The scheme contemplated is a series of dishes, termed the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), forming what essentially constitute colossal fields of antennae which detect radio waves. Twenty countries have been involved in the project, though as ever, the big question was which location would suffice. Enter, then, the bidding war.

The Australians and New Zealanders were hoping for a considerable slice of this scientific pie, if not all of it. They were fortunate in the end to end up with a considerably downsized version. At first instance, their joint bid failed to persuade the panel in question, the SKA Site Advisory Committee, that they could offer a more desirable location over the South African-led proposal. The board of directors seemed to agree – there would be only one winner.

The principle behind the initial decision to award it to South Africa lay in remoteness. While Australia and New Zealand offer some of the most remote locations on earth, such attributes were evidently insufficient in the scientific context. Radio telescopy works best away from sources of radio waves. It had also been suggested that the South Africans were fronting the technically better bid, one that would comprise the erection of dishes in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.

Then came the twist to the tale. Australia and New Zealand were not to miss out entirely. ‘We have decided,’ announced SKA chairman John Womerley at a press conference at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, ‘on a dual site approach.’ A few teasing morsels will be thrown down towards the antipodes. Australia is to receive the low frequency antennae that are stationary and collect signals from the whole sky simultaneously (Guardian, May 25). South Africa shall receive the steerable high frequency type, and the biggest share of the project – approximately 70 percent in all.

The South Africans were initially perplexed. Evidently, they thought it was all in the bag. The project director Dr. Bernie Fanaroff decided to be diplomatic, even if he was keeping the champagne on ice. ‘It’s obvious that we would have preferred the whole thing to be in Africa, but we recognise the need for inclusivity and to maximise the investments that have already been made’ (Guardian, May 25).

Suspicions were always bound to lie behind the decision and science, a mere sideshow, was hardly going to feature. The Australians have made little secret of the fact that endorsing a proposal that would involve a host of African sites could only be viewed as an economic matter. What of stability and safety on the Dark Continent? A suggestion has been made that European countries involved in the project would see such a project as a form of development aid (Sydney Morning Herald, Mar 10). In 2010, the then Australian science minister Kim Carr suggested there were ‘better ways to sustain development, if that’s what your primary purpose is.’ Besides, the Australian bid offered ‘security, an attractive lifestyle and conducive business development’.

Those behind the project are attempting to excite both the public and politicians. Enchanting details on how many large iPods could be filled a day with the data generated from the array, and the depths human star gazing will be able to go, have been released. Journalists have been excited about the prospect of finding ‘alien intelligence’ given the sheer strength of the proposed project. But the most alien intelligence remains, until shown to be otherwise, human, the only animal, as Mark Twain claimed, that needs to blush.

Only the previous year, the agency was given the go ahead through the NASA Authorisation Act to advance the cause of space commerce.  The Commercial Orbital Transportation Program (COTS) marked, in the words of Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office at NASA, ‘a significant NASA activity to implement the commercialisation portion of US space policy’.

One of those to first receive assistance from NASA was the US company SpaceX, an example of how the US hopes to catch up with Japan, Russia and Europe in being able to supply the ISS.  The situation became more acute once the shuttle program was retired in 2011.  Uncle Sam was falling behind.

SpaceX is owned by the modern, mercantile South African Elon Musk, PayPal’s co-founder, a billionaire who fancies himself as something of a modern Vasco da Gama, or, more likely, the brigand-like qualities of a Francis Drake.  The modern comparison has been to the fictional stinking rich character Iron Man, whom he is said to have inspired.  “We are really at the dawn of a new era of space exploration, one where there is a much bigger role for commercial space companies.”

That commerce is receiving funding from Washington in what are bound to be examples of space mercantilism.  SpaceX itself has a $1.6 billion contract, Orbital Sciences somewhere in the order of $1.9 billion.  As NASA administrator Charles Bolden explained, NASA’s interests are elsewhere – “exploring even deeper into our solar system, with missions to an asteroid and Mars on the horizon.”  The drudgery of transport was best left to the ‘private sector’.

Bolden’s own historical frame of reference is smaller.  “The Internet was created as a government endeavour but then the introduction of commercial companies really accelerated the growth of the Internet and made it accessible to the mainstream.”  He might well go back to the European courts of the fifteenth century, when aggressive colonial forces were unleased upon much of the world, courtesy of government trading companies.  An empire on earth can well move to one in space.  Indeed, Michael Milstein, writing for Popular Mechanics (October 1, 2009), did not shy away from the words “solar-system conquest”.

The Dragon space capsule, attached to the SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, is a versatile beast, able to carry both crew members (up to seven) and cargo.  And it will have few rivals.  The reality remains that space travel is a frightfully expensive business. The only individuals who tend to go into extra terrestrial orbit, leaving aside astronauts, are rather wealthy earth gazers with a fetish.  Till a formula is found to bring down costs and build cheaper equipment, space will, thankfully, be a less crowded place.  We might even claim it will be a less imperial place.  NASA is determined to change that.

I have and I can say that they’re typically rough workplaces.

At first glance, Amazon’s LV fulfillment center appears benign.

Primary red, yellow, green and blue splashes of color brighten the place, and motivational posters and friendly educational signs that feature cute characters provide guidance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers populate the warehouse at once, diligently taking direction from hand-held scanners or computers, and the place is enormous so it doesn’t appear cramped. Seriously, the place could house a small city.

Physical strength is not a necessary qualification to perform any of their warehouse job functions, and management is ostensibly concerned with worker safety. Just about anyone could staff Amazon’s FC, especially since it only takes a couple of hours to train workers to perform any specific job function. It’s safe to say that anyone laboring in an Amazon FC has fallen into hard times, and many of my former coworkers’ resumes featured distinguished past titles, impressive demonstrations of manual skill and ability, and/or lofty educational attainment.

Many never thought they’d wind up in a warehouse and so, yes, this was all foreign for many. Other workers who staffed other warehouses in the past didn’t know what to make of the place because there is something different about Amazon, something alien.

“Chairman” Bezos once said that Amazon workers don’t need a union because we own the company. “Chairman” Bezos has zero tolerance for union activity and several Amazon unionization attempts were summarily squashed.

After two years on the job an Amazon FC associate is entitled to eight shares of stock. If Amazon is trading at, say, $250 a share, that’s $2,000. Ownership? $250 per share is a generous projection. Seasoned investors are baffled by AMZN’s current overvaluation because of its unhealthy 188:1 (fluctuates, yet always unhealthy) price to earnings ratio, and they’re waiting for the bubble to burst.

I imagined reaching the two-year mark, receiving my payout, and some smiling patriarch saying, “There’s some shopping money sweetheart, have fun.”

Forget about those riff-raff temps, they work for nothing more than an hourly wage, and Amazon relies heavily upon temp labor.

Amazon relies heavily upon labor—period. Yet, we were routinely led to believe that our existence was owed to them, that it was they who paid our bills. Oh yes, and Amazon provides its employees with health benefits, a rare and precious commodity these days. I accepted the best plan, $59 was deducted from my pay every month, and I couldn’t even afford to use my benefits. I visited an in-network clinic for a cold and lost an entire shift’s pay after I forked over the $30 copay and the seemingly arbitrary additional prescription costs.

After taxes and other deductions, $12.75 per hour doesn’t go far. Amazon’s FC associates EARN greater compensation than they currently take home. Problem is, corporate Amazon deliberately keeps its FCs in a constant state of flux and it is practically impossible for Amazon associates to organize from within.

Could a union deliver dignity and quality of life to Amazon’s FC associates? Employment with Amazon is so thoroughly all-consuming and work/life balance is an ideal that this workaholic corporation deems unimportant. Amazon demands unquestioning loyalty and sacrifice from its workers and everything is non-negotiable. Workers’ schedules can be changed with little or no notice to suit management’s needs. Single mothers struggled with this most. Badges are deactivated without notice and a worker could suddenly be out of a job. The only incentive workers are offered to exceed expectations is the diminished risk that they may be let go at any time.

We worked, 10, sometimes 11 hour shifts and received a thirty-minute break for lunch and two, fifteen-minute paid breaks. Managers enforced break times to the minute and we were chained to the floor until the minute break started and expected to be back on the floor the minute break ended. Factor in walking time and getting hung up at security and we were able to sit and eat maybe forty minutes total during a 10 1/2 or 11 1/2 hour span of time.

In training they suggested we eat oats, fruits and vegetables (No, you’re not horses the poster said, but oats are a great way….). Meat, bread, cheese and energy drinks provided sustenance; not my typical fare, but it went the distance and I could stuff it down quickly enough. If we returned from break a minute late, we were “stealing company time.”

Yes, we’re criminals, and Amazon owns time. At any time, an ISS “coach” or Amazon manager could accuse a picker of a “false pick short.” If a picker couldn’t find an item in a bin, reported it missing, and someone checked the bin afterward and found the item there, a write-up was issued.

One write-up and a temp can’t be hired by Amazon, despite stellar performance, and the accusation could not be verified or disputed. If management sees that an employee didn’t scan a product’s bar-code for more than a couple minutes or so, the worker was often called down, scolded for “time-off-task” (even if they were exceeding rate) and possibly written up.

Managers watch numbers on a computer screen like it’s a horse race and workers’ every move is tracked. We were often paranoid, and it is wise for anyone to never feel too secure in Amazon’s most neurotic workplace. This was all too reminiscent of the East German Stasi for my tastes.

Brrr!

I never spoke to family or friends while I worked there and, for all they knew, I could have run off and joined some cult. My sister phoned after a local news station reported that an Amazon employee set fire to a shelving unit while we were working. The building was evacuated and, if we wanted to keep our jobs, we were forced to stand in sub-freezing temperatures for more than two hours wearing only t-shirts and shorts.

My sister was concerned. “What kind of place are you working at?” she asked. “Don’t worry,” I answered. “Call you tomorrow, need sleep, I work another 11-hour shift tonight.”

Our managers told us that we were like Santa’s elves, delivering happiness to children and families. If that’s the case, Santa is a hard driver and his elves must sport super-immunity because I never thought them to be as sick and rundown as the crew staffing Amazon during peak season. I suffered a chronic, dry, hacking cough and my spirits were never so low.

The shoppers want lower prices. The shareholders want greater profitability. Amazon strives to be “the most customer-centric company in the universe” and we must forever give thanks to anyone with money!

Happy holidays.

As a follow-up, Paul Haeder asked Nichole Gracely a few additional questions since her fine essay precipitated a lot of leaping-off points and questions.

PKH: How long did you do this job?
What was the feeling when you were let go?
What do you think Amazon would even think about reading this account? Bezos reading it? Average college grad coming to Amazon reading it?
Do Americans think life is dog-eat-dog existence, since this Amazon model is replicated in so many work places, abroad, and here?

NG: I worked there August 2010-February 2011 and August 2011-February 2012. I was ISS my first run, wanted to get hired by Amazon and was let go after I accumulated too many demerit points for missing work during snowstorms. My contribution to the Morning Call story talks about how they dangled the possibility for FT employment with Amazon in our faces, false promises. I returned in August 2011 as an ISS temp and I, surprisingly, was included in a group of ISS temps who were hired directly by Amazon in October 2011, shortly after the Morning Call expose was published.

Both Peak seasons were different experiences although I am certain that Peak 2011 would have been the same nightmare I encountered Peak 2010 if they would have never been challenged by the bad publicity. Although, again, more FCs were built in the interim so that may be why conditions in our warehouse eased up a bit.

For the sake of simplicity, I talked about conditions, workplace abuses that are still happening today, basic workplace rights and quality of life issues that a union could address. 10-hour shifts are too long and that’s what we were working, their surveillance tactics were in place, time-off task, false pick shorts, etc. Amazon directly hired more people and while I was there the second time around they relied less upon temp labor (I think they may have been scolded by their friends in govt. after the story ran) though nobody ever really felt secure there. In his message to me, Morning Call‘s Soper’s other informant who is still there said they were bringing in more temps. The turnover rate is insane, and Soper could never get concrete employment figures from management. We talked about it and I know he tried. Amazon tried to keep me there this last time around because I’m incredibly productive and I trained people well as an “ambassador” (no incentive, pay increase, etc). This time, they made it difficult for me to point out. I wanted out, though, so I could speak about my experience. All Amazon employees sign a vaguely-worded confidentiality agreement and we’re not allowed to talk to the press. I spoke to Soper before I went back and while I was ISS, temps don’t have to sign anything.

I would hope that Amazon (Bezos) now recognizes its workers’ humanity. It often felt like bad sci-fi, like I was part of some brutalized underclass and that we were being mastered by Tech types who don’t really give a shit for anyone or anything—just numbers, that’s it, numbers.

Yes, I’m a failure as a capitalist, I get it, and myself and my Amazon co-workers are clearly not faring well in this game. Bezos is winning, I get it, he’s smart, he may even be a genius, sheessh! I became really disgusted with him when I read all the Bezos worship headlines while I worked there (Forbes has a serious hard-on for the guy).

CEO worship is sickening. He takes all the credit for Amazon’s success in everything I read about Amazon, he’s like some sort of quasi-spiritual leader, and it was really tacky the way he was being promoted in the wake of Jobs’ death. “Is he the next Steve Jobs?” people were asking. Give me a break. He’s not a self-made man like media lead us to believe. He has gotten to where he’s at because tens of thousands of workers have made tremendous life sacrifices. I try to remember his humanity—it’s hard, though.

Bezos once said that the workweek minimum should be sixty hours and I could not disagree more. We should be working less, not more, and for greater compensation; that is, if we wish to restore any kind of economic equilibrium. I’m not an economist so don’t quote me on that.

The Amazon model seems counter-intuitive to me and they could destroy capitalism as we know it; problem is, we’re going to be longing for the good old days of capitalism if it’s somehow replaced by everything that Amazon embodies. Tech is supposed to liberate, not enslave. I do not place much faith in Tech, especially after working at Amazon and reading about Apple products and how they’re made. My apartment was broken into and my Macbook was stolen while revelations of Apple’s labor abuse were surfacing and I was actually glad to be rid of the thing.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon hired 28,000 additional workers last year and it terrifies me to think that more and more individuals are submitting to corporat(ist) Amazon’s command. I know how they operate and I will never remove them from my sight. And, it became clear to me that the federal government has their hands all over Amazon and I’d like to further investigate my hunch that Amazon has been designated as some social shopping service/government works program.

PKH: As a sort of pun, can you credit all that hard work at the warehouse as something gained by the Amazon way and whip cracking?

NG: I arrived at Amazon with a work ethic that would make Bezos smile. I consistently exceeded rate requirements and there were nights I could have napped a couple of hours or gone home after lunch and I still would have made rate for the night. I wasn’t provided any incentive to exceed rate. It didn’t take long for me to think that Bezos was running some kind of boot camp. I later read that Amazon actively recruits ex-military personnel to manage their warehouses, and that may explain why it was common for our managers to bark and holler and carry on in ways that I’ve never witnessed in any other workplace. I always empathized with management, no matter how badly they behaved, because they’re under tremendous pressure, subjected to endless hostility, and they’re overworked and under-compensated.

PKH: What is Lehigh, Pennsylvania, like, in a nutshell?

NG: Also, the Lehigh Valley is predominantly Pennsylvania German and Hispanic and the two groups don’t mix well. I prefer my Hispanic neighbors and don’t venture far from Bethlehem’s depressed Southside because I’m in conservative country as soon as I step out.

PKH: You mentioned that “alien-like” feeling working at the Amazon Fulfillment Center.

NG: I attempted a subtle segue here, Bezos is alien and at the same time he seemed ever-present in the warehouse once I learned more about him. I said “Chairman Bezos” because there’s something oddly Mao-like about him. Check this Economist link.

What do you make of the photo? My next piece will be about alienation and Amazon. So, everything is alien there, it’s very strange. Most workers never worked for a mega-corporation, a Tech company nonetheless, and so that definitely contributes to the alien quality of the place, the discomforting reality that most warehouse workers could never understand and articulate.

PKH: Okay, what do you think of the title, “Where Santa’s Helpers Work 24/7, 365 Days a Year … ”?

NG: During Peak 2010 they did operate 365 days a year, not Peak 2011. New Fulfillment centers were built in the interim and I think that was why Peak 2011 was slower at the LV FC. And/or maybe the boycott achieved something. And/or maybe disposable incomes are drying up. I handled millions of consumer products there, and I can say that their customers must have disposable income to be making these purchases. Amazon’s 1st quarter earnings report is questionable.

PKH: Then, what about the sub-title to your piece? “Come High Water, Come Fire, Come Exhaustion – The Amazon Way is America’s Way”

NG: Yes, definitely … I’m talking to and overhearing more people, regardless of their job or industry, who complain that their employers are demanding more and more and compensating less. Workers are being squeezed everywhere.

Three related phenomena largely account for this inflammatory incivility: a meretricious media, more desperate than ever to survive; irresponsible religious and political figures, willing to enunciate increasingly extreme and outrageous views for high-profile notoriety; and the nature of the internet itself, the most powerful and pervasive system of communication yet devised.

The internet connects everyone to everyone else, conjuring global intimacy. Thanks to cell phones and YouTube, we can all be “in the moment” when a woman lets fly a racist rant in the London underground or a mob storms a public square in Madrid or Cairo or Oakland or a crime occurs somewhere on the planet. Every place appears as near or far as any other, here on our screen.

Modern technology can summon up flash mobs or instant wads of cash to protest or abet incipient events. We can weigh in instantly to “like” or condemn what we see or hear, calling forth responses to our own responses, ad infinitum. Aided by the anonymity of user names, the level of interchange on comment threads trends downward over time, not up, producing more heat than light. Our sense of familiarity, however illusory, with events or newsmakers, breeds a primal contempt that tends to focus personal and political frustrations into immoderate attacks that in turn provoke others.

Irresponsible political heavyweights also demean our discourse. Mitch McConnell declared that the top priority of Congressional Republicans was to make sure Obama is a one-term president. That’s a pathetic partisan agenda for a so-called major party leader, considering the many challenges we face as a nation and a species. Of course, such a lame and limited ambition is far easier to accomplish than trying to restore employment, boost the economy, reduce military spending, promote environmental health, improve education, etc, etc. But McConnell and his ilk are not really out to better the lot of average Americans. Their goal is to serve their sponsors and masters, who enrich and enable them.

Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham rail against Muslims and homosexuals from pulpits they call “Christian,” though the blind hatred they flaunt contradicts the love and tolerance Jesus Christ actually espoused. Phony Christian bigots like Graham and Robertson – and the Westboro Baptist Church – poison our atmosphere and disinhibit their followers to commit acts of violence. These false prophets spew enmity and discord in the name of religion, like the killers of abortion doctors who consider themselves “pro life,” a murderous irony they have not the eyes to see.

Media feeds on conflict as much as the Pentagon does and, like the military, may sometimes provoke it for their own ends. To whip up interest in the “information” they peddle for (decreasing) profit, media amplify the divisive words of bigots, fools and scoundrels (with someone like Robertson, they get a three-fer) and then play up the predictably outraged responses.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network and numerous publications give platforms to political zombies like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, to rouse the faithful and enflame opponents. Murdoch resuscitated Gingrich after his well-deserved political demise, granting him an artificial afterlife.

Murdoch’s largesse enabled the foredoomed Gingrich campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The ethically impaired former House Speaker made over-the-top remarks that provided provocative headlines, enlivening the deadly primary process, feeding the Murdoch machine.

A recent British government report declared Murdoch unfit to lead a major corporation. But who will stop him? Murdoch is a major polluter who ought to be fined for degrading our atmosphere.

Like the irresponsible political and religious figures they interview, media “personalities” feel a need to top one another or themselves, to raise the decibel level to maintain their visibility. These talking heads give their fans permission to speak and behave outrageously. After he shot an unarmed black teenager to death, George Zimmerman sought out Fox stalwart Sean Hannity for counsel. Why?

The Trayvon Martin killing has become a flashpoint for issues from gun rights to racial profiling. Martin and Zimmerman turned into instant symbols and martyrs for different points of view. Some public figures donned hoodies in support of Martin, while one company does a brisk business marketing rifle targets with a hooded figure in their bull’s eye.

