daddyholes posted:xipe posted:the part where he takes a huge shit on jared cohen was funny
yeah that was a good read.
if anyone is interested in "best practice" when it comes to online communications, ive posted this before, but the grugq has a lot of great stuff on opsec, its geared towards hackers mostly, but not entirely. the presentations and resources pages are great. but the most important thing is still to not say anything online that you wouldnt want The Man to hear.
discipline posted:the point of all this is to make you aware that the government is watching you, and that you are under constant surveillance, which is 100% true. but for that surveillance to have its desired effect you have to broadcast your capabilities, which is what glen greenwald's job is - to make empire stronger and safer
let's put aside the debate about greenwald for a second.
this is really perverse logic. it's basically the same thing a federal judge said in a court ruling upholding the NYPD's Muslim surveillance program:
None of the Plaintiffs’ injuries arose until after the Associated Press released unredacted, confidential NYPD documents and articles expressing its own interpretation of those documents. Nowhere in the Complaint do Plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of the documents by the Associated Press. This confirms that Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents. The harms are not “fairly traceable” to any act of surveillance.
is your problem w/ the way GG and his cohorts report on surveillance programs, or that the programs are being disclosed at all?
HenryKrinkle posted:is your problem w/ the way GG and his cohorts report on surveillance programs, or that the programs are being disclosed at all?
imo it's the manner of reporting, i get the impression that's what discipline is saying too.
i think it's always good when these things are brought to light. the problem with GG, and he's emblematic of the problem with reporting about this stuff in general, is that he is a clusterfuck of ludditism and careerism. i personally don't see him as a knowing agent of imperialism. rather, he is useful to empire because he has a hysterical style, lack of real technical understanding, and the arrogance to violently reject any criticism of his work, no matter how friendly or constructive. this is how he is able to naively accept hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from a natsec oligarch to run a thinly veiled vanity blog. like brown moses writ large.
journalists can and do play a vital role in revealing and criticising the secret abuses of the state, but GG has internalised a puffed up, glamorised version of this, wherein he is completely pulling the strings of the natsec debate through dripfeed reporting and endless hype. much useful information has indeed come out through his NSA stories, but couched in this breathless, useless narrative.
i'm sure he is sincere in his aim to provoke a political debate and bring about legal reforms, which is obviously incredibly naive. the real effect of the narrative is what discipline and i have been talking about, though. the fear. the strengthening of empire through instilling a hopeless paranoia. he doesn't KNOW that's his job, but it is. intent is incidental. it's much like psychic cold readers who convince themselves that they are bringing comfort to people by pretending to talk to the dead. just because they believe they mean well, it doesn't mean they're not actually dumb assholes who make bank out of others' trauma.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:so things that apparently serve US natsec interests such as any public criticism no matter how valid of russia, north korea, or ISIS are CIA-backed plots, but also things that appear to damage US natsec interests such as critics revealing their criminal secret programs are also double secret reverse CIA backed plots. how does one meaningfully oppose such omnipotence
you misunderstand how power works. may i recommend the books of Michael Foucauld.
Petrol posted:this is how he is able to naively accept hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from a natsec oligarch to run a thinly veiled vanity blog
whoa there, he's bright enough at least to have a backup for the above task in case of failover, which is that glenn greenwald is not marxist and consistently erases class
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:so things that apparently serve US natsec interests such as any public criticism no matter how valid of russia, north korea, or ISIS are CIA-backed plots, but also things that appear to damage US natsec interests such as critics revealing their criminal secret programs are also double secret reverse CIA backed plots. how does one meaningfully oppose such omnipotence
be Marxist-Leninist. hope this helps
" I admire what Snowden did, but he is basically fine with Silicon Valley so long as we eliminate firms that have weak security practices and install far better, tighter supervision at the nsa, with more levels of transparent control and accountability. I find this agenda—and it’s shared by many American liberals—very hard to swallow, as it seems to miss the encroachment of capital into everyday life by means of Silicon Valley, which I think is probably more consequential than the encroachment of the nsa into our civil liberties. Snowden’s own proposals remain very legalistic: if we can only establish five more stages of checks and balances within the American juridical system, and a court that is better controlled by the public, everything will get better."
and since the privatization of public space that the internet represents is enabling the surveillance in the first place... though i guess if isps/tech companies were nationalized they'd cooperate with the government even more. but ad-hoc or mesh networks or whatever like the hong kong protesters were using are cool and hard (er) to surveill since you have to put someone on the ground
my favorite fact about joseph chen is that the official online picture of the chief executive of chinese facebook proves that one person can both build a billion-dollar company and never have occasion to learn how human arms fold across a chest.
