Fifty States of Fear

This is a baldly political article that doesn't belong on HN, and I flagged it.

But I can't resist engaging with one part of it, because I really dislike its author:

This playbook of fear has not been limited to motivating military actions. Environmentalists, once ridiculed as “tree-huggers” are now often characterized as “environmental terrorists” — as individuals we should fear and neutralize. The hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, who exposed the nefarious dealings of the private intelligence corporation Stratfor and its clients, was characterized as someone seeking to cause “mayhem” by Federal District Judge Loretta Preska when she sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Horse. Shit. Jeremy Hammond decided that he didn't like what a private organization and its supporters were saying. So, he coordinate a large-scale breakin of their computers, stole the credit card numbers of all its subscribers, and released them on the Internet. This is par for the course for Hammond, who a few years earlier stormed a restaurant in Skokie that had been hosting a holocaust denier; the resulting mayhem injured only innocent bystanders, one of whom was hit with a broken bottle wielded by one of the "protesters". Ludlow is quick to spend column inches painting a picture of an unjustly extreme sentence for Hammond, but not at all interested in informing readers of Hammond's history, which included a previous felony conviction for the same crime.

If Ludlow is the only person whose writing on Hammond you read, you could be excused for believing that Hammond is of a kind with Aaron Swartz. Which is, of course, his intent; he's made the comparison explicit elsewhere.

This is how Ludlow seems to argue, in piece after piece. He evokes political messages that many reasonable people, myself often included, would have a hard time arguing with. "Global War On Terror"? Fuck yes, that's a problem. It's so obviously a problem that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with then-SecDef Robert Gates, lobbied (unsuccessfully) to stop pretending that's what we're doing. It is an utterly banal observation. Orwellian surveillance of US citizens? How could opposition to that possibly be unreasonable?

But then he uses that accord to immunize actions reasonable people can't support. Using violence to make political statements isn't persuasion; it's thuggery. It's how you justify blowing up women's health clinics. Ludlow diminishes everyone who dissents from the conduct of the government by continuously supporting thuggery.

In all honesty, I don't think the rise of the surveillance state in the US has all that much to do with 9/11 or fear per se. The response of most people to things like the NSA isn't fear, it's apathy. To the degree that there is fear, for example in the acceptance of ridiculous measures at US airports, fear of our own government, i.e., fear of getting arrested, having a lifelong arrest record, or just plain old fear of standing out and rocking the boat etc., is stronger than any real fear of terrorist attacks.

I think there's something generational going on also. People who constantly publish their current location, current mood and current thought on social media for all to see are going to have a completely different relation to privacy than the generations that came before.

I talk to a lot of people about privacy issues and the difference between us isn't how much they fear a possible attack, the difference is how little importance they place on the government intrusion.

If you're seeing the NYT paywall use this Google Search for the article: https://www.google.com/#q=http:%2F%2Fopinionator.blogs.nytim...