“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

― Baruch Spinoza

It hasn’t been a month since President Biden mounted the steps of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, declaring it his duty to ensure each of us understands the central faction of his political opposition are extremists that “threaten the very foundations of our Republic.” Flanked by the uniformed icons of his military and standing atop a Leni Riefenstahl stage, the leader clenched his fists to illustrate seizing the future from the forces of “fear, division, and darkness.” The words falling from the teleprompter ran rich with the language of violence, a “dagger at the throat” emerging from the “shadow of lies.”

“What’s happening in our country,” the President said, “is not normal.”

Is he wrong to think that? The question the speech intended to raise—the one lost in the unintentionally villainous pageantry—is whether and how we are to continue as a democracy and a nation of laws. For all the Twitter arguments over Biden’s propositions, there has been little consideration of his premises.

Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both.

Are we right to think that?

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Our glittering nation of laws observes this year two birthdays: the 70th anniversary of the National Security Agency, on which my thoughts have been recorded, and the 75th anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The CIA was founded in the wake of the 1947 National Security Act. The Act foresaw no need for the Courts and Congress to oversee a simple information-aggregation facility, and therefore subordinated it exclusively to the President, through the National Security Council he controls.

Within a year, the young agency had already slipped the leash of its intended role of intelligence collection and analysis to establish a covert operations division. Within a decade, the CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and—gasp—interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars.

In 1963, no less than former President Harry Truman confessed that the very agency he personally signed into law had transformed into something altogether different than he intended, writing:

“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble…”

Many today comfort themselves by imagining that the Agency has been reformed, and that such abuses are relics of the distant past, but what few reforms our democracy has won have been watered-down or compromised. The limited “Intelligence Oversight” role that was eventually conceded to Congress in order to placate the public has never been taken seriously by either the committee’s majority—which prefers cheerleading over investigating—or by the Agency itself, which continues to conceal politically-sensitive operations from the very group most likely to defend them.

"Congress should have been told," said [Senator] Dianne Feinstein. "We should have been briefed before the commencement of this kind of sensitive program. Director Panetta... was told that the vice president had ordered that the program not be briefed to Congress."

How can we judge the ultimate effectiveness of oversight and reforms? Well, the CIA plotted to assassinate my friend, American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, in 1972, yet nearly fifty years of “reforms” did little to inhibit them from recently sketching out another political murder targeting Julian Assange. Putting that in perspective, you probably own shoes older than the CIA’s most recent plot to murder a dissident... or rather the most recent plot that we know of.

If you believe the Assange case to be a historical anomaly, some aberration unique to Trump White House, recall that the CIA’s killings have continued in series across administrations. Obama ordered the killing of an American far from any battlefield, and killed his 16 year-old American son a few weeks later, but the man’s American daughter was still alive by the time Obama left.

Within a month of entering the White House, Trump killed her.

She was 8 years old.

It goes beyond assassinations. Within recent memory, the CIA captured Gul Rahman, who we know was not Al-Qaeda, but it seems did save the life of Afghanistan’s future (pro-US) President. Rahman was placed in what the Agency described as a “dungeon” and tortured until he died.

They stripped him naked, save a diaper he couldn’t change, in a cold so wicked that his guards, in their warm clothes, ran heaters for themselves. In absolute darkness, they bolted his hands and feet to a single point on the floor with a very short chain so that it was impossible to stand or lie down – a practice called “short shackling” – and after he died, claimed that it was for his own safety. They admit to beating him, even describing the “forceful punches.” They describe the blood that ran from his nose and mouth as he died.

Pages later, in their formal conclusion, the Agency declares that there was no evidence of beating. There was no of evidence torture. The CIA ascribes responsibility for his death to hypothermia, which they blamed on him for the crime of refusing, on his final night, a meal from the men that killed him.

In the aftermath, the Agency concealed the death of Gul Rahman from his family. To this day, they refuse to reveal what happened to his remains, denying those who survive him a burial, or even some locus of mourning.

Ten years after the torture program investigated, exposed, and ended, no one was charged for their role in these crimes. The man responsible for Rahman’s death was recommended for a $2,500 cash award — for “consistently superior work”.

A different torturer was elevated to the Director’s seat.

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This summer, in a speech marking the occasion of the CIA's 75th birthday, President Biden struck a quite different note than he did in Philadelphia, reciting what the CIA instructs all presidents: that the soul of the institution really lies in speaking truth to power.

“We turn to you with the big questions,” Biden said, “the hardest questions. And we count on you to give your best, unvarnished assessment of where we are.  And I emphasize ‘unvarnished.’”

But this itself is a variety of varnishing — a whitewash.

For what reason do we aspire to maintain — or achieve — a nation of laws, if not to establish justice?

Let us say we have a democracy, shining and pure. The people, or in our case some subset of people, institute reasonable laws to which government and citizen alike must answer. The sense of justice that arises within such a society is not produced as a result of the mere presence of law, which can be tyrannical and capricious, or even elections, which face their own troubles, but is rather derived from the reason and fairness of the system that results.

What would happen if we were to insert into this beautiful nation of laws an extralegal entity that is not directed by the people, but a person: the President? Have we protected the nation’s security, or have we placed it at risk?

This is the unvarnished truth: the establishment of an institution charged with breaking the law within a nation of laws has mortally wounded its founding precept. 

From the year it was established, Presidents and their cadres have regularly directed the CIA to go beyond the law for reasons that cannot be justified, and therefore must be concealed — classified. The primary result of the classification system is not an increase in national security, but a decrease in transparency. Without meaningful transparency, there is no accountability, and without accountability, there is no learning.

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The consequences have been deadly, for both Americans and our victims. When the CIA armed the Mujaheddin to wage war on Soviet Afghanistan, we created al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden. Ten years later, the CIA is arming, according to then-Vice President Joe Biden, "al-Nusra, and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world." After the CIA runs a disinformation operation to make life hard for the Soviet Union by fueling a little proxy war, the war rages for twenty-six years — far beyond the Union’s collapse.

Do you believe that the CIA today — a CIA free from all consequence and accountability — is uninvolved in similar activities? Can you find no presence of their fingerprints in the events of the world, as described in the headlines, that provide cause for concern? Yet it is those who question the wisdom of placing a paramilitary organization beyond the reach of our courts that are dismissed as “naive.”

For 75 years, the American people have been unable to bend the CIA to fit the law, and so the law has been bent to fit the CIA. As Biden stood on the crimson stage, at the site where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and adopted, his words rang out like the cry of a cracked-to-hell Liberty Bell: “What's happening in our country is not normal.”

If only that were true. 

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Gospel, a word from Old English, is a compound that means “good news.” And it’s gospel that’s been in short-supply as we head into the Christmas season. Whenever this fact gets me down, I remember that finding evil, malfeasance, and even suffering in the headlines is just a sign that the press is doing its job. I don’t think any of us wants to wake up in the morning and read “Everything Going Great!” over our egg-nog-spiked chai — though even if we do, we know a headline like that is just an indication of all that's unreported.

Coming into this Christmas season, I find myself beset by odd religious yearnings—I say odd, because I’m not much of a believer, not in God, not in governments, not in institutions generally. I try to save my faith for people and principles, but that can lead to some lean years in the slaking of spiritual thirst. I can find a way to attribute my stirrings to the ritualism of Covid — the ablutions of sanitizing and masking, the penitent isolation, the what-does-it-all-mean? that comes from confronting powerlessness and the caprice of illness — but a more convincing source might be the novelty of parenthood: religion being a stand-in for tradition in general, I ask myself, what am I going to leave my child? What intellectual and emotional inheritance?

Along with “good news,” I’ve been thinking of “bad faith,” a phrase that always reminds me of the Thomas Pynchon joke, wherein everything bad becomes a German spa: Bad Kissingen, Bad Kreuznach, Baden-Baden… Bad Karma.

I’d known the phrase mostly through its legal vintage, but I’d started noticing it increasingly applied to politics during the Bush-Obama story arcs: Republicans were always “negotiating in bad faith,” or “operating in bad faith,” and it only got worse after that — the phrase only became more prevalent once Trump took office. So I was surprised to find that “bad faith” has roots far deeper than our common law: male fides, from the Latin. Its usage, which is fascinating to explore, was originally literal: it was used to characterize someone who was practicing the wrong religion. From there it departed into Whitmanesque — but way-pre-Whitmanesque — contradiction. Someone who was “in bad faith” was divided against themselves; they were of two hearts, or two minds, or more. In this sense, even Jesus might be said to have been in bad faith, being part human and part divine. 

I’m deeply taken by the generosity of this early definition: there’s a sympathy there — a sympathy with “a house divided against itself” — that’s utterly lacking in the contemporary sense, wherein “bad faith” is purposeful malfeasance. This remains, for me at least, a compelling history to decode: how a phrase that roughly meant “unknowingly lying to one’s self” came to roughly mean “knowingly lying to others.”

I’m sure we all have our favorite (least-favorite) examples of this duplicitous (or multiplicitous) practice — this condition that only later became a practice — but for me, the bad-faith category that takes the fruitcake has always been the bureaucratic legalism most familiar to me. Perhaps a better way to put it would be: those situations where law opposes justice.

You know this phenomenon well, I’m sure: the health insurance rep or DMV clerk who says “my hands are tied,” the police officer or soldier who unironically invokes some of the most evil law-enforcement of last century when they shrug and say, “I got my orders, bud,” or even those who go on TV to suggest  whistleblowers might be protected, if only they would submit themselves to “proper channels,” which is code for standing on a very particular part of the floor suspended above a tank labeled: DANGER! PIRANHAS.

It was Jesus who begged forgiveness for his crucifiers by saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” but these excruciating practitioners of bad faith invert the formula: they know exactly what they do, and yet they do it. I wonder if they can even forgive themselves.

This Christmas may well be the last that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will spend outside US custody. On December 10, the British High Court ruled in favor of extraditing Assange to the United States, where he will be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. It is clear to me that the charges against Assange are both baseless and dangerous, in unequal measure — baseless in Assange’s personal case, and dangerous to all. In seeking to prosecute Assange, the US government is purporting to extend its sovereignty to the global stage and hold foreign publishers accountable to US secrecy laws. By doing so, the US government will be establishing a precedent for prosecuting all news organization everywhere — all journalists in every country — who rely on classified documents to report on, for example, US war crimes, or the US drone program, or any other governmental or military or intelligence activity that the State Department, or the CIA, or the NSA, would rather keep locked away in the classified dark, far from public view, and even from Congressional oversight.

I agree with my friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the US government’s indictment of Assange amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this criminalization is a cruel and unsual paradox: namely, the fact that many of the activities that the US government would rather hush up are perpetrated in foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the US court system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department’s response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York Times reporters for violating Iran’s secrecy laws? How will the United Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition of Guardian reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K would ever comply with those demands — of course they wouldn’t — but that they would lack any principled basis for their refusals.

The U.S. attempts to distinguish Assange’s conduct from that of more mainstream journalism by characterizing it as a “conspiracy.” But what does that even mean in this context? Does it mean encouraging someone to uncover information (which is something done every day by the editors who work for Wikileaks’ old partners, The New York Times and The Guardian)? Or does it mean giving someone the tools and techniques to uncover that information (which, depending on the tools and techniques involved, can also be construed as a typical part of an editor’s job)? The truth is that all national security investigative journalism can be branded a conspiracy: the whole point of the enterprise is for journalists to persuade sources to violate the law in the public interest. And insisting that Assange is somehow “not a journalist” does nothing to take the teeth out of this precedent when the activities for which he’s been charged are indistinguishable from the activities that our most decorated investigative journalists routinely engage in.

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If you’ve been tuning into the bad news this past week, you’ve certainly encountered a version of precisely this question, is Assange an X or a journalist? In this inane formula X can be anything: hacktivist, terrorist, lizard person. It doesn’t matter what noun you put into this MadLibs, because the entire exercise is pointless.

This kind of sincere, credulous, smug, and gloating inquiry is just the most recent, just-in-time-for-Christmas, example of in-the-flesh-and-in-the-word bad faith, presented by media professionals who are never in worse faith than when they report on — or pass judgment on — other media.

