3-D Blogger

Adrian Chen, So Are You Saying the Wired Chat Logs Are Authentic Then?

2011-07-14T18:41:18-04:00

Anonymous b-tards cut their teeth on the virtual world of SL. Note this 2009 picture of an avatar with the Mr. Moneybags meme used today by LulzSec.

Adrien Chen, that secret-sharer and golf-clapper if not cheerleader of Anonymous hackers, has a piece dumping on that evil Lamo, that sneak, that rat, who tattled on Bradley Manning.

I don't get the Gawker comments policy, as they aren't transparent about it. It used to be they said forthrightly that they only selected certain people they liked (imported from the old Valleywag policy) and only let them post. It was utterly arbitrary and there was no way to appeal. At some point, I'm not sure how, I was selected, or maybe they changed their policy. I posted for awhile, and then suddenly after their big hacker attack I couldn't seem to get back on -- they had changed everybody's passwords, or cancelled them to force you to make new ones. Then I had a hell of time ever getting back on. Even though the Gawker.com mailer I've subscribed to never has any problem making its way every morning to my mailbox, a password retrieval request never even gets in the spam file. I finally got logged on again today as "Prokofy," my account from years ago that was previously cleared for comments, but I don't show up. Oh well, be that way.

Hence, my repost here in response to Adrian:

So, interesting, you're authenticating these Wired chat logs, Adrian? Scumbag though he may be (and he's followed the absolutely reliable rule of thumb that the b-tard types always out their own and are rats by nature), there are some important elements to this chatlog that could well serve as Manning's indictment:

o the chat logs tie him definitely to Assange, and directly. Assange's counsel claims he had no association with Manning, but these chat logs shows he talked to him directly

o furthermore, that relationship was so close and dependent, that Lamo himself called out Assange on it, asking him, essentially, why he was doing what Assange told him to. Ahah! And that would seemingly tie Assange to deliberately inciting Manning to hacking in order to harm the US.

So, seriously, if you could suspend your sneaking admiration of hackers for a minute, and your sense of solidarity with the anti-American anarchist people's forces, take a fresh look at the whole stack of chat logs again. They may not be admissible in court. But they don't only show Lamo is a scum, they show that Assange and Manning are guilty of deliberate theft of classified government documents.

And then, while we're studying the miscreants, here's another post from Adrian, on those evil people attempting to fight LulzSec on their own! Vigilantes! Horrible!

Well, Adrian. First of all, are you going to comment on all those media reports about how LulzSec "disbanded" when...that was all fake?

Secondly, if these folks are all, so, um, anonymous, how do you know who is doing what to whom?

Thirdly, what could be possibly wrong with attempting to expose hackers who cost Sony $171 million in damages, and have caused untold damages in their vandalism and harassment on other sites, many government sites?

Yes, the script kiddies love to victory-dance, and that's their downfall as you can trap them in the IRC channel bragging about their exploits. So when one set of bad guys outs another set, is this Nature's Way in the hacking world that we can only be grateful for?

It's terrible that this man's life is upended by the b-tards setting him up with the usual pizza delivery/SWAT team call meme to harass him -- in RL. But ultimately, what are you saying here? That good citizens can't hunt for these malicious hackers and out them? That law-enforcement authorities shouldn't use their propensity to out each other in their investigations? Of course they should. Overeager, amateur or not, it's ok to try to expose these criminals, you know? And no harm, no foul if in fact they aren't guilty, it will be easy to be exonerated as Sabu has apparently been by showing that he sold a domain name.

I'm just not getting your ignation and cautionary tale against vigilantes when they go after creeps like LulzSec, which is strangely absent about LulzSec's own vigilantism in the first case

Dave's Darknet -- and Mark's Маразм

2010-12-13T05:07:12-05:00

I knew things were bad -- but they could get worse.

At Personal Democracy Forum, Dave Winer, that old hippie control freak, first demanded that a separate meeting be held "for the techs". He was very irritated that this general audience of people who were NOT coders for the most part was getting involved in these issues. TERRIBLY irrated. He even asked for a show of hands as to who in the audience was a programmer, and there were a significant number, but I'd say no more than about 30 percent. He then pretended like it would be "boring" for everyone else to sit in on "boring discussions of the technicalities of Net Neutrality". Um, no Dave. Not boring at all. You bear watching, and you can explain yourself to people and not pretend "technicalities" require creating more secret factions.

He was trying the usual geek gambit of pretending that tech was not political; but of course it was VERY political.

Before he spoke, Rebecca McKinnon had spoken enthusiastically about the need to make an Internet free of corporations that "place a chill on freedom of expression" and are "coercive" ostensibly (although it's Anon that is coercive, taking down their websites). She spoke enthusiastically of "darknets" and "peer-to-peer networks" -- and it was like the reprisal of Second Life and its educators of the "edupunk" type who are maliciously hateful of "walled gardens" and demand that they be able to export not only their own but anyone else's content to "free" servers -- reverse-engineered Open Sims. All of this is known and the arguments for choice to have EITHER walled gardens OR open sims are all legitimate.

But the cyberutoipans are never happy; they always want to force the "open," which is really, as we have seen particularly graphically with Anon in this last week, forcing the closed. Open source=closed society. Does it get better than this new darknet fanatacism to prove my point!

Yeah, I've heard Lindens talk about darknets and p2p and all that "good stuff" any number of times so I have a rough picture of it. I don't have to be some technically proficient coder to understand what the basic premise is: building an architecture of the Internet that is outside the commercial Internet as it is now, which these Leninist purists chafe at terribly the way Malevich used to chafe at the oiliness of the "grub world" and long for endlessly perfect symmetrical lines disappearing into white infinity.

In fact, if you read about Darknet, you come to an awareness that what happened is that the original Internet was a darknet, or there was a darknet that grew up around the Arpanet that had the copyability built into it as a thesis and a coded exigency and an entire philosophy, then that darknet become web 1.0 but then got overtaken by the commercialized Internet, that began to grow hierarchies and domains and structures that roughly accorded to real-life countries with governments and sovreignty -- yes, at a flick of a switch, you can be removed from a domain, and yes, it's like being PNG'd from a country.

Then with first Napster then all the other p2p stuff like Kazaa and such and then all the social media hype with all its "sharing" and "liking" it seemed like Darknet might be prevailing again, having succeeded in destroying the music and news businesses (it's kinda of like Midas, at first, everything it touches is gold, seemingly, and then it is stuck with not being able to eat because it turned its food into a metal, and then even its daughter) -- and is now heading like a rapacious Pacman to destroy government.

Darknet was getting pushed back and made obsolete by Facebook (I think) and even Twitter (less so) but then WikiLeaks got booted and b& by Amazon. And so Dave started talking up Darknet again -- which he wants first and foremost to save his own stuff for ever, etched like words in the Parthenon.

So, keep that in mind, all ye who venture here. Dave's Darknet (and crypto-anarchism lurking nearby) is about him first of all being able to save his own stuff. He's terribly pissed off at Amazon for not hosting stolen government property and is dramatically -- hysterically! -- claiming that "journalism is not possible" and "saving all his back blog files" is not possible because of Amazon's action and that we can "no longer trust" the Amazon cloud. (There were other reasons not to trust the cloud; this would not be one of them).

That's just so entirely stupid that you hope the Internet will just keep routing around it. In case you didn't notice, WikiLeaks isn't censored, and went to other servers and is still visible all over the place with more cables coming out, more's the pity. Yes, maybe all the server companies in the world might be silenced, but then, that's because it's a crime to steal government documents -- that they are stolen from the most open government in the world and not the most closed is one of those ironies of fate.

But...The world isn't interested in the Panopticon; in fact, the sad thing is that 6 weeks from now, because of the way the news cycle and the society of the spectacle works, it will be almost impossible to interest anybody in anything related to this cables story, which is already losing its legs.

That Dave can't make a distinction between journalism and crime is, of course, highly troubling. But he can go on receding into history with his "Steal This Book!" approach and Amazon, which does make the distinction between journalism and crime, will likely go on making it possible for authors to get paid instead of forcing communist sharing in the "Creative Commons". Thank you!

The Dave Darknet thing of course will go on for awhile. There will be meetings, secret and semi-open. There will be posturing and manifestos and bills of rights.

As much as I vehemently oppose the "bill of rights" of Jeff Jarvis, at a human level, I feel a spasm of pity for this man. I keep thinking about my encounter with him yesterday, and I do feel sad. He's not getting any younger, and he has been ill. He seems to be sincere in his beliefs, and I appreciate that. In another setting, say, if he were a neighbour, he might be a pleasant acquaintance to chat with now and then. But his ideas are really deadly to freedom, and they have to be opposed. Since he seems to be a thoughtful and idealistic fellow, I still hold out hope that he might be reached and reason might prevail. I'm not going to hold my breath, however, because the vehemence with which I opposed him is explained by a simple thing: I could see from his blog, his video talks, etc. that he was ruthless. Cheerfully ruthless, but ruthless nonetheless.

With Dave Winer and Mark Pesce, apparently another Australian pro-WikiLeaks ideologu -- I know there is no hope of that sort, even. These men are total ideologues and total fanatics -- Doug Rushkoff, too. You won't be getting them to reason or compromise or -- most important -- curb their own power. They are absolutely convinced of their own rectitude and basing it on "technology" and "science" that they are unimpeachable. To be sure, Winer is such a thin-skinned sulking sourpuss on some of his ventures that his own peers with his own perspective push him out at times but he keeps reappearing because he's a zealot. God save us when Steve Gillmor gets at all this crap. Our only hope is that Scoble may cheerfully come bumbling in and actually sit on the sekrit darknet server and break it or something. Keep eating those tacos, Scobe!

I hope Amazon as a company and as a proposition will be short, sharp, abrupt and firm with people like Dave Winer saying crap like this, and not start building bridges and "reaching out" and all that other tech bullshit that happens in Silicon Valley. Yep, the road needs to fork, and fork here. Crime doesn't pay, so go away to your commune, Dave, if you don't like our server rules. This is like the Emerald Viewer. Go make your darknet and see it...get about 42 people. Or maybe 42 million? But then Esther Dyson won't be able to keep paying for it.

My answer to Mark's manifesto below.

Thanks for neatly laying out the theses of technocommunism, but they are to be repudiated.

They're to be resisted with every ounce of our being not because we are the old guard but because we already went through the Age of Enlightenment and won't go back to your tribes and your darkness. You're the reaction to the modern age, hiding in your IRC channels and plotting your darknets.

WikiLeaks is not "the press" or "journalism" but robotic functions and human vandalism. That's all.
Let's not glorify it any more than we'd glorify a train accident.

There is no hyperconnectivity, there is only the Wired State which is you tech elites and various anarchist cooperatives and thuggish gangs using the DDOS to enforce "code as law". Don't confuse that with a state of any benign sort; it's a conspiracy. Don't confuse that with a community of people who are served by technology, instead of being crushed by it.

The 21st century isn't about being connected -- not only because we are already connected by our common humanity and don't need you to artifically social-graph us as coders. No, your connected century is only about those tech elites like yourself who are wired up and arrogant with a false superiority of a rote knowlege, putting over a certain technocommunist agenda to attempt to destroy media, music, and now government which was once democratic and participatory.

When coders make the systems for "hyperdemocracy," it may be "hyper" but it sure ain't democracy. We see the results. The results are that WikiLeaks dog whistles, and Anon thugs take down commercial sites, in the name of "Freedom of Expression". No thank you.

In fact, the states will be fighting back, and some of them won't be as pretty as you imagine, like China and Russia.

And if this could work out better -- that is, not the way you like it, and if we can indeed not stop the future of the Internet as Zittrain demands with *his* variant of technocommunism, we might have an Internet of private and public organizations with communities of content and commerce where people make a living (*waves to cube3*), not by copying and sharing endlessly like Leninists in a commune where "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us," but by attaching content to payment. The net tends to route around not only censorship, thank God, but tends to route around Marxist solutions, like yours, too -- that's why ebay, Amazon, Paypal, Facebook all emerged to take the net out of its commune phase. The inevitable FUD and reaction against progress is taking place now -- um, that would be you, not me.

