I have been paying only the most superficial attention to the specifics of the race for the Republican presidential nomination because it is far too early in the process for it to serve as anything other than fodder to fill the inexhaustible appetite of television and the blogosphere for content-free political speculation.
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The anarchic hacker group LulzSec that I wrote about just a few days ago announces that it is disbanding. Whether this is a temporary or permanent move is unclear but it is inevitable that similar loose confederations of hackers will form and reform.
The Daily Show looks at the hacking issue.
Despite a Republican controlled state senate and opposition from the powerful Catholic Church, gays have won the right to marry in New York state, joining Vermont and the District of Columbia as the only places where this happened legislatively. In four other states (Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire) the change came about because courts ruled that denying gays this right was unconstitutional.
This is major progress in the march for equality for gays, a goal that is undoubtedly going to be attained. Like slavery, denying equality for gays is so manifestly unjust, so lacking in any rational basis, that future generations will shake their heads and wonder how the hell it could have taken us so long to realize that it was wrong.
In the midst of a generally reactionary political climate in the US, we should savor this achievement.
So congratulations, New York!
The ever-entertaining and acerbic Matt Taibbi aims his keyboard at Michele Bachmann. He warns us that even though she is indubitably nuts, treating her as a joke candidate who can be dismissed is a mistake. Here is a small sample from the article which is worth reading in full for the glimpse it gives us at the sorry state of politics today where we have to even pay attention to such a candidate.
In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.
…
Bachmann’s entire political career has followed this exact same pattern of God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying. She’s not a liar in the traditional way of politicians, who tend to lie dully, usefully and (they hope) believably, often with the aim of courting competing demographics at the same time. That’s not what Bachmann’s thing is. Bachmann lies because she can’t help it, because it’s a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.
…
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
There has been a recent spate of news stories about attacks on computer systems of various businesses. Most of these attacks seem to be for criminal purposes, to gain access to people’s personal information to commit identity theft, credit card fraud, and the like.
But some hacker groups (such as LulzSec and Anonymous) have different motives. They recently announced that they are “uniting in a campaign aimed at banks, government agencies, and other high-profile targets, and they are encouraging others to steal and leak classified information.”
These two hacker groups are not out to steal money or business secrets on behalf of competitors or kill people. They perceive themselves as righting wrongs and, in the case of LulzSec, to have fun while doing so. LulzSec and Anonymous seem to have as their intention to attack and subvert those organizations that are seen as doing wrong and opposing transparency, and are fighting government and corporate secrecy that lies at the heart of the control systems and which enable them to get away with their crimes. This is why the US government and businesses have taken such a vicious approach to news organizations like WikiLeaks, and the term ‘cyberwars’ has started to be used
The idea of secretive people or groups acting on behalf of transparency or to help ordinary powerless people to right the wrongs perpetrated on them by powerful and evil people, institutions, and governments tends to strike a chord. They form the romantic legends of history (Robin Hood, William Tell) and are the stuff of comic book heroes with their secret identities. It is perhaps no accident that the group Anonymous uses the V for Vendetta mask as its icon.
The US and other governments cannot afford to let these groups grab the imagination of the public as being fighters for justice. It cannot run the risk that these groups will be seen as the good guys. And so there has been a campaign to confuse the transnational, anarchic, and political computer hackers with those groups that seek to use hacking for merely monetary gain or those serving the interests of one nation against another.
As part of this propaganda war, there are ominous reports that nations hostile to the US (such as North Korea, China, and Iran) may try to infiltrate the computer systems in the US and disrupt or even paralyze their military systems. We receive warnings that these are grave threats to the security of the US and hence of its people.
To me, all this fear mongering sounds eerily familiar to the way in which the war on terror was ramped up. Stoking people’s fears that their lives are in danger from vague threats is the standard mode of operation of governments that seek to control them. Could it be that that the government needs a new threat because people are getting a little jaded about the war on terror, especially since the main bogeyman Osama bin Laden is no longer around? The silly color-coded alert system has been laughed out of existence and there are increasing grumbles about the many annoying rules that airline passengers are subjected to, particularly in the US.
It is to be expected that with the ubiquity of computers and the widespread sophistication of computer users, we should see an increase in hacking. So the frequent news stories of this or that company having its systems attacked should come as no surprise. Some people will do it with criminal intent, others simply to prove that it can be done. There will be an escalating war between hackers and security systems, just as there is with ordinary crimes.
But we have to be vigilant is preserving the difference between political actions and criminal actions. The government seeks to criminalize everything that might erode its wall of secrecy, which is why it is pursuing WikiLeaks and whistleblowers with such vigor.
In the fight for democracy, the actions of political hacker groups that seek greater transparency and the exposure of wrongdoing may be one of the few means by which people can fight the trend towards increasingly dictatorial governments.
