China's Cyber Warriors

101 East

Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Last month, Google, the world's largest internet company, closed down its search engine facility in China after issues with censorship and hacking. The case has highlighted a growing cyber warfare between the West and China. 101 East looks at the role of the internet in China and the rising tide of cyber warfare with the West.

Information Wars

How Will Governments Deal With The Information Revolution?

Last Modified: 29 Mar 2011 14:50
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Information is power and in the age of the information revolution, cyber and satellite communication is transforming our lives, reinventing the relationship between people and power.

In Depth

'Information Wars' on Al Jazeera Al Jazeera's Empire at Columbia Filming Empire at Columbia's Journalism school Video: The leaks and the mighty

New media, from WikiLeaks to Facebook, Twitter to YouTube, is persistently challenging the traditional flow of information, and cyber disobedience is exposing powerful governments.

Websites are now being treated like hostile territories; whistleblowers and leakers as terrorists, and hackers as insurgents.

Governments are scrambling to salvage their influence and take advantage of the new cyber and satellite media. From China to the Sudan, Egypt to Iran, despots and armies are tracking web activity and setting up Facebook accounts to spy on their citizens.

So is this the century of free information and expression as the cyber utopians predicted, or new methods of electronic oppression as the cyber sceptics warned?

Joining Marwan Bishara to discuss these issues are: Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist; Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer ofDemocracy Now!; Professor Emily Bell, the director of digital journalism at Columbia University; Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; Professor Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Our interviewees are: Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Charlie Beckett, the director of Polis at London School of Economics; Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of Danwei.org, and Pink Ke, the co-founder ofantiwave.net.

The Biggest Threat Facing U.S. Is Fast Creeping Ignorance

It's reached epidemic levels in government. Isn't wanton ignorance among those we trust with nuclear policies, war, famine, jobs, the national debt and more, a concern?

By Stephen Pizzo
March 25, 2011
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

I am old enough to remember the days when what Americans were told to fear most was "Creeping Communism."

There were even hearings. There was a blacklist. There were arrests and even a couple of executions.


In the end all communism turned out to be creeping toward was its own extinction.

We may not be as lucky with the new creep we're facing today: Creeping Ignorance.

As a story from AlterNet put it, "3/4ths of Senate GOP Doesn't Believe in Science: The Tea Party and its allies had made it unacceptable to the GOP base to be anywhere except pandering to the anti-science crowd." (Full Story)

The Right, which hated and feared commies and their (largely imaginary) infiltration into government, not only don't seem to care about creeping ignorance in government, but have come to embrace this new breed of government infiltrators.


The explanation for this embrace is simple as the minds of the infiltrators: science, and for that matter any other factual analysis, tends to flatly contradict many of the Right's most cherished fictions, such as:

• The more you cut taxes the more tax revenue flows into federal coffers.
• History proves America is a Christian nation.
• Climate change is either not happening at all or, if it is happening, it has nothing to do with our use of fossil fuels. ("I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything that human beings do. ..." - Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin)
• Slashing regulation of business and high finance is good for business, good for the nation and good for the American public.
• If the rich are allowed to keep more of their earnings they will share it with everyone else, (trickle down.)
• School science classes should be "fair and balanced," like Fox News, when teaching the origins of life on earth by teaching the biblically-inspired "creationist" version alongside Darwin's scientific theory of evolution.
• President Obama "may not have been born in America" as he claims.
• President Obama is "a secret Muslim."

And the list of Creeping Ignorance goes on and on, growing longer with each passing month. Michelle Bachmann believes that the founding fathers "didn't rest until the put an need to slavery." She also believes the first shot "heard around the world" that started our war of independence was fired in New Hampshire. It wasn't. Did she care? Nope. Pointing out that it was fired in Massachusetts was, to her and her kind, just further proof of how the mainstream media picks on conservatives.

So, where are the hearings on Creeping Ignorance in the halls of Congress? I mean, I remember the time, not so long ago, when it was held as a matter of national policy that "a mind is a terrible thing to lose." It seems to me it's reached epidemic levels in federal and state government. Shouldn't someone hold hearings? Isn't wanton ignorance among those we trust with nuclear policies, war, famine, jobs, the national debt and more, a concern?