Events like the Trayvon Martin murder are difficult to discuss – or even to perceive – on their own terms, devoid of the biased context into which such incidents “fit.” Our preconceptions determine the meanings of everything that is said or done.

Most public “discussion” consists of one side lobbing insults at the other from across an unbridgeable divide. There is little genuine give and take. Thesis and antithesis rarely move toward any synthesis. They merely re-enforce entrenched beliefs. Media promote and thrive on this sort of futile noise and conflict, a circus that distracts from the decreasing abundance of bread, enabling business and politics to proceed as usual with minimum interference.

Our lack of civility has consequences. Bullying – including cyber-bullying – of school-aged children by their peers (and in some cases, the parents of those peers) causes terrible harm, including suicide and murder. This trickle-down meanness merely follows the examples set by public figures in media and politics who belittle others for their religious preferences or sexual orientation.

With fewer defenses, our children are more likely to suffer the sometimes fatal effects of our toxic emotional environment before the rest of us. Mentally unstable individuals like Jared Loughner, who killed six people and injured fourteen in Tucson in 2011, also absorb the free-floating anger around them without a clear sense of what it signifies or where to direct it.

Even adults in traditionally calm corners of this world, such as the fanatical anti-Muslim Norwegian who murdered 77 of his countrymen to avoid multi-cultural contamination, can be twisted by the overheated sentiments of foaming politicians, amplified by media.

Who will take responsibility for such consequences?

There is a high price to be paid for allowing violent, hateful speech to predominate over more rational forms of public discourse. I fear we have only begun to pay it.

It’s a prime piece of property in downtown Seattle, West Lake. The non-profit got the 12 acres for a song – $53 million after the land was appraised at $72 million.

Then the city of Seattle “gave” another $28 off the price, so this land ended up costing Bill and Melinda Gates – their foundation – $25 million.

More than 40 people, as part of a global day of action against Monsanto, recently marched to and around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “campus” in West Lake to deliver a letter asking the Foundation to divest from Monsanto (the Foundation has more than $23 million in Monsanto stock as part of a very odd mix of companies in their portfolio).

Trying to eradicate developing countries’ diseases, forcing genetically modified farming into Africa, and weighing in on and lobbying for privatizing public education are just a few of the Gates Foundation’s larger goals, largely financed by $11.9 billion, with the following five top stock holdings:

• Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – 73,997,400 shares, 49.75% of the total portfolio.
• McDonald’s Corp. – 9,372,500 shares, 5.21% of the total portfolio.
• Caterpillar Inc. – 9,590,400 shares, 4.86% of the total portfolio.
• The CocaCola Company – 10,182,000 shares, 4.31% of the total portfolio.
• Waste Management Inc. – 15,716,367 shares, 4.15% of the total portfolio.

They’ve got 500,000 shares of Goldman Sachs, 7.1 million shares of Exxon Mobile and those half a million shares of Monsanto.

Monsanto’s Chemical War on the World

What’s all the protesting about? According to Dena Hoff, a diversified family farmer in Glendive, Montana, and North American coordinator of La Via Campesina, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s purchase of Monsanto shares indicates that the Gates Foundation’s interest in promoting the company’s seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the largest seed company in the world.”

These aren’t sour grapes about one of the richest people on earth capitalizing on stock trading. Monsanto, who created the dioxin-leeching defoliant Agents Orange and Blue, is one of the main drivers of genetically modified foods.

Heather English Day, director of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, and one of the organizers in Seattle to bring attention to the slash and burn mentality of Monsanto, the Gates Foundation’s AGRA, sums up the recent news on GE crops and foods: “Reports are coming out weekly about impending crop failures of GE corn in Africa, pesticide resistance for GE corn grown for ethanol in the US, and about indications that Bt toxins, the primary GE pesticides, especially when in the presence with Roundup, have potential impacts on human kidney cells and mammalian testis.”

Another protestor-letter signatory is Les Berensen, a medical doctor who is also with GMO Free Washington. His concern is tied to Monsanto’s Roundup, which has the main ingredient of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Berensen mentions how salmon and other fish species are being affected by the huge runoffs from fields of corn, beets, soy, cotton, and potatoes that are genetically modified to take up to four or five dousings of Roundup.

He likens this day and age of Monsanto as a Frankenstein era for both species in the wild and the human species. These anti-Monsanto events are carried out regularly in many parts of the world, and they are attended by a diverse group of people. In Seattle recently, several speakers rallied us before we marched to the FOundation: Dan Trocolli, Seattle Educators Association and Social Equality Educators; Kristen Beifus, Washington Fair Trade Coalition; and William Aal, Washington Biotechnology Action Council.

One fellow holding a corn sign and getting signatures is Travis Young, UW graduate student in planning and with CAGJ and AGRA Watch. He is seeing more and more destruction of departments at UW through consolidation and outright disbanding. He’s working on food policies for several cities as part of his graduate work.

Localized Food Security, Global Food Fights

“There are already many movements around healthy local food economies. There are proven projects and farms in Africa that are both sustainable and organic. Getting people hooked on Monsanto’s seeds and pesticides with micro-loaning that they can’t pay back will result in more farms being lost and more people moving to the cities. This is not a successful formula, and the Gates Foundation should really lead by getting rid of its Monsanto stocks, as a first step.”

Many protesters wear Haz-mat suits, and many carry signs belying the fear of this giant genetically modified experiment taking place in mankind. I met Ellie Rose at one of these events; she’s working on Transition Seattle and buttressing “a culture of engagement through a group called We the People Power.”

Karen Studders came from Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, where for two months she lived in a tent. Studders, in her mid-sixties, once worked in big business, for government organizations, and with United Nations agencies, plying her legal and science degrees from the University of Minnesota. “We have to act quickly. The abuse of these corporations, which is so blatant now, has got to stop. I have a lot of hope after being part of the Occupy movement, especially after we were illegally evicted.”

She not only went from tent to tent to listen to the ideas and rebellion of the youth, but she went into a self-made retreat after the police crack down, traveling to various cities to see the Transition Town movement up close and personal.

The security at the Foundation does not accept any signed letters. We tried delivering one asking the Gates Foundation to divest from Monsanto. I talked with several Foundation employees – researchers with higher education graduate degrees and doctorates. They said that Foundation’s policy for employees is to “not let us engage in any dialogue on any issues of controversy.” Which means, nothing but the weather can be discussed? (Whoops, climate change seems to affect disease and crops). Additionally, any nice, well-crafted and footnoted handouts on Monsanto and Roundup pesticides they might be handed “will have to be handed over to security once we enter the building.”

Those three monkeys – see, hear, and speak no evil – seem anachronistic in the 21st century for a think tank outfit like the Gates Foundation. Fortunately, less than a week after Seattle’s event, dozens of protesters monkey-wrenched Monsanto’s California office in Davis, an area close to the Capitol, through vocal activism. Unlike Seattle’s event, the California activists made demands to shut down the biotech giant which has its talons in the United States government, including the Supreme Court.

“If a small group can take down their office for a day from some mild protests, a few hundred thousand can take down the entire company — permanently,” wrote journalist Anthony Gucciardi from Natural Society.

Frankenstein’s Agronomists and Etymologists

Pretty strange news these days on the Franken-crop front, also known as the genetically engineered/ genetically modified food battlefield.

A top-secret visit by Bill and Melinda Gates to Australia in December to check up on their $10 million test crop of genetically modified bananas “capable of resisting disease.” Field trials at South Johnstone, Queensland, Australia, are pointing to a GE banana with more pro-vitamin A than regular bananas.

The stuff of movies like Soylent Green or some 21st Century James Bond plot. Poor African nations are in the sights of big agri-business and biotechnology outfits like Monsanto, Bayer, Chimera, BASF, Syngenta. The Gates Foundation’s AGRA – Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – is all about top down mandates, hyper-technology, corporate-driven solutions, and sometimes bizarre genetically modified organism in a hocus pocus that puts profits ahead of precautionary principle.

Seven Billion Guinea Pigs and counting …

Full steam ahead for outside-the-local-region solutions, and damn the local knowledge, those land races of food and crop varieties that have stood the test of time — and culture.

George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farming cooperative, which had more than $600 million in sales last year, puts it plainly: “There is a growing awareness that our [food supply] system makes us all guinea pigs of sorts.”

Story after story, incident after incident prove to more than just the organic foodies that genetic engineering isn’t the answer to famine, climate change and strengthening food security for poor and rich countries. The seed company Pioneer (owned by Dow Chemical) was developing a GE corn strain, Herculex, that had wrapped up in its DNA a toxin that would help it resist corn rootworm. The problem was, as a group of scientists working at Pioneer’s request found out, that GE corn killed ladybugs.

Here’s where the GE-Biotech story gets ugly – according to the journal Nature Biotechnology, Dow prohibited the scientists from publicizing the research and kept it from the EPA. That corn bio-tech “creation” was approved in 2003.

Now the narrative really gets close to the HG Wells story of The Island of Dr. Moreau: Nature News reported that a research team discovered two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild, plus a third variety that is a cross of the two GM breeds. One of the transgenic varieties found was Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola, – engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. The other one, from Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty Link canola, is resistant to gluphosinate.

That third cross contaminated variety contained transgenes from each of these, and, through it’s own evolutionary track, is resistant to both types of herbicide.

It doesn’t take graduate degrees in agronomy, chemistry and botany to figure out that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta have set loose into nature unnatural and untested plants that proliferate, cross-breed, and create new plants.

We have no idea what these GMOs are doing to us as biological entities eating so many foods containing GE canola, soy, corn and beet sugar used in a so many processed food products consumed by tens of millions of people.

Climate Change and Seeds

For more than two decades, and especially this past year, the alarms have been going off concerning climate change making an already difficult situation of global food security, and in Africa in particular, worse.

The climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, had all sorts of panels on food insecurity complicated by the effects of climate change. Which countries have the least capacity to adapt? Developing countries – i.e. the majority of countries.

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that body disregarded by Republicans and lambasted and vilified by the Tea Party and blokes like presidential aspirant, Ron Paul – recently made it clear with a convergence of dozens of scientific studies and organizations that there will be deleterious impacts of climate change on agriculture, livestock and fishing.

The Last Fish

Here’s how screwed up the GE-GMO purveyors are – genetically altered salmon, pen raised, of course, have been DNA-bombarded with the genes of a fresh water bass species so they get five times the size of “normal” farmed salmon in the same 18-month period. Feeding those Franken-salmon corn meal, soy by-products and chicken and beef renderings adds to the gross experiment.

Here’s an even more strange fact that is pushing GE technology into husbandry and fisheries sciences – a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for more than $100,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. They are so rare now – overfished to near extinction – we have to marvel at the rapidity of the globe’s drive for wild food. Fish are probably the last wild food Americans eat. Sushi joints from Seattle to Missoula and Las Vegas are as popular as Carl’s Jr.

When I talk with sushi-eating friends about their habits, they shrug it off, saying they might as well eat the last of the wild marine protein before the world contaminated everything and shifts to GE-Everything.

Famine, Hunger, Solutions

Floods and inconsistent weather patterns affecting rainfall have impacted most parts of the world, situations worsened by the prices of fuel. Oxfam correlates this impact into hardship –climate change will help double food prices by the year 2030.

These factors, seen before and after Durban’s “Climate Conference Debacle,” are churning up the debate on genetically modified food. The Gates, Monsanto and some agricultural experts are convinced that GMOs will provide part of the answer to the long-standing hunger and food insecurity challenges that have plagued the African continent for half a century.

But civil society, social justice advocates and others from non-governmental organizations urged world leaders to focus on the importance of food security, particularly in Africa. Wilfred Miga of PELUM sees food in Africa tied directly to individual countries’ identity and sovereignty – food culture and the right to grow they’re called. PELUM is an association in Zambia giving political and technical voice to small-scale farmers in rural areas. It’s simple for people like Miga – improving livelihoods and increasing the sustainability of farming communities by empowering ecological best practices.

Miga said PELUM understands that despite the challenges the African continent faces, GMOs are not a universal answer to food insecurity. In fact, he like thousands of others in the food sovereignty movement know GMOs gut food sovereignty because those crops are patented, they are bio-manipulated to have killer or assassin genes that prevent germination without the pesticides and other artificial inputs created and marketed by the same seed companies or subsidiaries, and the crops in mass plantings will contaminate all other wild or non-GMO crops, in a worse case scenario.

Hawaii had widespread contamination of papaya crops from GM varieties, even in the seed stocks that were sold as conventional.
Jimmy Buffet and the Mosquitoes that Ate Key West

Worse yet, back to HG Wells, is the GE mosquito, in Jimmy Buffet land (maybe he’ll score a song about the Franken-squito and Margarita-ville).

UK-based Oxitec is going to release genetically-engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys this month, the first-ever U.S. release of these engineered bugs.

Aedes aegypti are produced by this private biotechnology company in hopes that their offspring will die at a young age in an effort to lower mosquito populations and limit the spread of dengue fever. Genetically-engineered mosquitoes were released by Oxitec in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Brazil. Eradicating dengue fever is laudable (I had a case of it in Guatemala, and I never deviate from calling it Break Bone Fever to this day), but the company’s claims that their GE mosquitoes are sterile and they have eradicated the fever are wrong: their mosquitoes are fertile, and no one has successfully eradicated dengue fever from any population.

So, this corporation from overseas gets to use 36-square acres near the Key West Cemetery as a testing plot (undisclosed location) for up to 10,000 genetically engineered mosquitoes.

Many questions about genetically-engineered mosquitoes remain unanswered, and since Friends of the Earth exposed this GE mosquito release story, here’s what that group has to say about the real questions behind the release:

Who’s regulating this release and who more importantly, who will be legally and financially liable if something goes wrong?

Shoot, what about the unintended consequences of decreasing in Aedes aegypti population have on the local food chain and ecosystem? Could other more dangerous bugs take its place, such as the Asian Tiger mosquito which is one of the most invasive species on the planet?

Informed consent? Will Oxitec be required to obtain the free and informed consent of Key West residents (unlike in the Cayman Islands where “no public consultation was undertaken on potential risks and informed consent was not sought from local people”)?

The super-mosquito next generation? What happens when Oxitec’s mosquitoes survive into adulthood (since 3–4 percent have been found to do just that despite the flaw engineered into their genome)?

It’s not just a male thing! Although Oxitec plans to only release male genetically engineered mosquitoes, what are the risks if female genetically engineered mosquitoes are released (since the company sorts them by hand and up to 0.5 percent of the released insects are in fact female)? Since females bite humans, how could this impact human health? Will it hamper efforts to limit the spread of dengue fever?

Do we need more corporate marketing of things like mosquitoes? Since Oxitec cannot completely eliminate a mosquito population will countries and communities become dependent on Oxitec for the indefinite future? What economic impacts will such dependence have on communities?

Two Carrots a Day … and Corporations are NOT People

This entire GMO debate has to be framed by community power over corporate power. The Occupy movement speaks to some of that, and the Move to Amend (reversing or nullifying a Jan. 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United) also touches upon some of this corporate malfeasance and misdeeds. But it takes a real in-the-trenches person like Richard Grossman, who died November at age 70, to cut through the bedrock of why these corporations or foundations like Gates have way too much control and power.

He started off 40 years ago talking about how corporations had taken control of our environment. He has since looked at the systemic failure of the United States federal government which has since day one been in cahoots with the oligarchy and land-holding elite:
“One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.

“But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years before that they were the propertied nobility in England. In the USA, a minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws, using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don’t lay a hand on systemic reality, don’t touch the structure of governance and law, don’t question the country’s great myths. For the past century or so, one such realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast.”

So what’s for breakfast? Cassava? Friends of the Earth Nigeria is showing why even non-GMO messed-with hybrids pose problems with biodiversity. Using hybridization and selective breeding, three new yellow varieties of cassava with loads of vitamin A will supposedly help with malnutrition, blindness and death.

Can anyone in the Gates’ Foundations AGRA project understand why this supposed research breakthrough gets dismissed by groups like Friends of the Earth Nigeria (FoEN). The argument is around why the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) research team in Ibadan would be messing around with one of Nigeria’s key food crops.

It’s about biodiversity, something corporations scoff at when it comes to finding ways to “beat or speed up mother nature.” Here’s the irony with all of this agronomic meddling: two carrots can easily provide the daily vitamin A requirement.

Plain old carrots for breakfast. Easy to plant, easy to eat, and not one iota of that process is tied up in Dow, Monsanto, General Mills, or Bill Gates, or any stockholders’ greedy interests.

If the legislation passes muster in the Senate and is signed by President Obama (who has threatened a veto, but don’t hold your breath), it would allow private firms–internet service providers (ISPs), telecoms and wireless providers–to hand over personal information about users to law enforcement and security agencies.

This unprecedented power-grab by a cabal of giant corporations and the federal government would take place under the guise of “cybersecurity,” the latest front in the secret state’s assault on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights.

While the bill’s sponsors and supporters claim that any “information-sharing” of personal data would be “voluntary,” it would occur without benefit of a warrant or a court order and automatically “exempts such information from public disclosure.”

Denouncing the bill, the ACLU’s Michelle Richardson said that CISPA’s “biggest and most fundamental flaw” is that it empowers “the military, including agencies like the NSA, to collect the internet records of Americans’ everyday internet use.”

CISPA is the latest in a series of repressive measures that have incrementally rolled-back the Bill of Rights since 1995′s Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist provocations. Under successive Democratic and Republican administrations fundamental constitutional protections, specifically those guaranteed by the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, have been gutted.

Beginning with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), which severely limited the rights of prisoners to obtain habeas corpus relief from federal courts, 2001′s Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which handed the Executive Branch carte blanche to wage endless, undeclared wars, and now the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), which empowers the President to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison anyone, anywhere in the world declared a “terrorist,” including American citizens detained on U.S. soil, without charge or trial, the architecture of a police state is firmly in place.

“In the past decade,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Trevor Timm averred, “the amorphous phrase ‘national security’ has invaded many arenas of government action, and has been used to justify much activity that did not involve legitimate terrorist threats. The most obvious (and odious) example is the unfortunately named USA-PATRIOT Act, a law that was sold to the American public as essential to combating terrorism, but which has overwhelmingly been applied to ordinary American citizens never even suspected of terrorism.”

Citing the example of the FBI, Timm pointed out that under the rubric of “stopping terrorism” the Bureau “issued more than 192,000 National Security Letters to get Americans’ business, phone or Internet records without a warrant. These invasive letters–which come with a gag order on the recipient so they can’t even admit they received one–have been used to gather information about untold number of ordinary citizens, including journalists.”

Indeed, “‘Information sharing’–CISPA’s mantra–has also created privacy nightmares for everyday Americans in the name of national security. The federal government routinely shares its massive national security databases with local law enforcement agencies with predictable results.”

Amongst CISPA’s controversial provisions, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Obergruppenführer of America’s 16-agency Intelligence Community, “shall issue guidelines providing that the head of an element of the intelligence community may, as the head of such element considers necessary to carry out this subsection: (A) grant a security clearance on a temporary or permanent basis to an employee or officer of a certified entity; (B) grant a security clearance on a temporary or permanent basis to a certified entity and approval to use appropriate facilities; and (C) expedite the security clearance process for a person or entity as the head of such element considers necessary, consistent with the need to protect the national security of the United States.”

Under “Definitions,” (1) a “certified entity” is described as a “protected entity, self-protected entity, or cybersecurity provider that–(A) possesses or is eligible to obtain a security clearance, as determined by the Director of National Intelligence; and (B) is able to demonstrate to the Director of National Intelligence that such provider or such entity can appropriately protect classified cyber threat intelligence.”

“(2) The term ‘cyber threat information’ means information directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from–(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or (B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information. (3) Cyber threat intelligence.–The term ‘cyber threat intelligence’ means information in the possession of an element of the intelligence community directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from–(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or (B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.”

According to this reading, a “certified entity” is any one of the thousands of über-secretive “cybersecurity firms” with their stable of “cleared” employees who hold top secret and above security clearances who rely upon and do the bidding of their masters–corporate shareholders and the federal government.

The bill’s draconian language would in essence transform investigative journalism and whistleblowing into a crime since “the theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information” is precisely the meat and potatoes used by journalists and outraged citizens to uncover corporate and government lawbreaking.

