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First they came for the trade-unionists
Originally for Consortium News – Warning! this article violates ‘Godwin’s Law ‘ in almost every paragraph. Regrettably all these violations are all based on historic facts and documented current events.
From Rick Falkvinge’s blog post:
When the famous skyline landmark building in the world’s economic center was attacked in fire and flames on that fateful, horrible day, and our elected leaders decided to go to war against terrorism under the banner of “you’re with us or against us”.
When the blame for all evil was unanimously put on people from the Middle East with their foreign religion, and all of those were made suspicious.
When patriotic new laws were passed almost immediately in the emotions from the attack, and those laws suspended most civil rights. When the word “Homeland” suddenly started being used again, after having been practically extinct.
When the country went to war, one after another, in the wake of that attack. When internment and torture camps for those middle-easterners and other unwanteds were created – outside the country borders, in order to hide what was going on from the public.
Indeed, the 1930s were a very dark time in Germany, and the Reichstag fire in Berlin set off a chain of events that might – theoretically – repeat itself.
After more than six months of revelations about the global surveillance infrastructure built by the U.S. government and its “allies” (i.e. smaller countries that believe smiling-at-the-crocodile-in-the-hope-he-eats-you-last is a good long-term strategy), many people and politicians still tout the “I have nothing to hide” attitude toward the most over-armed, hyper-intrusive super-power in human history.
In a recent New Yorker article, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was quoted as saying: “My phone numbers, I assume, are collected like everybody else’s, but so what? It does not bother me. By the Supreme Court decision in 1979, the data is not personal data. There’s a Google Map that allows somebody to burgle my house, it’s so clear and defined, and I can’t do anything about it.”
For an elected U.S. senator to state the above is quite astonishing. Apparently a 35-year-old court decision, Smith v. Maryland, from a technologically different era is considered unalterable scripture (by a lawmaker!) and the power of the Google Corporation is simply accepted as a law of nature. Like the speed of light or the boiling point of water. What did that influential Italian political thinker from the 1920s say about the merger of state and corporate power? Wasn’t that the (political) F-word?
Europeans look on in dismay at how the world’s once-leading democracy has utterly lost the plot and slides in accelerating fashion toward societal models that we tried in the 1930s and 1940s and found seriously wanting. We’ve seen this movie and know how it ends; with way too many people in scary uniforms and lots of barbed wire everywhere.
The Dutch Example
Those lessons are particularly instructive for us Dutch. Since the mid-1600s, Amsterdam was a refuge for ethnic and religious groups from all over Europe who fled various forms of repression and persecution. This freedom and societal diversity was one reason why the Dutch trading empire flourished with technological advances (such as wind-powered sawmills for fast boat-building) and economic (corporate and stock) innovations.
The tolerance and diversity helped the Netherlands develop into a conflict-avoiding nation of traders who got along with everyone so they could sell them stuff. We kept out of World War I and sold a lot of planes to Germany. Municipalities registered people’s religion and ethnicity for a range of practical (and mostly benign) purposes such as allowing the local civil servants to operate in a culturally sensitive way.
The Dutch government kept this fantasy of remaining neutral going for a long time, right up to the early morning of May 10, 1940, when the German Wehrmacht rolled into the country and swept away our poor excuse for an army in barely four days. After the Dutch surrender, the vast majority of the German army was pulled out of the Netherlands and put to work in other places.
For the vast majority of Dutch people life went on pretty much as before. Resistance to the occupation was almost non-existent and many Dutch were happy to work for the government (the number of civil servants almost doubled during the occupation) or in industries that boomed because of orders from the German army.
It was not until 1942 that the enthusiastic data-collection by the Dutch government turned into a human catastrophe. Over 100,000 people – who thought they “had nothing to hide” – had provided accurate data on their Jewish identity and listed their addresses, enabling the most complete persecution of Jewish people in any country during World War II (with the exception of Poland where the Nazis had more time and fewer logistical challenges).