If there were hearings they could begin by taking a page from the popular Jeopardy quiz show:

Question: "They were the first major documents enshrining human rights since the Magna Carta."

Answer: "What's the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?"

Question: "The US Civil War was fought over it."

Answer: "What was slavery?"

Question: "A process used by researchers to prove theories."

Answer: "What is the scientific method?"

Suspects should put under oath and asked directly:

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of any group that believes, or claims to believe, such things as that the US government was behind the 911 attacks or that President Obama was born in Kenya?"

And so on. Each suspect would be grilled until it could be established that this member of Congress was or wasn't a certified ignoramus.

Now, I'm plenty glad that Creeping Communism turned out to be a -- excuse the pun -- red herring. But I am not at all convinced that Creeping Ignorance will be as benign a threat to the US.

For the nation that has, for a couple of centuries, been not only a beacon of freedom, but also a beacon of knowledge and science, Creeping Ignorance at the heart of our government threatens to turn us into a nation only Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter, et al., could love: one big festival of stupidity.

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

Libya: The Propaganda War

There Are A Cacophony Of Competing Narratives Coming Out Of Libya - We Take A Look At The War Of Words and Images.

Last Modified: 12 Mar 2011 10:28 GMT
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

This week on Listening Post: Propaganda wars escalate as the crisis in Libya rumbles on and Belgium's media divisions reflect a divided country that is still struggling to form a government.

When protests first began in Libya the media presence there was scarce so the story filtered out via social media thanks to courageous citizen journalists. Then, when the fighting intensified, global media numbers increased exponentially. Now there are hoards of international news teams camped out with rebel forces or reporting from the country's capital and Gaddafi stronghold, Tripoli.

There is a cacophony of competing narratives coming out of Libya. From propaganda on the country's state-run broadcaster, to propaganda on rebel-controlled radio, to international reporting with a clear agenda, it is enough to make your head spin. Our News Divide this week starts in Benghazi, the centre of the Libyan uprising and a key battleground in the war of words and images in the media.

Bits and pieces from the world of media: New rules for foreign journalists in China in the wake of the "Jasmine Revolutions"; several journalists in Turkey are arrested and charged with planning to overthrow the government; two more of Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers are implicated in the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Italy’s state-run broadcaster refuses to air the trailer of a new film about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

It took Iraq 289 days to form a government. Belgium will break that record if politicians there do not put aside their differences by the end of the month. The problem lies with the ethnic divide in the country. The north is mostly populated by Dutch-speaking Flemish Belgians and the majority in the south are French speakers known as Walonians. That divide is reflected in the media which many Belgians say exacerbates the political situation. Listening Post's Caroline Bodin went to Brussels to see what effect the country's polarised media is having on its parliamentary problems.

With all the animated speeches Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has been giving, it was only a matter of time until one of his rants went viral. He recently used the Arabic phrase "ZengaZenga" – which roughly translated means "each and every street or alley". Gaddafi wanted his supporters to search those alleys and root out rebel forces but an Israeli musician saw the lighter side of it, auto-tuned it, dropped in a techno beat and posted it online. With more than three million hits on YouTube and counting, it had to be our Web Video of the Week. We hope you enjoy the show.

Losing The Information War

Is The US Really Losing The Information War, As Hillary Clinton Claims, and How Can It Fight Back?

Last Modified: 06 Mar 2011 09:55 GMT
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"



"America is facing an information war ... and we are losing that war." That is what Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said as she spoke before the Senate foreign relations committee.

The war, she says, is being won by networks that offer "real news". She praised Al Jazeera and said that it is changing peoples' minds and attitudes.

Her comments came as Republicans plan to cut the state department's budget by half.

Is the US really losing the information war? And is public funding the solution?

Inside Story presenter Sami Zeidan discusses with guests: Tom Fenton, a former foreign correspondent and author of Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All; Charlie Wolf, a political commentator and broadcaster; and Abdallah Schliefer, the former NBC Cairo bureau chief and now professor emeritus of journalism at the American University of Cairo.

Fighting Back In Libya's Media War

Anti-Government Protesters In Benghazi Have Opened Their Own Radio Station To Get Their Message Out.

