Orwell

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Should Obama and Congress Be Arrested Under the NDAA?

Should President Obama (alongside Lindsay Graham and John McCain) be wearing an orange jumpsuit?

Welcome to the beautiful and surreal reality of life under American corporatism, under a Congress that churns out thousands  and thousands of pages of (often contradictory) legislation a year.

If providing material assistance to al-Qaeda is illegal under the National Defence Authorization Act (2012), and Obama and Congress are sending $25 million of aid to al-Qaeda-affiliated Syrian opposition, aren’t Congress and President Obama violating their own law? Should Obama (or at least the Justice Department) not be using “all necessary and appropriate force” including “the power to indefinitely detain” to prevent Obama and Congress from assisting al-Qaeda? Did anyone in Congress or the Obama administration even bother to read the law that they were signing? Do Federal laws no longer apply to lawmakers?

The only question left from this abrupt and absurd turnaround — from funding bin Laden’s mujahideen thirty years ago, to ten years ago declaring war on al-Qaeda, to today sending them material assistance — would appear to be whether or not Obama will pull a 1984 and claim that “we have always been at war with Eurasia“.

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Thoughtcrime is Real

I am careful what I say on Twitter especially, and the internet in general.

The sad reality is that the internet is not the place for expressing views that you do not want the wider public — including law enforcement and intelligence agencies — to know you hold.

We already know that the National Security Agency will soon capture all communications — phone calls, search histories, web history, e-mails, passwords, etc — in their Utah data centre.

In Britain, a dangerous precedent is being set.

From the BBC:

A teenager arrested over a malicious tweet sent to Team GB diver Tom Daley has been issued with a warning.

Dorset Police said the 17-year-old boy was held at a guest house in the Weymouth area on suspicion of malicious communications and later bailed.

After coming fourth in the men’s synchronised 10m platform diving event on Monday, Daley, 18, from Plymouth received a message on Twitter.

It told him he had let down his father Rob, who died in 2011 from cancer.

Arrested and cautioned for expressing an opinion. Not for threatening violence. Not even for racial or sexual abuse — as happened in March when a student was convicted of incitement to racial hatred after he tweeted a series of racial slurs.

Just for expressing an opinion that the authorities found to be distasteful. 

I admit, it was a distasteful comment. But the idea that the government should arrest the person who made it is far, far, far more distasteful still.

Meanwhile, the number of bankers arrested for rigging LIBOR remains at zero.

This is a very salient example of the problems with the internet in its present state. If the state has the opportunity to gather and index citizens’ thoughts, these cases in Britain — supposedly a free country — illustrate that it is a very short and slippery slope toward the state punishing citizens for expressing their opinions.

While the First Amendment might seem to protect speech, the United States has already got involved in policing expression. And the First Amendment has a massive loophole — it only restricts Congress’ ability to legislate against speech. Other agencies — like the TSA — would seem to be be able to restrict speech under “administrative” grounds (the same rationale they use to gut the Fourth Amendment and search travellers without probable cause).

From the BBC:

Holidaymakers have been warned to watch their words after two friends were refused entry to the US on security grounds after a tweet.

Before his trip, Leigh Van Bryan wrote that he was going to “destroy America”.

He insisted he was referring to simply having a good time — but was sent home.

Trade association Abta told the BBC that the case highlighted that holidaymakers should never do anything to raise “concern or suspicion in any way”.

The US Department for Homeland Security picked up Mr Bryan’s messages ahead of his holiday in Los Angeles.

The 26-year-old bar manager wrote a message to a friend on the micro-blogging service, saying: “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”

US law enforcement represents the overwhelming majority of requests to Twitter for users’ private information.

From Reuters:

Law enforcement agencies in the United States are behind the overwhelming majority of requests for Twitter users’ private information, the social media company revealed Monday in its first ever public report on the subject.

Of the 849 total government requests for user information during the period spanning January 1 to June 30 this year, 679 — or 80 percent — took place in the United States, typically for use in criminal investigations, Twitter said.

Japan was in second place after the United States with 98 requests filed by police, followed by 11 requests from law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom and the same number from agencies in Canada.

Speech on Twitter — and on the internet in general — isn’t free.

UPDATE: It would seem that the arrested party did later make some threats. Whether he was arrested for these or his initial messages remains to be seen — he was cautioned for “malicious communications” which means “causing anxiety or distress”, and so could easily apply to the first tweet — as opposed to intimidation or criminal threatening, which he was not cautioned for.

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Britain’s Orwellian Nightmare?

