I Have No Tribe

One off the odd occupational hazards of being someone who spends upwards of 40 hours a week paying word-for-word attention to news stories (and often direct testimony): It is remarkably difficult to maintain friendly acquaintances. People, you see, like to talk about current events, as they should, but they also tend to have strong opinions about them, as occasionally they should (but perhaps not as often as they do).

Normally it only takes a sentence or two on the subject for it to be obvious that most of them have not exactly kept up with the news so much as heard someone down the hall have an opinion about it, which that person in turn formed from hearing a few sentences on a morning chat program; and on the morning chat program, the host similarly didn't have a clear idea of what happened so much as read an editorial rant someone forwarded along, which they rushed to air under the umbrella "unconfirmed sources" (because if you wait to confirm, you won't be first to get the scoop), further clarified to be "juicy," "provocative," "disturbing," and "revelatory."

(I hear these programs too. It's remarkable how many times an hour one of the "reporters" says "It's too early to speculate" and then goes on to spin some wild theory. Later in the news cycle, there's a lot of "we know what happened was [blank], but you can just imagine if [unlikely thing] had happened instead! Let's pretend that happened and spend the rest of the hour never alluding to the fact that we're talking about a hypothetical that doesn't resemble the actual events." Even NPR does this all the time now. Infotainment won.)

To be fair to my job, this was always a hazard, even before I worked here. I remember the "Dean Scream" back in early 2004, and how many conversations I had about it, none of which I originated, and how literally nobody other than me had actually watched the clip in question. Not even "have you seen it in context." Have you seen it at all? No. I just heard about the Dean Scream. Can you describe it? I don't know; I guess he just kind of lost it. Lost it how? When? Look, I just know everybody is talking about it so it must be a big deal, and it really makes me question him.

I do not agree with Ronald Reagan very often. But I similarly embrace the Russian proverb "trust but verify." One of my favorite TV programs as a kid was called Take Nobody's Word For It (the motto of The Royal Society). Another touchstone: Check your source.

This Snowden stuff has been excruciating. (And now famewhore Julian Assange is trying to butt in again, so that circus could come back.) It is catnip to a certain sort of techy guy posting on the internet. It plays into a nerdy straight white male heroic fantasy of the noble hacker who, working alone, exposes a vast conspiracy that topples the government, leading to [unexamined Libertarian] utopian freedom. And it's a chance for them to get to feel oppressed, and like nobody listens to them enough. Oh, how noble to abandon all one's responsibilities to dash around the world, tragic and famous, with the occasional interview about how brilliant and daring one is.

Here's the thing: Anybody who has paid any attention for the past 10 years knew the NSA was storing this data. It used to be part of the Echelon project rather than Prism, but it's essentially the same. Congress knew about it. We set up FISA courts to oversee it. Its existence was not terribly classified. The news media is freaking out about it now because they like to have something to freak out about, and the Snowden story is nice and hooky. Arguably, it is less annoying to have the news freak out about Prism (which is late in coming but better late than never) than to have the news freak out about Fed policy statements, which involves even more speculation (since otherwise you'd have to talk about a lot of dry math). Possibly this is an all-around win for news viewers this week.

In any case, warrants are out for Snowden not because he bravely demonstrated that this program that we knew existed in fact existed, and not because he revealed some pretty gaping holes in our data security which allowed unauthorized access by people like himself (which as the kid of an auditor . . . holy crap the security holes), which I might characterize as whistleblowing. Warrants are out for Snowden because he stole a bunch of classified documents and then ran off to the kinds of places that make it look like he wants to sell them to somebody like China or Russia but doesn't have a lot of experience with espionage. Meanwhile, Snowden was not some guy who worked at the NSA for years and then had a crisis of conscience; he was hired by a contracting company as a sysadmin, was openly anti-NSA before he ever got there, and three months after being put on the contract pulled the grab and vanish we're talking about today. (How he got hired speaks to a few of those security holes.)

