Is a startup different from a tax shelter?

In Tom Slee's new article in Jacobin, he says that Uber's "current business depends not only on pushing all the risk onto individual drivers, but also on avoiding taxes (in non-US countries) through a 'Double Dutch' subsidiary arrangement."

As a thought experiment, what if: the Double Dutch comes first, and oh yes, it also happens to be about cars?

The whole point of PE and the LBO story is a change in the ratio of a business "doing something" to Slater/Walker saying "we're in the business of making money, that is what we do," and the use values of what the business is about are secondary. The attributes being assessed are financial attributes, not subject matter attributes. If subject matter attributes are assessed, this will be in context of their being ensconced by what they mean as financial entities, or as vessels for money laundering, etc. So this has a relationship with how portfolio companies are used and how they are approached. A portfolio company could be a PE's portfolio company or a VC's portfolio company. The idea is that subject matter follows finance. This is why the outcomes have been so perverse - like Magnetar, the funders of portfolio companies may profit off of failure rather than success. But when you're advertising to the general public, the logo will be associated only with subject matter and the public will think that subject matter is what it's about. It benefits the financier for the portfolio company to be seen in light of what it does. For Guitar Center to be framed in terms of music first, and finance second, rather than how the financier talk amongst themselves about the thing, which is ROI first, with musical instruments. For Curves to be discussed in terms of "exercise" rather than money - for Arctic Glacier to discussed in terms of "ice" rather than money, gives the financiers years' worth of a head start in which to operate. Or for the excitement of high-tech VC to be based on something supposedly real, (like communicating quickly over long distances or using platforms to match a need with an availability,) rather than a sales pitch that says that the perception of these amazing things is an excellent way to raise money, gives the financier years' worth of a head start. His adversaries are going to be gummed up in subject matter for years before they even remotely get a clue! As long as we're still talking about subject matter, we can be misdirected more easily. The overall theme is a differential between the controllers' ability and knowledge of disingenuous and instrument-like application of attributes to a finance venture (with subject-matter accents,) and the blinkered, narrow way that the people on the receiving end (the public, the press, regulators, advocates) will guilelessly assume that if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. If no one has ever heard of Kalanick, Zimmer or Busque before, and they say they're new people with a new entity doing new things then gee, it must be true. If it says on the billboard that it's about cars, it must be about cars. And if someone wants to raise a possibility that it isn't true, this is going to take years to assemble, which gives the company several early years of opacity and no one bothering them. We should address the entire engine, and we should do it early in the lifecycle, and not just late. And we should use the past precedent of one wave of portfolio companies - deaths, rapes, assaults - to judge the hot new startup of 2020. They didn't just pop out of the womb - grizzled old veterans from Kleiner Perkins use baby MBAs as a puppet, in order to attain "benefit of the doubt" and a perceived "newness" from the public.