Last Modified: 02 Mar 2011 02:10 GMT
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"



With state television in Libya reporting that the situation in the country is normal, anti-government activists have taken to creating their own media outlets to get their message out.

Several activists in the opposition stronghold of Benghazi have set up a radio station, getting updates from protesters on the ground and disseminating them to the wider public.

Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid reports from Benghazi, eastern Libya.

Media Black Hole

So Much News That We'll Implode?

By LINTON WEEKS
February 19, 2011
Courtesy Of "NPR"

Have you noticed? The news cycle is spinning faster. And faster. Andfasterandfaster.

Congressman Christopher Lee (R-NY) resigns because of a scandal even before the scandal is known to the public. On websites we get Tuesday's news on Monday. As online commenters, we discuss articles we haven't read and dis movies we haven't watched.Google anticipates the stories we want to see even before we know we want to see them. And as one person tweeted recently: "Tunisia's revolution took four weeks. Egypt: 17 days. Who's next and how much time do they have?"

When it comes to the news of the day, newspapers, websites, bloggers, cable networks and aggregators all trip over themselves to be the fastest and the first. The competition has always existed, but technology has ramped up the rivalries.

At this increasingly accelerated pace, is it inevitable that noteworthy events — and the news they engender — will rush lickety-split into each other? What happens when things just cannot occur any faster? What if the rapidity of the newscycle outpaces the news itself and we wind up in some form of warp speed — living life in a wormholish, time-wrinkled world?

Faster And Faster

It's not just the news that is moving faster.

Cars get speedier. The Super Sport model of the Bugatti Veyron is the fastest street-legal car on the planet. It can travel at more than 267 mph.

Trains are more rapid. In China, the Harmony Express high-speed train zips along at an average of more than 215 mph.

Humans run swifter. Scienceline, a New York University website, recently pointed out that in 1936, track star Jesse Owens set a human speed record for the 100-yard dash at a 21.7 mph clip. In 2009, Usain Bolt traversed the same 100 yards at nearly 28 mph.

How much faster can we run? Scienceline asked. Apparently, a lot faster. Peter Weyand, a researcher at Southern Methodist University in Texas, reports that humans should, theoretically, be able to move at 35 or 40 mph. And, with genetic modification, "radically faster," he tells the website. "If somebody manages the technical trick of having really fast animal fibers introduced and expressed, then all bets are off. Really crazy things would happen."

Such gene-doping, he adds, is just around the corner. And we are headed there. Fast.

— Linton Weeks

James Gleick, author of the 1999 classic Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything,says, "Everybody thinks there's got to be a breaking point. But the breaking point never comes."

A Quantum Leap

As overwhelming as the rush of news — the comings and goings of despots, the rise and demise of movements — can be, there is some "comfort" to be found in the laws of the universe, says J. Richard Gott III, an astrophysicist at Princeton University and author of Sizing Up the Universe: The Cosmos in Perspective. For the news to outrun the event is an impossibility in this universe, he says. That's because of the "Planck time" — the smallest measurement of time possible, in quantum physics terms — that would occur between events.

"You can't change governments faster than the Planck time," he says. "Otherwise, you create a black hole and the events collapse into each other."

Phew. In that, one supposes, there's a quantum of solace.

Still, with news — and reaction to news — moving more quickly than ever, says Louis Gray, a Silicon Valley blogger who chronicles the ever-increasing speed of computers and companies, "it is safe to assume the public does not know about many top stories or issues, and cannot be assumed to have enough data to ascertain truth versus spin, and right versus wrong."

As a result, Gray says, "people are intentionally filtering the information they consume through sources they agree with, or are turning instead to entertainment and idle-time activities, becoming less informed."

News Finders, Not Makers

Steven Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers Are Creators, believes we will learn to navigate the new world with the help of other navigators. He wrote in The Huffington Post that we are living in "a world where abundance is assumed in the world of content — there's no shortage of content makers of all shapes and sizes. But the avalanche of content makes finding the content you're looking for significantly harder."

By choosing to read a certain story or subscribe to a certain blog — and letting others know that we "like" the stories and blogs — we are saving time for those who trust us, according to Rosenbaum.

