GAMESMEN, GO HOME

These days, it seems too many people have come to believe, as Shakespeare almost put it, “All the world's a game, And all the men and women merely players.”

Here are 2 deadly serious examples of what I mean.

Let the NSA spy indiscriminately on us, and we’ll try and beat them at their own game.

“From Silicon Valley to the South Pacific,” the Associated Press reported this week, “counterattacks to revelations of widespread National Security Agency surveillance are taking shape, from a surge of new encrypted email programs to technology that sprinkles the Internet with red flag terms to confuse would-be snoops.”

http://www.abqjournal.com/280684/news/counterattacks-growing-against-nsa-spying.html

In a way, this report also plays a popular news media game, the “trend” story, in which a few micro-scale fragments of the real world are inflated into a global movement. 

Here is some of the evidence cited by the AP to show a digital world enflamed:

--- “[Encryption] Developer Jeff Lyon in Santa Clara, Calif., said that 2,000 users have installed [his Flagger service] to date.”

--- “Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, a free encryption service was being loaded about 600 times a day in the month before Snowden’s revelations broke. Two months later, that had more than doubled to 1,380, according to a running tally maintained by programmer Kristian Fiskerstrand.”

--- “Berlin-based email provider Posteo claims to have seen a 150 percent surge in paid subscribers due to the “Snowden effect,” to 25,000 in the past four months.”

WOWIE ZOWIE!!! Add ‘em all together, and accept the advocates’ figures as accurate, and you get about 100,000 new encryptors out of, what, a billion users of the global internet.

But wait, AP says, there’s more: “CryptoParties are springing up around the world as well. They are small gatherings where hosts teach attendees, who bring their digital devices, how to download and use encrypted email and secure Internet browsers.”

That’ll show those NSA bastards!

The “trend” would be laughable were the plans of these “digital rebels” not so awful.

Flagger Boy Lyons says, “The goal here is to get a critical mass of people flooding the Internet with noise and make a statement of civil disobedience.”

While Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgens in San Francisco wants everybody to encrypt, because, he says, “Encryption loses its value as an indicator of possible malfeasance if everyone is using it.”

Absurd, absurder, reductio ad absurdum: “University of Auckland associate professor Gehan Gunasekara said he’s received ‘overwhelming support’ for his proposal to ‘lead the spooks in a merry dance,’ visiting radical websites, setting up multiple online identities and making up hypothetical ‘friends.’

“And ‘pretty soon everyone in New Zealand will have to be under surveillance,’ he said.”

Hey, schmuck!  That’s what the surveillance system is set up to do, and if you think you and all your friends have the budget to out-run the spooks, good luck to you. 

Increasing the scale of data-mining is as much of a challenge to the security services as a hard, straight fastball down the middle is to a big league hitter.  And what’s the virtue of camouflaging serious encryption with fun’n’games versions?

The point here is not to stir the hornets’ nest, make ‘em mad, make ‘em even more hyperactive.  It is the opposite, to encourage, and if necessary, force the NSA, GCHQ and whatever the hell New Zealand calls its spook service,--  which is already part of the NSA-led “Mighty Five” intelligence collaborative -- to calm down, be more selective and more rational in their surveillance collection, collation and analysis.

And making that happen is not an Effing game, any more than is legitimate national security surveillance. The NSA et al have real jobs to do, including protecting our freewheeling society from real enemies, whose plots, while far fewer than the spooks and their budgets and their tactics seem to assume, still can be truly destructive.

That their exaggerated “trend” might have dangerous real world effects is something AP left out of their story.

The gamesmanship of this new generation of Jerry Rubin-style gigabit tricksters is repellant enough, but it is literally amateur night compared to the game-playing radical-right Republicans of the House of Representatives.

To them, the functions of the US Government and its financial credibility are just tokens in a game to force their will down the throat of that African-American (and can you see them smirking at the first half of that description?) President Barack Obama.

