was "illegal" we have no reason to believe the NSA/CIA/DIA/all the other Fink-based alphabet soup assholes have stopped collecting. Sorry.)

Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel for NSA and a critic of Snowden's ironically admitted nine months ago we're only talking about the first thing Snowden leaked to Greenwald and Poitras:

"The only debate we're really having in the US is about the very first document that Snowden produced," said Stewart A. Baker, a former N.S.A. general counsel and outspoken critic of the leaks, referring to the secret court order authorizing the phone records program. "The rest of the documents have been used as a kind of intelligence porn for the rest of the world - 'Oooh, look at what the N.S.A. is doing.'"

I can't tell if Baker is embarrassed before the world (I somehow doubt it), or if the borderline traitor is ironically telling the rest of us, "You think the phone records are something, wait till you find out we can turn on your smartphone's mic and listen to what you're saying...even when the power's off! Or that we can turn on your laptop's camera and watch you have sex and take pics of you and your lovers nude."

(Have a look-see from Jeffrey T. Richelson's book The US Intelligence Community for info on those two programs, "Captivated Audience" and "Gumfish," and as they say on infomercials, "much much more!")

NB: in the NYT article I linked to above, with the quotes from Stewart Baker, there are the required quotes from a commissar-like CIA fink-traitor to the Constitution, Michael Morrell, who says flat-out Snowden's leaks helped ISIS. Morrell is quite likely a liar.

And you know who else is a liar about Snowden? Hillary Clinton. Forget that she and Bill are now so far inside Wall St they're filthy rich off others' suffering.

Hillary can "never condone" what Snowden did.

See also re: Hillary's lies about Snowden here:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/hillary-clinton-what-snowden-did-gave-all-kinds-of-information-to-terrorists/

https://freedom.press/blog/2014/04/fact-checking-hillary-clintons-comments-about-edward-snowden-and-nsa

Hey, I'd be happy to have someone with a vagina as Prez of Unistat, but not this one. It seems a sure bet she'd continue the retrograde moves Obama made. Snowden didn't vote for Obama, but believed him when he said, running in 2007-2008, well, let me quote Obama from 13 June, 2007:

No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime...No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.

The sorts of Authoritarian contemptibles who Just Follow Orders and work for the Unistat spy agencies now? Quite likely sexual fascists also. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was notoriously on the lookout for info on sex practices of freethinkers, in order to try and blackmail them. Snowden said his fellow NSA workers commented upon and even joked about the nude bodies and sexual acts they surveilled. 

So, what do you think Thomas Jefferson would make of all this?

On second thought, don't answer that...

Re: sexual fascism: Sorry, I know that "slut shaming" is horrible. But let's not pretend something far worse, more despicable and illegal isn't happening among the security-cleared Finks whose paychecks We the People fund. (I call anyone with such a heinous interpretation of the 4th Amendment a "fink." It's one of my quirks. If you're offended, pardonamente!)

On the real issue here, privacy, I feel compelled to link to another longstanding member of our commissar class, David Brooks. For me, Brooks has quite the punchable face. I really detest David Brooks. But lawdamercy! sometimes he can write something smart, as he did in this piece about why privacy is one of Our Values. I could have quoted one of "my" guys/gals; here I just like the irony of linking to one of my enemies. 22 months before this, Brooks wrote that he "disapproves" of Snowden. As they would say about Brooks at BoingBoing, "Christ What An Asshole."

Why did all this shit go down in the first place? You probably have something to say about this. I think the venerable Alfred W. McCoy seems pretty hot when he writes about "imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA's latest technological breakthroughs look like a seductive bargain when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line."

So, getting back to the prick from Stewart A. Baker, why aren't we all talking about all the other forms of our Orwellian Panopticon? Ted Rall wonders, "Is it the media's notorious inability to focus on stories, especially when they're complicated? Or are they consciously complicit in a conspiracy to keep silent about America's out-of-control security state - nothing to see here, just move on?" (p.212, Snowden) Rall says Greenwald and Poitras's The Intercept, which was started to handle the massive info from Snowden so we can all read and comment, has not - au grand dam to many of us - produced a steady drip drip drip until Obama had to reign it all in. Unistatians seem to have passively accepted they're being watched all the time. 