George Orwell’s novel 1984 had as its background theme the idea of the world being split up into three great military powers permanently at war with each other but with regularly shifting alliances. Orwell’s novel was published in 1948 and was extrapolating from the power structure following World War II, with the world carved up into three regions, those within the sphere of influence of the US, those within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, and the rest of the world that came to be known later as the non-aligned bloc of nations.
With the end of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union dismantling itself and essentially conceding military dominance to the US and China not yet emerging as a major power, there was a brief period when it was hoped that this would lead to a flowering of real prosperity as a result of the ‘peace dividend’, as the wasteful expenditures on militaries that were no longer needed would be re-directed to improving the lives of everyone.
That hope died quickly but not because Orwell’s dystopian vision in its pure form seems likely to occur soon. While there are signs of a tri-partite military world order centered around the US, Russia, and China being recreated that could turn into states of actual war between militaries, that does not seem to be the direction we are headed. The ‘wars’ of this century are more likely to be multipolar economic ones, with the US, Europe, Russia, Japan, China, India, and Brazil all reaching some level of economic parity in the near future and competing for dominance.
But it is within the US that one element of Orwell’s dystopian vision is clearly emerging and that is of a nation whose people are exhausted and bowed down by thinking they are in a state of permanent war against some vague and ill-defined but somehow ominous enemy. Successive US governments, and the oligarchies behind them, have discovered how useful it is to have people living in this state of fear, so that they willingly give up their rights and freedoms in order to be kept ‘safe’ from the unseen threats that are supposedly all around us, in addition to being willing to spend vast sums of public money to feed the inexhaustible appetite of the military-industrial-financial complex.
One way in which people can be anesthetized to being in a state of permanent war is to get them used to the idea of wars all around them all the time, and this is helped by the ease with which war metaphors are introduced into the public discourse. It seemed to start out innocuously with ‘wars’ on poverty, hunger, cancer, and so forth, which were clearly metaphorical. The use of these metaphors had the benefit of getting people to think of the war word ‘war’ in a positive light, as something that can be noble and worthy of support.
Then we had the war on drugs, and the word war became less of a metaphor and more of the real thing, with armed action both domestically and overseas. The war against drugs was the first real permanent war, something that has no end because it is being waged against an amorphous and decentralized enemy and there is no measure by which you can determine if you have won. This made it the perfect prototype for creating a state of permanent war because the war will continue as long as the government says it needs to continue.
The next major step of course was the war on terror. Unlike in the case in the war on drugs where many of the so-called enemy, both users and dealers, are actually living amongst us and could be our neighbors, with this new war, the enemy are clearly ‘the other’, foreigners, aliens, ‘not one of us’, and all restraints on the government are off. As Glenn Greenwald writes, in the US today the word ‘terrorist’ seems to be reserved for “anyone — especially of the Muslim religion and/or Arab nationality — who fights against the United States and its allies or tries to impede their will.” This is why there is such strong opposition to using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe people like Timothy McVeigh and the members of the various domestic armed groups that have attacked and killed Americans because of their ideological beliefs that the government or other organizations must be destroyed. The ‘war on terror’ serves its purpose of spearheading the elimination our constitutional rights only as long as it is seen as abrogating the rights of others and not of ‘us’.
Those who hoped that the death of bin Laden would mark the beginning of the end of the war of terror were wrong. As Karen J. Greenberg, the executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security, writes:
The administration was visibly using the bin Laden moment to renew George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror (even if without that moniker). And let’s not forget about the leaders of Congress, who promptly accelerated their efforts to ensure that the apparatus for the war that 9/11 started would never die. Congressman Howard McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was typical. On May 9th, he introduced legislation meant to embed in law the principle of indefinite detention without trial for suspected terrorists until “the end of hostilities.” What this would mean, in reality, is the perpetuation ad infinitum of that Bush-era creation, our prison complex at Guantanamo (not to speak of our second Guantanamo at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan).
In other words, Washington now seems to be engaged in a wholesale post-bin Laden ratification of business as usual, but this time on steroids.
This is why I believe the war on terror will never end or at most will be replaced by some new and equally vague threat that will justify the same restrictions on our civil liberties. As 1984 illustrated, a state of permanent war is simply too useful a device for controlling populations.
Next: The next new shiny endless war?
After quitting halfway through her term of office as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has now quit halfway through her bus tour of America.
Among other things, it deals with the usual Orwellian world of language manipulation where ‘troop withdrawals’ don’t actually mean what you think it means, the growing realization that Obama’s justifications for the war in Libya are ridiculous, the accelerating assault on civil liberties, and how ‘liberal’ apologists for Obama are actually serving the conservative cause.
Read it here.