The current spate of stories about Russian agents or organized crime, if there is a need for a conjunction, WikiLeaks, the bottle-blonde Aussie punk in the Ecuadorian embassy, etc. doesn't seem to have made much of an impression on people about the fact that absolute privacy on the internet is a delusion. If the DNC can be hacked, if the government can be hacked, you certainly can be. I'm pretty sure I've been hacked, even with one of the better lesser known malware systems on my computers, I've become aware that someone got into one of them in the past. So I don't use my computer for anything I wouldn't want my real-world self to be associated with.
I understand that Oliver Stone is selling a movie about Edward Snowden, I probably won't watch it but I've read a few articles about it. Stone, like everyone who pimps himself in the big-time movie industry, is looking for something that will get him fame, money and opportunity, using the legend of Edward Snowden as interpreted by the man Snowden made even more semi-famous, Glenn Greenwald and, wouldn't you know, Snowden's version of himself as the basis for it.
Somehow I have doubts that the thing will be the "bio pic" or the substitute for objective reporting or scholarship that it will be considered in the minds of even the college educated viewership it will likely get. The abject failure to combat the suckering of the TV-movie mis-educated public, making them critical instead of passive consumers of propaganda is one of the reasons allowing those media to lie is so stupid and dangerous.
One of the articles I saw was about how Stone pushed his movie at Comic-Con, he wants to get in touch with the youth market. You would think that age cohort, who have been the most indoctrinated in the make-believe as reality nonsense, would be those most in need of a huge jolt of the reality that the idea their online communications can be reliably believed to be secure and private, though they live in the reality that they can't be, every day. Yet they are buying the basic premise of Greenwald, Snowden, and now Stone that they can be. Considering the second of those worked for the NSA, presented as being in the business of violating privacy, the very substance of what all three are peddling and that he violated the secrecy, or PRIVACY, if you will of the operation he was working for by stealing huge amounts of that collected "private" material and took it, first to China and then to Russia, two of the worst and most capable governments in doing exactly what Snowden, Greenwald and Stone claim to be against.
If anyone doesn't think that Edward Snowden didn't likely trade not being extradited to the United States by either of those governments by giving them the information he carried with him, they are too stupid to be taken seriously by anyone. The United States government certainly had things they could have traded to either government in exchange for Snowden that Snowden would have had to have topped in any attempt to prevent them sending him back. The only thing he had was the very private material that he had stolen, the very stuff that we are supposed to believe he is concerned that the NSA was collecting.
That Edward Snowden ISN'T IN AN AMERICAN PRISON is best explained by him buying his way out of that by giving China and the Putin government what he had to trade. I am pretty confident that him taking it on the lam with him to Hong Kong instead of some other place would lead a rational person to believe he intended to sell it to make a lot of money. Only he was too stupid to not get caught by Chinese intelligence. The Chinese are very good at that kind of thing, you'd think he'd have known that. I doubt that any of that was among the things Oliver Stone asked about when he met with Snowden in Russia. Nothing about that has been mentioned in any of the articles I've read about the movie. I wouldn't be surprised if none of that possibility even occurred to him as a possibility, he'd have been too busy thinking about how he could alter the story to make it more sellable. I can't understand how anyone who is so daddled with the story as told by the entirely self-interested Greenwald, Snowden and now Stone, couldn't have asked those questions, though I have yet to see anyone consider what the travels of Edward Snowden mean.
Edward Snowden should certainly be considered a property of the Putin regime and its agent now. That would be the Putin regime which has murdered journalists, opponents, destroyed freedom of speech and freedom of the press in ways that only the most paranoid of movie treatments could imagine happening here. Yet this is the kind of stuff that is being inserted into an election year by a director on the make, a year in which it is becoming ever more obvious that Donald Trump is in bed with if not owned by the same kleptocratic Russian oligarchy headed by the big KGB guy. Now, that's stuff they'd never believe if you put it in a movie and tied the loose ends together with story telling.
The mixture of show biz with politics is really bad and has had really bad consequences. Ronald Reagan was sold to the American people by Hollywood and the right-wing establishment that really owns it. Donald Trump is its creation. No one who is trying to sell themselves and make a lot of money by making a movie should be considered reliable, their phonied up history - especially as told by the criminals who have every reason to lie - is a delusion which is destructive of democracy. Oliver Stone is no exception to that. Pretending that story telling is the same thing as rigorous reporting is just another marketing gimmick, it's all all of it is, marketing. Marketing movies, marketing stories, marketing self-serving narratives, not infrequently criminals and white collar thugs peddling them. In short, movies are full of lies that are sold with marketing designed to gull the most people. In the mean time, reality remains real and the acids of it steadily wear away at the democracy that depends on The People, the very People who are those marketed to, knowing the truth that will make them free.
My favorite part of this "invasion of privacy" is that now, it's whose privacy is invaded.
ReplyDeleteIf it's not mine, it's cool, especially if you can provide me with some salacious gossip material.
What has Wikileaks revealed, except the ease with which digital information can be in anyone's hands? The biggest reveal of the Democratic Party hack so far, is how stupidly people put things in e-mails. I learned long ago (and I have to observe the rule, much of my communication with students and my bosses is by e-mail) not to put anything in an e-mail you don't want to see on a billboard. Not because I fear Russian hackers or Wikileaks will raid my school's servers, but because e-mail is forever and can be given to anyone, and we have no presumption of privacy in it.
Remember when mail meant letters and envelopes, and revealing a letter you'd received from someone else was a scandal, not for the sender, but for the recipient? Nowadays, if the e-mail is of sufficient (usually prurient, somehow) interest, who cares that you "leaked" it? It's all about us, the audience!
Watergate was a scandal because of the burglary, the cover-up, and the crime of wiretapping offices to gain information illicitly. Now we don't need burglars and microphones, just internet access. And now the crime is not the hack, but statements revealed by the hack. In that way, Assange has already won. Rather than labeling him a thief and abetter of destroying privacy, we praise him, or at least abide him.
Because he isn't violating OUR privacy. Thus does technology increase and amplify our balkanization. No one is above reproach but me and thee, and I'm not so sure about thee.
This is a much graver danger to social order than Black Lives Matter or angry Trump supporters.
I can't understand how anyone could look at this issue without understanding that Snowden stole the very stuff and distributed it to Greenwald, Poitras and the large number of whoever they are calling jounralists who they passed it on to and, beyond rational doubt, the Chinese and Russian governments - and they're concerned with the United States government, the only entity involved, which has legal restraints on its use or distribution of that information - whatever it is.
ReplyDeleteI still remember from when the story came out hearing an FBI agent saying how useful it would be to them to collect just facial images from the internet in order to be able to come up with an image of criminals and likely criminals but they couldn't do it because the law didn't allow them to, if I'm remembering correctly. I also remember the woman, the personal security expert, who said that if you wanted to have your best assurance of privacy and security of information, the MOST SECURE means of transferring it was the U.S. mail because the government would need to go to court to get the information. Somehow, I doubt that the Chinese or Russian mail systems could be considered so secure, not to mention internet based mail, which goes through who knows what servers in what countries with what legal protections or protection from non-government organized crime.
With all of the problems we have had with governments in the United States violating laws, the fact is it is far less bad than many other governments, some of them complaining about what the likes of Greenwald revealed about the United States collecting information about it, Greenwald's adopted home country, Brazil, for example. Yet we're supposed to be more afraid of it than a place like Russia, where organized crime melds seamlessly with the government or China which is not much less bad. That's the kind of thing you get when people mistake Hollywood thrillers for reality.