The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
Tags:
If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.
The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business.
Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare.
But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it.
The realm of secrecy and deception among shadowy yet powerful forces may sound like the province of investigative reporters, thriller novelists and Hollywood moviemakers — and it is — but it is also a matter for philosophers. More accurately, understanding deception and and how it can be exposed has been a principle project of philosophy for the last 2500 years. And it is a place where the work of journalists, philosophers and other truth-seekers can meet.
In one of the most referenced allegories in the Western intellectual tradition, Plato describes a group of individuals shackled inside a cave with a fire behind them. They are able to see only shadows cast upon a wall by the people walking behind them. They mistake shadows for reality. To see things as they truly are, they need to be unshackled and make their way outside the cave. Reporting on the world as it truly is outside the cave is one of the foundational duties of philosophers.
In a more contemporary sense, we should also think of the efforts to operate in total secrecy and engage in the creation of false impressions and realities as a problem area in epistemology — the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. And philosophers interested in optimizing our knowledge should consider such surveillance and deception not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but as real sort of epistemic warfare.
To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.
Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.
Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.
Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”
(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)
In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them.
The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.
This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities.
Several months after the hack of HBGary, a Chicago area activist and hacker named Jeremy Hammond successfully hacked into another private intelligence firm — Strategic Forcasting Inc., or Stratfor), and released approximately five million e-mails. This hack provided a remarkable insight into how the private security and intelligence companies view themselves vis a vis government security agencies like the C.I.A. In a 2004 e-mail to Stratfor employees, the firm’s founder and chairman George Friedman was downright dismissive of the C.I.A.’s capabilities relative to their own: “Everyone in Langley [the C.I.A.] knows that we do things they have never been able to do with a small fraction of their resources. They have always asked how we did it. We can now show them and maybe they can learn.”
The Stratfor e-mails provided us just one more narrow glimpse into the world of the private security firms, but the view was frightening. The leaked e-mails revealed surveillance activities to monitor protestors in Occupy Austin as well as Occupy’s relation to the environmental group Deep Green Resistance. Staffers discussed how one of their own men went undercover (“U/C”) and inquired about an Occupy Austin General Assembly meeting to gain insight into how the group operates.
Stratfor was also involved in monitoring activists who were seeking reparations for victims of a chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India, including a group called Bophal Medical Appeal. But the targets also included The Yes Men, a satirical group that had humiliated Dow Chemical with a fake news conference announcing reparations for the victims. Stratfor regularly copied several Dow officers on the minutia of activities by the two members of the Yes Men.
One intriguing e-mail revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for intelligence on PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) with Stratfor vice president for Intelligence claiming that “The F.B.I. has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I’ll see what I can uncover.” From this one could get the impression that the F.B.I. was in effect working as a private detective Stratfor and its corporate clients.
Stratfor also had a broad-ranging public relations campaign. The e-mails revealed numerous media companies on its payroll. While one motivation for the partnerships was presumably to have sources of intelligence, Stratfor worked hard to have soap boxes from which to project its interests. In one 2007 e-mail, it seemed that Stratfor was close to securing a regular show on NPR: “[the producer] agreed that she wants to not just get George or Stratfor on one time on NPR but help us figure the right way to have a relationship between ‘Morning Edition’ and Stratfor.”
On May 28 Jeremy Hammond pled guilty to the Stratfor hack, noting that even if he could successfully defend himself against the charges he was facing, the Department of Justice promised him that he would face the same charges in eight different districts and he would be shipped to all of them in turn. He would become a defendant for life. He had no choice but to plea to a deal in which he may be sentenced to 10 years in prison. But even as he made the plea he issued a statement, saying “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right.” (In a video interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong this week, Snowden expressed a similar ethical stance regarding his actions.)
Given the scope and content of what Hammond’s hacks exposed, his supporters agree that what he did was right. In their view, the private intelligence industry is effectively engaged in Psyops against American public., engaging in “planned operations to convey selected information to [us] to influence [our] emotions, motives, objective reasoning and, ultimately, [our] behavior”? Or as the philosopher might put it, they are engaged in epistemic warfare.
The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” — literally, “the state of not being hidden.” Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth. It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is. There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete.
This is the key to understanding why hackers like Jeremy Hammond are held in such high regard by their supporters. They aren’t just fellow activists or fellow hackers — they are defending us from epistemic attack. Their actions help lift the hood that is periodically pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.