Vincent Chen

I have an ongoing curiosity and unanswered question about the interrelation between the nonviolent movements (say, the Kingians or Gene Sharp) and the tepid-ization of organized labor relative to the hard-edged sitdown strikes and other strikes in the early part of the 20th century. I don't know enough about it and would like to find out about it from two angles. One is as a historical matter. I'm curious how they talked to each other, if they talked. The second angle is whether there is an argument, either from efficacy or morality, that would promote a particular approach to nonviolence during a strike, and what the arguments are for and against. It is a strange thing to be looking at in 2014. The first question is, "what strikes?" Labor is in a pretty miserable state of affairs. Then you have the actions by, let's say SEIU. Several militants I know who I have a very high regard for, are extremely critical of these short strikes, which (either I am asserting, or my friends are asserting, or some combination), are intended for the press coverage or for a lame sort of "moral witness", rather than DOING THE THING ITSELF, namely, stopping production and making the target lose revenue and agree to workers' demands (redress of grievances, proactive measures to improve things, or both) because they are losing revenue. Now, I think there are a few things conflated here and I am not positive they are the same. Kingians tend to be from the liberal/progressive end of Christianity, asymptotically approaching Dorothy Day. "witness" is a Christian phrase, as in, the phrase from a gospel or soul song, "Can I get a witness???" A Kingian I know (who I also have tremendously high regard for) was describing a waterboarding protest where someone was going to deliberately undergo waterboarding as a "powerful form of witness," which I think is a little presumptuous. But that's what it's like to be an atheist among Kingians- they use their vocabulary and phrasing, and it's unlikely you're going to criticize them because they are so relentless in their civil disobedience and the degree of their selfless devotion. This is another facet of this topic: that the idea of moral witness suggests that the person is going to do it til the day they die, and this is sort of appropriate for a problem that is gargantuan and probably can't be tackled by mere materialists. So I think there may be some sort of correlation where labor has calcified over time and is now locked in to labor-law rules over how they can behave within what is sanctioned, or face huge fines if they go outside of it. I think this may correlate somehow with this questionable tactic of trying to push society through shame or sympathy, as though the SEIU's of the world may use this because they can. But I don't know the reason. Recent articles have described indifference and mismanagement in the fast food and Walmart campaigns. They're bought... they're wrapped up with the Democrats.... they're used as a way to keep labor in a box, making sure it has no teeth. How did this happen? I found out a lot about this from Joe Burns' great book, _Reviving the Strike_. It is decades of repressive court decisions, beginning with Taft-Hartley's prohibitions on secondary strikes, on through the court decisions on management being allowed to permanently replace strikers, and many others. And Burns' core point is, the production-stopping strike! Bring it back! Stop abdicating the power! So here are my two angles: trying to get the facts on how these two things evolved and whether they were in conversation with each other, and then whether the Sharp/King adherents have anything *particular* to say about nonviolence in labor relative to nonviolence in, let's say, the decision on whether to have an armed struggle against a dictator or a nonviolent struggle. The former is more subtle. The former can take place in the neoliberal aftermath once you *have* brought down the dictator. For instance, after apartheid, South Africa is part of a vast, bland, neoliberal story. My heroes. Instead of one gigantic story against Ceaucescu, you have labor struggles, economic struggles. Here I also need to bring in Chris Hedges and the video'ed debate between Hedges and the guy from Crimethinc. I listened to Hedges around this time and I found his argument persuasive. Armed struggle rots you away on the inside. If I have Hedges correctly. It seems like a good approach, yet there is an argument for not doing it on the basis of effectiveness, because it elevates those who are good at violence and I think Hedges is saying this narrows who can feel comfortable in the movement, and how they will be treated. It elevates bullying, because those in a militia who are good at fighting the enemy will be good at intimidating the members of the movement who don't happen to make good guerrilla fighters. I guess the elevation would be a sort of increased social standing based on their accomplishments. If the fabric of what goes on, what people talk about, and the axis of whether you are making gains or suffering defeats is put in military terms, the axis for figuring out who is putting a 110% effort towards winning is based on a war lens. The others will be second-class citizens in the movement. The thing I have not seen expressed is whether Hedges, or anyone else, is asserting that this achilles heel of a "militia" mindset applies to something like this passage from Burns: "During the great textile strike [of 1934], 'flying squadrons' went from mill to mill, forcing owners to shut down and suspend production. Although the squadrons were mainly non-violent, 'the characterization of the squadrons as "peaceful picketing" misses entirely their character as extralegal enforcers of justice. Swiftly, militantly, the squadrons were not only picketing but forcing the closing of mills. ... Historian Irving Bernstein describes a key battle [now talking about the 1934 Teamsters strike] ... dubbed the "Battle of Deputies Run": "The pickets, more numerous and better armed with clubs, baseball bats and pipe, won control of the market place within an hour. The fighting then spread over the city as the pickets pursued the disintegrating police and Citizens' Army remnants ..."'" And two other quotes come to mind that just set a backdrop level of attitudes towards the usefulness of violence relative to the possible self-destructiveness. One is from Frank Bardacke, author of _Trampling Out the Vintage._ In a talk, he mentioned that the farmworkers had a past history of doing things like "beating up the foreman." The other famous quote, I'm trying to find the source for. I have heard it at least twice in conversation. It involves the phrase "hit 'em with a brick." I think it involves the racial integration of the ILWU. If I have this wrong, I apologize, but the point I am getting at is a nonchalant entertaining of an ends justify the means approach to extralegal enforcement of justice, which is fine if you are right, but my anxiety is that labor is just as subject as Hedges' militia or a drone pilot to the fog of war: mistakes, false positives, disingenuous abuse. The third quote is something like, the ILWU leaders were faced with an influx of African-American and Asian workers. Someone (I wish I could attribute this), says, "if they don't ????, hit em with a brick. Otherwise, sign them up into the union!" The framing of the story is often in terms of making a point about the laudable anti-racism of the ILWU and of Harry Bridges. The quote about the foreman, the quote about hit em with a brick, and the Burns quote is my evidence, among other evidence, that either that the rot Hedges describes doesn't occur in a solidarity situation ( and if not, my curiosity is to know why not?) or it does, but we don't pay attention to it (and if we don't pay attention to it, maybe this could bite us.) I'm probably misinterpreting King and need to read more about what actually happened. The militants I know are pretty disdainful of MLK and they may have a point. I suspect that the passage of time has made nonviolence in the civil rights fights seem different than it was. I recently tried to argue to a friend that the left is as subject to false positives due to fog-of-war, accidental and deliberate false positives as the right is and that it would be equally perilous to act on the basis of a belief (seeming a bit religious to me) that the banal things will go well because we're right on the ideas. I suggested to my friend that when someone fighting police brutality or fracking or unionbusting delegates to another activist the banal task of going to Kinkos and making 200 fliers to hand out, the project has an equal chance being marred by incompetence, mistakes, or fraudulent mischief (say by an agent provocateur), as when an "activist" for Westboro Baptist Church, dealing with the banal matters of putting their demonstration on, delegates to *their* co-congregationalist or whatever, the banal task of going to Kinkos to copy the fliers for the next day. There's nothing about the fact that I like and agree with progressive values that should lead to a suspension of disbelief towards the possibility of false positives either in the boring mechanics of getting a project done, or even in our susceptibility to the fog of war. Another thing I need to get down here is the argument by labor militants about the sheer overwhelming force of the other side. Cops use overwhelming violence in allowing scabs to cross picket lines. I take their point. These friends - who have a deep and profound CLASS analysis above all - also pointed out that my dichotomy is naive, because there are many kinds of violence. "Poverty is violence," said one. Another asked me if I had ever been fired - and led off of the work site on the spot. My question is, does being outnumbered, outgunned, does the fact that in the case where someone has been killed, it is surely a picketer being killed by cops, change the rot and trauma of beating up the foreman? Does the fact that we're doing it for a righteous goal matter? The Latin American or Bosnian militias that Hedges saw-- they were doing it for a righteous goal as well. Probably trade union freedom was one of the things they wanted to win. (if neoliberalism didn't get there first.) Here is a final passage from Burns which I think suggests not that nonviolence is superior, but that the left is not immune to false positives in the fog of war. "...when the U.S. auto industry came under assault from the import of lower cost Toyotas in the early 1980s, unions responded with appeals to U.S. nationalism in an attempt to persuade consumers not to purchase Japanese automobiles. Rather than devising a strategy capable of combating capital, the United Autoworkers instead fostered racist xenophobia, as groups of angry autoworkers would bash Toyota cars with baseball bats. Ultimately, the attacks degenerated into the exact opposite of the international workers solidarity required to confront global corporations. The level of venom reached such heights that a Chinese-American man in Detroit, Vincent Chen, was beaten to death by autoworkers in 1982 who believed he was Japanese and somehow to blame for the loss of their jobs."

Vexatious litigation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation Although the examples given in this wikipedia article sound like what they say, this little alcove of a topic raises issues around false positives. It would be unlikely that someone would be fraudulently added to "a list" that barred them from using the courts - and/or forced them to represent themselves because attorneys could themselves get in trouble for representing them - yet the severity of being on a list that bars you from using the courts is pretty freaking severe, and the U.S. now has NDAA and other dumbfoundingly bad and dangerous anti-terror measures. So it should not be discounted that a way of protecting society from "bad faith" litigation could itself be riddled with either accidental or disingenuous usage. Especially if the effect of the blacklist itself was a catch-22 situation where the person was then unable to challenge having been put on (by using the courts.)

The Ten Ninety Nihilists

From September 2012 until July 2013, I didn't write on here very much because I was writing an article for the Real News.  It's about independent-contractor status and the tech industry.  I'm proud to say that it ran on Real News at the end of September! And thank you Gifford- it also ran on libcom. Also, very proud to get linked by Naked Capitalism and Tom Slee. Also on a similar theme just a couple of weeks after the story ran, along with my friend Patrick I co-curated an Occupy Forum about disruption, precarious employment and the tech boom, with Darwin Bond-Graham of Counterpunch and Occupy activist and Wobbly Ryan Smith. Thanks to friends who supported me when I was talking about this thing for a year and a huge thank you to my sources. I want to do a something next, but I'm not sure yet what that will be.