But we'll be definitely seeing a backlash, and it will be first Gov 2.0 's fault, for their arrogance, then your fault, for your utopian "hyperdemocracy" concoctions.

Darknets are not the future of governance, but the future of totalitarianism, an archipelago of egos like Dave Winer who will rule supreme over their collectivized fiefdoms and where destructive 4chan-style meme-spreading will be ridiculously simple because the InternInternet will be brittle and Balkanized. A few "thought influences" will arrange it -- but fortunately as we saw from Personal Democracy Forum a few people will resist this idiocy and Tim Berners Lee will have to retreat back into history, and that will be a good thing.

There's a name for people who tell you they and their revolutions are "inevitable" or "cannot be wished out of existence", etc. It's Bolshevism. Thanks for at least being honest about it.

Fork away, you nerds. Patch and GTFO. The net will route around you. There is no "we" building "systems of human relations" because humans are free, and don't require you to code their relations.

Steven Johnson is a Technocommunist.

2010-11-01T03:23:26-04:00

Reading Pravda on the collective farm in the Soviet Union.

Stephen Johnson, the author of a book very popular among geeks called Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (!), tells a very Big Lie in the Times today. He claims he is not a Communist, although his ideas for "innovation" are merely another form of Shakedown Street for the masses, with yet another form of Bolshevism for a few oligarchs. He can get by telling that very Big Lie because of a basic subterfuge we see all the time from the Technocommunists: reliance on a classic definition of Communism that has to do with "state ownership of the means of production." Thus, he can tap-dance his way out of the label of "Communist" when confronted by ordinary people with concerns about his Bolshevik methods by saying, essentially, the same thing that the Bolsheviks taking power in various Eastern (and Western) European countries used to say: that he is for "people's" ownership of production (are you starting to get the idea, now?).

When Stephen Johnson tells you that "the people" own social media projects on the Internet, in a grassroots, democratic sort of way, it sounds very nice, doesn't it? Hardly sounds like evil Communism with its evil top-down management! But just as East Germany and the other Communist states used to mask their statist oppressive policies by qualifying themselves as "People's Democracies," so the massive crowdsourcing and Creative-Commons-sharing that Johnson and his friends like Lawrence Lessig incite are supposed to be "about capitalism" (and it is, for a tiny number of big new media oligarchs, or a few connected designers lucky enough to have the devs put them on the "recommended" list).

So he can craftily -- and cunningly -- say he is "not a Communist" merely because he's shifted the scrutiny away from *methods* to *institutions*, and got everyone scratching their heads over how there could *possibly* be any Communism in a seemingly "grassroots" system where there is..money being spent.

That the public -- the people -- never benefit from this transfer of cash *really* is one of the giveaways. It's not real.

That the system relies on an elite cadre of coders and their connections and thus is eminently akin to Milovan Djilas' New Class is another giveaway. It's fake.

Johnson waxes ecstatic about "amateur scientists of the Enlightenment," or university researchers, or volunteers on opensource platforms. Finally, someone in Seattle hearing Johnson warble on asked him a question he says he has never heard before: "Are you a Communist?" And small wonder, given that he celebrates these innovative folks without really ever looking at what props them up: the state, big IT (which pays for and benifits from opensource and also pays programmers in day jobs enabling them to pursue opensource in their free time), and of course, Mom -- and her basement.

Johnson said Stalin would have despised Wikipedia -- as if to say that his system can't *possibly* be Communist because it's not centralized. Oh, not on your life. Not at all. The early Bolsheviks dreamed of just such a thing as Wikipedia. Gorky, who was first a friend and then somewhat of a critic of Lenin dreamed of an all-encompassing Everyman's Encyclopedia that would contain all world knowledge and help educate the masses. He had big ideas about how to write this, contacting various great minds in Europe like H.G. Wells. He also wanted to gather up all world literature and rewrite it for the masses, in a kind of precursor to the Readers' Digest concept of the Great Books.

Wikipedia ultimately, when you get down to who decides, who ajudicates, and who handles the worst controversies, amounts to a very tiny cadre of people -- people whose identities are anonymous and whose actions are not any more accountable or transparent than the Politburo! Controlling all knowledge, all search -- that would be Stalin's dream, not his hate. And that's what Wikipedia -- hand-in-glove with Google -- in fact does to a large extent already. The argument with Johnson here is about the nature of Wikipedia -- he believes that, at face value, it's some sort of giant researcher's boon that thousands of entries thoughtfully provided by thousands of selfless people. I see how it is controlled -- by its own admission -- by a very small number of people and takes a tilt to the left on many important subjects and persons -- and shows up first in nearly every search. That's not freedom; that's a form of totalitarianism.

Getting a lot of people to work for free -- to not get paid! -- and producing something that is less than the truth -- that *is* Communism, Stephen Johnson!

So, essentially Johnson makes the false claim that because this new form of socialism on the Internet is dressed up in cyber-clothing, with "connectivity" and "apis" and "innovation" -- it isn't socialism or Communism. The centerpiece of his argument is Kickstarter, a platform that enables people to donate, sometimes very small amounts, to various entrepreneurial projects or artistic efforts they would like to see supported, *but not for ownership* in those inventions or art pieces or installations. Instead of *ownership* of this "product," the "investor" gets a CD or a t-shirt or an invitation to an art show and "the satisfaction of knowing that he has supported a good cause".

Take a look and you will instantly see the problem: yes, ideas for widgets like a tripod stand (the inventions hew largely to the geek selection of Internet-related and digital-media-related projects) that *might* make a profit, but many are goofy ideas like the "art happening" that will involve taking over an empty storefront and putting in a fake business -- an endeavour that has already soaked $876 out of some hapless art nuts.

Likely the most successful Kickstarter project is the more than $200,000 raised to fund the programmers making the opensource competition to Facebook, called "Diaspora". It has no obvious business model other than trying to get a jillion sign-ups and a gadzillion clicks on ads to make a buck (somewhat like the thing its cloning, eh? Or are we going to see, um, an addictive game like Farmville only with socially-redeeming messages inciting hatred of the extractive industries?). It's driven by ideology, not rationality, in hating the "walled garden" proprietary nature of Facebook and the inability of API engineers to scrape as much data as they like for their inventions -- while at the same time, as power users, to keep *their* own private information as private as they need it to be.

So...these aren't the next PC or even the next paperclip. These aren't causes helping starving children in Africa. These are art stunts by geeks and designers waiting to get noticed, and various widget makers and start-ups of API "innovations" that are variations on the theme of TwitterFacebookGoogle and often aspire, as the best form of their "liquidity event," to be bought out by these big companies.

Kickstarter itself takes a piece out of your donation to sustain its business at a profit and...we don't know how those start-ups do (unless the "successful" ones can be tracked somehow over the next few years to see if the funding translates at least to a profit for that start-up). I personally know one that is *not* making a profit, and I see a few others that may or may not be, it doesn't seem to tell you *the truth about all this*. (If there is sunlight on this, please send me a link).

There's another name for a machine that takes people's value, gives it to other people, and enables the machiner maker to take a profit: it's called "a collective farm" and "communism".

The faddish "innovative" part of this idea is that instead of looking for wealthy individuals called "angels" or "venture capitalists," the kids in the garage with a great idea can just find a dozen of their friends to start putting in small amounts like $100, and thus "democratize" innovation venturing. But if any of those garage kids suddenly strike it rich with the Next Big Thing like FourSquare, those "stock buyers" of $25 or $100 don't own anything. They don't get dividends. Profit-free investment AKA "collective farming". Kickstarter doesn't get ownership either for putting the deal together -- but they do get a fee, like a broker. Communism, pure and simple. It's how the Soviet Union was run. We pretend to work, and you pretend to pay us. In fact, we don't even get paid (except with a t-shirt) and you *might* make a profit (but most of the time you won't), but who definitely makes a profit is the collective farm manager.

The other part of the Big Lie that Johnson tells us -- in the headline although not as developed in the op-ed -- is that "innovation" is not the property of "either left or right". This is part of that overall shill that has technologists claiming that their ideology-infused tech, which is most certainly political, is "beyond" politics of left or right (what a neat trick!).

This is merely a way the left has of smuggling in the "progressive" or "socialist" agenda by stealth. They can then entlessly banter and joke and even viciously argue that they "aren't socialists" and sneer and ridicule people who find collectivism in what they are doing by invoking some "profit" to be made. It's like the way Cory Doctorow constantly tells you that its a "business model" to give away books, and that people will donate to him. Yet he doesn't tell you that he doesn't make a living that way. That he makes a living from lecture and consulting fees that in part hinge on the notion that people will still pay you to... go around lying to other people that by giving away your creations for free, you will actually ultimately earn money. Yes, a few do. Most don't. A system that merely extracts from one set of people (those "funders" at Kickstarter) and enables a few to skim off their funds (Kickstarters' devs) and then passes on money to people who *might* make a profit but might not -- and won't give anybody else any of it -- isn't a system that creates value; it's a system that destroys value, like Communism does. It's not "efficient"; it's destructive.

Instead of forcing self-indulgent and over-fertilized companies traded among VCs and then traded among big IT (and often *destroyed* in the process) to *go public* where they would have to justify themselves to directors on a board and the shareholders, they stay in their infantalized state perhaps forever, hitting up the boys for beer and pizza money on the Internet, using the wonders of connectivity on social media. It's not a market; it's a form of managed philanthropy -- an offshoot of the philanthrocapitalism of Gates which is so destructive in the Third World because it isn't a holistic and complex means of helping societies but merely a technological quick fix.

Johnson himself struggles to analyze and name the phenomenon of what he and his fellow "thought leaders" and Silicon Valley influencers are doing when they strip value from the middle-class and poor and covert it to oligarchic riches for a few, influencing and even replacing the state in some places. If he was willing to read a little more Communist philosophy, he might learn that the Soviets believed the state would "wither away" under Communism, when it was finally perfected by its founders. Well, here we are now. The state *has* withered and Google has replaced it, educating people, guiding their every economic and social decision, and even providing some small pittance (and for a very few, a decent profit) for those willing to educate themselves on the Internet and then spit back what they've absorbed on their blogs. Happy now?

Says Johnson:

BUT the problem is that we don’t have a word that does justice to those of us who believe in the generative power of the fourth quadrant. My hope is that the blurriness is only temporary, the strange disorientation one finds when new social and economic values are being formed.

The choice shouldn’t be between decentralized markets and command-and-control states. Over these last centuries, much of the history of innovation has lived in a less formal space between those two regimes: in the grad seminar and the coffeehouse and the hobbyist’s home lab and the digital bulletin board. The wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from the proprietary clash between private firms. They also emerged from open networks.

Well, I don't believe in the generatives (Kevin Kelly invented this term). They almost all involve what I call the geek mantra of "your information wants to be free/mine is only available for a consulting fee". They almost all involve forced sharing, hijacking of content until the DMCA axe falls (and it rarely does), browbeating into the Creative Commons (creative Communism), etc. and enabling only a tiny number of geeks and gurus to enrich themselves. Everyone else is supposed to make do with a warm glowy feeling of friendship induced by connectivity on Facebook and other interfaces.

Open networks aren't open. They are dominated by a sect of geeks who have a very harsh regime for how they should be run, often designing software through tyranny, with Stakhanovite "scrums" with "benevolent dictators for life". Forcing GNU and other types of licensing on people isn't innovation or some kind of global good deed; it can often harm development because nobody can be paid for their work or modify and resell something in a niche market they've found. The dual licenses that do enable this have a nasty side that mean that all those selfless donors of code get screwed when some company (like Linden Lab) makes a big killing all of a sudden on an opensource project that takes a turn to a customized special deal (like with the Electric Sheep Company, for their specialized viewer for the CBS-funded CSI tie-in in Second Life).

