There's something from the systems perspective that illustrates the difficulties faced by whistleblowers and also explains why vast networks of corruption can be so hard to reform. Corruption in a network often reaches a tipping point, or critical mass. And once that point has been reached, the mass of the network becomes far greater than any individual or group within the network; and keeping secrets becomes like a force of gravity.
It's also similar to a long freight train. Think of the force it would take to tip a single freight car off the tracks. But then think of the force it would take to tip it off the tracks if it was in the middle of a quarter-mile long train, with every car linked together. But the lines of force in a network are not just linear; they go in every direction. So how does one fight a network whose corruption has gone beyond critical mass? One needs to create critical mass in the opposite direction. And that's essentially what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa did.
This is also a case of divided loyalties and of being on the horns of a dilemma of betrayal, where one betrays someone or something no matter which way one turns. So if you fear betraying your promise to keep the secret, you have already, perhaps, betrayed the people against whom the secret is being kept from, the American people, for example. Maybe that would be some comfort to people who are considering whether or not to become a whistle blower. But then again, the American people are an abstract quantity compared to colleagues that might be harmed.
Aaron Swartz is no longer among us though the contributions he made to promote free flow of information and knowledge sharing will continue to benefit our present and future generations. He was charged with 13 felony counts for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR and accused of intending to distribute these articles through file-sharing sites.
The manner in which Aaron had been prosecuted offers a sharp contrast to the manner in which our legal system dealt with corporate America after the 2008 financial crisis, where there were no prosecutions of top corporate figures. Sadly, the contrast highlights that trying to disseminate knowledge, quite literally by making academic journal articles available online, is a greater crime than bringing down the United States economy through “corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking.”
Driven by a desire to make knowledge accessible Aaron has been attributed to author the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” Some key excerpts are as follow:
Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable … Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world … It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy … It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
Aaron's untimely death has left us without a great mind and even more importantly a compassionate activist. While Aaron is irreplaceable, we must aspire to freely disseminate the moral imperative he advocated, in the very spirit that he himself would have done.
Huffington Post repritned from Social Research, 13 January 2013
I) Reflections on Secret-keeping and Identity
In the “national security” area of the government — the White House, the departments of state and defense, the armed services and the “intelligence community,” along with their contractors — there is less whistleblowing than in other departments of the executive branch or in private corporations. This despite the frequency of misguided practices and policies within these particular agencies that are both more well-concealed and more catastrophic than elsewhere, and thus even more needful of unauthorized exposure.
The mystique of secrecy in the universe of national security, even beyond the formal apparatus of classification and clearances, is a compelling deterrent to whistleblowing and thus to effective resistance to gravely wrongful or dangerous policies. In this realm, telling secrets appears unpatriotic, even traitorous. That reflects the general presumption — even though it is very commonly false — that the secrecy is aimed not at domestic, bureaucratic or political rivals or the American public but at foreign, powerful enemies, and that breaching it exposes the country, its people and its troops to danger.
Even those insiders who have come to understand that the presumption is frequently false and that particular facts are being wrongly and dangerously kept secret not so much from foreigners but from Congress, courts or the public are strongly inhibited from speaking out by an internalized commitment to keep official secrets from outsiders, which they have promised to do as a condition of employment or access.
āHow long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?āāBob Marley
On January 11, 2013, according to indoctrination organs of the criminal Syndicate calling itself the US government (a Syndicate comprised, for the most part, of big bankers, generals, spooks and, below them, their puppets in the White House and gubernatorial mansions, Congress and state legislatures, and almost the entire judiciary), Aaron Swartz, aged 26, killed himself.
Many on the internet have already traced Aaronās tragic and untimely death directly to the Syndicate.Ā I wish to add my voice to this growing chorus, placing this recent event in a somewhat larger context of historical scholarship.
In relating this story, the Syndicateās propaganda organs conveniently forgot four crucial points:
The Syndicate had excellent reasons to wish Aaron dead.
As in most cases of covert Syndicate assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway), Aaronās death was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.
Ā The Central Institute of Assassinations (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Intimidations (FBI) can and do kill people while making the murder look like suicide.