How to account for this? Rall and others have cited M.E.P Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness" in human's dealings with stuff they don't think they can handle, which produces anxiety and human depression. People act like a dog reduced to whimpering helplessness after sustained abuse. (Followed by, I presume, self-medication with Facebook?)

Then also, I found in Robert Anton Wilson's book Everything Is Under Control an entry under P for "Passive Conspiracy." These are possibly more noxious than active conspiracies. The heroin problem circa 1998 will go on in Unistat, the author writes (I'm not sure if this is Wilson saying the following or the writer he's quoting from an NYU student he found on the Web) as long as it's perceived as a "black" "inner city" problem. The gummint will only pretend to care about stopping it. (Prophetic in 2016? You be the judge.)

RAW finishes the entry by linking the Passive Conspiracy idea with Wilhelm Reich's darker version, that "masses neurotically yearn to surrender to some fascist leader and will throw away their liberties as soon as a leader of that sort appears." (p.336) I guess Dick Cheney would've qualified here.

Just think of President Ted Cruz, ladies and germs: he has access to all your kinky sex stuff that Jesus wouldn't like. Gosh, what hijinks would ensue?

Some Sources:

The Intercept

Snowden, by Ted Rall

No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State, by Greenwald and Ganser

The Snowden Files, by Luke Harding

Citizen Four (2014 Laura Poitras) must-see documentary if ya haven't already. In a sane country, we'd realize we were wrong after 9/11 and give Snowden the Medal of Freedom and a ticker-tape parade and an official national holiday named after him...but which day of the year?
Snowden Statue
"Snowden, Assange and Manning Statues Unveiled in Berlin"

                                         You too might have your own blog artfully tagged!
                                         For inquiries, see Bob Campbell

Big Data and Two Proposals For How We Should Be Compensated For It

Both Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov have looked at the asymmetries in Big Data, saw how We have given our data away for free to gazoollionaires, and Lanier and Morozov have done gedankenexperiments to see how the playing field may become slightly more leveled, regarding the case of The People v. Google, WalMart, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, health insurance companies...the NSA.

I'll try to give a thumbnail, but some of you are ahead of me on this stuff, so feel free to chime in and correct my various egregious erroneous apprehensions. Even though you may be ahead of us here, can we agree this Big Data asymmetry qualifies as a Missing Public Discussion? On with it...

Morozov notes the winner-take-all aspects in Facebook and Google, et.al, having the biggest computers to harvest the most data about us. They've got megapetaflops of data stored on us. And they need more. We thought we were just having fun and playing and they were "giving" us search or social connectivity. We volunteered our user data, belatedly realized there were such things as "data trails" and gigantic computers somewhere with fancy algorithms attached to our name/number and what we do, what we like, who we know, where we live, how much money we have...and of course the NSA has the goods on the sort of porn-loving perverts we are. We only devoutly wished they wouldn't "go there," assuming like three year olds that if we wished they'd be decent they would be. Back to Bad Boy Evgeny.

The problem of Big Data asymmetry is a democracy problem, and passing privacy laws would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Lusitania. We need a civic solution.

He says the metadata should be thought of as the "social graph" and it's ours. Mostly. Anyway: it's time someone "pay" for it; we should be getting something back for...ourselves. For Morozov, this isn't money for us. The social graph should be given free to any startup. Google and Facebook: how are you going to compete with them? Level the data playing field! As it is, the situation is not good for "free market" competition. To say the least. If there was more competition for Google and Facebook (et.al) it could lead to possibly a reacquisition of some privacy...and innovation among the data-gatherers.