In the grad seminar, hobbyist's basement and coffeehouse Stephen Johnson celebrates as places where innovation is happening outside private firms, *somebody else is always paying*. It's either the university or the state or a foundation; it's either mom or the other working spouse; it's the corporation Starbucks enabling people to have a free office to sit in for half the day for only a $3.95 latte. Free isn't free.

If this was just all kind American barn-raising, I wouldn't oppose it. But it's not. It's always about the many having to supply content for free, provide attention for hours, and even give *payment* for merely a t-shirt and a warm fuzzy feeling -- as just a small number of people skim this and make bank. It's not fair or just. It's *not* a better world. There's nothing innovative whatsoever. It's the oldest story in the book, and a story that has led to the destruction of many lives.

Dan Gillmor's Orwellian News rules

2010-07-06T04:15:26-04:00

Dan Gillmor, the new media guru and author of We the Media, is quick to invoke the word "Orwellian" about the editorial judgement of the New York Times, pilloring Bill Keller for justifying what he views as his neutral position of quoting different sides in the waterboarding controversy using the words they wish to deploy for the topic, rightly or wrongly.

I'm going to be quick to invoke the word "Orwellian," too, then, since with this new Silicon Valley Influencers-directed campaign, we're now past having this term tethered to actual Stalinist or Nazi practices and their sympathizers in British media of 70 years ago.

You want to talk Orwell? Let's look at the awful set of rules that Dan Gillmor would have us obey in new media influencing operations that would bear little resemblance to free media as we know it now, but would be something like the Soviet Union's agitprop in the Lenin Corner.

These 22 rules are...creepy.

First, we "can't" run anniversary stories because this is lazy journalism -- although Dan himself is not above running his diatribe against Bill Keller opportunistically on July 4th, the nation's birthday, and pegging his piece to notions of independence.

Under these new rules, we're to endure a "multi-directional flow of news and information" without any quality control or accountability -- and bloggers can't look for pay from "the journalism process" (no longer a profession, but a "process") and have to wait for a vague incentive system. Gillmor himself founded a failed "community journalism" project that he himself critiques, although others are more pointed -- the problem was too much progressive ideology using "community" as a cover, and not enough actual community, i.e. locality.

Journalists are to make boxes -- like a kind of public stocks -- about "things they don't know" which would rapidly become busy-work to show off and become a fake-humble crowd-pleaser in a public communist-like "self criticism circle". I would submit that a journalist should write what he knows, and if the reader finds it lacking *he can go to another newspaper*.

The section the Times has called "set-rec" where the record is set straight on errors, large and small, would become, in Gillmor's metaverse, a notification service he could sign up for with the slider set to large or small.

There is the usual fetishizing of "the conversation" which is completely at odds with the actualities of most anonymous forums and even those nowadays with Facebook sign-ins. Fetishizing -- except when Gillmor is challenged in a few Twitters, then he tells me "I'm done with this conversation" as a put-down. I get the feeling that like the other tekkie influencers, nobody *ever* debates this thin-skinned propagandist. Why?

In a departure from most mainstream and alternative forums, in Dan's virtual reality, those who wished to comment would *have* to use their real names -- something that shouldn't be required in the name of free commentary. I've always advocated that the Times offer a system whereby if you pay a small fee, and you use your real and verified name to sign up, you could not only leave a comment, but get an answer from the journalists. Yet Dan wants to *enforce* civility -- and of course, that gets us far away from the First Amendment, and even the relatively lenient practices of the Times, or, say, Yahoo News, which lets through many thousands more raucous comments.

Now here's where the New-Speak and the Double-Think get scary. Says Gillmor:

We would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise language. If someone we interview misused language, we would paraphrase instead of using direct quotations. (Examples, among many others: The activity that takes place in casinos is gambling, not gaming. There is no death tax, there can be inheritance or estate tax. Piracy does not describe what people do when they post digital music on file-sharing networks.)

Of course, so bent is Gillmor, in his self-righteousness on correcting the politically-incorrect -- and sinister! -- Bill Keller, he doesn't realize what violence it does to the truth *not to quote a source directly* but to paraphrase using a politically-correct chart. Sorry, piracy *does* describe the *theft* involved in copying and posting digital music; the law applies. Call it euphemistically "sharing" if you must as a progressive propaganda sheet, but quote me accurately if I discuss it in a news story, and allow a variety of viewpoints. Oops, I guess you can't do that -- so much for being 'inclusive" and "transparent"!

If Bill Keller caves today on his news judgement about how and whether to use the term "torture"; tomorrow he'll have to be sure he never allows the term "gaming" instead of "gambling" and has to scrub "death tax" out and replace it with "estate tax". And so on. That's what this is about.

Gillmor's rule demanding voluminous hyperliking, like all the fake "Here Comes Everybody" stuff, rapidly devolves into what it always hopes to be -- the "avant-garde of the workers"; where Gillmor's editors would, as he puts it, "use our editorial judgement to highlight the ones we consider best for the members of the community". Sigh. We suffer from that on the Times of course, and this net-nannying shouldn't be further institutionalized.

Says another rule, intrusively:

We would help people in the community become informed users of media, not passive consumers – to understand why and how they can do this. We would work with schools and other institutions that recognise the necessity of critical thinking.

See, this is that didactic, politicized, politically-correct role that the progressives wish for the media which I hope Bill Keller and others among his peers will resist. We don't need subsidized political media to "work with schools". When that sort of construct is created -- a PC team of news-scrubbers who won't quote people precisely using the terms of their opinion but "correct" them -- then students don't learn to think critically--Gillmor means here that he wants the children to become critical of mainstream media, and consumers of his "work".

This sort of rule makes it clear that what Gillmor is talking about isn't a newspaper in any sense of the term, new or old, but a Bolshevik-type party:

"If we granted anonymity and learned that the unnamed source had lied to us, we would consider the confidentially agreement to have been breached by that person, and would expose his or her duplicity, and identity. Sources would know of this policy before we published. We'd further look for examples where our competitors have been tricked by sources they didn't name, and then do our best to expose them, too."

I have a mascot for you, Dan.

We can't use the word "must". And "the more we wish we'd done the journalism ourselves, the more prominent the exposure we'd give the other folks' work," says Dan.

Hmmm. Presumably this sort of utopianism and fake humility is what caused Bayosphere, Gillmor's "community journalism" concept to fail -- there isn't a sense of loyalty to brand or company or bottom line; there's no sense of the *commercial* operation that media has to be both to support itself and to win the public trust.

This sort of paper is not one that people will want to read -- it's too didactic:

"The more we believed an issue was of importance to our community, the more relentlessly we'd stay on top of it ourselves. If we concluded that continuing down a current policy path was a danger, we'd actively campaign to persuade people to change course. This would have meant, for example, loud and persistent warnings about the danger of the blatantly obvious housing/financial bubble that inflated during this decade."

Dan always wants the media to be the same as Amnesty International or a political action committee -- each story has to have a "what you can do" box by it. And he has some other great ideas for how to run a newspaper:

"We would make it a habit not to extrapolate a wider threat from weird or tragic anecdotes; frequently discuss the major risks we face and compare them statistically to the minor ones; and debunk the most egregious examples of horror stories that spark unnecessary fear or even panic."

Somehow, I don't think he means global warming...

This Newspaper of the Future has another rule that is sure to make it particularly dull and preachy:

"No opinion pieces or commentary from major politicians or company executives".

Of course, you get the idea: we should listen to a committee of Silicon Valley Influencers, a handful of technical elites with progressive agendas -- and shut up.

"We'd work in every possible way to help our audience know who's behind the words and actions. People and institutions frequently try to influence the rest of us in ways that hide their participation in the debate, and we'd do our best to reveal who's spending money and pulling strings. When our competitors declined to reveal such things, or failed to ask obvious questions of their sources, we'd talk about their journalistic failures in our own coverage of the issues."

I'll say! Dan Gillmor worked in mainstream journalism for a number of years and then at the San Jose Mercury acquired his fame as the first "real" newspaper blog on tech topics. This launched him into a wider career as a Silicon Valley Influencer (as I call people like Mitch Kapor, who funded Dan Gillmor, Steve Gillmor of the Gillmor Gang, Robert Scoble and other tech gurus). Today he is everywhere on blogs, Twitter, mainstream newspapers, conferences, etc. No one ever, ever debates him. Not a critical thing about him can ever be found in Google. And yet his 22 rules for journalism are hugely troubling and make for far more a slippery slope to Orwellianism that Bill Keller sticking to his guns about how he feels a controversy should be framed.

It would be one thing if Gillmor ran his newspaper in this way -- indeed, his blogs or some "progressive" newspapers *are* run this way. But he wants more -- he wants to intrude into the very way society is constructed and bend it to the progressive will:

"We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence. If we learned that a significant number of people in our community believed a lie about an important person or issue, we would make it part of an ongoing mission to help them understand the truth."

Wait. You would trust this man -- willing to quote people inaccurately, willing to expose confidential sources, and demanding to indoctrinate children in schools with the social task of determining when someone is lying, and when they are articulating a sincerely held opinion?

People in a community "believed a lie"? Or simply *had a different opinion* on their understanding of the intentions and actualities of something like the "death panels" issue? It's one thing to hold a "progressive" opinion -- it's another to foist it on the public coercively by claiming it is a scientific proposition. (Of course, this is what the White House did with their notorious flag@whitehouse.gov concept of turning in your neighbour if they promulgated "incorrect" information about the health care bill.)

I see all this differently.

I see newspapers, in keeping with First Amendment values, not as targets to be hijacked by progressive social justice movements and turned into bully pulpits, but commercia propositions that may be staggering now, but will find a way to adapt and continue to make money with ads as well as paid content and subscriptions. However they survive and continue to serve the public interest *really*, it will not by becoming sectarian committees of the politically-correct.

Rather than "22 rules," we need simpler validation of what is already implicit in the First Amendment:

The right to an editorial voice.
The right to a political position.
The right to make news judgements.
The right to reflect a variety of viewpoints.

Millions of people aren't persuaded by the incantation of universality arguments -- UN treaties, legal language -- that waterboarding is torture. They will have to be convinced in the way you always have to convince people if you do it legitimately, with argumentation, reasoning, facts, field cases, etc. -- not by shaming and browbeating.

P.S. Gillmor's response is to claim his rules are for "transparency" and "inclusiveness" -- both the new "progressive" buzzwords for coerced political correctness.

P.P.S. The ankle-biting Timothy Post, failing as usual to have an original thought, falls back on the usual geek forums-fighter gambit of claiming that *criticism* of a position like Gillmor's (so unexpected! *gasp!* How can this be?!) is the same thing as "attempting to silence" them or "drive them off the Interwebs". I'm not for driving anyone off the Internet (Post and his ankle-biting fellow Komsomoltsy work at that assiduously with their constant mocking, bullying, and harasasment of people whose views they don't like). I would consider adding a new rule for a $100 fine for any time someone used the smarmy little fanboyz term "interwebs" however.

The Spy Who Linked Me

2010-07-04T15:33:13-04:00

I'm written about Anna Chapman's Facebook friends for RFE/RL -- I continue to maintain that the mainstream media is neglecting to get past the sexy photos and the "real estate gossip-gathering" angle to understand what it going on with this network. The Washington Post's Jeff Stein is one of the few who at least peered past the photos to speculate one kind of cover the real estate industry might offer to pick up gossip of the rich and famous -- which Anna had actively pursued. My comment there is that Chapman isn't so much about "real estate" as she is about "online vertical search" and "start-up and venture capital" and its relationship to Russia and its new Silicon Valley project, Skolkovo.

Tom Balmforth at Russia Profile also tries to get past the tabloid surface of sexy photos and banal suburban barbecues and asks Alexander Rahr to comment -- who is a respected authority on Russian intelligence in Germany. But Rahr, too, says he is puzzled why this is about political intelligence and not military or industrial intelligence. That's because he's not looking at the list of Anna's FB friends, but is only reading superficial American press coverage and the FBI's complaints, that focus on the gathering of political intel.