Indeed under CISPA, the employees of firms such as the ultra-spooky Endgame Systems, SAIC, Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics, the designers of “boutique cyber weapons” for the government as BusinessWeek disclosed last summer, would ply their dirty trade in destructive algorithmic weapons with more than a wink-and-a-nod: they would be empowered to do so and earn big bucks (courtesy of U.S. taxpayers) in the process!

To get a sense of some of the surveillance “products” which have transformed private data into weaponized kit for the secret state, readers are well-advised to peruse The Spyfiles published last December by the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks.

“In the last ten years,” WikiLeaks informed us, “systems for indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence market.”

To cite but one example culled from The Spyfiles, NICE Systems, founded by “retired” members of Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, Unit 8200, has become a key player in the global Surveillance-Industrial Complex.

With decades of experience surveilling, tracking and repressing Palestinian and left-wing activists at home and abroad, the NiceTrack Mass Detection Center is a perfect tool that provides “nationwide interception, monitoring and analysis” to enterprising securocrats who need a leg-up on home-grown “subversive elements.”

Accordingly, the Mass Detection Center “helps intelligence organizations and national security agencies fight terrorism and reduce national threat levels. It supports both mass and target monitoring workflows and helps operators and analysts find new suspects, generate new leads and monitor existing targets.” Indeed, the software suite “stores and analyzes all types of telephony and Internet content.” We’re informed that “collecting and storing nationwide data enables broadening the scope of target information and performing on-going and post-event investigations.”

NiceTrack Target 360° according to brochures published by WikiLeaks “is the leading communication intercept system for tracking, monitoring, and investigating targets’ activities, securing 1.5 billion people worldwide.” Indeed, “the system is designed to provide Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), intelligence organizations and SIGINT agencies with hermetic 360° target monitoring by collecting, processing, retaining and analyzing any type of communication activity.”

Amongst the product’s “Key Benefits” we learn that Target 360° can “help” law enforcement “reduce crime, prevent terrorism” and “identify other security threats” by providing “persistent situation awareness” of a “target” through “advanced IP monitoring,” “open source intelligence” and “lawful hacking.”

Additionally, Target 360° can “manage and efficiently structure millions of internet activities and unstructured data into a simple and meaningful intelligence picture.” Target 360° “is designed to handle all types of Web 2.0 internet applications, including Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, forums, chats, and e-mails, and is scalable to support new services” and can “be integrated with legacy systems for telephony and mobile interception and provide a comprehensive solution for all types of communication interception.”

As numerous critics and journalists have pointed out, the privatization of the government’s intelligence and security functions, theoretically transparent under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), would, under CISPA, fall under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) where “disclosure” is little more than a euphemism for “down the memory hole.”

In all likelihood, privatized spooks would be exempt from revealing the state’s blanket surveillance of its citizens under any number of provisions built into the Freedom of Information Act.

For example under section (b)(1), the secret state can prevent “disclosure [of] national security information concerning the national defense or foreign policy, provided that it has been properly classified in accordance with the substantive and procedural requirements of an executive order.”

Can you say “state secrets privilege,” Sibel Edmonds or Thomas Drake?

Since, an “an employee or officer of a certified entity,” i.e., a private contractor, telecom or ISP will be empowered by Congress to share user information with NSA and other departments of the federal government, such information “shall be considered proprietary information and shall not be disclosed to an entity outside of the Federal Government except as authorized by the entity sharing such information.”

Under CISPA it will be virtually impossible for the average citizen to learn whether they have been spied upon since Section (b)(4) of FOIA specifically protects “trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential. This exemption is intended to protect the interest of both the government and submitter of information.”

And once an “employee or officer of a certified entity” has been “read into” a CIA, FBI, DHS or NSA black program, they are automatically exempt from disclosing such information to a lawful court since CISPA “prohibits a civil or criminal cause of action against a protected entity, a self-protected entity (an entity that provides goods or services for cybersecurity purposes to itself), or a cybersecurity provider acting in good faith under the above circumstances.”

With CISPA, official lawbreaking is automatically precluded from review by a lawful court and the average citizen, who may have lost their job because of malicious or flawed data collected by a “certified entity” will be stripped of their ability to obtain compensation from deputized cyber snoops “acting in good faith.”

Most controversially perhaps, the statute reads: “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” companies can share information “with any other entity, including the federal government.”

As CNET News analyst Declan McCullagh pointed out, “By including the word ‘notwithstanding,’ House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) intended to make CISPA trump all existing federal and state civil and criminal laws.”

Indeed, by inserting the word “notwithstanding” into the legislation, it “would trump wiretap laws, Web companies’ privacy policies, gun laws, educational record laws, census data, medical records, and other statutes that protect information,” McCullagh wrote.

As noted above, “CISPA’s authorization for information sharing extends far beyond Web companies and social networks. It would also apply to Internet service providers, including ones that already have an intimate relationship with Washington officialdom,” CNET reported.

“Large companies including AT&T and Verizon handed billions of customer records to the NSA; only Qwest refused to participate,” McCullagh reminded us. “Verizon turned over customer data to the FBI without court orders. An AT&T whistleblower accused the company of illegally opening its network to the NSA, a practice that the U.S. Congress retroactively made legal in 2008.”

What’s to prevent firms such as Google, Facebook or Twitter from turning over our private data to the government, after all, they have their customers’ best interests at heart as part of their business model, right? Better think again!

The New York Times reported Sunday that that “Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.”

That report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission “draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.”

“As early as 2007,” the Times disclosed, “Street View engineers had ‘wide access’ to the plan to collect payload data. Five engineers tested the Street View code, a sixth reviewed it line by line, and a seventh also worked on it, the report says.”

“Google’s rogue engineer scenario collapses in light of the fact that others were aware of the project and did not object,” Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the Times. “This is what happens in the absence of enforcement and the absence of regulation.”

Such practices will be infinitely worse under CISPA. Google’s harvesting of their customers’ private data or Facebook’s routine cooperation with law enforcement “requests” for users’ information could in fact be turned over whenever an intelligence agency declares that doing so is in the interest of national- or cybersecurity and we would have no way of ever learning about it since harvested emails, web searches and stored profiles could be deemed “proprietary information.”

With a ginned-up panic over “cybersecurity” taking its place alongside imperialism’s other “wars” on “terror,” “drugs” and “crime,” the secret state’s “unprecedented attacks on democratic rights, in which the entire political establishment and both Democrats and Republicans are participating,” as the World Socialist Web Site warned, “must be understood as preemptive preparations by the political establishment to meet the coming social upheavals with police state measures.”

With movements like the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and the Silver Liberation Army attempting to gain influence in global decision making, “science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears.”

In a study of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations a “relatively small group of companies, mainly banks” have been cited as institutions wielding a disproportionate amount of power and influence over the globe. But, whether or not this power results in undue influence over political processes remains a mystery to Science, according to the study.

Certain axiomatic foundations in the study have gained criticism by certain brokers of Science, but the study still remains a unique and complex systems analysis of the global power structure. Sober history books step aside, for your verbose narratives and portrayal of events is no match for the raw power of science and reason alone. First-hand experience counts for nil. The Experts have weighed in on the way things are, and, for apparently the first time, Science can confirm the oligarchy.

So, if the on-the-ground facts were not proof enough of where power on earth lies – think trillions of dollars of liquidity provided to banks through a bailout culture – or the grassroots movements such as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and Silver Liberation Army that have all posited corporate greed and banker occupation of the planet as a major hurdle towards peace and freedom, finally theory has been put to reality.

Conducted by three complex systems theorists out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the study, according to the New Scientist, “is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.” The method used combines mathematics used for a long time to model the makeup of natural systems with detailed data on the corporate world to then map the puzzle of ownership of the world’s transnational corporations.

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says a nonsensical James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

The issue I take up with the aforementioned enunciation is that I do not see the relationship between conspiracy theories and the free market. If I am not mistaken, I believe a free-market is a social condition, whereas a conspiracy theory is a view of an event or the world. And so, conspiracy theories can take place inside the free-market, but the free-market cannot, in any empirically provable manner, exist inside a conspiracy. I am not sure what kind of scienceing this scientist is trying to get away with, but it does not make any rational sense. Furthermore, why does he presume conspiracy theories and free-markets are not reality-based? It seems like Scientist Glattfelder is partaking in his own educated brand of dogma.

Surely, innumerable other studies have researched how very few TNCs own swathes of the world’s economy and its resources, but each of these studies included only some companies and omitted indirect ownerships, and so therefore were incapable of contemplating how the relationship of power affected the globe’s economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for example.

However, in its scientific glory, the Zurich team can do this. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors across the globe, they separated all 43,060 transnational corporations and the share ownerships between them. They then made a model demonstrating which companies controlled other companies through shareholding networks, alongside each company’s operating revenues.

The Great Work “revealed” a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of these companies had direct relationships with two or more different companies. On average they were linked to 20. Moreover, whilst they represented 20% of the globe’s operating revenues, the 1,318 companies appeared to collectively own, through their shares, the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms, “representing a further 60 percent of the global revenues.”

As the team pulled back the shadowy curtain of the corporate world, it discovered a “super-entity:” that is, 147 very tightly knit companies. The ownership of all these companies was held by other members of the super-entity. This entity controlled 40 percent of the total wealth in the overall network. Therefore, less than 1 percent of the companies controlled 40 percent of the entire network,” according to Glattfelder. Most of these were financial institutions. On the top twenty are featured Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and The Goldman Sachs Group.

A University of London macroeconomics expert, John Driffil, says the value of the analysis to the scientific community is not that a small number of people control the world, but rather what the study demonstrates in regards to economic stability. I submit that a small number of people controlling the world automatically creates instability, as the political and economic processes of civilization are not governed by the will of sovereign individuals, but instead by the decisions of businessmen and technocrats, whose morality could, due to their unique social status, divorce from the values of most people.

In a barrage of scientific verbiage, the Zurich trio maintains that the concentration of power is not inherently good or bad, “but the core’s tight interconnections could be.” The world learned in 2008 that such a highly concentrated network is unstable. “If one company suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”

“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, who heads the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis has some wrongheaded assumptions, such as equating ownership with control. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control how the companies they part-own conduct business. The system’s behavior, he says in scientific elitism, is too complex to just yet be understood by the study, and that more analysis is needed.

The analysis, the New Scientist goes on, could save the world. By pinpointing vulnerable parts of the System, economists can now suggest measures and policies to prevent future collapses from bringing down the global economy. Glattfelder suggests we may need global anti-trust rules, which currently only exist at the national level, to limit over-connection among transnational corporations. Sugihara maintains the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess inter-connectivity to discourage this risk. In other words, Science has concluded that global governance is needed to manage acute concentration of power among transnational corporations.

The super-entity, the New Scientist proposes, is not the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world, for “such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara. Newcomers to any network do their best to connect with the most highly connected members. Transnational corporations buy shares in each other for business reasons, and not for world domination, claims the article. If connectedness clusters, so too then does wealth, according to Dan Braha of NECSI. In other models created of wealth flow, money tends to flow towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, according to Sugihara, “is strong evidence that simple rules governing transtional corporations creates spontaneously highly connected groups.” As Braha presents it, “The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 percent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organizing economy.”

So, Science has confirmed an oligarchy, but has disproved a conspiracy to rule the world. The Zurich team suggests that one real question is whether the super-entity can exert political power over nations. Driffil maintains that 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha reasons that they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes the pyramid structures may be one such interest.

Although the study highlights the concentration of power within transnational corporations, the study does not track the evolution of this power. In other words, what path of history was taken for such an inordinate amount of power to be consolidated by so few shareholders, and what are the long-term implications for global stability.

When a sober analysis of the evolution of power in history is taken into consideration, one can reasonably and emotionally see that concentrated power by an oligarchy does not lead to stability, but, instead, to wars and famine such as those experienced by so many during the twentieth century, as demonstrated clear-as-a-southern-California-day by the historiography. These are wars and famines that cannot be quelled by the policy suggestions of economists, but only by a complete reset of the project of civilization by man, which means an ending to the dominant culture of power, control and authoritarianism as researched by the Zurich study.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

I’m afraid for our future. I’m afraid for our species.

I’m afraid of our species.

Homo Sapiens corrupt or foul any ecosystem that lies in the path of their economic interests. Homo Sapiens marginalize and/or exterminate almost every species of fellow inhabitant that it comes into contact with. Homo Sapiens are defiling the gasping blue orb they call home, but they presse on almost entirely heedless of their loathsome wrongheadedness.

You, me and every human being up and down our street, across the nation and throughout the world, en masse, comprise a sinister planetary menace. It is not our intent; we just can’t or won’t control ourselves.

Fort Worth writer and former resident John Graves once said that human beings would be finished when they stopped “understanding the old pull toward green things and living things.” But we’re already there. We are monstrously out of sync with the natural world. We no longer even take part in the most basic facets of our own sustenance.

Technology has replaced survival processes with leisure. Our livelihoods are based on ancillary subsistence modes which translate into to petty barter for factory farming and mechanized industrial slaughter. We live on pre-processed pseudo-nourishment. We reside in prefabricated shelters bathed in artificial light and filled with conditioned air. We don’t thrive as vital, fully-functional creatures; we merely exist as detached bystanders.

In our natural state we were never idle or bored or prone to weight gains due to a sedentary lifestyle. We were constantly involved in the means of survival, hands-on, acute and in-tune. We didn’t need Vegas or roller coasters or Viagara. Every day was a gamble and every food-source capture or kill was a victory if not an outright adrenaline rush. In our present state we struggle to survive business as usual with any useful, natural instincts intact.

Several seconds before the late August 2011 earthquake near the National Zoo in DC, flamingos grouped together, upper mammals climbed trees and lemurs sounded alarm calls. In our early existence, we probably weren’t much different than the spooked animals at the National Zoo. We probably sensed phenomena like earthquakes at an elemental level, before they happened, because we were more in touch with our habitat. Truth be told, we arguably knew more then as preyed-upon primitives than we know now as reckless louts at the top of the food chain.

We are a species run amok, obtuse and self-destructive. It’s time to debate Capitalism in a world of limited resources; it’s time to have a referendum on unaccountable Technology. If the swift-shod proliferation of excessive consumption in the name of ever-increasing profit margins reduces humanity to a lethal scourge, Capitalism is an evil that can no longer be tolerated. If the unavoidable byproducts of technology are human overpopulation, the pollution or contamination of our air, water and food supplies, biological exploitation and artificial preservation — all created at the expense of the planet and our fellow species –Technology is an evil that can no longer be promoted. If Capitalism and technology cannot be practiced with conscience, then we cannot conscientiously engage in them.

These issues warrant debate in the fore of this historical moment because humankind is toying with the notion of exploring and/or colonizing other earth-like planets in their galactic vicinity. It’s one thing for us to plunder and savage our own home. It’s quite another to destroy someone else’s home.

We must stop averting our eyes. We need to quit ignoring our crimes. In the grand scheme of things we’ve become a vicious virus that should be isolated and confined, allowing our madness to run its course, come what may.

As bad as things stand on Earth for inhabitants other than Homo Sapiens, at least Homo Sapiens are contained here. And the fledgling life-support and propulsion technologies that keep us from exploring deep-space ensure our quarantine.

If we perish, our perilous, suicidal propensities should die with us and not be flung amongst the galaxies to infect or endanger other living systems. The species Homo Sapiens had its chance.

Tragically, we’re wasting it.

The first time I fell in love, really fell in love, it was not with a girl or a woman. It was with a smattering of words here and there on a page. A printed page.

It presaged what love would be like.

It said love is a jigsaw sunset and you are the piece that holds the sun.

It said the best gesture of my brain is less than the flutter of your eyelids which whisper we are made for each other.

It took my breath away and then gave it back, deeper and more meaningful. I wanted to take in as much of it as I could.

While other kids were dreaming about throwing or catching the winning touchdown pass or chasing after the boy who threw or caught the winning touchdown pass, I discovered trunkless legs of stone in a faraway desert, wandered the stately pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan and pondered fears of what would happen if I ceased to be. My eyes widened and the narrows of obviousness rapidly became too confining.

I never idolized Luke Skywalker or Dr. J. I wanted to be Poe. I wanted to be Keats or Shelley or Yeats. I wanted to speak to people in a way that made them conscious of breathing.

Today air intake is just an involuntary reflex. Consciousness of it is something we attempt to force on our kids in school or college, but it doesn’t stick. And perhaps it was always so.

It’s been over two hundred years since Wordsworth noted that devoting our lives to getting and spending lays waste to our spirits. And we’re still mostly just getting and spending.

There’s not a business department in the land that will tell you that breathing is more important than getting and spending. Especially someone else’s breathing.

Society pays no praise or wages for the sullen art I loved because it taught me to love and breathe lovingly. And I know I have become a boring anachronism.

But I feel compelled to resist. I fear the reduction of our culture to raps and tweets and texts. The ironic truth about I-Touches, I-Pads and I-Phones is that more people are communicating, but less is being said. The gadgets truncate our thought processes and abridge cognition. They comprise a strain of expedience that might be useful in an immediate tense, but will likely be detrimental in the longer sense.

This is no time for intellectual slang. Look around.

The ceremony of innocence is being drowned. The best lack conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The mob may be incited or mollified by a text or tweet, but it will not be moved in a meaningful direction. That requires elucidation and crafted cogence.

Shelley may have overshot the mark when he said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but even if it isn’t true, it should be.

The world is so much with us that we fail to grasp the importance of the moment we live in and exist oblivious to the repercussions.

We need to be more conscious of our breathing.

We must become more mindful of our interconnectedness with everything and everyone around us. There’s no hope for us as a single party, cause, country, religion, ethnicity or species. Our only hope lies in collective conscience and broad concert.

Instead of getting and spending we need to do more watching and listening and thinking.

Instead of ceding conviction to brainwashed miscreants and manipulative scoundrels, we need to speak out and rise up, inspired and informed, and therefore indomitable.

We don’t need more pundits or politicians or profiteers. We don’t need unlimited texts or more folks following us on Twitter.

We need more eloquence and profundity.

We need more poets.

This upside down, deluded thinking is leading us to risk the precipitation of a colossal disaster of some unimaginable sort. The continuous plunder of limited resources and conversion of biomass into human mass, including the continual increase of food production to feed a growing population, are precisely what is causing humanity to charge down a “primrose path’ toward an unfolding confrontation with a global, human-driven ecological wreckage.

Perhaps we need to invite one another to listen more, see farther on a clear day, and communicate better. Thanks to all in the Circle of Friends and the Royal Society’s People and the Planet Working Group for being now here just as you are. We are going to make a difference. Like all of you, I do not have answers, but not having answers cannot be used as a ‘justification’ by population professionals, demographers and economists on our watch for ceasing their explorations and denying extant scientific research. Scientists cannot consciously and deliberately deny evidence of what could somehow be real.

All these unwitting experts must be called out. If foolhardy experts and their greedmongering benefactors are ultimately victorious in their elective mutism and willful denial of science, what is to keep silence from killing the world we inhabit? If ‘the ninety-nine percent’ are denying the human overpopulation of Earth, then 0.99% of the remaining 1% are in denial of the science of human population dynamics, I suppose. These circumstances are intolerable and cannot stand.

As a growing number of scientists are making all of us aware, a way needs to be discovered and chosen that effectively communicates an adequate understanding of the profoundly dangerous situation in which the human community finds itself in our time. As Paul Ehrlich reported last year, “Everybody who understands the situation is scared witless.”

That as it may be, experts need to gather their wits about them because they still have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform. After all, we live by our wits not witlessness; moral courage not fear; and by adapting to the requirements of reality rather than putting our heads in the sand. Somehow the vision, the honesty, the judgment, the pluck, the will and the means will be summoned by human beings with feet of clay to acknowledge, address and overcome the human-induced global challenges that are already dimly visible on the far horizon. Otherwise the greed of self-proclaimed masters of the universe and the witlessness of their minions, who together rule the world on our watch, will certainly bring about its ruin as a fit place for human habitation.

In all the seriousness and gravity of what could be true, never in a lifetime did I expect to see a situation like the global predicament looming ominously before humanity. Although my eyes were open during the first 50 years of life, I did not for a split second catch sight, even through a glass darkly, of the awesome big picture: the global predicament that is given its shape in the gigantic presence of seven billion, soon to become 9 billion human beings ravaging a finite planet with size, composition and frangible environs of Earth. The sight of something so awesome left me initially thunderstruck and later on incessantly compelled to speak out as I have for years.