Obfuscation, withholding, meaning-manipulation, meaning-denial — these are just some of the ways in which some journalists, and not just American journalists, have conspired, yes, conspired to convict Assange in absentia, and, by extension, to convict their own profession — to convict themselves. Or maybe I shouldn’t be calling the gelled automatons on Fox, or Bill Maher, “journalists,” because how often have they done the hard shoe-leather work of cultivating a source, or protecting a source’s identity, or communicating securely with a source, or of storing a source's sensitive material securely? All of those activities comprise the soul of good journalism, and yet those are precisely the activities the US government has just sought to redefine as acts of heinous criminal conspiracy.

Two-hearted, two-minded creatures: the media is full of them. And too many have been content to accept the US government’s determination that what should properly be the highest purpose of the media — the uncovering of truth, in the face of attempts to hide it — is suddenly in doubt and quite possibly illegal.

That chill in the air this Christmas season? If Assange’s prosecution is allowed to continue, it will become a freeze.

Bundle up.

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For a long time now, I’ve wanted to write to you, but found myself unable. Not from illness—although that came and went—but because I refuse to put something in your inbox that I feel isn’t worth your time. 

The endless stream of events that the world provides to remark upon has the tendency to take on an almost physical weight, and robs me of what I can only describe as origination energy: the creative spark that empowers us not simply to do something, but to do something new. Without it, even the best of what I can produce feels derivative and workmanlike—good enough for government, perhaps, but not good enough for you. 

I suspect you may know a similar struggle—you can tell me how you fight it below, if you like—but my only means for overcoming it is an aimless wandering in search of the unknown catalyst that might help me to refill my emptied well. Where once I might have had a good chance of walking away inspired by the empathy I felt while watching a sad, sad film, achieving such inspiration feels harder now, somehow. I have to search farther, and wander longer, across centuries of painting and music until at last, when passing by a dumpster, yesterday’s internet comment might suddenly pop into my head and blossom there, as if a poem. The thing—the artifact itself—doesn’t matter, so much as what it does for me—it enlivens me.

This, to me, is art. 

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I was most recently enlivened by a book, so I can’t think of anything more fitting for my return to this format than an account of it: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by the great Chinese artist Ai Wei-Wei.

I never expected to find so much of my own story—of my own country’s story—in Ai Weiwei’s book, mostly because Ai’s life and mine could not have been more different. I grew up as the (old) Red Scare was in its death-throes, and until the cusp of my thirties I lived a comfortable existence as part of the newly ascendant clerisy of the computer. Ai, on the other hand, spent his childhood sleeping in a dugout amidst the frozen wastes of “Little Siberia” after his father, a politically-connected but free-thinking poet by the name of Ai Qing, was branded a “rightist” and banished by the Maoists for “re-education.”

The first half of Ai’s memoir is a moving testament to his father, resurrecting for all of us a man who, despite the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, retained an ineradicable sense of self. 

Ai’s dual structure—of an account of his life, yes, but also and perhaps more importantly an account of his times—was familiar to me, despite the exotic settings. He uses the classic dialectical frame (which I used in my own memoir), allowing him to bring intimacy to the political and historical context to the personal. In the case of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, choosing to include a deeply readable record of how and how quickly China’s violent intolerance became normalized into national policy is tremendously valuable and frequently alarming. 

Ai writes:

Under the pressure to conform, everyone sank into an ideological swamp of “criticism” and “self-­criticism.” My father repeatedly wrote self-­critiques, and when controls on thought and expression rose to the level of threatening his very survival, he, like others, wrote an essay denouncing Wang Shiwei, the author of “Wild Lilies,” taking a public stand that went against his inner convictions.

Situations such as this occurred in Yan’an in the 1940s, occurred in China after 1949, and still occur in the present day. Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—­it is also present, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans. 

The bolding is mine, but the boldness is Ai’s.

From the time I began studying China’s quest to intermediate the information space of its domestic internet, as part of my classified work at the NSA, I’d experience an unpleasant spinal tingle whenever I came across a new report indicating that the United States government, was, piece by piece, building out a similar technological and political infrastructure, using similar the justifications of countering terrorism, misinformation, sedition, and subjective “social harms.” I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying “East” and “West” were, or are, the same; rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.

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If this theory strikes you as ridiculous, it is enough for now to bear in mind that no matter how different you believe China to be from the United States, there are lessons from Ai’s history that are uncomfortably easy to recognize: “If you try to understand your country,” he writes, “it’s enough to put you on a collision course with the law.”

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows is a memoir of a man attempting to understand his country, even as his country is trying, or purporting to try, to understand him—through surveillance and investigations, interrogations and detentions. It is also a reminder that, as during the (last) Cultural Revolution, the political battle with the highest stakes will always be waged against the imposition of a monoculture. Within a monoculture, there is tremendous pressure to participate in the enforcement of consensus as if it were truth, which alienates members from the possibility that truth can often stand in opposition to consensus.  

The vaccine against monoculture is tolerance.

The message that emerges from Ai’s work is that the truest resistance to the oppression of conformity is the riot of human diversity, the singular nature of the individual and their individual expression, the non-deterministic variability of things we—all of us—think and do and make. Difference is the seed value of our human process.

The public body is like Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds. Millions of handmade, ceramic seeds—identical from afar, but unique if you stopped to look, unique if you stopped to care—were poured into the bank-like lobby of the Tate Modern in London. Visitors could lie in them, they could touch them, they could roll around in their bounty and be renewed. 

I wish I could have been there to experience it.

But in consolation I have a book that has touched me, a book that I’ve been reading to my son. Though he’s not old enough to understand a word yet, I know he feels the sound, the vibrations of my chest, and the warmth of being held within the mystery of language. 

In the final pages, Ai writes a phrase that I let hang in the air: “Freedom is not a goal, but a direction.”

And, I might add, wherever it leads you is home.

Thank you for reading, and especially for contributing to make my writing possible by sharing and subscribing. —Ed

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1.

This week's news, or “news,” about the US Treasury’s ability, or willingness, or just trial-balloon troll-suggestion to mint a one trillion dollar ($1,000,000,000,000) platinum coin in order to extend the country’s debt-limit reminded me of some other monetary reading I encountered, during the sweltering summer, when it first became clear to many that the greatest impediment to any new American infrastructure bill wasn’t going to be the debt-ceiling but the Congressional floor.

That reading, which I accomplished while preparing lunch with the help of my favorite infrastructure, namely electricity, was of a transcript of a speech given by one Christopher J. Waller, a freshly-minted governor of the United States’ 51st and most powerful state, the Federal Reserve.

The subject of this speech? CBDCs—which aren’t, unfortunately, some new form of cannabinoid that you might’ve missed, but instead the acronym for Central Bank Digital Currencies—the newest danger cresting the public horizon.

Now, before we go any further, let me say that it’s been difficult for me to decide what exactly this speech is—whether it’s a minority report or just an attempt to pander to his hosts, the American Enterprise Institute. 

But given that Waller, an economist and a last-minute Trump appointee to the Fed, will serve his term until January 2030, we lunchtime readers might discern an effort to influence future policy, and specifically to influence the Fed’s much-heralded and still-forthcoming “discussion paper”—a group-authored text—on the topic of the costs and benefits of creating a CBDC.

That is, on the costs and benefits of creating an American CBDC, because China has already announced one, as have about a dozen other countries including most recently Nigeria, which in early October will roll out the eNaira.

By this point, a reader who isn’t yet a subscriber to this particular Substack might be asking themselves, what the hell is a Central Bank Digital Currency? 

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Reader, I will tell you.

Rather, I will tell you what a CBDC is NOT—it is NOT, as Wikipedia might tell you, a digital dollar. After all, most dollars are already digital, existing not as something folded in your wallet, but as an entry in a bank’s database, faithfully requested and rendered beneath the glass of your phone.

Neither is a Central Bank Digital Currency a State-level embrace of cryptocurrency—at least not of cryptocurrency as pretty much everyone in the world who uses it currently understands it.

Instead, a CBDC is something closer to being a perversion of cryptocurrency, or at least of the founding principles and protocols of cryptocurrency—a cryptofascist currency, an evil twin entered into the ledgers on Opposite Day, expressly designed to deny its users the basic ownership of their money and to install the State at the mediating center of every transaction. 

2.

For thousands of years priors to the advent of CBDCs, money—the conceptual unit of account that we represent with the generally physical, tangible objects we call currency—has been chiefly embodied in the form of coins struck from precious metals. The adjective “precious”—referring to the fundamental limit on availability established by what a massive pain in the ass it was to find and dig up the intrinsically scarce commodity out of the ground—was important, because, well, everyone cheats: the buyer in the marketplace shaves down his metal coin and saves up the scraps, the seller in the marketplace weighs the metal coin on dishonest scales, and the minter of the coin, who is usually the regent, or the State, dilutes the preciosity of the coin’s metal with lesser materials, to say nothing of other methods.

The history of banking is in many ways the history of this dilution—as governments soon discovered that through mere legislation they could declare that everyone within their borders had to accept that this year’s coins were equal to last year’s coins, even if the new coins had less silver and more lead. In many countries, the penalties for casting doubt on this system, even for pointing out the adulteration, was asset-seizure at best, and at worst: hanging, beheading, death-by-fire.

In Imperial Rome, this currency-degradation, which today might be described as a “financial innovation,” would go on to finance previously-unaffordable policies and forever wars, leading eventually to the Crisis of the Third Century and Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, which outlived the collapse of the Roman economy and the empire itself in an appropriately memorable way:

Tired of carrying around weighty bags of dinar and denarii, post-third-century merchants, particularly post-third-century traveling merchants, created more symbolic forms of currency, and so created commercial banking—the populist version of royal treasuries—whose most important early instruments were institutional promissory notes, which didn’t have their own intrinsic value but were backed by a commodity: They were pieces of parchment and paper that represented the right to be exchanged for some amount of a more-or-less intrinsically valuable coinage.

The regimes that emerged from the fires of Rome extended this concept to establish their own convertible currencies, and little tiny shreds of rag circulated within the economy alongside their identical-in-symbolic-value, but distinct-in-intrinsic-value, coin equivalents. Beginning with an increase in printing paper notes, continuing with the cancellation of the right to exchange them for coinage, and culminating in the zinc-and-copper debasement of the coinage itself, city-states and later enterprising nation-states finally achieved what our old friend Waller and his cronies at the Fed would generously describe as “sovereign currency:” a handsome napkin.

Once currency is understood in this way, it’s a short hop from napkin to network. The principle is the same: the new digital token circulates alongside the increasingly-absent old physical token. At first.

Just as America’s old paper Silver Certificate could once be exchanged for a shiny, one-ounce Silver Dollar, the balance of digital dollars displayed on your phone banking app can today still be redeemed at a commercial bank for one printed green napkin, so long as that bank remains solvent or retains its depository insurance. 

Should that promise-of-redemption seem a cold comfort, you’d do well to remember that the napkin in your wallet is still better than what you traded it for: a mere claim on a napkin for your wallet. Also, once that napkin is securely stowed away in your purse—or murse—the bank no longer gets to decide, or even know, how and where you use it. Also, the napkin will still work when the power-grid fails.

The perfect companion for any reader’s lunch.

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3.

Advocates of CBDCs contend that these strictly-centralized currencies are the realization of a bold new standard—not a Gold Standard, or a Silver Standard, or even a Blockchain Standard, but something like a Spreadsheet Standard, where every central-bank-issued-dollar is held by a central-bank-managed account, recorded in a vast ledger-of-State that can be continuously scrutizined and eternally revised.

CBDC proponents claim that this will make everyday transactions both safer (by removing counterparty risk), and easier to tax (by rendering it well nigh impossible to hide money from the government). 

CBDC opponents, however, cite that very same purported “safety” and “ease” to argue that an e-dollar, say, is merely an extension to, or financial manifestation of, the ever-encroaching surveillance state. To these critics, the method by which this proposal eradicates bankruptcy fallout and tax dodgers draws a bright red line under its deadly flaw: these only come at the cost of placing the State, newly privy to the use and custodianship of every dollar, at the center of monetary interaction. Look at China, the napkin-clingers cry, where the new ban on Bitcoin, along with the release of the digital-yuan, is clearly intended to increase the ability of the State to “intermediate”—to impose itself in the middle of—every last transaction.

