Prokofy

Good!

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/03/total-protonic-reversal-but-soon-weev-will-be-right-where-he-needs-to-be.html

I hope you learn a useful trade while in the slammer and get some counseling and reform yourself, and stay away from those big guys named Tiny -- and give them your cookies if they ask.

Your "rape crew logic" about other people's servers -- "she was wearing a short skirt so I did it because I can" -- is despicable and I hope you will have ample time to contemplate the error of your ways.

Do you think that there are lines that journalists should not cross in handling stolen classified files? Is there a point at which journalists can be said to be in collusion if they incite hacking or specify what they'd like to see hacked or constantly collaborate with hackers on the material?

Oh, stuff and nonsense. You don't have to be a technical specialist to report critically on the tech world and policies about cybersecurity.

Indeed, the take of someone like Lucas from the humanities is vitally necessary because otherwise we'd be at the mercy of the 0/1 binary thinkers in the tech set who have lost touch with how code affects real human beings.

The story of Snowden as I know from writing my own book

http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Not-Thee-Invincible-Transparency-ebook/dp/B00I2CJKI6

particularly critical of Snowden's hacker helpers -- this is a complex issue in which you need to follow Russia, hackers, the NSA, European history, the history of espionage, China, etc. A lot of moving parts, and moving parts that evade scrutiny.

Cybersecurity is not about code, ultimately, although people who salt their posts with obscenities and hash it with factology like links to biased Wikipedia don't get it: the weakest link in the chain is always the coder himself and his psychology and his motives. That's what happened to the NSA and that's what our government should have worked harder at preventing.

Let's turn this perennial misleading answer to the challenge that Lucas and others properly make about damage and simply ask this:

what would YOU accept as proof of damage?

Would it be an attack like 9/11, with massive casualties, in which the terrorists say "Courtesy of Edward Snowden"?

How do we know that the attack on the Kenyan mall wasn't something Snowden made possible by weakening and disrupting the NSA's ability to track Boko Haram in Africa?

Or would just any smaller terrorist attack do, as long as you have absolute bona-fide smoking-gun finger-printed evidence that a hit was related to something revealed from the NSA trove?

I think what we'll quickly find out is that either you'll discount various attacks or weakenings as not really damage --- small-scale terrorist attacks may not count for you (as for so many who argue in this manner) because "you have more chance of dying in a car accident". (Of course, the reason they call them "accidents" is because they are; terrorist attacks aren't.)

Or ultimately, we won't even agree at all on what damage is because unless the NSA is turned into red mist, you won't accept it as damaged.

Snowden has not produced a single, solid case proving that the NSA spies on individual Americans improperly -- or anybody, for that matter. If Merkel is your case -- say, we don't know what she talked about. So maybe they only had her name in a list, "just in case". That was one of Appelbaum's stories. Is it true? LOVEINT doesn't represent a policy. And the half dozen Muslims spied on might have been a case of the COINTELPRO kind, but we don't know, as we get no names or specifics -- and maybe the NSA quite properly tracked them as extremists inciting terrorism and jihad who needed watching.

A government is not going to paint a target on its back and say "Here's where I'm weak and if attacked you'll know Snowden damaged me" or "Here's where Snowden got a hit through, hey, you terrorists, come through."

So seriously, let's try to move this absolutely inane circular reasoning out of the vicious circle it's been in for 7 months and ask again: what would YOU accept as damage?

And given your loathing of the USG government, the answer is likely "even if it were in smoldering ashes I'd say we couldn't prove it was Snowden."

So go ahead, I'll wait.

The fiction is that "social media editors" are "curating" what they see as "citizens' media" and providing "added value". But often all they're doing is key-word searching Youtube for raw feed from disasters or listening to Internet streams of police radio and then tendentiously re-tweeting various bloggers that fit their worldview. Matthew Keys was a prime example of this. Anthony de Rosa is another example of a "social media editor" who in fact uses his bully pulpit to purvey his own views, selectively bash media that covers, say Occupy, more criticially than he would like, and selective mute critics -- and then make his Facebook feed with news disappear from view using the very censorious affordances of social media that are rarely questioned by the "curators" who like to "curate" some right out of existence pretending they are "trolls". That's downright creepy.

what you really should call yourself is columnists -- even micro-bloggers. That's all you really are. Why don't you and your companies admit that? At least when the Daily News Tweeter-in-Chief fills up his feed with rampant bias, he writes on the can "opinion writer". Meanwhile, with the vaunted title of "editors," you guys are distracting from your "social" -- which means you friend or de-friend in a personal, biased way whom you like and pretend you're in your living room -- that's often the analogy some of you give when anyone pipes up with anything but adulation.

So I'm not interested in talking about UGC which is a well-worked topic and not about you because you're not really curating it and even when you do, it's selective and biased without admitting it is so. I'm interested in you examining your own role -- why are you anything but columnists?! It's simply a fact of life that when we get "social media editors," we get "community organizers" in disguise with the "progressive" worldview to purvey -- they've bothered to master the tools or create the resumes and scared Internet-phobic middle-managers puts you in charge of the news stream and the public-facing job of dealing with customers -- and as a class you fail. Matthew Keys is indicted for helping Anonymous (something many of you wink and nod about); he helped get fired his colleague from Bloomberg who was too critical of his own employer. Philip Crowley is fired from the State Department for tweeting biased views when he is supposed to be the "spokesman". Let's face it, you're a marketing tool, but you're marketing more than the product of news!