More on that certain tone of voice

I've just been reading about the meetings between George Gilder, Esther Dyson, Newt Gingrich and Alvin Toffler, in Fred Turner's great book From Counterculture to Cyberculture. I inhaled it in 5 days. Actually, I read Gary Weiss, _Ayn Rand Nation_ , Kim Phillips-Fein's _Invisible Hands_ and Turner, all in succession! In about as fast a wave of reading as I could possibly do. I have notes. But here is a quick thing on that certain tone of voice from business. It's the difference between the main event and the sideshow. Suppose you are making arguments for trickle-down and saying there will be a second half where there are lots of positive consequences for a lot of people, but at the same time, you're charging a fee for the whole thing, which frankly, could perpetuate you on its own. This is the whole reason why it's important to look at vested interests. And there is an interesting bifurcation-- let's say you're calling for deregulation, and you're promising great things will happen. You can break up the person doing the telling according to (a) true believers (b) complete liars (c) people who are in some stage of self-delusion. It's more complicated, because maybe you have digested the idea of cognitive dissonance as part of the "can't make an omelette" concept. Rhetoric is a way of attaining your goals, just like everything else. So there's no such thing as lying. It is all part of getting your goal, which also happens to cement you as a winning personality, or a Randian hero: the sort of person who isn't afraid to GO FOR IT! According to Turner, Dyson, Kelly and Barlow's writings "fairly ache with a longing to return to an egalitarian world." So they mean it, supposedly, though they also have lots of financial confounds where they might just be sufficiently tickled that they're doing so well for themselves by telling tall tales that they rationalize any amount of cognitive dissonance. Probably not.. Turner has read the primary sources and I doubt he is wrong. There are lots of complicated intermediate forms of partial delusion, too. Phillips-Fein had a great phrase about the business conservatives, trying to persuade workers that unions were harmful. She's talking about 50s and 60s conservatives, not about the dot-com period, but the phrase is extremely interesting for both: "They believed that the market had given them their power and that the market was inherently democratic. They saw themselves as populists. In many ways they were disingenous even with themselves..."

Notes on a particular tone of voice from business

I want to get this down before I forget. It has to do with corporate attitudes towards inconvenience or harm to a small number of people. They are setting their own contextualization about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. So there is a message like "we apologize, but this kind of thing is bound to happen given the volume of people/transactions/information that comes through our thing every day." Suppose this isn't true, though. One thing is for sure - they will never contemplate the fact that they actually ought to shut down, or that the harm has outweighed the benefit. No company ever comes to that conclusion. Massive volume could be a smokescreen, potentially. Either as a way to shrug off neglect, or as an excuse and a form of plausible deniability towards a fraud they are quite aware of as it is going on. We ought to be constantly savvy towards situations where the real story is portrayed as a side story. For example, take a fraud having to do with trying to sell unemployed jobseekers a list of job listings. Or other work schemes that involve upfront fees. I think it is sometimes taught as part of Critical Thinking 101 that you never, never, never participate in this. Because these fees actually ARE the core of the scammer's business. If a person is familiar with the fonts/typefaces and the use of hyperbolic claims and other weird attributes of job-related things that are completely un-credible, they might escape unscathed but unfortunately, many people will probably get embroiled in employment scams especially as unemployment remains high. So it's very important to take a look at whether large, established business can engage in a modified form of these schemes. This whole bit of writing that I am doing on this subject is kind of unformed so I want to get the anchor down and revisit it some other time. But here is the basic skeleton of what it's all about. It has to do with the cloud. It runs on volume of people and permits a shrug of the shoulders towards the well-being of any one person. A lovely employment attorney I interviewed last year used the phrase "skimming off the applicants," in regards to Amazon. It probably gets portrayed as a way to make money. It is a turnkey business for the makers, because they have no responsibility for whether or not anyone actually does make money. The term "not a good fit" can always be applied to anyone after the fact. Again, plausible deniability. The participation of the gullible novice is important. You take something that under the hood has nothing to offer, is economically non-viable, and say "what have you got to lose, why not just try it for a short time, with no obligation?" The person being targeted joins up, and in one way or another, provides something for free. It could be an upfront fee, or, it could be participation in a so-called "Web 2.0" website. The subtext of Web 2.0 is that it's attractive to an investor because the costs are reduced by the fact that users create free content, users consume content from each other, and possibly the proprietor makes money through advertising. A story is told about the importance of your social standing and the respect that is afforded to your opinions. Which makes people get the urge to create a bunch of opinions, which are now somewhat fake and made of air, since the pacing was forced. The cart is leading the horse. And also, the work that the person does is done in this environment of work now at the outset, for a promise of future rewards. This is the sleight of hand. The churning present is the real story, not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Suppose it's 2050 and you have a crowdsourced telesurgery service. Surgeons from all over the planet are vetted for their qualifications and the top applicants get the privilege of joining the crowdsourced telesurgeon. The telesurgeon will act through a robotic drone with degrees of freedom comparable to the human body. When a surgery begins, doctors can participate in particular decisions of what to do next, in return for a penny reward. Through the use of massive redundancy, an action (like moving a scalpel five more degrees to the left) only takes place when 99% of the doctors in the crowdsourced telesurgeon have agreed. The quality of the surgery, when redundancy is used in this way, has been shown to be equally as good as having a real surgeon present. The patient doesn't even have to pay the penny reward to those doctors who made an incorrect choice. (Incorrect is defined as going against the consensus.) The proprietors of the telesurgery company are hailed for creating jobs. And the system is so popular (since work for non-crowdsourced doctors is faltering) that anyone who quits will be easily replaced by "skimming off the applicants."

