Snowden on the Twitters

[John Young]

>IMHO Snowden did something of real significance.

Snowden is to be pitied for believing giving material to the press to do with
what it likes is a victory.

Giving all material to the press for its mediation, interpretation and
monetization, as well as consulting with representatives of government
on what to publish, hardly changes the status quo of representative, rather
than direct democracy.

Snowden and the press are complicit in withholding the alleged material
he took, even now the public does not know and may never know what
that material consists of. The soup has been contaminated by editorial
selection, redaction and interpretation. That may be inevitable with the
sordid process the press calls leaking ("wikileaks" compounds the falsity
of censorious and editorially regulated pubic participation -- wiki -- and
exploitive, biased, corrupt, dramatized disclosure -- leaks).

Withholding material by self-empowered representatives, whether Snowden
or the press, self-regulating lawyers, stock peddlers and other professionals,
is a variation on official secrecy by which secret keepers pad their income
and perks so long as they abide the cult of secrecy. All this has been
done in the Snowden affair, as well as Ellsberg's. Those who don't
abid the cult go to jail, or ruined financially, or stigmatized for life.

Even now the representatives of the government, NGOs ACLU, EFF, MSM
and Freedom of the Press are negotiating a deal for Snowden for his return
to the US, following the Ellsberg precedent. The USG appears to be willing
to make a deal with all sides claiming victory "for the people." When such
deals are primarily beneficial to the secretkeepers and interpreters and
judges of what the public is allowed to know while "protecting national
security."

Finally, cpunks was founded, and may still, to advocate and demonstrate
an alternative to paternalistic, covertly royalist and militarily and spying
tyrannical, representative government. Phil Zimmermann called his PGP,
Tim May called his version Cryptoanarchy, Jim Bell called his Assassination
Politics, others called theirs financial, black net, anonymization, wikileaks,
and a slew of variations (see Wikipedia for those). Fortunately quite few
avoided naming and publicizing their alternatives to minimize being tagged
as traitors and worse -- those remain quietly virulent, albeit some were
snatched by governments to be insiders and informants.

Insiders and informants have always been welcomed on this list. This to
avoid the venal corruption of secrecy, asymmetrical exploitation of leaders
over followers, and the crippling narcotic of believing public interest is the
same as privileged party interest, and worse, that the concomitant rewards
of being somebody publicized is superior to being out of sight working
hard to undermine archies of all stripes -- oligarchy of the Omidyar type
currently underwriting the Snowden sweettalking of NGO field bosses
overseeing booty distribution handsomely paid by tax write-offs.

As Snowden tweets, he's a director at Freedom of the Press. That is,
still among the privileged insiders of loyal opposition. As here.