Rahr comes close to the point in this statement:

Rahr said what was most peculiar about the story was that it involved political espionage, rather than industrial or military. “It’s a strange story – for me it’s hard to believe that Russia is seriously engaged in political spying,” he said. “I can imagine that this is not state-sponsored espionage but maybe even some attempt to blackmail or form a pro-Russian business society or business lobby in the United States,” said Rahr, adding that there could be more damage to relations done if the trail does end up leading back to Russian officials after the court hearings, which began today.

And to bolster this case I would say that the Kremlin doesn't have to artificially seek to create a pro-Russian business society or business lobby; one already exists that seems to have been entirely organically grown without Kremlin assistance -- AMBAR. AMBAR president Anna Dvornikova, who took the "$60 billion dollar" big IT del to Russia in May, which also included U.S. National Security advisor Michael McFaul, was friends with Chapman. Was she among her angel investors?

Mahalo, which is the human-powered search run by the notorious Jason Calacanis, fetches up this question: Will the FBI Question Anna Chapman's Facebook Friends" and helpfully contains a screenshot of one of Anna's most recent discussions in May on the Village Voice server. Here's a translation (it's part in Russian and part in English):

Anna Chapman In Houston
May 20 at 6:53 pm
Kate Kushenko Oho? How come? Are you flying in space?
Grzegorz Kwolek Houston, we've got a problem
May 21 at 1:30 pm
Anna Chapman Why?
May 21 at 4:10 pm
Max Skibinsky @Greg +1! seesh, dumb blondes: http://bit.ly/cdl3tY
May 21 at 4:19 pm
Jenna Borisevich hahahhahah
May 22 at 3:50 pm

Max's link goes to a UK website explaining the tag line "Houston, we've got a problem" -- which Anna, as good as her English was, hadn't heard -- and it's the sort of American idiom that a Russian who had been living in England, and only recently come to the U.S., wouldn't be expected to know.

This little interchange is useful for understanding a) which people in Anna's friendship list at least felt close enough to talk to her on Facebook; but b) also felt like making a joke at her expense, essentially calling Anna "a dumb blonde" (although she's a redhead).

It occurred to me that Russian intelligence may have used Chapman -- and the other spies in the network -- as much to spy on their fellow Russian expats and emigres and travelling business abroad as they did to spy on Americans. In fact, for the Russian KGB successor, keeping tabs on their own economically-independent and nomadic coder class, particularly those wealthy enough from the start-up industries to have political independence, too, may have been a national security priority. The Russian security apparatus has always been directed first and foremost at its own people.

And if nothing else, through those Russian programmer contacts, heavily integrated with Silicon Valley (which isn't all literally in California), the Russian spymasters could gather intel on U.S. tech industries. The U.S. media has focused exclusively on the angle contained in the FBI's complaint about the spies' purported job of monitoring and reporting on American policy as it relates to economic issues or nuclear weapons, but of course there are other areas of interest to the Kremlin, especially related to Medvedev's pet project Skolkovo, the Russians' reverse-engineering of Silicon Valley.

Anna arguably had more Russian friends than American friends, even though she had spent some years in London, married to a British businessman. I didn't see hardly any British names in the Facebook list as it was viewable at 164 members, down from 181 when she was first arrested. This could be explained by her relative newness to Facebook -- she was on Odnoklassniki, which is the Russian classmates' social network, and on LinkedIn, but perhaps she didn't use Facebook that much.

One news story with a screenshot of a dialogue in Russian unwittingly shows some of her friends who were at least close enough to talk to her about her travels;

Some of those friends who bailed and cut her instantly including the 60-year-old man she was dating, a girlfriend whose Facebook profile seems to have a picture of someone who looks like Anna in it and a few others.

I caught up with some of the people I know on LinkedIn who were showing as related to Chapman. They say Anna must have linked to them, and not visa versa; it's the sort of thing that happens all the time with these services, where the platform itself, using those friend algorithms, constantly serve up people to you to recommend as friends, and where the objective is a game, in a sense, to show who has the most connections. More connections means more useful information, job leads, etc. so people collect friends like seashells. One person speculated that perhaps she had been looking for tech start-up case studies -- I could note that she'd been criticized in AMBAR in the comments to her video taken by Alyona Popova of the online start-up school for not having cases.

One friend who has now hidden her profile, Inga Mikhasiuta, who specializes in the sexy photos that Anna also liked, is fingered by social media maestro Artur Velf in his voluminous commentary on Anna Chapman as a possible honey pot for the FBI -- she awkwardly tried to friend him "translitom" which means writing Russian with the Latin alphabet and not Cyrrillic letters (as people who don't have the Cyrrillic keyboard often do). He has a theory that this is a set-up organized by the FBI agent writing the complaint on Chapman, whose last name is Patel, with another person named Patel also showing their pictures in their circle -- and of course even his Russian friends have to explain that "Patel" is like "Jones" in terms of being a common name.

Another Facebook friend is Alexander Sasha Galitsky. He is with Almaz Capital PartnersJanuary 2008 - Present, describing himself as a Managing Partner in Moscow, and describing the fund, which is from the word "diamond" in Russian, as a high-tech focused Venture Capital fund.

Fox News, always so maligned by the left and always described with such hysteria, is at least following up diligently on Chapman's facebook list like real reporters -- although they may not be bothering with the ones showing in Cyrrillic or whose names mean nothing to them. They've gone after prominent locals or those that look like big hitters, so out of all the media covering this, other than the Soho News, who interviewed Artur Velf, they are the only ones who have interviewed someone in the list, and gotten this reaction:

Another Facebook acquaintance, Alexander Sasha Galitsky, a managing partner for a Moscow-based Almaz Capital Partners, told FoxNews.com that he did not know Chapman personally.

"She tried to raise capital for her online real estate business," he said in an e-mail Tuesday. "After this she tried to speak about some other initiative like online poker, but this is out of our policy."

Another one interviewed is a Brooklyn blogger who doesn't seem to have ever written about Russia although his name could be of Ukrainian or Russian heritage -- like many people in Brooklyn, of course:

Alex Roshuk, an immigration lawyer and Facebook friend of Chapman's, described the woman as a "virtual" acquaintance with similar interests but said he never met her.

"I never met her," Roshuk told FoxNews.com, saying the young woman "friended" him on Facebook just last week.

At least one tech blogger Eliot's Blog, is looking at the deals around the domains instead of the tits, which is more relevant to this story:

When I saw this domain name mentioned, my eyes grew bigger because I recognized the name. According to a Whois history search, the domain name was transferred to Moniker Privacy Service sometime around June 22, 2010. I don’t want to mention who the previous owner was because it’s very likely he had nothing to do with the buyer.

Interestingly, the domain name was just listed in Ron Jackson’s recent domain sales report, which was published a couple of weeks ago. The domain name sold through Moniker for a reported $25,350, good enough to place #11 on the weekly sales list, and probably good enough to rank as one of the highest yearly domain sales.

I looked up the Whois and found that is has no person's name, only PropertyFinder, the name of Chapman's company.Eliot's curious reticence and protection of "one of his own" here speaks volumes about what is always wrong with tech coverage of the news -- a decided tilt to the tribe.

Speaking of tribes, here's some of the gushing praise for Anna on LinkedIn (now hidden):

“Anna’s entrepreneurial flair does not cease to amaze me, she sees opportunities in places were most would not think to look, and she makes them work.” November 24, 2009

Said Abdullaev, Vice President, KIT Fortis Investments, Moscow
worked directly with Anna at PropertyFinder Ltd

“Anna is extremely professional and resourceful with great industry insight and vision. She has been a pleasure to work with and will offer great value to anybody doing business with her.” November 23, 2009

Jesse Hemson-Struthers, Director, OS.invest Ltd
was with another company when working with Anna at PropertyFinder

“Anna is an ambitious, forward-thinking professional, who has totally embraced the open, collaborative way of working that has evolved in web industries. Working between New York, London and Moscow must be extremely challenging, but she takes it in her stride and makes things happen wherever she is.” November 19, 2009

Dan Johnson, Owner, TheMoveChannel.com
was with another company when working with Anna at PropertyFinder
VP
KIT Fortis Investments

“"Keep on moving", must be one of Anna's favorites mottos. When i met her in Moscow she was eager to learn, full of self control and ready to develop her client's network. One thing we learned together is that Kremlin museum is closed on thurdsdays.” December 10, 2009

Benoit Quisquater, Board Member / Head of sales Luxembourg and Ireland, Fortis Investment Management Luxembourg
was with another company when working with Anna at KitFortis Investments

Another Facebook friend was Estonian entreprenuer Andres Susi, MGIMO graduate, a partner at MTVP since July 2005, which he describes as a "Venture capital firm focused on technology, media and telecommunication companies in CEE, Russia/CIS."

Susi didn't cut Anna from his FB friends but maybe he doesn't bother to go on FB. He has more than 600 friends, including some of the prominent VCs on Chapman's list and influential Silicon Valley gurus like Shel Israel.

Anton S Soloviev whose profile says he is a producer at TribalDB.ru in Moscow -- TirbaldB is a new media ad agency. The profile also shows him in the past as a business owner and at COMSTAR, the leading Russian ISP provider, has among his 99 friends Dmitry Medvedev. This is the actual Facebook page of Dmitry Medvedev, not his fan page as a public figure. Of course, Anton is joining 4,800 other friends of the Russian president who "only shares some of his information".

Medvedev is a new-thinking kind of guy. He writes that his employers are "The citizens of the Russian Federation" and his job title as "President".

Who Is Scrubbing Anna Chapman's Social Media Footprint--and Why?

2010-07-03T05:28:16-04:00

I wish the tech media would do their job for once. Of course, their primary role is to serve big IT, and so they may be circling the wagons on this and keeping the spy story merely one of ridicule and sympathy for the Russian underdog on purpose, but even so, I expect better. The story particularly of Anna Chapman clearly relates directly to Russia's Silicon Valley, to a high-profile trip to Russia by leading tech California Silicon Valley CEOS "worth $60 billion" and leads directly to President Dmitry Medvedev. Could we get a little more curious about this, guys -- and stop ogling the missing knickers and do some basic journalistic work?

I've laid this Silicon-to-Silicon connection out in my article on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty here and I will keep posting additional information as I find it.

My comments are languishing in the moderator's queue as per usual at TechCrunch on this "exclusive" story but I managed to get in a comment through the moderator sieve on Arrington's frivolous take on this 00 and it's maddening because of all people, these Google-satured geeks should be out there using every connection and gadget they have to figure out why Anna Chapman was so embedded in their midst among their very friends -- and who -- and why -- is removing all her footprints from social media sites (at least in the English language).

Her Linked-in account is now removed from view and/or removed completely. Yesterday, I could still view, it as could others, and find out the pertinent fact that I was one person removed from her or in the second tier away from her circle -- Nic Mitham had friended her for some reason or she had friended him, possibly after attending some start-up or entrepreneurs' event. I also saw on Linked in she was one friend away from former Linden Lab educational evangelist John Lester (the notorious Pathfinder whom I've dissected in detail) but that's because he's friends with Nic or somebody like Nic.

Who is removing this footprint? It's funny to me to hear some people speculate that the FBI is doing this. If they were, they'd have removed all the FB and other footprints of all the spies -- and they haven't. Mikhail Semenko's page is left untouched (and, I might add, other than the son of some people I went to university with, doesn't seem to have anything I can recognize, and no Russian/Silicon Valley sort of connection -- but then, this guy's field was China.) So are some of the other spies. So my guess is either the lawyer is doing it, having gotten the passwords during a jailhouse visit; or the SVR, wanting to remove what traces they can of this sordid and embarassing affair, especially on *this* particular spy that reaches so close up to Medvedev and Skolkovo -- or it might possible be just a sister or the father, said to be KGB himself, who maybe worked his connections to do an old-fashioned crack of the sites and a scrub. I'm betting it's the lawyer or the sister in the U.S., because the Russian sites have been untouched.