"The world of curation will have lots of brand-name, well-known curators you know and trust," Rosenbaum wrote. "The new media moguls won't be makers, they'll be finders, endorsers and presenters."

In an interview, Rosenbaum adds: "Curious people will have more of an opportunity to engage in curated and complex editorial mixes, and people who define themselves as a political party, or an issue, or any other narrow set of filters will embrace sources that don't expose them to alternative points of view."

Still, the problem remains: The news is coming at us so fast and furious, we don't always have time to be exposed to news we are not already interested in. Our horizons may not be broadened by this onslaught but narrowed. And it might become harder to experience serendipitous moments, those Holy Cow! instances of discovery.

Gleick thinks the solution is to adjust our speed when it comes to filtering the news. Though everything is accelerating, "we aren't going to invert the space-time continuum," he says. "We aren't going to live our futures ahead of our past. But we're going to learn — we are alreadylearning — that faster does not equal better."

At the point at which we seem to be getting tomorrow's news today, Gleick says, "we just need to wave a red flag. Tomorrow hasn't come yet."

Gleick adds, "Some things — and news is just one of them—are worth waiting for."

How Facts Backfire

Researchers Discover A Surprising Threat To Democracy: Our Brains

By Joe Keohane

July 11, 2010

Courtesy Of "The Boston Globe"

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

Joe Keohane is a writer in New York.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

Ghost Of 'Total Information Awareness'

Editor’s Note: Total Information Awareness was a scheme devised in the months after 9/11 that would have allowed the U.S. government to collect and analyze the electronic footprints left behind by everyone in their daily lives, supposedly to ascertain who might be a terrorist.

By Coleen Rowley
April 15, 2010
Courtesy Of Consortium News

After TIA’s ambitious plan was exposed, Democrats in Congress blocked its funding. However, as former FBI agent Coleen Rowley notes in this guest essay, TIA has simply morphed into different forms, continuing to hover over the United States as a specter of potential high-tech fascism:

Since we all tend to reflexively cringe whenever someone mentions the ideological “F” topic, I’m going to try and minimize some of the natural revulsion and denial by writing the full word that we usually fear to name only once: fascism.

The very easy answer to why and how "F" is presently developing was actually answered in 1795 by “the Father of the U.S. Constitution” and our fourth president, James Madison, who observed:

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people.

“The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

In the ninth year of what’s become the seemingly unending “war on terror” (comprising real wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle East countries), we American citizens have consequently given up numerous liberties in the vain pursuit of absolute security, validating the prediction of another founding father, Benjamin Franklin, that those who attempt to trade their liberty for greater security will have neither.

Hard-core repressive police state tactics involving domestic use of the military have only occasionally emerged, however — for instance, during certain National Security Special Events. F-grade repression is not close to being a fact of daily life (yet).

How, then, has the government been able to keep the momentum going for hugely expensive and unpopular wars that have pushed the country into a permanent war economy — where much of our only remaining manufacturing resides in military bombs/weaponry and a large segment of the decent-paying jobs exists in the “all-volunteer” military?

How has the growing disparity between the masses of ordinary people losing their jobs, pensions, health care and homes – and the clear ties to corruption of government by moneyed special and corporate interests – not yet led to serious social unrest?

To be sure, our large-scale system of prison warehousing always plays a role in tamping down social unrest. And a little official intimidation goes a long way. It’s slowly being ramped up.

For instance, the small fines customarily imposed for minor offenses of improperly posting flyers about upcoming rallies have now become draconian penalties amounting to thousands of dollars.

Peace activists who simply lie down on the sidewalk in front of the White House are being thrown in the terrible “D. C. lockup” for a day or more. “Minnesota Patriot Act” law, passed after 9/11, now defines causing minor property damage as an act of “terrorism.”

We experienced a form of police state intimidation firsthand in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul when vague threats of “anarchism” were leaked to the press months before the 2008 Republican National Convention.

A show of force by anonymous “robo-cops” ensued and, unsurprisingly, their threatened use of tasers, chemical weapons and mass arrests materialized.

Mass arrests of approximately 800 people at the RNC, including those of over 40 journalists (most of which were later dismissed due to lack of justification), took place, but the really bad result (which most citizens do not know) was the serious intimidation that had effectively reduced the number of participants marching that first day in St. Paul streets.

