I missed this while I was watching the revolution in Egypt:

It appears that the law firm BofA was using as a part of its Wikileaks crisis response task force, Hunton and Williams, had reached out to firms asking for research and a plan against Wikileaks. HBGary Federal, along with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies put together their pitch. According to the emails discussing this, the firms tried to come up with a plan as to how they could somehow disrupt Wikileaks , see if there was a way to sue Wikileaks and get an injunction against releasing the data.

What comes over in the presentation below is the atrocious idiocy of the people planning the ‘disruption’, who’d already shown ineptitude in their discovery of the ‘leadership’ of Anonymous. This is the best that the Bank of America can hire to take down Wikileaks?

Leaked HBGary Documents Show Plan To Spread Wikileaks Propaganda For BofA… And ‘Attack’ Glenn Greenwald | Techdirt.

I was wondering how long it would take me to encounter this statement. If you like it is the bad twin of the ‘X is a Twitter Revolution’ position, which I don’t suspect advocates take to mean, “X is merely an example of Americanisation.”  One day after Mubrarak stepped down was faster than I thought! Skimmed for and added to my long reading list, which gets piped to my Kindle via Instapaper, a system that is working very well for me right now.

It should not be too difficult to see – if one can think beyond the mass media hype – that the “color revolutions” and the “spontaneous revolts” that have taken place, and are now taking place in the Arab world, have not arisen from “traditional Christian and Muslim Arabs” in a revolt against Americanization and capitalist moral nihilism, as per the statement by Sobran, but rather arose among bourgeois secular youth under the long-term influence of American globalists. Whether the current revolts will be captured by Arab traditionalists and turned into a genuine liberation movement against Americanization remains to be seen.

Genuine stirrings against global Americanization referred to by Sobran constitute the major roadblock to the “new world order,” whether as regimes such as those of Iran or as grass roots phenomena such as the re-emergence of nationalism and traditionalist movements in the former Soviet bloc states, wishing to revive what American globalists consider to be anachronistic ideas, such as those of religion, ethnic identity and nationalism. Against these they postulate a counter-idealism, concentrating on the youth generation, in the same manner by which the American Establishment sought to co-opt and experiment with American youth via the “New Left” during the 1960s.[12]

The American Establishment, or – if you prefer – what Eisenhower in his presidential “farewell” speech called the “military-industrial complex,”[13] seeks to direct the emergence of revolutionary and reform movements throughout the world, albeit presented by media and political commentators as rebelling against America. Hence the present phenomena of “revolt” that has “spontaneously” (sic) swept North Africa, with the public being simplistically told that this is causing the fall of “pro-American dictators.” As I have previously pointed out, the “spontaneous revolts” in Egypt and Tunisia, for example, portrayed with such unrestrained enthusiasm by the Western news media, are the culmination of years of planning, training, networking, and funding “activists,” following exactly the same pattern as that seen in the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet bloc states.[14] A far-reaching network of interlocking organizations has emerged, funded in part by the US Government, and in part by corporate sources, to foment “world revolution.”

via The Globalist Web of Subversion | FPJ.

A couple of days ago I was thinking a bit, and fuzzily about the NSA’s problem with their operating system on board the reverse-engineered EP-3E reconnaissance aircraft . The EP-3E  fell out of the sky above China after colliding with a Chinese jet and the crew failed to decommission the information hardware using the approved tools — a fire-axe and hot coffee. Patterns and behaviours observed by NSA information analysts later suggested that the Chinese had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s OS.

The whole thing had to be re-written at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, but meanwhile the stratagems instantiated in that operating system had now become available to the Chinese and put in play in the flow of global surveillance. (One thinks of a demon, once owned by a particular master, now replicated and put to service at the hands of his enemy.)

There are three key things that interest me I think:

(i) Any informational system is capable of being reproduced;

(ii) Such dense systems encode an enormous amount of knowledge and strategy:  a way of operating on the world;

(iii) This embedded way-of-doing becomes, by virtue of its reproducability, available to other uses and other constituencies. (The expertise of the NSA is transferred to China’s military apparatus and soon put to work.)

Limewire LLC, a limited liability corporation in the United States, was was recently  forced to take its P2P software Limewire, a client for the Gnutella network, offline. The case cost the litigants many millions of dollars on both sides and the Recording Industry Association of America hailed the victory as a milestone for the recording industries.

However as TorrentFreak reports, within a matter of days hackers have taken the most recent binaries for Limewire, hacked them to remove some of the more annoying features, and re-released the client as ‘Limewire Pirate Edition’. ‘After Lime Wire LLC stopped distributing its software in October 2010,’ the project’s website reads,

a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons and released it FREE to the community to help keep the Gnutella network alive.