How about government getting in on it? Nope: public money can't compete here; the behemoths are way ahead of all that. They're that Big. However, our personal information and our social connections (which we gave them, remember) are not only the public...mind? and much of the personal aspects of our selves, but we and our connections may outlast Facebook and Google and the other tentacles of the Behemoth. Historically, very very few corporations have lasted 100 years. (I smell that last part as a component of a Bad Argument, but let me sally forth anyway...)

Morozov proposes the social graph as a public institution, to be regulated, maybe by a civil agency or even the UN. This would open up competition: say you wanted to start something to compete with a Behemoth: the social graph is there, and you access it. Morozov seems correct: if we went back in time before these Behemoths got started, we'd look at the hardware and algorithms and not be all that impressed. They only got there earlier and nabbed our data quicker than everyone else, and "won."

As a new competitor, maybe you'd guarantee anonymity, so you would opt in. Or you could opt out. The regulatory body would control how social graph data was collected and accessed.

The NSA is mired in secrecy, with no congressional oversight, which seems like a clear violation of the 4th Amendment to many of us. And that's not to mention what they've been doing. Of course, NSA used Google's and Facebook's data on us. And Verizon's and AT&T's and holy muthafreakinshit what a mess this is for any semblance of privacy, Constitutional rights and protections, decency, democracy. You know: The little things.

NSA ain't goin' away, so let's take the NSA's data (they're being paid by us, our taxes!) and make some or a lot of it available for a more robust competition for social networking and search engines.

This is a basic sketch of Morozov's way of dealing with our current Worldwide Theatre of the Absurd and Big Data collection asymmetry. Personally, I think it's nuts. (He does call it a "modest proposal.") But, if implemented, can it make things worse? Or would it be more likely to make things better in some way? What am I missing here? One thing I like about his ideas here: he wants to fiercely politicize the public dialogue about privacy and data and democracy.

Lanier basically sees the mess we're in as a "collective action" problem: it can't be solved by individuals in a free market but only by a sort of paradigm-shift in the way We perceive the problem, and by an adjusted normative response.

Facebook employs less than 5000 people, but it's worth over $65 billion. The heirs of the WalMart fortune are worth, according to one data point I saw recently, $147 billion...and they're just Sam Walton's offspring.  How can a scenario like this be sustainable? It can't. (Lanier in his book Who Owns The Future? fascinated me in many ways, but one of them was his explanation of how WalMart "won": they basically did what Facebook and Google did, but earlier than them: massive data banks [what Lanier calls "Siren Servers" and they're the new "factories" for the Robber Barons of 2013] on consumers, buyers, distributors, every sort of technological minutiae imaginable, all to get a leg up on their competitors.)

The bigger the computer, the more likely you're gonna be the winner in a game that's basically winner-take-all. And what really makes you a winner? Data. Big Data. Gather the data, enter it. Pay hotshot computer people to write the algorithms. Pay others to keep the lights on and the data servers from overheating.

The Facebook game of "giving" consumers something they want then harvesting data about them? This will continue to spread throughout banking, health care, retailing: they'll give us good service at good prices...but soon most of us will be unemployed and at their mercy because The Behemoth is too good at doing what it does. Marc Andreeson wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal in 2011: "Why Software Is Eating The World." With the acceleration of computing power entire industries are replacing workers and distribution with a few dozen of the most talented programmers and a few dozen data servers.

Look at how Amazon ate up its competition. Look at how many people Kodak employed, with decent, middle-class-bolstering jobs. Then look at how many people work at Instagram (hint: the number is 13), which bought Kodak. How can anything like that be sustainable without some sort of "collective action" solution, as Jaron Lanier puts it?

Note: there are scads of smart free-market thinkers who think all of this is good. No collective action required. Andreeson is one of those guys. You probably know one yourself. Jaron Lanier is not one of them. He sees this as a disaster: you think the inequality between the 1% and the rest of us is bad now? He sees all this as making it much worse, and it's happening so fast we're stunned. I agree.

