Now Streaming on YouTube: Confessions from a Presidential Hit Squad in Gambia | Hacker News Reader

Now Streaming on YouTube: Confessions from a Presidential Hit Squad in Gambia

nytimes.com

146 pointsdanso59 comments

I think technology has a high potential for increasing accountability.

However, it's likely much larger superpowers i.e. US, China, etc. will take decades or centuries before being held accountable in this manner, which is honestly a little too tragic. I was thinking "we don't have this accountability in the States," when I realized we sorta do -- to an extent, this is Wikileaks and whistleblowers, except this is considered illegal. It's crazy to think at a high level that we have made "accountability" illegal and somehow this is just fine.

Accountability is predicated on outcome. If the extent of outcome is some keyboard warrior outrage or a minor stock dip nothing will change.

The process of establishing a ground truth is itself useful, most especially if that has been sorely lacking previously.

I'm not going to insist that justice is impossible where fundamental agreement on truth is scarce. But it's far more difficult.

"Accountability" used to be the job of the Fourth Estate, at least ostensibly, but they abandoned that job no later than the 80s, and now need to be held accountable themselves, since they're manifestly incapable of self-policing. The hope would be that somehow independent organizations would use the internet to do this, but the gatekeepers of search make this impractical. Consider the trajectory of WikiLeaks' perceived credibility, and that is best case. Everyone else has been reduced to"conspiracy theorists."

Agree.

And WikiLeaks sort of jumped out at me from the OP's comment.

Not much accountability when it is actually SelectiveWikiLeaks.

Wikileaks was nothing more than a counterintelligence operation by the USSR for their interests. Informants weren’t, necessarily — e.g., Snowden, but that is definitively resolved.

> Wikileaks was nothing more than a counterintelligence operation by the USSR for their interests

The USSR, huh? Are they operating from a hidden base on the moon? (No doubt having signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis who are out there too.)

This comment gave me my good chuckle of the evening. Cheers for that.

Is this supposed to be some sort of indictment?

If Wikileaks is publishing inconvenient truths about USG, then they are furthering the interests of US citizens, period. That the accountability Wikileaks brings couldn't happen at home in the US merely reflects the neutering and corruption of our domestic fourth estate.

Nonsense. There is zero evidence that Russia was behind Wikileaks, save a few butt-hurt American patriots who don't like knowing the truth about their country's evil mis-adventures around the world.

Just because it hurts your feelings doesn't mean its the Russians behind it. Maybe your country is just doing evil, illegal things that the world should know about, ASAP.

It's still accountability, even when it's selective - it's accountability for those that it watches. Granted, universal accountability would be great, but some is better than none. Also, Western media does an okay job holding those accountable that aren't aligned with Western interests, so WL's selective accountability fills a gap in that regard.

The Fourth Estate didn't abandon that job in the 80s, private equity companies saw their advertising based recurring revenue streams, bought them in LBOs, decimated the teams and extracted profits until nothing was left.

Online advertising finished off the rest.

To be bought you have to accept to sell. That’s maybe what the other commenter meant by “abandon their job”.

CIA and military have much deeper, more significant roles in media, hollywood then you would believe. This information is freely available through Google searches.

But there is also a trend where the big media corporations seem to be turning to evil. I mean, I don't know what better word there is for it. What I mean is the kind of stuff described here: https://www.salon.com/2016/09/20/betraying-snowden-theres-a-...

Accountability is subject to power. Gambia, like South Africa before then, can have a Truth and Reconciliation because they have overthrown the reign of terror.

The US (and for that matter UK) have not had the thorough regime change that would enable a true accounting. And yes, this has to include the media and the permanent state.

I'm going to say something that seems to be way more controversial than I expect, but we also haven't really had a reign of terror in awhile.

Well, we did, but we exported it. In the case of the UK it was Northern Ireland; thereafter for both it was Afghanistan and Iraq. Admittedly there we took over from a different reign of terror, but the whole situation remained lawless.

The US built a special law-free zone so it could apply indefinite unaccountable punishment to a few dozen people. A police microstate.

I always saw Guantanamo Bay as proof that the cases against these people were for the most part so flimsy that they would not have held up in an actual court of law.

I think the evidence was conclusive enough, but obtained in a way that made it inadmissible in any non-marsupial court.

So the US had two options: try and free known terrorists who now harbour even deeper hatred against the US after having been tortured, or keep them in legal limbo until they die. We know which one they picked.

That's a possibility, but not all of the defendants in Guantanamo bay were captured in the same manner.

