Secret-Spilling Machine
The news from Ukraine, where last week’s violent anti-government protests have ended, seemingly, with the collapse of President Victor Yanukovich’s regime, is heartening and suggests that even in the age of hyper-surveillance and police forces willing to use live ammunition against civilians, authoritarians don’t always prevail. Some questions I’d love to see more reporting on:
How did the “sotni”–the irregular but well-disciplined groups of roughly 100 street fighters each–get organized and what holds them together?
Unlike other recent protest movements, which have been more adept at using social media to organize to dissolve power than to build counter-power, how have did #EuroMaidan coalition get built?
What happened to the Yanukovich regime’s use of mobile phone tracking–recall those intimidating text messages it sent to protesters in January? Why didn’t it shut down or throttle the Internet when it saw how protesters were using it?
Instead of spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the NSA has increased its snooping of other senior German officials, the Bild am Sonntag paper reports.
Eli Lake has a long, sympathetic profile of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, in the Daily Beast, adorned with photos from Clapper’s personal collection. Read it if you want to understand how a child of the “deep state” (Clapper’s father was a career army intelligence officer and the two of them bunked together in Vietnam) thinks.
Glenn Greenwald parses Lake’s profile of Clapper with his usual brio, concluding: “James Clapper should look in the mirror every morning and be extremely grateful for the corrupted political system that has shielded him from the consequences of his crimes even as he tries to criminalize others for doing things that the U.S. Constitution guarantees them the right to do.”
Speaking of the “deep state,” longtime Republican budget committee staffer Mike Lofgren, has a lengthy essay on BillMoyers.com on the “anatomy of the deep state.”
Gawker’s Nick Denton tells Playboy magazine (link is SFW) that he thinks as the Internet reduces privacy, society’s attitudes about once previously shamed behaviors like drinking or homosexuality are being forced to change more quickly: