And if you read Yasha Levine's book, he'll tell you that all of the methods
that are now available which will supposedly hide your identity if you leak
secret information to the press are not trustworthy because they were all
originally developed by the government and therefore, what you leak is also
available to the government.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2021 9:52 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Eight Years Ago, My Life Began
This piece reminds me of a science fiction story I once read. Consider this.
Humanity has come into contact with an alien race from another star. These
aliens have given the people of Earth a new technology. It is a device by which
within a gravity field one can see any scene that has happened within that
gravity field since it came into existence. You can watch it on a high
definition television screen and hear any sounds that accompanied the scene.
Naturally paleontologists are extremely interested in this and a device is
given to a group of paleontologists and one of the aliens is there to guide the
paleontologists through using it. The alien can be described as a real
goofball. He knows his stuff, but picture a beer drinking idiot who has no
shame about how he presents himself. The scientists use the device to look at
dinosaurs that appear to be alive even if they died millions of years ago. They
can tag a dinosaur and thereby watch it at any point in its life. As a matter
of fact, they can watch anything that has happened on Earth in its four and a
half billion years of existence. Towards the end of the story the alien lets
them know that they are in for more than they bargained for. He points out that
he already knows that they regard him as a goofball and that there is good
reason for it. In fact, it is likely that they will all soon become goofballs
too. It seems that this device works just as well for the very recent past as
it does for millions of years ago. The alien says that gives the phrase, this
day will live in infamy, a whole new and literal meaning. It seems that anyone
can now be tagged just like these guys have been tagging dinosaurs and that
means that anyone can now look at any event that ever happened to anyone in
their entire life and you can bet that the scenes that will get the biggest
audience are the most embarrassing moments in one's life. That is, the whole
concept of privacy, even in the tiniest details, has just become obsolete.
Doesn't that sound a lot like what Ed Snowden is talking about here. Once
before I mentioned on this list that I have another email address that I use a
fake name with. The question was asked why do I use a fake name? The answer is
that since the inception of the Internet people have been using handles, screen
names and other kinds of fake names to preserve their privacy. When I set up
that other email address it was partially for that same reason and partially
just because most other people use pseudonyms on line. I still use that fake
name there, but according to Ed Snowden here I suppose I may as well not.
___
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through disbelief
and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so! Your
patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply a child's
wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the eveastingly
bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory scientifically
demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had not the courage to
follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we
created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.” ― Irvin D.
Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept On 6/16/2021 4:10 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Eight Years Ago, My Life Began
By Edward Snowden, Continuing Ed
16 June 21
This piece first appeared on Edward Snowden's new Substack page called:
Continuing Ed-With Ed Snowden.
Snowden will be writing a weekly column on issues that are important
to him and posting it here:
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask
We encourage RSN readers to check it out.
-Paul/RSN
Eight years ago, my life began.
I was a climbing careerist in the American Intelligence Community, a
former CIA officer and NSA contractor, until I discovered that my work
- and the work of my generation - had, in secret, been turned toward
the construction of history's first truly global system of mass
surveillance: a machine dedicated to building perfect and permanent records
of our private lives.
I quietly showed documents detailing the full scope of this new
architecture of oppression to my colleagues, who were first alarmed,
and then filled with a sense of resignation: what can you do?
And so it was eight years ago this week that I left my partner, my
family, and my country behind to reveal evidence of this malfeasance
to journalists I'd never met but had to trust.
As part of this process, I also revealed my identity.
This was the moment:
Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when [Laura Poitras]
pointed her camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a cramped,
messy room that I hadn't left for the past ten days. I think everybody
has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being
recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness
that there is, or might be, somebody pressing record on their
smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that
somebody is a friend. [...] In a situation that was already
high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of Laura's camera, like a
sniper's sight, kept reminding me that at any moment the door might be
smashed in and I'd be dragged off forever. And whenever I wasn't
having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going
to look when it was played back in court. I realized there were so
many things I should have done, like putting on nicer clothes and
shaving. Room-service plates and trash had accumulated throughout the
room. There were noodle containers and half-eaten burgers, piles of
dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor. It was a surreal dynamic.
Not only had I never met any filmmakers before being filmed by one, I
had never met any journalists before serving as their source. The
first time I ever spoke aloud to anyone about the US government's
system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world
with an Internet connection. In the end, though, regardless of how
rumpled I looked and stilted I sounded, Laura's filming was indispensable,
because it showed the world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way
that newsprint never could.
That was how I described how I felt in my memoir Permanent Record.
Today, when I re-read that passage, and when I replay that old clip, I
have a curious sense of distance: it's me, but also it's not. I still
stand by the words, yet I can't help but acknowledge that I'm always
standing at a different remove, contemplating the past from a new
perspective, determined by all that has changed in the time that's
elapsed. Between the clip and the memoir, my girlfriend Lindsay and I
were reunited and married. Between the memoir and the present, we
became parents to a son. Between that child and the writing of this sentence,
I developed a new appreciation for time.
Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my
disclosures remains constant. In the past eight years, the
depredations of surveillance have merely become more entrenched, with
the capabilities that used to be the province of governments now in
the hands of private companies, too, which employ them to track and
tether us and attenuate our freedoms. This enduring danger, this
compounding danger, is one of the reasons I've decided to lift my
voice again - adding a new page to my "permanent record"...one to which I
hope you subscribe.
2.
Since 2013, it feels as though the world has accelerated, when really
only the rate of opinion has - through the sheer speed and volume of
bite-sized algorithmically "curated" social media. On Facebook, and
especially on Twitter, plots and characters appear and vanish in
moments, imparting emotions, but never lessons, because who has time
for those? The only thing that most of us manage to take away from
social media, besides the occasional chuckle, is an updated roster of
villains - the daily roll-call of transgressors and transgressions.