So what does Lanier propose? He's somewhat similar to Morozov in that he agrees the Behemoths have mostly gotten that way by collecting data about us. But his solution - and he's proposed variations on this scenario - is that we should be paid for our data, via micropayments. NSA and other governmental surveillance is out of control because there's no limit on the cost to them. If they had to pay you a tiny bit of something when they took a picture of you on some camera on some street corner and used facial recognition and stored that data...you should get some little bit back for that. It's your data. Whoever agreed to allow the government to be so intrusive in our lives? If they're going to do this sort of shit, they're going to have to pay. After all, We are the government, in a democracy....errr...right? In increasingly starry-eyed theory we're the government. We pay them out of our taxes to work for us. Imagine that.

And not only that: all the data about us that's being shuffled around and sold to other Behemoths and vendors: that represents us. If they're going to do business with our data, they're just gonna hafta pay. Literally. With "micropayments." Every bit of data about us can be tagged when it's used and we get a little bit back. If you write some article and all kinds of people link to it, tweet it, use it in some way (still not sure about the limits of this), you get something back. One of the godfathers of the Net, a fascinating genius named Ted Nelson, wanted HTML to always link back to the origins of some idea. It didn't go Ted's way, but Lanier - who knows and loves Nelson - says there might be a way to tag our data to ourselves so that if our face ends up in an ad on Facebook, we get paid. This would seem to entail a reworking of the architecture of the Net, so I don't know how workable the idea is. In theory I like it more than Morozov's idea...which is, I know, anathema to the Everything FREE! vision we all love(d) so much.

Some Sources Used
"Let's Make the NSA's Data Available For Public Use" by Evgeny Morozov
"The Real Privacy Problem" by Morozov
"Who Owns the Future?": Morozov reviews Lanier and thinks Lanier's ideas are lame. (Of course!)
"U MAD???: Evgeny Morozov, the Internet, and the Failure of Invective" by Maria Bustillos: a sort of smack upside the head for Evgeny; Bustillos rather likes Lanier. And Bustillos is one of our best interpreters of this whole scene, in my view; I love her.
video: "Jaron Lanier On Connected Media Universal Micropayments and Attribution": 2 minutes. I think Lanier had a dental problem here, which accounts for the lisp?
"In Venting, A Computer Visionary Educates," an article by John Markoff about Ted Nelson
- A bunch of other sources; presumably I'd have had to pay a little bit under the micropayment scheme, but then presumably I'd get something back from people reading this? However, when we look at it from Jaron Lanier's perspective, the Behemoths are gonna have be paying us far more than we're paying them?

The Surveillance State: Some Books and Other Media, Precursors, Re-Taking Stock

There's a textbook titled Surveillance and Democracy, edited by Haggerty and Samatas. It came out in 2010 and I got it via Berkeley's wonderfully extensive "Link Plus" system. Even though it was only about 220 pages, much of it was too theoretical for what I was looking for, but I did "enjoy" - if that's the word - a chapter by Ben Hayes: "'Full Spectrum Dominance' As European Union Security Policy: On the Trail of the NeoConOpticon.'" I think at the time I was interested in stories about how the NeoCons (or the NeoCon Mind At Large, mostly in media and banking and the Pentagon; Obama played Occupy for his own ends) wanted to isolate and contain or crush Occupy, but this all seems so long ago now. I had no idea that Constitutional Law professor Obama would continue in the Cheney mode. Humility is endless, someone once said...Suffice to say that the next edition of this text - read in Political Science classes? - could easily jump the record by going from 270 pages to 2700 pages.