The group that's been useful to watch for various clues has been AMBAR, that seemed paralyzed into inaction after the news struck -- with one member urging everybody to cut cards with her because they might be investigated as illegals by the FBI -- then later posting a link to the story about her sexual adventures. But then, it's not such an active group in this particular manifestation of it -- they'd hardly said anything in the group since May, when they were all impressed by the red-hot redhead startupshchitsa's video on how to get venture funding. Pro-tip -- in the U.S. it might have been a good idea to spell the word "ventures" properly in the name of your adventura -- Anna's project mentioned in the video is TIME Venchures. Of course, Time Magazine was one of the open venues that the spies used to communicate with each other, which we learn from one of the gee-whiz spy tech articles -- although it does not appear Chapman used this method.

The Facebook account was hidden yesterday the pictures hidden or removed. Now you can only see any friends you have in common with Anna Chapman. I've kept the list and I've been researching the people on it. The 60-year-old rich guy she was dating is one of those who cut her out of his list when he learned she was a spy -- and can you blame him? He gets what this is about. Not everybody is working to spin this story as a plot of evil Amerika against everything-that-is-good-for-you, Obama, and earnest innovation-seeking Russkis -- like Peter Lavelle, Timothy Post and Sean, the Guy who has a Blog Named Sean's Blog. They realize that even a charge of "working for a foreign government" is a serious one, and just because there haven't been espionage charges yet, doesn't mean they might not appear -- and they may not appear merely to protect work that law-enforcement is doing in other areas.

When you get past the Boris and Natasha stuff on the TechCrunch video, Paul Carr has a good point -- it used to be journalists were the spies, because they could travel anywhere and ask any questions. Now, with media dying, and the journalists' jobs and overseas budgets drying up, what figure in society can play this role? And the answer is: the entrepreneur, the start-up geek, because he has to aggressively push himself everywhere, network with tons of people, ask questions constantly -- especially in the social media biz. Perfect cover.

For some reason, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld turned in a piece he called "an exclusive" which we'd all seen days ago which is just her web page NYCrentals (which also has a twitter account) and its "biznes-plan". It has that same amateurish (or fake spy cover) feel -- and TechCrunch didn't bother to ask any of the 30,000 Russians living near its offices (or me!) to translate the video which you can see here (watch both parts, and read the comments, too) -- the interview by web entrepreneur and new media consultant Alyona Popova. Popova felt she had a good example of someone benefiting from her "online school for startupery" (as they are called in Russian, hilariously) in Chapman, but her readers were skeptical -- one former Facebook friend of Anna's named Artur Velf raises an eyebrow and wonders who Chapman, who only a few months previously, was seeking her own venture capital, was now dispensing advise about how to raise it. In the AMBAR group, someone comments that she hasn't supplied any real case studies.

Velf takes the position, in a huge long wall debate worthy of Dostoyevsky and several other debates on Facebook with many participants, that she is innocent, the victim of some kind of plot, and even comes up with a theory that the FBI agent, whose last name is "Patel," is related to another "Patel" in the Facebook circles of Chapman, and therefore it's all some kind of sinister set-up. He says he met her at a venture conference in 2008 and she's just a real-estate agent. Velf writes on social media and is prominent in these circles; I'm trying to figure out why he feels such compulsion to spin the story of Anna Chapman's arrest as a function of evil Amerika and not her working for the SVR as the FBI maintains.

Here he is giving an interview to ABC swearing of her innocent:

Arthur Welt (sic), a 36-year-old Russian journalist living in Moscow who first met Chapman in 2008 at a start-up conference, said the idea that Chapman is a spy is "nonsense."

"She was very professional in the real estate market," Welt said. "Startup founders don't have time, especially not for espionage."

Right. Out of all the bloggers and friends in her list and commentators, nobody seems to be working as hard as Mr. Velf to spin this story away from looking like what it appears to be -- a spy related to Skolkolov and Silicon Valley. Why?

The lawyer is constantly quoted saying this:

Chapman's attorney Robert Baum said, "The government's case is very thin against Ms. Chapman. There is no allegation that she ever met face to face with any governmentt official. No allegation despite constant surveillane that she ever delivered anything to anyone or received any money."

As news accounts (and the complaint itself which you can get online) say this, however:

The complaint charging Chapman alleges that on 10 occasions between Jan. 2010 and June 2010, Chapman was observed on FBI surveillance communicating covertly via a private internet wireless network with a Russian government official including a coffee shop at 47th and 8th Ave and other locations around New York City. On Saturday, the day before she was arrested, the FBI used an undercover FBI agent, posing as a Russian Consulate employee to approach Chapman to set up a meeting with her to discuss problems she was having with her computer.

I guess "being in the same cafe as a Russian government official and transmitting coded message over an encrypted line that the FBI has identified" is equal to "not meeting face to face" and "not deliverying anything" LOL.

Velf points out that Nur Rubini was among Chapman's friends but he cut her.

I have to credit ABC for so far being the *only* media outlet that is doing the investigative journalistic job of searching through the Facebook and Linkedin lists and trying to interview the subjects. They came up with only one name with anything to say about, however:

Chapman was a Facebook friend of well-known economist and NYU Stern Business School professor Nouriel Roubini. Roubini, dubbed "Dr. Doom," has been credited with predicting the global economic meltdown and is well-known on the New York club circuit.

Chapman and Roubini were Facebook friends until this morning, when the former Director of the Office of Policy Development and Review at the U.S. Treasury Department removed her from his friend's list.

Roubini, who is also the former senior economist for international affairs with the White House Council of Economic Advisors, told ABC News that Chapman had "befriended" him on Facebook.

"I may have met her socially on one or two occasions in a large party (not at my place) and never had a one to one conversation or meeting with her," Roubini said. He added that he has no association with Chapman nor would ever want to have one.

At one point, listening to her second video, the thought crossed my mind that Chapman was set up by Russians in the Skolkovo project, precisely because she disses the venture capital prospects in Moscow so badly -- or perhaps because the SVR simply needed to have some scapegoats and a case that would help galvinize that sort of indignant, protective, patriotic feeling that Velf is so good at gushing on cue, and the sort of sympathy-for-the-underdog and regrets and not helping Russian ventures more that Sarah Lacey is also gushing on cue. At times thinking about this case I wonder if it is an elaborate set-up (as in my favourite book about Russia, "The Set Up" by Volkov), in which the case was created to elicit a series of other events indirectly -- in this case, the bonding of Skolkovo and Silicon people, and others in other relevant policy feels, to feel as if they are victims of hardliners and hawks on both sides, and can go questing together into the brave new future, smarter and more special than everyone else, and of course, surrounded by idiots.

In her video, Chapman basically says that unless you can suck up to some big firm you can't get in -- and the small businesses are just too niche and don't warm to any outsiders so it's all impossible. Yet she then miracuously cuts through all these difficulties and gets her funding -- in ways we never quite here in these two length videos (she said she had 6 investors; I wonder if Dvornikova, the angel investor of the American Silicon Valley, was one of them; they were FB friends).

I've studied the website domdot.ru -- it's fairly sophisticated as far as its interface and coding and functionality. It's not a craiglist because it isn't as cluttered and is more focused in putting buyer and seller together and apparently running a side consulting business in lead generation for sales agents. There was a team of people coding this site, obviously -- not Anna, who didn't study computer science, isn't a programmer, and was in economics and finance. The team is all listed in her social circle on Yandex -- but they all seem to have left in 2008 and 2009, and it's not clear who replaced them -- whether the team merely got sick, after the first flush of enthusiasm, of recording their fabulous coding adventure on social media, or whether some people removed themselves.

The young people in this social circle don't seem to be Zolotaya Molodezh (Golden Youth, privileged children of high-ranking government officials), but if you go through their ranks, you find those kind of sturdy, solid older men who built the BAM and run the industrial complex of the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, Inc.

Someone on TechCrunch who says he knows them says they couldn't compete in the cut-throat start-up environment, and she took the technology and business to New York. Yet the site still functions at domdot.ru

I'm wondering if her TIME Venchures has anything to do with the company of one of her Facebook connections but it might be purely coincidence, as it may just be a cool-sounding name. (In the 1990s, Russians would name their companies after their wives, mistresses, or children -- or small animals -- so you'd get firms with names like Belochka or Belka. Nowadays they seem to like to put a foreign word into the mix like "Invest".)

September 15 Elections: Vote for Yassky as Comptroller

2009-09-06T01:23:02-04:00

David Yassky is running for NYC Comptroller.

September 15 will be election, and if you are like me, you're getting mighty sick not only of all the robo-calls, but the mounds of junk mail.

I think nowadays, like a lot of people voting, I pay more attention to email and Facebook than junkmail which aggravates me. So I pay attention to the Freelancer's Union, which says:

"Christine Quinn has been a strong ally for independent workers, championing our Unincorporated Business Tax proposal, which was just signed into law, and she will continue to fight for us to meet the needs of freelancers."

She's in the Murray Hill area.

In our area, a candidate who also supported reducing the harsh impact of the Unincorporated Business Tax on freelancers and home workers was David Yassky.

Says the Freelancers' Union:

"We’ve endorsed David Yassky for Comptroller for all that he has done—like tax reform—and all that he will do, like creating unemployment protection for freelancers."

The flyers are geting bigger and more colorful and glossy and more frantic about the "hate" in "negative campaigns" of the other guy (itself a kind of hate) -- and the cost in designing and producing and mailing it would likely be enough to put some people without health insurance like me on at least some minimal plan...

But it rains, and pours, and it is hard to pick your way through it. I did save the magazine printed on newsprint that seemed to describe all the positions, but to be honest, like other people in the neighborhood, I'm going to be looking for the candidates who actually get up and out on the street to shake hands with people and hear their concerns about issues like health and housing, people like Brian Kavanagh who has always walked around the ward here the old-fashioned way unlike the ward-mailers who never seem to set foot up here.

I will be struggling to make sense of them all -- but I have a request for next time. Could you guys and gals quit it with the endorsements from the big guys? I don't care if Mayor Koch endorses you or if you are Cy Vance's son. I'd like to know what YOU stand for. Your endorsements might give you some luster, but they aren't helpful in really pulling the lever, to be honest.

And, could you *re-introduce yourself* when you make the robo calls *again* at the end of your call? Because all your robo calls coming into my voice mail, which is always turned on precisely for occasions like this, seem to get caught off at the first line, so I can't tell...hmm....why is someone who *sounds* like Hillary Clinton stumping for Cy Vance, Jr.? Am I hallucinating? Does Hillary still live here? Didn't she get a big job in Washington?

I think nowadays, like a lot of people voting, I pay more attention to email and Facebook than junkmail which aggravates me. So I pay attention to the Freelancer's Union, which says:

Christine Quinn has been a strong ally for independent workers, championing our Unincorporated Business Tax proposal, which was just signed into law, and she will continue to fight for us to meet the needs of freelancers.

She's in the Murray Hill area.

In our area, a candidate who also supported reducing the harsh impact of the Unincorporated Business Tax was David Yassky.

Says the Freelancers' Union:

We’ve endorsed David Yassky for Comptroller for all that he has done—like tax reform—and all that he will do, like creating unemployment protection for freelancers.

The Moral-Equivalence Squad at the Russian-American Summit

2009-07-08T19:38:39-04:00

This sort of article, even by Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe -- which knows better -- was bound to appear during the Russian-American summit with the first black American president visiting the Kremlin. Just as the politically-incorrect Charles Wrangel quipped that Obama should stay out of visiting some New York City neighbourhoods, where even black policemen are mistaken for criminals and shot to death by their fellow policemen -- Obama should stay out of a lot of Moscow neighbourhoods where even just plain white Americans can face rampant hatred.

Criticism of American racism was a long-time staple of Soviet propaganda, and the existence of both slavery and its after-effects in racist policies were often duplicitously used by the Soviets to distract from their own crimes against humanity on their own territory.

It seems as a consequence of that very effective propaganda, especially as imbibed more uncritically by the Internet generation, liberal intelligentsia in both America and Russia today still see the American legacy of slavery and racism as "worse" than anything that ever occurred in the Soviet Union. I think this bears some nuanced context -- and a lot more history than it gets.