The other problem was the pro-authority attitude of most Dutch (even if that authority was a brutal military occupation by a foreign army). The famous Dutch “tolerance” often expressed itself as “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t bother me.” That included shoving fellow citizens into cattle-cars on their way to death-camps. There was no occupied country where Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous poem – “first they came for the Socialists…” – was more applicable than the Netherlands.
Troubling Comparisons
Though comparisons with the Nazi era are always problematic, aspects of that time and U.S. society today are eerily similar. The United States seems under the de facto control of a consortium of banksters and an military-industrial-security complex begging for blood, all feeding off each other and feeding into a political/media system that controls the national agenda and marginalizes people who dissent.
This structure has made many citizens afraid of their own shadows and lacking the information to ask meaningful questions even if they so desired. There are two political parties, the minimum number to have at least the pretense of a democracy, but – on issues relating to “national security” and the “surveillance state” – the Republicans and Democrats offer little that is significantly different, except at the fringes of the two parties.
Sen. Feinstein’s blasé acceptance of the National Security Agency’s collection of electronic metadata on virtually everyone and President Barack Obama’s mild “reforms” of the NSA fit with what you can expect from many “security-conscious” Republicans, too.
Yet, the unpleasant reality is that the U.S. government has built a turnkey infrastructure for a level of totalitarian control that repressive leaders of past eras could only dream about. The NSA’s metadata lets the government chart a spider’s web of your associations with multiple “hops” to draw in the networks of other people whom you have never met. The scheme takes guilt-by-association to whole new levels.
The U.S. government also reserves to itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere who supposedly represents a “terrorist” threat to the United States – and to do so on the say-so of some unaccountable and essentially anonymous intelligence officials.
A Political Excuse
The only missing element for a full-scale tyranny is a political excuse to flip the switch and turn this machine on full-power. Perhaps the excuse could come from another “terrorist attack” or from another financial meltdown as the government seeks to control social unrest. Or a thoroughly unscrupulous President might just rev it up to go after his enemies. But the point is the equipment is now in place and ready to go.
Many people still find it hard to accept that the U.S. government could take such a monstrous turn. But its modern history – from Hiroshima through the Vietnam War to support for death-squad regimes in Latin America and the invasion of Iraq – shows a callous disregard of human life and an acceptance of mass slaughter, even genocide, as a policy choice.
I realize that these concerns that I’ve raised violate what’s known as “Godwin’s Law”, i.e. the avoidance of comparing current events to the Nazis, but – regrettably – these comparisons are increasingly unavoidable. One could even revise Niemoller’s famous poem for the present:
First they came for the Muslims in a dozen countries
but most of us did not share that faith so we said nothing
Then they came for union leaders and social activists
but we did not want to be labeled as lefties and so we said nothing
Then they came for the journalists
but we long stopped reading political news and so we said nothing
Then finally, when the government came for us
there was no one left to say anything”
Arjen Kamphuis left his native Netherlands (an active participant to the warcrimes in Afghanistan & Iraq) over 5 years ago for Germany – the one country that has learned deep lessons from trying out various forms of totalitarian regimes.
‘Tinfoil Is The New Black’, Keiser Report interview
I was a guest on Max Keiser’s programme ‘The Keiser Report‘ last Thursday jan. 16th for the second time. Max is a former Wall Street trader who foresaw the current economic crisis a decade ago.
Full Keiserreport episode here on RT site and here on Youtube.
Max caught me be susprise by asking about the NSA TURMOIL and TURBINE programs. I confused them with other programs (there are many). The TURMOIL and TURBINE programs are part of the ‘Targeted Acces Operations’ family (see this Spiegel article). These are programs for gaining acces to systems by other means than abusing their built-in weaknesses over internet connections (the NSA’s favourite method because it can be automated to spy on everyone at very low cost). Targeted Accces Operations (TAO) deals with everything from intercepting & modifying electronic devices that people order online to the use of microwave beam weapons to identify, hack, break and manipulate computer systems from great distance. The latter method has also been used for targeting drone strikes. The talk by Jacob Appelbaum I mention in the beginning of the interview is here. Many more talks from the 2013 CCC conference in Hamburg can be found here.