                                     Marshall McLuhan seems to have foreseen our 
                                     Patriot Act/Snowden Era

In light of what's been revealed and will continue to pour out in this, the Snowden Era, as some of us now call this Epoch (9/11 is so...like...yesterday, man), I'd like to point out that it's still not too late to get filled-in by what Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post accomplished in their stellar research and collating and just overall journalist mega-due diligence in Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. Dig how Bush/Cheney privatized surveillance on such a massive scale that Priest and Arkin found nondescript snoop centers in industrial parks all over Unistat. And I mean all over. And they're not government agencies! It's privatized now. It pays better than the low-mid-level gummint spook gig, so why not defect to the private sector, get paid more, and have absolutely zero ideas about democratic principles? No more of that nagging, cognitive-dissonance-y pangs that you may not be serving the people of Unistat, but only the servicing the needs of the 1%.

Of course, we still have  ye olde fashioned spooks, like the alphabet soup of NSA/CIA/FBI, et.al...that we're paying with out tax dollars to listen in on...well, just about everything, really.

Here's Richard Rhodes's review of Priest and Arkin. A passage:

“A culture of fear,” write journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin, “had created a culture of spending to control it, which, in turn, had led to a belief that the government had to be able to stop every single plot before it took place, regardless of whether it involved one network of twenty terrorists or one single deranged person.” The resulting “security spending spree,” they report, “exceeded $2 trillion.”

But let's not worry too much. The number of people who have Top Secret Security Clearance is only at least 854,000. 

A few years ago a film about life in East Germany under the Stasi came out: The Lives of Others. The Hollywood elite voters gave it the Oscar for Best Foreign Movie of 2006. Way back in 2006! I remember seeing the film and wondering how close we in Unistat were to this situation, and thinking: probably closer than most Unistatians would want to know. At the same time, another part of my brain told me, Stop being such a paranoiac...
Here's the trailer.

James Bamford's Puzzle Palace came out in 1982. Around 1995 I bought a battered paperback copy at a used bookstore and read it all, riveted. The few people I knew who were fascinated by this stuff agreed: how come the CIA are the rock star spooks, while you mention "the NSA" and the common response is, "Who?" Bamford deserves credit for doing the first extended book-job on Snowden's former employer.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the last book I read about the NSA - how evil they could be - before the Snowden stuff hit. It was Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. Yes, I admit it. I had gone through a point where I felt like I had to read DaVinci Code, if only to see what all the fuss was about. When that book sold 10 million (or however many), his previous potboilers got popular again. So I read those too. Here's someone from Democratic Underground, writing this past Bloomsday, on how oddly prescient the novel now seems. I admit I hadn't thought much about the NSA (except they were probably doing something nefarious with regards to the 4th Amendment in addition to maybe getting a line or three on possible terrorists) when I read Brown's book. 

A question after all these books and films and now the Snowden Era: what are we supposed to do this all this information that They have about us? And what do They plan to do with their information about us? And a third question, if I may: must we replay something like East Germany, or is there some saner way out of this madness? What part of the 4th Amendment don't They get? (I know, I know: they get it all, but they're just obeying orders; it's nothing personal, yadda blah yadda blah meh meh meh.) 

It's far too easy for paranoids like me to see a President Palin and local cops having ultra-fast digital info, based on my license plate whizzing by, that I'm an "America-Hater" and it's best for True Americans to get rid of people like me...who read Chomsky, have been involved with Occupy, support the ACLU, and are clearly guilty via documentation of hundreds of thousands of Thought Crimes...

Going Back
In 1967, when Allen Ginsberg visited Ezra Pound in Rapallo, they talked about the craziness of Vietnam and how the Unistat government seemed to see the "peaceniks" as troublemakers. And they agreed: Make everything open. End the State secrets game. The artist Bobby Campbell has remarked on Timothy Leary's very similar vision, which emanates from that era. (For Ginsberg/Pound: see What Thou Lovest Well Remains, pp.36-37)

Poets as Distant Early Warning signalers...