People who have a stake in trying to portray the U.S. as "worse" cite what in fact was highly selective propagandistic Soviet manipulation of figures like Paul Robeson as proof that the Soviets were "more tolerant". Or they cite the presence of a figure like Yelena Khanga in the Russian elite of today as proof that Russians are "more" progressive and tolerant on race.

They aren't. And the Soviet legacy is abysmal, regarding the minorities and non-Russian ethnic groups on Soviet territory as well as those of Africa descent.

The alarming increase in racist murders in Russia indicated by the research of Sova and other human rights monitors is part of the story that lets us know that all is not well with the issue of race in Russia today.

But it's also worth looking at the two countries over a longer period of time.

Russian serfdom was an institution in its way similar to slavery -- and while formerly abolished roughly at the same time American slavery was abolished, persisted long after U.S. slavery as even during the Soviet era, peasants on collective farms had no domestic passports and were not free to move out of their farms at will.

But perhaps the more appropriate analogy to American mistreatment is to look at Soviet oppression of "the punished peoples" like Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans and others. Hundreds of thousands of these people were forcibly displaced under Stalin's nationalities policies, particularly when they fell under suspicion as supposed collaborators with the Nazis. Their populations were decimated as they were forced into cattle cars, with many suffocating or dying of disease along the way, or after they arrived to be forcibly resettled in bleak and unprovisioned collective farms. The parallel is something like the U.S. internment of the Japanese during World War II only with far more brutality.

Aside from those forced displacement tactics, of course the Soviet "small peoples" as they are called in Russian, i.e. minorities have suffered all kinds of other forms of racism that have forced disappearance or assimilation or second-class status.

The wars that the Soviets -- and later Russians -- have waged on their "nationalities" such as the Chechens have been attributed to racism by many activists who try to work with these awful situations -- and the point has some merit. When you have such an enormous population of clear non-combatants -- Chechen women, children and elderly men -- winding up massacred and disappeared during what are supposed to be pinpointed anti-terrorist operations, you have to ask about parallel issues of racism.

Moral equivalence debates are usually not so helpful in understanding developments in either America or Russia; it's better if both sides appeal to universal human rights and live by universal values rather than seeking to justify their own bad deeds by exigencies of parallelism. They are not equivalent countries in terms of their history or societies or forms of government or economies. Still, as long-time enemies and as large multi-ethnic states, they do often get compared.

Usually what I do with these sorts of inevitably long and contentious moral equivalence debates that rage around Russia and America is I wait for them to die down after an hour or two and then I ask quietly: OK, but in which direction is the migration going between the two countries? Is it going away from that place where everything has historically been "worse" and is supposedly "worse" today...or?

And the answer is: emigration continues to flow out of Russia to the United States; it does not go in the opposite direction, with few exceptions.

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews emigrated to the United States in part because they faced discrimination in their own society. Today, Russian Jews continue to emigrate to the U.S., as do artists and intellectuals, and there are increasing numbers of both Russians leaving the former Soviet republics because they cannot find a place in Russia or Central Asians and Caucasians leaving Russia because they face discrimination.

My Encounter With Frank Zappa

2009-04-14T02:34:13-04:00

Weasels Ripped My Flesh cover by Neon Park. 1970.

It was a curious encounter indeed -- and a memorable one, and was strange and directly appealing, the way everything about Frank Zappa had been strange and directly appealing from the beginning.

I first saw Frank Zappa's odd albums in the record store when I was 13 and 14, in the old days, when they sold big 33 1/3 RPM vinyl records in stores, in big cardboard jackets with album art. Weasels Ripped My Flesh was one album with a creepy parody of a 1950s sort of commercial on the cover. There were albums Zappa produced as well like Capt. Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Wild Man Fischer.

Somehow, I recall an album, or perhaps it was even the B side of a 45, in which it seemed to me Frank Zappa was singing (but it was more likely Wild Man Fischer, characterized as insane, even violently so at times) a very odd song, "Miss Jennifer Jones is lying dead on the porch doo doo doo doooh." The song was so arresting because its content was so unlike the sugary bubblegum stuff we usually heard on the radio (at least until I started listening to Spark Hicks' WCMF.fm), and unlike a lot of rhyming romantic 1960s Mo-town stuff, and was more like an opera, telling a story, albeit a very grotesque one of a bizarre murderous rampage. I didn't understand any of this -- the weasels, the dead Miss Jones -- but I felt it was some kind of fascinating parody that was saying something more deep and mysterious about our age than was usually being said.

Zappa had a strange fascination for us. There was the name of the band which seemed so clever -- "Mothers of Invention" (necessity being the mother of that). Then there were all the strange songs that were stories, not just banal lyrics. It's hard to explain now why the weirdness of those songs and the album art and the deconstruction of the 1950s and parody of the 1960s seems to penetrating -- yet it did. I never saw Zappa in any concert, I don't think the Mothers ever came touring close enough to where we lived, but I was interested to follow his career, read about him in Rolling Stone, and see that he even inspired the Czech dissident band Plastic People of the Universe -- in Eastern Europe, where perhaps the edginess of weird deconstructions were more keenly in demand, Zappa was very popular, maybe even more than at home in the U.S. In time, Zappa also came to fight the good fight against censorship of rock music which took the form of a battle over ratings of music (something I'm not sure I oppose, but given the context, it was good Zappa took on the fight).

Back in February 1990, Vaclav Havel, who had just been elected president by a now-free Czechoslovakia, came to the United States for a kind of victory tour, stopping to see the people who had supported him when he was a political prisoner. I worked for several organizations that had campaigned for him and for the rock musicians and we were all invited to a gala event at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, followed by a fancy reception. The event was very crowded, and I found myself standing next to one of the former political prisoners I knew from various travels who had now been made minister of something -- there was a lot of this free and exciting feeling in the early days of the Havel administration when everyone thought this playwright-turned-dissident-turned-politician was going to represent some kind of new form of governance. Remember, this was even before the Soviet coup defeat in 1991, and of course long before 9/11, it was a day when the wind was really in the sails of citizens' movements especially in Eastern Europe.

After the church ceremony and a lot of speeches, we made our way to some fancy venue -- I can't recall where, but only that the feeling of it was a lot like entering the ramp of a jet plane, upholstered walls winding up a ramp to a large room. With the crowds, and trying to get cabs or something, we were somewhat late.

I arrived to find myself in a kind of long receiving line that eventually snaked up to Havel himself to shake his hand. I saw writers like Bill Styron and his wife Rose and other celebrities, and various State Department officials and ambassadors. There was such a crowd that it seemed the food and wine were already dwindling.

As I inched along the walkway, suddenly, I looked straight into the dark brown eyes of someone who seemed terribly familiar -- and also very sad. It was one of those moments in life where it seemed as if you had always known the person forever, and you were just picking up the conversation where it had left off -- and that you knew *exactly* what they were thinking.

Looking at Frank Zappa sitting, dejected at a table, alone, with crumpled napkins and used champagne glasses around him, I instantly sensed what had happened -- somewhere, somebody, had talked Havel out of making Zappa special ambassador for culture and tourism. We had all marvelled when the appointment was first made, and like the other appointments of rock stars as interior ministers and such, it seemed part of that wacky, wild heady moment of the Havel reign that simply would not last -- reality would set in.

Without hesitation, I went straight over to Frank's table and sat right down. I nodded toward a prominent ambassador who was involved in Eastern Europe. "Did he...did they...?" I said, speaking in only half phrases, because we both knew what this was all about. He nodded sadly -- I could see that something had been said to him just recently, and he was still kind of in shock. I hung my head, feeling crushed, too. Certain cool things were just never meant to be. Having Frank Zappa as a cultural minister accepted at a state level with official protocol in the United States was something that obviously more than one fussy bureaucrat was not going to let go by.

I sat there in silent commiseration with Frank Zappa. I don't know what was more strange about this moment -- that I had instantly recognized him (his hair was different than I had recalled from the album pictures); that I had immediately understood what had happened just when it did; or that when I sat down, I was somehow accepted as a commiserator from a community of people that had found Weasels Ripped My Flesh compelling. I can't remember if I said anything more, I just patted his hand, letting him know that I cared. He seemed dazed, lost in thought -- and his dark eyes sad. Famous people kept pushing by the little table -- nobody seemed to give him a second glance. Eventually, nodding in sympathy again to Frank, I got up and got back in the line. I never saw him again.

Later, it turned out that in fact indeed, James Baker, who apparently had a longer-standing grudge with Zappa over an insult to his wife, apparently got some intermediaries (quite possibly the ambassador I had known) to talk to the Czechs and tell them that it was unacceptable to have "an American citizen" (well, this one, anyway) as an ambassador. Apparently Baker even said something like "You can do business with the United States of America. Or you can do business with Frank Zappa." Havel then must have made some sort of awkward explanation for why he chose the former -- but somehow he cooked up something later called "unofficial cultural attache" or something that of course wasn't any compensation -- the look on Frank's face let me know that.

My 9/11

2008-09-11T13:00:00-04:00

9/11 for me has always been a living embodiment of W.H. Auden's Musee de Beaux Arts -- my daughter marvelled at the way in which people kept walking their dogs and even getting a suntan along the banks of the East River even while the horror downtown was unfolding.

I found this year on the 7th anniversary that I simply didn't want to remember or memorialize at all. I will wait until another year to pull out envelopes of items related to 9/11 or watch TV. I didn't go to the memorial service at our church as I have done other years or go to the memorial garden made from cement and metal from the site in memory of our parishioners who died there as well as Fr. Mykal. I listened to my son recount his memories of that day, but the conversation was brief. At the time, he concluded, at the age of 9, "God is a terrorist." He's remained with that conclusion, which I think is intellectually and emotionally sound, given the circumstances, which is that God enabled terrorists to kill innocent people. I don't think God is a terrorist, I merely think He has given man free will, and these are the results. My son, who exercises a great deal of free will that then leads to his free will being removed for periods of time when he is grounded, hasn't grasped yet the larger context of free will -- but then, he's young.

So I wasn't even going to blog, and it was only Zha Ewry's pious musings that impelled in me that notion of civic duty that makes me write again, and again, and write too long, and write in a way that is not accessible to many people, but that's ok, write I must.

At the time, a week or so after that attacks, there was suddenly an alarm at the Empire State Building where I had just been for a meeting and where a colleague was still up on a higher floor -- there was concern that it was going to be "next". It was a bomb scare, and false alarm, but like a lot of the false alarms in those first days of copycatting, you couldn't be sure. I had already taken a hike down lots of stairways in that building because of a false alarm, and while it was reasonable to consider it was another one, I sent an email to the friend in case they were glued to the screen and not paying attention but the phone wasn't answering.

We went to my son's window and stared out at the Empire State Building, which could still be seen in those days before construction blocked it, and began the mental trajectory that all New Yorker's seem to instinctively know these days especially due to constant crane accidents -- if that building falls, will it fall on *me*? Am I in its pathway?

"Are they going to attack our house?" my daughter asked, worried. "No," I said. "They only attack symbols. They crashed into the World Trade Center because it's a symbol."

"But am *I* a symbol?" my little seven-year-old daughter asked, without hesitation.

Chilling, that a child would have to ask that question at such a tender age, not even quite understanding what "symbols" are -- taking it literally as "the thing you become because people make you one." We're not special -- all kinds of people have to live under armed conflict all over the world, but it hasn't been the norm in the U.S.

And I while I tried to reassure my daughter at the time, I would have to conclude philosophically that yes, a little white American girl is a symbol. Just like a little Jewish girl in Israel is a symbol. And, some leftwingers will hasten to add, a little Palestinian girl is a symbol.