Perhaps speaking out about what is true to you as best it can be expressed and thereby raising awareness, is at least one distinctly human way to go forward.

That’s the claim made in a recent op/ed in our local paper by policy analyst Josiah Neely of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Austin. His conclusion: “Throughout history, technological advances have been driven by private investment, not by government fiat. There is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon.”

As is often the case in faith-based systems, reconciling doctrine to the facts of history can be tricky. When I read Neeley’s piece, I immediately thought of the long list of modern technological innovations that came directly from government-directed and -financed projects, most notably containerization, satellites, computers, and the Internet. The initial research-and-development for all these projects so central to the modern economy came from the government, often through the military, long before they were commercially viable. It’s true that individuals and businesses often used those innovations to create products and services for the market, but without the foundational research funded by government, none of those products and services could exist.

So I called Neeley and asked what innovations he had in mind when he wrote his piece. In an email response he cited Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. Fair enough — they were independent entrepreneurs, working in the late 19th and early 20th century. But their work came decades after the U.S. Army had provided the primary funding to make interchangeable parts possible, a transformative moment in the history of industrialization. In the “good old days,” government also got involved.

As Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway explain in their book Merchants of Doubt, the U.S. Army’s Ordinance Department wanted interchangeable parts to make guns that could be repaired easily on or near battlefields, which required machine-tooled parts. That research took nearly 50 years, much longer than any individual or corporation would support. The authors make the important point clearly: “Markets spread the technology of machine tools throughout the world, but markets did not create it. Centralized government, in the form of the U.S. Army, was the inventor of the modern machine age.”

That strikes me as an important part of the story of the era of Edison and the Wrights, but one conveniently ignored by free-marketeers.

Even more curious in Neeley’s response were the two specific products he mentioned in his email: “The plow wasn’t created by government fiat, and neither was the iPhone.”

The plow and the iPhone are the best examples of innovations in the private sphere? The plow was invented thousands of years ago, in a world in which governments and economic systems were organized in just slightly different ways, making it an odd example for this discussion of modern capitalism and the nation-state. And the iPhone wouldn’t exist without all that government R&D that created computers and the Internet.

Neeley didn’t try to deny the undeniable role of government and military funding; for example, he mentioned the Saturn V rocket (a case made even more interesting, of course, because Nazi scientists were brought into the United States after World War II to work on the project). “But the driver of these advances’ adoption and relevance outside the realm of government fiat has always been the private sphere,” he wrote in his response.

Neeley is playing a painfully transparent game here. He acknowledges that many basic technological advances are driven by government fiat in the basic R&D phase, but somehow that phase doesn’t matter. What matters is the “adoption and relevance” phase. It’s apparently not relevant that without the basic R&D in these cases there would have been nothing to adopt and make relevant for the market.

We’re in real Wizard of Oz territory here — pay no attention to the scientists working behind the curtain, who are being paid with your tax dollars. Just step up to the counter and pay the corporate wizards for their products and services, without asking about the tax-funded research on which they rely.

There are serious questions to be debated about how public money should be spent on which kinds of R&D, especially when so much of that money comes through the U.S. military, whose budget many of us think is bloated. More transparency is needed in that process.

But anyone who cares about honest argumentation should be offended on principled grounds by Neeley’s sleight of hand. His distortion of history is especially egregious given the context of his op/ed, which argues against public support for solar energy in favor of the expansion of oil and gas drilling. Neeley focuses on the failure of Solyndra — the solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy after getting a $535 million federal loan guarantee — in trying to make a case against government support for alternative energy development. When public subsidies fail, there should be a vigorous investigation. But the failure of one company, hitched to a highly distorted story about the history of technological innovation, doesn’t make for a strong argument against any public support for solutions to the energy crisis, nor does it cover up the fact that the increasing use of fossil fuels accelerates climate change/disruption.

The larger context for this assertion of market fundamentalism is the ongoing political project to de-legitimize any collective action by ordinary people through government. Given the degree to which corporations and the wealthy dominate contemporary government, from the local to the national level, it’s not clear why elites are so flustered; they are the ones who benefit most from government spending. But politicians and pundits who serve those elites keep hammering away on a simple theme — business good, government bad — hoping to make sure that the formal mechanisms of democracy won’t be used to question the concentration of wealth and power.

Throughout history, the political projects of the wealthy have been driven by propaganda. There is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon, which means popular movements for economic justice and ecological sustainability not only have to struggle to change the future but also to tell the truth about the past.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in just such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– William O. Douglas

“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time we have been asked to supply a dissident or ‘truth telling’ website with our Automatic Traversal Algorithm. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your — ah — establishment had much use for such software. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the dissident, adjusting his woolen beret and carefully putting away the mobile-phone with which he had been messaging his co-conspirators. “Your ATA can carry out any standard tree traversal involving up to one hundred million nodes, using the most efficient path. However, for our work we are interested in traversing actual routers and web-servers on the Net, not nodes of a data-structure. As we wish you to modify the code, the software will not only traverse nodes but also execute an instruction on each node.”

“I don’t understand …”

“Here’s my other b-card,” the dissident said, handing Wagner a business-card, a different one from that with which he had introduced himself.

“Hal L. Burton, Ph.D., President, Burton Microprocessor Research?” Wagner finished on a surprised note, reading the business-card. “I see — so that’s how you earn your money then, and I suppose freedissident dot-com is where you spend it.” Wagner warmed to his visitor. “You know, I, I …” he trailed off. After fifteen years of authoritarian rule under FEMA and the so-called ‘USA Patriot Act’, personal freedoms were severely restricted and it was not wise to express admiration for any dissident activity. Still, he said, “Actually, I visit freedissident dot-com quite often. You do great work, you’re gutsy folks.”

Wagner meant it. That website was only about three years old but had quickly developed a reputation for occasionally managing to expose government secrets and lies, and breaking suppressed news-stories. The government had tried to shut it down but had failed.

Burton smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Wagner. Been in and out of prison for it.”

Wagner smiled too, feeling a new respect for his customer. “Hoder. Call me Hoder.”

“Hoder? Nordic?”

“You’re right. Norwegian and German extraction. So tell me, how I can help you — in any way.”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three years — since freedissident dot-com was founded, in fact. It is perfectly in keeping with your line of work, so I think you will be able to provide the solution after I explain it,” Burton began.

“Ooo-kay.”

“It is really quite simple. It’s because of the CPU-virus and worm menace that started a few years ago. Remember Stuxnet? — that was the grandpa. My team has made a self-learning firmware patch, a one-time universal patch that takes care of several entire classes of these damn things. Nobody will have to care about any CPU virus or worm for several years, especially with new server-boxes, and therefore new chips, not being available anymore. We want to traverse the Web and apply the patch to every web-server and router.”

“Excellent idea!” Wagner was enlivened. “So you wish to start at triple-a dot-com and work up to, say, uh, … zygote dot-org …”

“Exactly–”

“… not that the actual process would be executed alphabetically,” mused Wagner thoughtfully.

He had seen the immense benefits of Burton’s plan at once; it was the need of the day, literally. Only personal desktop computers were available to Joe Blow; these machines were made such that they could not be used as web-servers. Server-class computers and routers were strictly regulated and were not available to the general public. Apart from the government and the armed forces, servers could be sold only to businesses and they too had to fill out a variety of forms to establish ‘need’, and even so, permits were granted to a minority of applicants. All the personal and independent media websites in the country ran on repaired and re-repaired machines that were over ten years old. Ten years ago, after coordinated hostage-takings and bomb-blasts in Peoria, which were blamed on foreign ‘terrorists’, the Department of Homeland Security had demanded the law regulating servers and routers, and had been given what it had asked for. Wagner knew that it was critically important to take good care of the old machines that the general public and individuals were using, and to minimize their vulnerability to viruses and worms. Personally, he suspected that the N.S.A. was behind many of the viruses that regularly crippled free-thought and dissident websites.

“You know how the Baldur chip works, right?”

“In general, yes,” Wagner nodded. He thought back to the second Bush-Cheney administration when the Baldur chip had been invented and mandated as an etched integrated-circuit on every CPU. First, it had been the V-chip. Then, the RFID chip. It had been only a matter of time before something like the Baldur chip would be proposed, be legislated for electronic devices, and become ubiquitous — every web-server and router carried it now. It provided the means to disable or lock, and re-enable or unlock, any device it was on-board on by means of one kilobit lock or unlock instructions and an accompanying and suitable five kilobit key.

“Because it’s not possible to install a firmware patch when the CPU is operating, what we plan to do is to make two passes: on the first pass, we disable the CPU and install our patch. And on the second pass, we attempt to upgrade to a different version of the firmware patch by applying a delta on the old patch for any CPU that needs it, and re-enable the CPU. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why we need this dual-pass system, even if I knew all the technical details behind it.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on. I’m curious about, I mean, how are we supposed to crack those one-K instructions?” Not even any single government branch possessed those two one kilobit instructions’ bit-sequences. Each instruction was split up into three components. The Federal government was the custodian of the lower-order 512-bit-sequence, and the State governments and the Judiciary were the custodians of the higher-order bit-sequence with the 512 bits of each instruction equally split between them. This would be a first, if they pulled it off. And an underground effort, at that.

“We’ve hacked it,” Burton said with a trace of smugness. “That’s what we’ve been working on for the past three years. That, and the universal patch. But for the traversal, you’re the experts. That’s why I’m here.”

“Of course, to successfully unlock a chip, the re-enable code must be accompanied by — doesn’t the key … I mean that doesn’t it have to somehow mesh … in that there has to be a — an equivalence between the bit-wise ORs and the bit-wise ANDs between the one-K disable instruction and the key’s one-K chunks … ?” trailed off Wagner in a querying tone. He was not at all sure as to just how all this worked; he was a through-and-through Language Theory & Automata man. One or two of his specialists would certainly know this Baldur-chip business backwards, however.

Burton laughed. “I’m even more in the dark than you, but we’ve got that part nailed down. My boys are all set with the keys, the instructions, the whole shebang on that end. All we need from you is a guaranteed traversal of every node, every leaf, every router, every web-server on the Net in North America. And then they’ll be safe from these virus-making crazies.”

“Thanks to you.”

Burton smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Thanks to us, if you must.” Shifting his weight to one side, he pulled out a chequebook from his hip-pocket. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Wagner replied, “Don’t even think about it, Hal — we’re in this together.” He smiled at Burton and rose to shake his hand.

The root reason behind these machinations was the fact that the World Wide Web was that greatest of ‘unknown unknowns’ — a random techno-sociological mutation in an otherwise (mostly) ordered and controlled world; an ‘unknown unknown’ whose unforeseen birth and stupendous power to capture and exhibit the evasive and coquettish Truth had thrown off-course, and was hampering, the march towards that unholy concentration of wealth and power — the ‘New World Order’ — which the European-originated money-lending power-elite clans had so carefully been planning for centuries.

This, thought Greg, was the most satisfying thing that had ever happened to him. Chuck and he were both volunteers with an activist movement, ‘Winter Soldiers & Rainy-day Patriots’ — an apt twist of a two-century-old American concept — to restore (true) Republican government, and so the nature of this project and the linkage with freedissident.com gave him a good feeling. His thoughts drifted to the erosion of civil liberties. Besides a question of ideals, he had personal reason to be concerned: he had been detained in prison for a fortnight without any charges, simply for submitting a withering short-story about the government to a publisher — someone there had probably ratted on him. A number of laws contradicting and subverting the still-constitutionally ‘guaranteed’ free-speech were on the books now. These anti-constitutional laws had various sections — ‘dissent,’ ‘incitement,’ ‘sedition,’ and so forth. They had either been in existence since 2001 by way of un-American legislation or had been enacted during Bush-Cheney II or Clinton-Lieberman I. He was a boy when it had all started, but he knew that except for a few (true) patriots who invoked Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the majority of the populace, apathetic and afraid, had not bothered to challenge those repressive Totalitarian laws.

Greg heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck joined him on the balcony.

“Dude! Clean compile,” Chuck said. The software they had been working on that day had built successfully.

“Sounds good! Seems like we’ll beat the schedule. You told Shrub?” ‘Shrub’ was their private nick-name for Sam W. Jaffe who was nominally partnering them from Burton’s team. On their very first day, he had delivered a near-monologue about a documentary he had seen on the San ‘Bush-men’ of the Kalahari Desert. He had gone on a little too long for Greg’s liking, and had finished by telling Greg and Chuck that, in his opinion, ‘the Bush-man’s way of life is thoroughly depraved, degenerate, and inhuman.’ After that, Greg had started referring to him as ‘Shrub.’

“Yeah, he’s happy. I’m likin’ this so far. Wanna go get some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They walked back into the office and out to the corridor.

“You seem kinda … a little subdued …” ventured Chuck after a couple of minutes, as they were descending in an elevator.

“Thinking about this project made me think of the Unpatriotic Act, FEMA, and all the shit that came after that,” said Greg, and cut loose with a few obscenities. “It’s perverse to have called something so un-American and anti-patriotic the ‘Patriot Act’!” he said loudly, and punched the elevator door as it was opening.

“Well, one reason was to fool the public into buying it, so that they would not protest against it,” said Chuck matter-of-factly. “Doing anything on New Year’s?” he asked hurriedly as they turned left at the Christmas tree in the main lobby, wanting to get Greg’s mind off the USA Patriot Act.

“Maureen and I are just getting together with a few friends. And being grateful we’ve made it a quarter of the way into the century … without blowing everyone up, despite all the carnage and mayhem. Hey, you and Janie, if you don’t have plans, why don’t you join us?”

“Aw-ight, thanks dude. I’ll tell her. Guess she’ll give you guys a call,” answered Chuck as they entered the cafeteria.

He picked up a bar of chocolate from the packaged foods rack. “Wonder which of the F3 this benefits,” he groused.

“Huh? F3? — what are you talking about?” Greg said, not comprehending.

“Dude! You mean you don’t know?! The F3 — that’s Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto — they’ve a lock on all foodstuffs. Throughout the Americas. Happened during Clinton-Lieberman II. Not even a giant like McDonald’s gets its beef now without it passing through one of the F3.” Chuck kept up with the minutiae of economic developments much more than did Greg who was naturally inclined to ideologies and abstract concepts.

“Oh!” Greg sighed and shook his head in disgust. He thought back to the second Hillary Clinton-Joseph Lieberman administration and the merger of the two political parties. Soon after their increasingly lockstep economic policies had become undeniable and obvious, the show ‘Democracy’ had been dispensed with and the Democrats and the Republicans had made their marriage official. It had ostensibly been ‘to foster inclusiveness, put an end to partisanship, and bring all Americans together under one tent.’ Exalted sentiments, tawdry reasons … and Totalitarian phraseology. The new combined party — the aptly-named ‘Federalists’ — pointed to the disorganized, little-known Constitution Party as evidence of a thriving ‘Democracy’. Standing at the packaged-foods rack, Greg subconsciously smiled wryly and shook his head in the midst of his ruminations that were triggered by Chuck’s little nugget, causing one or two people nearby to stare at him. The strange part of it all was that even though large bodies of voters would agree amongst themselves that they had voted for a Constitution Party candidate, that candidate would somehow almost never win the election. The Max McKinney crisis of the previous election was evidence of that. But the strangest thing was that frequently the media’s ‘scientific polls’ too would be at odds with an honest person’s investigation of reality. Everyone and their dog would tell you that they had voted for populist, popular activist Green, yet the ‘polls’ would show capitalist, well-connected businessman Gray holding a ‘twenty percent lead.’ It was as if normal, sane people were saying one thing to their friends and families but saying something else to these ‘pollsters’… .

“Howdy guys,” replied Sam, walking into their office. “Hal just sent me a secure message. He’s not sure if you’ve been told but absolute secrecy is essential for this project; if any governmental agency — any snoop — gets wind of it, they’re going to try to halt it, sabotage it, whatever.”

“You bet,” answered Chuck. “Hode — that’s our president, Dr. Hoder Wagner — told us. Yeah, I can imagine that the Pentagon warlord, the A-G — all those Anti-American dictatorial creeps — would not like web-servers and routers getting virus and worm-proofed.”

Their concerns were well-founded. For the past two decades, the government had maintained a network of informants within the general public, reminiscent of the long-gone U.S.S.R.

“Mum’s the word,” Greg chimed in. “So, where does Dr. Burton keep himself?”

Sam made no answer. Greg and Chuck stared at him, then glanced at one another.

“He usually, er, he has another concern that … that he spends his, um, time at,” said Sam uncertainly.

“If you mean freedissident dot-com, we know about it,” said Greg.

Sam looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure you did. Yes, these days he’s usually over there. That setup is in a basement, a townhouse near Tysons Corner.” Tysons Corner was an expensive commercial and semi-residential area in Northern Virginia, about half-an-hour’s drive from Washington D.C.

After a pause, Chuck said, “It’s odd that they — the government — didn’t take down at least some part of the Web by fiat. What I mean is that I’m surprised they haven’t really tried.”

“I suppose they know that … that if they messed with the backbone or the routers, the Web would go underground,” offered Sam. “People possess routers and web-servers. Activists would create an alternate mini-Web … like a bits-and-pieces Web.”

“You’re right, we could patch up something, hmmm …” Greg mused. “Yeah, one-oh-nine-B, cable hookups, plain old copper … all underground,” he continued; he was thinking out loud more than talking to Sam. “Though I wouldn’t have thought that they’d, I mean the Feds, woulda been able to think around that curve,” he finished, addressing Sam now.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to your work,” Sam said, walking to the door. “The Web is a prized freedom and this project is important. In fact, it should have been done years ago — previous generation should’ve taken care of it.” Sam winked at them conspiratorially as he left their office.

“Shrub’s a funny guy,” said Chuck. “But he’s awright.”

“The previous effin’ generation was complacent. Complacent! Those dumb-asses kept blabbering about America being the most free country in the world even though that wasn’t true and even as our freedoms were gradually being … being chopped down, like a bloody forest being clear-cut,” said Greg, turning back to his computer. “Our freedoms are like the species: once plentiful, now declining.”

“Nice, that’s a good analogy, partner. Hey, how many species are there?” enquired Chuck. Responding to his own question, he continued, “After these climate-change-related extinctions, I think there’s, hmm … The Nine Billion Names of God … I mean, er, names of God’s creations,” he corrected himself, having taken a stab at flowery speech and felt embarrassed at the results.

“Uh, not billion, but million,” Greg said. “Nine million species.”

“Oh, yeah … ‘scuse me!” Chuck laughed at his mistake. “Though our freedoms have vanished at a rate far faster than the species,” he mused, on the same bent. “Ya know, I hacked into a Fed server one night and hit paydirt.”

“Welcome to the club,” grinned Greg. “But what do you mean, ‘paydirt’?”

“Yeah, was gonna tell you — it had a bunch of Top Secret white-papers and research reports. One was about freedoms, I’ll never forget that one. A complete list, and then some, of all the freedoms that man has and has had. Sociologists have determined that there’s precisely nine thousand freedoms.”

“Like?” prodded Greg curiously, swivelling in his chair to face Chuck.

“We-e-ell, it had all types of … of details; stuff about Paine and Mill and Nietzsche, and sociometrics and ethnograms and biostatistics … and I don’t know what — government’s technocrats have waded through all kinds of crap. They’ve concluded that 21st century humans have, or can have, exactly nine thousand freedoms. Like, just take one freedom, Communication. From plain talking to coded speech to music to … um, yes, ritual gift-giving to, what was it … gypsy-camp markers to smoke-signals, would you believe we have, if I recall correctly, exactly six-hundred and-seventeen modes of Communication? At least that’s what that research report says.”

“Six-seventeen? What were some of the others? I mean the other modes of Communication?”

“Gawd, I dunno. I remember they’ve, like, enumerated different ‘elemental’ freedoms within … what was it, a ‘group-level’ freedom, and those are within a ‘top-level’ freedom. Like ‘eye movements,’ ‘head movements,’ aah … yes, ‘muscle tone,’ ‘foot shifting,’ ‘finger-tapping’ and so on fell under ‘Body Language,’ which itself falls under a ‘top-level’ freedom, ‘Communication.’ Man, it’s freaky, I tell ya. Supposed to be a ‘research report’, but what with its different volumes it’s really like a book. It’s over three thousand pages.”

