09/19/13 – Peter Ludlow – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
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Our first guest today is Peter Ludlow.
He's a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and writes frequently on digital culture, hacktivism, and the surveillance state.
Welcome back to the show.
Peter, how are you doing?
Hey, pretty good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
You know, it was the strangest thing.
Over there on the Twitter a week or two ago, I was notified, I think first by you, that my interview of you and maybe other interviews that I had done had been used by the federal prosecutors against Barrett Brown in a hearing to gag his lawyers from speaking to the press.
Now, you're not one of his lawyers.
I never spoke to one of his lawyers, so I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything, but then they won, and they got their gag order.
Do I got that straight?
Yes.
Basically, they got their gag order.
Now, in the end, the defense came to some sort of agreement, which is going to allow Barrett to talk about other topics, because I think there was a threat hanging over him that he'd be gagged completely, but yeah, in effect, the prosecution effectively got their gag order in place, yes.
And wow.
You're right.
Not only did they have their gag order, in the evidence that the prosecution provided, there was a CD, which included, among other things, a recording of our interview, and then they had a transcript of our interview, too.
And that was evidence why they needed a gag on Barrett Brown.
I guess maybe you should take it as a compliment.
It means your audience is so large that after people listen to you and me talk about Barrett Brown, it's going to be impossible for them to impanel a neutral jury.
That must be the rationale.
It's the craziest thing I've ever run across.
Well, listen.
Our only saving grace is the incompetence of the executive branch of our government, so thank goodness they have no idea what they're talking about, especially on that.
It's very weird.
The other thing is, it's as though they never heard of the Streisand effect, because the minute the gag order went into effect...
They never heard of the what now?
Because I'm not sure I have.
What?
Oh, the Streisand effect.
Well, if you check out hashtag Streisand effect on Twitter, for example, it's just cases of where people don't like the publicity they're getting, and then they try and shut it down or stop it, and what it does is it has the effect of generating ten times the publicity.
And that's, in effect, what's happened from this gag order.
The minute the gag order went into effect, my inbox blew up with media inquiries, starting with the New York Times.
For the first time ever, they took an interest in the Barrett Brown case.
So this is like when the pop star tried to get her picture removed from the internet, and it just became a meme.
That kind of thing is what you're talking about.
Yeah.
No, it's exactly like that.
Funny.
In a way, it's creepy, because they had in the evidence that the prosecution presented, there was just a list in which my name appeared seven times, because I had written an article in the New York Times in which I mentioned Barrett Brown in a paragraph.
We bat-mated in there.
The article I wrote in The Nation was in there.
A couple of radio interviews I had done.
No, I don't understand, honestly.
I do understand that there's no such thing as a rule of law in America, and they can just do whatever they want.
But I would like to understand at least what their attempted argument is here, because it sounds like what they're saying to the judge is, hey, judge, look, the media is covering this case, and so therefore, there ought to be a gag on the defense.
But I don't see how that follows, and I don't see, I mean, and look, it's the other Scott Horton is the lawyer.
What the hell do I know about it?
But I thought that it's perfectly fine for the media to cover criminal cases, and so what?
Again, I never talked to his lawyers.
His lawyers never came and gave me an hour interview where they went on and on and on and on in a way that somehow could be interpreted as compromising their hearing process or whatever the hell, however they would want to say it.
I interviewed a professor about it.
What does that have to do with anything?
Exactly.
So there are two issues, right?
One is, was the prosecution, sorry, were the defense lawyers orchestrating something?
And number two, does that matter?
I mean, for granted, let's just take number two.
Why should someone not have the constitutional right to defend their innocence in public with the media?
I mean, what- So in other words, if you were a paid- Possibly be more important.
You're saying if you were a paid consultant working for his lawyers, then still, so what?
You should still be able to come on the show.
When is it more important to be able to express, have free speech when you've been falsely accused of a crime?
I mean, when could it be more important to have that right and to exercise that right?
So the idea that someone is trying to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech when they've been falsely charged with a crime, the idea that that should be taken away is just astounding.
But second of all, I mean, the first point is, was the defense team even doing this?
And the answer to that is no, it's just some fantasy that the prosecution invented.
Because my articles were written, I mean, my article for The Nation, for example, was written before the defense team was on board.
Well, then Democracy Now picks up the story because they read The Nation.
You presumably read one of those two things, and so you called me.
The defense team had nothing to do with this.
Right.
Well, I mean, I called, I contacted one of the lawyers for fact checking on my article.
