I was doing some house-cleaning on my computer and various online accounts, and I found a little gem which I’d like to share. This is a message which I sent off to the State of Washington Attorney General on 14.12.2010. No, not this Rob McKenna, the other one.
Dear Mr McKenna,
As you are probably aware, WikiLeaks — the not-for-profit whistleblower media organisation — and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange have together created an enormous degree of turmoil in the world, and the United States.
What is your stance on this matter?
Thank you for your time,
–Andrew McInnes
My tone was purposefully neutral, because I wanted to see how the AG would react. It is a well-established trait, that people will ‘read’ their own opinions into a suitably receptive text. The plan worked swimmingly. Mr McKenna bit, hook line and sinker.
Dear Mr. McInnes,
I received your email of December 14 regarding the WikiLeaks release of thousands of sensitive United States diplomatic documents. This release poses a serious threat to our country’s foreign policy interests and could significantly impact our alliances and collaborative relationships in the international community. I am pleased that President Obama has ordered a complete criminal investigation of this matter, as well as a broad review of the guidelines for handling classified information. I understand that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also ordered new security measures to protect against this type of security breach in the future.
I would also encourage you to contact your Congressional representatives to let your concerns be known, since this is a federal issue outside of the State Attorney General’s jurisdiction. You can find contact information at [redacted because I don’t care]. Simply enter your address and click the button for “Congressional” for “District Type.”
Thank you for contacting the Attorney General’s Office.
Sincerely,
Rob McKenna
Attorney General
Now, in backhanded fairness, this is before the news broke that Pfc Bradley Manning is being tortured. Still, it’s an insight into an unsubtle mind. Mr McKenna is in the “WikiLeaks is illegal, let’s find out how!” camp, in line with Secretary Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and my delightful Senators, amongst others. His opinion is representative of the majority of state and federal officials, although his frankness assures him of never rising above the level of state politics.
Compare Mr McKenna’s relatively straight-forward language to the slimy non-committal blather of these other government officials, when asked the same question, via emails sent on the same day.
Senator Maria Cantwell, 21.01.2011:
Thank you for contacting me regarding the publication of classified Afghanistan war documents by the website WikiLeaks. I appreciate hearing from you on this matter.
As you may know, the website WikiLeaks published over 70,000 classified documents relating to the ongoing war in Afghanistan on July 25th and are currently reviewing an additional 15,000 that they are expected to release soon. I am a strong defender of the First Amendment and the freedom of the press; however, we must ensure that the release of these documents does not in any way pose a threat to our brave men and women currently fighting in Afghanistan. Please know that I am monitoring this situation and will keep your thoughts in mind should any legislation come before the United States Senate.
Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. You may also be interested in signing up for periodic updates for Washington State residents. If you are interested in subscribing to this update, please visit my website at [redacted for my sense of self-worth]. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance.
Senator Patty Murray, 07.02.2011:
Thank you for contacting me regarding the recent activities by the WikiLeaks Website. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.
As you may know, WikiLeaks is an online organization that characterizes itself as a whistle blower and disclosure Website. WikiLeaks has released numerous documents, most recently publishing classified documents and diplomatic cables.
As a U.S. Senator, I am supportive of efforts to responsibly cast light on inappropriate and illegal behavior by government or corporate entities. Our democracy is made stronger by having individuals report improper behavior or practices that they see to the proper authorities. I am, however, troubled by the indiscriminate release of certain sensitive and classified documents by WikiLeaks. For example, despite pleas and warnings to withhold the names of Afghan translators and assistants, WikiLeaks chose to release that information and put the lives of service members of the United States and our allies at risk. Instead of helping our democracy by casting light on improper behavior, this action puts our country more at risk for threats and violence in the future.
Please know that as the Senate considers issues related to WikiLeaks, I will keep your concerns in mind. If you would like to know more about my work in the Senate, please feel free to sign up for my weekly updates at [redacted for my sanity].
Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me.
I don’t know about you, but they don’t have my vote just based upon mealy-mouthed non-opinions. WikiLeaks is the biggest revelations in the history of diplomacy; the least ‘my’ very slimy senators could do is actually take a stand. History treats winners with grandiose worship , losers with bemused condescension, and waffling wannabe populists with a footnote of contempt.
To paraphrase Martin Luthor, if you are to come down on the wrong side of history, do so boldly.
Moving on from those two, I’d like to pass along the responses of two Representatives, the last one being ‘my’ Representative, the embalmed toad himself.
Representative Jay Inslee, 07.02.2011:
Thank you for contacting me regarding leaks of classified information. I appreciate hearing from you.