The new FISA directive and the PRISM story

The Prism story brings my preoccupation with silicon valley together with my preoccupation with false positives and the GWOT. Both of these revelations are awful. Are they going to be received with a shrug? The story of unauthorized location tracking on the iphone was received with a shrug. Warrantless wiretapping was received with a shrug in the sense that Obama voted for FISA and we supported him anyway, plus there wasn't enough outcry for impeachment of Bush/Cheney to make Conyers do it. It seems to me that by shrugging at privacy violations, we are painting ourselves into a corner not only for the present moment, but for the future too. The story of living standards and the basic progressive priorities is just awful. Do we not need some privacy in order to fight these fights? I don't know. Maybe not. Janet reported on Occupy Wall Street after she visited last fall, and she said that there was this move towards radical transparency. The Occupy planners held their meeting on the steps of the police department. If you want to know what we're doing, come and find out. It seems like a Gandhian way to do things ... I have merely seen the movie, and haven't read about him, which I plan on doing eventually, but Gandhi I don't think cared if the cops knew what and where he was going to bring his people to make salt or something else, because they were going to walk right into the line of fire. Was privacy important to Gandhi or MLK? It's not a rhetorical question - eventually I am going to read the histories and find out: Is there anything about our present relationship to information and surveillance in 2013 that would make the Indian independence or civil-rights fights untenable or more difficult? Or does strong encryption take care of everything anyhow? My worry and irritation is that people who fight on principle like Bruce Fein don't have enough ordinary centrists with them. It doesn't mean Fein is wrong, but without numbers of constitutents, the politician just does the cost-benefit analysis and says "I can afford to ignore Fein." My other worry and irritation is that if progressives don't get out in front on civil liberties, libertarians like Rand Paul become the voice of sanity and might get the executive branch and more seats in Congress. Which sounds great on war, drones and surveillance, but their domestic policy is fucking heartless and always has been. And economic issues is what makes people do things that get them surveilled! When Rand Paul filibustered over drone strikes, the heart of civil liberties protection swung to the RIGHT. I called Senator Boxer's office and made the above objection. Cross your party! I want you to be the ones crossing Obama because if you don't, the libertarians will and that's horrible for labor law and workers' rights. The center doesn't seem to care about any & all surveillance. We need to connect it with household economics better. There are going to be more Occupys, and they are going to be fighting over the cost of a loaf of bread, the minimum wage and the fact that minimum wage is a moot point when you're 1099 in the first place. And they're going to be fighting over downward mobility and the impossibility of getting by. And surveillance is going to be turned on THEM, and they're going to be muddied together with terrorism, just like union people in the Red Scares were portrayed as the enemies of the USA. It was something business could get away with. This needs to be emphasized more: the use of surveillance by the U.S. government is really the use of surveillance by business, because of this parallel story of Senator Durbin's remark, "the banks own this place." If the banks own this place, the banks can exert influence over how and where the NSA's resources are used and they can go after whoever they want. It won't be about terrorism - it will be about squelching the economic fights and the workers' fights.

Being an information medium is a shield against scrutiny

If you try to search in a search engine for information about Google the corporation, about Eric Schmidt etc., it's likely that some of your results will have to do with Google the idea or Google the tool. If you try to search a search engine for information about Reid Hoffman and Linkedin, the company, you will come back with a bunch of profiles that use Linkedin the conduit. If you want to know about Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and whoever else works at Twitter, the physical building, and you try to find information about their belief systems and biases by searching 'Twitter', you're going to be inundated by information that was disseminated over Twitter, the medium. A second confound is that once you do find things about Silicon Valley household words that takes them as office parks and workplaces and places where banal corporate culture happens, the biggest source of information is the tech hagiography press. So you're finally reading about Jack Dorsey, but the story is written by someone who fawns over him. A third confound is that if you aren't looking in the tech press in particular, there is coverage of the big names as corporations and as office buildings in the right-wing business press, like Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Wall Street Journal. A fourth confound is that if you aren't looking in the tech press or the business press, you can find coverage in the mainstream press - USA Today, New York Times, CNN - but the writers, who are probably used to contextualizing Google, Facebook and Twitter as conduits, are often credulous and easily snowed by whatever the tech companies tell them about their goals and purposes. Exceptions: The Register, Jane Hamsher's new thing, Carl Franzen, Valleywag.... with a lot of caveats for most of those.

Twitter ordered to turn over tweets

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/court_orders_twitter_to_turn_over_occupy_protesters_tweets_20120702/ Twitter went to court on behalf of the Harris, according to the story. I guess that's good. I continue to think that the public's stance towards tech corporations disregards the idea that corporations are too big to say no to any request from authority. This request happens to be public, but in the case of an unfounded NSL with a gag order, Twitter would do what they were asked to do in secret, because getting in trouble by violating a gag order is nothing to do with the business they are running and could cost them a lot of money. And there are false-positive NSLs, just like there are false positives in all other aspects of the endless global war. Facebook and Twitter have become de facto heroic, for being the platforms for messages around the Egyptian and other revolutions. The messages got through, so there's nothing concrete to complain about. And the high-tech conduit gets a sort of credit, or is the hub of a sort of fondness, for being the medium that certain messages went out on. Even though Facebook and Twitter do not give a shit and would just as easily carry messages for the near right, the far right, the Flat Earth Society and everyone else. Facebook and Twitter are no different than Yahoo, who cooperated with the Chinese government and helped get dissidents arrested. Eventually, if activists have some reason to think that Twitter would exercise a prior restraint over some messages and not over others - or, take private Twitter messages and leak them in the moment rather than months later - the activists will move their communication to their own inventions. No time like the present. Occupy had an "Occupy Facebook" software development initiative a while ago. That's all fine, but my point is that the compromised situation is going to happen sooner or later, so the various social movements around the world may as well get out of the corporate medium business now, on a preventive basis, for the sake of whatever canaries are in the coal mine when a request comes in to compromise the privacy of certain communications in the moment rather than months later. Added later: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/the_government_is_after_your_tweets_20120703/?ln "...Information requests will include data pursued in connection with criminal investigations. Twitter says it does not automatically comply with every request and that users are informed of prying into their accounts in cases where it is legal to do so. Cases in which notification is not permitted would include those involving a National Security Letter. Such a request is a demand for information issued by government agencies about which the recipient is forbidden to talk ..." What disincentive does the government have for going wide with their NSLs? The voters are hardly going to politically punish them for it.

NYT 'Kill List' story

Here is the New York Times story on the targeted killings by drone.

I don't agree with the even-handed, centrist point of view that Obama is dealing with a tough situation rationally and methodically and doing what he can.

- Innocent false-positive casualties are described as "minimal" throughout this story. True positives and false positives are both important, but one perspective missing from this article is the trauma and suffering of those false positives. At the least, this perspective would be a component in assessing how to formulate an opinion about the fact that such a program is going on. Once you tell the story of Khaled al-Masri, it shines a powerful light on the arrogance of the programs that allowed him to be rendered, imprisoned and tortured for five months. Also, the false positives who are described are mostly family members of people who, by virtue of glimpse that the article gives us into weeks of deliberations, we are supposed to accept as probably OK to feel good about killing. Cruel or not, I think most people would probably feel ambiguous towards the close family of someone they are satisfied is a terrorist. But al-Masri is not even close. al-Masri was a case of mistaken identity and had nothing to do with anything. When George Tenet found out about al-Masri, his remark was "oh shit." What is the record of Obama's program in killing or traumatizing people who were complete accidents?