To them, the serious consequences of default or a government AWOL, matter less than their sense of “fair play.” 

 “You can’t just demand pure capitulation,” Boehner-buddy Representative Tom Cole, (R-OK), said,   “Negotiations don’t work that way.”

A senseless sentiment amped-up by Tea Party Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), who whined: "We’re not going to be disrespected.  We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

Stutzman seems to think that, like his 8 year old daughter, he should get a “self-esteem” trophy for having played the game and lost.

Not in the real world.  In the world, you need both votes and brains to win. 

Unless, like Congressman Cole, you can tell the Washington Post that losing on Obamacare, losing on the shutdown, losing on default, is really a win, because it “forces” President Obama to do what he’s been asking to do for months now, use the normal legislative process to carve out changes in Federal taxing and spending.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/all-eyes-on-us-stock-markets-as-debt-deadline-draws-closer/2013/10/14/4a2a9992-34be-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story_1.html

“Any agreement, Cole told the Post, that creates a process to litigate broader budget issues would achieve an important GOP goal. ‘If you’re able to do that and you’re able to get some savings out of the entitlement portion of the budget, those aren’t Republican defeats. They are Republican victories.’”

Cole and Boehner are free to say that, but Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) knows better.  What the GOP will get out of their months of Provocation Theater will be, he says, “a tough vote.”

As the Post put it, “The misguided assault on the health-care law had diverted attention from more meaningful efforts to overhaul the tax code and rein in spending on Medicare and Social Security, he said. And now time has run out for achieving those goals.

“’Let’s just spell out what’s happened:’ Cole said, ‘We’ve basically blown the last two months with some of our members and a lot of the House focused on a shiny object that was never going to happen.’”

But, of course, the game isn’t over yet.  Bloodied, beaten, disgraced before an American voting public which has rarely polled so strongly their disapproval of the Republican Party, the GOP can’t wait to do it all over again.  For the next round of negotiations, their booby prize, they are clinging to their shameful tactic: they will once again hold the functions of the government and its full faith and credit hostage against new dates, in January and February 2014.

Let us say it one more time, civilly and quietly, in hopes that some Republicans might understand: a functioning government which pays its debts on time is something Americans want to believe in, not play with.

 

SENDING A MESSAGE

The world sent two messages to President Barack Obama, but it remains to be seen if he got them.

The two messages were: (1) The world is weary of America using its standoff weapons to vaporize its enemies, and (2)  What the world thinks, as in what the world’s people think, as opposed to what “world leaders” (or even local leaders) think, matters.

In my last blast http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/08/syria-what-is-to-be-done.html  I accused the Obama White House of “old world thinking.”  What I was talking about was President Obama’s apparent conception of “sending a message,” in this case to the Syrian serial mass murderer President Bashar al-Assad.

The incremental escalation of the American government’s response to President Assad’s continuing crimes against his citizens, from (1) scowling at him, to (2) threatening to give some number of small arms (but not actually giving them) to -- which fraction of? -- the Syrian rebels, to (3) raining rockets or missiles or bombs on “military targets” is thought of as “sending messages,” to convince Assad to give up his war in favor of the civility of a “peace negotiation.”   Each nudge up the scale is a further “statement,” leader to leader.

It is significant that so far, the White House whispers of disapproval, and the brandished threat now on the table have not moved Assad to reform. 

So, the conventional political logic, accepted by “leaders” of the Democratic and Republican parties and the country’s media, asserts, Obama’s personal and national  credibility demand that he deliver on his threat, his metaphoric hard punch to Assad’s leadership biceps, enough to hurt, but not cripple or even short-term disable him.  

A manly sort of diplomatic communication: the kind that once could be done discreetly, a “message that was “private,” or “secret,” depending on whether or not you were “in the loop.”