Like you, I am concerned whenever sensitive or classified information that may compromise our national security is leaked to the public. Regarding the information published by the Wikileaks organization, the Obama Administration is prosecuting multiple parties involved in the leak of over 70,000 pages of information related to U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Pfc. Bradley Manning has been arrested and charged with unauthorized disclosure of classified information and the Wikileaks organization is being charged with encouraging Pfc. Manning to break the law. I will keep your thoughts in mind as the judicial process moves forward.
Please continue to contact me about the issues that concern you, as I both need and welcome your thoughts and ideas. Because security measures in the House cause delays in receiving postal mail, I encourage you to contact me by telephone, by fax, or through my website at [redacted to preserve my immortal soul]. For more information on my activities in Congress, and for information on services that my office can provide, please visit my website at [why god why did he have to give it twice?].
Representative Norm Dicks, 14.12.2010:
Thank you for providing your views on the recently released diplomatic cables of the U.S. State Department from the website Wikileaks. I appreciate hearing from you.
During more than 30 years in Congress I have had the opportunity to hear from my constituents on matters that concern them. It is because my constituents share these concerns that I am able to carry out the duties for which I am elected. I am very proud to be your Representative from the Sixth District of Washington State.
I understand the concerns you mentioned. I value the Freedom of Speech that is enabled and protected by our Constitution and will do my utmost to ensure that the ability of individual citizens to exercise that right is kept sacrosanct. However, the disclosure of unauthorized, classified information is a violation of our country’s laws and a danger to our national security.
Be assured I will keep your comments in mind as the 112th Congress holds hearings and meets with senior military leaders. Please feel free to contact me on any further issues of concern to you.
The eerie similarity of all these responses does nothing to comfort me, whilst I worry about whether or not ‘my’ government is actually listening to me. All these esteemed politicians, with their handsome salaries and probably oversized staffs, leapt to the conclusion I had given them my “thoughts” or “comments”. Obviously I hadn’t: if it weren’t for my pro-WikiLeaks axe-grinding all across this blog, I would be willing to bet a person would read my message according to their own feelings about WikiLeaks. They were all only seeing what they wanted to see, which is obviously that WikiLeaks is very, very naughty, and I thought so, too.
An arch, but fair, reply to that would be ‘what did you expect?’ To repeat, if you are to come down on the side of history, at least do so boldly. History loves a glorious, outspoken idiot almost as much as it loves a successful general, after all.
This I think can be tied into what I wrote about in this post. To summarise quickly, Pandora’s Box (aka Barrgate, HBGary emails, et cetera) shows that the US government is living in an alternate reality, wherein the USG is ahead of every trend and successfully managing every emergent ‘threat’ before it even coalesces. This is, as I argued, complete hogwash, but that does not stop the government and its incestuous corporate snuggle-buddies from absolutely believing all that is true.
A similar situation, I posit, is ongoing with WikiLeaks. That is the only reason why really strong stances aren’t being taken by these members of Congress. Yes, aggressive actions have been taken against WikiLeaks, but much to Sarah Palin’s chagrin, the USG is not, in fact, hunting down WikiLeaks like a terrorist organisation. Considering the USG is perfectly happy to invade countries based upon ‘evidence’ manufactured to legitimise the occasion, if WikiLeaks had been seen as a real threat, it would have received an airstrike.
So, I would suggest that WikiLeaks isn’t a big deal, as far as the US government is concerned. The institution literally does not see how WikiLeaks has already ensured the demise of the US government. Presumably this is why HBGary, along with partners Hunton & Williams, Palantir Technologies, and Berico Technologies all conspired to create a plan to deal with ‘the WikiLeaks threat’. The slightly less stupid section of the USG/corporate complex, represented conveniently by HBGary, had a funny feeling that something might be wrong somehow, and that WikiLeaks was definitely the crux of the matter.
Too little, too late. It does not matter whether or not these people are aware of history being in the making, nor that they will not be the lauded party. The events have already been set in motion, and there is nothing which can be done to stop what has begun: WikiLeaks is more than just releasing dribs and drabs of inconvenient or ‘sensitive’ information. It has already revolutionised the information world, because the idea of WikiLeaks can never be de-invented. Not understanding and respecting that simple fact dooms those people and organisations to coming down on the wrong side of history.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Letters from a Broken Country 
Robyn Banx
18/02/2011
Good of you to mention the impossibility of de-invention; an important concept which seems to get little press.
I first encountered it in some work by Robert Romanyshyn – “Technology As Symptom And Dream.”
And, quote: “The slightly less stupid section of the USG/corporate complex, represented conveniently by HBGary, had
a funny feeling that something might be wrong somehow, and that WikiLeaks was definitely the crux of the matter.”
Let’s not forget the crucial role seen to be played by Glenn Greenwald and with Glenn out of the way, “….wikileaks would fold….”