The US Declaration Of Independence is one of the greatest political writings in history and can be re-written for more contemporary political problems as I did here. Accoring to US academics the US declaration was inspired by the Dutch declaration that preceded it by almost two centuries.
Blogpost on a previous interview last year.
Interview on London Real
Last year during my December visit on London I gave a 1 hour interview to London Real. This is great new free-form 1+ hr completly unscripted interview program that is available on Youtube and as a podcast. Tired of the superficial 3-minute interviews that stop just when things get interesting? London Real is your channel. If you want to keep up to date on the London startup/tech scene then checkout Silicon Real.
I was honored to be in a lineup that includes several of my current heroes including Max Keiser, Jared Diamond, Annie Machon and Rick Falkvinge.
Brian Rose and me spoke about NSA-spying, the nature of privacy, copyright, bitcoin and much more. The interview begins at 7:48. For more check out the London Real site. Compact mp3 for download here.
NSA intell goldmine, who else has access?
<also on HuffPo UK>
Shortly after the initial release of some documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden I wrote a little summary about the IT-policy implications for Europe based on earlier columns. A lot of additional documents have come out since then and we can basically conclude that almost every computer system on the planet is fully broken or at least very vulnerable to NSA interference or manipulation.
Nobody, including the NSA, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald has a total oversight of all the in the tens of thousands of documents let alone the political or strategic implications of the info contained in them. Most of the news keeps focusing on the ‘scandal’ aspect and/or the person of Snowden. Being angry at the US government (practised by most opponents) and attacking the person of Snowden (a favorite of apologists of the US regime) distracts from defining adequate policy responses and so far there have been precisely none in Europe. This constitutes a massive failure of the various EU governments to protect their citizens’ rights and the economic sovereignty of their nations. It is also strange in light of the fact that an adequate policy response had already been formulated in July 2001 and really just needs to be implemented.
But every now and them the disinfo spread by some apologists for the behaviors of the NSA is useful for understanding how much worse the situation may just turn out to be. This article by a former NSA employee is a nice example of an attempt at smearing the whistleblower while actually digging the hole the NSA (and the US regime) is in much, much deeper. The piece claims Snowden secretly worked for Russian intelligence all along. While I do not share the authors views on Snowden’s motivations or allegiances the suggestion that outside organisations could have agents inside the NSA has some interesting implications.
If I understand the gist of this post correctly there is a much bigger breach than one would conclude based on the mainstream news from the Guardian. Not only can (and does) the NSA collect pretty much everything anyone does in the digital realm by breaking systems and breaking into systems. They then are unable to protect this sigint goldmine from falling into the hands the agents of foreign intelligence organisations. So now all our data is in the hands of both the US and Russian governments. This begs the question what other organisations have deep-cover moles inside the NSA using its infrastructure to do the hard works of global sigint for them? The Chinese government? A South-American drugs Cartel? Private Military Companies? Journalists-activist-terrorists? Goldman Sachs? The implications are astounding.
If what this academic-with-the-columnist-style says it true the disaster is exponentially much bigger than it would initially appear to be and this has very little to do with any ‘damage’ to the US image (it’s got nowhere to go but up by now) or its ability to ‘do’ intelligence. First America gave the world the Internet as a global comms infrastructure and now it has given an unknown number of completely unaccountable actors the keys to this infrastructure to do with as they please.
A Russian/Chinese/Israeli/Iranian spy will benefit both from the sigint collected by the NSA systems and even more from the info about what the US Intelligence community is (and is not) looking at. They could maybe also manipulate the collection process to steer the NSA away from things they would like to remain unseen. Any serious spy organisation would spend a lot of resources on creating that ability since the US has made itself totally dependent on signals intelligence as opposed to humans in the field who speak languages and understand cultures.