As a British citizen, I find Britain’s recent authoritarian creep to be deeply unsettling. First we greatly diluted our ancient rights of habaeas corpus. Then we created the world’s largest video surveillance network (which of course was completely powerless to prevent last summer’s riots).

Now we have started locking people up for comments on Twitter.

From Brendan O’Neill:

If you thought it was only authoritarian states like China or Iran that imprisoned pesky bloggers and tweeters, think again.

This week, Britain became a fully paid-up member of that clique of illiberal intolerant, tweeter-harassing states.

On Tuesday, at Swansea Magistrates Court in Wales, Liam Stacey, a student, was imprisoned for 56 days for writing offensive tweets.

Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting. It needs to be spelt out like that in order to show how shocking it is that in the 21st century, in a nation that gave us such great warriors for freedom as The Levellers and John Stuart Mill, a young man has now been banged up for expressing his thoughts.

Stacey’s thoughts were far from pleasant ones. In fact they were offensive and repugnant.

On March 17, Fabrice Muamba, a 23-year-old black football player for Bolton Wanderers, collapsed with cardiac arrest during a match against Tottenham Hotspurs. Many people were shocked, and before long a #PrayforMuamba hashtag took off on Twitter.

But Stacey, who claimed he was drunk at the time, didn’t fancy praying for Muamba, and so instead he tweeted:

“LOL. Fuck Muamba. He’s dead.”

(Muamba did not die, though he remains critically ill in a London hospital.)

56 days in prison? For expressing a distasteful opinion? Frankly, I find the notion of convicting someone of such an offense more offensive than Stacey’s words.

Most recently, Parliament is enacting a law to allow for the monitoring and recording — in real time — of all online activity (presumably including my work) by GCHQ.

From the BBC:

The Home Office has said laws allowing the monitoring all emails, texts and web use in the UK will be brought in “as soon as parliamentary time allows”.

Home Secretary Theresa May says “ordinary people” will have nothing to fear- but there is opposition to the idea from all sides of the House of Commons.

All of this is troubling. Throwing people in jail for expressing unpopular opinions? That seems un-British, and seems to not tally with the idea that we should live and let live. I don’t have a problem with criminalising speech that is an incitement to imminent violence (e.g. “kill that man”). But criminalising opinion? Not only is that paternalistic, that’s a sticky slope to thought crime. And why is that a problem? In a society where we are not free to express any opinion we like — even deeply unpopular ones — innovation is surely stifled. Innovators and freethinkers are forced to think tricky questions (“will I be jailed for expressing this opinion?”) before they publicise their ideas.

And why would GCHQ need to monitor the entire internet? If they need to gather evidence to prevent imminent criminality, why not get a warrant, and monitor a suspect? The fact that they are writing a law that acts as a warrant on all of us suggests that contrary to the Home Office’s statements, we are now all suspects.

Britain has a rather unique legal and political system. Nothing is really set in stone other than the supremacy of the sovereign — in other words, the Queen. Right now, sovereignty has been delegated to Parliament, and the Queen retains only a ceremonial role. But because the Parliament is sovereign, it is free to pass any law it wishes. No rights are absolute, no system is set in stone. There is no first amendment guarantee to free speech. And even though Britain is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, that piece of legislation is phrased so that governments can curtail rights for the “greater good”.

Some legal flexibility can be good. British society has been remarkably free and remarkably stable, certainly in contrast to many other nations. But let’s be honest: authoritarianism can blight any nation. We shouldn’t be complacent to that threat.

And the overarching and striking problem with this authoritarian creep is mostly that it is a waste of money. As I wrote last week terrorism and civil disorder and the expression of unpopular opinions (and all of the things that this authoritarianism is supposed to quell) is of minimal threat to the West (and of course the expression of unpopular opinions is largely beneficial). More people are killed by being crushed by furniture than by terrorism. While trillions are spent on homeland security and the “liberation” of foreign lands, domestic infrastructure is neglected, and businesses and workers lose out as they pay in taxes for the expenses of large authoritarian interventionist government. CCTV has little effect on crime.

And certainly, the social effects of authoritarian creep may be huge. How many legitimate criticisms of the government will go unpublished due to fear of censorship or monitoring? How many people will spend time in jail — and face life with a criminal record — just for expressing an opinion? How many innocent people will spend time in jail as a result of monitoring mistakes or misinterpretations? How many good businesses and ideas will not receive funding due to productive capital being redirected to the government coffers to pay for authoritarian interventionism? How many people will waste their productivity working as government snoops when instead they could be deploying their minds and skills in creating valuable products and services that would improve our economy?

But above all, what would George Orwell think? Big brother is watching and recording us all. Every time we go online, we display our thoughts, our interests, our desires, our curiosities, our sexual preferences, our politics. All of these things are recorded by the state — a state which seems to have no problem with locking people up for expressing unpopular opinions.

Orwell understood that that was a peril to everything — our homes, our lives, our rights, our society, our economy and the very fabric of our existence.

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Why I Love and Hate Apple

Yes, by pressing alt+shift+k on my Macbook Pro, I can write the Apple © logo. This is surely the only company in the world whose logo is a unicode character. According to the Guardian, Apple’s brand is now the world’s most valuable on Earth. While I am highly sceptical of such rankings, Apple recently became the second most valuable company in the world, and has a larger pile of cash than the US Treasury, and its brand plays a huge role in driving sales.

So why hate on success? Well, I don’t. I use Apple products every day.

My first Apple purchase was this:

A 2003 15GB iPod: beautiful, minimalist and functional. Nothing Apple has produced or designed since has quite lived up to the sheer, stark beauty of the 2003 iPod. Prior to that, I remember using Apple products and feeling baffled and wrong-footed. There was no way to right-click, I thought. The circular iMac mouse felt clunky and unintuitive. The interface felt strange, unfamiliar and cloudy. All of these thoughts melted away when I got a 2006 CoreDuo 15″ Macbook Pro with Logic Express:
I still have it; the Logic board burnt out after four years, and it no longer turns on. But it was the thing that has since left me a Mac-only user. I am locked in: my music software of choice is Mac-only, and I am deeply familiar with the interface. Mac and Windows do not really compete with each other: they are both monopolies catering to separate audiences with a small overlap. If I want to use Logic Pro, or GarageBand, or FaceTime, or Mac OS X, then I have to use Apple’s hardware. Switching over would require me to ditch my work-flow, purchase an expensive batch of new programs, and spend years learning them in depth, and simply the premium I have to pay for Mac hardware is not enough to make me consider that. But the thing that really makes me uncomfortable about Apple is its cultlike following, and the way in which Apple cultivates this. The cult wail:

“But Apple just works! It never crashes or gets viruses!”

Well, that’s a steaming pile of horseshit. Yesterday my iPad crashed twice, and I’ve had innumerable software faults, kernel panics and hardware failures. Apple is a computer company like any other; they use the same basic hardware, the same processors, the same memory manufactured in the Far East by the same near-slave-labour-camps at Foxconn. Being part of the evangelical cult of Apple is bad for your philosophy, bad for your individuality, and bad for your bank balance. The manner in which Apple controls the user experience smacks of techno-fascism. True, I am not being prevented from typing this screed into my Macbook Pro (although Apple its customers movements through their iPhones). But what if I want to use Adobe’s Flash on my iPad? No, says Apple. What if I write an App that Apple finds objectionable? No, says Apple. What if I want to upgrade to OSX Lion via DVD, as I have done for Leopard and Snow Leopard? No, says Apple. What if I want to record a video of a concert on my iPhone? Apple has software that can prevent that. There are many more examples. But the highly addictive OS X and iOS user experience keeps customers rolling in, and coming back for more. John Naughton° wrote last year:

In Stephen Fry’s words: “No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects.”

Which is where I begin to think of Aldous Huxley and Soma, the hallucinogenic, hangover-free drug in Brave New World that makes users contented with their (subjugated) lot.

Apple has a more sinister side still in the way it treats its (non-unionized) Apple Store employees‡:

Workers at Apple’s tech support ‘Genius Bars’ are not allowed to use the word ‘unfortunately’ to customers as it is considered to have negative connotations.

Instead they are encouraged to use phrases like “as it turns out.”

One former employee interviewed by the WSJ says that he was forbidden from correcting customers when they mispronounced the names of Apple products.

The notion of well-oiled blue-shirted brigades of lanyard-wielding corporate minions dancing, speaking and thinking in line to the beck and call of Steve Jobs goes beyond running an efficient operation. It’s obsessive-compulsive, and downright creepy. In my view, the sooner a competitor arises that delivers minimalist, solid and sleek computers at a similar price and without all this peculiar control-freakery, without the backdoor surveillance, and without the cultlike undertones, the better. I will jump ship as soon as I possibly can. But right now? Apple has no real competitors.

° http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/31/ipad-review-comments-naughton
‡ http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/apple-store-employee-secrets-revealed-966556