Sam appeared in the doorway of their office, looking a little flushed. “Hey, guys. Just on the news. The invasion got underway.”

“Oh, great! Now we’re killing Norwegians!” exclaimed Greg, opening a web-browser and going to news.yahoo.com.

“What’s the government-controlled media gonna call this? After all the ‘Oil Wars’, now the ‘Water Wars’?” muttered Chuck morosely.

“Um, yeah,” answered Chuck sheepishly.

Seeing Greg’s querying expression, a sly, insinuating grin spreading on his face, Chuck continued, “Hey, I found it in my pocket! I don’t know — perhaps it fell in … perhaps Janie put it there. So what?” he ended on a petulant note.

Greg clapped Chuck on the shoulder and laughed out good-naturedly at his defensiveness, setting Chuck laughing too.

“So nothing … dude!” he said, in a friendly way. “That first dynlib we built, the one for the disable-and-patch, it’s still just ‘oh dot d-n-l.’ We needed a name for it. I’ll call it ‘Mistletoe’.” Greg was referring to the dynamic-library which would, at run-time, disable or lock the CPUs on the first-pass and apply the anti-virus/anti-worm patch.

They turned back to their workstations, still working but easing off for the day.

“Damn!” said Chuck suddenly. “Hey, we gotta stress-test that random key-sequence generator I wrote before we leave for the day.” Glancing at the time, he continued, “Oh hell, Greg, Hode will be here soon. We should’ve started testing it earlier today.”

“Already banged the hell out of it. It’s good to go.”

“Oh … you did? Cool! Ya know, I wonder though that there’s no test-team. I mean what’s Hode thinking, and that guy Burton? We’re testing each others’ stuff. Should’ve had a couple of good QA guys.”

“Well … I suppose Hode knows that what we write doesn’t need testers,” said Greg with a touch of conceit. Grinning and crooking an eyebrow at Chuck, he continued, “I mean, in these past few projects, how many bugs — I mean material defects — have been found in what you and I have written? All that’s happened is that the QA guys have wound up getting an inferiority complex because they couldn’t find a single, real bug!”

Chuck smiled and shook his head, and both of them ended up laughing at Greg’s hot-shot ego-stoking. Though egotistical, his vanity was not misplaced; neither was Chuck’s caution: in the three projects that they had worked on together, the testers actually had felt dispensable — Greg and Chuck were not only exceptionally talented, they were also very careful with their coding and debugging. Yet the lack of an independent, professional Quality Assurance unit in any software project considerably increased the chances of a calamitous defect being discovered post-deployment — when the software went ‘live.’

After some time, Greg rose from his chair and stretched. However, with the first step he took, he stumbled, and awkwardly and noisily toppled across a chair. Startled, Chuck got up. Grasping the edge of the table, Greg got back on his feet and voiced an oath or two.

“Dude! You okay?” enquired Chuck. “You know I’ve seen you do this before … like, stumbling, lurching — maybe there’s a balance problem?”

“Yup, there is. Inner-ear problem. In fact, that’s what saved me from my — ah — ‘elective service’,” replied Greg, holding on to the table and grimacing at the words ‘elective service.’ “Not that I’d have enlisted, I’d rather rot in prison than kill innocents abroad.” Except for the spoilt brats of the super-wealthy and powerful, who somehow received unlimited deferments or took refuge in the National Guard, all males had to enrol compulsorily with the armed forces. The draft was back in force in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Except that it was not called ‘the draft’ any more. It was called ‘Elective Patriotic Service.’ Such Orwellisms were consistent with the by-then usual government practice of redefining old terms and inventing new ones to befog the minds of the people.

“Oh — okay.” Chuck looked on with some concern as Greg settled himself in his chair. “I was deferred because of my sciatica. Same here; I’d have chosen prison over getting brainwashed by the armed forces into massacring other peoples.”

He went on, slowly, “Ya know, it’s the armed forces themselves who shoulda bailed us out of this horror. Before it got to this point.” He was voicing a thought more than talking to Greg, blankly gazing into the distance.

“I can’t understand why the national guard, the army — they all … they all attack us, arrest us, when we simply demonstrate,” said Greg. “Are they crazy? Just for holding up signs?! Don’t they understand that we’re doing it for them besides for us? They’re the ones who get traumatized and sick and maimed for life, if not killed, in these wars and invasions!”

“That’s the way it goes — you know,” Chuck replied softly, resignedly. “The oligarchy and the Zioneocons, they make sure to recruit Afros and Hispanics from poor neighbourhoods, and those they call ‘hicks’ and ‘trailer-trash’. They’re expendable — cannon-fodder — to the powers-that-be.”

After a moment of silence, Greg said passionately, “Yes. Young guys all of them, and what a waste. Those stupid, stupid lame-brains. They’re made to feel special by being told they’re heroes, by being given their purple hearts and silver stars. Heroes on their two-bit military pensions, with amputated limbs, strange illnesses. And shattered consciences … or, or brutalized humanities from the horrors they perpetrate on innocent humans. But those corporate plutocrats and Zioneocons — the scum of humanity — they make their millions off those wars and laugh all the way to the bank.” Though conscientious and a true patriot as was Chuck, Greg was seldom quite so bitter.

Chuck said nothing; he knew that staying on the subject would only get Greg wound up. Greg was right, he thought. The public had at last realized that the mega-corporation’s main function was simply to be a front behind which the super-wealthy and the privileged few hid to further their narrow interests and accumulate ill-gotten wealth, and that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘pre-emptive’ wars had been nothing other than wars of loot and plunder for American corporate officers, stake-holders, and Zioneocons. Those ‘pen for hire’ writers who had sung to their tune earlier in the century had been rewarded with book contracts, positive publicity by the corporate-controlled media, and outright payoffs disguised as ‘grants’. But the few courageous writers who had exposed the truth had seen their works damned with faint praise or trashed altogether. And the writers themselves had had their names smeared and been hit with ruinous lawsuits; and those residing overseas had even been murdered by U.S. puppet-regimes or C.I.A. hit-men. Chuck shook his head as he gazed vacantly at his monitor, lost in his thoughts. Murdering writers had become a frighteningly commonplace activity for the American government after they, in concert with Royal Dutch Shell, had murdered Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa early in the century. Neither had had to face the consequences of their crime, for the American people had remained blissfully ignorant and unconcerned. They systematically had been deceived by the controlled media into believing that Arabs, Afros, drugs, ‘terrorists’, and other such hobgoblins hiding in the bush were the enemy, so as to divert their attention while the power-elite and the Zioneocons had been proceeding stealthily with their treacherous conquest of the U.S.A. and its economic structures and financial systems, all the while subverting the ideals of the founding fathers. American citizenry had finally woken up to reality, but it was nearly too late now… .

Chuck’s thoughts were suddenly but poetically interrupted by Greg; still in a fit of passion, he burst out in declamatory tones: “You would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, That old Lie! Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” He spat the words, with venom and bitterness.

Startled for a second time by Greg in twenty minutes, Chuck began “What was th—” when the door opened. It was Wagner.

“Hello, men,” he said, briskly walking into the room. “Now there’s a set of domains we don’t want to hit,” he said, coming up to them. “No dot-gov or dot-mil sites and apart from those, the ones written on this list. Doable, right?”

He showed them a printout; they looked at it. It had several hundred host-names or ‘domains’. Many of them were easily recognizable as being those of the largest and most powerful corporations and the rest were those of large corporate-controlled media, wealthy political foundations, and such.

“Can-do,” said Chuck, brow furrowed. “Just curious why.”

“Talked with Hal earlier today; he brought up a good point. We don’t want to virus-proof the government’s or military’s computers! And if these giant transnationals or big-media get hit with viruses and go down for a while, screw ‘em,” Wagner said with distaste.

“Oh yeah — cool!” replied Chuck. Greg grinned and nodded approvingly.

“Good. I just emailed it to both of you; encrypted of course. Stick it where needed. So, you guys ready? Meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“So? How goes it?” Wagner asked as they walked up to the elevators.

“How goes it? Great!” said Chuck. “To be honest, Hal’s guys have done all the donkey work. Greg and I have the easy part and we’re ahead of schedule. Web’s gonna get vaccinated now, thanks to the Baddler — I mean the Baldur chip. Jeez, what a weirdo name — why, why would they call it that!”

“It’s the name of some god … North European, perhaps; a god of beauty, light, and stars, I think,” Greg said, trying to be helpful, interpreting Chuck’s rhetoric literally. “And that’s apropos — you know, aren’t some websites stars of freedom dotting the vast night-sky of, of ignorance and obfuscation? …and web-servers dot the miles and miles of fibre, and … twinkle with knowledge and information.”

“That’s pretty, Greg,” nodded Chuck appreciatively and Wagner concurred.

Greg chuckled and said that he hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did as they entered an elevator.

Greg, Chuck, and Sam were having coffee and doughnuts in the office, a very early breakfast. They had reached the office by 3:45 a.m. on Monday and had set off the live run at four.

“Let’s see what the latest is from Norway … and also how that standoff with Brazil is developing,” said Greg, turning to his computer and bringing up a web-browser on his monitor.

“You guys think and talk a lot about wars and stuff,” commented Sam.

Greg looked at Sam and then looked through him. His face broke into a half-smile, a joyless smile; his eyes communicated the pain born of a compassionate humanity and carried a jadedness unnatural to their age of thirty-two years. He spoke very softly. “Sam, we Americans have been talking of warfare and dealing in wanton wickedness for over a century. We wouldn’t have to be talking about it and confronting it now if folks at the beginning of only this century hadn’t gotten things as totally out of hand as they did.”

Nobody replied.

“You know,” said Chuck, changing the subject, “I wonder why they asked us to randomize the keys the way they did. I mean, all the CPUs are going to be disabled for what — two, three hours? Nobody’s going to be able to crack any one-K key in even months so we might as well have used the same key for every CPU.” Chuck sounded perplexed. He looked at Sam.

Sam looked at Chuck, tilted his head, and shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Burton and his chief programmer decided.”

“I suppose they had a reason,” said Greg. “Or maybe they just didn’t think of it. Anyway, we’ll find out when Hal comes in this morning — we can ask him.”

“If he knows, if there was a reason,” said Chuck, still bemused.

“Speak of the devil…” said Sam as Burton walked in the door.

“Greg? Chuck? Pleased to meet you,” Burton said, pleasantly shaking hands with them. He gave each of them a business-card.

“Hal I. Burton, Ph.D.,” said Chuck, mis-reading the business-card.

“That’s ‘L’, not ‘I’,” corrected Burton.

“Oh! Yes, sorry. What’s the ‘L’ stand for?” Chuck asked amiably, trying to make small talk.

“My middle-name? Oh, that’s kind of embarrassing!” laughed Burton. “Blame my classicist parents! And their flights of fancy. But anyway, it’s Loki.”

“Huh! Loki. Never heard that name before.”

Greg, however, had. He frowned and smiled wryly to himself. ‘Baldur’. ‘Mistletoe’. And now ‘Loki’. A peculiar coincidence … eerie, in fact… .

Six military policemen silently entered the office and stood along a wall. Greg and Chuck, quite perplexed, stared at them, looked into their faces. Not that they found any variety or even individuality: each man had the blank, glazed, obedient face of an automaton who does as he is told; the face of an ever-increasing number of Americans, in truth.

“Change of plans, boys. We’re not starting the second pass this morning,” said Burton, as two men appeared in the dim corridor outside the door.

Greg and Chuck now looked at these two new arrivals. One of the men was elderly and squat and had a shuffling gait, the other seemed equally elderly but walked with a jaunty strut. They came into the office. Both men were remarkably ugly; their countenances bespoke the arrogance and corruption of unrestrained and untrammelled abuse of power.

“We are going to have to delay that second pass; indefinitely,” the ugly squat man said. Greg and Chuck realized with a sense of confusion that this new visitor was the Attorney-General, Sandler ‘Sandy’ Farm.

“And that’s strictly confidential, strictly confidential,” the ugly jaunty man offered, flashing that roguish grin he doled out like spare change to the fawning, vacuous hacks and flacks of the American media. He shook hands in a faux-friendly manner with Greg and Chuck. They were struck dumb, for this was the Secretary of War, Ron S. Field.

“After all, you are working for the Government of the United States of America so your absolute secrecy is required,” said Farm. His usually sullen — literally ashen — face was beaming, even cheery. “But I thank you gentlemen most sincerely for bringing this project to a successful closure.”

“I guess I can tell you now why we used different bit-sequences so as to manufacture unique five-kilobit keys for every CPU that’s being locked,” Sam said. He wore a smirk and it made him look both stupid and crafty at the same time. “Even if some bunch of idealists somehow cracks the standard re-enable instruction, it would take literally years of cracking for them to figure out the five-K key with which one particular CPU has been locked. And if they do, so what? You can’t use that same key to unlock any other — virtually any other — CPU.”

Chuck looked at Greg, not making full sense of it. Greg returned his gaze.

“You’re very smart engineers, breaking into government computers and reading our white-papers and research reports,” said Field. Nodding at Chuck, he continued, “If you had read that one all the way through — I mean ‘Mankind’s Nine Thousand Freedoms’ — you would have found out that here in America, fewer than several hundred freedoms now remain for the riffraff … I mean for the common man. The top-level freedom to think straight — ‘Unconstrained and Noise-free Cognition,’ they call it — that freedom’s, of course, the fundamental one, and it plus all its derivatives has been off the table for … what, over fifty years now.”

Everyone remained silent. Field went on, addressing both Greg and Chuck, “A small group of people have been working on this project to create voluntary free-slaves for more than two centuries — since shortly after the country was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your idealistic way of thought. And the Web, now –’The World-Wide Web’ is the linchpin freedom.”

“The Web was the linchpin freedom, was the linchpin!” Farm shrieked, punching the air in quite an uncharacteristic spasm of excitement. “That’s why — Yes, yes! — I, I wanted to be here! … when i-i-it it-happened!” he babbled, and started laughing in a manner that was quite maniacal. His face was twitching and his eyes were bulging and glinting as he cackled uncontrollably.

“What … what do you mean?” asked Chuck, distracted and repulsed by Farm’s demeanour. He was still not comprehending, or perhaps not wanting to comprehend. Greg realized in a flash that there would be no second pass. They had been taken. He fell back limply in his chair.

Burton answered. His demeanour too had changed, though in a different way. His very face seemed to have undergone a transformation — as if a snake had moulted its old skin. He looked triumphant, but apart from that emotion, base cunning, greed, and evil had manifest themselves, as if settling into their rightful home after a necessary absence. “I’ll tell you what he means. The Web and the Internet started off as the ARPANet. It was not meant for –and I’m not even sure how … the rabble managed to get it. But we know how to scaremonger the little people, we know how to control you, even if the process is slow and gradual. We’re the rulers, we want the Internet back, and this time we’ll keep it for ourselves. Forever,” he said, leaving nothing to interpretation.

“All right,” said Field, now wearing a cold, disdainful smile. “Time to clear out. You’ll be debriefed at a location in Fort Meade.”

“Hoder’s waiting there,” said Burton, smiling the smile of the serpent.

Someone switched off the lights. The room was now lit only by the corridor lighting seeping in and the glare of six or so computer monitors.

Chuck walked a step or two past Greg, and started to whistle but gave it up immediately. This roomful of hostile strangers silhouetted in the dim light of the monitors did not encourage such ebullience. Greg remained seated, he felt light-headed and nauseous. There was one thing whose loss he was never going to be able to get used to… .

At a signal from Burton, two military policemen walked up to Chuck and Greg to escort them out.

Chuck glanced at his watch. “Should take only an hour more,” he murmured over his shoulder to Greg. Then he added, in an afterthought, “Wonder how many hosts have been hit? It should be halfway through about now.” He felt a sense of desolation, a stark desolation, as he said that.

Greg didn’t reply so Chuck turned around to see why. Just a moment earlier, Greg had swivelled his chair to a nearby workstation, opened a web-browser, and typed in ‘news.yahoo.com’. Chuck could just see his face, a pale, drained oval staring at the monitor.

“Look,” whispered Greg, and Chuck looked at the monitor. (There is always a last time for everything. Even the Web.) Well knowing that all was lost, Greg had acted on emotion in bringing up that website, just for the sake of looking at it once more. But it was not to be. The familiar white-and-blue home-page loaded only partially before the web-browser froze –

‘Error: Server not responding.’

Across America, without any fuss, the Web was shutting down.

In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution…not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

The Dangers of Digital Diplomacy

The Senate report, “Latin American Governments Need to ‘Friend’ Social Media and Technology” was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State’s use of digital diplomacy.

“Despite Latin America’s broad social and economic progress, many countries in the region still face challenges to democracy similar to those recently seen in the Middle East,” wrote Lugar in the introduction to the report. “In the extreme cases, countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are led by authoritarian leaders who curtail civil and political freedoms.”

The report urges improving internet infrastructure in the region, along with expanding the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as essential in order to advance Washington’s foreign policy interests. This is also identified as a way to reassert Washington’s influence in a part of the world where it has been perceived to be waning since the Bush Administration and the subsequent rise of center-left governments in the region.

“In particular, the characteristics of Latin American social media use and engagement of connectivity resources…indicate that this area could be primed for substantial positive change in a manner similar in nature, if not in process, to that recently observed in the Middle East,” the report states.

The right-leaning journal Americas Quarterly praises this “smart idea” calling it “an innovative strategy to advance U.S. goals”, one of them being the need to “ramp up our data collection and research on the impact of social media and technology on fostering democracy in the region, particularly Venezuela.”

This all falls under what has been dubbed 21st Century Statecraft, the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate re-branding—swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy—a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism,” explains the New York Times in a July 2010 article.

Described as a “marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department,” Washington has turned to “Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s…to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development” abroad.

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” said Clinton in a speech on internet freedom in January 2010.

In August 2011 the Washington Post reported findings by the Lowy Institute for International Policy which show that U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr.

But Judith McHale, former under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, gave a more honest assessment in March 2011 of what’s driving the State Department’s new initiative, stripped of the flowery and misleading language of freedom and democracy.

“New media and connective technologies enhance our ability to listen…Social media provides new ways for us to keep our ear to the ground,” said McHale. “Of course, we are not interested in developing social media platforms for the sake of having them. We are interested in applying social media to promote our strategic objectives in the Americas.”

But as history has shown, Washington’s strategic interests are often antithetical to freedom and human rights. And it is naïve to think that the State Department would be conducting this form of diplomacy in “a principled and regime-neutral fashion,” as intellectual apologists like Anne-Marie Slaughter may profess. And in Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries are undoubtedly in Washington’s cross-hairs.

During a June 30, 2011 Senate hearing,“The State of Democracy in the Americas”, Senator Lugar asked Roberta Jacobson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere at the time, to name programs specifically targeting ALBA countries. Jackson noted in her answer that the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has programs that support media training in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador; these programs address the use and impact of social media, along with traditional topics such as independent journalism, investigative reporting, and overcoming self-censorship.”

All of these countries have democratically-elected governments, and while they all are struggling in varying ways to build stronger democratic institutions and to translate democratic rhetoric into functioning policy, Washington’s meddling in internal affairs through 21st Century Statecraft is dangerous for social movements and democratic activists.

The Social Networking Counterinsurgency

On February 3, 2011 the Senate held a hearing examining US intelligence agencies’ alleged lack of anticipation of the uprisings in Egypt. Afterwards, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said “she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government,” the Washington Post reported. The CIA has an Open Source Center, where analysts based in a headquarters in an undisclosed location in Virginia, along with analysts in working in U.S. Embassies (“to get a step closer to their subjects”) throughout the world monitor as many as millions of tweets per day, along with Facebook updates and other open source media outlets.

Wired Magazine reported in July that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Wired’s Adam Rawnsley points out:

It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself…SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what.

Furthermore, the military solicited contracts for the development of software to create fake Facebook personas, to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent,” the Raw Story reported in February. Private security contractor HB Gary has already been exposed for doing such a thing on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce as a way to “infiltrate left-leaning groups” in the country, as ThinkProgress revealed last year courtesy of 75,000 private company emails provided by the hactivst group Anonymous.

These strategies are particularly cynical given the following passage from Lugar’s Senate report:

Collaborators of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently hacked the Twitter accounts of opposition activists. Staff strongly believes that this example indicates how policy needs to take into consideration the extent repressive governments will take to silence democratic voices using this technology.

What officials seem to be saying is: never-mind what happens in this country. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring “social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world” isn’t important. And while US corporations are selling surveillance systems to repressive regimes, that’s just the free-market supply and demand economics at work.

And even if, “What elevated the [Occupy Wall Street] activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media,” as Betty Yu, national organizer at the Center for Media Justice, wrote last month, these same tools can, and are, being used to monitor, undermine and co-opt these and similar movements.

So if Washington approaches Latin American governments with aid for internet infrastructure and training, citizens and governments should approach this as a very loaded Trojan Horse.

We distinguish these colony insects from mammals which we project have much higher degrees of individuality. We like to think of herds or packs of mammals as individuals who “choose” to come together and cooperate. We generally don’t admit body characteristics of individuals as being associated with class in societal dominance hierarchies.

But humans, primates and ants and bees may be much closer than we care to admit, then we are easily able to perceive.

There is an area of scientific research which points to just how wrong we may be. It is the study of the effects of a dominance hierarchy on the health of the individual. It turns out that in mammals and birds, for example, the health of the individual, barring accidents of nature, is primarily due to the individual’s position in the society’s dominance hierarchy.¹,²,³ Here, one needs to stress “primarily”, as in by far the greatest determining factor — having a direct bio-chemical and physiological impact.¹

The dominance hierarchy in packs of monkeys, for example, determines fertility, resistance to disease, vigour, and longevity of the individual.¹

Now the dominance hierarchy as individual health determinant discovery is a paradigm-establishing discovery in medicine (if medicine is ever able to recognize it!³ ), akin to plate tectonics in the Earth sciences, Newtonian mechanics in physics and evolution in biology, but it naturally leads to a follow-up question: Why?

Is there an evolutionary advantage, for mammals say, to suffer severe individual health effects from the intra-species dominance hierarchy? Otherwise, how has individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy survived on the evolutionary time scale? Is there a use or a need for individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy in terms of species survival, or is it simply a remnant of pre-insect-divide or colony-forming cells evolution?

A first glance would suggest that the human species, for example, cannot possibly benefit from having individual health materially and negatively affected by society’s dominance hierarchy. But is this the correct conclusion?

I think not.

What is the most successful nervous-system-bearing animal species on Earth, in terms of both number of individuals and total biomass, and in terms of its transformative impact on the biosphere? Answer: Ants.⁴ And the most successful large mammal? Humans.⁵ Both live in highly hierarchical societies.

What is the sustaining biology of a highly hierarchical society of mammals? The individual must accept his/her place. All-out competitiveness of equal individuals (like a bar fight) is a recipe for disaster and does not lead to a highly stratified hierarchy. Pumped individuals who are and feel equally strong do not spontaneously organize into a stratified dominance hierarchy.

The built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy is the biological (bio-chemical-metabolic) mechanism that sustains a positive feedback able to spontaneously generate a highly stratified dominance hierarchy.

If you are and feel sick from being dominated, you are not going to fight back. You are going to accept your place. The species is happy to have hoards of unhealthy individuals who will die young having spent their days doing the grunt work. What better way to stratify a successful species?

The impact on individual health also plays another key role, in addition to providing the feedback for stratification. It provides a needed mechanism of self-destruction for individuals who grow out or fall out of docility and compliance.

In a highly stratified society, individuals who cannot function must be eliminated, or they become a destructive force against the hierarchy. The police and jails would never be enough to achieve this without the built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy.

As soon as the individual wants out and senses that there is no out, the individual self-destructs — rather than go on a destructive rampage, most of the time. This is called cancer and heart disease. It prevents the destructive rampage of the disillusioned individual and provides a natural end at the completion of the individual’s cycle of utility to the hierarchy, to the species.

No wonder anarchists are so few and far between! But as with any positive feedback-driven system, it is inherently unstable.⁶

1. “The influence of social hierarchy on primate health (Review)” by Robert M. Sapolsky, Science, 308, p.648-652, 2005. (and references therein)
2. “Anti-smoking culture is harmful to health: On the truth problem of public health management” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.
3. “Is establishment medicine an injurious scam?” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.
4. “Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
5. “Collective intelligence does not imply individual intelligence: Technology does not come from geniuses” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.
6. “Institutions build hierarchy between politico-cultural re-normalizations” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.

Judaism.com sells what it calls “essential Judaica,” which includes items such as imprinted kippot (skullcaps) for weddings and bar mitzvahs, kosher wines and a small but amusing collection of “pet Judaica.” The site was completely inaccessible on Friday. On Saturday typing “Judaism” into your browser displayed a message claiming that the site was down because of “routine maintenance” and that Judaism.com would be operational on Sunday. The maintenance must have been more difficult than anticipated. The site was not restored until Tuesday afternoon. There was neither mention of Iran or hackers nor any indication of the four-day disappearance of Judaism from cyberspace.

I understand that I could be accused of taking pleasure in someone else’s troubles, but I found this incident risible. Could the cyber-attack on Mr. Perelman’s web site be a small part of a larger organized government campaign from Tehran to retaliate for the Stuxnet virus and various other assaults which are now generally recognized to be part of an American/Israeli effort to punish or overthrow the Iranian regime? Or could the attack have been perpetrated by a young Iranian seller of Islamic religious paraphernalia who erroneously believes harming Judaism.com is an appropriate Muslim response to the Israeli threats to bomb Teheran nuclear facilities? The possibility that my Hanukkah candle order could become collateral damage in a nasty covert war being waged between Israel and the United States against Iran made me laugh.

I have had three short telephone conversations with Mr. Perelman who refuses to be interviewed about the attack. He did tell me that he had informed the FBI and that they were currently attempting to find the culprit(s). I wonder what the Feds would be able to do if they located the hackers in Iran.

When I first heard Shlomo Perelman had called about the digital intrusion, I imagined newspaper headlines such as “Iranians Attack Judaism, Israel Vows It Will Retaliate.” Shlomo, not surprisingly, did not see the humor in the situation. Although his website was fully restored on Tuesday afternoon, December 6, and he indicated that the monetary lose incurred was not too bad, Shlomo Perelman still feared that if the cyber-attack became widely known it would somehow hurt business and the image of Judaism.

To my Jewish readers: Judaism.com actually has some nice stuff. Check out the menorahs and Jewish calendars. Just remember to observe the Palestinian boycott campaign and make sure nothing you buy is made in Israel or by settlers from the Occupied Territories.

The relation of information technology (IT), and more specifically the internet, to politics is a central issue facing contemporary social movements.  Like many previous scientific advances the IT innovations have a dual purpose:  on the one hand, it has accelerated the global flow of capital, especially financial capital and facilitated imperialist ‘globalization’.  On the other hand, the internet has served to provide alternative critical sources of analysis as well as easy communication to mobilize popular movements.

The IT industry has created a new class of billionaires, from Silicon Valley in California to Bangalore, India.  They have played a central role in the expansion of economic colonialism via their monopoly control in diverse spheres of information flows and entertainment.

To paraphrase Marx “the internet has become the opium of the people”.  Young and old, employed and unemployed alike, spend hours passively gazing at spectacles, pornography, video games, online consumerism and even “news” in isolation from other citizens, fellow workers and employees.

In many cases the “overflow” of “news” on the internet has saturated the internet, absorbing time and energy and diverting the ‘watchers’ from reflection and action.  Just as too little and biased news by the mass media distorts popular consciousness, too many internet messages can immobilize citizen action.

The internet, deliberately or not, has “privatized” political life.  Many otherwise potential activists have come to believe that circulating manifestos to other individuals is a political act, forgetting that only public action, including confrontations with their adversaries in public spaces in city centers and in the countryside, is the basis of political transformations.

IT and Financial Capital

Let us remember that the original impetus for the growth of “IT” came from the demands of big financial institutions, investment banks and speculative traders who sought to move billions of dollars and euros with the touch of a finger from one country to another, from one enterprise to another, from one commodity to another.

Internet technology was the motor force for the growth of globalization at the service of financial capital.  In some ways IT played a major role in precipitating the two global financial crises of the past decade (2001-2002, 2008–2009).  The  bubble in IT stocks of 2001 was a result of the speculative promotion of overvalued “software firms” de-linked from the ‘real economy’.  The global financial crash of 2008-2009 and its continuation today, was induced by the computerized packaging of financial swindles and underfunded real estate mortgages.  The ‘virtues’ of the internet, its rapid relay of information in the context of speculator capitalism turned out to be a major contributing factor to the worse capitalist crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Democratization of the Internet

The internet became accessible to the masses as a market for commercial enterprise and then spread to other social and political uses. Most importantly it became a means of informing the larger public of the exploitation and pillage of countries and people by multi-national banks.  The internet exposed the lies which accompany US and EU imperialist wars in the Middle East and Sothern Asia.

The internet has become contested terrain, a new form of class struggle, engaging  national liberation and pro-democracy movements.  The major movements and leaders from the armed fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan to the pro-democracy activists in Egypt, to the student movements in Chile and including the poor peoples’ housing movement in Turkey, rely on the internet to inform the world of their struggles, programs, state repression and popular victories.  The internet links peoples’ struggles across national boundaries – it is a key weapon in creating a new internationalism to counter capitalist globalization and imperial wars.

To paraphrase Lenin, we could argue that 21st century socialism can be summed up by the equation:  “soviets plus internet = participatory socialism”.

The Internet and Class Politics

We should remember that computerized information techniques are not ‘neutral’ – their political impact depends on their users and overseers who determine who and what class interests they will serve.  More generally the internet must be contextualized in terms of its insertion in public space.

The internet has served to mobilize thousands of workers in China and peasants in India against corporate exploiters and real estate developers.  But computerized aerial warfare has become the NATO weapon of choice to bomb and destroy independent Libya. The US drones which send missiles that kill civilians in Pakistan and Yemen are directed by computer ‘intelligence’.  The location of Colombian guerrillas and the deadly aerial bombings are computerized.  In other words, IT technology has dual uses:  for popular liberation or imperial counter revolution.

Neo-liberalism and Public Space

The discussion of “public space” has frequently assumed that “public” means greater state intervention on behalf of the welfare of the majority; greater regulation of capitalismand increased protection of the environment.  In other words, benign “public” actors are counter-posed to exploitative private market forces.

In the context of the rise of neo-liberal ideology and policies, many progressive writers argue about the “decline of the public sphere”. This argument overlooks the fact that the “public sphere” has increased its role in society, economy and politics on behalf of capital, especially financial capital, and foreign investors.  The “public sphere”, specifically the state, is much more intrusive in civil society as a repressive force, particularly as neo-liberal policies increase inequalities.  Because of the intensification and deepening of the financial crises, the public sphere (the state) has undertaken a massive role in bailing out bankrupt banks.

Because of large scale fiscal deficits provoked by capitalist class tax evasion, colonial war spending and public subsidies to big business, the public sphere (state) imposes class based “austerity” program-cutting social expenditures and prejudicing public employees, pensioners, and private wage and salaried employees.

The public sphere diminished its role in the productive sector of the economy.  However, the military sector has grown with expansion of colonial and imperial wars.

The basic issue underlying any discussion of the public sphere and the social opposition is not its decline or growth but rather the class interests which define the role of the public sphere.  Under neo-liberalism, the public sphere is directed by the use of public treasury to finance bank bailouts, militarism and expanded police state intervention.  A public sphere directed by the “social opposition” (workers, farmers, professionals, employees) would enlarge the scope of public sphere activity with regard to health, education, pensions, environment and employment.

The concept of the “public sphere” has two opposing faces (Janus-like): one facing capital and the military; the other labor/social opposition.  The role of the internet is also subject to this duality: on the one hand the internet facilitates large scale movements of capital and rapid imperial military interventions; on the other hand it provides rapid flow of information to mobilize the social opposition.  The basic question is what kind of information is transmitted to what political actors and for what social interest?

The Internet and the Social Opposition:  The Threat of State Repression

For the social opposition the internet is first and foremost a vital source of alternative critical information to educate and mobilize the “public” – especially among progressive opinion — leaders, professionals, trade unionists and peasant leaders, militants and activists.  The internet is the alternative to the capitalist mass media and its propaganda, a source of news and information that relays manifestos and informs activists of sites for public action.  Because of the internet’s progressive role as an instrument of the social opposition it is subject to surveillance by the repressive police-state apparatus.  For example, in the USA over 800,000 functionaries are employed by the “Homeland Security” police agency to spy on billions of emails, faxes, telephone calls of millions of US citizens.  How effective the policing of tons of information each day is another question.  But the fact is that the internet is not a “free and secure source of information, debate and discussion”.  In fact, as the internet becomes more effective in mobilizing the social movements in opposition to the imperial and colonial state, the greater is the likelihood of police-state intervention under the pretext “combating terrorism”.

The Internet and Contemporary Struggle:  Is it Revolutionary?

It is important to recognize the importance of the internet in detonating certain social movements as well as relativizing its overall significance.

The internet has played a vital role in publicizing and mobilizing “spontaneous protests” like the ‘indignados’ (the indignant protestors) mostly unaffiliated unemployed youth in Spain and the protestors involved in the US “Occupy Wall Street”.  In other instances, for example, the mass general strikes in Italy, Portugal, Greece and elsewhere the organized trade union confederations played a central role and the internet had a secondary impact.

In highly repressive countries like Egypt, Tunisia and China, the internet played a major role in publicizing public action and organizing mass protests.  However, the internet has not led to any successful revolutions – it can inform, provide a forum for debate, and  mobilize, but it cannot provide leadership and organization to sustain political action let alone a strategy for taking state power.  The illusion that some internet gurus foster, that ‘computerized’ action replaces the need for a disciplined, political party, has been demonstrated to be false:  the internet can facilitate movement but only an organized social opposition can provide the tactical and strategic direction which can sustain the movement against state repression and toward successful struggles.

In other words, the internet is not an “end in itself” – the self-congratulatory posture of internet ideologues in heralding a new “revolutionary” information age overlooks the fact that the NATO powers, Israel and their allies and clients now use the internet to plantviruses to disrupt economies, sabotage defense programs and promote ethno-religious uprisings.  Israel sent damaging viruses to hinder Iran’s peaceful nuclear program; the US, France and Turkey incited client social opposition in Libya and Syria.  In a word, the internet has become the new terrain of class and anti-imperialist struggle.  The internet is a means not an end in itself.  The internet is part of a public sphere whose purpose and results are determined by the larger class structure in which it is embedded.

Concluding Remarks:  “Desktop Militants” and Public Intellectuals

The social opposition is defined by public action:  the presence of collectivities in political meetings, individuals speaking at public meetings, activists marching in public squares, militant trade unionists confronting employers, poor people demanding sites for housing and public services from public authorities…

To address an active assembled public meeting, to formulate ideas, programs and propose programs and strategies through political action defines the role of the public intellectual. To sit at a desk in an office, in splendid isolation, sending out five manifestos per minute defines a “desktop militant”.  It is a form of pseudo-militancy that isolates the word from the deed.  Desktop “militancy” is an act of verbal inaction, of inconsequential “activism”, a make-believe revolution of the mind.

The exchange of internet communications becomes a political act when it engages in public social movements that challenge power.  By necessity that involves risks for the public intellectual:  of police assaults in public spaces and economic reprisals in the private sphere.  The desktop “activists” risk nothing and accomplish little.  The public intellectual links the private discontents of individuals to the social activism of the collectivity.  The academic critic comes to a site of action, speaks and returns to their academic office.  The public intellectual speaks and sustains a long-term political educational commitment with the social opposition in the public sphere via the internet and in face to face daily encounters.

Speaking at the Security Innovation Network (SINET) “Showcase 2011″ shindig at the National Press Club in Washington, Alexander told security grifters eager to gouge taxpayers for another piece of lucrative “cybersecurity” pie: “What I’m concerned about are the destructive attacks. Those are the things yet to come that cause us a lot of concern.”

That’s rather rich coming from the head of a secretive Pentagon satrapy suspected of designing and launching the destructive Stuxnet virus which targeted Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

According to fresh evidence provided by IT security experts it now appears that the same constellation of shadowy forces which unleashed Stuxnet are at it again with the newly discovered Duqu spy Trojan.

In a follow-up analysis, Kaspersky Lab researcher Alex Gostev wrote that “the highest number of Duqu incidents have been recorded in Iran. This fact brings us back to the Stuxnet story and raises a number of issues.”

Not least of which is the continuing demonization of the Islamic Republic by an unholy alliance of U.S. militarists, their Israeli pit bulls and congressional shills hyping the “Iran threat.”

War Drums Beating

With the United States and the other capitalist powers incapable of digging the world economy out from under the slow-motion meltdown sparked by 2008′s market collapse, and with tens of millions of enraged citizens rejecting austerity measures that will further enrich financial elites at their expense, will the Obama administration “go for broke” and set-off a new conflagration in the Middle East?

Ratcheting up bellicose rhetoric, John Keane, a retired four-star general, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army now currently perched on the board of General Dynamics, a major purveyor of cyber attack tools for the government, told the House Homeland Security Committee October 26, “We’ve got to put our hand around their throat now. Why don’t we kill them? We kill other people who are running terrorist operations against the United States.”

AFP reported that “Iran made a formal protest” over Keane’s remarks which urged “the targeted assassination of members of its elite Quds Force military special operations unit,” over a fairy-tale plot allegedly cooked-up by Tehran, which employed a failed used-car salesman, a DEA snitch and members of the Zetas drug gang in a scheme to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

While the plot lines are as preposterous as allegations prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the 9/11 attacks, one cannot so easily dismiss the propaganda value of such reports by administration “information warriors.” The same can be said of the series of controlled leaks emanating from London, Tel Aviv and Washington urging immediate air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Guardian reported that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran amid mounting concern about Tehran’s nuclear enrichment programme.”

Chillingly, the “Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.”

On the same day that MoD’s sanctioned leak appeared in the British press, Haaretz disclosed that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are trying to muster a majority in the cabinet in favor of military action against Iran, a senior Israeli official has said. According to the official, there is a ‘small advantage’ in the cabinet for the opponents of such an attack.”

“Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon said he preferred an American military attack on Iran to an Israeli one. ‘A military move is the last resort,’ he said.”

The Associated Press reported that as Netanyahu moved to persuade his cabinet to “authorize a military strike against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program,” Israel successfully test-fired “a missile believed capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to Iran.”

Adding to the disinformational witch’s brew, The Washington Post reported that “a new spike in anti-Iran rhetoric and military threats by Western powers is being fueled by fears that Iran is edging closer to the nuclear ‘breakout’ point, when it acquires all the skills and parts needed to quickly build an atomic bomb if it chooses to,” anonymous “Western diplomats and nuclear experts said Friday.”

Post stenographer Joby Warrick informed us that a “Western diplomat who had seen drafts of the report” told him “it will elaborate on secret intelligence collected since 2004 showing Iranian scientists struggling to overcome technical hurdles in designing and building nuclear warheads.”

And late last week Reuters disclosed that “a senior U.S. military official said on Friday Iran had become the biggest threat to the United States and Israel’s president said the military option to stop the Islamic republic from obtaining nuclear weapons was nearer.”

“‘The biggest threat to the United States and to our interests and to our friends … has come into focus and it’s Iran,’ said the U.S. military official, addressing a forum in Washington.” Conveniently, “reporters were allowed to cover the event on condition the official not be identified.”

While some critics argue that Israel does not presently have the capacity to launch such an attack, and that “the volume of the war hysteria is being turned up with one purpose in mind: the Israelis want the US to do their dirty work for them,” such reasoning is hardly reassuring.

Indeed, as the World Socialist Web Site points out, “the Israeli government has already made advanced preparations for an attack on Iran.”

“On the military front,” analyst Peter Symonds warned that “Israeli warplanes last week conducted a long-range exercise–of the type required to reach Iran–using a NATO airbase on the Italian island of Sardinia.” In other words, the IDF drill was not a “rogue” exercise unilaterally conducted by Israel, but further evidence of Washington’s “desperate bid to offset its economic decline by securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.”

