Year Zero: Private and self-censorship

[jw at bway.net]

Steganography, My Ass:
The Dangers of Private and Self-Censorship in Wartime
by Jonathan Wallace jw at bway.net

The categories of speech protected by the First Amendment are 
well-known, and despite the repetitive chatter on Internet mailing 
lists, are not in serious dispute. Supreme Court decisions 
interpreting the constitution have made absolutely clear that highly 
unpalatable political speech, and even words of quite hateful and 
violent import, have absolute protection (so long as they don't fall 
into the very narrow pigeonhole of threats conveying an immediate 
fear of violence to a specific individual). We can argue about what 
the First Amendment ought to protect, debate whether and how to 
change the Constitution. But there can be no serious discussion today 
of whether, for example, web pages calling for Jihad or approving the 
destruction of the World Trade Center and the murder of Americans, 
are protected by the First Amendment. They indisputably are.

Justice Holmes, creator of the operative metaphor for U.S. speech 
freedoms, the "marketplace of ideas", made clear in a famous dissent 
that the First Amendment's sweep reaches the most offensive political 
speech imaginable:


"If in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian 
dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of 
the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be 
given their chance and have their way."

Yet pages approving violence and terrorism against the U.S. were 
pulled from numerous U.S.-based servers soon after September 11, 
without any recourse for the people maintaining them. The reason that 
there was no constitutional violation was that (as Internet debaters 
sometimes forget) the First Amendment only protects us against 
government interventions in speech. It doesn't protect us against 
each other.

Purveyors of free web space such as Geocities and Tripod have "Terms 
of Service" (TOS) contracts that users must accept which give the 
companies broad discretion to reject and close web sites for their 
presentation of constitutionally-protected but politically 
unpalatable speech. TOS violations were probably the single most 
important justification for the acts of commercial censorship which 
occurred this fall.

However, another more widespread but even less visible force at work 
chilling speech was the fear of job or social consequences of 
expression of unpopular ideas. In the first flush of emotion after 
the attacks, we had several remarkable examples, unusual mainly for 
being examples of public rather than highly private retaliations. 
Television host Bill Maher (paid after all for saying outrageous, 
attention-getting things) made the comment that terrorists who are 
willing to give their lives, whatever else they may be, cannot 
accurately be described as "cowardly". (By the way, he is right about 
this and I have made the same observation myself.) He then went a 
step further and said that firing cruise missiles from a distance is 
more properly described as "cowardly". Whatever you may believe about 
Maher's taste and timing, his words fall squarely within the 
protected realm of vivid American political speech--which extends in 
fact much further, to include radio talk show hosts descri!
bing how to kill federal "gun-grabbing" agents and NRA board members 
day-dreaming out loud about the murder of gun control advocates.

Maher soon after his statement was in danger of losing his 
job--something which hasn't happened yet--and received an 
unprecedented public rebuke from Presidential spokesman Ari 
Fleischer, whose remarks were later toned down in the official 
transcript:


"There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what 
they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like 
that; there never is."

In the weeks after the attacks, we also heard of newspaper columnists 
losing their jobs for remarks that were actually rather mild compared 
to the rhetoric heaped on Bill Clinton for the last eight years. An 
Oregon newspaper, the Daily Courier, fired columnist Dan Guthrie 
after he wrote on September 15 that the president hid "in a Nebraska 
hole" when he should have returned to Washington after the attacks. 
First the newspaper's editor wrote a column apologizing for Guthrie, 
and stating that "Criticism of our chief executive and those around 
him needs to be responsible and appropriate..." Then publisher Dennis 
Mack fired Guthrie, describing it as a "private personnel matter".

Tom Gutting, city editor of the Texas City Sun was also fired by his 
publisher for commenting on the President's behavior the day of the 
attacks:


"There was W. flying around the country like a scared child seeking 
refuge in his mother's bed after having a nightmare....W. has behaved 
like you would expect a first lady to."

(For what its worth, I also agree with Guthrie and Gutting and spoke 
of Bush's disappearance in my own essay written on September 11.)

The conservative National Review dropped columnist Ann Coulter for 
the following opinion:


"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert 
them to Christianity..."

(Do I need to mention I don't agree with Coulter? However, I defend 
her right to blither.)

Through-out our history, more valuable information and debate has 
been stifled by private censorship (including the chilling fear of 
it) than by government intervention. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized 
the contradictory nature of U.S. society, in which freedom of speech 
so often translates into freedom to jump on the bandwagon:


"In our time, the most absolute sovereigns of Europe would have no 
idea how to prevent certain ideas, hostile to their authority, from 
circulating silently in their countries and even in the heart of 
their own courts. Its not at all the same in America: as long as the 
majority is uncertain, everyone speaks; but as soon as the majority 
has irrevocably decided, everyone shuts up, and friends and enemies 
alike seem then to jump, with one accord, on the public bandwagon. 
The reason is simple: there is no monarch so absolute that he can 
hold in his hand all of society's force and vanquish all resistance, 
to the same extent as a democratic majority with the right to make 
and execute the laws."