- The article alludes to the fact that Russia and China are eyeing the precedent we are setting. There is a reciprocity argument that the killings are counterproductive. If Russia has a dispute with Georgian nationalists, they may track a Georgian nationalist to an apartment building in Oakland, CA, kill him, and eight other people while they're at it. This would only be commensurate with the astonishing decisions by Obama that various innocent bystanders are acceptable to kill. The broadening of the categories also allows us to kill innocent bystanders and just categorize the killings in a way that makes us feel it must be okay- they must have been militants. This may eventually be a precedent for Russia to do the same in a conflict with Chechnya or Georgia. Just call whoever happened to be around a militant.

- We aren't there *yet*, but the lower and lower bar towards "militants" is a problem. The carrying out of indefinite detention until the end of hostilities was just put on hold by the injunction from Judge Forrest. I don't know what will happen next with the NDAA in particular. But it is also a picture of where the barometer is at a particular moment in time. A lot of people push the envelope as much as they possibly can over true positives. A missed attack is on their minds, day and night. It's important to have some compassion for people at the other end of the true positive/false positive spectrum from you. Both are important, and the point of keeping this blog is not to belittle the sleepless nights that go into prevention of attacks. What is a problem is the possible coming together of preemptive detention in the U.S. along with a very broad definition of militant. The economy is a driver. Even if Occupy has gotten quieter, the same conditions that gave rise to Occupy are ongoing and are an engine for something new from the progressive side. So there are things which aren't happening now, but I think are a hell of a lot more plausible and evidence-based than the things Alex Jones raves about: (1) austerity drives unemployment and poverty (2) The degree to which some people radicalize is a function of whether they are getting a fair deal and a decent existence according to the current system. As the perception widens that this isn't happening, with Citizens United and the broad meme of back-and-forth collusion between rich people in industry, lobbying and government, some of the newly unemployed will go further out politically. (3) They are preemptively imprisoned under NDAA, or even (4) killed on U.S. streets, accurately or inaccurately portrayed as militants through an ever-eroding standard of what is acceptable to do to who, and where.

- The other type of false positive is a deliberate false positive. I don't know of Obama targetting anyone on false pretenses. I think the outing of Valerie Plame by Bush/Cheney is an example of this, though, and the Times story makes it clear that Obama used subtlety to give himself loopholes on a lot of other Bush policies that the common imagination has him heroically ending. The finality of the drone strikes create a disturbing possibility that the next accidental al-Masri could be dead instead of just traumatically tortured, and the next Plame scapegoated as a political enemy could be dead instead of just exposed to danger through the abrupt exposure of the secrets that ensured her safety in a foreign country.

Sherman Antitrust Act - precedent for scope creep

I don't expect much out of an editorial by Tim Griffin on the NDAA in the Daily Caller. And Griffin was as big of an apologist shit as I would have expected given his history. However, the Daily Caller has angry paleocons, civil libertarians, Ron Paul libertarians or whatever labels they want to use for themselves, in its commenters. So that's a little heartening. Some of us want to call a harmful law what it is, no matter if it comes with a (D) or an (R) next to its name.

In response to Griffin's downplaying of the danger that vague legislation will be applied in a new context later on, commenter Stewart Dawson said this:

Here's the problem. The Sherman anti-trust act. Anti-monopoly legislation warped to apply toward union busting ... Congress has a long and storied history about using vague phrasing to warp meanings to apply to whatever they want.

I am interested in learning more about Stewart's example. I'll put it on my copious reading list. By staying on top of the fact that there are real precedents of scope creep in U.S. history, this is how you have some substantiation for saying that it can happen again in spite of the possible good intentions of the non-disingenuous ones who want to use the new detention powers just on true positives intent on mass murder.

Ian Tomlinson / Sousveillance

I feel uninformed.. I happened to stumble on coverage of this incident of Ian Tomlinson's death. He was a newspaper vendor in the area at the 2009 G-20 meeting and was killed by police who were already in the mindset of fighting protesters.

From Wikipedia... "Ian Tomlinson ...was an English newspaper vendor who collapsed and died in the City of London after coming into contact with the police while on his way home from work during the 2009 G-20 summit protests. A first postmortem examination indicated he had suffered a heart attack and had died of natural causes. His death became controversial a week later when The Guardian obtained video footage showing him being struck on the leg from behind by a police officer wielding a baton, then pushed to the ground by the same officer. The video appeared to show no provocation on Tomlinson's part—he was not a protester, and at the time he was struck was walking along with his hands in his pockets. He walked away after the incident, but collapsed and died moments later. ... After The Guardian published the video, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) began a criminal inquiry. Further postmortem examinations, conducted by different pathologists, indicated that Tomlinson had died from internal bleeding caused by blunt force trauma to the abdomen, in association with cirrhosis of the liver. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced in July 2010 that no charges would be brought against the officer, PC Simon Harwood, because the disagreement between the pathologists meant prosecutors could not demonstrate a clear causal link between the death and the alleged assault. In May 2011 an inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing, ruling that the push and baton strike had involved excessive and unreasonable force. As a result the CPS reviewed its decision, and Harwood was charged with manslaughter. He entered a plea of not guilty in October 2011; his trial is set to open at the Old Bailey in June 2012."

This seems a little like ancient history now because it all happened before 2011 and the rising thermostat of civil unrest - Tunisia, Egypt, Occupy, Indignados, Tottenham. It's part of the same story in a way. After Oscar Grant was killed, I was discussing the Oakland protests with someone who said he was undecided. He is open minded towards the left and right, but probably has the sensible centrist's indignation towards the aesthetics of marchers and the far left. I brought up the Toronto G20 and his reply was, "yes, but Canada is a whole separate country from the U.S."

I think incidents where false positives are killed, combined with a shrinking world with instant global communication, are going to gradually erode separations and perceived distances. So a false positive killed by cops in any country is gradually going to have more and more immediacy to anyone else in another country, maybe depending if the viewer/reader has the predisposition to accentuate the dangers of breaking a few eggs, rather than centrists or people on the right who temperamentally might tend to emphasize the stability of entire cultures and time periods. Maybe-- I'm not sure. That's the international angle of it. Also, it happened at a specifically international, neoliberal meeting, which provides a certain backdrop but there might be an exaggeration of the relationship between the inside and the outside. Paul Jay was positing the police response to the G20 in Toronto as a demonstration of one facet of the program being ratified inside the meeting. Almost like a perverse, creepy showcase: the people are not going to like what we're cramming down, so we have to be ready with a draconian smackdown and you can see a preview right here out your window. Sometimes the story of the Democratic Convention in 1968 is told like that too. Maybe it's accurate... I would tend to go with Paul Jay's impressions.