That's it.
That's my contact.
Well, look, I mean, again, I'm not a lawyer and I don't really understand the background and the history of the case law and this, that and the other thing, but it seems like a gag would be to prevent the prosecutors from smearing a defendant all day, every day on the nightly news before they ever get a chance at their trial.
Because, of course, what we're talking about in the case of any of these public prosecutions by these government employees, they have the entire resources of the state on their side.
And whoever you are, you're just little old Barrett Brown.
And so that's why the burden of proof is supposed to be on them.
And that's why all, you know, deference to the accused is supposed to be provided here, like in, you know, the American system and all of that.
You're absolutely right.
You said something that was wrong just a few minutes ago, and what you said was wrong is you said there is no rule of law.
It's more accurate to say there's like an inversion of the rule of law.
That is, the law has been taken from being something which protects individuals like Barrett Brown, and it's now been turned upside down and it's being used to unfairly, and I believe unconstitutionally in this case, punish people like that.
It's now become a force to punish the innocent.
And so it's worse than a failure or a breakdown of the rule of law.
It's a subversion and an inversion of the rule of law.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you may have read Glenn Greenwald's latest book, Liberty and Justice for Some, where he makes the point that, come on, it's always been unfair.
If you can afford the Johnny Cochran's of American history, you've got a hell of a lot better chance of being acquitted, right?
And John Adams on, if you're paid, the law always was sort of kind of unequal.
On the other hand, the ruling establishment always at least claimed and probably mostly really believed in having equality under law, if in no other way.
At least under law, there should be some form of equality, this, that, but the advent of our modern era is now they don't even pretend anymore.
Now they'll blatantly say things like, this guy's too rich to prosecute, or, well, you know, we want our long national nightmare to be over, or let's look forward, not backwards or whatever.
And they just outright renounce even the principle that there ought to be equality under the law.
I think that's right.
They're just getting, they're no longer, you know, reciting the lines and so forth because they figure it doesn't matter.
I mean, at this point, they just proceed and do what they want to, and there isn't even a lip service paid to equality at this point.
Yeah.
You know, MJ Rosenberg and I were having this conversation the other day about how, well, it seems like at least for the last two presidents, five years in, they have their Katrina or their Syria debacle or something, and that's when people are finally over it and lose their faith in them.
And I was arguing that maybe that's a reason to keep these guys longer so that we'll have presidents that no one likes and no one trusts and no one wants to see accomplish anything.
You know what I mean?
And instead, we have this, still, no matter, I mean, we've had nothing but Nixon since Nixon at least, you know, depending on how far back you want to go.
And yet every four or eight years, they get this stamp of it's just fine because the democratic process has ratified the worthiness and the justification of these people's power, you know, even when they're just Bushes and Obamas and Clintons and have no real right to rule at all, you know?
I think it's shameful the way Democrats are circling the wagons for Obama on this surveillance stuff and, you know, giving him a pass on the whole Snowden business and the NSA business.
I think it's an embarrassment.
I mean, you know, I used to be a big donor to Democratic Party and nobody, I mean, they called me just yesterday.
I said, no, I'm not going within 100 miles of you guys because you've circled the wagons around Obama on this business, you know, and the way he's, in effect, prosecuted people like Manning and now he's chasing down Snowden and so forth and letting the NSA continue with its unconstitutional behavior.
I mean, how do you support something like that?
Good question.
And, of course, the answer is you can't.
And that all brings us, of course, to your piece, your most recent piece in the New York Times.
I believe it's the spotlight on antiwar.com today, the banality of systemic evil.
And I really like this.
It's sort of a Milgram study-ish sort of angle on human behavior and I guess you're trying to help the New York Times readers understand how someone like Snowden could do what they do in the face of David Brooks-like thinking, which is probably the thinking of a great many New York Times readers anyway about how, and this was with Jeffrey Toobin and so many establishment opinionists had to say about Snowden and Manning, too.
How dare you?
It's not up to you to decide what gets declassified.
That's for dear leader only and the narcissism of someone like Snowden to dare.
And you're trying to explain why it was that Snowden, he wasn't committing treason.
He was, at least in his own mind, trying to do the right thing.
But in the face of what?
Why wouldn't he just use the proper institutions the way David Brooks would ask him to do?
Well, for the same reason that Benny and Drake, those other guys at the NSA tried to, the same reason that Bradley Manning tried to, they go off the chain of command.
It's not like these people that say, oh, I don't like this.