Peter Ludlow is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and is currently co-producing (with Vivien Weisman) a documentary on Hacktivist actions against private intelligence firms and the surveillance state.
244 Comments
Share your thoughts.
Nothing new under the sun. Just becomes more sophisticated, more secret, and more expensive each time around.
The first Gulf War was deceptively promoted by an American PR firm that blatantly lied to Congress.
And of course COINTELPRO was a notorious mechanism of disinformation, infiltration, surveillance, and provocation of peaceful protestors in the 70s.
Outsourcing it to private spooks just adds a layer of crony profiteering and firewall of plausible deniability.
There's nothing new about that either: think Pinkerton.
The "Founding Fathers" could not have foreseen the overarching influences of the military-industrial complex, and while the concept of separation of church and state is part of our constitution, perhaps now what is needed is a divestiture of loopholes and establishment of oversights to keep industry and government in separate beds.
Our government sounds as bad as the Chinese government! Wow. That's bad...
Is there really such a thing as "the world as it is?" I agree there can certainly be more or fewer layers of intentional deception... is that what you mean?
This is news? The Bush administration hired media groups to specifically tilt the propaganda wind in a favorable direction for invading Iraq under the “slam dunk” allegation Iraq either possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) or that it had attempted to purchase uranium in Niger.
Whether contractors are hired to actively engage the enemy as real soldiers, launch propaganda against American citizens, or monitor all foreign bound emails and phone calls, the inescapable truth is that the privatization of an inherent governmental function endangers our collective freedoms.
For what could be more dangerous? A contractor whose very existence depends on the generation of intelligence? A contractor skilled at obfuscation---a war is launched on a sea of allegations? Far fetched? Just ask the families of the nearly 4,500 US war dead who died for a war where the catalyst for war, WMD---was never found.
Now we need someone to expose the other shoe dropping. If private companies are doing all this for the government, how online information about us is being shared where it counts the most...between our employers, prospective employers and bank managers?
Most of us who look for work send application after application into cyberspace and 99 times out of a hundred never hear back and never get so much as an interview any more. Once a background check is authorized, none of us have any idea how far that background check goes or what algorithms an employer may be using to screen for what they want in an application. But if one googles on background check, civil suit, one can find companies that will check prospective hires to determine whether they have ever been a plaintiff in a lawsuit for any reason. In other words, employers are free to hold it against you if you have ever stood up for your rights for any reason, an employer can find out about it. This needs to come out.
Given the nature of the leaks from Snowden (and others) it is obvious the government intelligence agencies lack intelligence (such incompetence that a lower mid-level person in a contracted agency would have access to these classified documents?).
However, Prof. Ludlow's key assertion here is not the government's information gathering apparatus, but that of private corporations. These private firms have no one to answer to but their shareholders. The governments can, rightly or wrongly justify their actions under the umbrella of "national security. Corporations however, use these very similar strategies and tactics to gather information and disseminate misinformation to unsuspecting Americans (and others) simply to increase profit. That is immoral on all levels and companies that engage in such activities ought to be publicly disclosed.
Unfortunately, who will do the "outing?" Too much of the media restricts criticism of their current or potential corporate sponsors. Some journalistic courage is necessary here.
Let's keep in mind which of our noble political parties is gung-ho to privatize every smidgen of our government. I'm sure a large quantity of the profits flow backward into the hands of these congresscritters.
One of the problems with the government intelligence agencies is that the pay scale doesn't hold up to what these private con-men can make, so it is simply honesty and the desire to do good deeds that keeps their nose to the government wheel.
There is only one ultimate truth: the GOOD that you can do for others.
Your government may betray you, your boss may lie to you, your colleagues may conspire behind your back, a friend may turn out to be your foe, but your integrity is unassailable. It's up to you.
People may not always be sure what they're looking at is evil, but they have no doubts about pure goodness.