I happened to wander around the Wikipedia article on Tomlinson and click over to 'sousveillance.' Interesting. I usually feel really late to adopt or hear about a particular meme, so I wonder how long this one has been around. The article on sousveillance has an interesting photo of a guy with a necklace that is one of the black, semicircular CCTV cameras. It's interesting to take the "privacy is over" viewpoint to extremes. I listened to one of Vernor Vinge's Long Now talks a few years ago where he was spinning out possible trajectories for the future. One of his ideas was that when privacy is over, the bar for what's unacceptable actually becomes pretty high. So there's that.. I'd like to re-listen to what he said. Another thing on the subject comes to mind. The first fifty pages of Samuel Delany's _Triton_ are so jam-packed with ideas, it stands out as a rainbow in the mind. It is such an odd book. I love it. So in the very first few pages, this character Bron Helstrom steps into a special booth. Inside the booth, you can see little bits of surveillance footage of yourself. Apparently Delany is positing that people can be mollified for the same reasons that the most beautiful sound is supposed to be the sound of your own name. People don't care that much about surveillance cameras so long as they can get a little bit of a narcissistic thrill out of it.

My preoccupation is false deaths and harming innocents. So it's interesting to think about how ubiquitous surveillance changes impunity, if at all. You can't be rendered to a secret prison if there are no secret prisons. I am not inclined to support or approve of this idea that sousveillance makes everything OK, because I suspect there are and will continue to be inequities that favor power, corporations, the military-industrial and other complexes. What about ubiquitous surveillance and trade secrets? I'll be more impressed with ubiquitous "sharing" when Facebook makes all its intellectual property open source. There's a double standard. Sousveillance is intriguing when it breaks down the double standard and says, hey, this is cheap technology that everyone can use.

Weren't there some reports of police in Zuccotti Park "going for the cameras", hitting people at the pocket or the waist to try to break their phones? Did I hear something about phone-video-recording the police being illegal? Was there some sort of "blackout" when OWS was raided? And how is this possible.... maybe the next stage after a blackout is that the cheapness and the ubiquity of cameras goes way up, even higher than it is now, so that a blackout is technically impossible. I say this as a sort of devil's advocate. I hear it coming out of someone, but not out of me. Actual flatness would be one thing. But it never seems to work out that way. The bell that some of this is ringing for me is towards the people who argue for pure capitalism. It never comes to that because of monopolies and cartels. I think there's an analog there. I suppose in a way, an argument for sousveillance could be like an argument for market solutions. Don't legislate privacy rules. Just spread the cameras around and let the mechanism doing the work do the work for rich and poor alike, for the enforcers and the Ian Tomlinsons and Maher Arars. I don't think anyone is actually saying this - I'm just speculating. In both situations, it's no good because of hypocrisy.

I don't know though. What if every person on the planet had unblockable GPS and unblockable cameras rolling. Let's say, coming from the pupil. You can no longer do disappearances. I guess one reason why this isn't a helpful avenue if you're Amnesty or Human Rights Watch is that the people with impunity don't care if you find out. They do it in broad daylight. If you can't go to a black site, you just go to a white site. You control the person's recourse - habeas corpus, due process - the things they would do if they COULD do anything. Maybe the difference is that outrageous videos outrage the swayable center. There is a variability in how many apolitical centrists will come out in the streets for different reasons. Some won't, some will and some might. If every Abu Ghraib and Bagram is constantly on camera 24/7, it might not stop the Lynndie Englands. They'll just do it anyway. But it shocks the conscience, and video footage shocks the conscience in a tangible way.

(Though pictures and videos can be doctored. But aha - now we have massive redundancy! I suppose redundant videos can be faked or altered as well, but I have a hunch that redundancy is going to become a shorthand for true events as time goes on. So the officer beating someone up - if it can be seen from three angles, with three resolutions and sound qualities - you start to doubt it less.)

If you keep on doing it, you might get 2011 levels of people fighting back. If you still keep on doing it, you might get yourself deposed. If you try to do it quietly, maybe that's possible and you solve your PR problem. But if it becomes less possible as time goes on, maybe a completely fair and even-handed, ubiquitous, 24/7, cheap, easy and unblockable panopticon could be a positive thing for human rights? I don't think we'll be there for a couple of hundred years.

FDL: Twitter allows for censorship of tweets in individual countries.

David Dayen story here.

At least it forces the issue when they make an overt announcement. It is the type of news story I have been wanting to see for five years. Cover Twitter executives - cover Evan Williams - don't just cover stories that break ON Evan Williams' medium.

This means that *every* news outlet and every piece of the internet that makes a de facto standard out of having the Twitter "T" in the corner is going to have to contend with the fact that they are using a medium that censors when governments ask. I have never liked the damn thing because I always felt as though this censorability and master switch-ability was being downplayed or ignored.

I guess as this notion of censorship erodes trust in Twitter, it probably drives some people to set up their own services with strong encryption. See recent Wired story about development of replacement social networking :here. So what I'm wondering is, then does strong encryption get criminalized, or given the reliance of business on encryption, will there be strong encryption licenses, and will it be illegal to SE without permission from a government?

There has never been a better time for Eben Moglen's Freedom Box.

Hedges sues Obama administration over NDAA

I am glad he is doing this. But don't these types of suits usually get thrown out because of standing? By pointing this out, I am not opposed to the suit. I am just discouraged.

Eventually, it probably *will* be found unconstitutional. But there is a temporal trick in there, which I've noticed coming up from time to time. It could have been passed with the authors knowing perfectly well it would eventually be thrown out by SCOTUS. But this gives them a couple of years of carte blanche in the meantime. Doesn't it? So you can detain a lot of false positives and screw up a lot of innocent peoples' lives in the time it takes for your justification for doing so to be thrown out by the courts.

It's like a broader form of police taking advantage of what they are permitted to do in the moment, maybe knowing perfectly well it won't hold up. So protesters can be arrested in the moment, and if the police don't have a case or have overreached, just release them and don't file charges. Isn't this a sort of checkmate? For any trial balloon you want to launch, just structure it to only work for as long as it will take to be shot down by the courts. Then move on to something else short-term.

I don't know if Hedges is correct in what he says about why it was passed. He probably is. So it's bankers who want austerity and read austerity for its impact on an *investment.* When money isn't spent on social services, that's good, because it means it will be put towards debts, or I guess they also like it because it means a hospitable operating climate for them. I'm partially getting this from Klein, partially from James Crotty and others, like on Real News. Michael Hudson, for example. It's very helpful that Paul Jay is constantly asking interviewees what's in it for them, who wants austerity and why?

So populations will fight back and protest movements will grow. Hedges says that bankers/governments don't trust the police to enforce their crackdowns, so they want the military to do it. That's interesting. I get the impression from some of what I read that maybe the military is as likely to rebel as the police are. Someone commenting on Daily Bail made the fascinating point that a few unemployed JSOCs who go down to Zuccotti Park would probably be able to run rings around the police, because they're trained. It puts blowback in a whole new light. Another thing that it puts in a whole new light is the recent advent of "Hire-a-Veteran" initiatives. Keep them busy - they are the people you DON'T want siding with the unemployed.

Newton's Third as a rationalization for bad policy

There's an argument that I hear and see around for why something that the left is concerned about is really no big deal. It sounds like Newton's Third Law, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So bad policy will be its own undoing. If the NDAA is used to detain someone, there will be suits. The Supreme Court will eventually hear it. Bill Scher gave this argument for why the left should "calm down" about the NDAA. He and his co-host were basically criticizing Cenk Uygur for expressing his doubts about re-electing Obama.

I don't agree with this argument. For one thing, the process that occurs as this reaction plays out is stressful to the individuals involved. It is a kind of de facto punishment. Real News had stories about demonstrators who were detained at the G20 in Toronto. First they were arrested, in the moment. By virtue of being arrestees, they were subject to a low buzz of verbal abuse and degrading treatment by police. This is all in the middle zone between the action and the equal and opposite reaction. So then after a period of time, charges are dropped, or no charges are filed. This activity that can happen *right away* in the moment is actually not a side story, but the main event. There are many other stories of this nature. Democracy Now journalists were arrested at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, MN. They challenged the police conduct in a federal suit and eventually won a large settlement. The settlement is an equal and opposite reaction, years later. But does their ordeal, in & of itself, work as a chilling effect on others?

Hopefully not, but the point is that real psychological and physical damage to innocent people's lives can be done in this temporal middle zone. In the case of the activist work and court challenges that are going to come against the NDAA, people may die in detention while waiting to find out that that detention is unconstitutional. The notion of a future ameliorating event should not be an excuse or a reason to shrug off new bad policy and bad laws. If the center left is apologizing for these things and the eventual counterweight is their reason why, they ought to be ashamed.

Tom Lantos on Yahoo cooperation with China

This is a few years old and I wasn't aware of it at the time. I admire Rep. Lantos for saying these things.



Thank you Richard for pointing out Yahoo and talking about this hearing when we were discussing the role of name-brand IT in Occupy and the new post-Lehman left.

In this graphic, the EFF calls out thirteen corporations: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Myspace, Skype, Twitter, Verizon and Yahoo. Yahoo has since gotten one star out of four from the EFF, for fighting for user privacy in the courts. Good. But I think there is a serious deficiency of journalism that covers these 13 companies in a critical way. And in my opinion, the fact that some of them are part of the media's essential "social networking strategy" in itself will tend to ameliorate the coverage. Specifically, Apple and Google, for their mobile platforms, Amazon, for Kindle, and Facebook and Twitter as the de facto mediums for dissemination of news and ancillary promotions around news.

The elephant in the room is that as the endless war rolls into its third presidency (either now or in 2016,) I think quite a few of these information and computer corporations will continue to sell people out and cooperate with governments that are repressive now, and governments like the USA that are not facing a hell of a lot of outcry for codifying preemptive military detention. There is some, but not from the center. I don't view a Chinese dissident differently from an American one, but the idea of U.S. companies helping go after Americans, and being wrong a lot of the time, would shock a lot of Americans. Especially if you consider the high false-positive rate that JSOC is having with assassinations, according to Dana Priest, according to Stanley McChrystal. One would assume that the "elite" JSOC is about as good as it gets, and that isn't very good. It's a different agency, but I don't think that matters.

In addition to Yahoo we have the example of AT&T. I think Google did say no to something, so yeah, kudos to Google on that. I hope there will be a lot more people in the coming years who see through the fetishization of Silicon Valley's cool inventions, read them as news and not simply as an inert conduit over which you read news. And consider that they may be participants in a military-industrial complex where in place of military you can substitute the octopus legs of a militarized police response to Occupy, war, DHS, fighting terrorism and surveillance in the U.S., and in place of Boeing or Lockheed, the cooptable information sector. And the response could be aimed towards any Occupy demonstrator or, if the JSOC example is any guide, a high rate of innocent bystanders per success.

Perfect / Good

The phrase that you hear in arguments, "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," popped into my head. And I thought of an extension or a corollary to this. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but also don't let worries about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good stop you from pushing for three things instead of two, or four things instead of three, or only killing ten false-positive human beings in your war instead of a hundred.

In the Tim Noah/Mark Schmitt bloggingheads about Ted Kennedy, they were talking about Kennedy's approach. They were saying that he went for incremental progressive policies in bits and pieces, and after a while of doing that, you get a lot done. So I was thinking about how this saying might have been wielded on Kennedy. A big part of this blog is about the question of disingenuousness or bad faith. So I wonder how often the subtle suggestion that it's OK to stop short of pushing harder is wielded in bad faith by someone who actually has vested interests against whatever it is getting done. Like let's say, pushing for single payer. Or even pushing for a public option. I think there is the possibility of good and bad outcomes in either eventuality. Kennedy didn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and he got a lot accomplished over time. However, if the person telling you not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good has a top hat and a curly moustache and a nametag reading "insurance lobbyist," it might also be good to consider ignoring them.

I think it's important to take a look at how people take language as a bundle, and it obviates the need to finely consider the elements of the bundle. People are often scanning around for stories and contexts to help them make sense out of the world. If there's a new anti-terror bill working through Congress in 2020 AD, and it ratifies preemptive rape and preemptive murder of most anyone, and activists fight and fight for three straight days and finally get the murder provision stripped out, and then someone speaks up and says "I'm horrified that we're still legalizing rape" and is told in response, "yes, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good," it would be awful to accept that contextualization and feel some relief. But probably also human, if you're at a complete loss, horrified, and looking around for some help, and the person saying those words is a progressive elder statesman - or a bigwig of the Dems or the GOP or whoever - who you admire. I have felt this way about commentary on the killing of Awlaki, the killing of Qadaffi, and recently on the new NDAA - it doesn't go as far as my satirical example, but it's bad enough - and even listening to Jon Stewart talk about bin Laden being killed. You do do a double take and say "well, if xy person thinks it's actually okay, maybe I'm wrong."