In Only Apparently Real, a collection of interviews with Philip K. Dick with Paul Williams, the ever-present topic of PKD paranoia comes up, and PKD has ideas about the end of privacy...in 1974! (see pp.154-164)

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice, in 1970 the ARPANET is suspected as a future Panopticon. (see pp.364-366)

In his book of poetry, Coming To Jakarta: A Poem About Terror, Canadian-raised and later Berkeley English Professor and chronicler and theorist of "Deep Politics," Peter Dale Scott, recalls that, in the 1930s, when his father was away on conferences about economic democracy or world peace, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police tapped their phone. (see p.30)

In Laurel Canyon, a history of late 1960s/early 1970s rock and folk musicians who lived in that area of LA, information about the LA County Sheriffs harassing hippies, wiretapping, surveillance. Sure, the Manson stuff could bring that on, but...

Marshall McLuhan, dying sometime in the early hours of the last day of 1980, had been wondering where the new tribalized electronic human was going, with the evident omnipresence of electronic and digital technologies, which were extensions of our own nervous systems and which changed us in ways we could not know about unless we constantly investigated and "probed" how they were working in feedback loops with our own nervous systems. Add synergetically to that: the-non-wired environment, and our conscious sensibilities. In his Catholic, quasi-anachist mind, he worried about the elimination of  what he thought of as "natural law," mostly in the Catholic Church, Aquinas-on sense. The trouble with all this new tech: it seemed to render ourselves evermore "discarnate." He thought this discarnate-ness would lead to a new religious age, which could be an occult-like thing. It might be a diabolical or destructive age that was upon us. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand takes it from here:

"There was yet another twist to the phenomenon of discarnate man, as McLuhan saw it. In an age when people were translated into images and information, the chief human activity became surveillance and espionage (recall: McLuhan died in 1980!- OG). Everything from spy satellites to Nielsen ratings to marketing surveys to credit bureau investigations was part of this intelligence-gathering, man-hunting syndrome. So pervasive was the syndrome that discarnate man worried whether he existed as nothing more than an entry in a databank somewhere." (see Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, p.250)

Do the (very) few OG readers suspect the OG could go on and on with these classic "counterculture" figures and their musings on the "Surv State" (as poet Ed Sanders often writes it)? Aye. I could. I will. But to end this blahg, let me go WAY back:

Do not revile the king even in your 
          thoughts,
  or curse the rich in your bedroom,
because a bird of the air may carry
          your words,
  and a bird on the wing may report
         what you say.
-Ecclesiastes 10:20

PS: Bertold Brecht:

Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?

• "The Solution" ["Die Lösung"] (c. 1953), as translated in Brecht on Brecht : An Improvisation (1967) by George Tabori, p. 17

NSA Revelations and Edward Snowden: Some of What Froths For Me, Now

I don't know what part of me remained surprised, or even why, after Snowden outed the NSA. Because the topic has been a leitmotif in conversations with all of my friends, since at least the too-Orwellianishly-named Patriot Act passed. But I guess there were a few clusters of neural circuits that were in denial: maybe no one's really spying on me. And you know: that would be just...grand.

[But: in 2011, hadn't Dana Priest's and William Arkin's "Top Secret America" articles in the Washington Post annihilated any last vestige of that neurally stubborn naivete? Apparently not...]

Now: the more "adult" clusters of neurons, the ones that neurobiologists implicate in learning, which have been actively buzzing each others' synapses, exchanging glutamate and acetylcholine, strengthening each other's connections, building on other circuits, merging different circuits, looking for patterns...that part of me was not surprised. Because I've been following the topic of "surveillance" and "privacy" and "the corporate state" and the Panopticon ever since that summer after I graduated from high school, when, just for "fun" I read Brave New World, then immediately: 1984. As soon as Winston Smith learned to love Big Brother and that whole boot stomping on the face of humanity forever thing, I chased those two novels with Fahrenheit 451. I was naive. I was a budding conspiracy theorist. I was an adrenaline junkie. I didn't know what to make of these three books, which acted synergistically in my nervous system...and well, frankly, they fucked me up one side and down the next pretty good. And yet: I "enjoyed" them.

Since then, I like to think my thinking/feeling in those areas has become far more nuanced. I mean: that poor 18 year old gangly naif! All hair and fear and testosterone and yea, verily: idealism.