Truly, this has been around for a century. The great preacher Beecher went down because of a sex scandal that was broken by the Claflin-Woodhull sisters on Broad Street. Their newspaper was financed in secret by Cornelius Vanderbilt. They were arrested and jailed and in the subsequent hoopla the NY press had to admit, there really was a sex scandal where Beecher was concerned. None other bu the NY Times lead the way. In point of fact Vanderbilt was likely targeting Beecher's church, which was financed by the chief lawyer of his arch rival Fisk & Gould over the Erie Railroad Stock. Private investigators were hired liberally by either side in that struggle. So as most of the NY State Assembly (boy that sure has improved). The motives, techniques and false history hasn't changed, just the technology and the medium. McLuhan was really not correct. The medium is not the message. Techniques can be adjusted but the message is still the same. Money trumps intelligence, history, and ethics unless a lot of lock, perseverance, and the public is brought to bear.
If the National Power Grid were hacked would that be how all of a sudden everyday Americans became personally aware of cyber terror. Perhaps our 1st line weapons systems become disabled. What would tail chasers want then? What Government Agency failed to monitor the Internet on our behalf. Most would want the electricity back on. When the power was restored I am sure the investigation into how this could possibly hapen would begin. Pick and choose. Because of our obvious political polarization every statement & action is 50% wrong. If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about.
"If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about."
In a country where you will get beat or shot by the police for being the wrong skin color, still, in 2013, doing nothing wrong is still not enough.
This is, of course, the same government saying "If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about" that invaded a country over falsified WMD intel, murdered a million citizens, tortured, illegally detained and set up countless more.
It sounds to me that axiom is better applied to our government. If they had nothing to hide, they'd nothing to worry about. But instead, we have the panopticon surveillance state of today so desperate to hide the truth about what it does in the citizenry's name.
If you don't want it to be seen, write a letter. It worked well for a very long time.
The unshackled might just as well turn around and investigate the people walking behind, those stoking the fires, making (and selling) the chains, locking up the prisoners in the cave. I do realize it's just a metaphor, but mightn't that be just one such element of how the chains are instantiated? That is, through the deployment of this very allegory? One should, presumably, go outside, learn of the world in the light of the good, attain levels of generality, etc. On that basis what actually goes on in the cave would be accessible to competent investigation, which would be a specific, topical ontical/ontological investigation, yielding a category such as your "epistemic warring" or what I would call epistemence or epistemic violence. Or perhaps epistemologence, where this occurs at a more fundamental level. But the inflection of general categories for their violence potential must release itself from the most original violence of philosophy (among other things): the failure to unfold the question of nonviolence as such. Here the situation of said shackles emerges more probelmatically. The "set up" inherent in philosophy has restricted this basic "fundamental ontology" that is not ontology: the unfolding of nonviolence. Revolutions await minds capable of thinking and promoting nonviolence (like what occurred in Egypt). I think this nonviolence is buried somewhere beneath the fire pit in the cave. Grounded depolemicizing may then speak to the NSA issues more originally.
"the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is."
The problem is that no one really knows how deep the illusions go. The very ideas of space and time and separately existing things (including the thing called self) are ultimately illusory.
Until philosophers understand how deep our illusions go, we're going to continue to believe that epistemic warfare will make "my life" better without also degrading the quality of that very same life.
The key lies in understanding the distinction between relative and absolute; a distinction that, from what I can tell, no practicing philosopher understands.
Clarifying this distinction is the subject of my book The Ultimate Distinction: Resolving Our Biggest Philosophical, Spiritual, and Practical Problem.
Perhaps professor Ludlow in his next article can lay out a methodology by which a person can avoid being deceived in life--or at least a method which tries to do justice to whatever natural abilities a person is born with in life. Many people probably cannot be helped by any method to avoid deception. Others might benefit by some sort of method.
But what method other than the tried and true over history--relentless self-education? How many people here posting understand that a person should try to read widely in all subjects and learn about methods of all types--from how to fix a broken arm to play a musical instrument to run an economy? The point is no one knows what truth is and to keep certain people from deceiving one in life one must unfortunately learn as widely as one can about life.
Saying the right wing is trying to deceive you or that the left is trying to create a socialistic state amounts to assertion which really helps no one; what does help people is method against being taken in by assertion of all types in life. But this is science, reasoning, depends optimally on natural ability and education. A far bigger problem than any group trying to deceive people in life is the nonsense the majority of people speak every day. Common ignorance.
If you remain stupid you will be deceived. The answer to deception is not exposure of truth for the simple reason that truth depends on discipline, education, natural ability to reason--you have to make yourself see truth.