“Intermediation,” and its opposite “disintermediation,” constitute the heart of the matter, and it’s notable how reliant Waller’s speech is on these terms, whose origins can be found not in capitalist policy but, ironically, in Marxist critique. What they mean is: who or what stands between your money and your intentions for it.

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What some economists have lately taken to calling, with a suspiciously pejorative emphasis, “decentralized cryptocurrencies”—meaning Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others—are regarded by both central and commercial banks as dangerous disintermediators; precisely because they’ve been designed to ensure equal protection for all users, with no special privileges extended to the State.

This “crypto”—whose very technology was primarily created in order to correct the centralization that now threatens it—was, generally is, and should be constitutionally unconcerned with who possesses it and uses it for what. To traditional banks, however, not to mention to states with sovereign currencies, this is unacceptable: These upstart crypto-competitors represent an epochal disruption, promising the possibility of storing and moving verifiable value independent of State approval, and so placing their users beyond the reach of Rome. Opposition to such free trade is all-too-often concealed beneath a veneer of paternalistic concern, with the State claiming that in the absence of its own loving intermediation, the market will inevitably devolve into unlawful gambling dens and fleshpots rife with tax fraud, drug deals, and gun-running. 

It’s difficult to countenance this claim, however, when according to none other than the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the US Department of the Treasury, “Although virtual currencies are used for illicit transactions, the volume is small compared to the volume of illicit activity through traditional financial services.”

Traditional financial services, of course, being the very face and definition of “intermediation”—services that seek to extract for themselves a piece of our every exchange.

4. 

Which brings us back to Waller—who might be called an anti-disintermediator, a defender of the commercial banking system and its services that store and invest (and often lose) the money that the American central banking system, the Fed, decides to print (often in the middle of the night).

And yet I admit that I still find his remarks compelling—chiefly because I reject his rationale, but concur with his conclusions.

It’s Waller’s opinion, as well as my own, that the United States does not need to develop its own CBDC. Yet while Waller believes that the US doesn’t need a CBDC because of its already robust commercial banking sector, I believe that the US doesn’t need a CBDC despite the banks, whose activities are, to my mind, almost all better and more equitably accomplished these days by the robust, diverse, and sustainable ecosystem of non-State cryptocurrencies (translation: regular crypto). 

I risk few readers by asserting that the commercial banking sector is not, as Waller avers, the solution, but is in fact the problem—a parasitic and utterly inefficient industry that has preyed upon its customers with an impunity backstopped by regular bail-outs from the Fed, thanks to the dubious fiction that it is “too big too fail.”

But even as the banking-industrial complex has become larger, its utility has withered—especially in comparison to crypto. Commercial banking once uniquely secured otherwise risky transactions, ensuring escrow and reversibility. Similarly, credit and investment were unavailable, and perhaps even unimaginable, without it. Today you can enjoy any of these in three clicks.

Still, banks have an older role. Since the inception of commercial banking, or at least since its capitalization by central banking, the industry’s most important function has been the moving of money, fulfilling the promise of those promissory notes of old by allowing their redemption in different cities, or in different countries, and by allowing bearers and redeemers of those notes to make payments on their and others’ behalf across similar distances.

For most of history, moving money in such a manner required the storing of it, and in great quantities—necessitating the palpable security of vaults and guards. But as intrinsically valuable money gave way to our little napkins, and napkins give way to their intangible digital equivalents, that has changed.

Today, however, there isn’t much in the vaults. If you walk into a bank, even without a mask over your face, and attempt a sizable withdrawal, you’re almost always going to be told to come back next Wednesday, as the physical currency you’re requesting has to be ordered from the rare branch or reserve that actually has it. Meanwhile, the guard, no less mythologized in the mind than the granite and marble he paces, is just an old man with tired feet, paid too little to use the gun that he carries. 

These are what commercial banks have been reduced to: “intermediating” money-ordering-services that profit off penalties and fees—protected by your grandfather.

In sum, in an increasingly digital society, there is almost nothing a bank can do to provide access to and protect your assets that an algorithm can’t replicate and improve upon.

On the other hand, when Christmas comes around, cryptocurrencies don’t give out those little tiny desk calendars.

But let’s return to close with that bank security guard, who after helping to close up the bank for the day probably goes off to work a second job, to make ends meet—at a gas station, say. 

Will a CBDC be helpful to him? Will an e-dollar improve his life, more than a cash dollar would, or a dollar-equivalent in Bitcoin, or in some stablecoin, or even in an FDIC-insured stablecoin?

Let’s say that his doctor has told him that the sedentary or just-standing-around nature of his work at the bank has impacted his health, and contributed to dangerous weight gain. Our guard must cut down on sugar, and his private insurance company—which he’s been publicly mandated to deal with—now starts tracking his pre-diabetic condition and passes data on that condition on to the systems that control his CBDC wallet, so that the next time he goes to the deli and tries to buy some candy, he’s rejected—he can’t—his wallet just refuses to pay, even if it was his intention to buy that candy for his granddaughter.

Or, let’s say that one of his e-dollars, which he received as a tip at his gas station job, happens to be later registered by a central authority as having been used, by its previous possessor, to execute a suspicious transaction, whether it was a drug deal or a donation to a totally innocent and in fact totally life-affirming charity operating in a foreign country deemed hostile to US foreign policy, and so it becomes frozen and even has to be “civilly” forfeited. How will our beleagured guard get it back? Will he ever be able to prove that said e-dollar is legitimately his and retake possession of it, and how much would that proof ultimately cost him?

Our guard earns his living with his labor—he earns it with his body, and yet by the time that body inevitably breaks down, will he have amassed enough of a grubstake to comfortably retire? And if not, can he ever hope to rely on the State’s benevolent, or even adequate, provision—for his welfare, his care, his healing? 

This is the question that I’d like Waller, that I’d like all of the Fed, and the Treasury, and the rest of the US government, to answer: 

Of all the things that might be centralized and nationalized in this poor man’s life, should it really be his money?

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The following is an excerpt from my memoir, Permanent Record, available in most languages wherever fine books are sold.

Pandemonium, chaos: our most ancient forms of terror. They both refer to a collapse of order and the panic that rushes in to fill the void. For as long as I live, I’ll remember retracing my way up Canine Road—the road past the NSA’s headquarters—after the Pentagon was attacked. Madness poured out of the agency’s black glass towers, a tide of yelling, ringing cell phones, and cars revving up in the parking lots and fighting their way onto the street. At the moment of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the staff of the NSA—the major signals intelligence agency of the American Intelligence Community (IC)—was abandoning its work by the thousands, and I was swept up in the flood.

NSA director Michael Hayden issued the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. Subsequently, the NSA and the CIA—which also evacuated all but a skeleton crew from its own headquarters on 9/11—would explain their behavior by citing a concern that one of the agencies might potentially, possibly, perhaps be the target of the fourth and last hijacked airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, rather than, say, the White House or Capitol.

I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about the next likeliest targets as I crawled through the gridlock, with everyone trying to get their cars out of the same parking lot simultaneously. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. What I was doing was obediently following along, in what today I recall as one totalizing moment—a clamor of horns (I don’t think I’d ever heard a car horn at an American military installation before) and out-of-phase radios shrieking the news of the South Tower’s collapse while the drivers steered with their knees and feverishly pressed redial on their phones. I can still feel it—the present-tense emptiness every time my call was dropped by an overloaded cell network, and the gradual realization that, cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.

The stoplights on Canine Road gave way to humans, as the NSA’s special police went to work directing traffic. In the ensuing hours, days, and weeks they’d be joined by convoys of Humvees topped with machine guns, guarding new roadblocks and checkpoints. Many of these new security measures became permanent, supplemented by endless rolls of wire and massive installations of surveillance cameras. With all this security, it became difficult for me to get back on base and drive past the NSA—until the day I was employed there.

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Try to remember the biggest family event you’ve ever been to—maybe a family reunion. How many people were there? Maybe 30, 50? Though all of them together comprise your family, you might not really have gotten the chance to know each and every individual member. Dunbar’s number, the famous estimate of how many relationships you can meaningfully maintain in life, is just 150. Now think back to school. How many people were in your class in grade school, and in high school? How many of them were friends, and how many others did you just know as acquaintances, and how many still others did you simply recognize? If you went to school in the United States, let’s say it’s a thousand. It certainly stretches the boundaries of what you could say are all “your people,” but you may still have felt a bond with them.

Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they’re gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.

Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America’s response.

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence—the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: “Stop resisting.”

This is why whenever I try to understand how the last two decades happened, I return to that September—to that ground-zero day and its immediate aftermath. To return to that fall means coming up against a truth darker than the lies that tied the Taliban to al-Qaeda and conjured up Saddam Hussein’s illusory stockpile of WMDs. It means, ultimately, confronting the fact that the carnage and abuses that marked my young adulthood were born not only in the executive branch and the intelligence agencies, but also in the hearts and minds of all Americans, myself included.

I remember escaping the panicked crush of the spies fleeing Fort Meade just as the North Tower came down. Once on the highway, I tried to steer with one hand while pressing buttons with the other, calling family indiscriminately and never getting through. Finally I managed to get in touch with my mother, who at this point in her career had left the NSA and was working as a clerk for the federal courts in Baltimore. They, at least, weren’t evacuating.

Her voice scared me, and suddenly the only thing in the world that mattered to me was reassuring her.

“It’s okay. I’m headed off base,” I said. “Nobody’s in New York, right?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. I can’t get in touch with Gran.”

“Is Pop in Washington?”

“He could be in the Pentagon for all I know.”

The breath went out of me. By 2001, Pop had retired from the Coast Guard and was now a senior official in the FBI, serving as one of the heads of its aviation section. This meant that he spent plenty of time in plenty of federal buildings throughout DC and its environs.

Before I could summon any words of comfort, my mother spoke again.“There’s someone on the other line. It might be Gran. I’ve got to go.”

When she didn’t call me back, I tried her number endlessly but couldn’t get through, so I went home to wait, sitting in front of the blaring TV while I kept reloading news sites. The new cable modem we had was quickly proving more resilient than all of the telecom satellites and cell towers, which were failing across the country.

My mother’s drive back from Baltimore was a slog through crisis traffic. She arrived in tears, but we were among the lucky ones. Pop was safe.

The next time we saw Gran and Pop, there was a lot of talk—about Christmas plans, about New Year’s plans—but the Pentagon and the towers were never mentioned.

My father, by contrast, vividly recounted his 9/11 to me. He was at Coast Guard Headquarters when the towers were hit, and he and three of his fellow officers left their offices in the Operations Directorate to find a conference room with a screen so they could watch the news coverage. A young officer rushed past them down the hall and said, “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Met with expressions of disbelief, the young officer repeated, “I’m serious—they just bombed the Pentagon.” My father hustled over to a wall-length window that gave him a view across the Potomac of about two-fifths of the Pentagon and swirling clouds of thick black smoke.

The more that my father related this memory, the more intrigued I became by the line: “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Every time he said it, I recall thinking, “They”? Who were “They”?

America immediately divided the world into “Us” and “Them,” and everyone was either with “Us” or against “Us,” as President Bush so memorably remarked even while the rubble was still smoldering. People in my neighborhood put up new American flags, as if to show which side they’d chosen. People hoarded red, white, and blue Dixie cups and stuffed them through every chain-link fence on every overpass of every highway between my mother’s home and my father’s, to spell out phrases like UNITED WE STAND and STAND TOGETHER NEVER FORGET.

I sometimes used to go to a shooting range and now alongside the old targets, the bull’s-eyes and flat silhouettes, were effigies of men in Arab headdress. Guns that had languished for years behind the dusty glass of the display cases were now marked SOLD. Americans also lined up to buy cell phones, hoping for advance warning of the next attack, or at least the ability to say good-bye from a hijacked flight.