Edited by Peelzebub ()
Petrol posted:daddyholes posted:xipe posted:the part where he takes a huge shit on jared cohen was funny
yeah that was a good read.
if anyone is interested in "best practice" when it comes to online communications, ive posted this before, but the grugq has a lot of great stuff on opsec, its geared towards hackers mostly, but not entirely. the presentations and resources pages are great. but the most important thing is still to not say anything online that you wouldnt want The Man to hear.
Rather than avoid buiding a trail you could meticulously build one designed to make ppl's heads explode with truth bombs, but that's probably more TNT movie territory (my land of expertise)
NoFreeWill posted:well it's really hard to wrangle data on the scale that the NSA collects. stuff like Hadoop and other researchers/startups are working hard on it but it is still very difficult to manage/sift/search etc. i think a level of paranoia below this site's is reasonable...
lmao yeah you're right, the guys who introduced math hacks into openssl a billion years ago are using off the shelf hadoop. there are very good C libraries to do very good searching and indexing that have been around for years, I used them to replace some hadoop bullshit in a small company that did high-speed indexing for bank fraud detection around 2006, so i think they probably can do better now. (there was in fact an nsa project that got in touch with that company but it was super small-time)
tpaine posted:please stop using GG to refer to him, i am constantly getting triggered because i used to play 1v1 starcraft and age of empires and get raped by my oponent who would then type "gg" and that will forever remind me of it
hahhahahha
Petrol posted:on the one hand, its true that its terribly unwise for revolutionaries to do sensitive communications online. its just good practice to presume that someone is listening. on the other hand, all this talk about NSA capabilities i think has the effect of discouraging people from even entertaining revolutionary thoughts. im sure the NSA has wicked sick 0days that can infect your brain stem or whatever, but theyre not going to waste them on a kid who googled "marx was right". nah mean? anyway, i still think the best reaction to any of this stuff is to simply say, fuck it, im going to the real world, to join an organisation, and talk about things off line.
I really liked Zizek's argument on the topic of surveillance. It's certain that large scale surveillance is occurring. It's unlikely that any particular person is being watched in any particularly meaningful way.
So how should we communicate with the possibility of being watched? Do it well! because now you have an audience!
Are they listening to my words? Maybe, I can't know, and this is precisely their form of power. This situation is a real large scale virtual panopticon, and according to Foucault, it's this uncertainty that produces the effect of domination and control of one's behavior.
So I'm going to keep on studying, keep questioning, keep engaging in the public use of reason, and if they want to listen, by all means they are welcome. Perhaps they might learn something, and they should.
The_Boourns_Identity posted:Petrol posted:
on the one hand, its true that its terribly unwise for revolutionaries to do sensitive communications online. its just good practice to presume that someone is listening. on the other hand, all this talk about NSA capabilities i think has the effect of discouraging people from even entertaining revolutionary thoughts. im sure the NSA has wicked sick 0days that can infect your brain stem or whatever, but theyre not going to waste them on a kid who googled "marx was right". nah mean? anyway, i still think the best reaction to any of this stuff is to simply say, fuck it, im going to the real world, to join an organisation, and talk about things off line.
I really liked Zizek's argument on the topic of surveillance. It's certain that large scale surveillance is occurring. It's unlikely that any particular person is being watched in any particularly meaningful way.
So how should we communicate with the possibility of being watched? Do it well! because now you have an audience!
Are they listening to my words? Maybe, I can't know, and this is precisely their form of power. This situation is a real large scale virtual panopticon, and according to Foucault, it's this uncertainty that produces the effect of domination and control of one's behavior.
So I'm going to keep on studying, keep questioning, keep engaging in the public use of reason, and if they want to listen, by all means they are welcome. Perhaps they might learn something, and they should.
this only holds if you are a do-nothing bougie academic who couldn't threaten the state if you gave them an atomic bomb, like zizek and his tribe of pop culture studies mouthbreathers. people who actually organize and take action have to deal with immediate threatening physical and social realities of surveillance and its consequences, and worms like you parroting the "ubiquitous but unfocused" line on surveillance are at the very least naive collaborators with the state isolating, silencing, and painting them as crazy. grow the fuck up
The_Boourns_Identity posted:It's unlikely that any particular person is being watched in any particularly meaningful way.
The CIA, NSA and FBI should fire everyone on the payroll if this is the case.
getfiscal posted:lars lih annoys me because he brings up good points but then sort of goes whole hog with it to basically defend kautskyism. and most of the framing around that is junk. but it dovetails with the drive in the US to start a reformist party so people eat it up. i don't even disagree with a lot of what's involved with that, i just think he argues it badly. paul le blanc is the other one like that, who writes stuff like how socialism is definitionally equal to humanism. both of them use lenin to empty him of any real new content.
I'm barely becoming acquainted with lenin just now. but my opinion of him has gone down from what ive read. so maybe this is happening- the emptying of lenin that you refer to
The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing. At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.
Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and so on. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry to say, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour's animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished poem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS (this was the real stroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants), that I lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighbourhood.
In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at last that he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work. And when that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let me pass.
"But," I said, "what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue of that Dryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like knight-errants. You, the higher humanitarians, are not deceived by the seeming stillness of the green things, a stillness like the stillness of the cataract, a headlong and crashing silence. You know that a tree is but a creature tied to the ground by one leg. You will not let assassins with their Swedish daggers shed the green blood of such a being. But if so, why am I not in custody; where are my gyves? Produce, from some portion of your persons, my mouldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I have just convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist, that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank of Ilkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether I have been guilty of cruelty to vegetables. The tree is none the less damaged even though it may reflect with a dark pride that it was wounded by a gentleman connected with the Liberal press. Wounds in the bark do not more rapidly close up because they are inflicted by people who are stopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley. That tree, the ruin of its former self, the wreck of what was once a giant of the forest, now splintered and laid low by the brute superiority of a Swedish knife, that tragedy, constable, cannot be wiped out even by stopping for several months more with some wealthy person. It is incredible that you have no legal claim to arrest even the most august and fashionable persons on this charge. For if so, why did you interfere with me at all?"
I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood, for the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came. It is very possible, of course, that they were fairies. In that case the somewhat illogical character of their view of crime, law, and personal responsibility would find a bright and elfish explanation; perhaps if I had lingered in the glade till moonrise I might have seen rings of tiny policemen dancing on the sward; or running about with glow-worm belts, arresting grasshoppers for damaging blades of grass. But taking the bolder hypothesis, that they really were policemen, I find myself in a certain difficulty. I was certainly accused of something which was either an offence or was not. I was let off because I proved I was a guest at a big house. The inference seems painfully clear; either it is not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man. Suppose a very poor person, poorer even than a journalist, a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent. Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green gaiety of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees and could give no description of a dwelling-place except that he had been fired out of the last. As I walked home through a cloudy and purple twilight I wondered how he would have got on.
Moral. We English are always boasting that we are very illogical; there is no great harm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil in the fact that people always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable. But there is this to be said, that illogicality in your constitution or your legal methods may become very dangerous if there happens to be some great national vice or national temptation which many take advantage of the chaos. Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours; a temperate man may obey his instincts.
Take some absurd anomaly in the British law—the fact, for instance, that a man ceasing to be an M. P. has to become Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally to keep down some wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever that is. Obviously this kind of illogicality does not matter very much, for the simple reason that there is no great temptation to take advantage of it. Men retiring from Parliament do not have any furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills. But if there were a real danger that wise, white-haired, venerable politicians taking leave of public life would desire to do this (if, for instance, there were any money in it), then clearly, if we went on saying that the illogicality did not matter, when (as a matter of fact) Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was hanging Chiltern shop-keepers every day and taking their property, we should be very silly. The illogicality would matter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence. It is only the very good who can live riotous lives.
Now this is exactly what is present in cases of police investigation such as the one narrated above. There enters into such things a great national sin, a far greater sin than drink—the habit of respecting a gentleman. Snobbishness has, like drink, a kind of grand poetry. And snobbishness has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil, that it is rampant among very kindly people, with open hearts and houses. But it is our great English vice; to be watched more fiercely than small-pox. If a man wished to hear the worst and wickedest thing in England summed up in casual English words, he would not find it in any foul oaths or ribald quarrelling. He would find it in the fact that the best kind of working man, when he wishes to praise any one, calls him "a gentleman." It never occurs to him that he might as well call him "a marquis," or "a privy councillor"—that he is simply naming a rank or class, not a phrase for a good man. And this perennial temptation to a shameful admiration, must, and, I think, does, constantly come in and distort and poison our police methods.
In this case we must be logical and exact; for we have to keep watch upon ourselves. The power of wealth, and that power at its vilest, is increasing in the modern world. A very good and just people, without this temptation, might not need, perhaps, to make clear rules and systems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers. But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago, from mere native good feeling.
chickeon posted:keep in mind that guy made this thread http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/12295/ without a trace of irony
this type of thing is the new tumbler sensation for some reason. it's a normal white supremacist reaction really.
"who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head, to the soles of your feet?... before you come asking mr. muhammad does he teach hate, you should ask yourself: who taught you to hate being what god made you?"
chickeon posted:keep in mind that guy made this thread http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/12295/ without a trace of irony
wow, i actually tried reading this thread and dam... cant really imagine a better endorsement for atheism.
do all europeans need comforting fairytales to help them sleep soundly on the corpses of the conquered?
chickeon posted:keep in mind that guy made this thread http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/12295/ without a trace of irony
my post in that thread owns.
quavers posted:literally your only chance is to renounce stalin and beg to serve imperialism
tell that to nemtsov