I'm going to leak it.
Snowden went to supervisors just like Drake did, just like Benny did, just like Manning did and they all just say, shut up, stuff it, I don't want to hear it.
And there's a kind of institutional logic.
That's why in the article I talk about this book, Moral Mazes, which is a book that sort of explains the kind of rules of conduct when you're in some sort of organization.
And it's always just shut up, don't tell your boss about a problem, just ignore it.
And that's what a good corporate citizen does, that's what a good organizational person does.
And that is kind of the root of systemic evil.
So it's not bad people sitting around in a boardroom trying to do bad stuff, it's the fact that we all just play our little roles in the organization and sort of follow the logic of the organization and don't kick bad news up to our boss and we don't challenge our boss.
And because we don't challenge our boss, because we don't think where is this organization taking us, that is kind of the source of the real causes of evil in this world.
And that's the thing that all these whistleblowers saw.
That's what Manning saw, that's what Snowden saw, that we're on this big machine and it's just in motion and I've got to like jump off the machine or throw a spanner in the works because I can't just keep letting it go in this direction.
Yeah, I guess people just assume, we're brought up in government schools to assume that it's all just a self-correcting thing.
As long as you have regular elections, you'll have good people in there and it'll all take care of itself.
And here these guys are up against a system that is not self-correcting, you know?
They're doing their part and then they're seeing the evil continue.
See, here's one of the interesting things about this.
It's not even, you know, sometimes we think, well, this decision should be left to the guy at the top or something, but even the person at the top of the food chain is part of this system.
So even if you run the company, you have to answer to the shareholders or the board of directors.
And so it's like, really, you have these systems, whether it's the military, a corporation, or whatever, in which no one is charged with making the moral decision.
And that's the flaw that sort of, you know, Bolton and all these people who say this was above Snowden's pay grade.
There is no pay grade at which these decisions are being made.
And the fact of the matter is, if you're sitting in a chairman of board's office or anywhere else up the hierarchy, you're not in a better position to see when the organization is moving in an immoral direction.
I mean, like a private first class might be in a better position to know that the military is going in a wrong direction than a general is.
Someone in the mail room might know better than, like, the chairman of the board.
I mean, the fact that you are paid more doesn't mean that you are in a position of ethical superiority to everyone else in the organization.
And it's up to each of us as individuals to be morally responsible, right?
And this is precisely the problem.
They say, oh, it's not his responsibility.
How arrogant of him.
It's not arrogant to say this organization is doing evil.
In fact, it's your responsibility to point that out.
And it is your moral duty to be alert to these things.
It's not arrogance.
It's duty.
Well, yeah, I mean, you really nailed it right there about the diffusion of responsibility.
It's just like a public handling, right?
We all murder the guy just a little bit.
And so we all get a little bit of pleasure out of exercising the power of the hanging.
But none of us is really to blame for killing him.
And even the guy with the lever has got a black hood on.
And so he's not responsible either, even though, you know, he's just acting as an agent of the rest of us or whatever.
And this is how it's funny, because, you know, I'm a libertarian, so I get arguing with people all the time.
And people a lot of times assume that when I'm arguing that the state itself is, you know, supposedly aggression legitimized and I don't think it's legitimate and I think aggression is aggression and and and evil that then they'll extrapolate that I'm what I'm really saying is that every blue haired old lady that works down at the Social Security office is evil or every guy who works at the parks department is evil or whatever.
When the point of it is that it's it's an evil system.
Obviously, the parks and the Social Security administration aren't the very worst parts of it or whatever.
But like if you read Daniel Ellsberg's book Secrets, he talks about how, you know, every virtually everyone who works at the Pentagon or in the national security state, they all think that they all know so much better than everyone else because of the access to classified information that they have, that the rest of us nobodies don't have that, you know, it's like they're all looking at us from the top of the Empire State Building.
We're the tiny little ants and they're the masters of the universe.
And they'll keep their secrets just fine because they wouldn't even know where to begin explaining the real truth to us nobodies.
And and they'll just keep right on.
They conceive of themselves as entirely separate from the rest of us in their knowledge and and then therefore their ability to make these choices for the rest of us, too.
I think that's right.
But I also think it's important to realize that we all think that way in the sense that, you know, we all say, well, don't tell me how to do my job.
Right.
And like, if you knew what I knew and all that stuff and you put people in these positions of power and they don't want to be told how to do their jobs and they assume, like, as is human nature, that people who are being critical of what they're up to are just mucking up the works.