Nearly a hundred thousand spies returned to work at the agencies with the knowledge that they’d failed at their primary job, which was protecting America. Think of the guilt they were feeling. They had the same anger as everybody else, but they also felt the guilt. An assessment of their mistakes could wait. What mattered most at that moment was that they redeem themselves. Meanwhile, their bosses got busy campaigning for extraordinary budgets and extraordinary powers, leveraging the threat of terror to expand their capabilities and mandates beyond the imagination not just of the public but even of those who stamped the approvals.

September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified resolve, strengthened by a revived sense of patriotism and the goodwill and sympathy of the world. In retrospect, my country could have done so much with this opportunity. It could have treated terror not as the theological phenomenon it purported to be, but as the crime it was. It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and cultivate resilience in the now-connected global public.

Instead, it went to war.

The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive, unquestioning support for that decision. I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment. I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it. I wanted to be a liberator. I wanted to free the oppressed. I embraced the truth constructed for the good of the state, which in my passion I confused with the good of the country. It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed—the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system—and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance. The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it.

I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring. Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001. In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for enemies. The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online. The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.

My options dismayed me, however. I thought I could best serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe for this new world of asymmetrical conflict. I hoped I could do something like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes with walls of virus-warning blinkenlights, tracking enemies and thwarting their schemes. Unfortunately for me, the primary agencies that did that—the NSA, the CIA—had their hiring requirements written a half century ago and often rigidly required a traditional college degree, meaning that though the tech industry considered my AACC credits and MCSE certification acceptable, the government wouldn’t. The more I read around online, however, the more I realized that the post-9/11 world was a world of exceptions. The agencies were growing so much and so quickly, especially on the technical side, that they’d sometimes waive the degree requirement for military veterans. It’s then that I decided to join up.

You might be thinking that my decision made sense, or was inevitable, given my family’s record of service. But it didn’t and it wasn’t. By enlisting, I was as much rebelling against that well-established legacy as I was conforming to it—because after talking to recruiters from every branch, I decided to join the army, whose leadership some in my Coast Guard family had always considered the crazy uncles of the US military.

When I told my mother, she cried for days. I knew better than to tell my father, who’d already made it very clear during hypothetical discussions that I’d be wasting my technical talents there. I was twenty years old; I knew what I was doing.

The day I left, I wrote my father a letter—handwritten, not typed—that explained my decision, and slipped it under the front door of his apartment. It closed with a statement that still makes me wince. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I wrote, “but this is vital for my personal growth.”

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The bump on your toe is probably cancer; levels of Arctic sea ice are both decreasing and increasing; the world is either 6,000 or 4.5 billion years old...

Because you’re online, you already know this: Google (or Mad-Libs your search-engine-of-choice) is able to vomit up “scientific” data to support, even “confirm,” nearly any private theory you want. And the truth—yes, the truth-truth—is that a lot of that data will be accurate, but a lot of it will not be.

You probably don’t have toe cancer. 

Much screen-ink has been spilled over the fake news and pseudoscience that are returned to us by our searches — the information (let’s call it) that answers our sincere queries in a manner algorithmically aligned with our preferences, and our community’s preferences. Though for the word “preferences,” you might as well substitute “biases”…

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Data as filtered by what calls itself the media, as opposed to data as filtered by an individual, should be better, but isn’t. After all, the statistics on CNN, on FOX, and in The New York Times—someone Googled them too. That’s what the media has become: someone Googling for you. And yet whenever the media presents statistics, it somehow never manages to remind us that statistics are inherently uncertain. The field of statistics is literally the study of uncertainty, of possible or probable likelihoods (or unlikelihoods), which are ten-out-of-ten times presented as the personally-applicable percentage chances, the Vegas odds that X or Y will (or will not) happen to YOU.

For many of us, to read the daily news is to assess our personal risk-levels and yet we rarely recall—and the media never mentions—that the true challenge is not to enumerate the risk, but to live with it; to stake out the resilient middle ground between denying danger altogether (and, say, refusing to wear a mask in a crowded train or bus) and finding nothing but danger everywhere (and, say, wearing a mask and gloves when alone in the middle of the woods).

The way we assess risk is inextricable from the way we process fear, and it is one of the many factors that determines our paranoia and susceptibility to conspiracy. Anti-vaxxers fear the vaccine (which saves lives) more than the disease (which ends or impairs them); climate-denying politicians fear the economic consequences of climate adaptation more than... the end of the world, which, you know, might have some impact on the portfolio. 

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One of the more interesting and urgent questions for me is how to deal with good research that also happens to be bad news—especially when it comes to Covid and the changes in our climate. 

Coronavirus variants are multiplying; sea levels and temperatures are rising, unseasonable storms are more powerful and frequent than ever before, unprecedented wildfires are spreading, and “unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.” If you don’t want to hear about this stuff, you have a choice: you can either look at the other side’s “data” that says the opposite, or you can toss your phone into the ocean... which is littering.

When we decide the situation is so bad that there’s nothing to be done, we succumb to a kind of civic paralysis. An overwhelming concatenation of negativity, communicated as constantly unfolding catastrophe, leads even the most conspiracy-immune into apathy—and willful ignorance. And now here’s the baddest news: it leads us into apathy and willful ignorance whether or not we believe the science.

Take climate scientist Steven Chu’s nihilistic troika:

1. people who accept climate change and think it is caused by humans

2. people who accept climate change and think it is caused by nature 

3. people who don’t accept climate change at all
   

What do all of these people have in common? They can usually agree on the “fact” that nothing can be done. 

With Covid-19 persisting into ‘21, and this fall marking the second anniversary of our new lives, this mutant strain of “science denialism” has become its own pandemic—one that leaves us in denial about our ability to implement change. 

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By now you've probably heard that Apple plans to push a new and uniquely intrusive surveillance system out to many of the more than one billion iPhones it has sold, which all run the behemoth's proprietary, take-it-or-leave-it software. This new offensive is tentatively slated to begin with the launch of iOS 15⁠—almost certainly in mid-September⁠—with the devices of its US user-base designated as the initial targets. We’re told that other countries will be spared, but not for long.

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned which problem it is that Apple is purporting to solve. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn't matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however... As a parent, I understand this is a real problem, but...

As a parent, I’m here to tell you that sometimes it doesn’t matter why the man in the handsome suit is doing something. What matters are the consequences.

Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.

How?

The task Apple intends its new surveillance system to perform—preventing their cloud systems from being used to store digital contraband, in this case unlawful images uploaded by their customers—is traditionally performed by searching their systems. While it’s still problematic for anybody to search through a billion people’s private files, the fact that they can only see the files you gave them is a crucial limitation.

Now, however, that’s all set to change. Under the new design, your phone will now perform these searches on Apple’s behalf before your photos have even reached their iCloud servers, and—yada, yada, yada—if enough "forbidden content" is discovered, law-enforcement will be notified.

I intentionally wave away the technical and procedural details of Apple’s system here, some of which are quite clever, because they, like our man in the handsome suit, merely distract from the most pressing fact—the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices work for them.

Why is this so important? Once the precedent has been set that it is fit and proper for even a "pro-privacy" company like Apple to make products that betray their users and owners, Apple itself will lose all control over how that precedent is applied. ​​​​​​As soon as the public first came to learn of the “spyPhone” plan, experts began investigating its technical weaknesses, and the many ways it could be abused, primarily within the parameters of Apple’s design. Although these valiant vulnerability-research efforts have produced compelling evidence that the system is seriously flawed, they also seriously miss the point: Apple gets to decide whether or not their phones will monitor their owners’ infractions for the government, but it's the government that gets to decide what constitutes an infraction... and how to handle it.

For its part, Apple says their system, in its initial, v1.0 design, has a narrow focus: it only scrutinizes photos intended to be uploaded to iCloud (although for 85% of its customers, that means EVERY photo), and it does not scrutinize them beyond a simple comparison against a database of specific examples of previously-identified child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

If you’re an enterprising pedophile with a basement full of CSAM-tainted iPhones, Apple welcomes you to entirely exempt yourself from these scans by simply flipping the “Disable iCloud Photos” switch, a bypass which reveals that this system was never designed to protect children, as they would have you believe, but rather to protect their brand. As long as you keep that material off their servers, and so keep Apple out of the headlines, Apple doesn’t care.

So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering “extremist” political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"?

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If Apple demonstrates the capability and willingness to continuously, remotely search every phone for evidence of one particular type of crime, these are questions for which they will have no answer. And yet an answer will come—and it will come from the worst lawmakers of the worst governments.

This is not a slippery slope. It’s a cliff.

One particular frustration for me is that I know some people at Apple, and I even like some people at Apple—bright, principled people who should know better. Actually, who do know better. Every security expert in the world is screaming themselves hoarse now, imploring Apple to stop, even those experts who in more normal circumstances reliably argue in favor of censorship. Even some survivors of child exploitation are against it. And yet, as the OG designer Galileo once said, it moves.

Faced with a blistering torrent of global condemnation, Apple has responded not by addressing any concerns or making any changes, or, more sensibly, by just scrapping the plan altogether, but by deploying their man-in-the-handsome-suit software chief, who resembles the well-moisturized villain from a movie about Wall Street, to give quotes to, yes, the Wall Street Journal about how sorry the company is for the "confusion" it has caused, but how the public shouldn't worry: Apple “feel[s] very good about what they’re doing.”

Neither the message nor the messenger was a mistake. Apple dispatched its SVP-for-Software Ken doll to speak with the Journal not to protect the company's users, but to reassure the company's investors. His role was to create the false impression that this is not something that you, or anyone, should be upset about. And, collaterally, his role was to ensure this new "policy" would be associated with the face of an Apple executive other than CEO Tim Cook, just in case the roll-out, or the fall-out, results in a corporate beheading.

Why? Why is Apple risking so much for a CSAM-detection system that has been denounced as “dangerous” and "easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship" by the very computer scientists who've already put it to the test? What could be worth the decisive shattering of the foundational Apple idea that an iPhone belongs to the person who carries it, rather than to the company that made it? 

Apple: "Designed in California, Assembled in China, Purchased by You, Owned by Us."

The one answer to these questions that the optimists keep coming back to is the likelihood that Apple is doing this as a prelude to finally switching over to “end-to-end” encryption for everything its customers store on iCloud—something Apple had previously intended to do before backtracking, in a dismaying display of cowardice, after the FBI secretly complained.

For the unfamiliar, what I’m describing here as end-to-end encryption is a somewhat complex concept, but briefly, it means that only the two endpoints sharing a file—say, two phones on opposite sides of the internet—are able to decrypt it. Even if the file were being stored and served from an iCloud server in Cupertino, as far as Apple (or any other middleman-in-a-handsome-suit) is concerned, that file is just an indecipherable blob of random garbage: the file only becomes a text message, a video, a photo, or whatever it is, when it is paired with a key that’s possessed only by you and by those with whom you choose to share it.

This is the goal of end-to-end encryption: drawing a new and ineradicable line in the digital sand dividing your data and their data. It allows you to trust a service provider to store your data without granting them any ability to understand it. This would mean that even Apple itself could no longer be expected to rummage through your iCloud account with its grabby little raccoon hands—and therefore could not be expected to hand it over to any government that can stamp a sheet of paper, which is precisely why the FBI (again: secretly) complained.

For Apple to realize this original vision would have represented a huge improvement in the privacy of our devices, effectively delivering the final word in a thirty year-long debate over establishing a new industry standard—and, by extension, the new global expectation that parties seeking access to data from a device must obtain it from that device, rather than turning the internet and its ecosystem into a spy machine.

Unfortunately, I am here to report that once again, the optimists are wrong: Apple’s proposal to make their phones inform on and betray their owners marks the dawn of a dark future, one to be written in the blood of the political opposition of a hundred countries that will exploit this system to the hilt. See, the day after this system goes live, it will no longer matter whether or not Apple ever enables end-to-end encryption, because our iPhones will be reporting their contents before our keys are even used. 

I can’t think of any other company that has so proudly, and so publicly, distributed spyware to its own devices—and I can’t think of a threat more dangerous to a product’s security than the mischief of its own maker. There is no fundamental technological limit to how far the precedent Apple is establishing can be pushed, meaning the only restraint is Apple’s all-too-flexible company policy, something governments understand all too well.