And here's where I say, "No." The little Palestinian girl is *not* a symbol, dehumanized, for Israel as a state, or Israeli armed forces or movements (if they existed) to attack *deliberately* as it is for Palestinians, both the armed movements and the mobilized civilizans. Israel is not a state funding suicide bombers as other states are; it is not sanctioning and excusing the deliberate attack on civilians; its citizens don't dance in the streets at another's misfortune, as Palestinians did after 9/11. If Israel has in fact been responsible for the deaths of innocents it is due to accident, disproportionate use of force, even larger policies like the settlements which one might conclude are responsible, but it is not the same kind of raw, murderous, deliberate hateful logic of symbolism that a suicide bomber engages in. There aren't any Israeli suicide bombers. If throughout history you can dredge up examples of a Jewish terrorist here or there, everyone has to concede that they are not the norm, and dwarfed by the numbers of Palestinians. There isn't a moral equivalence to the two sides when you look at the use of symbols. It's one-sided. And that's why the morality you develop around this can't be falsely "bilateral".

And that's why, on this day, I don't fetch up moral equivalence bromides and follow faddish activities like "The Day of Interdependence" trying to whip up more blame to distribute to the U.S. and other Western nations for its bad policies (the war in Iraq) -- as Zha Ewry does here, just to cite one of many examples. And maybe it's simply because Zha, who went to the exact same area I did on that fateful day, had a very different day...

Zha describes in vivid detail the rush around town to pick up children in the E. 20s, the people covered with white powder, the shock, the worry about friends on the upper floors, culminating in a happy scene somewhere uptown or in the suburbs in Zha's affluent life where there are just happy children playing on a playground, not children who ask if God is a terrorist, or if they are a symbol, and who continue to play with blocks, building up big towers, and knocking them down...

The E. 20s might seem an affluent neighbourhood of its own, after a fashion, but it isn't, as it happens to be all hospitals and public housing and people who have lived there in rent control for 50 years, and then the big complex formerly owned by MetLife sprawling down to the East River, which is filled with people in services that were settled there as a class after World War II -- for many returning servicemen. They are firemen, policemen, insurance adjustors -- outsiders don't realize that the Towers were not the center of world commerce with big guys like Soros or Trump sitting in them -- their offices are uptown -- rather, it the Towers were the back office to world commerce.

It happens that a lot of people in those service occupations are ethnic Irish or Italian or Spanish and tend to be Catholic. Interestingly, the Jesuits claim that of all groups vying for victim status around the event, they suffered the greatest losses, since they made roll calls of all those who perished, and so many had happened to graduate from their high schools. Of course, the tragedy knew no nationalities or creeds or races -- Muslims, Jews, and secular humanists were all burnt to a crisp by the homocidal suicide bombers without distinction.

A friend of mine in the building trade pointed out that the suicide pilots deliberately turned their planes sideways at the last minute so as to achieve the absolute maximum of destruction, something that acquired an even more special type of fanatical concentration than the fanatical concentration that they would have aready had as suicide bombers in the first place. Many extra people died -- and the buildings fell over -- precisely because of that chilling calculation to turn the planes rather than just slice through them. But we didn't know that was happening.

When the first plane hit, I had just exited the polls -- we had a local election that day -- and as I made my way home to pack my suitcase to take the train to Washington (an aborted trip, obviously), I saw a circle of people standing outside my doorway. My neighbour was holding up a cell phone, saying he was trying to talk to someone inside the tower, and the doorman was fiddling with a radio dial. Nobody seemed to be able to find out anything coherent, so I went upstairs and turned on the TV and watched the news about one plane hitting. Perhaps it's a tribute to our thick skin as New Yorkers or my own obliviousness, but I concluded that it was "just like February 1993" when the towers were bombed as I sat nursing a baby and watching out my window at the towers, which suddenly went dark. It was bad, but a localized sort of bad.

I sat down and tried to finish up a document but then suddenly there was an email from a friend in Congress, where I was scheduled to go and testify at a hearing. "We are evacuating. Congress is closed." I still didn't fully grasp the situation as I kept watching TV. I called my office manager and she said "The Pentagon has been hit," which is something that I hadn't gleaned from TV or radio or computer at that point because we were obsessed with the first -- and then the second planes. I told her to go home immediately, and raced toward the door -- while one or two towers being hit in New York might not ruffle me as a New Yorker who had seen them bombed before, the Pentagon being hit must mean that it was a war -- so my first thought was to get to the kids.

As I raced down the steps, I saw other parents who had arrived at exactly the same conclusion as I racing toward the schools as well. When I got to my daughter's school, the head of the PTA was in the hallway, quietly organizing the situation to avoid panic. On my way, I had seen people lining up already at bank ATMs and stores, and said I was concerned there could be some kind of shortages. There was also the awful situation that wives of firemen were also starting to show up and Monsignor decided to open up the church and parish hall for everyone to come in as a kind of community organizing point. I fetched my daughter, who had been told that a big accident had been happening; one of the more curious things about this day was that she was carrying in her backpack one of those black-and-white marble school notebooks, and inside, dated September 10, was her carefully-worded advice to the Mayor, in a school essay that was supposed to teach civic involvement, that he should take care of buildings better so they didn't fall over -- this was of course *before* 9/11, and referenced the situation of the odd bricks falling, as they had done in our area, necessitating the removal of a playground the ended up nerfing it into something not as fun for the kids.

I should mention that before I raced out, the phone had rung several times, one from my babysitter, saying that she didn't think she could get on the subway, it wasn't running, and one from a very distraught neighbour on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, who said the same thing -- and worried how her son would be picked up from school. I assured her I'd get her son and keep him at my house.

Once I picked up my daughter, and saw all the lines hitting the stores, I was concerned about my aunt and ailing grandmother who lived next door to the school -- perhaps they'd not be able to get out. I ducked into a deli with less lines on a side street and bought some water and soup as the quickest things I could get with the money I had. (Of course, like a good New Yorker, later as I saw the disaster was larger than originally conceived, I filled the bath tub with water, having gone through a number of water outages in the past in these situations).

So I went upstairs to drop off things for them and said I had to get my son and his friend -- and meanwhile, my aunt filled me in on the Pentagon and mentioned that the two planes were empty (this was a fervent wish that many people passed around as a story in the early hours).

We went outside...and looked downtown. The towers were a pillar of smoke and black clouds. I don't know at which point they began falling. My aunt went up on her roof and watched as one of the towers collapsed, but I didn't stay to look, needing to get the other kids. At this point men and women carrying their briefcases, covered in white powder, looking for all the world like those public sculptures in parks of business people, began to stagger uptown. We continued our way up to the E. 30s, and entered the public school, which as I've written before, contrasted vividly with the combination of private administrative and civic involvement in the parochial school. Children were wandering, confused. School safety police deployed in the schools were insisting that children not be removed without presentation of ID, causing a huge traffic jam. I managed to get upstairs, and we heard a teacher sobbing -- apparently she was talking to her husband in the tower, we were told, but we were never able to find out anything more about it.

My son helped me find his friend, and we decided to go down some back stairs out to another exit to avoid the traffic jam. On our way, we met an administrator, the same man who had told me on our first day about "fuzzy math" (TERC), and how "there are no right answers". I told him that the other boy's mother was trapped in Brooklyn and couldn't get him, and I was simply taking him, and the ID check would be damned. The administrator, whether due to common sense or fuzzy math, made an executive decision simply to let us pass because the boy vouched for me as "not a kidnapper".

As we made our way back home, we passed huge lines around the hospitals -- people already looking for "missing" (actually: dead) friends or co-workers. There was little to be done for them except give them some water or use of a cell phone. Another chilling scene I won't forget: lines and lines of hospital cots rolled right out on the sidewalk, with the Ringer's solution already hanging, in anticipation of mass numbers of casualties. Buses filling up with men and women in their white doctor's coats and stethyscopes to go down to the scene of the tragedy. But...nobody would ever go on the cots. They were never filled, for the most part, because you either survived, or died, it seemed.

Off we went -- and there was a co-worker knocking on my door, scared because he seemed to realize before any of us, coming from the former Soviet Union, the dimension of the crisis. He, and the children's father, were calling us and urging us to get out of New York immediately -- it would be attacked again, because enemies always circled back to attack wounded and funerals. But there was absolutely no question of departure -- the mayor closed the exits to prevent entries for a time. We made big pots of soup to store, got more water and flashlights, and watched TV -- and the panorama of the emergency playing out below the window, with its view on to all the hospitals, the cots, the buses, the lines, the police and helicopter and ambulances with lights flashing.

The mayor got on TV and made two important points: "We are not going to have group hate," he said very simply, to try to stem some harassment of Muslims -- or people who were mistaken for Muslims, such as Sikhs, as a few incidents of this nature had occurred. "Group hate is what brought us THIS" he said, gesturing toward the wrecked towers. I felt that was the single more important thing Rudy said in that moment -- it set a tone, it was simple and direct, and it worked. The other point he made was that first, the city would have a "snow day". We were to treat it as a "snow day" -- and with all the white ash falling everywhere, it seemed appropriate. The next thing is that on September 12, we were to go out and purchase something and restore business to usual. I recall going outside and buying a cat box (no, I'm not a cat lady, it's the kids' cats) and buying socks for dogs -- one of the things our tenant committee had said we should all purchase and turn in for the effort were dog socks for the K-9 units to be able to have dogs walk over those hot embers. We also brought in all our towels and sheets we could spare as the firemen were bunking in a school and showering and sleeping there. Police from as far away as Florida and Maine arrived -- we saw the state troopers in their big hats.

Let me try to explain the toll some more, so different than Zha Ewry's 9/11 which involves only his own brush with the visuals and a friend in the tower who happily didn't go to work (I had one friend like that, too, who stopped to get a pizza and was saved.) First, there was the boy in my son's class who lost his father -- the whole school turned out for the funeral. There were the other parishioners -- firemen, insurance adjustors, a policewoman who left a two-year-old. For days, as we walked to school, we saw two vivid scenes: firemen's boots and flowers put out on the steps of buildings in memory of the fallen, and black hearses blocking the sidewalk by the church. We picked our way around the weeping women in black veils to go to school. Day after day it seemed, for weeks, although there couldn't have been more than a dozen, they seemed endless.

Then there was the neighbour whose son played with ours at the playground, with whom I always had a pleasant chat. I saw him unshaven, sweaty, stricken on the sidewalk. He is a volunteer fireman. He told me his nephew was still down there but he was confident he'd turn up. He said the same thing when I saw him the next day -- and the next, when he pointed out to me where they were putting the bodies -- in a back ally, in refrigerated trucks, requiring a lot of staging and piping of some sort of chemical that foamed up along the street. Eventually, I saw a list at the fireman's union, and it unfortunately contained his nephew's name. I saw him at the playground, and his son told me he wanted to be a fireman when he grew up. We can all remember the two New Yorker covers from those weeks: one showed a scared Sikh man in a taxi cab, covered in flags and "I Heart America" buttons, barrelling along the street; another showed Halloween, with lots of little tykes dressed up in fireman and police costomes carrying their pumpkins.

For days, the hospital lines continued, then dwindled, but each one becoming a huge memorial site with pictures and candles. And for some reason, the authorities decided that the "Missing" concept for people who had obviously died pretty soon and been pulverized, was a good way to cope. It gave people long forms to fill out. It kept them busy finding hair in hairbrushes or bringing plastic bags with toothbrushes along to people waiting at cardboard tables. It also kept them busy put up posters everywhere. Those posters, waving, fluttering, ripping, finally disintegrating along all the avenues are among my strongest memories. I wrote something that was even immortalized by the Library of Congress oral history project. And then of course the smell. Didn't Zha smell it? It was the smell of burnt flesh, mixed with burnt plastic. It was everywhere. All over everything. I looked out and saw the East River filled with ceiling tiles. I went up close. There was the plastic cover of a Blackberry floating along, with some tattered and gristly...thing attached to it that I didn't want to think was a hand.

Bodies. Or should I say parts. They kept them stored in the quonset hut there for years. I can't think that there are many people who knew they were there (the Times didn't write about it for awhile) -- I had found out accidently from that neighbour. Few people had a view on to it, just because of the layout. Each day, for a long time, I would wake up and say a prayer for the departeds' souls and for the survivors. It seemed insane, no? To keep some 5,000 or more parts in refrigeration as people painstakingly got a finger or a shinbone to bury...and then had to come back the next year to get some other chunk.

