Anonymous in The Economist
economist.com
economist.com
If Anon is taking down Mastercard and Visa, then perhaps our governments will start obeying their own laws instead of trying to manipulate companies into compliance. Or at the very least, our companies might actually question whether obeying the government is in their best interests.
And the idiocy of millions, considering that one of their "bank" targets (PostFinance) isn't a bank. It is a money transfer service operated by the Swiss post office for Swiss residents only. Assange is not a Swiss resident, so they closed his account, and are returning his money to him.
> If Anon is taking down Mastercard and Visa, then perhaps our governments will start obeying their own laws instead of trying to manipulate companies into compliance. Or at the very least, our companies might actually question whether obeying the government is in their best interests.
Let's see--obey an anonymous group of DDOSers, who at most can cause you a short term outage until you add more capacity, or obey the government which has the full power of the state behind it and can actually stop your business and seize your assets...this one is a no brainer.
The timing was coincidentally close to many other "spontaneous" corporate actions against Wikileaks.
Boss: "Hey, everyone's talking about this Assange guy's financials—do we have anything to do with that?"
Clerk: "I'll check. ...huh! We have him in our books as a client!"
Boss: "But he's not even Swiss! Good thing we noticed, I guess."
Government representative: "Hey, nice company, wanna keep being friends with the govt?"
Boss: "Sure."
I keep saying that Swiss is a socialist country (the main assets are government-controlled, health and welfare are compulsive, minimum wage is astronomic) but no one believes me… and I'm the only Swiss around.
However, I don't think there was any US interference: Switzerland is a fiercely autonomous country (with a whiff of xeno…-scepticism). There most likely were sincere about discovering that he wasn't seriously considering to stay and discontinued service only for that: banking in Switzerland is like cooking in France — don't try to make sense of it, do as you are told, and admire in silence.
Switzerland is a wonderful coctail of free market capitalism and social responsibility toward it's citizens. Would you think it were more "capitalist" if there were a Walmart every thousand meters and all small businesses were dead?
The last one is the system described in Karl Marx's The Capital It's also slightly incoherent with free market, because properties can't be exchanged freely: the community of owners have a say, albeit implicit. The best current example of that is Silicon Valley, where Arrington can sell TechCrunch to AOL, but still has to pull up a couple of stunts to prove his editorial independence; or where the value of your start-up is dependent on PG's impression of you being a nice guy. It's usually a very efficient system, especially with innovation, but it is quite “unfair”: winners are not always the absolute best (well, they tend to) but generally make orders of magnitude more money. It's acceptable in SV because most people have enough money to eat, and those who own redistribute it, but it wasn't so acceptable when the children of Rothshild's workers starved.
Free market, vs. planned economy are system that consider production. You can have a planed economy with private ownership (France in the 70s) or free market with very strong control over workers benefits, like Switzerland. Because large corporation have far more responsibility (thanks to heavy State controls on the job market) Switzerland indeed has a lot of SMEs.
I have no idea why you asked you last question: it goes well beyond the usual straw-man.
because Swiss banks are so rigorous about closing the accounts of third-world tinpot dictators?
Furthermore there are [3 (65% visa, 30% MC)] billion credit cards used outside of the US. If MC/Visa's assets were seized, the US would be under global shit for fucking up the global economy that it wouldn't even have to reach consumers in other countries before all hell broke loose.
What do you think the global repercussions of half the western world being unable to buy anything with credit for even a day?
Sorry, but it's a no brainer not to obey the government when they're making rice paper thin threats and to not even consult your legal department on the matter. Now they're dealing with genuine losses from their online payments being down for trying to brown nose the US government.
Yes, because the US government only managed to get 63%
voter turnout
Obama only managed to get 33.3% of eligible voters to actually vote for him. But got 52.9% of general vote.
Where have we heard all of these before?
Empty, vacuous rhetoric, that's all this situation has come down to. I'm tired of hearing about WikiLeaks because it's polarized and made everyone rhetoric-spewing, logic-hating extremists. Everyone involved, and sadly to say, particularly the pro-WikiLeaks crowd, has been making grandiose, pompous speeches as if it's their last day on Earth and they're the President from the movie Independence Day.
Stop. Just stop. Julian Assange is not the messiah and you are not delivering the the gospel truth of life, the universe, and everything. There is zero need for the amount of hyperbole, rhetoric, self-aggrandization, and more weasel words than I can shake a stick at.
Is this an important issue? No doubt, but polarizing speeches like yours aren't helping anyone. When you start using loaded words like "attack" and "collaborator" you've lost any semblance of credibility with moderates, and just come off as an extremist instead.
You seem to be of the opinion that suddenly suspending the account of an organization that hasn't broken the law is a neutral, harmless action.
Most people don't fly, so they don't care about the TSA.
Most people aren't Iraqis, so they don't care about Iraqi war dead.
Most people aren't Paypal, so they don't care about Anonymous.
Most people don't have much to say, so they don't care about the First Amendment. And they don't expect that anyone wants to search their home, so they don't pay too much attention to the Fourth, either.
And they're not rich, so they don't see how tax cuts for the rich are any of their concern.