This is the reality of the fully commercialized mainstream internet:
our exposure to an indigestible mass of shortest-form opinions that
are purposefully selected by algorithms to agitate us on platforms
that are designed to record and memorialize our most agitated, reflexive
responses.
These responses are, in turn, elevated in proportion to their
controversy to the attention - and prejudice - of the crowd. In the
resulting zero-sum blood sport that public reputation requires,
combatants are incentivized to occupy the most conventionally
defensible positions, which reduces all politics to ideology and
splinters the polis into squabbling tribes. The products of the
irreconcilable differences this process produces are nothing more than
well-divided "audiences," made available to the influence of
advertisers, and all that it cost us was the very foundation of civil
society: tolerance.
For this reason, I'd like to do my part in encouraging a return to
longer forms of thinking and writing, which provide more room for
nuance and more opportunity for establishing consensus or, at the very
least, respecting a diversity of perspective and, you know, science.
I want to revive the original spirit of the older, pre-commercial
internet, with its bulletin boards, newsgroups, and blogs - if not in
form, then in function.
The utopianism of these blogs might seem as quaint today as the sites'
graphics (and glamorous MIDI audio), but whatever those outlets lacked
in sophisticated design, they more than made up for in curiosity and
intelligence and in their fostering of originality and
experimentation. They were, when it comes down to it, not curated and
templated "platforms" so much as direct expressions of the creative primacy
of the individual.
One history of the Internet - and I'd argue a rather significant one -
is the history of the individual's disempowerment, as governments and
businesses both sought to monitor and profit from what had
fundamentally been a user-to-user or peer-to-peer relationship. The
result was the centralization and consolidation of the Internet - the true
y2k tragedy.
This tragedy unfolded in stages, a gradual infringement of rights:
users had to first be made transparent to their internet service
providers, and then they were made transparent to the internet
services they used, and finally they were made transparent to one another.
The intimate linking of users'
online personas with their offline legal identity was an iniquitous
squandering of liberty and technology that has resulted in today's
atmosphere of accountability for the citizen and impunity for the state.
Gone were the days of self-reinvention, imagination, and flexibility,
and a new era emerged - a new eternal era - where our pasts were held against
us.
Forever.
Everything we do now lasts forever... The Internet's synonymizing of
digital presence and physical existence ensures fidelity to memory,
identitarian consistency, and ideological conformity. Be honest: if
one of your opinions provokes the hordes on social media, you're less
likely to ditch your account and start a new one than you are to
apologize and grovel, or dig in and harden yourself ideologically.
Neither of those "solutions" is one that fosters change, or intellectual and
emotional growth.
The forced identicality of online and offline lives, and the
permanency of the Internet's record, augur against forgiveness, and
advise against all mercy. Technological omniscence, and the ease of
accessibility, promulgate a climate of censorship that in the
so-called free world instantiates as
self-censorship: people are afraid to speak and so they speak the
party's words... or people are afraid to speak and so they speak no words at
all...
Even the most ardent practitioners of cancel culture - which I've
always read as an imperative: Cancel culture! - must admit that
cancellation is a form of surveillance borne of the same technological
capacities used to oppress the vulnerable by patriachal, racist, and
downright unkind governments the world over. The intents and outcomes
might be different - cancelled people are not sent to camps - but the
modus is the same: a constant monitoring, and a rush to judgment.
3.
If this past year-and-change has taught us anything, it's how
interconnected we all are - a bat coughs and the world gets sick.
Vaccines aside, our greatest weapon for defeating Covid-19 has been
the mask, an accessory I'd formerly appreciated only a symbol: masks
make secret, masks hide, masks cover, in protests as in pandemics.
The social value of the mask has been made clear: they're not
deceptive so much as protective, of ourselves and of others too.
Masking is a mutual responsibility, a symbol of common identity
founded in a common hope. This is the very same rhetoric I've always
employed about the use of technological masks: about the use of Tor
networks, virtual private networks, encryption keys, and allied
technologies that protect our identities online. Over the past eight
years, the number of people - of organizers, protestors, journalists,
and regular people - who've adopted these masks has been heartening,
but then so too has been the courage of those who speak unmasked, in
situations where their speech demands the authentication of
experience. As with so-called public health, so with the health of the
body politic: to drop the mask requires confidence in one's fellow
citizens, and in the system in general. From the blue checks to the
red pills, we all want to be free to speak as ourselves, and to be
recorded as ourselves, without fear of persecution, and we all want to
be able to decide what that freedom means, to ourselves and to our
communities, however defined. My family back home in the States, along
with many of my friends in the States and in Europe, are lucky enough
to now be going around unmasked, but millions - mostly in the world's
poorer countries - have no such privilege. It's here that the analogy with
speech freedoms comes into starkest relief: until the air is clear for all,
it's clear for none.
4.
For the past eight years, I've spoken out in defense of speech
freedoms on various platforms, but none has been a home. I've been
edited by editors, moderated by moderators, crammed into newspaper and
magazine columns next to the ads for fancy wristwatches; I've had my
thoughts contorted by character-limitations and tripped-up by threads,
even before they were taken out of context and misinterpreted,
accidentally and willfully. Platforms should ensure a writer has full
control over, and full ownership of, their intellectual property, so I'm glad
to help give this one a fighting chance.
Readers of this column should expect weekly posts dealing with civil
liberties and technology, in addition to commentary on the worlds of
whistleblowing and leaking, a series on false conspiracies (QAnon) v.
true conspiracies (debt), news roundups, and various reviews and
how-tos, for good measure. Subscribers will have access to audio
versions of many of the pieces, as well as to a series of podcasts,
featuring conversations between myself and friends and allies and
occasionally, yes - in the spirit of this space - even some folks I disagree
with.