The “Total Information Awareness (TIA)” collection of private data on individuals was originally proposed after 9/11 by Admiral John Poindexter (convicted in the Iran-Contra affair) and falsely sold as a solution to prevent terrorism.

Despite the lack of any evidence that TIA type programs “work” and are capable of effectively identifying actual terrorists through the vacuuming up of more data, they have taken root in the 16 different “intelligence” agencies.

Just as Blackwater attempted to shed its bad image through a name change, so did TIA. Each newly minted acronym (which I do not have the space here to list) makes a false promise similar to the NIMD (“Novel Intelligence from Massive Data”) one that allows billions more records to be collected, stored, and “data-mined.”

The NSA, for example, is reportedly building a new computer system the size of the National Capitol Building which will require more electricity than what Salt Lake City uses for everything just for the NSA to store its records.

Much of the data probably emanate from the NSA’s warrantless monitoring program that Congress recently legalized after the monitoring was illegally commenced by Bush.
Previous Attorney General Guidelines, which were enacted in the early 1980s after the Church Committee exposed abuses (such as J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO), have largely been unceremoniously discarded to open the doors further.

Although it’s well known that the task of finding a needle in a haystack or “connecting the dots” is not made easier, but instead much harder, by adding more hay to the haystack, it has not stopped the newly burgeoning “Security-Surveillance Industrial Complex,” which is as privatized as the military-industrial complex.

In 2007, the FBI temporarily raised some eyebrows when it proposed quadrupling its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) database to ultimately collect 6 billion records, or 20 for each man, woman, and child in the U.S.

While a National Academies of Science study had refuted Total Information Awareness’s ability to achieve its stated objective to “proactively” mine the data to find terrorists using “predictive” analysis, nothing seems to stop such collections from proceeding.

Private security and surveillance corporations have huge profit incentives to push to expand such programs, as they benefit from contracts with the government.

The average citizen does not suspect, however, that the government would waste such vast sums of his/her tax money on useless surveillance and data collection-mining systems to profit private companies.

So the U.S. government intelligence agencies’ massive “intelligence” collection serves to fuel and reinforce people’s fears of “terrorism,” as well as intimidate and scare the average citizen away from such basic good citizenship activities as marching, writing letters to the editor, blogging, joining activist or social networking groups (such as Facebook), or otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights.

Airport screening that increasingly includes equipment that effectively removes passengers’ clothing has another pernicious impact. Reducing someone to a naked state and removing all semblance of personal privacy is actually one of the permissible “harsh interrogation tactics” touted by Cheney and his ilk as effective in “breaking” a suspect.

Similarly, it is perhaps one of the most effective ways of demonstrating the absolute power of the state over an individual. Forcing individuals to remove their shoes is one thing, but forcing them to essentially become totally naked on a regular basis will not only destroy self-esteem but immediately create feelings of helplessness and powerlessness.

The current government intrusiveness in the name of the “war on terror” threatens much more than mere loss of individual privacy. Everyone should be able to learn from history — specifically, the five decade-long, Cold War-induced period in America when the zealot F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, conducted guilt-by-association spying and disrupted First Amendment activities with COINTELPRO.

Hoover’s immense power over other government and nongovernment leaders (especially those he didn’t like) was based on his collection of vast amounts of private information about them and his consequent ability to blackmail them by threatening to expose their information and secrets.

Think about the daily exposés one reads involving sexual scandals, for instance, of elected government politicians caught routinely in bathrooms and brothels, and you might grasp the dangerous potential of this intrusive spying to thwart our democratic processes.

Up to now, the five main buttons that propagandists push to control and manipulate larger masses of people have worked quite well. Those in power have not had to resort much to the harsher forms of official repression.

Pushing fear, hate, greed, false pride and blind loyalty, actually in that order and on an almost 24/7 basis, has worked very well thus far: not only has it brought out the worst in some people, but it has also tamped down displays of dissent and social unrest.

But yes, Virginia, I do believe our young corporatocracy boat is sailing right into the perfect category F storm unless we, as a country, can quickly change course.
Instead of allowing the propaganda tools to manipulate and bring out the worst in our citizens, we need to immediately encourage and strengthen the opposite traits: courage, love, generosity, humility and critical thinking.