Other times I seem to have not changed much, only lost a lot of that hair. (And I was all hair, really. I played guitar in metal bands and it was sorta like Marty Friedman's, only dyed with Miss Clairol Number 52 Blue/Black...and I was 6 feet tall and weighed about 135. Yes: a freak. Like Cousin It, only with a well-used library card.)

So what to make of Snowden coming out and confirming what intellectual paranoids like myself already suspected?

Well: I was pleased to see that sales of 1984 jumped 5000%, but was equally disappointed by my fellow Unistatians that they weren't already on board with Orwell's ideas. I mean: you'd think the Patriot Act would've done it fer ya, eh? Also: I suspect only about 15% of those who ordered it from Amazon will actually read it all the way through. Also: I remembered the story of Amazon's Kindle owners having their Orwell (and other books) erased. Remotely.  Because they could. Hey, they apologized and gave your money back. And said they wouldn't do that again under "those circumstances." But they can do that. Just another reason why I love the dead-tree book.

No need to point out irony. I hope...

As far as Ray Bradbury's book: no one is burning libraries. Not yet. Oh, you have your Christian fascists getting together for a good ol' Two Minutes Hate and burning, say, Harry Potter books. And there are always classic Murrrkin a-holes harassing librarians and school boards for teaching from commies like John Steinbeck or Mark Twain. Get a load of it HERE.

I think Aldous Huxley's 1932 book cements him as a seer. Just that book alone. The ideas about an entire society made drug-dependent and infantilized, with the overwhelming assumption that some people are "naturally" better than others so there ought to be a way to keep the lessers away from the betters...all with an overarching ethic of consumption, of buying things and consuming them as a way to obtain a self-identity? Aldous was legally blind, a modern Tiresias. Aldous's World Anti-Sex League is far too...2013 Kansas for me. It's spooky.

Orwell. Let's see. For his dystopian state to meet ours we need, indefinite detention just because the State says so (check!). We need the State to be able to torture people for any reason they want and get away with it. (We have lift-off on that. Roger!) The State can decree that it can kill anyone they want, anywhere, and they're supposed to have a reason for this but they can choose to not tell anyone what those reasons are, and no one can compel them to tell why they're assassinating people. (We have this, now, under a "liberal" President in Unistat, June, 2013.)

And of course, the State can have surveillance over all communications. (Edward Snowden on Line 1.)

Hmmm...

What about..."Justice"? Presumably there's a Justice system. I mean, there's a Justice Department, just as there was a Ministry of Truth, that put out non-stop propaganda. One of my favorites from 2013 - so far, and there's a cornucopia of this crap to choose from - was the President of Unistat coming in, assuring us that his would be the most "transparent" administration we'd seen. In "reality" as I see it, his Admin has been one of the most opaque when it comes to..."extrajudicial" (Orwell!) matters. (My blogspew on "neomedievalism" might be a germane link here?) And other matters. Liberals have been taken for a ride with this guy.

Time to re-think. What? Hillary Clinton will clear it all up and make it better in 2016? If you believe that and you're reading this blog, you're in the wrong place. Hillary is set as a Neoliberal thinker...better than NeoCon, but really: she's an embodiment of the very outmoded way of thinking about economics and foreign and domestic policy that led us into this morass: a new sort of Failed State, where the government can't even get background checks on gun sales despite about 90% of the public wanting them, us Idiot Citizens thinking it's about time we take even the most trivial steps towards trying to keep from getting accidentally slaughtered by a "lone nut" when we go the goddamned mall. This new sort of Failed State spends as much on military matters as the rest of the world, combined, while the infrastructure crumbles, the actual unemployment level is closer to 20%, and there's a welter of staggering statistics that show how the 1% have run away from the 99%. This government can't even insure its citizens health care, but it can kill any one of its citizens, for any reason.

Justice? Who goes to prison? The poor. And any insider who blows the whistle on the rampant theft in banking, or the gross injustices in the military policies overseas. And let's just wait to see what happens to Snowden.