I mean, we supposedly had this great national progressive moment in America not two years ago. Well, what happened? Would you say that the so-called leader of that progressive movement, Barack Obama, has spent too much time appeasing his base, and not enough time convincing moderates? (I'm not even sure what his base is anymore but let's pretend it's the left for the sake of argument.) His entire Presidency so far has been about trying to hog the center, while the Republicans spent the last two years nurturing the fears and hatreds of their most extreme and vocal supporters, while ceding as little ground as possible to the victors of 2008. So, who won?
So no, au contraire, I don't agree that the job of the extremist is to convince the moderates. His job is to basically leave them the hell alone, and outflank his opposition so as to relieve them of their hold on the status quo. Then, replace it with one of his own. The moderates will go along because they don't give a shit either way. In this case a good start would have been to get the Fairness Doctrine reinstated in the FCC by revoking the executive order of 1987, and hit the Right where it hurts. But now we're talking tactics.
Of course, in saying this, I have to acknowledge that some people hold moderate views out of laziness (it's not black and white). Of course, there is probably an equal proportion of lazy extremists.
In the same way that the Encyclopedia Britannica gained fame by endorsing the cause of rationality, and in the same way that Wikipedia gained fame by endorsing the cause of free information, so too can anonymous gain fame as a mob that supports social justice. Anonymous has a lot of the characteristics of other populist uprisings, so I wouldn't be surprised if their (mostly) harmless civil disobedience today morphed into something more interesting in ten or twenty years. I'm not saying I support them, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
I think this discussion might just be getting lost in the generalities of such statements, though. Do you have a more specific point to make?
A mob is just a group of people. If we are ever going to have a free, just, and rational society then by definition the mob is going to have to support freedom, justice, and rationality.
That's not true. 'Mobs', specifically, are unruly assemblages and more often irrational, unjust, and freedom-destroying. A mob doesn't have to be brought around to righteous thinking for society to function; it has to be dissolved, and stop acting like a mob. Ideally this is when its smartest members wake from an angry emotional trance and choose to become other kinds of 'groups of people' that work better for rational and just aims. But sometimes it's when adults say, enough is enough, and apply hard force against the mob.
Actual mobs sweep tyrants into power, either populist tyrants, or reactionary tyrants. The framers of the US Constitution understood this, at least.
Let's not fetishize the idea of mobs as any mass action in the name of some murky form of 'social justice'.
They've removed them as well. See "French Revolution", Romania, Albania and a bunch of others.
It's angry people breaking rules and doing unfocused damage with the exercise of raw bulk power. That we can cherry-pick a few examples where similar action caused (or more likely, just correlated with) beneficial change shouldn't make 'mob' a positive-connotation term for the 'group of people' that via its 'support' determines whether society is 'free, just, and rational'.
We should prefer to rely on free speech, elections, courts, legislatures, voluntary assemblies, armies and even 'well-organized militias' over angry anonymous 'mobs'.
Because I can't. In every example I can think of the Government has doubled down on its crack down effort. I suspect we're only months away from a bunch of these people getting arrested for cyber-terrorism.
I suppose this sort of thing can be effective if the government crack down becomes so oppressive that the general public turns on them (See the Kent State Shooting). But that's a pretty destructive way to make your point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_peace_march
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_wall#The_Fall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_parks#Her_Refusal_to_Move
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Satyagraha
I think you make a good point--the reaction to an attack is generally a stronger counterattack, not reconciliation--but there are certainly counterexamples.
I didn't see anything trying to belittle the fall of the Berlin wall. Drawing extreme conclusions like this reminds me of "Unamerican" arguments from a few years ago.
Cape Town Peace March, The Berlin Wall & Salt Satyagraha: In these cases the Government felt it didn't have a choice but to capitulate lest it be overthrown completely. The Cape Town article makes that point and in the case of the Berlin Wall the Government of East Germany did dissolve. But I'll happily add the caveat "where the government believes it is capable of doubling down on its efforts without being overthrown". Still doesn't change the point though (unless you seriously think Anon is capable of overthrowing the U.S. Government)
The same was true of the Indian independence movement. In the end the British Government didn't so much capitulate as it withdrew (which goes back to my first point of Governments doubling down until they can't anymore)
Rosa Parks : In my post I said it would work if you are willing to let the Government take a pound of flesh and that's exactly what happened in the case of Rosa Parks. Parks was arrested and convicted. People who protested in her name were beaten as well as being arrested and convicted. The very section you point to says that MLK's house was bombed and churches were burnt down.
You're an optimist.
http://twitter.com/AnonOperation (not official, but seems to be working along: http://twitter.com/AnonOperation/status/12652603078877184)
This tweet (http://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/12651605946015744 ) is a wary thought on how things can scalate, and how badly: if we can't have twitter account, nobody can
I just wonder if any of this will come on the panel with Tim Bray later tonight: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981547
I think the anonymity allows people, who are experts in their field, to be candid but protect their reputation.
They have a public list of their journalists (or at least, their work): http://www.economist.com/mediadirectory/books.cfm and staff can publicly say they work there.
A friend of mine works there (or interns, not sure); she post on Facebook and twitter the papers that she wrote, or the video that she shot, but she also includes other papers that she really liked. I'm assuming the official policy is stricter, but what she does is rather implicit, that only a handful of people notice (and presumably mostly other journalists that help with her ‘beat‘). So far, she has defended, sincerely, every paper that I criticized (I go after The Economist a lot) — most of them quite far from her beat (I'm closer to the Economist's line when it comes to the topics that she covers).