I would say there should be a law, but I fear it would only make things worse.

We are bearing witness to the construction of an all-seeing-i—an Eye of Improvidence—under whose aegis every iPhone will search itself for whatever Apple wants, or for whatever Apple is directed to want. They are inventing a world in which every product you purchase owes its highest loyalty to someone other than its owner.

To put it bluntly, this is not an innovation but a tragedy, a disaster-in-the-making.

Or maybe I'm confused—or maybe I just think different.

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The last week has been hard for me, and yet I can only imagine what this week has felt like, and what the future will bring, for the people—the peoples—of Afghanistan.

Nearly 20 years after it was launched in the wake of 9/11, the long war in Afghanistan, one of the great cruelties of my generation, has unexpectedly reached its expectedly tragic conclusion.

I am certainly not sad to see it go, but it’s difficult to avoid a profound sense of regret at the error of it all. When I recently spoke with Daniel Ellsberg, he pointed out that neither of us is entirely a pacifist. Dan and I agree, and are on-record agreeing, that certain wars are wrong, but if one can conceive of a “just” war—or at least a less-injust war—there are wrong ways to fight it, and particularly wrong ways to finish it. There are also, come to think of it, wrong ways to begin wars too—namely refusing to declare them.

The war in Afghanistan was not one of those wars—it was not justifiable. It was, is, and forever will be wrong, which means leaving is the right decision. 

Yet there was a time when I felt like picking Afghanistan up by its ankles and shaking it until all the terrorists fell out, like scorpions from a boot. Most Americans felt that way, in the autumn of 2001, and I was no different. I was 18 years old and almost competitively wrong about everything. I actually believed most of what I heard on TV from “official sources”—not everything I heard, but enough. I trusted my government, at least I trusted it to know more about Afghanistan than I did, and the government told me this: that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda, and that both the Taliban and al-Qaeda hated us for our freedoms. My youthful righteousness was manipulated by collaborators in the media until it burned all the red, white, and blue of a flame—a flame that could scorch, but also a flame that could serve as a beacon of light in the darkness. 

This was why I signed up: to defeat the “enemies of freedom,” or to make the enemy unto us... fair, equitable, democratic. The motto of the United States Army’s Special Forces was to my younger self a hook so perfectly baited as to be irresistable: De Oppresso Liber—“To Free the Oppressed.”

Shamefully, it took me a very long time, peering down from my technocratic perch at the CIA and later the NSA, to apprehend the nature of my work: transforming the internet—a liberating, democratizing tool—into an architecture of oppression. But before I took that step toward clarity, I struggled to apprehend the nature of our violence in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.

“You are either with us or you are against us in the fight against terror,” said Bush the Younger. But he never defined who, exactly, was the enemy. If you look beyond the label, terrorists are just murderers with a political motive: mere criminals. So were our enemies states, or were they criminal groups within those states? And were those criminal groups subject to direction by the states in which they operated, or to other states, and how? And if we dealt with criminals in the way we dealt with states, does that not unduly elevate them to something close to a peer? In substituting a military action for a police action, are we not setting a dangerous precedent for the future? These questions spread like a net—a dragnet, and caught up everyone.

I'm not trying to say this realization was immediate. It was not. It was a process, beset by rationalization—the reflex of a mind desperate to escape an inevitably dark denouement. Precisely because I had intended to do good, it was difficult to accept the possibility that I had become involved in something bad—perhaps even evil.

Intentions are what paved the roads to Kabul, a hell of our own making.

But that might be the charitable explanation. Because for all the talk of democratizing Afghanistan, it was never clear that it was Afghanistan we were fighting. Weren't we fighting the Taliban? Or Al-Qaeda? And weren't they backed by Pakistan? And what about Saudi Arabia?

Ultimately, we Americans were fighting ourselves, or our own governance, as we came to understand how the agony of 9/11 had been politicized. Of all the great cliches to be revived by this new lost war—“Afghanistan: the grave of empires,” “never get involved in a land war in Asia”—the most banal was also the truest: We are our own worst enemies. 

Just hours before I sat down to draft this, the President of the United States gave a speech in which he tried to defend the honor of this war—a defense that is frankly offensive, and that I think most offends the families of the injured and the dead. President Biden then went on to assert that our erstwhile ally, Osama bin Laden, had been brought to justice—our noble lie. He could have been brought to justice, but we shot him instead. 

He wasn't even in Afghanistan. 

If there are any lessons to be learned from this tragic sequel to Saigon, you can be assured, we will not learn them. We will just sit by as the people of Afghanistan—many of whom were as deluded by American promises as Americans themselves—cling to hopes and cling to planes and fall, lost to the desert of theocratic rule. Some will say, they didn't fight! They get what they deserve! To which I say, “And what do we deserve?”

A fractious country comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, and so they perish—in the span of a breath—without ever reaching the promised shore.  

Today, the country this describes is Afghanistan. Tomorrow, the country this describes might be my own. 

1.

The easier it becomes to produce information, the harder that information becomes to consume — and the harder we have to work to separate the spurious from the significant.

Humans are meaning-making machines, seeking order in the chaos. Our pattern recognition capabilities are a key determinant in defining intelligence. But we now live in a dystopian digital landscape purpose-built to undermine these capabilities, training us to mistake planned patterns for convenient and even meaningful coincidences. 

You know the drill: email a colleague about the shit weather and start getting banner ads for cheap flights to Corsica (I hear it’s nice?); google "ordination license" or "city hall hours" and watch your inbox fill with rebates for rings and cribs. For those of us who grew up during the rise of surveillance capitalism, our online experience has been defined by the effort of separating coincidence from cause-and-effect. Today we understand, if not accept, that hyper-consumption of information online comes at the cost of being hyper-consumed, bled by tech companies for the that data our readings secrete: You click, and the Big Five scrape a sample of your “preferences”—to exploit.

The real cost to this recursive construction of reality from the ephemera of our preferences is that it tailors a separate world for each individual.

And when you do live at the center of a private world, reverse-engineered from your own search history, you begin to notice patterns that others can’t. Believe me when I say I know what it feels like to be told that you’re the only one who sees the connection—a pattern of injustice, say—and that you’re downright crazy for noticing anything at all. To manufacture meaning from mere coincidence is the essence of paranoia, the gateway to world-building your own private conspiracies—or else to an epiphany that allows you to see the world as it actually is.

I want to talk about that epiphany, about taking back control of our atomized, pre-conspiracy world. 

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2. 

The German psychologist Klaus Conrad called this premonitory state apophenia, defined as perceiving patterns that don't actually exist and referring them back to an unseen authority who must be pulling the strings. It’s a theory he developed as an army medical officer specializing in head traumas under the Third Reich. Today, it’s analogized to political conspiracy thinking.

Consider Case No. 10: a German soldier at a filling station refuses to service a patrol that doesn’t have the proper paperwork. Chalk his behavior up to that infamous Nazi officiousness, but when the patrol returns, papers in hand, the soldier still refuses to obey orders. His pattern recognition has gone into overdrive, and he’s begun to see every detail—a locked door, these patrolmen, papers signed or unsigned—as a test. His paranoid disobedience lands him in the psych ward, where Conrad writes him up as one of 107 cases that revolutionizes the Germano-sphere’s understanding of human psychology.

Conrad became famous for recognizing this oppressive emergence of patterns as a pre-psychotic state that he compared to stage-fright. It culminates in a false epiphany: an apophany is not a flash of insight into the true nature of reality but an aha experience (literally: Aha-Erlebnis) that constitutes the birth of delusion. The entire universe has “turned back” and “reorganized itself” to revolve around the individual, performing and corroborating his suspicions.  

Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage. But in this case it’s staged specifically for you, the audience who's also the star.

For someone obsessed with the pathology of conspiracy, Conrad was pretty susceptible to conspiratorial thinking himself. Born in Germany and raised in Vienna, his loyalties to the Nazi Party preceded his military duty. He joined in 1940 when his earlier research in hereditary epilepsy looked like promising fodder for the Nazi's monstrous sterilization laws. Maybe it was careerist opportunism, maybe it was ideological. Or maybe it takes one delusion-obsessed man to recognize another: Hitler was one of greatest conspiracy theorists of all time.

Only Conrad’s scientific findings aren’t themselves delusional. In fact he ended up being one of the only Nazi scientists to be producing science without rockets, torture, or pentagrams. The traumatized soldiers he treated on the battlefield turned out to be good data, and the hundreds of cases he worked on allowed him to work out the laws of ”Gestalt” (i.e. ‘pattern’) psychology, a school of thought that argues the human mind grasps in an instant not just individual elements of an information set, but entire configurations or patterns. For example, when we see alternating bars of light, they appear to be moving, even though they're not — our brains are just recalling patterns related to the perception of motion and applying them to stationary objects.

In an apophenic state, everything’s a pattern. And while Conrad’s stage-model uses the analogy of starring in your own one-man show, the narcissism of living online today provides plenty more. On Instagram you can filter your face, filter out unwanted followers, construct an image that you and your peers want to believe in—you’re living a private illusion, in public, that the world reifies with likes. For-profit data collection has literally “reorganized” the world to revolve around you. As you wish it—or they will it.

The true epiphany, I want to argue, is that you’re the one pulling the strings. Enlightenment is to realize you have more agency than your push-notifications would have you believe. 

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3.

Here’s a better way to think: in an apophenic, information-glutted world where you can basically find evidence for any theory you want, where people inhabit separate online realities, we should focus on falsifiability (which can be tested for) over supportability (which cannot). ​​​​​​​

This what what the Austrian Jewish sociologist Karl Popper, refugee of the Holocaust in New Zealand and later England, laid out in his theory of science. Popper believed conspiracy theories are exactly what feeds a totalitarian state like Hitler’s Germany, playing on and playing up the public’s paranoia of The Other. And authoritarians get away with it precisely because their pseudoscientific claims, masquerading as sound research, are designed to be difficult to prove “false” in the heat of the moment, when data sets — not to mention a sense of the historical consequences — are necessarily incomplete.

By Popper’s lights—and, I’d argue, by the intuition of basic human decency—we shouldn’t consider these provisional theories “science” at all. 

Popper’s a favorite in conspiracy theory studies, but I want to bring in an adjacent idea of his that I think is underemphasized in this context, which is that most human actions have unintended consequences. Instant advertising was supposed to yield informed consumers; the National Security Agency was supposed to protect "us" by exploiting "them." These plans went horribly wrong. But once you wake up to the idea that the world has been patterned, intentionally or unintentionally, in ways you don’t agree with, you can begin to change it.

It is in good faith that whistleblowers around the world bring these contradictions to public attention; they facilitate public epiphany, reminding us that we’re not quarantined in our private, paranoid “stages.” Thinking in public, together, allows us to stage a different performance entirely. We become more like Popper’s social theorists:

The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group-personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they were individual men. As opposed to this view, the social theorist should recognize that the persistence of institutions and collectives creates a problem to be solved in terms of an analysis of individual social actions and their unintended (and often unwanted) social consequences, as well as their intended ones.

Maybe I’m the deluded one for finding reason for optimism in this idea—and not only because it saves me from letting the former Nazi Conrad have the last word. Popper’s thinking offers an escape hatch from our private worlds and back into the public sphere. The social theorist is a public thinker, oriented toward improving society; the conspiracy theorist is a victim of institutions that lie beyond their control. 

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One of the interesting things for me about this shared space of ours is to be able to see what it is that you most enjoy—or don’t—and where your questions lie. The most common request I’ve heard is about, uh, well:

Closely following that desire for what I’m going to call the occasional shorter piece in a more conversational tone, are requests for practical technical advice:

Patrick Emek writes:

“Is there any chance you might write a future article explaining in  easy to understand language how one might go about removing the listening devices from mobile phones?”

stefanibus writes:

"I am a normal citizen with no intention to screw open my phone prior to using it. What shall I do after reading this article? I might need a detailed behavioral pattern. Some kind of a plan I can stick to." 

Shane writes:
Would removing any of the chips remove functionality of the phone other than the spying pieces?

