[liberationtech] And right on cue, the flush our civil liberties down the toilet boys rear their ugly heads

[Shava Nerad]

Jake --

I think the usual language would be alleged, not potential suspects.
 Wouldn't alleged bombers be even stronger though?  I would think "persons
of interest" would be toned down, and "alleged bombers" would be turning it
up.  What is this "potential suspects?"  That's unusual language, and I
think it comes from DHS, not the press stylebook.

Regarding the situation in Boston, I live three hours slow walk north of
the MIT campus.  NOTHING is changed here.  Other than the relentless gossip
everywhere on the north shore, and a few people who didn't make it to work
on reverse commutes, 12 miles north of Boston life is going on as usual.
 Stores are open, businesses are running as usual.  The transit system is
down, but we don't depend on that as much here.

I am a 54 year old disabled woman.  I could have walked from the murder
scene of the MIT campus policeman to my home by 2am, at a brisk walk, even
today.  Under the cordon they set out, at 19, it would have taken me
probably six hours.  Then, I could have hopped rail to anywhere up and down
the east coast.

I understand that my skill set may be unusual, but it's not that unusual,
and it's trainable, so if these kids had any training, what we are seeing
in Boston is either stupid, theater, or both.  Or, it's CYA, and insurance
against the unknowable for the inevitable press repercussions.  I can't
figure out if I am more sad if this 19 year old is cowering in a friend's
basement now that his big brother mastermind is dead, or waiting out the
heat, or in NYC with a new haircut picking a new target -- but it's
probably useless shutting down Boston regardless.

As an update, the young man is currently in a firefight with the police --
he didn't skip town.  But shutting down Boston?  I'm not sure it did much
but spread much fear and panic.

I had to go to a doctor's office today to pick up a some paperwork.

While there, I had to listen to an older gent (probably mid-60s, so only a
decade older than myself) rant how "converted muslims were the worst" since
this kid was a Russian.  I tried to explain how the regions around Chechnya
were Muslim, more Central Asian, and he glared at me, like WTF do I know.
 I tried to point out to him that a dozen or so years ago, our kids and
NATO forces were pulling Bosnian Muslims out of pits where the Serbs were
trying to massacre them in Sarajevo, and that then the Muslims were our
allies, not our enemies.  That in the 40s the Japanese were our enemies,
and the Germans were our enemies and now they are our allies, and here in
Salem the Brits were our enemies in a couple different wars and now they
are our special allies.  Things change, and they will change again.  We
will not always, I told him, be at war with Eurasia.  He looked at me
funny.  I suspect he thought I was some kind of commie.

His wife thought I was kind of nifty, but she just smiled and didn't say
anything.  She looked like she was used to letting him rant.

And I got my paperwork and left.

The Onion ran a pretty telling story something like 90% of Americans are
too ill informed to diss Chechens on the basis of ethnicity.  *sigh*

We have so many tools to educate people, but my bets are that most of folks
will hold close to their silos in times of crisis and not reach out to
learn more about the situation, wait for due diligence, wonder how a thing
could have developed, wonder about the credibility or sourcing of
information or the shaping of opinion or why things went down as they did.

It will take about negative five or six days for the conspiracy theories to
emerge. (Obama's already being blamed.  The Jews are being blamed.
 Skinheads wanting gun control are being blamed,...)  The technology will
spread these in receptive channels, and they were accrete favorable and
attractive accoutrements until they are as attractive as possible to their
proper targets.

Conspiracy theories only seem complex but they are actually
made-for-TV-drama versions of history.  They always tie up the loose ends
around the fog-of-war uncertainty that surrounds real historical events
much more neatly than any actual current events/journalistic or historical
explanation could ever do with a straight face or a clear conscience.

So conspiracy theories are for people who are actually so wrapped up in
fear, they feel safer thinking there's an identified boogey man out there
to hate, than living with the less certain and more realistic risk
assessment and missing pieces to the jigsaw puzzles of history.

This is why they are so popular with people who would never pick up a real
history book.  They have the quality of myth, not scholarship.  And they
are already growing up around these events, with people investing their
faith in one "teaching story" or another, with no particular rationality
involved.

The medium being the message, the *content* being neutral to the medium --
there is no demand for the lexical  content of our wires to be
intellectual!  We will see a great deal of hate and idiocy go over the
wires for the coming weeks, just as we did after 9/11, probably in
miniature.  Some information too.

It might be worthwhile to pull in Andy Carvin (he and I and I feel badly --
I forget the gentleman in Germany who was the third moderator on
sept11-info at yahoogroups.com after 9/11) moderated an English language
mostly press but also op/ed list on and after 9/11, a curated predecessor
to Twitter curation as an email list.  We included (often with editorial
notes and disclaimers that certain aspects were factually incorrect) items
regarding Jews being told not to go to work at the WTC on 9/11 and so on.

The same sort of thing is going on on G+ and Twitter and FB now regarding
the marathon bombings and the "suspects."  It's worth capturing and
deconstructing the hysteria, if anyone can figure out a way to do it.  It's
far more distributed than it was in 2001.

yrs,
SN

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net>wrote:

> Shava Nerad:
> > I was fascinated today to see Mother Jones and many others reposting,
> > entirely without reflection or comment, what seemed to me to be not
> > "crowdsourced" images but second story surveillance camera shots of the
> FBI
> > suspects.  (Who, in addition, are being howled after as guilty until
> proven
> > innocent in this digital manhunt - and thank God the NYPost "exonerated"
> > their suspects before that turned into something ugly...)
> >
> > Well, yes, the FBI is doing their job with the tools available, and as I
> > live in metro Boston I would most healthily STFU...  But if this incident
> > had happened in London, I can't help but think MJ et al might have
> engaged
> > a moment of reflection and spine in the middle of that process, perhaps?
>
> I find it telling that the local news papers in Seattle referred to
> their photos as 'potential suspects' on the front page. The use of
> language is telling - it suggests that to be suspect is to be guilty. I
> wouldn't be surprised if we saw people using the word potential as a
> subtle replacement for suspect in the near future again and again.
>
> I also find it striking that it looks like de facto martial law has been
> imposed on parts of Boston:
>
>
>
> http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/19/us/gallery/boston-area-violence/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
>
> Who are all the players in this by the way? The SWAT team in those
> photos looks like a full blown military unit; the vehicles look like
> APC/mini-tanks. The bomb robots look like iRobot produced machines.
>
> I haven't seen any of the radio equipment up close but I'd bet that
> they're pulling out all the stops. I wonder if they'll publish the raw
> logs from the Boston ShotSpotter system? I know they have it deployed
> but I'm not sure if it extended to MIT's campus.
>
> All the best,
> Jacob
> --
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-- 

Shava Nerad
shava23 at gmail.com
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