Graveyard of Memories, Available Today

Okay, today's the day: the new Rain novel, Graveyard of Memories, just launched in Kindle; trade paperback; and audiobook, narrated by your humble author. It's an "Origin of Rain" story, set in Tokyo in 1972, and I think you're going to enjoy it.

Writing this prequel was a blast:

First, because it was an opportunity to get to know Rain before he became the cool professional we get to know later—while his reflexes are quick but his instincts and tactics still callow.

Second, because of the challenge of recreating the Tokyo of four decades ago. I always do a lot of onsite research for the books I write, but this time I was forced to do so only in those parts of the city that have changed little with time (here are some of my location photos), and to supplement that research with books of old photographs and interviews with long-time Tokyo residents.

Third, because it was so satisfying to finally get to tie together all the fragments about his past that Rain hints at in the other books. For first-time readers, these fully developed fragments will make for a compelling story; for existing fans, the fragments will function as fun Easter eggs, too.

And finally, because I love the heroine of this story—Sayaka, an ethnic Korean girl, confined to a wheelchair, older than Rain and also tougher and savvier. One of the things Rain learns in the course of the book is the way being in the life endangers those around him. It's not a lesson he learns willingly, and he accepts it only at great cost.

BTW, I'm so honored to have received these kind words from the legendary Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple, and author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur; What the Plus!; Enchantment; and a bunch of other books I've learned a ton from.

There are some things in life you don't want to end. Massages, Thanksgiving dinner, and Steve Jobs product introductions are in this group. If you're into thrillers, I would add Graveyard of Memories.

Seriously, this book is insanely great—especially if you're a Japanese-American like me who isn't offended by a racial stereotype of stone-cold, martial-arts, samurai-assassin, 9.5-fingered yakuza Japanese people. Steve Jobs taught me it's better to be feared than loved, anyway.

If you want to savor Graveyard for as long as possible, read every article and watch every video Barry includes in the Acknowledgments before you read the book. By doing this, you'll learn about paraplegic sex, gun-versus-knife killing range, flying-triangle strangles, and killing people by electrocution according to Dartmouth.

Then, when you read the book, you'll have a much better appreciation of what's going on. It's like the difference between drinking regular coffee and artisanal coffee—which is another thing you'll learn about. Rain makes all this action child's play. After I read Graveyard, I wanted to go on a tour of Tokyo to visit all the spots that John Rain hung out—up for Raincaching, anyone?

And be sure to pay attention to a character called Gai Kawasaki because he isn't killed off. Like the Terminator, maybe he'll be back. Come to think of it, what are the odds that Barry would name a character Gai Kawasaki? I am just so happy it wasn't the name he gave the medical student in the morgue...you'll see why.

Speaking of audiobooks, I've now finished narrating my entire backlist, so audiobook lovers like me can now get all ten novels, plus the four short works, finally all with the same narrator (he's pretty good, too—the New York Times says:

Male readers, in my experience, have more trouble sounding like female characters than do females imitating men, and Brits, in general, are better at this than Americans. (An exception is the recent thriller "Inside Out," read by its author, Barry Eisler, who is also an exception to the rule that writers should not be allowed to publicly declaim their own prose.)

You can sample 'em all right here. Brilliance Audio is my audio publisher, and they've been a joy to work with, even during studio days involving an exceptionally cold Michigan winter. :)

Starting today, I'll be visiting some terrific bookstores to promote the book: Book Carnival in Orange; Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego; Kepler's in Menlo Park (Valentine's Day launch party at the Palo Alto Four Seasons); Books & Books in Miami; Murder by the Book in Houston. If you're around, come by and say hello. See you on the road and thanks for your support!

Cheers,
Barry

P.S. By happy coincidence, today is also officially The Day We Fight Back, a movement against mass, unaccountable surveillance. Call your local legislator; talk it up on social media; host a banner. Be a part of We the People.

On the Sad Human Tendency to Judge People Based Solely on their Worst Moments

Here’s an exercise:

I want you to recollect the most thoughtless or insensitive words you’ve ever said; or the stupidest or most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done; or the angriest outburst you’ve ever had.

Really, do it.  It shouldn’t take long.  Those moments are typically easy to recall, because we tend to be ashamed of them and they’re therefore imprinted indelibly in our memories.

Now imagine that someone managed to record that atypical instant of your very worst behavior, and has posted it on the Internet.  And now, everyone who has never met you and knows nothing of you — which is to say, outside a tiny circle of friends and family, the entire world — knows you only through that recording, and is gaining a first impression of you via the worst moment you’ve ever had.  The whole world is judging you based solely on that one instant of atypical bad behavior, bad behavior of which you’re already ashamed and wish you could do something, anything, to retract.

Are people forming accurate impressions of you?  Do you feel you’re being treated fairly? Reasonably?

I can’t imagine there’s anyone who would answer any of the preceding questions, “Yes.” So then why do so many people instantly and reflexively judge the totality of a stranger based on a single reported instance of the stranger’s behavior?

I can think of various reasons that might apply case-by-case, but my guess is that the overall explanation for individual such acts of condemnation is self-pleasure through sanctimony.  Sanctimony, contempt, dudgeon, umbrage, outrage… all are among the most self-pleasuring emotions available to humans.  This alone should render them the least trustworthy.  But for many people, the insidious high delivered by, say, a solid hit of dudgeon is too alluring an opportunity to pass up.

Now let’s talk about condemnation mobs.  Have you ever ginned up or joined a dudgeon mob on Twitter or elsewhere on the Internet?  Have a look at the video below, depicting the Two Minutes Hate from the movie version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Do you see any similarities between this and some of the wildfire denunciations you sometimes see flaring up (and that perhaps you’ve been part of) on the Internet?  Is it possible George Orwell was depicting not just some fictional behavior peculiar to a certain dystopic novel, but was instead expressing a profound insight into an ugly and universal human tendency?


What’s behind the mob behavior?  My guess is, it has to do with an innate human hatred of the feeling of powerlessness and concomitant attraction to things that make us feel powerful (think vengeance and torture and other such behaviors that logic can’t do much to explain).  It’s the pleasure brought on by a surge of empowerment.  You see someone you typically perceive as higher status or otherwise more powerful than yourself; that person is suddenly vulnerable; you have the force of overwhelming numbers and passion on your side; the typically more powerful person is suddenly less powerful, and the person with the power is you!  It’s a rush.  And who doesn’t love a good rush?

Part of what’s involved in the instant condemnation reflex (group or singleton) is something known as the Fundamental Misattribution Error.  Here’s how it works:

I’m driving along the highway, minding my own business, and I change lanes.  But oh shit, somehow I didn’t see how quickly the car I just moved in front of was approaching, and he had to apply the brakes as a result of my move.  It was just a careless, innocent, and essentially harmless mistake on my part; I certainly didn’t intend to cut the guy off, and I would have waited if I’d seen him.  How do I know all this?  Because I have direct access to my own thoughts and I know my behavior in the context of my whole life, which includes such information as I’m a nice and courteous person and generally a careful driver, and if I do something rude, it’s always an accident and I would apologize for it if I could.

The other guy, though, has access to none of this context.  The only thing he knows about me is that I just did something rude to him.  And he’s a good person.  Courteous, careful, etc.  If someone does something rude to a courteous, careful, worthy-of-respect good person, the rude person must ipso facto be an asshole.

So… he rolls down the window, races ahead, and cuts in front of me, flipping me the bird on the way.  Which he knows I deserve, because he’s already figured out I’m an asshole.

You can see the rest:  now I’m thinking, What?  I made a dumb, harmless mistake; I’m a good person; and he’s flipping me off?  He must be an asshole!  And I act accordingly.

Etc.  Each person perceiving himself with the greatest possible knowledge and context, and reducing the other person to the only thing he knows about the other person, which is that the other person just did something bad to a good person.  I understand my own behavior in the context of character; the other guy’s behavior is his character.

I’ve written about this before (Dudgeon is Easy; Understanding, Hard; also And Why Beholdest Thou The Mote In Thy Brother's Eye...?).  What put me in mind of it recently was the crazy mob reaction to an after-game video interview with Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman (I actually don’t know anything about sports, but I do follow The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson), plus some people going after a friend of mine on a list serv for a long-ago stupid thing my friend had said.  What made me want to write about the topic again, though, wasn’t the interview as such, or what the list serv people were saying; it was that, in my anger at how unfairly the list serv people were treating my friend, I wound up resorting to sarcasm.  And then realized:  I was falling into the very trap I was trying to get them to understand -- treating them as though they were unworthy of respect just because of one unfortunate series of comments they were making.

I’m not much on religion, but there are two bible passages I think are profound, timelessly relevant — and almost universally ignored except via lip service. These are, of course:

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

and

The mote and the beam

They're really worth thinking about.  Everybody knows them, but how often are they applied?

Everybody knows the instinct to judge the entirety of a person based on one stupid mistake while ignoring everything else he or she has ever said or done is ungenerous; the conclusion, almost inevitably caricatured or otherwise inaccurate; the practice, innately hypocritical because anyone on the receiving end of such treatment would find it wildly unfair.  I’m hoping this post will serve as a handy link we can forward to others when they slip up — or that people will remind me of when I do.

Dogs and Cats, Living Together... Mass Hysteria!

So... the Republican National Committee has passed a resolution to end indiscriminate domestic surveillance:

The measure, the “Resolution to Renounce the National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program,” passed by an “overwhelming majority” by voice vote.

That's the RNC, not the DNC.  Obama is defending the program, so Obama supporters defend it, too.  It's the mirror image of why the RNC is now against it.

It put me in mind of this.

This Week in Establishment-Publishing Bullshit

Today I'm guest-blogging at The Bookseller, where I write an  open letter to literary agent Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media, exposing establishment-publishing straw men, correcting disinformation, and hopefully taking down a zombie meme or two, as well...

And here's an amazing response from Joe Konrath (with a small contribution from me) demolishing the odd notions promulgated by Kensington Publishing CEO Steve Zacharius, including that self-published books should include a kind of warning label.

The Self-Stupifying Narcissism of the Anti-Pot Brigade

I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling that at the end of any great policy or cultural shift, the old guard tends to twitch in a final spasm of feeble protest.  And so, as Washington and Colorado move to implement their voters’ decision to decriminalize marijuana, it’s probably natural that the reactionary vestiges of the flat-earth Reefer Madness movement would scowl and wag a futile finger one last time, if only to indicate, “Don’t say we didn’t tell you so!”

I won’t repeat the many excellent rebuttals that have already been addressed to prohibition dead-enders.  I recommend the Chris Hayes video embedded below, and Matt Taibbi and Charles Pierce also wrote terrific pieces.  I’m sure there are plenty of others.  The logical and empirical flaws in the pot prohibitionists’ last stand are so glaring that were other than prominent media personalities involved, I doubt anyone would even bother responding.

So here, I want to note just one interesting element the various old-guard cries of “Nooooo!” seem to have in common.  Which is:  narcissism.

Read the columns, if you can stand feeling embarrassed for the people who authored them, and you’ll see the foundation for all their anti-pot animus is... they themselves don’t like pot.  Brooks got high and feels like it was what made him mess up a presentation in English class, something he claims now sometimes keeps him up at night.  Ruth Marcus liked pot well enough when she was wearing "bell-bottoms and polyester," but no longer approves.  Joe Scarborough claims to have never smoked pot himself, but it made some of his friends "dumb" (whatever that means -- dumb for an hour? for the rest of their lives? and how do you get from "I saw this happen to a few people so I know it happens to all or most people," anyway?) and that's all the evidence he needs.

David Brooks: "Memory of being stoned in class keeps me up nights. But endorsing bloody illegal war? I sleep THAT motherfucker like a baby."
— billmon (@billmon1) January 3, 2014

The tendency to confuse subjective preferences with objective principles is unfortunate and widespread:  as John Cusack said to Jack Black in High Fidelity, "How can it be bullshit to express a preference?"

The inability to distinguish between subjective taste and objective principle is the very confusion that takes people from "I don't like gay sex" to "gays shouldn't be allowed to marry each other."  Obviously, the tendency is powerful -- so powerful it causes a collapse in logic and reason in otherwise presumably capable people, people who can feel so strongly about their own preferences that they manage to leap from "I don't like X" to "which means X is objectively bad for society" to "and therefore the best and only way to address X is to make it a criminal act."  None of these three things in any way follows logically from the others, but sometimes, when you really don't like something, those three unrelated concepts can start to seem as ineluctably connected as a chain of ipso factos.

Beyond the obviously solipsistic tendency of prohibitionists to conflate their own tastes with what's best for society (see this hilarious and dead-on take, where Dan Gillmor substitutes "alcohol" for "pot" and "drinking" for "smoking" in Brooks' piece), there's also the problem of conflation of ends and means.  The only sane objective for any drug policy would be to cost-effectively minimize and manage the incidence of drug abuse.  And we have mountains of data demonstrating that prohibition does little or nothing to reduce drug abuse, while achieving that little or nothing at about the highest cost reasonably imaginable (just Google "costs of drug prohibition").  An attachment to prohibition as the best or only way to minimize drug abuse is so at variance with logic, everyday experience, and history that I don't know how to explain it other than as the result of emotion occluding reason. 

Interesting.  It seems that among the many things that can cause people to be "dumb," fear and loathing of pot can be much more potent than pot itself.

One other thought.  Scarborough's column struck me as more or less as thoughtless as the others, but I sensed something in it beyond the usual prohibitionist "I don't like it/therefore it's objectively bad/therefore it should be illegal" fallacy.  About ninety percent of the piece is a gratuitous and off-the-mark sarcastic response to Taibbi (making fun of Taibbi, for example, for publishing his anti-prohibition piece to a presumably sympathetic audience in Rolling Stone, while overlooking the fairly obvious fact that Rolling Stone happens to be the magazine Taibbi writes for, whatever the topic), and that excessively ego-driven response, too, seems to have occluded Scarborough's ability to reason.  I've written about this before, and the more I see it, the more I think excessive sarcasm, and certainly insults and contempt, are tendencies to resist.  It's not just that the right tone makes persuasion of other people more likely; it's that the wrong tone engages your ego and turns off your mind.  Certainly it seems to have had this effect on Scarborough.

Hmm, another non-pot thing that can make people dumb -- with apparently longer-lasting and far more deleterious effects.  By the standards of the people who indulge in it, I guess that means we should make it illegal.

The More Things Change...

If you haven’t seen it already, don’t miss this New York Times article revealing the identities of a group of activists who in 1971 broke into a Media, Pennsylvania FBI office and stole thousands of documents — including ones revealing the existence of the FBI’s “COINTELPRO” domestic surveillance program and other government crimes.  The accompanying video is also a must-watch.

Other commentators have already done a nice job of demonstrating how it’s impossible to distinguish the actions of the Media group, on the one hand, from the actions of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on the other.  Here, I just want to add how continually amazed I am at how many commentators seem unable see contemporary events through the prism of history.

Part of the reason the Media break-in story is so important is that it renders so increasingly obvious, even darkly hilarious, the mental gyrations and rationalizations of pundits like Josh Marshall, Fred Kaplan, Jeffrey Toobin, Ruth Marcus, and others.  How can these people not read their own columns without a sense of how embarrassed they’ll feel in years to come, when the massive corruption and criminality revealed by whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden have eclipsed today’s small-minded focus on the sacredness of "secrecy oaths” and obliviousness to the Constitution?

I don’t have an answer to that question.  But history lessons like this one can only help.

"Collect It All"... They Really Mean It

A few months ago, I argued that

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.  Think that's too strong a statement?  If so, you're not paying attention.  There's a reason the government names its programs Total Information Awareness and Boundless Informant and acknowledges it wants to "collect it all" and build its own "haystack" and has redefined the word "relevant" to mean "everything."  The desire to spy on everything totally and boundlessly isn't even new; what's changed is just that it's become more feasible of late.  You can argue that the NSA's nomenclature isn't (at least not yet) properly descriptive; you can't argue that it isn't at least aspirational.

What’s interesting, too, is that the National Surveillance State doesn’t even recognize there could be anything fundamentally wrong or objectionable about any of this.  Here’s their latest logo:

If we ever do come to live in a world where the government will be able to monitor every meaningful thing we do, we won't be able to say we weren't warned.

If we value freedom and democracy, we citizens need to engage in a national — an international — conversation about whether we want any government to be able to monitor all the communications, Internet behavior, and physical movement of everyone in the world.  If you're glad that conversation has begun, thank Edward Snowden.

Patriots and Authoritarians

As predictable as it is, it's still shocking to see Britain's parliament haul in for questioning Alan Rusbridger, the head of The Guardian, rather than looking into the extremely serious revelations of metastasized, unaccountable UK spying Rusbridger's newspaper has reported on.  In essence, in response to Edward Snowden's unprecedented revelations, the UK government has decided to investigate journalism rather than the unchecked growth of the surveillance state.  If I put this kind of thing in a novel, people might not believe it, and yet here it is, actually happening.

At one point during the inquisition inquiry, a Labour MP named Keith Vaz actually asked Rusbridger, "Do you love this country?"  Unsurprisingly, Rusbridger assured Vaz that he does.  But I wish Rusbridger had gone further.  He might usefully have taken a page from the CIA's "Admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations" playbook (yes, they really do teach this, and yes, it really is effective), and assured Vaz that he obviously loved this country more than Vaz does.  In doing so, Rusbridger would have usefully accomplished at least two things.  He would have:  (i) shifted the focus from his supposed lack of patriotism to Vaz's actual lack; and (ii) provided a teachable moment about the difference between patriotism and authoritarianism.

Authoritarians don't love their country.  They worship the state.  These are not the same thing.  I would have loved Alan Rusbridger to point out the difference to the goose-stepping parliamentarian, and by extension to anyone else ignorant of the difference.

Sadly, I'm sure Rusbridger and others will have plenty of other opportunities.  I hope they'll fully avail themselves.

Chiron Self-Defense Training

A few pics from a useful and fun evening with Rory Miller of Chiron Training at Soja Martial Arts in Oakland.  If you're interested in reality-based self defense and you have a chance to train with Rory, I highly recommend the experience.  His books are also excellent.

I know he's going to hit me... but how?

Showing how to fight through encirclement

Teaching "Dracula's Cape" -- a defensive elbow

That's a Tony Blauer High Gear suit at left -- awesome equipment

Infighting

Trying out a Tony Blauer spear

Staircase brawl

Maybe Ben Treven Was On To Something...

I highly recommend this article, "The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks," by Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (if that link is paywalled, here's a related piece by the always-exellent Mike Masnick of TechDirt that'll get you the gist).  The heart of Farrell and Finnemore's argument is this:

The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government’s public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook Washington’s covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their own.

Few U.S. officials think of their ability to act hypocritically as a key strategic resource. Indeed, one of the reasons American hypocrisy is so effective is that it stems from sincerity: most U.S. politicians do not recognize just how two-faced their country is. Yet as the United States finds itself less able to deny the gaps between its actions and its words, it will face increasingly difficult choices -- and may ultimately be compelled to start practicing what it preaches.

I was struck by one small oddity in the article:

Of course, the United States has gotten away with hypocrisy for some time now. It has long preached the virtues of nuclear nonproliferation, for example, and has coerced some states into abandoning their atomic ambitions. At the same time, it tacitly accepted Israel’s nuclearization and, in 2004, signed a formal deal affirming India’s right to civilian nuclear energy despite its having flouted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by acquiring nuclear weapons…

No disagreement there, but it seems to me the authors left out an even more glaring example of US nuclear hypocrisy:  our own possession of thousands of nuclear weapons and simultaneous insistence that most other nations must forego such weapons.

I was also struck by the similarity of the authors' views and those of my black ops soldier, Ben Treven.  In Fault Line, Treven puts it like this:

The Iranian enemies Hort was referring to were the Israelis.  In fact, while he was in Istanbul, Ben had been eating food brought directly from Israel.  If the op went sideways and he was killed, or if he was captured and used the cyanide pill he was carrying, there would be an autopsy, his stomach contents analyzed.  Best for things to point in the direction of Israel.  JSOC had laid down a few other false clues, as well, nothing too heavy-handed.  Not a very nice trick to play on a friend, but the Israelis were realists and would understand.  Anyway, what could Russia really do to Israel that it wasn’t doing already?  Sell arms to Damascus?  Deliver nuclear fuel to Tehran?  And what could Iran do?  Back Hezbollah?  Blow up another Argentine synagogue?  Yeah, one thing the Israelis had going for them was clarity.  Their enemies couldn’t hate them more than they already did.  Ben wished the U.S. could be equally clear-eyed.  What did Caesar say?  Oderint dum metuant.  Let them hate us, so long as they fear us... 

He thought about hate.  America was hated overseas, true, but was pretty well understood, too.  In fact, he thought foreigners understood Americans better than Americans understood themselves.  Americans thought of themselves as a benevolent, peace-loving people.  But benevolent, peace-loving peoples don’t cross oceans to new continents, exterminate the natives, expel the other foreign powers, conquer sovereign territory, win world wars, and less than two centuries after their birth stand astride the planet.  The benevolent peace-lovers were the ones all that shit happened to.

It was the combination of the gentle self-image and the brutal truth that made Americans so dangerous.  Because if you aggressed against such a people, who could see themselves only as innocent, the embodiment of all that was good in the world, they would react not just with anger, but with Old Testament-style moral wrath.  Anyone depraved enough to attack such angels forfeited claims to adjudication, proportionality, even elemental mercy itself.
Yeah, foreigners hated that American hypocrisy.  That was okay, as long as they also feared it.  Oderint dum metuant.

Hardly the first time life is caught imitating art... :)

Dick Cheney and John Rain

UPDATED BELOW

In an odd instance of life imitating art, it turns out then-Vice President Dick Cheney had his doctors turn off the wireless feature in his defibrillator, lest someone use the wireless feature to turn off the device itself.  Of course, John Rain fans have known about this vulnerability since at least 2002, when Rain first deployed it in A Clean Kill in Tokyo.

Interestingly, Cheney describes his fears as relating to the actions of potential "terrorists."  This is because, as we all know, if you kill a US official, it's terrorism, while when a US official does the killing, it's merely an "operation pursuant to a lethal authority" or a "kinetic action" or a "targeted killing."  Or sometimes, when we make an oopsy, it's "collateral damage."  Even bombing Syria wouldn't be a war -- as long as we're the ones doing the bombing.

As Mel Brooks said, "It's good to be the king."



UPDATE:

In other exciting news, the incomparably oligarchical Senator Dianne Feinstein wants you to know that the NSA's call records program is "not surveillance."   So no need to be concerned.

Art, Craft, Revolution... and Scott Turow Taunting

In a new Huff Post interview, my thoughts on the craft, the business, and the revolution in publishing.  Also I taunt Scott Turow.

"Generally, there are four levels of knowledge. There's research at a library or on the Internet along with books and articles. Then there are interviews to conduct with people who've actually been there. Then, there's your own direct experience, if you have it. The fourth element is..."

"What really threatens America are not stateless acts of terror themselves, but rather, America's over-reaction to those acts. To me, it's axiomatic: who is more powerful -- Al Qaeda or the nuclear-armed, 350 million population America? Al Qaeda is a flea compared to American might and power. If we turn that power on ourselves, that is a national security threat. The only way any stateless actor can really threaten our national security is by tricking or persuading America to turn its own might against itself. And that's what's been happening since 9-11. As much as a cold virus is not lethal, if the body's defenses to that little pathogen causes it to run a fever of 107 trying to destroy it, the body might kill itself. America's response has been exactly like that -- a spectacular over-reaction. The only entity able to really hurt America today is America itself. And if you want to write a great thriller -- one with the highest and most realistic stakes -- that's the thriller to write..."

Read the whole thing here.

My Favorite TechDirt Posts

The excellent blog TechDirt, which covers intellectual property issues, flattered me by asking for my favorite TechDirt posts of the week.  My thoughts include:

"If we can lose hundreds of thousands of people a year to guns and cars and cigarettes with no impact at all on national security, how can it be that something like the Boston Marathon bombing, as tragic as it was, was a national security event?"

Read the whole thing here.  I think you'll enjoy TechDirt.

David Miranda and the Preclusion of Privacy, Part 2

Last week I argued that the UK government's lawless detention of David Miranda, spouse of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was intended to make journalism harder, slower, and less secure (and see this great follow-up by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen of Press Think).

Today, I'd like to discuss a common leftist reaction to the National Surveillance State's war on journalism:  the idea that journalists should preempt government attacks like Miranda's detention and the destruction of Guardian computers by immediately dumping onto the Internet any secret files that come into their possession.

The notion is superficially appealing:  if you're a journalist, patiently examining a large trove of secret documents so as to minimize the private harm and maximize the public benefit of publication, and there's a chance the government could impede or intercept your efforts, shouldn't you insure against such a dire possibility by immediately publishing everything you have?

To answer this question, we should ask two of our own.  First, what are your proper objectives as a journalist?  And second, what does the National Surveillance State hope you'll do?

I think many people would answer the first question with some version of, "The proper objective of a journalist is to make information public."  This is fine as far as it goes, but I don't think it's complete.  To me, the proper objective of a journalist is to bring about meaningful change.  Publication by itself could conceivably serve a variety of functions:  it could embarrass, or titillate, or entertain… it could provide some level of emotional satisfaction for the journalist and her audience.  Any one or combination of these could be an objective of journalism, but is any of them a worthy objective?  I would argue no, not particularly, at least not in comparison to what I think is the most important objective of journalism, which is, again, to bring about meaningful change.

(For more on the exceptionally interesting and important topic of what journalism is for and how it can best be done, have a look at The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled, and especially at the links at the bottom of the post.)

If you agree that the proper objective of journalists like Barton Gellman and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras is to use their reporting to bring about meaningful change, I think you have to agree that timing and tactics matter.  That is, what course of action would have a better chance of achieving meaningful change:  immediate, indiscriminate dumping, on the one hand, or deliberate, time-released reporting, on the other?  I would argue the latter, and I think the events of the last two months tend to suggest that the kind of drawn-out, deliberate reporting for which Greenwald has been criticized by some on the left support that argument.  James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has been caught lying to Congress; public opinion has shifted dramatically; voters are engaged in an overdue debate about programs of which previously they had no knowledge; Congress only narrowly defeated an effort to defund the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records.  Of course I can't prove causality, but I can't see how any of this would have been achieved, or in any way better served, by an immediate indiscriminate data dump.

Pushing back the National Surveillance State is a long game that requires sound tactics.  Those tactics can only be properly understood by reverse-engineering from the correct objectives.  Yes, it might be emotionally satisfying to embarrass powerful officials, and it might be temporarily empowering to feel like you're flipping the bird to a bunch of self-important oligarchs, and yes, an immediate dump might be the proper tactic in the service of such objectives.  But they are the wrong objectives.  If meaningful change is your primary goal, you have to work backward from that objective, and not let other, less worthy ones distract you.

But look, even if you disagree about which tactic would be most likely to bring about meaningful change, might the fact that we share a goal and differ only about tactics be cause for some perspective?  The fury I've seen in some portions of the Twitterverse at Greenwald's insistence on a patient, deliberate approach seems out of all proportion.  I know patience, perspective, and civility aren't necessarily the hallmarks of Twitter  discourse, but still.  This is -- I think -- a discreet disagreement about the utility of certain tactics, not a culture war about philosophical aims.

Okay, now let's ask that second question.  What does the National Surveillance State want?

Well, let's use that handy tool of trying to put ourselves in the shoes of those determined to spy on everything boundlessly and totally.  You're determined to make journalism harder, slower, and less secure by interdicting backup means of communication -- detaining couriers, invading newsrooms, that sort of thing.  But you're smart, too, and you know that for every action, there is a reaction.  Spies and soldiers are trained never to attack without first asking, How will the enemy react to my attack?  Because that reaction could be dangerous, meaning you might have to reconsider your original plan, or it might be useful, creating a new vulnerability that you can then exploit.

Let me put it this way:  do you think it's even conceivable that the National Surveillance State is engaging in tactics like detaining the spouses of journalists and invading newsrooms, without having first imagined how journalists might respond?  Is it even conceivable that the spooks are unaware they're are creating an incentive for journalists to just dump everything on the Internet as a way of preempting governmental attempts at interdiction?  No, it isn't conceivable.  The government is engaging in these tactics knowing full well that the tactics will incentivize less careful, patient, discriminate reporting.  What follows, then, is one of two things:  a journalistic "data dump" reaction is either a risk the National Surveillance State is willing to take… or it is an objective it is attempting to achieve.

Which is it?  I would argue the latter.  Again, put yourself in the shoes of our secret overlords:  if you can goad someone like Greenwald into rashly dumping improperly vetted secret information onto the Internet, is that a loss for you… or is it in fact a significant win?

Answer that question by asking, what would the data dump cost you, and what would it gain?  Operationally, it would cost you little.  Spying operations have been continually outed since the dawn of the Cold War, and the size and power of the National Surveillance State has only grown.  A few new revelations will have no more impact on the leviathan-like expansion of your reach than have any of the previous ones.  Conversely, a blown listening station, or better yet, a dead human asset, would be enormously useful:  it might enable you to shift the narrative from lawlessness and overreach to something more like "These traitor journalists have blood on their hands!," which you know is your propaganda trump card.

All this being the case, you might not merely hope someone like Greenwald would abandon his patient, methodical reporting in favor of something more knee-jerk and less careful.  You might go further than just hoping.  You might even try to provoke Greenwald -- say, by harassing his family.  You might even try to manufacture opportunities to change the narrative -- say, by leaking a few ostensibly damaging secrets yourself and blaming them on Edward Snowden.  More than anything, if you're the National Surveillance State right now, you crave a bloody shirt you might wave to try to blow back the tide of thoughtfulness and rationality precipitated by Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, and by the extremely careful reporting accompanying it thus far.

(Or, short of that, wag the dog by going to war with Syria, I guess.  That kind of thing is always a good distraction.  But I digress.)

On balance, therefore, I'd have to say that if journalists start dumping secrets in response to government interdiction efforts rather than judiciously reporting them, it will be a win for the National Surveillance State.  The National Surveillance State understands this, and is choosing its tactics accordingly.

Of course, if you're one of the people who's been agitating for an immediate, indiscriminate, knee-jerk document dump instead of the patient, deliberate approach that has kept Snowden's revelations as front page news for over two months now, the fact that you and the National Surveillance State both want the same thing isn't necessarily dispositive.  But it ought to give you pause.  When you find yourself and your antagonist both trying to bring about the same thing, one of you is being smart, and the other, naive.  Best to give a little more thought about which is which, and choose your tactics accordingly.

David Miranda and the Preclusion of Privacy

Updated Below

I think it's obvious to any reasonable observer that the UK authorities detained David Miranda, spouse of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, to intimidate journalists and whistleblowers -- to "send a message," as Greenwald put it.  But I also think there's something more going on.

Put yourself in the shoes of the National Surveillance State (given the kind of US/UK cooperation involved in Miranda's detention, we could as easily call it the International Surveillance State).  In collusion with US telcos, you've succeeded in commandeering the Internet, and are able to monitor at least 75% of American Internet activity.  Further such monitoring represents opportunities for improved coverage only at the margins, and because people are now changing their Internet behavior to evade government eavesdropping, you realize you have to turn your attention to emerging attempts at privacy.  You will have to focus especially on journalists, the fourth estate:  as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has observed, "The Guardian's work on the Snowden story has involved many individuals taking a huge number of flights in order to have face-to-face meetings.  Not good for the environment, but increasingly the only way to operate.  Soon we will be back to pen and paper."

Under these circumstances, if you were the NSA, and you learned -- say, by examining passenger manifests and customs data -- that Glenn Greenwald's spouse was traveling from the couple's home in Rio to Berlin, currently the home of Laura Poitras, Greenwald's collaborator on the blockbuster Snowden revelations, what would you do?

You might reasonably suspect that the spouse, trusted by both parties, was helping Greenwald and Poitras in some fashion with their reporting.  If you dug into credit card transactions and learned the Guardian was paying for the spouse's travel, your suspicions would harden.  You might decide to place a call to your contacts at Britain's GCHQ, mentioning to them that a certain Brazilian national would soon be transiting Heathrow en route from Berlin to his home in Rio, and recommending ever so artfully that this Brazilian national be detained, all his electronic gear confiscated, his personal passwords revealed to you under the threat of imprisonment (yes, the UK airport authorities really can legally imprison you if you don't tell them your Facebook password.  They have to, to keep you safe).

Of course you wouldn't formally direct the UK authorities to do anything; you'd want to maintain the ability to obscure your involvement without outright lying about it if possible.  And of course you might not even be sure the spouse would be carrying anything secret at all, but intercepting secret information wasn't really the purpose of the exercise anyway.  The purpose was to demonstrate to journalists that what they thought was a secure secondary means of communication -- a courier, possibly to ferry encrypted thumb drives from one air-gapped computer to another -- can be compromised, and thereby to make the journalists' efforts harder and slower.

Does this sort of "deny and disrupt" campaign sound familiar?  It should:  you've seen it before, deployed against terror networks.  That's because part of the value in targeting the electronic communications of actual terrorists is that the terrorists are forced to use far slower means of plotting.  The NSA has learned this lesson well, and is now applying it to journalists.  I suppose it's fitting that Miranda was held pursuant to a law that is ostensibly limited to anti-terror efforts.  The National Surveillance State understands that what works for one can be usefully directed against the other.  In fact, it's not clear the National Surveillance State even recognizes a meaningful difference.

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.  Think that's too strong a statement?  If so, you're not paying attention.  There's a reason the government names its programs Total Information Awareness and Boundless Informant and acknowledges it wants to "collect it all" and build its own "haystack" and has redefined the word "relevant" to mean "everything."  The desire to spy on everything totally and boundlessly isn't even new; what's changed is just that it's become more feasible of late.  You can argue that the NSA's nomenclature isn't (at least not yet) properly descriptive; you can't argue that it isn't at least aspirational.

To achieve the ability to monitor all human communication, broadly speaking the National Surveillance State must do two things:  first, button up the primary means of human communication -- today meaning the Internet, telephone, and snail mail; second, clamp down on backup systems, meaning face-to-face communication, which is, after all, all that's left to the population when everything else has been bugged.  Miranda's detention was part of the second prong of attack.  So, incidentally, was the destruction of Guardian computers containing some of Snowden's leaks.  The authorities knew there were copies, so destroying the information itself wasn't the point of the exercise.  The point was to make the Guardian spend time and energy developing suboptimal backup options -- that is, to make journalism harder, slower, and less secure.

A heart beset by coronary disease will begin to recruit secondary arteries to carry oxygenated blood.  If you're the NSA, you recognize you have to block those developing secondary routes, too, or you'll lose control of the flow you feed on.  To the National Surveillance State, therefore, coverage of Miranda's treatment at Heathrow isn't a bug.  It's a feature.  And why not?  The authorities want you to understand they can do it to you, too.  Whether they've miscalculated depends on how well they've gauged the passivity of the public.

Updated:  Part 2 is here.

Heathrow Isn't an Incident. It's a Principle

In case you missed it, yesterday for nine hours at Heathrow Airport the UK authorities detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, under an anti-terrorism law, and have confiscated all Miranda's electronic gear, including games and a watch.  No explanation was given; no news about when or even whether Miranda's property will be returned to him.  This is the kind of thing the US likes to criticize when it's China or Iran doing it.

Maybe you don't like Greenwald -- his personality, his reporting, what he stands for, whatever. Maybe on a gut level you find Miranda's detainment pleasing, and so you'll support it.  If so, remember that you're not supporting an incident, you're supporting a principle -- the principle that governments can harass the family members of journalists they don't like, or anyone else.  The principle that governments can detain you and confiscate your property without any due process or even a word of explanation.  That's the principle at issue here.  The government fully understands this.  Do we?

Some related reading:

Juan Cole, Ten steps to dictatorship

Andrew Sullivan, How the UK government's behavior proves Greenwald right

Tom Friedman: No Sixth Amendment For You

Updated Below

Every time I come across a Tom Friedman column, I ask myself, "Could this guy get any stupider?"  And every time, he manages to find a way.