In the context of escalating tensions over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, seeded by manufactured “terror” plots, the imperialist powers may choose the “cyber” route prior to launching devastating missile and bomber strikes against Iranian military installations and civilian infrastructure.

Pentagon planners now believe that attack tools have reached the point where blinding Iran’s air defenses while sowing chaos across population centers with power outages and the shutdown of financial services may now be a viable option.

This is not idle speculation. During the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, the National Journal disclosed that Central Command “considered a computerized attack to disable the networks that controlled Iraq’s banking system, but they backed off when they realized that those networks were global and connected to banks in France.”

Facing growing opposition at home and abroad to endless wars and imperial adventures, would the Obama administration have such qualms today?

Attack Tools Already in Play

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, when the Duqu virus was discovered last month, analysts at Symantec believed that the remote access Trojan (RAT) “is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.”

“The threat was written by the same authors (or those who have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered,” researchers averred.

Since their initial reporting, Symantec, drawing on research from CrySyS lab at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary, the organization which discovered the malware, reported they located an installer file in the form of a Microsoft Word document which exploits a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability.

Like Stuxnet, Duqu’s stealthiness is directly proportional to its uncanny ability to capitalize on what are called zero-day exploits hardwired into it’s digital DNA; security holes that are unknown to everyone until the instant they’re used in an attack.

Similar to other dubious commodities traded on our dystopian “free markets,” zero-days are bits of tainted code sought by criminal hackers, financial and industrial spies and enterprising security agencies that can sell for up to $250,000 a pop on the black market.

When Stuxnet appeared in dozens of countries last year, targeting what are called programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on industrial computers manufactured by Siemens that control everything from water purification and food processing to oil refining and potentially deadly chemical processes, researchers found it was designed to harm only one specific target: PLCs processing uranium fuel at a nuclear facility in Iran.

As Wired Magazine reported, when Symantec analysts who had been picking Stuxnet apart convinced internet service providers who controlled “servers in Malaysia and Denmark” where the virus “phoned home” each time it infected a new machine, to reroute the virus to a secure “sinkhole,” they were in for a shock.

“Out of the initial 38,000 infections,” journalist Kim Zetter wrote, “about 22,000 were in Iran. Indonesia was a distant second, with about 6,700 infections, followed by India with about 3,700 infections. The United States had fewer than 400. Only a small number of machines had Siemens Step 7 software installed–just 217 machines reporting in from Iran and 16 in the United States.”

“The sophistication of the code,” Wired averred, “plus the fraudulent certificates, and now Iran at the center of the fallout made it look like Stuxnet could be the work of a government cyberarmy–maybe even a United States cyberarmy.

“This made Symantec’s sinkhole an audacious move,” Zetter wrote. “In intercepting data the attackers were expecting to receive, the researchers risked tampering with a covert U.S. government operation.”

Writing in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Thomas Rid, a former RAND Corporation employee and “Reader in War Studies at Kings College in London,” who has close ties to the Western military establishment, observed in relation to Stuxnet that network “sabotage, first, is a deliberate attempt to weaken or destroy an economic or military system. All sabotage is predominantly technical in nature, but of course may use social enablers.”

“The resources and investment that went into Stuxnet could only be mustered by a ‘cyber superpower’, argued Ralph Langner, a German control system security consultant who first extracted and decompiled the attack code.”

In an interview with National Public Radio, Langer said that the “level of expertise” behind Stuxnet “seemed almost alien. But that would be science fiction, and Stuxnet was a reality.”

“Thinking about it for another minute, if it’s not aliens, it’s got to be the United States.”

“For the time being it remains unclear how successful the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear program actually was” Rid noted. “But it is clear that the operation has taken computer sabotage to an entirely new level.”

Researcher Vikram Thakur, commenting on the latest Duqu discoveries reported: “The Word document was crafted in such a way as to definitively target the intended receiving organization.” And whom, pray tell, was being targeted by Duqu? Why Iran, of course.

“Once Duqu is able to get a foothold in an organization through the zero-day exploit, the attackers can command it to spread to other computers.”

Thakur wrote, “the Duqu configuration files on these computers,” which did not have the ability to connect to the internet and the author’s command and control (C&C) server, “were instead configured not to communicate directly with the C&C server, but to use a file-sharing C&C protocol with another compromised computer that had the ability to connect to the C&C server.”

“Consequently,” Thakur concluded, “Duqu creates a bridge between the network’s internal servers and the C&C server. This allowed the attackers to access Duqu infections in secure zones with the help of computers outside the secure zone being used as proxies.”

As Kaspersky Lab researchers pointed out, “in each of the four instances of Duqu infection a unique modification of the driver necessary for infection was used.”

“More importantly,” analysts averred, “regarding one of the Iranian infections there were also found to have been two network attack attempts exploiting the MS08-067 [MS Word] vulnerability. This vulnerability was used by Stuxnet too.”

“If there had been just one such attempt, it could have been written off as typical Kido activity–but there were two consecutive attack attempts: this detail would suggest a targeted attack on an object in Iran.” (emphasis added)

Simply put, before the Pentagon decides to “kill them” as Gen. Keane indelicately put it, battlefield preparations via directed cyber attacks and other forms of sabotage may be part of a preemptive strategy to decapitate Iranian defenses prior to more “kinetic” attacks.

‘Boutique Arms Dealers’

Despite media hype about future cuts in the so-called “defense” budget, Defense Industry Daily disclosed that “the US military has announced plans to spend billions on technology to secure its networks.”

According to the Defense Department’s FY 2012 budget proposal, “the Pentagon said it plans to spend $2.3 billion on cybersecurity capabilities.”

However, when NextGov “questioned why the Air Force’s $4.6 billion 2012 budget request for cybersecurity was $2.3 billion more than Defense’s servicewide spending proposal, Pentagon officials upped their total figure from $2.3 billion to $3.2 billion.”

Why the discrepancy? A “Pentagon spokesperson explained that the service’s estimate differed dramatically because the Air Force included ‘things’ that are not typically considered information assurance or cybersecurity.”

What kind of “things” are we talking about here?

As BusinessWeek reported in July, firms such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics, “the stalwarts of the traditional defense industry,” are “helping the U.S. government develop a capacity to snoop on or disable other countries’ computer networks.”

Capitalizing on the Defense Department’s desire to develop “hacker tools specifically as a means of conducting warfare,” this “shift in defense policy gave rise to a flood of boutique arms dealers that trade in offensive cyber weapons.”

Investigative journalists Mike Riley and Ashlee Vance averred that “most of these are ‘black’ companies that camouflage their government funding and work on classified projects.”

As last winter’s hack of HBGary Federal by Anonymous revealed, “black” firms, including those like Palantir which received millions of dollars in start-up funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, hacker tools, such as sophisticated Trojans and stealthy rootkits, believed to be the route used to introduce the Stuxnet virus, have also been used to target political activists and journalists in the United States at the behest of financial institutions such as the Bank of America and the right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As researcher Barrett Brown revealed, “Team Themis was a consortium made up of HBGary, Palantir, and Berico (with Endgame Systems serving as a ‘silent partner’ and providing assistance from the sidelines) that was set up in order to provide offensive intelligence capabilities to private clients.”

Although Endgame Systems “went dark” after Anonymous released thousands of HBGary files, The Register disclosed that the firm “helps US intelligence identify and hack into vulnerable networks, and is targeting a similar role in Britain’s nascent national cyber security operations.”

The Register noted that the “limited publicly information currently available on the firm hints at its further role assisting clandestine government cyber operations by identifying targets and developing exploits.”

As BusinessWeek revealed, the firm is “a major supplier of digital weaponry for the Pentagon. It offers a smorgasbord of wares, from vulnerability assessments to customized attack technology, for a dizzying array of targets in any region of the world.”

Unsurprisingly, this was a major draw for venture capital firms “Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,” who collectively fronted Endgame some $30 million. According to Riley and Vance, “what really whet the VCs’ appetites, though, according to people close to the investors, is Endgame’s shot at becoming the premier cyber-arms dealer.”

While a client list has yet to emerge, it’s safe to assume that secret state agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are lining up to purchase Endgame’s toxic products.

Although no definitive answer has emerged as to whom might targeting Iran with Duqu, as BusinessWeek revealed Endgame “deals in zero-day exploits. Some of Endgame’s technology is developed in-house; some of it is acquired from the hacker underground. Either way, these zero days are militarized–they’ve undergone extensive testing and are nearly fail-safe.”

“People who have seen the company pitch its technology–and who asked not to be named because the presentations were private–say Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices.”

According to Riley and Vance, “the executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.”

Indeed, “Endgame weaponry comes customized by region–the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China–with manuals, testing software, and ‘demo instructions.’ There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies.”

“The quest in Washington, Silicon Valley, and around the globe is to develop digital tools both for spying and destroying,” BusinessWeek observed. “The most enticing targets in this war are civilian–electrical grids, food distribution systems, any essential infrastructure that runs on computers.”

“This stuff is more kinetic than nuclear weapons,” Dave Aitel, the founder of a computer security company in Miami Beach called Immunity told Riley and Vance. “Nothing says you’ve lost like a starving city.”

While Aitel and a host of other “little Eichmanns” who enrich themselves servicing the American secret state refused to discuss his firm’s work for the government, a source told the publication that Immunity “makes weaponized ‘rootkits’: military-grade hacking systems used to bore into other countries’ networks,” and that Aitel’s clients “include the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.”

We do not know if, or when, the United States, NATO and Israel will opt for a military “solution” to the so-called “Iranian problem.”

We do know however, as the World Socialist Web Site warned, “as global capitalism lurches from one economic and political crisis to the next, rivalry between the major powers for markets, resources and strategic advantage is plunging humanity towards a catastrophic conflict that would devastate the planet.”

The human species has produced a new organizing principle evolved to increase the rate and reach of adaptation using new and unprecedented methods.  For two million years or more, and through several versions of our genus, this forming principle was caged by the immediate biophysical boundaries of environment.  However, its absolute confinement in the ecological space served not so much to limit its capacities as to allow them to develop without inherent limits; the limiting forces were external and immutable and so did not require the evolution of inhibiting designs.

I call this principle the Consciousness System of Order (CSO); everyone is aware of its functioning, but like the air its very ubiquity and transparent presence hides its nature from us.  The natural environment in conjunction with our biological instincts and propensities were the information sources for the CSO, its design is to create causative maps from this information; events can be predicted and behaviors can be tested before they are put to actual practice.  Behaviors that succeed especially well or that prove especially dangerous are stored in Story, forming the essential information storage device of the CSO and allowing its content to be spread through space and time (analogous to DNA/protein information nexus in living systems).

For the last few tens of thousands of years the CSO has gradually been creating its own reality, slipping in small ways through the boundaries of environment and biology.  The capacity to influence the immune system by convincing a person with an illness that she or he will improve or will die is an early example.  In essence, the causative map created in the ‘mind’ and institutionalized in Story can begin to compete with biophysical reality for those periods of time following and prior to forceful environmental action.  It was even possible to model environmental action in the CSO and avoid some of the consequences.  The evolutionary power of such a design cannot be overstated.

Ultimately, the trickle of the CSO’s creation of its own reality became a flood until we find ourselves in the situation of today. Billions of people “believe” that human descriptions of the real are equal to or even more important than biophysical Reality.  Reality itself is treated as negotiable.

The magnitude of earth processes, the degrees of human knowledge and technical capacity and our not insignificant, but relatively small numbers historically, have buffered our impact on the total biosphere until now.  However, our species has always had a major impact on the ecosystems where we have resided; we have steadily spread to all environments and so have powerfully influenced the biological construction of the whole earth.  But now our powers have moved to changing the biophysical structure of the atmosphere, the oceans and even to some extent the near depths of the earth’s crust.  It is becoming abundantly clear that the momentum of our present uninhibited application of CSO principles will end badly: our capacity for staving off forceful environmental action will soon reach its limit.

It is essential that the capacities of the CSO be applied to discovering and instituting inhibitions of its functioning. We have tried religion and politics in this role and they have been uniquely unsuccessful since they are the essence of the created realities that distort our relationship with environmental reality.  The scientific method is the one principle that can give the biophysical the place and value that it had in our origins.

Fundamentally, science is a process for the veridical adaptation of behavior to the immediate universe of our actions; it is one of the processes with this purpose or function, and it has its own unique set of opportunities and consequences.  In the most general sense there is no disagreement from any quarter with the argument that humans must, over the long run, act in the world with correct responses to “reality.”  Argument arises, however, when we try to describe what that Reality is.  Further, most people, most of the time, hold the view that there is but one “really true” Reality, and, therefore, those who hold other views are misinformed, pathological or criminal – even as they might be unaware of their errors.

Science is a process; it is not the various bodies of knowledge generated by that process.  Although we divide up the products of science into areas of study, this is done for pragmatic reasons and has nothing to do with what science is.  But these divisions create a fruitful basis for confusion: the question, “Is physics a better science than biology or biology a better science than psychology?” is but one example.  Certainly, the technical application of science methodology is different for different areas of study (the laboratory skills and equipment of a microbiologist would not serve the needs of a volcanologist or sociologist), but the underlying principles are, and should be, the same.  It is science conceived in this way that needs to be compared and contrasted with other methods of adapting our actions to our world – which is always the ultimate test of our biological suitability: failure to function agreeably within the constraints of biophysical reality is the final measure for any living thing, even humans.

The classical distinction made between primary methods of knowledge acquisition contrasts authority with direct experience.  In the first case, a question is addressed to an existing source of knowledge for an answer.  In the second case, the question is formed into a created experience from which the answer is supposedly obtainable.  It is abundantly clear, with a moment’s reflection, that both methods must be part of the human repertoire, and that the quality of the authority and the adequacy of the created experience would be determinative of the quality of the answer gained.  It is here that science has pitched its tent.

The greatest problems with authority are the origins and quality of the knowledge possessed and spread by that authority.  An imperfect partial solution is to ask the authority to support answers with evidence, the source of that evidence and some measure of the success of their answers in practice.

The greatest problems with creating experiences that might answer questions are that the created experience must be appropriate to the question and that the experience be free of bias that might decide the answer in favor of some preconceived notion, whether intentional or not.  An imperfect and partial solution is to require that the created experience be described in such detail that someone else could try the same thing in exactly the same way.

These two methods of gaining the knowledge needed for living are used by everyone every day.  We ask for directions when lost.  We add a new spice to a recipe.  We might time the drive to work by one route to compare to another route.  And we seek wisdom about those things beyond our experience from those who either have such wisdom or claim to.

What distinguishes science as a special form of the foundational processes by which humans gather the information to act in their daily lives is a nonnegotiable demand for complete transparency; there are no secret ingredients, no special proprietary processes. The gold standard of a scientific report is one that allows another researcher to perform the exact same steps with the exact same materials (or an arguable equivalent – and methods for determining equivalency).  A scientific theory is one that is constructed from the details of many such reports of experimental experience and is utterly dependent on correctly predicting new results of new experimental experience; and thus floats on the fragile buoyancy of the original transparency.

To repeat, science is a process: geology, for example, is a subject that can be “studied” by many methods, of which one is science.  The science “facts” of geology are under constant review by the method. Some details have been so thoroughly and transparently tested that an assumption of final truth can be made, but it is only a shorthand: things like the composition of minerals and the conditions under which they are formed, the sequencing of sedimentary rocks, the origin of various fossils.  But these facts are not science, they are the product of science as a method.  Allegiance to a set of “science facts” is a human fault, not to be confused with science as process.

This last notion can be expanded, must be expanded, as a general principle.  Humans need to be clearly and transparently devoted to some process, not to some set of details that they hold to as final realities. The nature of their process will determine the quality of adaptation to biophysical reality.

It should be noted that rejection of the need to adapt to biophysical reality is a tip-off that a form of mal-adaptation is functioning. This can come from two directions: nihilism/solipsism at one extreme and devotion to supernatural “realities” at the other.  Neither requires intellectual consistency or a transparent statement of beliefs, only an attachment to the simplest of all propositions: “it’s someone else’s problem.”  People with these attachments do not dematerialize; they consume energy, act on the world and are acted upon by all the lawful principles of biophysical reality even as they claim independence of it.  The solipsist integrates with the movements of matter and energy even as he or she rejects the reality of that integration.  The religious zealot is continuous with the material world as its product/participant even as she or he sees only the movement of a supernatural ‘will’ controlling events.  Both of these, when removed from the basic human unit of the heterogeneous community, are a form of madness; within a natural human community they are only expressions of human diversity since it is the community adaptation that is ‘measured’ by Reality.

In the deep and recent past our intellectual and material tools were inadequate for the full flowering of science method as a means for adapting to our world – conveniently, neither was it necessary.  Religious process had long been the method, an evolutionary form of adaptive process mediated by stories given power by their supernatural content created in human imagination and supported by the complexity of Reality.

But times have changed.  The level of detail and power that we bring to acting on the world, reached by the application of science method, now demands that we moderate and inhibit our actions with the same science process-based understandings that led us to this pass.  In other words, we must fully embrace the process of science as a belief system.  We cannot continue supplying our old, slowly responding and woefully distorting belief systems with details of Reality that both allow and force us to act rapidly and with huge effect.  Science-based power simply cannot be effectively mediated with present belief systems.

There are two great obstacles to moving toward science process as a belief system: 1) the present condition of belief – ancient forest and desert beliefs carried forward to this time by the momentum of human Story – to which billions of people are totally devoted; and 2) the different design of process belief as opposed to ‘fact set’ belief systems.  When belief is in a process, then the consequences of that process must be taken as the basis of new action; bases will change with new knowledge and with changes in the world. ‘Fact set’ based beliefs allow and demand adherence to acceptable behaviors.  Process based belief systems demand that details of actions tested by the process be changed when exposed as inaccurate by the process.

This is a higher order way of functioning, and would be a revolution in human cognition, not unlike The Enlightenment when reason became the challenge to tradition.  The Enlightenment was not entirely successful in “enlightening” the world in part because it did not go far enough; today a fully formed science process can be offered as a belief system without its necessarily being seen as intellectually elite.

The various areas of science “fact” are elite and will remain so.  They have their own language, concepts, organizations and “intellectual ethnicities”, but science process is completely available.  It can be taught to 9 and 10 year olds using a wide range of subject areas requiring a minimum of “science fact” detail.  Science process is only a particular formalizing of the way we all gain information.  It is actually easier to believe in a process that, in general, over time, produces “correct” answers than it is to believe in a ‘fact set’, often so inadequate, that only ‘faith’ can sustain. It is a matter of believing that an appropriate process will supply answers rather than believing in answers already fixed in place.

Focus is on the method for arriving at information and not the uses to which the information may be put or which person or collective entity will be advantaged or disadvantaged.  For example, it is obvious that flows of heat energy in the oceans are not influenced by needs of a corporation, a political party or a religion, but changes in such flows can affect them as well as determine the fate of millions of farmers and consequently billions of people.  Belief in a process of discovery that explicitly limits the power of bias has become essential.

Relatively small positive differences in the average importance given to information coming from the methods of science and a noticeable difference in the ability of many people to evaluate, not necessarily all the detail, but the ways in which the information was obtained all supported by a principle-based demand for transparency, could make a great difference in how our present institutions respond to the best available “facts” about our world.

I know that science process can be easily learned and appreciated by children and adults, even when they are encumbered by the distortions of other created realities. I do not know what facts would be generated by science process if it were to be broadly and generally applied to the problems that we confront.  But with an understanding of science process, knowledge of how to evaluate its products and a belief in its value, the changes required by improved knowledge and understanding could become a normal part of life experience.

Humans require a belief system to function; we are not data driven, but operate from general principles that can apply to a wide variety of situations; i.e., beliefs.  It is time that we have a system of belief that is based on how to gather the best information in the most trustworthy way rather than belief systems that prescribe what the “facts” of our truth will be independent of a measurable reality.

According to researchers, the malicious program was dubbed “Duqu” because it creates files with the prefix “~DQ.” It is a remote access Trojan (RAT) that “is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.” Mark that carefully.