They're just getting in the way.
And so then they start to, you know, you start classifying everything if you have the power to do that.
So people can't see the, you know, the relevant documents and so forth, because why should they be able to see it?
Because they're just not going to understand what it really means or they're going to misinterpret it.
And I'm in this position where I understand and hence you do get that.
And I don't think these are evil people.
I think these are humans like you or me.
And this is how we all kind of work when we're in an organization and we sort of set up firewalls to protect ourselves.
We try and, you know, sit on information that we think would be misinterpreted.
And we just it's not like, oh, my God, look at these evil people.
It's like when you build an institution like that and put fellow human beings in it, this is the result that you get.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, remind us a little bit about Aaron Schwartz, because I think his story is a really important one.
And the price he paid was the ultimate one.
And it gets a mention in your article here.
Right.
I think Aaron's I thought that Aaron's case was relevant.
He wasn't working in a corporation or an organization per se, but he was, in some sense, part of the system, which is the distribution of knowledge.
And he was very concerned that we have all this knowledge that this scientific research we do and people write papers and it's paid for by public money.
And then these are published and then they're put behind a firewall so that only people who pay for it or perhaps people that are affiliated with a research university have access to it.
And he thought that was a private theft of public culture.
And so he downloaded a number of scientific journal articles that were behind a paywall.
They downloaded them from an organization called JSTOR.
He did this at MIT.
And he was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is to use a computer system in an unauthorized manner.
And basically, the government was charging him with 35 years in prison for this quote unquote crime, and they drove him to suicide.
And the real tragedy of this is that recently MIT came out with a report on the whole thing.
This is after his death.
And the conclusion of the MIT report said two things that are very interesting.
One is that it's not clear at all that he violated the rules of access for MIT.
So first of all, there's no evidence at all that he actually broke any law.
And JSTOR, who held the documents, wrote a public message saying, we're not interested in pursuing this.
We don't really care.
Okay?
So basically, the guy was persecuted to death, threatened with 35 years in prison and persecuted to death, literally to death, because of a non-crime.
At MIT, this is very interesting, a famous computer scientist named Hal Abelson authored this report.
And he said the real issue here is what happened with MIT?
Because why didn't our faculty and students understand that what was happening to Aaron Schwartz could happen to any of us?
And so I believe it's leading to some real soul-searching at MIT, which is, you know, why weren't we more concerned?
Why weren't we fighting for this guy?
Yeah.
Well, and I think this gets lost in the article, too, is he never even uploaded these articles to anything.
He didn't put them all on WikiLeaks or any kind of equivalent to it.
He may have been planning to at some point.
He may have, well, changed his mind about whether he ever would.
Right.
I mean, not that that would have been some horrible crime, but...
No, I mean, you might say it was like a tremendous act of civil disobedience.
And we all paid for those journal articles.
Why is it we don't all have access to them?
Right.
Yeah, it's more like...
And I wrote an article about that.
Yeah, it's more like he planned to go sit in at the lunch counter, but he didn't even do it, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, oh, that's right.
No, that's right.
Yeah, that's true.
It's like he got pulled over and arrested on the way to Woolworths, where he got to the lunch counter.
Right, right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and now, the federal prosecutor here, people really...
I'm enjoying the public mood in America right now, where an actual federal prosecutor is under some heat and has some...
And maybe this is part of the Facebook and Twitterization of American political opinion and that kind of thing, too, where she's made herself famous now for driving poor Aaron Schwartz to suicide, and she's had some other problems, too, but it does go back to that whole thing about diffusion of responsibility, the people versus Aaron Schwartz.
So she could really waterboard him 183 times to death or whatever she wanted, and it's still not her fault, you know?
It's not her responsibility.
She's just acting as an agent of the people through their democratic processes, whatever, and all of her choices, the responsibility for her choices are diffused on all the rest of us.
I think that's right.
I mean, Holder backed her up, he said, well, we don't have an issue with the prosecution in this case.
Now, there's a political dynamic in that case, and the only reason she's getting some heat is because she was an up-and-coming Democrat in Massachusetts, and people were even talking about her as a possible gubernatorial candidate.
And so Darrell is the kind of a daunched Republican in Congress who's investigating her.
And so even though we can say, yeah, great, good job, Congress is doing its job, and investigating this horrendous act of prosecutorial overreach is probably, at the end of the day, just political stuff going on.
Well, that's the best you can hope for, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll take what I can get, yeah, exactly.