In America, England, and most other countries, painstaking research by people like Kevin Barett, Jim Douglass, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, David Helvarg, and William F. Pepper discloses an unmistakable pattern: influential friends of the people (and hence, enemies of the Syndicate) tend to die before they reach old age, often under bizarre circumstances.Ā This pattern has an obvious corollary: when friends of the Syndicate die prematurely, we can reasonably assume, with a high degree of probability, that the Syndicate killed them.
Let me expound on these four points, one at a time.
EDIT of 21 January 2013:Ā I have gotten both sharp criticism from folks I revere, and complements.Ā I am more than willing to delete this, but I am more interested in having people think outside the lines.Ā I've made some revisions, adding issues and readings in each section.Ā Ā Email me as you please, robert.david.steele.vivas [at] gmail [dot] com.Ā I'm doing this to raise some ethical nuances, not to deny or revise history.Ā Relevance to today:Ā the “government” rarely tells the truth, and the “reasons” it gives for doing things that ultimately benefit the few at the expense of the many are generally, at best, “flimsy” and at worst, “calculated lies.”Ā All institutions are lacking in both intelligence (decision-support) and integrity (holistic transparent analytics).Ā Wars are a form a global crime, they are not fought for the reasons given, and the public ALWAYS loses while bankers ALWAYS gain.Ā We need to change that.Ā Thomas Jefferson had it right — we need to be better armed than the government — not just guns, but intelligence with integrity.Ā That's what I think about.
– – – – – – – –
A colleague I respect very much suggested I watch Lincoln, the new movie, for an understanding of a leadership style that worked.Ā Having dismissed the movie because of its erroneous depiction of the Civil War as being about slavery (it was actually a war for and against secession, and a war of conquest from the north of the south), I demurred.Ā Today I read the following from Bill Clinton speaking to an adoring crowd in Hollywood, and it put me to thinking about the point my colleague was trying to make:
“A tough fight to push a bill through a bitterly divided House of Representatives: Winning it required the president to make a lot of unsavory deals that had nothing to do with the big issue.” A little shrug. “I wouldn't know anything about that,” Clinton said. His audience laughed.
Abraham Lincoln
President Abraham Lincoln's struggle to abolish slavery “reminds us that enduring progress is forged in a cauldron of both principle and compromise,” Clinton went on. This film “shows us how he did it, and gives us hope that we can do it again.”
I have known for some time that I am viewed as uncompromising, perhaps even arrogant, in my insistence on intelligence with integrity, and my intolerance of the civil service and uniformed leaders who pander to politicians who shake down corporations and banks for campaign contributions, and then discount the public treasury by 95% solely for the purpose of getting their 5% kick-back, without any deep thought of the public interest, and certainly without considering any ethical evidence-based decision-support.Ā Those same civil service and uniformed leaders are never held accountable for failure and roll over into retirement jobs with the industries they have not been holding accountable themselves.Ā At the end of the day, 50 percent of every federal dollar is waste, and the other 50 percent is primarily beneficial to the recipient of the taxpayer revenue, not to the taxpayer.
A mass murder and an alleged suicide are very much on my mind these days.Ā The mass murder is that of Sandy Hook, and the alleged suicide is that of Adam Swartz.Ā I am quite certain that the government is covering up the facts on Sandy Hook, and not investigating the death ostensibly by hanging, of Aaron Swartz.Ā I will return to these in my conclusion.
First I will touch on The War, Principle, on Compromise, and then on Citizen Intelligence / Counterintelligence and finally on Autonomous Internet.
Every donor of at least $15 receives a Golden Candle pin in the mail with a receipt for the donation and a signed bookmark used to hold the pin in place in an envelope.Ā The pin costs $2 and the mailing is 66 cents in the USA, $6 for international airmail.
Select bibliography of terrorism resources
Standard Note: SN/HA/5866
Last updated: 8 January 2013
Author: Diana Douse
Section: Home Affairs Section
A selective bibliography of terrorism resources. This includes reports on terrorism legislation by the Independent reviewer and government policy.
Alexander Horne is the library specialist on terrorism relating to the UK.Ā Ben Smith is the library specialist on international terrorism.
This information is provided to Members of Parliament in support of their parliamentary duties and is not intended to address the specific circumstances of any particular individual. It should not be relied upon as being up to date; the law or policies may have changed since it was last updated; and it should not be relied upon as legal or professional advice or as a substitute for it. A suitably qualified professional should be consulted if specific advice or information is required.