For the last eight years, I’ve tried hard to stay away from “what, specifically, should I do?” questions, because technology moves so quickly—and readers’ circumstances are so varied—that the answers tend to age off and become dangerous after just a few months, but Google will keep recommending them to people for years and years. However, I’ve recently been persuaded by the increasingly dire state of the network that the risks of bad advice are outweighed by how hard it is to develop the public understanding of even very basic technical principles. That means I’ll be taking some time in the next few months to talk about technology and my personal relationship to it, particularly how I deal with the newly hostile-by-default nature of it.

If you like, I might also be able to bring in some real experts to chat about some of the more complex problems in more depth. Let me know in the comments if audio content like that is of interest.

Addict writes:

While I agree that they need to be stopped, I'm worried about what consequences it might have to ban code. I personally view code as a form of free speech, but I am not sure what implications it might have to ban specific forms of code.

I struggle with this question quite a bit myself. It’s apparent to me that just as we cannot trust governments to decide the things that can and cannot be said, we should not empower them to start permitting the applications that we can write (or install). However, we also have to recognize that until your neighbors are lining up to storm the Bastille, we’re forced to respond to policy crises within the context of the system that currently exists.

The government already manages to (unconstitutionally) regulate speech in the United States through various means: we need look no further for examples than the Espionage Act, or the abuse of state secrecy to prevent any accountability for those involved in the CIA’s recent torture program. I’m fairly confident that you could watch any arbitrary White House Press Conference today to witness indicia of that continuing impulse applied to new controversies. And as you say, outside the United States, circumstances are often similar or worse.

How, then, do we restrain the governmental impulse to reward cronies and punish inconvenient voices in the context of something as complex as exploit code? If we’re going to ensure publicly harmful activity (the insecurity industry) is impacted while exempting the publicly beneficial—defenders, researchers, and uncountable categories of benign tinkerers—we need to identify some variable that is always present in category A, but not strictly required by category B.

And we have that, here. That thing is the profit motive.

Nobody goes to work at the NSO Group to save the world. They do it to get rich. They can’t do that without the ability to sell the exploits they develop far and wide. You ban the commercial trade in exploit code, and they’re out of business.

In contrast, a researcher at the University of Michigan writing a paper on iOS exploitation or some kid on a farm trying to repair their family’s indefensibly DRM-locked John Deere tractor is not going to be deterred from doing that just because they can’t sell the result to the most recent cover model for Repressive Dictator magazine.

That’s the crucial caveat that I think many missed regarding my call for a global moratorium: it is a prohibition on the commercial trade—that is to say, specifically the for-profit exploitation of society at large, which is the raison d’etre of the insecurity industry—rather than the mere development, production, or use of exploit code. My proposal here is in fact closer to an inversion of the government’s response to Defense Distributed, where it sought to reflexively ban the mere transmission of information without regard to motivation, use, or consequence.

Eoan writes:

Which is more likely to kill someone if allowed to be sold: a software exploit or a 250-kg air-dropped bomb?

I think this misses the point. Beyond the question of “how do they know where to drop the bomb?”, there’s a more important one: “which of these is more likely to be used?”

Bombs are blunt instruments, the ultima ratio regum of a state that has exhausted its ability—or appetite—to engage in less visible forms of coercion. They are at least intended to be the very end of the kill-chain, the warhead-on-forehead that erases the inconvenient problem.

Software exploits, in contrast, are at the very top of that chain. They are the means by which a state decides who and where to bomb—if it even gets that far, since spying provides an unusual menu of options for escalation. As I mentioned, a software vulnerability can be exploited repeatedly, widely, and nearly invisibly. Unlike a bomb, if an exploit generates a headline, it will most probably happen years later instead of on that evening’s news. The result is that spying is far more common than bombing, and in many ways becoming prerequisite to it.

Another little-understood property that make exploits more dangerous than bombs—and they definitely are—is that, as with the viral strain of a biological weapon, as soon as an adversary catches a sample of an exploit, they can perfectly reproduce it... and then use it themselves against anyone they want.

When you fire a rocket or drop a bomb, you don’t have to worry about the target catching it and throwing it back at you. But with exploits, every time you use it, you run the risk of losing it.

All of this is to say that while we can’t stop the sale of bombs, when the Saudis then drop that bomb on someone, we know that it happened, we often know who made it (from the markings on exploded fragments at the scene), we normally know who dropped it, and we know who it was dropped on. In the vast majority of cases involving the insecurity industry’s hacking-for-hire, not one of these details are known to us, and all of them are important in providing for the possibility of enforcing accountability for misuse.

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1.

The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don’t do this to satisfy a tinkerer’s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because it is unsafe to operate. Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside, is only the first step of an arduous process, and yet even after days of these DIY security improvements, my smartphone will remain the most dangerous item I possess.

Prior to this week’s Pegasus Project, a global reporting effort by major newspapers to expose the fatal consequences of the NSO Group—the new private-sector face of an out-of-control Insecurity Industry—most smartphone manufacturers along with much of the world press collectively rolled their eyes at me whenever I publicly identified a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone as a potentially lethal threat.

Despite years of reporting that implicated the NSO Group’s for-profit hacking of phones in the deaths and detentions of journalists and human rights defenders; despite years of reporting that smartphone operating systems were riddled with catastrophic security flaws (a circumstance aggravated by their code having been written in aging programming languages that have long been regarded as unsafe); and despite years of reporting that even when everything works as intended, the mobile ecosystem is a dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation, it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good. Over the last eight years I’ve often felt like someone trying to convince their one friend who refuses to grow up to quit smoking and cut back on the booze—meanwhile, the magazine ads still say “Nine of Ten Doctors Smoke iPhones!” and “Unsecured Mobile Browsing is Refreshing!”

In my infinite optimism, however, I can’t help but regard the arrival of the Pegasus Project as a turning-point—a well-researched, exhaustively-sourced, and frankly crazy-making story about a “winged” “Trojan Horse” infection named “Pegasus” that basically turns the phone in your pocket into an all-powerful tracking device that can be turned on or off, remotely, unbeknownst to you, the pocket’s owner.   

Here is how the Washington Post describes it:

In short, the phone in your hand exists in a state of perpetual insecurity, open to infection by anyone willing to put money in the hand of this new Insecurity Industry. The entirety of this Industry’s business involves cooking up new kinds of infections that will bypass the very latest digital vaccines—AKA security updates—and then selling them to countries that occupy the red-hot intersection of a Venn Diagram between “desperately craves the tools of oppression” and “sorely lacks the sophistication to produce them domestically.”

An Industry like this, whose sole purpose is the production of vulnerability, should be dismantled. 

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2.

Even if we woke up tomorrow and the NSO Group and all of its private-sector ilk had been wiped out by the eruption of a particularly public-minded volcano, it wouldn’t change the fact that we’re in the midst of the greatest crisis of computer security in computer history. The people creating the software behind every device of any significance—the people who help to make Apple, Google, Microsoft, an amalgamation of miserly chipmakers who want to sell things, not fix things, and the well-intentioned Linux developers who want to fix things, not sell things—are all happy to write code in programming languages that we know are unsafe, because, well, that’s what they’ve always done, and modernization requires a significant effort, not to mention significant expenditures. The vast majority of vulnerabilities that are later discovered and exploited by the Insecurity Industry are introduced, for technical reasons related to how a computer keeps track of what it’s supposed to be doing, at the exact time the code is written, which makes choosing a safer language a crucial protection... and yet it’s one that few ever undertake. 

If you want to see change, you need to incentivize change. For example, if you want to see Microsoft have a heart attack, talk about the idea of defining legal liability for bad code in a commercial product. If you want to give Facebook nightmares, talk about the idea of making it legally liable for any and all leaks of our personal records that a jury can be persuaded were unnecessarily collected. Imagine how quickly Mark Zuckerberg would start smashing the delete key.

Where there is no liability, there is no accountability... and this brings us to the State. 

3.

State-sponsored hacking has become such a regular competition that it should have its own Olympic category in Tokyo. Each country denounces the others’ efforts as a crime, while refusing to admit culpability for its own infractions. How, then, can we claim to be surprised when Jamaica shows up with its own bobsled team? Or when a private company calling itself “Jamaica” shows up and claims the same right to “cool runnings” as a nation-state?

If hacking is not illegal when we do it, then it will not be illegal when they do it—and “they” is increasingly becoming the private sector. It’s a basic principle of capitalism: it’s just business. If everyone else is doing it, why not me?

This is the superficially logical reasoning that has produced pretty much every proliferation problem in the history of arms control, and the same mutually assured destruction implied by a nuclear conflict is all-but guaranteed in a digital one, due to the network’s interconnectivity, and homogeneity.

Recall our earlier topic of the NSO Group’s Pegasus, which especially but not exclusively targets iPhones. While iPhones are more private by default and, occasionally, better-engineered from a security perspective than Google’s Android operating system, they also constitute a monoculture: if you find a way to infect one of them, you can (probably) infect all of them, a problem exacerbated by Apple’s black-box refusal to permit customers to make any meaningful modifications to the way iOS devices operate. When you combine this monoculture and black-boxing with Apple’s nearly universal popularity among the global elite, the reasons for the NSO Group’s iPhone fixation become apparent.

Governments must come to understand that permitting—much less subsidizing—the existence of the NSO Group and its malevolent peers does not serve their interests, regardless of where the client, or the client-state, is situated along the authoritarian axis: the last President of the United States spent all of his time in office when he wasn’t playing golf tweeting from an iPhone, and I would wager that half of the most senior officials and their associates in every other country were reading those tweets on their iPhones (maybe on the golf course). 

Whether we like it or not, adversaries and allies share a common environment, and with each passing day, we become increasingly dependent on devices that run a common code.

The idea that the great powers of our era—America, China, Russia, even Israel—are interested in, say, Azerbaijian attaining strategic parity in intelligence-gathering is, of course, profoundly mistaken. These governments have simply failed to grasp the threat, because the capability-gap hasn’t vanished—yet.

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4.

In technology as in public health, to protect anyone, we must protect everyone. The first step in this direction—at least the first digital step—must be to ban the commercial trade in intrusion software. We do not permit a market in biological infections-as-a-service, and the same must be true for digital infections. Eliminating the profit motive reduces the risks of proliferation while protecting progress, leaving room for publicly-minded research and inherently governmental work.

While removing intrusion software from the commercial market doesn’t also take it away from states, it does ensure that reckless drug dealers and sex-criminal Hollywood producers who can dig a few million out of their couch cushions won’t be able to infect any or every iPhone on the planet, endangering the latte-class’ shiny slabs of status. 

Such a moratorium, however, is mere triage: it only buys us time. Following a ban, the next step is liability. It is crucial to understand that neither the scale of the NSO Group’s business, nor the consequences it has inflicted on global society, would have been possible without access to global capital from amoral firms like Novalpina Capital (Europe) and Francisco Partners (US). The slogan is simple: if companies are not divested, the owners should be arrested. The exclusive product of this industry is intentional, foreseeable harm, and these companies are witting accomplices. Further, when, a business is discovered to be engaging in such activities at the direction of a state, liability should move beyond more pedestrian civil and criminal codes to invoke a coordinated international response.

5.

Imagine you’re the Washington Post’s Editorial Board (first you’ll have to get rid of your spine). Imagine having your columnist murdered and responding with a whispered appeal to the architects of that murder that next time they should just fill out a bit more paperwork. Frankly, the Post’s response to the NSO scandal is so embarrassingly weak that it is a scandal in itself: how many of their writers need to die for them to be persuaded that process is not a substitute for prohibition?

Saudi Arabia, using “Pegasus,” hacked the phones of Jamal Khashoggi’s ex-wife, and of his fiancée, and used the information gleaned to prepare for his monstrous killing and its subsequent cover-up.

But Khashoggi is merely the most prominent of Pegasus’ victims — due to the cold-blooded and grisly nature of his murder. The NSO Group’s “product” (read: “criminal service”) has been used to spy on countless other journalists, judges, and even teachers. On opposition candidates, and on targets’ spouses and children, their doctors, their lawyers, and even their priests. This is what people who think a ban is “too extreme” always miss: this Industry sells the opportunity to gun down reporters you don’t like at the car wash.