That's even in the design, right?
No one must be made to check in, Bish.
We'll just have a bunch of scumbag senators and congressmen and presidents investigating each other all the time.
Hopefully, they'll be too busy oppressing each other to enslave the rest of us completely anyway, you know?
Well, I think that was actually the reason we constructed our system of government that we did with the checks and balances, which is, you know, the founding fathers had a lot of problems, but they did get this part right.
As long as, you know, you set it up so that the senators of power are, like, fighting each other and checking each other in some sense, hopefully things don't get completely out of control.
Yeah, we need more of that, too.
And in fact, you know, I think the American people in general agree with that, because all things being equal, you know, if it's just the invasion of Iraq time, that kind of thing, that throws a variable in the works there, whatever.
But for the most part, in off-year elections, the president's party loses in Congress.
People will even, even though the parties aren't in the Constitution, where we use that as one extra check and balance, you know, most of the time.
Right, right, right, right, right.
Anyway.
Well, and so that's a good fact.
The recent poll said that trust that government will do the right thing, make the right decision, etc., is at an all-time low, which is the best news I've seen since Rouhani and Obama writing nice letters to each other.
I would say that the problem is that there's a kind of thick system that sort of, you know, it's not accidental that we get people that are trampling on rights or bombing willy-nilly.
It means that there's something deeper going on, whether the government's been captured by corporate interests or something like that, and we end up basically prosecuting wars for our corporate donors or whatever, or whether, you know, we're trampling on rights for similar reasons.
I think that it's not, the first step is absolutely just for people to wake up and understand what's going on, and then we get to the hard problem about what's the source of this problem.
What's the deep source?
Let's not just cure the symptoms, let's cause the cure, sorry, let's cause the actual source of this problem.
It's the empire.
It's the empire.
Ever since World War II, the military never went away like it was supposed to, and it's at the root of everything that's wrong, and everybody knows it, at least in their heart, you know?
Come on.
It's the power to abuse, right?
That's what Harry Brown says.
It's not the abuse of power, it's the power to abuse.
When every aspect of our society is up to Congress to decide, well, then you're going to corrupt every aspect of your society, you know?
They have too much authority in the first place.
It might be that this much power is going to be inherently problematic.
That's a possibility.
Although you would like to ask a question like, can something, an institution like the United States government, is there a way to make it less evil, or to engage less often in these kinds of wars of aggression, or attacks on privacy and personal freedom?
And these are difficult questions now.
Well, we've seen a bit of that.
I mean, the people just stopped the war in Syria with a little help from Vladimir Putin, but that was the public, said no to that.
And you know, I think the next time Amash introduces his NSA bill, we might see some real progress there, too, so it's not impossible.
We can hope for this, yeah?
I mean, again, I think it's a deep problem, and you're going to have to root out the source of the problem, which, whether it's corporate takeover of government, regulatory capture by corporations, they're going to be, first of all, it's going to be difficult to isolate the problem, and second, it's probably going to be more difficult to actually do something about the problem.
Can I just say one thing before I've got to run, but I wanted to say, you were talking about the fusion of responsibility, and I just wanted to add here, my favorite example of that, and my favorite illustration of that of all time, is in the movie The Grapes of Wrath, and I don't know if you remember seeing that, or if you ever saw it, but there's a great scene where this businessman comes out to this farm where these sharecroppers live, and they're broke, you know, they've got nothing, he's going to foreclose on them, and they're like, well, you know, who is responsible for this, was it the banker?
And they just, no, no, it's not the banker, he's got to answer to someone in Tulsa, or whatever, Tulsa, and then they've got to answer to someone in New York, and then a guy is sitting there going, well, who do we shoot?
And the guy in the car goes, I wish I knew, buddy, I wish I knew, because it's all diffused, it's like no one individual is actually responsible.
The problem is we're in the middle of a sick system.
That's the problem.
It's a systemic problem.
It's not that there are bad people in the government, or bad people running the show, it's a sick system.
Yeah, and boy, now it's even worse, because now it's, hey, the computer says, so it's not even the person you can't find, it's the computer screen you can't find to point your finger at and blame, you know?
True enough.
Yep.
All right, hey, listen, I really appreciate your time back on the show, Peter.
All right, thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Talk to you again someday.
Bye.
All right, that's Peter Ludlow.
He's a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, and his latest in the New York Times, it's opinionator.blogs.newyorktimes.com.
The banality of systemic evil.
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