Great piece -- and I am already wondering about who paid (and to what end) the writers of some of thel responses that were submitted. Poo-pooing the matter or over-enthusiastic endorsement or attacks on side elements of the article could all be parts of a campaign to discredit the article a.s.a.p. This is truly scary, even if similar tendencies are to be found in all governments since the stone age. They didn't have the means to create reality based on fake information that we (or rather: the purveyors of false truth) have today.
I've got three examples of creating a falsified realities to further political agendas off the top of my head. The forged document that stampeded Janet Reno into widening Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation to include Monica Lewinski using the Paula Jones civil case. Another was a real document showing Bush's National Guard duty was incompetent but changed so that it could be debunked as fake which cost a good reporter, Dan Rather, his job and standing. And, the BBC getting a photo of Iraq military torture that could be found to have been made in Britain to defang investigations into actual military abuses going on at the time.
The evidence he lays out here is disturbing to say the least, but I can't say I see what makes these cases worthy of the title "epistemic warfare." The government has been keeping secrets from us since there was a government. This seems neither revelatory nor particularly philosophical to me; it's deception, plain and simple, and I can't say this piece convinced me that we've arrived at an Orwellian future where 2+2=5. Furthermore, most of the cases discussed here are not examples of widespread deception, but of underhanded surveillance tactics: getting dirt on PETA is not the same as waging a war on reality.
This was an impressive piece of muckraking on a weighty topic, but the philosophical angle - that private security is waging a 1984-like war on truth - falls flat.
Really good job, thank you. I hope that its place in the NYT. a liberal paper, will contribute to making liberals get past their denial. 1984 has arrived at last, and it came from a direction liberals didn't expect.
The idea of leaking a forged document to a reporter, then exposing the forgery to discredit the reporter and the story, sounds a lot like the Dan Rather/George W Bush Texas Air National Guard caper.
Since each individual's perception of "reality" differs... The real war is inconsistent and is therefore nonexistent.
Mere nihilism.
Refer to novelist James Clavell's rendition of the Art of War by Sun Zu, who lived in Ancient China.
First words of book: "The art of war is of vital importance to the state. it is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected." Last words; "Spies are a most important element in war, because upon them depends an army's ability to move."
"All warfare is based on deception."
"Humanity and Justice are the principles on which to govern a state, but not an army; opportunism and flexibility, on the other hand, are military rather than civic virtues."
"In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."
Here are the 5 essentials for victory according to Sun Zu. He will win who::
1. knows when to fight and when not to fight;
2. knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces;
3. whose army is inspired by the same spirit throughout all its ranks;
4. prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared;
5. has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
" If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
Let our leaders study it so they may understand what they are doing and what has to be done.
So now our own government sees us all as the enemy.
The "Art of War" stuff is cited endlessly. Perhaps it is time to learn the art, and the essence, of nonviolence, of breaking apart war itself. If all one thinks is war, all one can do is enter into battle, which the NSA is doing itself, of course. This time of nearly endless wars and the glacial coming to the realization of the need for the transcendence of war itself in order simply to end them, while generals on the ground and chicken hawks will insist their incessant necessity, only makes clearer that we are living in the poverty of thought of nonviolence. While the revolution of Egypt, which was successful in large part due precisely to nonviolence, remains uninteresting, we are ramping up support for embattled, sectarian Syria, and deftly chose strategic intervention in Libya. But as for actually promoting real nonviolence in the Middle East as a real counter to terrorism, we are vary far indeed from this. Such nonviolence does something to the "fighting" you wish to see finessed: it deconstructs it in very basic ways, for fighting remains the impinging of violent, painful and mortal force, whose limits are obvious, the cooperation gained by which is illusory, and which feeds the overall climate of coercion. Nonviolence as a primary case may seem laughable to some. That laughter is in a strange parallel to the crocodile tears of retribution; both are ignorant of an essential nature that is not explored so long as our philosophy remains ensconced in the logics of war.
Dear Professor Ludlow,
Brilliant and beautiful and relevant. This is what "The Stone" was meant to be at its best.
Thank you.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
Themis- The Goddess of good counsel (sic)
Palantir- Thats the wizards ball from Lord of the Rings.
I wish I could laugh about it
Please NYTImes, more articles (and comments) like this
and less high end real estate and middle east articles
please!!
oh!
and thanks Prof Ludlow!!
correction to previous comment:
"without fear of arrest"
Read More Comments