As disturbing as the firing of columnists is, an incident with even 
worse implications for U.S. democracy was the mainstream media's 
almost total obedience to the President's request that videos of bin 
Laden and other al Quaeda members not be televised. By all 
traditional standards, these were highly newsworthy. Transcripts of 
all of these were made available by the translation service of the 
BBC. For example, on November 3, Al Jazeera broadcast a bin Laden 
video. Bin Laden claimed that polls showed that the Islamic world 
approved of the attacks by a wide majority; spoke of world-wide 
demonstrations opposing U.S. action in Afghanistan; said that the 
Islamic world has been under the "crusader yoke" for 83 years, since 
World War I; and attacked the United Nations, which is widely 
respected in Arab nations for its support of Palestinians, for having 
tolerated or promoted violence against Moslems.

The bin Laden broadcast is newsworthy for several reasons. First, 
consistent with his other utterances, he never denies involvement in 
the U.S. attacks and goes to some length to justify them, supporting 
the circumstantial evidence of his involvement. Secondly, even in 
translation, his precise, rather Talmudic style of argument, with 
constant reference to long-past historical events, gives us 
significant insight into the personality of a once-faceless 
adversary. Third, his reference to the U.N. introduced a potential 
new target of Al Quaeda attacks.

I vaguely recall knowing who Osama bin Laden was before September 11: 
a clever murderer, lurking somewhere, who was linked to the killing 
of U.S. troops in Somalia, the African embassy bombings, and the 
attack on the Cole. Today, I have an intense interest in him, as 
someone who is trying to kill me personally, and that produces a 
desire to find out everything I can.

As I never tire of telling you, I arrived at the World Trade Center 
that morning just as the second plane hit. I saw the flames and 
falling paper, and tiny fragments of glass rained on my head. People 
were dying a short distance away from me; minutes later, as I was 
running across the bridge, I saw someone jump from the south tower.

I have a "pay to play" theory of democracy. I made a partial payment 
on September 11, and I'm willing to pay more: serve on the jury 
trying an Al Quaeda member, even join the armed forces if they'd have 
me. What I want in return is very simple: my seat at the table. And 
that means the information that goes with it. There can be no 
democracy without information; how do you decide what to do, what to 
support or to oppose, without it?

The excuses given by the government for its request not to broadcast 
or even print a transcript of the bin Laden video were laughable. 
Most prominently, the government announced that the videos might 
contain hidden messages, a technique called "steganography". Further 
terrorist attacks might be launched as a result of the bin Laden 
video being broadcast on CNN.

To which I say: Steganography, my ass. How stupid do President Bush, 
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld believe we are? There has not yet 
been the slightest showing of any hidden messages in any bin Laden 
video, despite obedient, silly news pieces on CNN interviewing 
experts who could only say that it is imaginable that they could be 
there. In these supposedly balanced pieces, where were the experts 
saying how silly the idea was and that it was unsupported by any 
evidence?

Multiple choice question: If you were a terrorist trying to send a 
message to activate a U.S.-based cell, the most effective way to do 
so would be a. a telephone call b. an anonymous email c. Placing a 
classified ad in an obscure newspaper the cell was previously 
instructed to monitor d. Hiding the message in a fifteen minute video 
which you courier to Al Jazeera network and relying on them to 
broadcast it in its entirety enough times for your U.S.-based cell to 
see it.

Raise your hand if you think (d) is the best answer.

However, if bin Laden was strange enough to conceal messages in the 
video or in the language he used, asking CNN and the networks not to 
carry it was a completely ineffective way to block transmission of 
the message, given the fact that it had already been broadcast by Al 
Jazeera, translated and made available by the BBC, etc. Successful 
interdiction of a hidden message still wouldn't prevent the follow up 
phone call or email.

Note also that Rumsfeld et al. failed to run the football through the 
goalposts. If they had taken the steganography chimera to its logical 
conclusion, they could have asked American media to black out the war 
entirely. Taliban mortars might be firing rhythmically in some 
obscure Islamist Morse-like cadence. Afghan refugees in the 
background of crowd scenes might be making hand gestures. John 
Walker, the American Taliban member captured this week, might be 
twitching in code.

Vague, unsupported claims about steganography don't trump my interest 
in receiving accurate information about someone who is trying to kill 
me.

Our government's other statement justifying censorship of the bin 
Laden videos was more honest, though it got less play. Why give 
airtime to Al Quaeda propaganda? This is one of those statements that 
sounds credible, but is not. It pre-supposes two insulting things. 
One is that there is a U.S. audience susceptible to bin Laden's 
message (and Holmes would say that even if there were, they're 
entitled to hear it). The other is that the rest of us don't need or 
are not entitled to the information contained in the "propaganda". 
Propaganda is information; it is an extremely valuable source of 
knowledge about history, intention, and psychology. Mein Kampf is 
freely available in the U.S., and is read much more by people 
interested in understanding what happened than by those looking to 
reaffirm their hatred and desire to commit genocide. Like 
fundamentalists who condemn a book without having read it, the 
government message is that there is information in the world so 
volatile that we!
  are better off being protected from it.