Well, as I said in my very first post http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/07/privacy-and-secrecy.html it is the defining quality of our new age of digital communication that your expectation of privacy and government’s expectation of secrecy are obsolete fantasies.  Because of the global network of mobile phone, tablet, computer and television screens it is literally true that almost everybody can know almost anything – personal or political  -- and know it instantly, from cell phone snappies of physical and political boobs or from video “live shots” from the Supreme Court steps or Tahrir Square.

One of the great things about human beings is, if you let them do something, most of them will want to do more; if you let people know something, most of them will want to know more.  Now that people know what their digital screens can show them, they feel entitled to unfettered use of them to see more, in as close to real time as possible.

This certainly has its downsides, as screens are extremely susceptible to manipulation, both through what they show and don’t show, and the “real time” obsession crowds out time to think.  But, too bad, screens rule, like it or not, which means these swift judgments of screen-watchers are both more widespread and deeply-held than any in history, including the comparatively parochial affirmations of faith in Christianity or Islam. 

People today, all over the world, see for themselves, and judge for themselves and then back their judgments with all the conviction their egos can give them. 

In today’s media age, governments, democratic or not, have to sell their ideas to their people, and so, doing nothing but denouncing the use of chemical weapons is sold as “caution,” or “patience,” or “prudence,” while threats of arms supplies or armed attacks or sold as “justified,” or “measured,” or “necessary.”  This is called “spinning” the American people.  When Assad spins his own people he claims Israel is behind any American aggression; when he adds that it will fail like previous American aggressions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, he is trying to spin the American people and the world. 

So far, probably for the better, the noise of the multi-party attempts to spin the Syria crisis is drowning out, maybe flat sweeping downstream, the drums and guns of war.  Today, everybody in the world gets to listen in on the leaders’ conversations, gets to hear the messages, back and forth.  And draw their own conclusions.

That’s why the Arab League, the group of regional states which first tossed Assad’s government out, then gave status to self-declared representatives of the rebels, which has no love nor loyalty for the Syrian tyrant, has opted out of any military assault, no matter how “limited.”  Their people are telling them, loudly, on Facebook and Twitter, in the barber shops and beauty parlors, the Parliaments and on the streets, "Do not sign off on this American message of force."

So, it seems obvious, are the people of Great Britain and of Northern, Western, Eastern and Southern Europe telling their governments, “Hold on! Not so fast, and maybe not at all.”

From every corner of the world there is a call for evidence that the Assad government (and not a “rogue faction” of it, or not a faction of rebels) was responsible for the use of poison gas on civilians, women and children, and that any military response will be both careful of human life and effective in improving Syrian lives.

What is new here, and historically definitive, is that so many people have opinions they consider informed, and are so willing to share and embrace their judgments.  What is new here and defining of our age is that people can see what is happening “on the ground,” see how it is affecting the people who live on the ground, and tell their families, friends, neighbors, governments all about it.

For the past several years, people have seen global coverage of the results of American drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.  Even sincere and professed enemies of the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula take little pleasure in them.  They know the warheads sometimes go astray and when they do, innocent civilians die, and, far too frequently, the American government and military minimize their culpability.

The net result in Pakistan and Yemen, polls show, is diminished affection and respect for the United States, and military intelligence suggests, continued growth in recruits to the terrorist cause.

And global polling shows, disaffection and disrespect for Uncle Sam also seem to be growing.  Our propensity for warfare, and interference in affairs and nations beyond our borders are usually seen as leading reasons why.

Everybody loves a winner, but not a bully, especially when the “loser’s” wounds are on display.

So “secret wars,” even “secret” attacks are no secret anymore.  No drone rocket falls without the eye of some sparrow-sized camera recording it, and sending the picture around the world. 

And as long as “secret policies” are executed by human beings, no policy-planner should feel his or her secrets are immune to the sting of an Ellsberg, a Manning or a Snowden, or the coverage of the Post or the Times or CNN, CCTV, Al Jazeera, RTV or YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.

This is called “living in the real world.”

Hey, White House! Get the message?