This Can't Be Happening!

All is abuzz and atwitter (literally) with news of the firing Friday by America On Line’s boss Tim Armstrong of half of the staff of its local news project, Patch. The firing comes on the heels of Armstrong’s humiliating dismissal of one of AOL’s top executives during an August 9 phone call to 1000 Patch staffers.

All this AOL news in one painful week! It certainly says a lot about how Internet corporate execs’ view their workers, but the more important story is how they view the Internet. How could a major technology company like AOL so deeply misread the culture and the irreversible changes that have taken place in news coverage and how reflective is that of the corporate Internet? Important as it is, that issue has gone largely unreported.

The “incident”, on the other hand, has been reported ad nauseum. It happened two Fridays ago (August 9). Armstrong was running a major meeting for staff members working on “Patch”, AOL’s four year old “localized news” web system. About 1000 people were on the call. In the first few minutes of the call, Amstrong suddenly said “Abel, put that camera down right now! Abel, you’re fired. Out!” He was speaking to Abel Lenz, the creative director at Patch and other AOL news websites. (You can listen to this on a leaked audio from Jim Romensko.)

The Photo That Sparked a Firing — Armstrong at the Fateful Meeting

Lenz’s sin? He shot a photo of Armstrong at the meeting–something he would routinely do for distribution to Patch sites. Armstrong, in a subsequent quasi-apology letter, said he had over-reacted but that he had warned Lenz about photos and videos in the past and Lenz just kept on shooting so he fired him…in front of 1000 people.

Last Friday, Armstrong acted more politely but much more painfully. AOL separated Patch staffers into two rooms: one for employees who would be retained and the other for those being fired. Remote staff were given a dial-in number to their appropriate room. Armstrong then addressed each, firing about 350 in one room and telling those in the other room that their jobs (and local news sites) were safe for now but things had to improve or there may be more down-sizing. In fact, sources at AOL are sure that at least 150 more people will soon lose their jobs.

There’s much speculation about why Armstrong would hold one meeting to threaten cuts and then another a week later to specify the cuts. But, as important as that is for those who lost their jobs, and probably for the bunch who have momentarily kept them, there is a more important question for the rest of us: Why in the world would a collossus like AOL go against the tide in news coverage that we are all witnessing — the rise of blogs and participatory journalism — by investing a reported $60 million in a service that started failing the moment it went live?

 
Watching the White House squirm over the on-going massacres in Egypt one doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or resort to the vaudevillian method and throw rotten vegetables at them.

President Obama’s “condemnation” of the Egyptian military’s massacre of civilians sounded like obligatory ass-covering. Then there was the slippery boiler-plate verbiage spouted by the White House’s new spokesman with the wonderfully apropos name of Josh Earnest. I wouldn’t josh you, that’s his name. And trust me, he’s the personification of earnestness.

The sense of absurdity in the air takes one back to the halcyon days of Richard Nixon and his “credibility gap,” which now seems like child’s play. Incredibly, even John McCain has a more critical analysis of the Egyptian coup.

Josh Earnest, John Kerry and Barack Obama

It’s a real low point in the Obama presidency. They no doubt have the capacity to go lower, but the President golfing and cocktail partying with rich corporate donors on Martha’s Vineyard while the Egyptian military shoots over 1000 citizens to death in the street is pretty bad.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry has been shuttling around the world trying to make everyone believe night is day and, somehow, a deal between a settlement-focused Israel and a sovereign Palestine is possible. These days Kerry sounds like the man who ate the canary spouting optimistic sound bites as he spits out little yellow pin feathers.

There was an old 1978 Saturday Night Live skit that hit dangerously close to the truth about how modern US society deals with those it fears. Steve Martin, playing a 12th century judge, Theodoric of York, is confronted with the case of a woman, Lorraine Newman, charged with being a witch. With the townsfolk calling for her to be burned at the stake for “consorting with the devil,” he says the only way to determine her guilt or innocence is to put her in the “trough of justice” — a deep vat of water into which her bound body will be cast. Theodoric advises the woman that she has “nothing to fear” since if she is guilty her body will float, rejected by the waters of justice, but if she’s innocent she will sink. When her body sinks, leaving just a few rising bubbles which indicate she has drowned, Theodoric announces: “Ah! Not guilty!” Leaving her in the tank, he then moves on to the next case.

The trial of Pvt. Bradley manning has far too much in common with this skit to be funny. Manning, a young man of principle who said he had decided to release hundreds of thousands of documents exposing the true brutal nature of the US war on Iraq and the so-called war on terror, as well as the self-serving crudeness and imperial corruption of US global diplomacy, stood accused in a military court of hugely inflated “crimes,” including causing death and injury of American troops, aiding the enemy, harming America, and treason. The judge, Col. Denise Lind, proved to be an even a more ludicrous mockery of justice than Martin’s Theodoric of York. Blatantly promised a big promotion by the Obama Pentagon as an inducement to assure her reaching a guilty verdict against Manning, she assured that the trial was conducted largely in secret, and denied all efforts by the defense to have Manning freed based on the year he spent being tortured and held without charge by his military captors in what was a transparent effort to get him to cut a deal blaming his document release on the organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.

In the end, Manning was tossed into the trough of justice and found duly guilty of all but the most specious and overblown charge of “aiding the enemy,” and was left to face a possible 90 years in jail which, for a 26-year-old man, would be a life sentence.

Okay, I admit it. I helped my father last year to die quicker in a Connecticut rehab center, and I was also witness to an assisted suicide in New York.

It’s time that we put this stuff out in the open and stopped the brutal prosecutorial nonsense around this issue.

As I write this, Barbara Mancini, a 57-year-old nurse here in the punishment state of Pennsylvania, has been charged with a serious felony, and is facing up to 10 years in jail because she put the morphine prescription for Joseph Yourshaw, her dying 93-year-old father, who was in home hospice care but in pain from terminal diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease, into his hands as he requested, so he could terminate his life.

Her father, a decorated WWII veteran, had expressed a desire to end his life at home and to receive no further medical intervention. He understood that he could do that by taking too many doses of morphine, and his daughter gave him the opportunity to make it happen. Unfortunately, the hospice nurse arrived at the home after he had done so, was informed of the action by Mancini, and called 911. Against his earlier stated wishes, Yourshaw was hauled off, comatose, to the hospital, where he was subjected to the medical establishment’s most strenuous efforts to perversely prolong his doomed life, and he died four days later just where he didn’t want to be: hooked up to life support in a hospital bed.

Then, piling on, the prosecutors stepped in, and went after Mancini.

Don’t they have anything better to do?

So back to my father and that New York assisted suicide.

Great News! After three years stuck on computer screens, ThisCantBeHappening! has been refigured to both load faster, and to be viewed on smartphone screens.

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If you’re not a subscriber, send us your email (we have a secure list, except of course for the NSA, over which we have no control, sadly, and will never share or sell your information). You’ll get an email (no attachments ever), with a link to click that will bring you straight to the latest story posted.

ThisCantBeHappening! It IS happening.
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The term “collateral damage” is most frequently applied to the “non-targeted” death and destruction brought by bombs and guns. But it seems that our government, the master of collateral damage, is now doing it in “non-violent” ways. Take the recent situation at Lavabit.

The Texas-based email provider, specializing in encrypted email services, announced Thursday that it’s immediately suspending its services. The crux of the issue is obliquely revealed in the statement by Lavabit’s founder and owner Ladar Levison: “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.”

Lavabit's Home Page Before the Suspension
 

Most of us can’t be sure what forced Levison’s hand but the content and cryptic nature of his explanation speaks volumes. “As things currently stand,” he wrote, “I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.”

One of Lavabit’s 350,000 users is Edward Snowdon and, given the frenzied attacks against and investigations of this renowned whistle-blower, it’s pretty clear what happened. “Reading between the lines,” Wired’s Kevin Poulsen writes, “it’s reasonable to assume Levison has been fighting either a National Security Letter seeking customer information — which comes by default with a gag order — or a full-blown search or eavesdropping warrant.”

If that’s the case and LavaBit doesn’t give up what’s being demanded (probably Snowdown emails) Levison faces harsh criminal penalties. If he does give them up he contradicts the very purpose the provider was founded for in the first place and that would probably spell LavaBit’s death. It’s like forcing someone to play Russian Roulette with bullets in all the chambers. Except that one of those bullets is also aimed at our privacy and our ability to use the Internet the way it was intended.

Not only is this a significant and sobering expansion of the government’s attack on secure Internet communications; it also shows the complete disdain the Obama Administration has for people’s privacy, specifically in this case the 350,000 Lavabit users who now have no secure email service.

Like an obnoxious drunk harassing everyone and spilling drinks at a party, the US has continued to make itself both loathed and laughed at in the wake of the revelations about the National Security Agency’s global spying program as revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

The latest example of this was the report in Germany last week that the US had been massively spying on millions of German people based upon a tortured interpretation of a secret Cold War-era agreement foisted upon the then Bundesrepublik back in the early 1960s. That agreement gave the US and Britain the authority to surveil Soviet and East German spying activities inside what was commonly referred to as West Germany, and also to conduct spying operations to “protect” US troops based there. Obviously, spying on Soviet and East German spies is a far different thing from spying on Germans themselves, and clearly the Cold War is long gone. As for spying on Germans who might threaten the bases, that clearly could have been handled by police in Germany, and in any even would only involve a small and discrete program, not the monitoring of millions people’s electronic communications.

Angela Merkel, the conservative German Chancellor whose governing coalition is facing a critical national election in a few weeks, and who has been taking a lot of heat from Germans over disclosures that her government knew all along about the American spying program, has been trying to look proactive, and so the her government announced that it was canceling the spying agreement and ordering a halt to the NSA’s spying activities in the country.

The US response: nothing public, but unidentified “sources” in the US government made it clear that, agreement or no agreement, the NSA’s spying would continue (a German government official also stated that the supposed termination of the secret Cold War agreement would have “little effect” on continued spying by the US in Germany).
I'm Uncle Sham and I want YOU to forsh Evo Moraleshs' plane to land!

Every generation occupies itself with interpreting Trickster anew.

-Paul Radin
 

 

America 2013 is a far cry from the days of Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death!”) and even the days of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. It’s a brave new world 30 years beyond Orwell’s imagined dystopia 1984 .

While we may have had the cathode ray tube then, the technology of the 1960s and 1970s had more in common with the slowness of media in the 18th century than it does with today’s media/surveillance reality. Daniel Ellsberg could not have imagined the internet and that a war could be entirely managed and operated within the confines of an alternate cyber universe. One of the first visions of today’s internet reality was notably published in 1984: William Gibson’s sci-fi classic Neuromancer.

Within this mind-boggling, ever-growing maze, it’s interesting to inject the time-honored archetype of the trickster, famous as edgy and playful figures in Norse and Native American myth. Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, puts it this way: “If the confidence man is one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers, then instead of saying there are no modern tricksters one could argue the opposite: trickster is everywhere.” Caveat emptor — buyer beware.

We’re now told any technology operating with a computer chip can be hacked into and controlled from a remote spot — including cars. My reaction to that is: You gotta be kidding! We’re also informed there exists 300 types of drones, which are flying robots able to do things most of us can’t even imagine. Our soldiers (oops, I mean warriors) will soon be equipped with on-board computer glasses linked to command and intelligence support elements — that is, they’ll be armed humans a hiccup away from the cyborgs of science fiction.

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A smart young veteran who had the identical job as Bradley Manning in Iraq once told me — a tech-ignorant, flesh-and-blood Vietnam veteran — the entire war in Iraq was recorded and tracked in cyberspace on the internet. “The whole war is secret!” he told me with an amazed chuckle.

It’s clear to many Americans the combination of post-911 fear, the militarization of sophisticated technology and a runaway regime of secrecy has led to a dangerous condition of permanent war in which our military is outrunning the capacity for responsible democratic decision-making. As outgoing President Eisenhower warned in 1961, the Military-Industrial Complex is now running the show, and the idea of citizen-based democracy is a feel-good myth incessantly flogged with the tools of Public Relations. Real democracy cannot exist in such a context.

The fact is, our military and its powerful civilian supporters deal with the American public and the rest of the world in two very distinct modes: Secrecy or Public Relations. Serious journalists and their critical sources — ie. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden — work the no-man’s-land between these two distinct modes. We have now reached the point the government is seriously gunning for those working in this no-man’s-land.