LimeWire Pirate Edition is pure P2P software; it does not depend on any servers operated by Lime Wire LLC or other companies. It does not include any adware or spyware, and it cannot be remotely monitored or shut down.

The following things seem to me interesting here:

(i) The process of law is obviously not very well suited to dealing with assemblages of code like this. Because there was a company involved, the company was sued. It lost. This prevents Limewire LLC from operating Limewire for profit. However, to the extent that there was any special ingenuity emdedded in its code, it is like the NSA’s operating system openly available to other constituencies. [Has anyone tried? to issue a cease-and-desist notice to a virus.] But it’s as if  the company Limewire, like the owner of a conjured demon, never really had possession of its entity: now the ‘piratical monkeys’ have it and apparently have made some quick improvements.

(ii) Two radically different modalities or spirits have been ‘in charge’ of Limewire the software in a relatively short space of time. Cf. the NSA’s problem with China. Knowledge is portable and its ownership is brittle.

(iii) Those seeking to change the social behaviours ‘emanating from’ Limewire [it 'induced' infringement] used one of the chief means available to them, the law — but Limewire’s reconstitution ensures the behaviours will continue unabated.

(iv) So it’s obvious why certain parties will want to seek control at the network level. At the juridical level and the level of code, control is lost.

Code is thus a general class of ‘post-state actant’. I should go back and read Lawrence Lessig’s book Code, which I always avoided for some reason.

UPDATE

In a pleasant irony, the ‘original’ Limewire’s site was recently updated to read as follows:

WE HAVE VERY RECENTLY BECOME AWARE OF APPLICATIONS ON THE INTERNET PURPORTING TO USE THE LIMEWIRE NAME, SUCH AS THE LIMEWIRE PIRATE EDITION. WE DEMAND THAT ALL PERSONS USING THE LIMEWIRE SOFTWARE, NAME, OR TRADEMARK IN ORDER TO UPLOAD OR DOWNLOAD COPYRIGHTED WORKS IN ANY MANNER CEASE AND DESIST FROM DOING SO. WE FURTHER REMIND YOU THAT THE UNAUTHORIZED UPLOADING AND DOWNLOADING OF COPYRIGHTED WORKS IS ILLEGAL.

Pirates cease-and-desisting other pirates is amusing.

via Jim Killock /Open Rights Group, 05 November 2010

Commissioner Neelie Kroes today announced [1] that the EU Commission wants to reform EU copyright. She — like David Cameron yesterday [2] — stated clearly that current copyright laws are creating a barrier to creativity and trade:

“Today our fragmented copyright system is ill-adapted to the real essence of art, which has no frontiers. Instead, that system has ended up giving a more prominent role to intermediaries than to artists. It irritates the public who often cannot access what artists want to offer and leaves a vacuum which is served by illegal content, depriving the artists
of their well deserved remuneration. And copyright enforcement is often entangled in sensitive questions about privacy, data protection or even net neutrality.

It may suit some vested interests to avoid a debate, or to frame the debate on copyright in moralistic terms that merely demonise millions of citizens. But that is not a sustainable approach. We need this debate because we need action to promote a legal digital Single Market in Europe.”

[...]

Kroes is calling for two very important reforms. The first is pan-EU copyright licenses. This would allow simpler trade in legitimate copyright works. iTunes, for example, has never provided services to many EU states, because getting licenses is too complicated.

The second reform is about allowing the use of the vast swathes of music, books, films and photos where the copyright owners have long since disappeared, generally because they have died, and it is unclear where their relatives might be. These are called ‘orphan works’. While the best solution would be shorter copyright terms, there are other possible
solutions.

Here, Kroes’ solution is likely to be more limited and less ambitious. ORG participated in the evidence gathering and debates in the EU, following the Google Books case in the USA. Orphan works create complicated political debates, where particularly photographers have been worried that their works may be incorrectly classed as ‘orphan’. The Google Books debate also showed that there are commercial questions about who might be able to allow access to ‘orphan’ works, and where any money goes.

The result is that an EU orphan works solution may well be designed to deal with academic archival uses, rather than commercial uses. That’s ok as far as it goes, but may mean many old recordings, films and books stay out of print even when they have been digitized.

So today is another good today for those of us who want modern, flexible copyright: but both Kroes and Cameron will need to hold to their principles if we are to get the benefits they are talking about.

[1] http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/10/619&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

[2] http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/cameron-copyright-is-out-of-date