I wanted to be treated as an adult even before September 11, and with 
my life in danger I feel even more strongly about it. Truth is one of 
the cornerstones of democracy; our vote, our decision-making ability, 
is impaired or destroyed when the government lies. The steganography 
story was a silly lie. The truth--the government's desire that bin 
Laden's ideas not be communicated, even though that means denying 
important information to citizens of a democracy--shows how far we 
have fallen from Justice Holmes' defiant and cheerful understanding 
that we can trust ourselves.

I was astonished by the way that the broadcast media immediately 
lined up behind the government without the mildest protest. 
Twenty-four hour news organs, like CNN, are extremely hungry for 
content, and had repeatedly played prior videos in their entirety, 
with simultaneous translation. Once the government asked them to 
stop, the newly-released video warranted only a brief mention without 
even a clip (for fear of those hidden messages).

Why were the broadcast media so docile? In part, for the same reason 
everyone else was. But broadcast media have a unique problem of their 
own, which we ignore or forget in trusting them for information. They 
are licensed and regulated by the FCC. Could the FCC legally pull a 
license from a station which broadcast the bin Laden video in full? 
No. Could the agency make its life quietly miserable? Absolutely. 
Broadcast media executives never forget who holds the leash.

Ernst Renan said that nations hold together based not only on 
collective memory but on collective forgetting as well. As a nation 
we have completely forgotten that the regulation of broadcast media 
began with a bloodbath about seventy years ago. The Federal Radio 
Commission, the FCC's predecessor, targeted political programming and 
drove it off the air to free the spectrum for commercial 
broadcasters. Even seven decades later, the bland, mainstream, 
nonchallenging nature of broadcast media is a product not only of 
audience desires but of the shadow of government regulation. As the 
ACLU's Morris Ernst said in the 1930's, "So long as the Department 
can determine which individuals shall be endowed with larynxes, it 
does not need additional power to determine what shall be said."

What about the print media? I was startled by the way they lined up 
too. In the New York Times, which I count on for much (too much) of 
my information about the world, the bin Laden video was no longer 
front page news and no transcript was published. Again we seem to 
have fallen a long way from the days of the Pentagon Papers and the 
brave stand the Washington Post and the Times made against the Nixon 
administration.

De Tocqueville provides the explanation. For most of the 1960's, the 
press also lined up to support the Vietnam war. When the press first 
began to examine the other side of the war--to ask questions about 
whether the strategy made sense, the tactics were working, whether 
civilians were being killed--they were moving in accordance with a 
power shift that was already taking place in America. The press was 
leading, but it was also following, like a middle manager or a 
mid-level military officer. Significant constituencies in U.S. 
business and politics had not waited for the Pentagon Papers to start 
wondering if the war made any sense. In de Tocqueville's terms, 
powerful people had already started jumping from the bandwagon. Which 
is not to say that the Post and Times were not brave, did not behave 
admirably, to stand up to the power (including the threat of illicit 
action and even violence) of the Executive Branch.

After September 11, everyone was on the bandwagon. As three months 
have passed without further Al Quaeda violence, and as we seem to be 
winning the war, the print media are less frightened and there is a 
slightly wider spread of opinion. Opposing voices have been heard on 
the military tribunals, for example.

Speaking as a hawk, one who believes this is a just war, I want to 
know where the antiwar voices were. CNN presented us with the usual 
assortment of ex-generals analyzing air strikes, but where was Noam 
Chomsky, saying that we shouldn't be bombing Afghanistan at all? I 
did not see Chomsky in the Times op ed pages either, nor any other 
guest editorial opposing the war. Certainly those voices are out 
there; Chomsky spoke out forcefully in the small publications which 
carry him. Why were antiwar views not represented in a mass media 
which still likes to think of itself as the "fourth estate", affected 
with a public interest?

Arriving at the truth in a democracy (as elsewhere) is a dialectical 
process, where opposing views muster information in support and each 
of us then makes our decision. Since September 11 the press has 
consistently and miserably failed to present the other side of a 
debate. It has not just failed to present the Al Quaeda view-- that 
Americans deserve to be killed--though that has informational value 
in evaluating personal risk and deciding what government responses to 
support. The press has even failed to present the view that the 
bombing of Afghanistan was a use of excessive force, or force applied 
in the wrong place; or the view that law, rather than war, is the 
answer.

My libertarian friends claim that the public responsibilities of the 
press are a myth, that a newspaper is a business like any other, and 
will only print what most of its audience wants to hear. But the 
Times serves other minorities, such as those who read the bridge 
column or the coverage of less popular sports; and diversity and even 
adversity on the op ed pages was once thought to sell papers. No, I 
think the true explanation of the obedient silence of the U.S. press 
is not fear of its own readership, but is due to a disturbance 
elsewhere in the force: a fear of offending a government and a 
majority strongly aligned with one another, de Tocqueville's 
"democratic majority with the right to make and execute the laws." 
But it is precisely in times like these that we most desperately need 
the information, as well as exposure to the variety of viewpoints 
that convey it.

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