Of course the government is freaking out. In ways that have almost nothing to do with free speech. Governments tend to do that when you run to the doorstep of a semi-hostile foreign intelligence service and start waving around "secrets! secrets! US govt secrets! I won't tell you what they are yet, but hoo boy!"

Civil disobedience: it's not a get out of jail free card. You stage a sit in, and you get arrested. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Letter from the Birmingham Jail? That was written from the Birmingham jail. Gandhi? Jail. Mandela? Jail. Suffragettes? Jail. Civil disobedience says: I believe so strongly in what I am doing that I am willing to give up my freedom to make this point. Civil disobedience is the pacifist's version of putting one's life on the line, of standing firm while people point guns at you (sometimes literally). Whistleblowers are admirable precisely because they put their jobs and reputations on the line to expose something they believe is morally repugnant, and they can't know in advance whether the rest of us will agree.

You know who did something kind of like that? Bradley Manning. Who did not particularly seem to want to leak things to get rich and famous, or to stick it to the army. Who to all appearances was genuinely disturbed by discovering some deeply illegal cover-ups that may have pointed to war crimes, and passed them on to someone else who he thought could look into them. Who was deeply conflicted before and after, submitted to arrest once he was exposed, pleaded guilty (to the point where a judge has said: Look, you're not as guilty as all that; let's moderate it a little), and was put on suicide watch.

Bradley Manning is not, however, a great nerd hero fantasy figure; he's depressed instead of confident, he doesn't make big speeches, and he is or was very interested in gender reassignment surgery. Much sexier to credit Julian Assange for bravely letting the New York Times buy him dinner, and then bravely letting the Ecuadorian embassy put him up so he doesn't have to face rape charges in Sweden.*

So instead I get to read all this Snowden, Snowden, Snowden, poor Snowden talk from people who don't know anything much about Snowden or Prism or the documents he leaked or the documents he claims to have. People who see "nerdy guy like me! Who everybody's talking about! Let's talk more about me and how great I am! I mean Snowden!"

And it is very hard to maintain friendly acquaintances. Because when people want to talk about the news, they don't want to talk about the news. They haven't checked what the news is. They want to dream, and they want to be reassured how right they are. Not on anything specific; just in general. Which is difficult to handle when one has actual facts. Everyone may be entitled to an opinion, but some of those opinions? Make people look really stupid and really exposed, in ways I'm sure they don't intend. I know how to handle it; I know to change the subject or ignore it entirely. But it doesn't change the drop in my esteem.

I'd really much rather talk about the weather. Which is not dull at all, cliches to the contrary.

* Assange likes to talk about the US being after him, but the US has no arrest warrants out for him and has not filed any extradition requests. The furthest they've gone is looking into whether they might want to arrest him, and mostly decided, eh. Not exactly single-minded US pursuit of Assange going on. Some of the usual excitable congressmen got excited for a bit, but then they moved on to get excited about other things like, oh, how much the IRS spent at a conference, or whether Eric Holder answered an e-mail fast enough.

Nor does Sweden give any indication of wanting to extradite him even if the US did ask; they've been pretty dogged about saying "nope, rapedy rape rape rape, what we care about is rape." In what world is Sweden more likely to extradite someone to the US than our "special relationship" friend the UK? Sweden, that bastion of remaining neutral during WWII, remaining neutral throughout the Cold War, and continuing to remain neutral as best it can even though the EU says sometimes it has to be involved in things. (In fairness, Sweden does have forces currently in Afghanistan as part of a NATO mission. Neutrally.)

Incidentally, if in any of the Snowden or Assange coverage, you are relying on reporting by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, don't. He's not a reporter; he's a pundit. You may like what he has to say, but don't confuse it with fact just because it's under the banner of a newspaper. So is Doonesbury. Greenwald's background is not academic or journalistic; his background is litigation. His whole perspective is filtered through the "what if" and "theoretically someone could" approach which should be familiar to anyone who has hung around trial lawyers. Useful? Possibly. But not news reporting, any more than, say, Arianna Huffington or Bill O'Reilly. Grain of salt. Big one. He's the main one blowing the horn on "well in theory the US could have this clever master plan with Sweden. . ."