If we don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets: It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.

This will be the future: a world of people too busy playing with their phones to even notice that someone else controls them.

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    Jonathan T / ChumbaRoomba ask:

What if instead of Conspiracy enabling individuals to abdicate from the making of truth-value judgments, Conspiracy Practice and Conspiracy Theory emerge from an interwoven tapestry of narratives formed of the truth-value judgments of a multitude of individuals—and only when examined holistically in the context of the knowns and unknowns of history can we see who made good judgments based on true or false facts and who made bad ones? ...How do we sort True conspiracies from False? 

This is a great question, and one I still struggle with. To put it in my own terms: could it be that what I regard as the malevolence of conspiracy practice and the ignorance of conspiracy theory simply stems from well-meaning people adhering to, and making decisions based on, what they regard as their truth?

I’m not sure I have a decent answer. Certainly the secular world has this experience when dealing with extremist religious groups. How can an athiest tell a true believer that they are wrong, when they claim the authority of a god? Contemporary politics are, to my mind, similarly as much or more a test of faith than an examination of fact. The core problem is to identify a space where the definition of truth can be narrowed to some set of facts that can be measured, tested—verified, from the latin verificare: to make true.

Too often we forget that the unverified is, quite literally, not truly "true." It can still be reasonable, and even probable, but fact unverified is no fact at all, a circumstance made all the more difficult in a moment when the truth has become emotionalized or psychologized, and increasingly confused for what’s more accurately called “belief.”

    Thomas Moller-Nielsen asks:

I don’t quite see how the Liar’s Paradox is supposed to relate to the issue of self-censorship. As I understand it, The Liar’s Paradox involves sentences which cannot be either true or false without entailing a contradiction. (“This sentence is false”, if true, is false, and if false, it is true.) Self-censorship, on the other hand, involves refraining from publicly uttering one’s beliefs due to fear of possible negative social/political/economic/consequences. But what does the former have to do with the latter? What is logically paradoxical about failing to publicly air one’s views?

It has been said that I'm prone to failures of elaboration. In this case, I invoked the Liar’s Paradox to describe and contextualize the role not of the writer or speaker but of the reader or listener: In a culture of self-censorship, how do we who consume news and opinion know what to believe? How can we tell when someone is being honest (or thinks they’re being honest)? Self-censorship doesn’t just prevent communicators from expressing themselves freely. It eventually erodes the trust of the public—the true “silent majority” who might not have a platform, or want a platform, from which to speak, but who rely on the voices of others to inform them.

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    Larsiusprime asks:

Ed—how much do you think the current state of the internet is due to the surveillance impetus of state actors, and how much [to] private forces? Or are they inherently related? Curious which end of the dog is wagging which, in your opinion.

Good timing on this one: today's news is full of the escapades of one of those private forces, namely the Israeli NSO Group’s sale of hacking tools to the likes Kazakhstan, Azerbaijian, Mexico, and Hungary. These tools, which were developed by the Israeli state—or more accurately those recently in the employ of the Israeli state—were sold by NSO, nominally a private company. The links between the two significantly complicate any answer. Look to this space later this week for more in-depth treatments of this issue, but for now let me just say this: while it's not easy to tell where the state ends and the private begins, it's not hard to see that it’s those whose seek to limit the expression of institutional powers—journalists and opposition candidates and human rights activists—who most often find themselves the victims of it.

    Eoan asks:

Have you seen or read the series Liar Game?

I wondered when the anime questions would start.

I’ve been rigorously dodging questions like this for as long as I’ve been in the public eye. Occasionally, a friend asks me why.

When you’re the subject of a controversy in an environment where a significant portion of the media has greater economic incentives to titillate than to edify, even passing references to something like video games or anime will get you treated like a weirdo — despite the fact that they’re probably more popular than baseball, these days. That’s just how it is.

As a result, I’ve been pretty careful about the things I’ve said and how I’ve said them, because my every utterance was evaluated by the worst people on Earth for its utility in not only discrediting me as a person, but me as a proxy for people in favor of surveillance reform. I cared a lot about that, and so I worked hard to minimize my peculiarities — or at least the evidence of them.

Fortunately for all of us, The Peculiarities Of Edward Snowden is no longer the kind of article that gets assigned at The New Yorker anymore — except in place of something like a book review, if a writer can’t be bothered to read or understand the text — which means I have finally recovered a lost freedom.

That freedom is, in part, what has enabled me to start this newsletter, which is probably the only place where someone will be able to ask me about a wildly obscure manga like Liar Game, and I’ll be able to say, “Yeah, sure: I read it — at least through the Contraband arc.”

What a world.

For the Fourth of July, I reached out to an old friend, Daniel Ellsberg, to experiment with recording little conversations for you about big topics. Production quality will be a bit rough around the edges until I get the hang of it, but I hope you enjoy it.

The wonderful music was provided by the talented Jamie Saft (Twitter: @jamiesaft). My deepest thanks, friend.

I.

The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious — not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens —  all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.

The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile Satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.

This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.

Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices — the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized — are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.

In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a Top-Secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing — and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press — I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse — Facebook.

As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of Internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background, and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: “What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”

It took years — eight years and counting in exile — for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.

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II.

It's my hope in this post and in posts to come to engage a broader scope of conspiracy-thinking, by examining the relationship between true and false conspiracies, and by asking difficult questions about the relationships between truth and falsehood in our public and private lives.

I'll begin by offering a fundamental proposition: namely, that to believe in any conspiracy, whether true or false, is to believe in a system or sector run not by popular consent but by an elite, acting in its own self-interest. Call this elite the Deep State, or the Swamp; call it the Illuminati, or Opus Dei, or the Jews, or merely call it the major banking institutions and the Federal Reserve — the point is, a conspiracy is an inherently anti-democratic force.

The recognition of a conspiracy — again, whether true or false — entails accepting that not only are things other than what they seem, but they are systematized, regulated, intentional, and even logical. It’s only by treating conspiracies not as “plans” or “schemes” but as mechanisms for ordering the disordered that we can hope to understand how they have so radically displaced the concepts of “rights” and “freedoms” as the fundamental signifiers of democratic citizenship.

In democracies today, what is important to an increasing many is not what rights and freedoms are recognized, but what beliefs are respected: what history, or story, undergirds their identities as citizens, and as members of religious, racial, and ethnic communities. It’s this replacement-function of false conspiracies — the way they replace unified or majoritarian histories with parochial and partisan stories — that prepares the stage for political upheaval.

Especially pernicious is the way that false conspiracies absolve their followers of engaging with the truth. Citizenship in a conspiracy-society doesn’t require evaluating a statement of proposed fact for its truth-value, and then accepting it or rejecting it accordingly, so much as it requires the complete and total rejection of all truth-value that comes from an enemy source, and the substitution of an alternative plot, narrated from elsewhere.

III.

The concept of the enemy is fundamental to conspiracy thinking — and to the various taxonomies of conspiracy itself. Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason and author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (2013), offers the following categories of enemy-based conspiracy thinking:

• “Enemy Outside,” which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors scheming against a given identity-community from outside of it
  

• “Enemy Within,” which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors scheming against a given identity-community from inside of it
  

• “Enemy Above,” which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors manipulating events from within the circles of power (government, military, the intelligence community, etc.)
  

• "Enemy Below," which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors from historically disenfranchised communities seeking to overturn the social order
  

• “Benevolent Conspiracies,” which pertains to extra-terrestrial, supernatural, or religious forces dedicated to controlling the world for humanity's benefit (similar forces from Beyond who work to the detriment of humanity Walker might categorize under “Enemy Above”)
  

Other forms of conspiracy-taxonomy are just a Wikipedia link away: Michael Barkun's trinary categorization of Event conspiracies (e.g. false-flags), Systemic conspiracies (e.g. Freemasons), and Superconspiracy theories (e.g. New World Order), as well as his distinction between the secret acts of secret groups and the secret acts of known groups; or Murray Rothbard's binary of “shallow” and “deep” conspiracies (“shallow” conspiracies begin by identifying evidence of wrongdoing and end by blaming the party that benefits; “deep” conspiracies begin by suspecting a party of wrongdoing and continue by seeking out documentary proof — or at least “documentary proof”).

I find things to admire in all of these taxonomies, but it strikes me as notable that none makes provision for truth-value. Further, I'm not sure that these or any mode of classification can adequately address the often-alternating, dependent nature of conspiracies, whereby a true conspiracy (e.g. the 9/11 hijackers) triggers a false conspiracy (e.g. 9/11 was an inside job), and a false conspiracy (e.g. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction) triggers a true conspiracy (e.g. the invasion of Iraq).

Another critique I would offer of the extant taxonomies involves a reassessment of causality, which is more properly the province of psychology and philosophy. Most of the taxonomies of conspiracy-thinking are based on the logic that most intelligence agencies use when they spread disinformation, treating falsity and fiction as levers of influence and confusion that can plunge a populace into powerlessness, making them vulnerable to new beliefs — and even new governments.

But this top-down approach fails to take into account that the predominant conspiracy theories in America today are developed from the bottom-up, plots concocted not behind the closed doors of intelligence agencies but on the open Internet by private citizens, by people.​​​​​​​

In sum, conspiracy theories do not inculcate powerlessness, so much as they are the signs and symptoms of powerlessness itself. 

This leads us to those other taxonomies, which classify conspiracies not by their content, or intent, but by the desires that cause one to subscribe to them. Note, in particular, the epistemic/existential/social triad of system-justification: Belief in a conspiracy is considered “epistemic” if the desire underlying the belief is to get at “the truth,” for its own sake; belief in a conspiracy is considered “existential” if the desire underlying the belief is to feel safe and secure, under another's control; while belief in a conspiracy is considered “social” if the desire underlying the belief is to develop a positive self-image, or a sense of belonging to a community.

From Outside, from Within, from Above, from Below, from Beyond...events, systems, superconspiracies...shallow and deep heuristics...these are all attempts to chart a new type of politics that is also a new type of identity, a confluence of politics and identity that imbues all aspects of contemporary life. Ultimately, the only truly honest taxonomical approach to conspiracy-thinking that I can come up with is something of an inversion: the idea that conspiracies themselves are a taxonomy, a method by which democracies especially sort themselves into parties and tribes, a typology through which people who lack definite or satisfactory narratives as citizens explain to themselves their immiseration, their disenfranchisement, their lack of power, and even their lack of will. 

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I.

At the height of the events in Poland, just at the time when the trade union Solidarnosc was being outlawed, I received a letter stamped NIE CENZUROWANO. What exactly did these words mean? They were probably supposed to indicate that the country from which it came was free of censorship. But it could also mean that letters not bearing this stamp were censored, a token of the selective nature of this office, which apparently mistrusts certain citizens while trusting others. It could naturally also mean that all letters bearing this stamp actually did pass through the censor's hand. At any rate, this symbolic and ambiguous stamp gives a profound insight into the nature of censorship, which on the one hand wants to establish its rightfulness, while at the same time attempting to camouflage its very existence. For, while censorship considers itself a historical necessity and an institution destined to defend public order and the ruling political party, it does not like to admit that it is there. It sees itself as a temporary evil, to be applied during a state of war. Censorship, then, is only a transitory measure which will be scrapped as soon as all those people who write letters, books, etc are politically mature and responsible, thus exonerating the State and its representatives from having to act as guardians of their citizens.

Such is the opening of Censorship/Self censorship, a landmark essay by the Serbian-Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš, who was born in Subotica, on the Hungarian-Yugoslav border in 1935 and died in Paris in 1989.

Published in English in an anonymous translation in 1986, Kiš's essay on censorship is something akin to a personal manifesto, and builds on the work of numerous other dissidents of the Cold War milieu who sought to elucidate a certain power-structure in the dreaded Soviet censorship system that prevented their books from being published and their films and TV shows from being made. Dissidents in closed or closing societies naturally come to understand the 16th-century wisdom of Étienne de La Boétie: the State is an abstraction, which depends on citizens — individuals — to execute its will.