Yesterday's drivel was about whistleblower Edward Snowden.  Let's try to unpack the Friedmanesque quantities of bullshit he crams into one short paragraph.

"Considering the breadth of reforms that President Obama is now proposing to prevent privacy abuses in intelligence gathering…"

Obama's proposed "reforms" are a joke, a whitewash, and an insult to anyone with a functioning brain.

"...in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures, Snowden deserves a chance to make a second impression — that he truly is a whistle-blower, not a traitor.  The fact is, he dumped his data and fled to countries that are hostile to us and to the very principles he espoused. To make a second impression, Snowden would need to come home, make his case and face his accusers. It would mean risking a lengthy jail term…"

Wow.  Snowden now "deserves a chance" to be afforded a trial as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, but in the absence of Obama's proposed whitewash, he would have had to forfeit his Sixth Amendment rights?  This is very generous of Friedman, suggesting that under proper conditions an American might deserve Constitutional protections.  What does Friedman think Snowden "deserved" before Friedman decided he had earned his "chance" at being afforded his Sixth Amendment rights -- an imperial drone execution?

And "the fact is" that Snowden "dumped his data?"  Snowden personally reviewed everything he handed over to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and The Washington Post's Bart Gellman, held back a great deal more, and instructed Greenwald and Gellman to use their journalistic discretion in determining how and how much they should publish of even the limited amounts he gave them.  To call this "dumping" is to eviscerate the word of meaning.

And Snowden was bad for fleeing to "hostile" countries?  Initially, he went to Hong Kong; he then got stuck in Russia when the US government revoked his passport.  Which means:  he's in Russia now because the US government stranded him there. Where would Friedman prefer Snowden fled -- France? Italy? Portugal? Spain?  All of which are so in thrall to the United States that, acting on a tip that Snowden was on board, they denied access to their airspace to the plane of Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, forcing him to land in Austria, where he was then detained for twelve hours.

And does it ever occur to Friedman that there's a reason an American whistleblower might feel compelled to flee?  That the the US government might bear some responsibility for why an American whistleblower might feel compelled to seek asylum abroad?  More on this below.

I couldn't help noticing that Friedman referred to a possible lengthy "jail" term.  This might be because Friedman doesn't know that jail is where people are held before sentencing, and that prison is where they're sent after.  Or he might have been using the term accurately after all, given that Bradley Manning spent three years in jail, much of it in solitary confinement, before his sentencing; given that journalist Barrett Brown has been in jail for over a year awaiting trial; and given the US government's demonstrated proclivity for imprisoning people indefinitely without any sentencing at all -- indeed, without even bothering to accuse them of a crime (we call these unfortunates "detainees" because, having been convicted of nothing, they can't be convicts, and because "prisoners" sounds so harsh.  "Detainees" just sounds so much more pleasant; really, it's almost as nice as "guests").

"...but also trusting the fair-mindedness of the American people, who, I believe, will not allow an authentic whistle-blower to be unfairly punished."

The ignorance here -- or the mendacity -- is breathtaking.  Does Friedman really not know that the U.N.'s special rapporteur on torture formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for locking Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for almost a year?  Has he really never heard of William Binney?  Thomas Drake?  Jesselyn Radack?  The eight whistleblowers the Obama administration has accused of espionage and worse?

Or maybe Friedman thinks none of the punishments these people received was "unfair."  Or that, although the US government has clearly and repeatedly abused its powers, the American people "will not allow" such things to happen this time!

In fact, I doubt even Friedman could be that ignorant or that naive.  More likely, he's hanging his hat on that weasel-word, "authentic."  Because if Tom Friedman thinks you're not authentic, you just don't qualify.  This is a version of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.  It's also a variant of Obama's own Humpty Dumpty policy, by which America minimizes civilian drone-strike deaths by defining anyone killed in a drone strike as a terrorist.

Maybe the saddest thing of all about Friedman -- sadder than his ignorance, sadder than his bullshit -- is that he actually seems to believe someone with the conscience, conviction, and courage of Edward Snowden could possibly give a shit about making a proper second impression, or any impression at all, on an establishment tool like Friedman.  Can you imagine the level of narcissism required in urging someone to risk torture and life in prison for the chance to make a proper impression on you?

If I were as much of a solipsistic, self-important, l'etat-c'est-moi naval-gazer as Friedman, at this point I might advise him that he must find a way to make a better second impression on me!  Perhaps by repenting for all the bullshit he's ever dumped on any reader foolish enough to trust him, and particularly for his cheerleading for American "Suck on this" barbarity in Iraq.

But I'm not so neurotic as to expect other people to make decisions about their lives based on what kind of impression their decisions might make on me, and not so ignorant as to suggest their constitutional rights might be forfeit should they fail to please me.  That's Friedman's schtick.  I wish someone he trusts would do an intervention.  He really needs help.

Update:  The Freedom of the Press Foundation has its own typically excellent take on Friedman's latest excrescence:

"No, he can’t. Snowden will not be able to make the case he’d like to make in court because, contrary to common sense, there is no public interest or whistleblower exception under the Espionage Act. In recent cases, prosecutors have convinced courts that the intent of the leaker, the value of leaks to the public, and the lack of harm caused by the leaks are irrelevant, and are therefore inadmissible in court..."