We will need all of these to cut through the mass apathy, desensitization and political gaming that has currently put our country on the F course.

Coleen Rowley is a former FBI Agent. She holds a law degree, and served in Minneapolis as "Chief Division Counsel," a position which included oversight of Freedom of Information, as well as providing regular legal and ethics training to FBI Agents. In 2002, Coleen brought some of the pre 9/11 lapses to light and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the endemic problems facing the FBI and the intelligence community. Rowley's memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller in connection with the Joint Intelligence Committee's Inquiry led to a two-year-long Department of Justice Inspector General investigation. Today, as a private citizen, she is active in civil liberties, and peace and justice issues.

CIA, State Department Plan To Destroy Wikileaks

Mar. 24 2010 - 2:20 pm
Courtesy Of True Slant

The rise of the internet brings the greatest challenge yet to the globe’s existing centers of power, and those associated with those centers of power are at least partially aware of this. China has reacted with the construction of its second Great Wall, the Russian government appears to have shut down a website used to organize a recent spate of ad hoc protests, and there have been various murmurs by such degenerate political figures as Hugo Chavez to the effect that the internet’s anarchic nature runs contrary to their own preferred schematic for humanity, one which is reliant on such people as themselves (I am paraphrasing for accuracy by implication, of course).

Among the institutions that have arisen as of late that challenge secrecy, and thus the status quo, is Wikileaks, which has provided a tremendous service to humanity by serving as a clearinghouse by which previously-secret information may be disseminated to the public, which may then decide for itself whether the more traditional institutions that operate in its name ought to be permitted to continue to do so. It has produced a great number of important scoops over the past few years, and it appears to be preparing for yet another. It also appears to be under present attack by portions of the U.S. intelligence community at this very moment.

As noted by a related blog[Down due to excessive traffic, changed link to Twitter feed itself, 6:11 EST], the Wikileaks Twitter feed produced a number of disturbing messages last night:

WikiLeaks to reveal Pentagon murder-coverup at US National Press Club, Apr 5, 9am; contact press-club@sunshinepress.org

WikiLeaks is currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation. Following/photographing/filming/detaining

If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film. And you know who is responsible.

Two under State Dep diplomatic cover followed our editor from Iceland to http://skup.no on Thursday.

One related person was detained for 22 hours. Computer’s seized.That’s http://www.skup.no

We know our possession of the decrypted airstrike video is now being discussed at the highest levels of US command.

We have been shown secret photos of our production meetings and been asked specific questions during detention related to the airstrike.

We have airline records of the State Dep/CIA tails. Don’t think you can get away with it. You cannot. This is WikiLeaks.

These messages come a few days after Wikileaks produced what appears to be evidence that portions of the U.S. intelligence and diplomatic communitieshave floated the idea of discrediting this outlet by way of methods similar to those employed in the CIA’s COINTELPRO operations of the late ’60s.

If this is actually occurring, it is the most important story of the year thus far. Depending on who you are, though, you may not take it seriously. I will note, and you as a reader may verify for yourself, that nearly every single individual involved in matters of information freedom takes this extraordinarily seriously, and that this incident will be the focus of all of them no matter whether or not the defunct media decides to grace it with a passing mention (and thereby legitimize the story in the eyes of those who deem matters important on the basis of whether they are being discussed by big shiny news outlets run by producers who care only for handbags). I will have more to relate on that particular subject later today after I hear back from certain individuals with more information on this incident and the specific events that may have prompted it.

Update

Some important links:

Wikileaks Twitter Feed – This hasn’t been updated for some 14 hours as of 2:00 pm EST. Update 9:04 EST Updated with message to the effect that everyone’s fine, see below.

Update 2:29 EST

It’s worth noting that German police last year raided the home of a certain individual who owned that nation’s version of the Wikileaks domain name. Again, national governments take Wikileaks seriously, and so should you.

Update 2:40 EST

The New York Times deserves credit for having reported on the U.S. intel community’s plan to discredit Wikileaks a few days ago. More to the point, this should help to convince those who may be coming to this late to the game that, yes, this is legitimate. Our nation’s intelligence service has targeted this website for destruction, and is most likely carrying out some variant on the plan at this very moment.