Yet, here are the difference in two societies: one creates suicide bombers, who can turn the plane at the last minute to maximize the mass deaths, obliterating themselves as individuals along with others. The other holds the body parts in storage for years, so that individual families can get individual closure for individuals who died. And I know which society I pick, and any moral and intelligent person does have to pick, and even Zha has picked by continuing obliviously to spout ideals.

You have to chose at this level. You don't get to say, "Oh, but the whole reason they bombed us is because we support Israel and they hate that, and we are responsible for the wrongs of Israel, and therefore they get to do this." That's immoral. You don't get to say, "Our policies did this," because as one Latin American from a new democracy put it very starkly, "What, I'm poor, I get to blow up a building?!". No. You don't. The wrongfulness of a policy isn't endorsed by the stark, criminal wrongful means to end that wrong policy -- terror. It *is* the lesser evil.

When you pick this side of the lesser evil, or the ideal that knows bounds, you don't pick nationalism; you pick the rule of law. You don't say "I remain uncritical" but you do pick the morality of not dehumanizing the individual. It really is all about the individual and the collective. You can say, "I won't be forced to pick, because it's not black and white." Perhaps if you think more about the burnt stench, the funerals, the orphans, the boots and flowers, the white ash everywhere, you will be helped to see the problem of morality here, although I suspect it won't work in Zha's case, as she is determined to be a moral equivalizer to the bitter end.

That's partly because Zha imagines she belongs to another polity, some sort of utopia, some international do-good organization or movement or sophisticated club of those who are intelligent and "get it" and who imagine "the rule of law" isn't in imperfect governments or countries, but some kind of magical transnational empire, perhaps "the best of Second Life". That sort of capacity for speculative utopianism is how she is able to imagine that America had some moment when every one was on her side, but lost its chance for leadership and decency. Baloney. The problem is that the terrorists kept coming -- in London, Moscow, Madrid. They keep coming in Iraq -- it is not the U.S. that is reponsible for the overwhelming majority of deaths there, but the terrorists, who are backed in part by states. Terrorists don't change by America being better. Terrorists are terrorists; if they stopped because America got better (they didn't; they won't; they can't) then only tribally-decided policy or code-as-law would matter, yet not the rule of law which must apply to everyone, governments and terrorists alike.

Now, the question comes: is it proper to call this a war? Should it have been a police operation? I'm happy to study a lot more about this, as I've heard a lot lately from the scholars and lawyers of this issue and they make a compelling case that we went down the wrong path making this a "war on terror" instead of "an international police operation against terrorists". There are many compelling arguments to make against the "war" approach, the leading of which was the wrongful and injust decision of the highest leaders of our country to sanction torture of foreigners abroad. This is why they have to be voted out of office; this is why a lot of Republicans I know will vote them out of office and why I think we can be fairly certain Obama will come to power.

I was among those who marched against the war in Iraq as it was launched because I simply think it's always a good thing to show up and protest any war that will lead to massive loss of life, and this one not only didn't start as a "just war," but did not even prove itself to become a "just war," which in the Thomist sense would mean "a war that put an end to war." I went to a friend's 65th birthday party that October who used the occasion as an old lefty to protest the invasion of Afghanistan, too, and stood with everyone else to sing the Internationale -- both sets of lyrics, as befitting of an event for Trotskists. I think Obama supporters are going to be rethinking their notion that the way to get out of Iraq is to "take the war over to Afghanistan". Look at the British. Look at the Russians. You get into Afghanistan easily; you don't get out except in failure and humiliation. Of course, a long the way, many lies about this are told. Certain peace groups claimed falsely that 100,000 civilians, mainly children would be killed if the U.S. went into Afghanistan. It didn't happen. Noam Chomsky lied and claimed that the U.S. withheld wheat deliveries to starve out the Taliban -- false, it didn't happen (I'm amazed nobody ever calls him on his lies, I guess because if he gives chapter and verse of an incident and a newspaper clipping, nobody thinks to *keep reading the newspaper the next day after* to see how the story is further investigated and unfolds). They should have sat and heard the UN personnel describing the starving, literally *blue* children of Afghanistan *in August* before Masoud was killed (which should have been a bigger warning to us than it was) -- before 9/11. The Taliban would forbid or shoot at humanitarians using sat phones to coordinate aid deliveries. Where's Noam Chomsky about *that*?

Those who inhabit this false utopian realm of the failure to make a moral choice (a moral choice that need not lead to ill-conceived wars) imagine that they can suspend moral judgement for ever as an act of good will. But I know which side I pick: the societies that even if their highest leaders have sanctioned torture, have the means to expose and address it, as Abu Ghraib is exposed and is being addressed, or as the Israel Supreme Court has condemned torture. There is a difference between imperfect societies that establish and aspire to the rule of law, and fall short but have remedies, and those that are tribalist mobilized movements of hate wishing to make symbols out of children. So I know what I pick: I pick the society with the rule of law, because the moral choice is to pick the rule of law. You don't get not to pick, and say "a plague on both their systems," unless you wish to pick *away from* the rule of law, and succumb to the argumentation of the tribe whose code is law. That's what Zha is doing and many others are doing who are delivering big, baggy, platidinous lectures on these anniversaries imaging that wrongs on the side still upholding the rule of law balance the saddle bags to equal the wrongs of those with lawlessness. They don't.

Zha's lofty and pious sentiments of 7 years ago remind me a bit of something actually written a lot better, from Susan Sontag, that was heavily criticized at the time. I don't agree with the essence of her point, that the attack wasn't one on "civilization" or "liberty" ("They hate our freedom") but on a superpower with bad polices. Why? Because the policies aren't at root all bad. What *is* the right thing to do for Israel, surrounded completely by bristling, hostile Arab states who fund suicide bombers? Abandon it and make them refugees to America? You might criticize 100 things about the policy, but a) you have to have a better idea about how to deal with the hostile encirclement than a solution that dissolves the Jewish population and b) you have to have a solution to the problem of killers who use these means -- suicide bombing -- to achieve their ends. You cannot sanction that. You do have to chose *against* that.

Yet one thing Susan Sontag said stuck in my mind and I kept repeating it to myself in those weeks: "Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together." No, we don't want to be stupid, and start a stupid war that is stupid. We don't want to get in a worse plight. Yet, upholding the rule of law and civilization is an imperfect -- not a utopian exercise. It's execution is imperfect, and at times heavily flawed. We can listen to Susan Sontag or Mr. X or Zha Ewry mouth pious notions, but as I re-read Zha's words, I don't feel any cold anger toward anything but her as a pious and useless lefty (which prompted me to write all this on an occasion when I didn't even want to write anything.) That's because justice cannot be swift when you are chasing terrorists, and is long and messy. That's because you can't move on when you can't even capture the main bad guy (Pakistan protects him; we need Pakistan to keep the area from further disintegrating). Bin Laden isn't caught for the same reason Karadic wasn't caught -- the people backing him, namely Serbs and Russians, couldn't be tangled with and confronted *more* without risking *more war* (look at Georgia).

David Levine lives in the utopia of Second Life, as I do. But even he, like Icarus, had his wings melted recently and fell from the sky, and that was exactly the image I summoned up, noticing recent events where he was Burnt by the Sun -- even before I recalled Auden had written about this painting. I don't wish anybody suffering, but I do wish them knowledge so that they don't keep defending utopias mindlessly. They aren't defensible.

One of the things that occured on 9/11 wasn't immediately clear to me. I had a job -- a book I was translating, and I had just sent in my final chapters on September 10. I hadn't really focused on the address of the place, as I worked from home, and was only going to be visiting it in the future, during a special event we were planning -- which never happened. An email I sent September 12 about the manuscript came back returned, and then again and again, strangely and then I decided to look. The address was right next to the World Trade Center, a building which was immediately condemned, while still standing, and nobody was allowed in even to fetch the office equipment. The entire place decamped to another state, and had to kill or postpone their spring list -- and send us only a partial payment with a letter in lawyerly language talking about "force majeure". The expected revenue from the completion of the project never occured. At another job, our salaries were cut in half -- all the activities and programs planned involving people flying from foreign countries here and there all had to be cancelled in the wake of 9/11. While experiencing nothing of the horror that any family with a real 9/11 loss could experience, the impact was substantial and contributed to an ongoing sense of loss that Zha Ewry never experienced.

Am I resentful or bitter? Not about losses, they can be restored, after a fashion, or coped with. I am resentful about the moral equivalency and the utopianism, however. She acts as if the worst thing that happened is that we lost our ideals and didn't live up to them. But that's wrong. That is NOT the worse thing that happened. We retain our ideals and we are working to put them into effect and in fact addressing the wrongs. The worse thing that happened is that the terrorists, with *their* ideals came, and keep coming *and they have no plans of changing their ideals*. They come to countries that don't even support these polices that Susan Sontag was outraged about. The worst torture and mayhem happen often most of all to those living under these very repressive regimes that sponsor or breed the terrorists, as they suffer more than any of us. The wrong is terrorism, not somebody coping with terrorism the wrong way. The wrong *is terrorism*, and terrorism is wrong not because it is a response to wrongs (that might really be wrongs) but because it is wrong in and of itself. THAT is where the moral choice must occur: 1) the rule of law and civilization -- our ideals -- is right and we must live up to them; 2) terror is the tyranny of uncivilization and is wrong, and we must not do anything that choses it or sanctions it or excuses it.

All over the world, people focus on what they can focus on as "wrongful" in the "war on terrorism" -- America. The book and TV and blogosphere industries are constantly heated up on these issues that get a huge amount of exposure, and I hope all of this will lead to Guantanamo being closed down, which of course I'm for. But I contrast all of this with the huge hall of empty echoes in the other societies -- Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran. There isn't the intellectual class able to furiously write and blog and appear on these issues critical of their states -- without winding up murdered or put in jail. I simply have to, if indeed I am a global moral person, worry more about THAT vacuum, and the thousands of ways THOSE states are inciting and contributing to terror affecting thousands of lives, with thousands of victims more for whom terrorists, not U.S. policy are responsible -- without any rule of law or Susan Sontags or Zha Ewries, than worry about a situation affecting far less people in a situation getting enormous scrutiny. Morality should go to where the victims are, not only where the surrogates for advocacy are.

A great deal of thought and debate has to go into how to fight terrorism without declaring a war on our own people or on foreign peoples who are not combatants. I actually think Mr. X's long piece contains some helpful thinking, and I've heard this recently mischaracterized as being about "not becoming like them" -- which in fact isn't said in this piece at all in so many words, but something quite different, which was more about "becoming more like ourselves":

"This is not only a question of the modest measure of informational activity which this government can conduct in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, although that, too, is important. It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problem of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time. To the extent that such an impression can be created and maintained, the aims of Russian Communism must appear sterile and quixotic, the hopes and enthusiasm of Moscow's supporters must wane, and added strain must be imposed on the Kremlin's foreign policies. For the palsied decrepitude of the capitalist world is the keystone of Communist philosophy. Even the failure of the United States to experience the early economic depression which the ravens of the Red Square have been predicting with such complacent confidence since hostilities ceased would have deep and important repercussions throughout the Communist world."

Here's what will happen in the coming years of America's waning power. We will get Obama and a "better government". It will make some difference -- but not as much as the utopians who think if we live up to our ideals everything will be fine. In part, they fall prey to this grave fallacy of the left which "Blames America First," thereby reinforcing an illegitimate notion of American hegemony in the world, as if America can affect everything. It can't. Their assumption that it can is utopian, and a lumpy sort of anti-matter that originates from the premise they reject of America's imperialism. The other powers that arise -- China, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, the far more united Arab world -- will make America and Europe irrelevant in many settings that will not be under our power or influence and for which we will not be able to be blamed whatsoever. We may go on for a long time to create a beacon of freedom with a free and prosperous society to which people from all those other powers will wish to flee -- or at least get a grant from. But it will wane, and the overshadowing that occurs won't be because we lost our ideals, but because these other powers will not even have the same ideals, but others, antithetical to the liberal concepts of freedom for which we stand.