[liberationtech] Recent Der Spiegel coverage about the NSA and GCHQ

[Shava Nerad]

It is important that people such as Jake, who does this work unrelated to
his work for Tor, are noted a bit more often with appreciation in the
community and to figures outside of it in ways that
non-hackers/non-geeks/(people who think this began with Snowden) will
understand plainly.

I am going to be that old woman who speaks frankly here (and completely
unofficially -- not like I've had any significant role at Tor since 2007… )
-- in the States,  Tor is taking serious heat right now and State and the
NSA are spitting like two cats across the Mall at each other.

Tor was a more political animal under my watch,  but Andrew I think is more
determined to keep the shop as entirely ideologically neutral as he can --
Tor is a toolkit.  When I launched, Tor was a toolkit with specific
audiences and goals, and I've never hesitated to exercise that in my
personal opinions, even when they brought me in conflict with swaths of the
Tor-using community (Silk Road, etc. as an example which I consider as a
term of art to be at the least dumbass,  venal, harmful and ultimately
feeding the War on Drugs).

Part of our movement is the right to articulate and separate personal and
professional-role opinions.  In my generation, more often accomplished
through nyms,  but in Jake's more often asserted a priori.

Of course, this means the bureaucracy of my generation will not recognize
Jake's asserted rights as proper protocol unless his community makes it
clear,  memetically, that this is the new normal they must accept,  just as
they must accept candidates having a personal life on social networking, a
political life they need politely ignore (like that's really going to
happen -- but the "real life" cognates were always available in DC), and so
on.

I don't have specific suggestions, and this isn't just about Jake.  It's
about cultural change.

My father told me that the civil rights movement in the US tipped after the
sad Birmingham church bombings, when several young black girls in a church
basement were killed, and one horribly injured,  by a white terrorist
bombing.  It was,  he told me, the white mothers at the dinner tables all
through the south, who when their menfolk started bitching about the damn
n****s, told them to "shut your mouth, that could have been our girls in
that basement."  And that's how blacks became human in a significant number
of households here.  A tide turned.

It was unanticipated, and a regrettable way to get there, to say the
least.  And they were organized and trying.

Our work is not just about law, technology, and media, education, and
direct action.  We lose track and often avoid discussing details -- for
fear of community conflict or seeming uncool or losing allies -- that our
goals are culture change.

Or sometimes, simply reacting to others' efforts to change the culture
(say, the NSA's).

May I suggest, reacting to those efforts without a coherent positive vision
of where we are going,  or an idea of what their root motivations are, are
both radical mistakes we must correct in order to support people like
Jake,  Snowden, Greenwald, friends in the CCC, press, world governments,
and so on?

It's only conspiracy if it's not a goddam movement.  I know a lot of folks
here are arm's length observers, but this is for the rest of you.

Otherwise, even neutral parties such as Tor will end up with their support
sabotaged as pawns in a proxy infowar, a cyber cold war with a three decade
build up, struggling over money,  power, and influence -- burning billions
in waste and pork on the beltway, while standing at ease over the
collateral damage of civil liberties.

Excellent work, Jake!  What can we best do to support your team
specifically, beyond distributing links?

yrs,
Shava Nerad
shava23 at gmail.com
On Jan 6, 2014 12:22 AM, "grarpamp" <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 7:37 PM, Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net>
> wrote:
> > We worked
> > very hard and for quite some time on these stories - I hope that you'll
> > enjoy them.
>
> Thank you Jacob, and for all your work.
> --
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