In simple terms, a Trojan is malicious software that appears to perform a desirable function prior to its installation but, in fact, steals information from users spoofed into installing it, oftentimes via viral email attachments.

In the hands of enterprising security agencies, or criminals (the two are functionally synonymous), Trojans are primarily deployed for data theft, industrial or financial espionage, keystroke logging (surveillance) or the capture of screenshots which may reveal proprietary information.

“The threat” Symantec averred, “was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered.”

The malware, which began popping-up on the networks of several European firms, captured lists of running processes, account and domain information, network drives, user keystrokes and screenshots from active sessions and did so by using a valid, not a forged certificate, stolen from the Taipei-based firm, C-Media.

Whereas Stuxnet, believed to be a co-production of U.S. and Israeli cyber-saboteurs, was a weaponized virus programmed to destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear power infrastructure by targeting centrifuges that enrich uranium, Duqu is a stealthy bit of spy kit that filches data from manufacturers who produce systems that control oil pipelines, water systems and other critical infrastructure.

Sergey Golovanov, a malware expert at Kaspersky Labs told Forbes that Duqu is “is likely the brainchild of a government security apparatus. And it’s that government’s best work yet.”

Speaking from Moscow, Golovanov told Forbes in a telephone interview that “right now we are pretty sure that it is the next generation of Stuxnet.”

“We are pretty sure that Duqu is a government cyber tool and are 70% sure it is coming from the same source as Stuxnet,” Golovanov said.

“The victims’ computer systems were infected several days ago. Whatever it is,” Golovanov noted, “it is still in those systems, and still scanning for information. But what exactly it is scanning for, we don’t know. It could be gathering internal information for encryption devices. We only know that it is data mining right now, but we don’t know what kind of data and to what end it is collecting it.”

Whom, pray tell, would have “access to Stuxnet source code”?

While no government has claimed ownership of Stuxnet, IT experts told Forbes “with 100% certainty it was a government agency who created it.”

Suspects include cryptologists at the National Security Agency, or as is more likely given the outsourcing of intelligence work by the secret state, a combination of designers drawn from NSA, “black world” privateers from large defense firms along with specialists from Israel’s cryptologic division, Unit 8200, operating from the Israeli nuclear weapons lab at the Dimona complex, as The New York Times disclosed.

Analyst George Smith noted:

Stuxnet was widely distributed to many computer security experts. Many of them do contract work for government agencies, labor that would perhaps require a variety of security clearances and which would involve doing what would be seen by others to be black hat in nature. When that happened all bets were off.

Smith averred, “once a thing is in world circulation it is not protected or proprietary property.”

While one cannot demonstrably prove that Duqu is the product of one or another secret state satrapy, one can reasonably inquire: who has the means, motive and opportunity for launching this particular bit of nastiness into the wild?

“Duqu’s purpose,” Symantec researchers inform us, “is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party.”

In other words, while Stuxnet was programmed to destroy industrial systems, Duqu is an espionage tool that will enable attackers “looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.”

Although it can be argued, as Smith does, that “source code for malware has never been secure,” and “always becomes something coveted by many, often in direct proportion to its fame,” it also can’t be ruled out that military-intelligence agencies or corporate clones with more than a dog or two in the “cyberwar” hunt wouldn’t be very interested in obtaining a Trojan that clips “industrial design” information from friend and foe alike.

Black Programs

The circulation of malicious code such as Duqu’s is highly destabilizing. Considering that the U.S. Defense Department now considers computer sabotage originating in another country the equivalent to an act of war for which a military response is appropriate, the world is on dangerous new ground.

Speaking with MIT’s Technology Review, Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto think tank that researches cyberwarfare, censorship and espionage, told the publication that “in the context of the militarization of cyberspace, policymakers around the world should be concerned.”

Indeed, given the fact that it is the United States that is now the biggest proliferator in the so-called cyber “arms race,” and that billions of dollars are being spent by Washington to secure such weapons, recent history is not encouraging.

With shades of 9/11, the anthrax mailings and the Iraq invasion as a backdrop, one cannot rule out that a provocative act assigned to an “official enemy” by ruling elites just might originate from inside the U.S. security complex itself and serve as a convenient pretext for some future war.

A hint of what the Pentagon is up to came in the form of a controlled leak to The Washington Post.

Last spring, we were informed that “the Pentagon has developed a list of cyber-weapons and -tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary’s critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare.”

The list of “approved weapons” or “fires” are indicative of the military’s intention to integrate “cyberwar” capabilities into its overall military doctrine.

According to Ellen Nakashima, the “classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months and has been approved by other agencies, including the CIA.”

The Post reported that the new “framework clarifies, for instance, that the military needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later.”

On the other hand, and here’s where Duqu may enter the frame, the “military does not need such approval, however, to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of other activities. These include studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate.”

Additionally, Nakashima wrote, Pentagon cyberwarriors “can also, without presidential authorization, leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses, the official said.”

As part of Washington’s on-going commitment to the rule of law and human rights, as the recent due process-free drone assassination of American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki, followed by that of his teenage son and the revenge killing of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi by–surprise!–Al Qaeda-linked militias funded by the CIA clearly demonstrate, the “use of any cyber-weapon would have to be proportional to the threat, not inflict undue collateral damage and avoid civilian casualties.”

Try selling that to the more than 3,600 people killed or injured by CIA drone strikes, as Pakistan Body Count reported, since our Nobel laureate ascended to his Oval Office throne.

As George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins described in their recent paper, Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy, despite overheated “rhetoric of ‘cyber doom’ employed by proponents of increased federal intervention,” there is a lack of “clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public.”

However, as Brito and Watkins warned, “the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War,” one where “a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This complex may serve to not only supply cybersecurity solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for them as well.”

A “demand” which will inevitably feed the production, proliferation and deployment of a host of viral attack tools (Stuxnet) and assorted spybots (Duqu) that can and will be used by America’s shadow warriors and well-connected corporate spies seeking to get a leg-up on the competition.

While evidence of “a serious threat” may be lacking, and while proponents of increased “cybersecurity” spending advanced “no evidence … that opponents have ‘mapped vulnerabilities’ and ‘planned attacks’,” Brito and Watkins noted there is growing evidence these are precisely the policies being pursued by Washington.

Why might that be the case?

As a declining imperialist Empire possessing formidable military and technological capabilities, researcher Stephen Graham has pointed out in Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, the United States has embarked on a multibillion dollar program “to militarize the world’s global electronic infrastructures” with a stated aim to “gain access to, and control over, any and all networked computers, anywhere on Earth.”

Graham writes that “the sorts of on-the-ground realities that result from attacks on ordinary civilian infrastructure are far from the abstract niceties portrayed in military theory.”

Indeed, as “the experiences of Iraq and Gaza forcefully remind us,” robotized drone attacks and already-existent cyberwar capabilities buried in CIA and Pentagon black programs demonstrate that “the euphemisms of theory distract from the hard fact that targeting essential infrastructure in highly urbanized societies kills the weak, the old and the ill just as surely as carpet bombing.”

A Glimpse Inside the Complex

In the wake of the HBGary hack by Anonymous earlier this year, the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence released a 2009 Defense Department contract proposal from the firm.

Among other things, it revealed that the Pentagon is standing-up offensive programs that “examine the architecture, engineering, functionality, interface and interoperability of Cyber Warfare systems, services and capabilities at the tactical, operational and strategic levels, to include all enabling technologies.”

HBGary, and one can assume other juiced defense contractors, are planning “operations and requirements analysis, concept formulation and development, feasibility demonstrations and operational support.”

“This will include,” according to the leaked proposal, “efforts to analyze and engineer operational, functional and system requirements in order to establish national, theater and force level architecture and engineering plans, interface and systems specifications and definitions, implementation, including hardware acquisition for turnkey systems.”

Indeed, the company will “perform analyses of existing and emerging Operational and Functional Requirements at the force, theater, Combatant Commands (COCOM) and national levels to support the formulation, development and assessment of doctrine, strategy, plans, concepts of operations, and tactics, techniques and procedures in order to provide the full spectrum of Cyber Warfare and enabling capabilities to the warfighter.”

During the course of their analysis Symantec learned that Duqu “uses HTTP and HTTPS to communicate with a command-and-control (C&C) server that at the time of writing is still operational.”

“The attackers were able to download additional executables through the C&C server, including an infostealer that can perform actions such as enumerating the network, recording keystrokes, and gathering system information. The information is logged to a lightly encrypted and compressed local file, which then must be exfiltrated out.”

To where, and more importantly by whom was that information “exfiltrated” is of course, the $64,000 question.

A working hypothesis may be provided by additional documents published by Public Intelligence.

According to a cyberwar proposal to the Pentagon by General Dynamics and HBGary, “Project C” is described as a program for the development “of a software application targeting the Windows XP Operating System that, when executed, loads and enables a covert kernel-mode implant that will exfiltrate a file from disk (or other remotely called commands) over a connected serial port to a remote device.”

We’re informed that Project C’s “primary objectives” was the design of an implant “that is clearly able to exfiltrate an on-disk file, opening of the CD tray, blinking of the keyboard lights, opening and deleting a file, and a memory buffer exfiltration over a connected serial line to a collection station.”

“As part of the exploit delivery package,” HBGary and General Dynamics told their prospective customers, presumably the NSA, that “a usermode trojan will assist in the loading of the implant, which will clearly demonstrate the full capability of the implant.”

Duqu, according to Symantec researchers, “uses a custom C&C protocol, primarily downloading or uploading what appear to be JPG files. However, in addition to transferring dummy JPG files, additional data for exfiltration is encrypted and sent, and likewise received.”

While we don’t know which firms were involved in the design of Stuxnet and now, Duqu, we do know, thanks to Anonymous, that HBGary had a Stuxnet copy, shared it amongst themselves and quite plausibly, given what we’ve learned about Duqu, Stuxnet source code may have been related to the above-mentioned “Project C.”

Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of product management told The Register that “the people behind Stuxnet are not done. They’ve continued to do different things. This was not a one-shot deal.”

It has since emerged that despite legal requirements that police do so only with a warrant and only if surveillance intercepts are used to prevent threats to “life, limb or liberty,” authorities are not complying with strict limits laid down by Germany’s Supreme Court.

And while these disclosures may have ignited a political firestorm in Berlin, they will come as no surprise to readers of Antifascist Calling.

Three years ago, I reported that Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, was caught up in a major scandal after the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, published documents which revealed that the agency had extensively spied on, and even recruited, journalists for use in illicit intelligence operations.

Recalling the CIA’s long-running Operation Mockingbird program that enrolled journalists as spies in what are now euphemistically called “influence operations,” the covert manipulation of the domestic and foreign press according to WikiLeaks, showed “the extent to which the collaboration of journalists with intelligence agencies has become common and to what dimensions consent is manufactured in the interests of those involved.”

BBC News reported that “Bavaria has admitted using the spyware, but claimed it had acted within the law.” And Deutsche Welle disclosed that “several additional German states have admitted to deploying spyware,” including “Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony,” but like their counterparts in Bavaria, those officials also claimed they had operated “within the parameters of the law.”

As I have written many times, the secret state is bound by their own set of “laws.” Normal rules and procedures which are supposed to protect citizens from unwarranted government intrusions are deemed inoperative for reasons of “national security.”

In the United States, constitutional protections designed to guarantee the right of citizens to protest, enjoy a modicum of privacy in their daily lives or, at the most basic level, have their day in court before being executed, have been overthrown by two successive administrations who assert the right to conduct the affairs of state in secret, according to a set of legal guidelines which are unreviewable by any court.

It would appear that similar moves are underway in Germany.

‘Backdoor Functionality’

The Chaos Computer Club revealed in their analysis that when they reverse engineered the program, variously dubbed “0zapftis”, “Bundestrojaner” or “R2D2,” they discovered that the spyware “found in the wild” and “submitted to the CCC anonymously,” can “not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.”

Club researchers learned that “the trojan’s developers never even tried to put in technical safeguards to make sure the malware can exclusively be used for wiretapping internet telephony, as set forth by the constitution court. On the contrary, the design included functionality to clandestinely add more components over the network right from the start, making it a bridge-head to further infiltrate the computer.”

“The government malware can,” analysts noted, “unchecked by a judge, load extensions by remote control, to use the trojan for other functions, including but not limited to eavesdropping.”

“This complete control over the infected PC, is open not just to the agency that put it there, but to everyone. It could even be used to upload falsified ‘evidence’ against the PC’s owner, or to delete files, which puts the whole rationale for this method of investigation into question.”

Their study also “revealed serious security holes that the trojan is tearing into infected systems. The screenshots and audio files it sends out are encrypted in an incompetent way, the commands from the control software to the trojan are even completely unencrypted. Neither the commands to the trojan nor its replies are authenticated or have their integrity protected.”

“We were surprised and shocked by the lack of even elementary security in the code. Any attacker could assume control of a computer infiltrated by the German law enforcement authorities,” a CCC spokesperson commented. “The security level this trojan leaves the infected systems in is comparable to it setting all passwords to ’1234′.”

Nothing ‘Magical’ about this ‘Lantern’

There are glaring similarities between the “R2D2″ package deployed by German police and “Magic Lantern” software used by the FBI. As with Bureau spyware, the German program is a keystroke logging virus installed via a malicious email attachment or by exploiting operating system vulnerabilities.

When news of the FBI program first broke back in 2000, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) obtained documents under a Freedom of Information Act request relating to the system, which were part of a suite of surveillance tools then called Carnivore.

At the time, EPIC revealed that the FBI “had developed an Internet monitoring system that would be installed at the facilities of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and would monitor all traffic moving through that ISP.”

Once a user is spoofed into installing the malicious Trojan, it is activated when PGP encryption is used to enhance email security. When switched on, the Trojan will log the PGP password which will then allow the agents to read the encrypted communications unbeknownst to the sender. Since its first iteration in the 1990s, such programs are exponentially more sophisticated and are now capable of scooping-up virtually everything a user stores on a computer or handset.

A 2007 exposé by Wired Magazine revealed that Magic Lantern’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier” or CIPAV, “gathers a wide range of information, including the computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.”

And once that data was obtained, it was siphoned-off to the Bureau’s technology laboratory in Quantico, Virginia via fiber optic splitter cables.

As whistleblower Babak Pasdar revealed in 2008, following earlier disclosures by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, Verizon, and other giant telecommunications firms, including AT&T, maintained a high-speed DS-3 digital line that handed the Bureau and other security agencies “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless network, including billing records and customer data “transmitted wirelessly.”

Just after the scandal broke, Wired Magazine disclosed that “two years before the Bavarian state in Germany began using a controversial spy tool to gather evidence from suspect computers, German authorities approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation to discuss a similar tool the U.S. law enforcement agency was using.”

“Bavarian authorities,” Wired reported, “began using their spyware in 2009. It’s not known if that spyware is based on the FBI’s, but in July 2007, German authorities contacted the FBI seeking information about its tool.”

The FBI’s assistant legal attache in Frankfurt “sent an email to Bureau colleagues on July 24, 2007, writing, ‘I am embarrassed to be approaching you again with a request from the Germans … but they now have asked us about CIPAV (Computer Internet Protocol Address Verifier) software, allegedly used by the Bu[reau]‘.”

The email uncovered by Wired was part of a huge cache of files obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in response to their 2007 Freedom of Information Act request for data on CIPAV.

In the years since those disclosures, secret state surveillance is more pervasive than ever and and now includes the “lawful interception” of GPS locational data streamed automatically to their manufacturers or hosting services by smart phones.

It appears that German secret state officials are playing a similar game. According to Der Spiegel, at least two agencies, the Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA, the federal crime investigation agency equivalent to the FBI, and some 16 Landeskriminalamt or LKAs, regional investigative bureaus, may have deployed the malware during wide-ranging investigations unrelated to terrorism.

Following Chaos Computer Club revelations, it is clear that German authorities have been caught red-handed violating a landmark decision by the Supreme Court. “The court,” Der Spiegel noted, “specified that online spying was only permissible if there was concrete evidence of danger to individuals or society.”

In a follow-up piece, Der Spiegel disclosed that the firm DigiTask was the spyware’s developer. Along with hundreds of similar firms, DigiTask is a niche security outfit that develops applications for the so-called “lawful interception” market.

In 2008, WikiLeaks released two documents concerning “interception technology for Skype and SSL in Bavaria, Germany. The first document is a communication by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice to the prosecutors office, relating to cost distribution for the interception licenses between police and prosecution. The second document allegedly presents the offer made by Digitask, the German company developing the technology, and holds information on pricing and license model, high-level technology descriptions and other detail.”

According to the WikiLeaks analysis, the DigiTask offer “introduces a basic description of the cryptographic workings of Skype, and concludes that new systems are needed to spy on Skype calls.”

We were informed in that letter that German police were interested in standing-up a “Skype Capture Unit.”

“In a nutshell: malware is installed onto a target machine, to intercept Skype Voice and Chat. Another feature introduced is a recording proxy, that is not part of the offer, yet would allow for anonymous proxying of recorded information to a target recording station. Access to the recording station is possible via a multimedia streaming client, supposedly offering real-time interception.”

“Another part of the offer,” WikiLeaks noted, was related to “an interception method for SSL based communication, working on the same principle of establishing a man-in-the-middle attack on the key material on the client machine. According to the offer, this method works for Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. Digitask also recommends using overseas proxy servers, to cover the tracks of all activities.”

As it turns out those proxy servers were conveniently located in the United States. This raises the distinct possibility that information captured by German secret state officials is also being shared with “partner agencies” of their close NATO ally, the CIA, FBI and NSA.

This was confirmed by CCC’s analysis of R2D2′s code. “To avoid the location of the command and control server, all data is redirected through a rented dedicated server in a data center in the USA. The control of this malware is only partially within the borders of its jurisdiction.”

“Considering the incompetent encryption and the missing digital signatures on the command channel, this poses an unacceptable and incalculable risk. It also poses the question how a citizen is supposed to get their right of legal redress in the case the wiretapping data get lost outside Germany, or the command channel is misused.”

The short answer is, they can’t.

Aside from lining the pockets of DigiTask shareholders, there are more sinister uses for the malware. As the World Socialist Web Site noted “the remote-control function could be used to load and execute malicious software, and to plant bogus digital evidence on the computer, which can then be detected if the computer was seized. A suspect would have no way of proving that this had happened.”

This would certainly be a convenient way to “neutralize” a troublesome politician, journalist or over-eager anticorporate campaigner.

‘Less Democracy’

Following similar efforts in the United States, evidence that police are illegally spying on German citizens using sophisticated malware developed for the government are neither benign nor accidental events.

As a recent article in German Foreign Policy disclosed, leading voices in Europe’s largest state are “pleading for a transition toward ‘less democracy’.” A recent book, published under the title, Dare Less Democracy, claims that the “voice of the people” and the “‘emancipatory Zeitgeist, putting everything into question,’ has a too ‘paralyzing influence” on current governance’.”

“The author,” the critical online leftist magazine observes, “demands to ‘correct the system’ for ‘more efficient policy making.’ These ‘corrections’ must include the dismantlement of democratic participation.”

Author Laszlo Trankovits, the bureau chief of the Deutsche Presse Agentur in South Africa, who had previously worked for the agency in Washington “as its White House correspondent,” explained “it should never be suggested that a ‘democratic society can do away with inequality and establish social justice’.”

“Trankovits,” German Foreign Policy notes, is “a member of the elitist Rotary-Club.” He demands that “the elite clearly ‘commits itself to capitalism and profit,’ and that ‘intelligent forms of public relations’ be used to communicate policy measures to the population. However, the demand for more ‘transparency’ is ‘counterproductive and paralyzing’ for any ‘governance efficiency’ and must be rejected.”

That drivel such as this was penned by a journalist for Germany’s leading news agency, to whit, that the media should serve as a propaganda mouthpiece for casino capitalist interests, is one more sign that democratic norms, already seriously eroded in the West, are now being rapidly jettisoned by our political masters.

With the global capitalist system on the verge of a repeat performance of the 2008 meltdown, and with a worldwide resurgence of opposition to the one-sided costs of saving a system of financial plunder borne by the working class, elite calls for “less democracy” are warning signs that stern measures, including blanket surveillance and naked police violence, are in the offing.