BREAKING!: It could well be that the harsh pretrial treatment of Bradley Manning and the harsh verdict handed down against him Tuesday may have been what convinced Russian authorities of the validity of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s appeal for asylum, which his Russian attorney and his father have both now announced has been granted this morning. (Snowden in his application asserted that he cannot hope to receive a fair trial in the US, where Washington leaders have been publicly calling him a traitor and have been clamoring for harsh punishment, and where even the president has condemned him as a “hacker,” instead of a whistleblower who exposed the nation’s ubiquitous spying on all electronic communications of all Americans in wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution). Snowden has reportedly left the Moscow airport where he had been stranded by US revocation of his passport, and has entered Moscow as a political refugee from US state terror.
 

ALSO BREAKING The Obama administration and leaders in Congress are behaving like spoiled brats over Russia’s principled stand in granting Snowden political asylum. Their impotent raging is pathetic and must have the rest of the world wondering whether the US is a actually a great power at all. The White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who is the official voice of President Obama, said that the Russian decision “undermined” law enforcement cooperation between the two countries — a silly claim since Russia is simply following international law on asylum and has no extradition agreement with the US. In fact, it is the US which has been violating international law by doing such things as forcing down a presidential aircraft carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales in a clumsy attempt to capture Snowden, whom the US believed, wrongly, to be on the plane. As we wrote earlier, one reason Snowden got asylum was because he convincingly argued that he could be tortured by the US if he were returned here, a true claim that led US Attorney General Eric Holder to send a letter to Russian authorities promising “not to turture” Snowden if they sent him back (a promise no one believes, since the US these days claims things like waterboarding, lengthy solitary confinement, lengthy periods of sensory deprivation and wall slamming are not “torture”). Sen. John McCain, who almost became president running against Obama in 2008, blustered that Russia’s decision was a “slap in the face” to all Americans, though actually a majority of Americans are sympathetic to Snowden and think his leak exposing the unprecedented NSA spying on them was a good act. Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York State’s senior senator, called for cancellation of the G-20 summit set to be hosted by Russia because of the decision — surely the most absurd of demands, since most other leaders in the group would go anyway, making the US look even more childish. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, who really appears to have lost his wits these days, called the decision a “game changer” in US-Russian relations, and said it showed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lack of respect for President Obama. But then, Republicans like Graham have been doing that for five years now, and polls show that most Americans don’t respect the US president much either.
 

The New York Times, in an editorial published the day after a military judge found Pvt. Bradley Manning “not guilty” of “aiding the enemy” — a charge that would have locked him up for life without possibility of parole and could have carried the death penalty — but also found him guilty on multiple counts of “espionage,” called the verdict (not guilty of aiding the enemy, guilty of espionage) “Mixed.”

The Times editorial writers were as mixed up as the judge, though.

Challenging fascism and the national security state: Bradley Manning, Aaron Swarz and Edward Snowden

The Bradley Manning verdict may seem a victory of sorts for the defense — it’s certainly being treated that way in the mainstream media — but the decision handed down Tuesday by Court Marshal Judge Colonel Denise Lind is actually a devastating blow not only to Manning, who was convicted of unjustifiably serious charges brought by an aggressive administration seeking to make an example of him, but also to Internet activity in general and information-sharing in particular.

Judge Lind found the young Army private not guilty of the most serious charge he faced: “aiding the enemy”. But it was the most serious because he could have faced life imprisonment as a result. Now he faces a sentencing hearing on 17 charges of which he was convicted.

Much of the media reaction reflected relief:

“We won the battle, now we need to go win the war,” Manning’s trial lawyer David Coombs told a press conference. “Today is a good day, but Bradley is by no means out of the fire.”

Or as Marcy Wheeler wrote in Salon: “But the big news — and very good news — is that Manning is innocent of the aiding the enemy charge. That ruling averted a potentially catastrophic effect on freedom of speech in this country.”

Defendant, Trial and the Infamous Video
(image courtesy of the Bradley Manning Support Network)
 

The relief may be misguided. We have not averted a catastrophe; we have experienced one. Manning’s convictions include five counts of “espionage” under the 1917 Espionage Act and therein lies the poison. The logic of that espionage finding means that any of us could potentially be convicted of the very same crime if we were to publish anything on the Internet that the government considers “dangerous” to its functioning or activities.

Hand in hand with the recently-revealed system of surveillance that effectively models a police state, this verdict is spectacularly pernicious.