Wikileaks' Spy Files

Thanks to Yves Smith for talking about this in her latest Links post.

Guardian story

Wikileaks releases the Spy Files

I wonder if one of the rebuttals against Wikileaks is that the release is mostly just a bunch of public brochures.

I'm glad to see them target complicit corporations in addition to governments.

This is the comment that I wrote on Naked Capitalism:

Thanks for the link to the wikileaks Spy Files and Guardian story! Silicon Valley needs to be muckraked. I sometimes see this contrast being set up where people are disgusted with the ephemeral nature of the FIRE sector, and their example of what to contrast that with is the good old, solid American know-how in northern California. That’s great, but it should be put through an ethical lens as well. We need technologist-muckrakers who do for the west coast what Yves does for the east.

Since something like this is often too big to wrap our heads around, I think a way to get concrete is to concentrate on false positives hurt or killed in the course of accomplishing what they’re trying to accomplish with surveillance. The false positives have to be documented methodically. Maybe this approach is a remedy for human susceptibility to go whole hog towards paranoia and be easily dismissed and ridiculed. No. Specificity and citations are really important. If there’s someone being hurt by this, let’s write it up dispassionately, and you can sway more people that the costs might outweigh the benefits.

Also, I see a lot of counterarguments (say in the blog comments on stories like this, maybe not on NC but in a more centrist environment) where someone will come back and say “so what? Privacy is over – so what is the point of wringing your hands about it today if you weren’t wringing your hands about it yesterday?” This throws the baby out with the bathwater. False positives are being hurt on an ongoing basis, even in the case of JSOC targeted killings (my post on Dana Priest/Thom Hartmann.. (the original youtube would have worked too) ), and the false positive deaths that haven’t happened yet can be prevented.

Scunthorpe / OWS

There's a lot going on in the world, as usual. There are a lot of stories that are within my bailiwick or my preoccupations.

I have recently been listening to various discussions in the press about bad actions that were being carried out by Occupy encampments. It reminds me in a way of the cluster of familiar ideas and social back-and-forth around the Scunthorpe problem. So in the Scunthorpe problem, you have a perfectly legitimate city name that happens to have an offensive word as a substring. So in the clean, discrete digital world, pieces of software might be deployed to censor certain sequences of characters, because of a belief that those sequences of characters correlate with a fight, a troll, something that is gratuitous, mean, inappropriate, drags everybody down.

First phase. Let's say it begins when some neo-Nazis were harrassing city workers in various cities around the UK and writing them hurtful emails.

City workers in Scunthorpe happened to be getting these messages, and their manager wants to placate them. So the manager asks his IT guy what can be done. The IT guy is brilliant but doesn't have a lot of savvy. He has some autistic characteristics and tends to view problems in a linear way. He's not political. He says, let's just make a list of words that are beyond the pale. We'll discard the mail that contains these words. Problem solved.

The manager and the IT guy both accept this solution because it's quick. The city employees don't have a ton of computer savvy, and they're very grateful that someone took care of it.

Weeks go by and there's something wrong. Scunthorpe city council is having trouble getting its work done because their emails keep getting put in the trash for no reason. People start to miss meetings because they never received the reminder email.

So the manager comes back to the IT guy and explains the problem. The IT guy isn't out to get Scunthorpe or screw with anyone's work. Apparently a regular taxpayer had written in about a water bill and the correspondence got eaten. And now the guy thinks that city hall is persecuting them on purpose. He's a little paranoid anyhow, so it's OK.

So now the IT guy says "Look, I just did what I was told. I'll figure something out."

So a new rule is added to the program. Try to match 'Scunthorpe' and if you do, let the message through no matter what. If you don't match 'Scunthorpe,' try some other rules. Try to make an exact match on the letters 'cunt' and if you do, throw the email in the trash.

more later...

Maher Arar on Real News

Maher Arar was just on The Real News. The beginning and ending of the interview were about his own experience being rendered and tortured as early casualties in the war on terror's incredible arrogance towards the whole world. Maher Arar and Khaled al-Masri are why I'm writing this post right now. I remember watching Dana Rohrbacher's obnoxious excuses when Arar appeared at a session of Rep. Nadler's Judiciary subcommittee. They were the stories through which I discovered how horrified I was with Bush and Cheney.

When Obama was elected, I decided I needed to find a way to genericize what I was concerned about. The global war on terror is an ongoing engine for individual outrages. It isn't tied to a particular president and vice-president. The policies might take a turn for the fair or unfair over the years, but the danger of ancillary damage to innocent bystanders is going to remain so long as a government feels that they must prevent a miss and certain costs are acceptable towards that end.

We have to keep Maher Arar's story and Khaled al-Masri's story at the ready and never forget. I hope we will get better, split hairs finer and have fewer mistaken identity stories, fewer false positives, innocent people rendered, if not by appealing to the leaders' sense of right and wrong, then by court judgments that make it so expensive or politically damaging that they become more careful. According to Dana Priest and according to Stanley McChrystal, we *aren't* getting better yet.

Unfortunately, under Bush and under Obama, Maher Arar has gotten no justice from the U.S. courts system. This is from the transcript of the Real News interview:

"Maher is a human rights advocate now, whose story gained public attention after American authorities falsely accused him of being linked to terrorists. Despite being a naturalized Canadian citizen, Arar was then rendered to his birth country, Syria. There he was subjected to torture, like incessant beatings, and with electrical cables, and confined to a cell the size of a grave. After his release in 2003, Canada and Syria found him to be completely innocent of all allegations ... Maher is joining us from Ottawa. We'd like him to be able to visit the United States, but he can't, 'cause he's still on a no-fly list, he's still not allowed in. And even though everyone else in the world acknowledges the fact that he was not guilty of anything, the United States finds it a national security concern to admit they were wrong."

Note: the middle of the interview was about the current situation in Syria, which is a different kind of thing to remark on. Confusing. My feelings about Syria, Libya and even the Arab Spring is that innocents matter. I don't trust any guerrilla army, no matter how righteous they are. The ends don't justify the means if the means involve wrecking the life of innocents along the way. If you're intervening to stop a massacre? Well maybe- but I don't agree with liberal hawks if liberal hawks think you can kill one group of children to save another.