What we have here ladies and gentlemen, is a textbook case of weapons-grade stupidity, a level of intelligence so low, that it can cause serious harm to anyone coming into contact with it.
As for your banishment from facebook, I think you should take it as a compliment.
I checked it out last year for a couple of weeks but soon booed it off the stage.
Andrew McInnes
18/02/2011
Hi Robyn,
Thank you for your kind words, and your recommendation. I’ll see if my — rather sad — local library has that book, as I am always very interested in different perspectives on the impact of technology on the human condition. As a suggestion in return on this topic, I like Gilbert Chesterton and George Grant.
Now, I must say that “weapons-grade stupidity” is inspired genius! May I use that phrase in the future?
I definitely take getting e-assassinated as a very big compliment. There’s nothing quite like being axed to show I’m probably saying good stuff, and definitely pissing the right people off.
Where did you get booed off of the stage, and what were you saying?
Best to you, and thank you for your comment!
–Andrew
Robyn Banx
18/02/2011
Andrew – you are welcome to W-GS (Weapons-Grade Stupidity). I think I got it from something John Perry Barlow was doing, a few years ago; maybe “The Jargon File” at Wired Magazine.
I wasn’t booed off the facebook apparatus; I booed the ghastly apparatus off the stage; i.e., I deleted the entire account I had there and will never return.
I found facebook to be a remarkably stupid contraption that insulted my intelligence.
However, I made no overtly negative statements of any kind on the site, about what I really thought about it. I just got the fuck-outa-dodge.
During the whole period that I was doing some recon on the site, something or other was bothering me about it. So I left. But it was instinctive; I wasn’t able to explain my feelings about it.
Then I read Jaron Lanier’s book YOU ARE NOT A GADGET. Lanier writes a splendid account of how the facebook enterprise diminishes and degrades the very concept of “friendship.”
His is the best overall critique of digital technology I’ve read in many years. Facebook isn’t the only thing that he mows down. He blasts Web 2.0 to smithereens and shows it to be a monstrous engineering catastrophe.
I’m consistently amazed how a misuse of this medium thoroughly diminishes the value of what is portrayed; the way Facebook diminishes the concept and value of ‘friendship’ and the wall street pitches selling us huge buildings full of horse shit, and the pitch going along the lines of – “With this much horse shit, you just know there’s gotta be a pony in there somewhere…”
Imaginary friendships, imaginary money, and, imaginary values.
It all reminds me of Wolfgang Pauli’s statement, often attributed to Niels Bohr or Richard Feynman. “You’re not even wrong…”
Andrew McInnes
21/02/2011
Hi Robyn,
Getting to your earlier comments…
I think the best way to describe Facebook, is that it starts with a flawed and shallow view of the human condition, flattens everything down so it can be commercialised, and then sells itself to bankers (probably as a mound of horseshit, to use your phrase!) An already shallow and narcissistic jumps at the opportunity to become all the more shallow and narcissistic.
Not to say that some things can’t be mined out of the thing, in the manner that although a horse might not accompany the shit, there might be some $20 bills stuck to the surface. As a replacement for real life, Facebook is a horrid creation; as a networking tool it is flawed; at the end of the day, though, it’s pretty darn useful for revolutions! 🙂
“Imaginary friendships, imaginary money, and, imaginary values.” I’d add an imaginary standard of living backed by an imaginary Empire, involving imaginary lives. Any piece of technology, in my opinion, ceases to be useful and instead becomes something despicable, when it attempts to dictate the manner in which it is to be used.
Robyn Banx
21/02/2011
Andrew;
I regard FB as a symptom. The disease is web. 2.0, and how its software has been engineered. The view that the engineering has of the human condition is part of the disease.
“People are encouraged to degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.” – Jaron Lanier, YOUR ARE NOT A GADGET – A Manifesto.
Lanier points out that before the recent crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms, that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. Further, he points to how we ask teachers to teach to standardized tests, so that a student will look good to an algorithm.
“We have repeatedly demonstrated our species bottomless ability to lower our standards, to make information technology look good. Every incident of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.” – Jaron Lanier.
Lanier’s critique goes very deep into the weapons-grade stupidity of all this, too deep to entirely enumerate here, and I think you get the basic idea. To be a bit retrospective with it, consider this:
NASA engineers decided that it would be just fine to launch the Challenger Space Shuttle with computers. The entire launch was computer controlled, no human to be found anywhere in the loop. Kaboom! Oops!
This is the disease I’m trying to describe here; the idea that people should diminish and degrade themselves in order to make machines appear intelligent.
Web 2.0 is not the Internet, it’s a layer superimposed upon it and it’s extremely atrocious engineering.