Kiš was intrigued by the manner of this execution. His systemization of censorship was tripartite and hierarchal: at the top was the official apparatus — the various bureaus tasked with formulating and enforcing the rules and policies. Below that official level was the publicly legible or popular level, the world of media outlets like newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, which employ publishers and editors to police their pages. In Kiš's view, the very reason that publishers and editors can perform the tasks of censorship is because they are “not only censors,” but...publishers and editors. ​​Their official titles give them cover in performing the work the state demands of them, which is not shaping and creating writing, but deforming and destroying it. Finally, at the bottom of Kiš's hierarchy are what he calls the “last resort”: the printers, who, “as the most responsible elements of the working classes, will simply refuse to print the incriminated text.”

Yet the apparatus of censorship doesn’t end there. There is also what I might call the “first resort,” those censors who exist below everyone, and yet above everyone too: the author who self-censors — a figure who in contemporary Internet terms might be called the “creator,” or “maker.” This figure is me — and this figure is you. It’s someone who takes the burden of censorship unto themselves, without any official censor or cover-censor commanding them. In Kiš's estimation, this figure threatens to become the ultimate vessel or incarnation of the State, a person who has internalized its oppressions and works them on themselves. According to Kiš, the more censorship happens at this level — at the Marxist level of production, or at the level of your posting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — the more the presence of censorship, indeed the more the very existence of censorship, is hidden from the public.

Think about it: if the suppression is happening in your own home, if you're suppressing your own speech, who will know? And how can you ever call for help?

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II.

The Liar's Paradox, attributed to Eubulides, is famous in philosophy and logic. Its classic expression is as follows: “This sentence is a lie.” How to evaluate the sentence's truthfulness? Can it be evaluated? Any attempt to do so leads to paradox. 

This is the same paradox that underlies all attempts to discuss censorship with the censored, and especially self-censorship with the self-censoring. How to begin? With what? NIE CENZUROWANO: “This statement is not censored.”

Kiš, who narrowly escaped the Holocaust and whose work was eventually suppressed in Yugoslavia, wrote passionately on this struggle:

Whichever way you look at it, censorship is the tangible manifestation of a pathological state, the symptom of a chronic illness which develops side by side with it: self-censorship. Invisible but present, far from the eyes of the public, buried deep down in the most secret parts of the spirit, it is far more efficient than [official] censorship. While both of them induce (or are induced?) by the same means — threats, fear, blackmail — this second ill camouflages, or at any rate does not denounce, the existence of any outside constraint. The fight against censorship is open and dangerous, therefore heroic, while the battle against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and unwitnessed, and it makes its subject feel humiliated and ashamed of collaborating.

Self-censorship means reading your own text with the eyes of another person, a situation where you become your own judge, stricter and more suspicious than anyone else. You the author know what no outside censor could ever discover: your most secret, unspoken thoughts which nonetheless you feel must be obvious to others “between the lines”... Therefore, you attribute to this imaginary censor faculties which you yourself do not possess, and to the text a significance which it actually does not have. For your alter ego pursues your thoughts ad absurdum, until the dizzy end where everything is subversive, where to tread is dangerous and condemnable.

“Lonely and unwitnessed,” “dangerous and condemnable” — Kiš's perfect and tragic adjectives — describe how many people feel today, when confronted with the internet's many opportunities for self-presentation, and equally many opportunities for self-destruction. Under the pitiless eye of mass surveillance, which funnels the most tentative keystroke into our permanent records, we begin to surveil ourselves. 

Unlike in Kiš's milieu, or in contemporary North Korea, or Saudi Arabia, the coercive apparatus doesn't have to be the secret police knocking at the door. For fear of losing a job, or of losing an admission to school, or of losing the right to live in the country of your birth, or merely of social ostracism, many of today's best minds in so-called free, democratic states have stopped trying to say what they think and feel and have fallen silent. That, or they adopt the party-line of whatever party they would like to be invited to — whatever party their livelihoods depend on.

Such is the trickle-down effect of the institutional exploitation of the internet, of corporate algorithms that thrive on controversy and division: the degradation of the soul as a source of profit — and power. 

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1.

Eight years ago, my life began. 

I was a climbing careerist in the American Intelligence Community, a former CIA officer and NSA contractor, until I discovered that my work — and the work of my generation — had, in secret, been turned toward the construction of history’s first truly global system of mass surveillance: a machine dedicated to building perfect and permanent records of our private lives.

I quietly showed documents detailing the full scope of this new architecture of oppression to my colleagues, who were first alarmed, and then filled with a sense of resignation: what can you do?

And so it was eight years ago this week that I left my partner, my family, and my country behind to reveal evidence of this malfeasance to journalists I'd never met but had to trust.

As part of this process, I also revealed my identity. 

This was the moment:

Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when [Laura Poitras] pointed her camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a cramped, messy room that I hadn’t left for the past ten days. I think everybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. [...] In a situation that was already high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of Laura’s camera, like a sniper’s sight, kept reminding me that at any moment the door might be smashed in and I’d be dragged off forever. And whenever I wasn’t having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going to look when it was played back in court. I realized there were so many things I should have done, like putting on nicer clothes and shaving. Room-service plates and trash had accumulated throughout the room. There were noodle containers and half-eaten burgers, piles of dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor. It was a surreal dynamic. Not only had I never met any filmmakers before being filmed by one, I had never met any journalists before serving as their source. The first time I ever spoke aloud to anyone about the US government’s system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world with an Internet connection. In the end, though, regardless of how rumpled I looked and stilted I sounded, Laura’s filming was indispensable, because it showed the world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way that newsprint never could.

That was how I described how I felt in my memoir ​​​​​​​Permanent Record. Today, when I re-read that passage, and when I replay that old clip, I have a curious sense of distance: it's me, but also it's not. I still stand by the words, yet I can't help but acknowledge that I'm always standing at a different remove, contemplating the past from a new perspective, determined by all that has changed in the time that's elapsed. Between the clip and the memoir, my girlfriend Lindsay and I were reunited and married. Between the memoir and the present, we became parents to a son. Between that child and the writing of this sentence, I developed a new appreciation for time.

Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my disclosures remains constant. In the past eight years, the depredations of surveillance have merely become more entrenched, with the capabilities that used to be the province of governments now in the hands of private companies, too, which employ them to track and tether us and attenuate our freedoms. This enduring danger, this compounding danger, is one of the reasons I've decided to lift my voice again — adding a new page to my "permanent record"...one to which I hope you subscribe. 

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2.

Since 2013, it feels as though the world has accelerated, when really only the rate of opinion has — through the sheer speed and volume of bite-sized algorithmically "curated" social media. On Facebook, and especially on Twitter, plots and characters appear and vanish in moments, imparting emotions, but never lessons, because who has time for those? The only thing that most of us manage to take away from social media, besides the occasional chuckle, is an updated roster of villains — the daily roll-call of transgressors and transgressions. 

This is the reality of the fully commercialized mainstream internet: our exposure to an indigestible mass of shortest-form opinions that are purposefully selected by algorithms to agitate us on platforms that are designed to record and memorialize our most agitated, reflexive responses. These responses are, in turn, elevated in proportion to their controversy to the attention — and prejudice — of the crowd. In the resulting zero-sum blood sport that public reputation requires, combatants are incentivized to occupy the most conventionally defensible positions, which reduces all politics to ideology and splinters the polis into squabbling tribes. The products of the irreconcilable differences this process produces are nothing more than well-divided "audiences," made available to the influence of advertisers, and all that it cost us was the very foundation of civil society: tolerance.

For this reason, I'd like to do my part in encouraging a return to longer forms of thinking and writing, which provide more room for nuance and more opportunity for establishing consensus or, at the very least, respecting a diversity of perspective and, you know, science.

I want to revive the original spirit of the older, pre-commercial internet, with its bulletin boards, newsgroups, and blogs — if not in form, then in function.

The utopianism of these blogs might seem as quaint today as the sites' graphics (and glamorous MIDI audio), but whatever those outlets lacked in sophisticated design, they more than made up for in curiosity and intelligence and in their fostering of originality and experimentation. They were, when it comes down to it, not curated and templated "platforms" so much as direct expressions of the creative primacy of the individual.

One history of the Internet — and I'd argue a rather significant one — is the history of the individual's disempowerment, as governments and businesses both sought to monitor and profit from what had fundamentally been a user-to-user or peer-to-peer relationship. The result was the centralization and consolidation of the Internet — the true y2k tragedy. This tragedy unfolded in stages, a gradual infringement of rights: users had to first be made transparent to their internet service providers, and then they were made transparent to the internet services they used, and finally they were made transparent to one another. The intimate linking of users' online personas with their offline legal identity was an iniquitous squandering of liberty and technology that has resulted in today's atmosphere of accountability for the citizen and impunity for the state. Gone were the days of self-reinvention, imagination, and flexibility, and a new era emerged — a new eternal era — where our pasts were held against us. Forever.

Everything we do now lasts forever... The Internet's synonymizing of digital presence and physical existence ensures fidelity to memory, identitarian consistency, and ideological conformity. Be honest: if one of your opinions provokes the hordes on social media, you're less likely to ditch your account and start a new one than you are to apologize and grovel, or dig in and harden yourself ideologically. Neither of those "solutions" is one that fosters change, or intellectual and emotional growth.

The forced identicality of online and offline lives, and the permanency of the Internet's record, augur against forgiveness, and advise against all mercy. Technological omniscience, and the ease of accessibility, promulgate a climate of censorship that in the so-called free world instantiates as self-censorship: people are afraid to speak and so they speak the party's words... or people are afraid to speak and so they speak no words at all...

Even the most ardent practitioners of cancel culture — which I've always read as an imperative: Cancel culture! — must admit that cancellation is a form of surveillance borne of the same technological capacities used to oppress the vulnerable by patriarchal, racist, and downright unkind governments the world over. The intents and outcomes might be different — cancelled people are not sent to camps — but the modus is the same: a constant monitoring, and a rush to judgment.

3.

If this past year-and-change has taught us anything, it's how interconnected we all are — a bat coughs and the world gets sick. Vaccines aside, our greatest weapon for defeating Covid-19 has been the mask, an accessory I'd formerly appreciated only a symbol: masks make secret, masks hide, masks cover, in protests as in pandemics. 

The social value of the mask has been made clear: they're not deceptive so much as protective, of ourselves and of others too. Masking is a mutual responsibility, a symbol of common identity founded in a common hope. ​​​​​​​This is the very same rhetoric I've always employed about the use of technological masks: about the use of Tor networks, virtual private networks, encryption keys, and allied technologies that protect our identities online. Over the past eight years, the number of people — of organizers, protestors, journalists, and regular people — who've adopted these masks has been heartening, but then so too has been the courage of those who speak unmasked, in situations where their speech demands the authentication of experience. As with so-called public health, so with the health of the body politic: to drop the mask requires confidence in one's fellow citizens, and in the system in general. From the blue checks to the red pills, we all want to be free to speak as ourselves, and to be recorded as ourselves, without fear of persecution, and we all want to be able to decide what that freedom means, to ourselves and to our communities, however defined. My family back home in the States, along with many of my friends in the States and in Europe, are lucky enough to now be going around unmasked, but millions — mostly in the world's poorer countries — have no such privilege. It's here that the analogy with speech freedoms comes into starkest relief: until the air is clear for all, it's clear for none.

4. 

For the past eight years, I've spoken out in defense of speech freedoms on various platforms, but none has been a home. I've been edited by editors, moderated by moderators, crammed into newspaper and magazine columns next to the ads for fancy wristwatches; I've had my thoughts contorted by character-limitations and tripped-up by threads, even before they were taken out of context and misinterpreted, accidentally and willfully. Platforms should ensure a writer has full control over, and full ownership of, their intellectual property, so I'm glad to help give this one a fighting chance.

Readers of this column should expect weekly posts dealing with civil liberties and technology, in addition to commentary on the worlds of whistleblowing and leaking, a series on false conspiracies (QAnon) v. true conspiracies (debt), news roundups, and various reviews and how-tos, for good measure. Subscribers will have access to audio versions of many of the pieces, as well as to a series of podcasts, featuring conversations between myself and friends and allies and occasionally, yes — in the spirit of this space — even some folks I disagree with.

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