Update 3:23 EST

Not a word of this on Memeorandum or any of the major U.S. media outlets. This is exactly why we need more and better institutions designed with improved information flow in mind. Consider e-mailing me for info aboutProject PM at barriticus@gmail.com. Consider donating to Wikileaks. Consider getting in touch with a competent blogger and letting them know about this story.

Update 3:42 EST

If you have been directed to this page and are reading me for the first time, allow me to note that I am not in the habit of writing news updates of the breathless sort and do not specialize in these sorts of stories. I am also not the credulous type. I write for Skeptic and have a column for the Skeptical Inquirer, which is to say that I have earned some skeptic street cred over the years and am cashing those chips in today. If I take the position that a consortium of U.S. intel agencies are taking actions against an institution dedicated to transparency, it is because I have determined that this very thing is happening, and if I have made such a determination, it is only because the totality of the evidence points to such a thing as being not only probable, but obvious. Having said that, the evidence is here for all to see, and to act on.

Any assault on the ability of individuals to obtain the information necessary to ensure humanity’s collective well-being is an assault on humanity itself and ought to be regarded as such.

Update 4:29 EST

Wikileaks Twitter feed finally updates with the following message: “To those worrying about us–we’re fine, and will issue a suitable riposte shortly.”

Update 4:37 EST

Wikileaks is planning on releasing segments or at least stills from the video in question on April 5th. Apparently, it is a decrypted video displaying some sort of “massacre.” Insomuch as that the video was encrypted in the first place, it was likely stolen/leaked from some government military agency; it is possible that what worries the agency in question is not the contents, but the fact that an encryption schematic in use by said agency has been broken by people in the business of distributing secrets.

Update 5:30 EST

To clarify, Wikileaks has previously claimed that the video in question shows the deliberate murder of journalists and civilians, and that the video comes from some branch of the U.S. military. Obviously, there a number of conclusions one could draw from this regarding specifics and thus the full extent of the potential scandal; I’m trying to get in touch with those close to the matter before speculating further.

Update, 6:00 EST

This recent post by Scott Horton of Harper’s provides a good rundown of the context regarding Wikileaks, secrecy, and the mindset that defines too many U.S. government agencies:

What does the Pentagon have in common with North Korea, China, Zimbabwe, and a number of private Swiss banks? They all feel threatened by WikiLeaks, the Internet service that offers whistleblowers an opportunity to publish documents that expose corruption and wrongdoing by state and private actors.

Update 8:43 EST

Based on all available information, I would guess that the video clip depicts a Predator strike gone wrong – one that inadvertently killed a few journalists – and that certain officials took steps to minimize knowledge of the incident, to put it cutely. Again, this is simply an estimation.

Update 9:09 EST

A quote from the DoD report published on the 15th that deserves particular emphasis:

The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistlblowers could potentially damage, or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.

Update 9:38 EST

Another quote from the DoD report that’s worth emphasizing for different reasons:

The governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, and several other countries have blocked access to Wikileaks.org-type Web sites, claimed they have

the right to investigate and prosecute Wikileaks.org and associated whistleblowers, or insisted they remove false, sensitive, or classified government information, propaganda, or malicious content from the Internet. The governments of China, Israel, and Russia claim the right to remove objectionable content from, block access to, and investigate crimes related to the posting of documents or comments to Web sites such as Wikileaks.org. The governments of these

countries most likely have the technical skills to take such action should they choose to do so.

Update 10:08 EST

They must indeed be okay insomuch as that they’re now posting links to Gawker articles about themselves and analysis about why China hates them.

Update 11:08 EST

The Modern Media Initiative, with which Wikileaks is involved, probably merits more attention from those who agree that Iceland’s possible role as a global safe haven for information freedom is a crucial response to the inevitable attempts that will be made to encroach upon humanity’s fundamentally improved access to information.

Related Posts

• WikiLeaks Editors Make First Statement Since Aggresive U.S. Intel Operation
• Antiwar.com Radio Interview Regarding Wikileaks, Information Freedom