One thing that many smart writers have missed: even if the NSA can decide to hone in on a domestic citizen with potentially "subversive" ideas, they probably are really only after communications from abroad, looking for "real" terrorists: the infrastructure for a future President Brownback/Palin/Ted Cruz/Newt Gingrich is in place, and it's not going anywhere. If Wall Street or the college loan debt bubble or a combination of both plus something else (another terrorist attack?) happens, this is a real threat to make Orwell's Oceania look like Sesame Street.

We now know that young well-educated people in Unistat who became politically active in order to avert more economic or environmental disasters were heavily surveilled by the State apparatus. As Chomsky has been telling us for at least 15 years: the internal dialogue of the Military/State/Corporate complex refers to the citizenry as "enemy territory."

"The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth." - Sean Hannity, "Hannity's America," June 6th, 2008.

                                  Seth Rosenfeld, author of the stunning Subversives

Seth Rosenfeld Hasn't Had A Proper Hearing Yet:
Another thing a lot of smart, perspicacious writers are missing surrounding the NSA/Snowden clusterfuck: there seems an assumption of linearity in history: we're getting dangerously out of hand, and we need to dial it back. But it's not that simple. Look at what turned up in 30 years of Freedom of Information Act requests in Seth Rosenfeld's 734 page book about Ronald Reagan's and J. Edgar Hoover's wildly paranoid hatred of the University of Berkeley, Subversives, which came out last year. The FBI fought Rosenfeld tooth and nail, but ultimately, the 9th Circuit sided with him. What did we find? A dizzying number of new things that haven't yet filtered into our discourse. Among them:

That Reagan was a snitch for the FBI since 1947. That the FBI sent poison-pen letters (where they make up stuff about someone they don't like) to officials in order to get people fired...that the FBI helped Reagan get elected Governor or California. That the FBI broke into offices, stole and copied and planted information, falsified documents and planted false news stories, assumed both Mario Savio (a brilliant but disturbed Philosophy student and architect of the Free Speech Movement) and UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr (a Quaker and pacifist) were both "communists." The FBI did everything they could to ruin both of their lives, and they succeeded fairly well. (Kerr and Savio were, in actuality, opposed to each other politically regarding the policy of Berkeley.)

To those students of COINTELPRO: yes, it seems like you've seen this; it's not "new" to you. But the depth of Rosenfeld's research ought be considered a series of at least "major" important footnotes to "all that." To those of you who have not been students of COINTELPRO, or only have a cursory knowledge of it: Rosenfeld's book is a perfect place to start, if only because he's so wonderful at narrative using his research. It's a thick book but I found it hard to put down. (Get it from your library as some sort of ethereal shout-out to Ray Bradbury?)

Above all, for our purposes here: the FBI created massive secret lists of "subversives" who should be rounded up "in case of emergency." This included students who were interested in alternative points of view about political and social ideas. If you were an 18 year old English major who signed a petition agreeing that the HUAC should be disbanded, you got on the Hoover/Reagan shitlist. And if your friends or family members subscribed to (or especially: wrote for) publications they thought were "UnAmerican" you were suspect. The brightest young people at the best public university (where much of our actual wealth originates: in new ideas) were enemies to Hoover and Reagan.

This is a hell of a book, so far criminally overlooked. Just because it's about one university, albeit maybe the top public university in Unistat, always productive of Nobel Prize winners, in one small area of Unistat, doesn't mean it's not germane to you who live in some other part of the country...or the rest of the <cough> "free world."

So - and sorry I've gone on far too long once again here - it has already happened here. But a digital infrastructure just makes it possible to do again, but about a million times more - and here's a favorite fascist's word - efficiently. Or, as Edward Snowden put it, we have extended the "architecture of oppression."

Oh, and the "subversives" in Rosenfeld's book?: they're not Savio or the SDS or professors who ordered books on communism. Guess who they are.