For instance, there were a number of children there and I highly doubt the evidence would warrant holding children in this way or possibly even at all. Yes, won't someone think of the children.

You raise another interesting point, that the torture and possible other crimes the United States committed would have come out in full.

So what harm could a little legal black hole do? You are only a nation ruled by law if you apply the law equally, the damage that Guantanamo Bay's continued existence does is incalculable in the longer term, and not just to the United States.

> free known terrorists who now harbour even deeper hatred against the US after having been tortured

Even more perversely, I've read people say that about people may very well not be terrorists at all, but by now they probably resent the US so much, it still would be a threat to release them. I just have to think of someone attacking a random person in the street, then choking them, then realizing the mistake but not letting go because they already attacked them and they might retaliate, so it's best to just "see it through". It boggles my mind.

And the citizens know of this and nothing is done. Doesn't that make them complicit?

Most of America believes than Bin Laden worked in collusion with Saddam Hussein. They are oblivious to the body count in Iraq (assisted by an indifferent media). The citizens don't know much of anything at all.

> I just have to think of someone attacking a random person in the street, then choking them, then realizing the mistake but not letting go because they already attacked them and they might retaliate, so it's best to just "see it through". It boggles my mind.

Well, when you left so many half choked people around, no wonder when so many want to kill you.

See, US always carries through its promise to "finish off" old adversaries. Saddam was once a US ally, but much more of a frenemy. US waited for decades to dispose of him.

Ghaddafi, almost the same, once got a grudge against US no longer giving him carrot, and 30 years later, bang!

Castro - they tried for whacking 20 long years, to no avail.

Noriega - again, it took them near a decade to smoke him after their flirting with him went bad.

A ton of other harebrained dictatorship in Latin America ended very similarly, the moment they antagonise US, the clock is set ticking. US may even keep supporting them enthusiastically, while supporting a coup against them: Arellano was a US darling until US threw a bananagate at him, then deposed his deposer. It went even more wild in Salvator, where US sponsored a free trip to Hague for both Daubuisson and Duarte, after supporting them both against each other.

But ultimately that logic is both self defeating and amoral. Any war, no matter how tiny and "manageable" it looks like carries a lethal risk, eventually you will get killed no matter how tough you are.

I can bring a parallel with life in a lawless city. People who survive the longest are not the strongest ones. The "tough guys" on other hand, almost always tend to get killed in meaningless fights over stupid things because they can not concede a thing.

Like a crime king of mid-naughties Moscow who was killed in a fight over... a parking spot, by a single hit to the head with a stone...

I can not imagine that somebody who comes with such policy lines is an actual military man. Nobody who went through a real war, and not ended up a psycho, would ever meaninglessly provoke an enemy.

But that reeks of doctrinalism of political theoreticians dressing up as generals. Very much along the lines of thought in places like RAND institute, or the more MBA-brained parts of Westpoint.

> Like a crime king of mid-naughties Moscow who was killed in a fight over... a parking spot, by a single hit to the head with a stone...

Interesting story. That sounds like someone who truly believed they were invulnerable and could get away with anything. Justice was served in some manner I guess.

If you are black in America, your neighborhoods got redlined and demarcated by highways, your children were called super predators and jailed, even after the civil rights movement your right to vote was curtailed (and still is), and before that, you were lynched with no justice following afterwards. You are given fewer pain medications even today, compared to white people. You are murdered with impunity by the police meant to protect you. That's a reign of terror.

If you were a native in America, you were not always considered a US citizen until after 1924 (Indian Citizenship Act), and you were banned from voting in some states until 1957, your children were subject to medical experiments by Ivy-educated doctors, taken away from you, or subject to eugenics experiments. All your lands were taken away, or replaced with less productive ones, repeatedly breaking treaty after treaty, after mass genocide. That's a reign of terror.

If you are a women, you couldn't vote until 1920, and barred from the top educational institutions that would've allowed you to make your case why women are deserving of education (that's a catch-22!). In some states, you don't enjoy real reproductive freedom, most states, no maternity leave, and until recently, no guarantee of healthcare. If you were a lesbian, black, or native, you of course had it and have it much worse. This one it is less clear to me is a reign of terror - due to lack of mass lynchings and killings that happened in the previous two cases.

And btw, USA is an outlier in terms of healthcare, and other social benefits, not due its "freedom loving nature" (lack of freedom for most Americans should be clear from above see: lack of voting until 20th century), but because it was constructed as a slave state from the beginning and didn't want THOSE people from getting the social benefits.

You should pay more attention to the refugee children who have walked across Europe to escape American wars.

They definitely feel they have been reigned by American terror campaigns at the rate of one bomb dropped every twenty minutes for the last 19 years.

Pay attention to the victims of America's wars. That is true terrorism.

It's not clear if it is possible to have that type of thorough regime change under mass-media-driven Democracy. Voting acts as a pressure relief valve, allowing continual small reforms to address immediate gripes, but at best only slows down the larger agenda of the pan-partisan ruling class.

The moral compromises necessary to achieve any sort of significant political (or other) power intrinsically preclude ever understanding why Wikileaks et al are a good thing for society. And barring outright societal collapse, there will never be a cataclysm causing everyone who has bought into that paradigm to flee to the hills.

Well sooner or later there will be a Nurmberg style trial to U.S and the future generations ask how was the common man so passive and blind.

No; that would take a world war where the US would be defeated.

Rather, look at various less than nice things that British Empire has done for last 300 years. Though many of them are admitted and (duly) despised, no Nuremberg-style trial was ever held to judge them.

This sounds more like the losers are held accountable.

This is correct, but accountability of winners does not follow readily from it.

This comment is veering into John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" territory.

The only thing that's become eminently obvious in recent years is what an intellectually bankrupt ideology it is. And I think even most self-reflective "cyberlibertarians" (who are probably in there 40s, 50s, and 60s) would agree with that at this point.

Technology is not inherently emancipatory. In fact it's being used to subjugate and oppress people all over the world. At best technology is neutral.

Representative governments are sovereign. The only thing that is going to emancipate mankind are the things that have always: self-determination, rule of law, strong institutions, and people who adhere to enlightenment values. No one wants to be ruled by an unaccountable technocratic elite who are mostly from the west coast of the US.

I mostly agree but how many people were really motivated with this ideology where it’s worthy of punishment?

Even the average person in the Bay Area just wanted cool stuff and liked technology, automation, and the power software gave them to create anything from scratch with only their mind (and of course some capital and state support systems). The techno liberation ideas were typically pushed after-the-fact by journos looking for a narrative or a potential side benefit in the minds of founders.

Obviously the original source of this was was all predictive of the future before it all took shape and critically before it reached scale.

This why the whole idea of captain retrospect’s punishing people for once holding these views might be misguided.

I remember even with Web 2.0’s whole wiki-fication, wisdom of the crowds, and semantic web stuff were all treated largely as academic/pop science narratives and was met with plenty of skepticism. Even from people who actively contributed to it.

This isn’t the first time either. We’ve been battling the concepts of decentralization vs centralization forever.

I’m remember reading some great critiques by HL Mencken about the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ type arrangements and from the 1920s when the debates over representative democracy were raging... thanks to the rise of anarchists, socialists, etc who challenged norms:

> The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Not all of HLs words are relevant to tech, but he’s right that scale is the critically important test in these liberations and wisdom of groups things, which IMO break down far faster the bigger the platform gets and sum of the whole gets a lot more mediocre in order to be tolerable to everyone. I also think this is why small countries like Canada and Scandinavia are more functional politically but that’s another story.

The first French Revolution also worked great in war time Paris until it went to the country sides and they went back to monarchy for a few more decades.

Technology is already making a difference. $30,000 watches and yachts on Instagram are revealing corruption and tax evasion all over the world. Police violence is being recorded and distributed. Secrecy is harder than ever - Russia sent agents from the middle of nowhere to kill someone and from low-quality photos the internet pieced together their identities, ranks, where they lived, their career paths. We're not far from it being impossible for one parent of a child to remain unknown or unaware, that's going to be a funny one.

And when the great detectives of the internet get things wrong, which is the vast majority of the time, and potentially ruin people's lives, who is holding them accountable?

>Russia sent agents from the middle of nowhere

Well, actually not from the middle of nowhere. Thanks to the said investigation and checks' photos we know that they were sent literally from one of the HQ buildings in Moscow.:D

>US, China, etc. will take decades or centuries before being held accountable in this manner

Remember Snowden.

Don't forget Manning and Assange which are currently both in Prison.

Manning was pardoned for her leaks.

I thought her sentence was commuted which only reduces her sentence but it doesn't wash away her guilt.

Edit: Also she's back in prison for refusing to testify against Assange.

> Edit: Also she's back in prison for refusing to testify against Assange.

Well that's orthogonal to punishment for leaks.

She was never pardoned. Obama commuted most of her remaining sentence. There is a big difference between pardoned and commuted.

Ah then I'm in the wrong, bit different. Bit strange that they went for one and not the other, really.

On the contrary. And if anything Manning is proof that Snowden got it right: the system will happily take revenge.

Well, yes, having done the paperwork for a clearance at one point, I can assure you the Federal Government makes it very clear what happens to you if you betray your oath such that Snowden need not see Manning to know the outcome.

Whether you consider that moral is another matter.

And Ola Bini, Swedish engineerwith ties to Assange held without charges in Ecuador. Time is ticking for him and this has received very little coverage (I am from Sweden and only learned about it from a conference talk).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ola_Bini

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/14/ola_bini_ecuador_arre...

He's out on bail

Damn, you're right. And the only mention I see on this is announcements from Amnesty[0] and EFF[1], and his own Twitter feed[2]. Zero mentions in national news whatsoever. It seems he's now actually being charged with cybercrime due to a photo they found in his phone of opening a telnet connection to a particular IP. No login attempts, just opening a connection and taking a photo of the login banner. They're also looking into his visa status and taxes. It should be obvious that this is a political case.

[0]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/08/ecuador-gobie... [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ola-bini-prosecutors-w... [2]: https://twitter.com/olabini

Nor Reality Winner. She called out the Russian electoral tampering and was imprisoned for 5 years after agreeing to a guilty charge.

Accountability is very relative in a time where the fabric of the real itself is beeingcalles into question by deep fakes and exteemely potent tools to synhesize images and voices.

We will have to find societal responses towards these technological shifts or they will find us. And it is already happening: young people comparing their mirror image to the digitally optimized selfies they see of influencers they like. And then they figure out how to fake it themselves, but their parent generation believes everything they see online: a gang of foreign dark skinned men tricking the state wellfare into giving them 8 grand a month each, while the local people have to fear about beeing thrown out of their houses? outrage!

No, online media is a double-tripple-edged sword and we need to find solutions to this that are not censorship or thought police. I’d opt for education, but I am afraid we’re a bit late to start that now.

> Accountability is very relative in a time where the fabric of the real itself is beeingcalles into question by deep fakes and exteemely potent tools to synhesize images and voices.

All the more reason we need accountability on what wikileaks did release now. How else can we trust our government at all?

Seems to me that the superpowers have already figured out how to neutralize the Internet: flood it with bullshit.

Disinformation works on the same principle as radar chaff. When something is trying to see you you blow out a bunch of shiny tinsel and nobody can tell signal from noise.

You can't keep secrets but you can definitely drown the truth. Online conspiracy nuts and other useful idiots are happy to help out by adding their own amateur BS to the noise screen.

Wharley (1982) is a great paper formalizing how militaries use deception [1]. There's a lot of combinations of tactics to use disinformation to distract from the truth beyond the chaff case.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0140239820843710...

Gambia? I thought it was the Gambia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gambia#Etymology

Particularly notable coming from The New York Times, as it insists....

I'd love to see a Truth and Reconciliation of the techno-utopian ideology that has been at the center of the tech industry for decades. John Perry Barlow is dead but other principals are still alive.

Barlow shared many reevaluations that might interest you then; this one from 2006 is relatively old but kinda of interesting in how it's somewhere far from the present but also far from his "Declaration": https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/march-april-...

That is ... starting ... to emerge.

I've noted over the past few years that Wired in particular has taken a sharp turn to Dark Futurology, though I hold Kevin Kelly directly responsible for many of the worst abuses, along with others. Stewart Brand, as of a few years ago (I'd tangle with him on Google+) was decidely unrepentant.

Others have changed tunes, with Kara Swisher being a notable example. Tim Wu, Tristan Harris, Cory Doctorow, danah boyd, and any number of Facebook insiders and financiers (though notably not "dumb fucks" Zuck, have ... pivoted. I'm one of those, if less notable.

And some have pretty much always been there: Noam Chomsky, Shoshana Zuboff (a review of one of her early books actually featured in one of the occasionally-published Whole Earth spin-offs around 1987-89, of which Kelly was editor, showing he wasn't completely unaware). Douglas Rushkoff apparently came on-board in the early 1990s, which I'd count as early.

Hauling SV VC and founders in front of a T&R commission is starting to sound like a Very Good Idea.

The stream had a horrible buzzing sound, so still plenty of room for technical improvement I guess.

I’m curious if the fact they speak English made this more newsworthy in the west.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyE4wFwnxnk&smid=nytcore-ios...

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