If the NSA has created a global spying machine whose output they cannot control perhaps it would be best to shut the whole thing down today. This would also have the additional benefit of respecting the human right of privacy (as described in Article 12 of the universal declaration of human rights) for most of humanity.
OHM and other Three-Letter-Agencies
<originally a column for OHM2013.org – also on HuffPo UK>
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” – Mahatma Gandhi
This summer the Dutch hacker community, with help from friends all over the world, will organise the seventh hacker festival in a series that started in 1989 with the Galactic Hacker Party. The world has changed massively since then (we’ll get to that) but the goal of these gatherings remains the same: to share knowledge and ideas about technology and its implications for our world, have heated discussions on what we should do about the problems we see (sometimes well before many others see them), generally have fun in communicating without keyboards, and being excellent to each other.
Four years ago a somewhat unknown Australian hacker with some new ideas about the future of journalism gave the opening keynote at HAR2009. His site was called Wikileaks and some of us had a hunch that this concept might be going places. We had no idea just how far that would be…
Not long after the first gathering in the Netherlands in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. While we can claim no connection, the interminable Cold War had finally ended and many of us felt, with the optimism so typical of youth, that world peace might just be possible in our lifetimes. We would go back to making rockets that went up instead of straight-and-level and other great things would follow.
Regrettably that was not to be. First the .coms imploded, then three skyscrapers in New York, and soon after that our entire economy turned out to be a sort of multi-level-marketing casino. The 3rd millennium has started with a bang that is still echoing around the planet. Since then we’ve seen the ‘free’ part of the world become rather un-free rather fast. “US Department of Homeland Security relaxing a ban on toenail clippers” would have been be a scary headline for someone in 1993 on several levels. But in 2013 it is just one of those things to which people have sadly become accustomed.
What happened? And is there anything we can do about it? Why not ask some of the people who were insiders with some of those three-letter-agencies-that-many-of-us-fear*, who left and are now speaking out often at great personal risk and cost. Five former insiders from different government organisations will all give talks about their experiences within various secret agencies and provide a historic context to what is happing right now.
The alphabet soup begins with ex-CIA Ray McGovern who is now an outspoken and indefatigable international peace campaigner. Ray will give a broad historic context based on his experiences as an analyst and presidential ‘daily-briefer’ during a career with the CIA that started during the Vietnam war.
Ex-FBI Coleen Rowley will talk about her experience working against organized crime and terrorist organisations at the FBI. She went public over the intelligence-sharing failures that allowed 9/11 to happen, and in 2002 was voted “Time” Person of the Year.
In a more recent case, ex-NSA and natural-born geek Thomas Drake and ex-DoJ Jesselyn Radack will discuss Tom’s whistleblowing case relating to his work for the NSA were he was managing very large information gathering projects. Tom was one of the first victims of the recent US push-back against whistleblowers under the reanimated 1917 US Espionage Act and was threatened with life in prison.
Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer for MI5, will discuss her experience working for UK’s Security Service against terrorist organisations, why she became a whistleblower about the crimes and incompetence of the UK spies, and how all of this relates to current developments both in the Middle East and the shredding of our civil liberties in the West.
To try to make sense of all these insights and figure out what we should do to get out of the mess, the five experts will discuss our options in a special “Spook Panel”, and you can join in. How can we resist, retain privacy and perhaps get back to a world where you can get on a plane without being prodded, scanned and forced to give up dangerous materials like mineral water?
It is easy and understandable to get depressed about the world today, but that doesn’t help. Hackers are people who do things. So join us, share your knowledge, creativity and talents to help figure out what we can do to fix this. New media, crypto, art, networks, music, blogging, fast & clever analysis of news and patient explanations of history & culture. We need it all and much more. And we need everyone to help out because while the freedom to play with tech is vital, the freedom to do so while not being subjected to ‘extraordinary rendition‘, torture, or drone-strikes is even more important.
The summer of 1989 was long, hot and free. Let’s make another one at OHM2013.
*)If you don’t fear these agencies you’re either not paying attention or you have a very boring life.
