Wikileaks and the security of communities

go listen to this

it's just under an hour and a half long. and it's worth it.

what you're listening to, incidentally, is the keynote speech for the HOPE conference, which is a semiregular conference in NYC, the 8th of which is winding up today.

the keynote speaker was announced, as of yesterday, to be This Man, who, as the actual speaker tells his audience of computer whizzes and feds early on, will not be able to make it, because of the overwhelming interest of the latter group.

The target audience of this speech, in fact of this conference, is knowledgeable about computers to a stunning degree. i don't understand a lot of the specific technical stuff Applebaum is talking about. and i'm ok with that (though i'd still like someone to walk me through securely installing Tor) because the social dynamics at play here are at least as interesting.

These are computer geeks with political and rhetorical savvy: The likelihood that Assange would make it into the US was very small at the time when his keynote was announced. BUT saying he'd be there guaranteed that a helluva lot of intelligence operatives and agents of various persuasions would show. which provides a really lovely teachable moment about how hierarchical and authoritarian structures are obligated to respond to stimuli in predictable ways, and that those patterns tend towards assuming people are "leaders" of organizations which can be structurally "decapitated."

this, no matter how many times those supposed leaders explain that they are not so much calling down the rain as observing the direction of the wind, and though they may be supa dupa fly, they do not have the keys to the jeep, as it were.

So the guy with the microphone isn't Assange, he's some guy named Applebaum who I never heard of before. And he takes that first teachable moment, and turns it into a different one, about the resilience of community, and how "leaders" and figureheads aren't the source of a community's power, but emergent properties of it. He doesn't say it in quite this way, but in that moment, the State had responded in its predictable way, and has succeeded, sort of. The speech is the moment immediately after, where the community is running around like a hydra with its head cut off.

The community that Applebaum invokes has far more interesting implications than its defanged contemporary usage. it's not a synonym for "identity grouping." it's an obligation, and a security protocol. and if you neglect your community, that compromises the security system. which, in cryptographese, is called an attack.

Applebaum talks about someone who performed this kind of attack. (more background & etc.)
i don't know if the parallels with avoidance speech mourning practices is intentional, but it's striking. saying someone has no name anymore, in this context, has profound practical implications. they're no longer a trusted node. this in a set of systems where identity verification is everything, and is the source of one of the only widespread means of strong encryption.

keep listening for the parts where Applebaum talks about community.
dissidents, especially computer geek dissidents, get painted as antisocial like nobody's business, and there's something truly beautiful about hearing the idea of collective interresponsibility, and the drive to keep your people safe, invoked so passionately by someone with such a broad understanding of his collective, and so much of the wherewithal to aid in that safety.

it's worth saying, frequently, that the current wars are not about far off places we don't understand, but about us, and what we allow to be funded, and how far we can expand our universe of empathy, and what our societal response to crisis is. it's worth saying that war is a process by which destruction and suffering are manufactured domestically, for foreign consumption. so i always appreciate when someone  bothers to say it.

and then listen to the part where he invokes Harvey Milk. because it's a really wonderful reminder that coming out was never just about saying "hey, i have an immutable individual identity! if the status quo can assimilate it i'll stop bugging you!" It was actually about asking the people who wanted to see you dead if they would like say it to your face, when you ran into them at family gatherings. it was about strategy, and it was about passion, and it was about community, and it was about making it personal.

in the end what i get out of this, even when i can't understand the jargon, is that caring about people is powerful. tangibly so. and that being able to care about and and trust people is a valuable security resource, and a tool with almost limitless social potential.

7-7-10

yesterday broke 100 degrees fahrenheit.

or not broke, exactly. monday too had bested the double digits

this has happened 8 other times.

to be clear: by "this" i don't mean back-to-back triple-digit-days.

nor do i mean 101 degree july 5ths, or 6ths.

i mean that this little bend in the Connecticut river has seen ten days this hot in recorded history, and two of them happened in the last 48 hours.

3 out of 10 since i graduated college.

to account for the next 3 you have to go back to the summer that the civil rights act was passed.

but since the dawn of the standardized mercury thermometer in western massachusetts, every single day above 100 has come since the birth of Queen Elizabeth II.


The front page of tomorrow's paper lists another ten days. On these ten days, residents of New England drew more electricity from our coal-and-nuclear grid than at any other time in history. None of these days is so much as 5 years distant.

this morning the dial in the shade outside the kitchen window read 90 degrees by 10AM, while the cylinder out the back door catches a glint of sun, and reads above 110. officially, this is not another 100 degree day. The Official Thermometer can sit in the shade all day and lose no credibility.

residents of the United States have a long and distinguished history of believing themselves outside of history, or avatars of the driving forces of history, or witnesses to the denouement. Being all of these at once, history is reduced to teleology, an ugly fable to which we are the moral. We speed towards ourselves along this story's only trajectory, which is a brutal process of elimination.


Yesterday I waded barefoot through a riverbed lined with smooth stones, pottery shards and bits of brick with edges worn round. I watched the sun set over a field of feral peas and brassicas, sitting in among the Queen Anne's Lace in a stand of sumac. The field has been pocumtuc land, the border territory with nipmuc, then logged and farmed for a hundred years. Just over the rise, 205 years, one month and 2 days ago, on a hill called Pancake Plain, two irishmen, Dominic and James, were hanged for murder and with scant evidence. Farmland, a few trees, and a crowd of fifteen thousands looked on. Fifty years on, the field was farmed again, now by the inmates of a State Asylum. In the quiet of the baking sun, the sumac grows back in the poor soil, and the remains of an Institutional foundation and its attendant coal boiler fall slowly down the hill behind me.


I watch the sun set on what may not be the hottest day of the year, and i listen to the highway, 
and i wonder if America only concerns himself with the end of the World because he has already ended so many of them.