I’m all for automation and anything else that can liberate the human being from mindless drudgery, but we must be very careful we don’t use such assets in trivial ways. Too much harm is done with that.
At the shoe store, we no longer have the option of using a fluoroscope to x-ray our feet while fitting shoes. It was realized that the x-raying of feet was a trivial application of the technology (also very harmful).
Andrew McInnes
21/02/2011
Hi Robyn,
I know exactly what you’re getting at. It’s definitely a serious problem, and I think it’s must more fundamental than simple technology.
I’m a big-picture person, so I like to focus on notions of sovereignty and the nature of the state. So, what we live under is not really a Fascist state, or even a capitalist state, but the Scientific state. Even Canada suffers this, despite the benefits of the monarchy.
Under the Scientific State, Truth is not enshrined as the Rule of Law. Rather, the Rule of Law is used to discover Truth. People are not to be protected, but experimented upon. Hence the Challenger: NASA didn’t see anything wrong with trying to launch the shuttle via computer control, because it was all an experiment. Oh snap, didn’t work, better luck next time.
If you accept as valid that computers ‘are the best scientific instrument ever invented’, then it is perfectly logical to teach students to algorithms rather than actual knowledge. Since the algorithms change, then students must be adapted to what the computers ‘think’ is best, with varying methods tested upon real-life students through experimental education processes. To top it off, every student posseses information which has a very short lifespan, and can only be applicable to the job market for a very short amount of time before needing to be reeducated in the latest and greatest. Throw-away labour and information is experimental, as well.
All this follows logically, if one simply accepts that a person is a means to an end. Everything from Facebook to torture can be arrived at from that simple premise.
I despise moral relativism.
Robyn Banx
24/02/2011
Hey, Andrew; excellent posting.
“I’m a big-picture person, so I like to focus on notions of sovereignty and the nature of the state. So, what we live under is not really a Fascist state, or even a capitalist state, but the Scientific state. Even Canada suffers this, despite the benefits of the monarchy.”
If you are pointing to the militarization of “science,” that is now the state, I fully agree. And no, it isn’t confined to the U$A. It’s rampant throughout the world.
“People are not to be protected, but experimented upon. Hence the Challenger: NASA didn’t see anything wrong with trying to launch the shuttle via computer control, because it was all an experiment. Oh snap, didn’t work, better luck next time.”
Yes, agreement again. People are now expendable, in exactly the same way they are in so-called conventional warfare. World War Three is not conventional in that there is no difference or distinction between ‘civilian’ and military.
Marshall McLuhan wrote about this in 1967: “World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian & military participation.”
Around this same time, he wrote that “Computers are the LSD25 of the business world. Computers will destroy all the business they are brought to serve.” By “business world” he meant all centralized institutions, and it is astonishing to me how precisely accurate this statement is.
As you said in another post, the U$A ‘will shake itself to pieces,’ or words to that effect. To merely regard a new medium as a way to do ‘the same old thing in new ways’ is idiocy.
Media are “make happen” agents, but they are not “make aware” agents.
Andrew McInnes
03/03/2011
Hi Robyn,
Thank you! Same back at you: always a pleasure to read your thoughts. 🙂
It’s not so much the militarisation of science, but rather the adoption of the eternal desire of science to refine, bother, perfect, and generally experiment, by Law. Laws therefore become tools, not standards: they are tools to reshape the population into something different, depending on the whims of those who wield the law, and what they think ‘perfection’ might be. Indeed, there might be no notion of perfect, but rather using Law as instruments to discover what is perfect, by experimenting upon the people.
Homeland Security’s penchant for buying up useless technology, using it for awhile, and then parking it in storage units is an example of this. They experiment, not on the technology, but on the people. “How useful is the Chertoff Brainscanner Pro 2000 in finding the terrorists we know lurk amongst the people?” Certain assumptions are made in the experiment, the most obvious being that technology can never be wrong, just mis-applied. The second, only slightly less obvious assumption, is that we the people are all guilty until experimentally proven merely suspicious… over and over and over again.
Best,
–Andrew
e-lena
13/04/2011
Hello, Andrew,
just want to let you know that i’m reading your posts and never forget you as it is “always a pleasure to read your thoughts” 🙂
I was just very ill, but getting slowly better now 🙂
Best to you, stay healthy! (at least, the internet doesn’t transfer any real viruses 🙂
e-lena
Andrew McInnes
16/04/2011
Hey Elena!
Good to hear you’re feeling better, my sympathies on your illness. Get well soon!
I’m doing well, thanks for asking. The fallout from Fukushima is in the air now, so whenever it rains I get a “suntan” without any sun. Quite exciting. I’ve stopped walking without an umbrella now, as it seems prudent. 😛
Best to you as well! We must catch up on things! 🙂
–Andrew