'Snowden'

The Secret History Of Today

The Guardian had an advance screening of Oliver Stone's new film 'Snowden' so I got to tag along. I was hoping for somebody from the Production to turn up and talk about the film but the Q&A apparently turned out to be about whistleblowing and journalism. I didn't stay for it as I headed to a pub for a feed.

Of course protecting whistleblowers is important, but nobody really steps up to protect those people because they are in a sense, enemy of the state when they do that. The state, has long arms, even longer than the ones it's supposed to have by its own laws. And that's enough of a topic for Oliver Stone to be making this film.

As Oliver Stone films go, it's not as didactic as his other historically inspired films. It feels much like a docudrama, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is a standout. Rhys Ifans turn as "O'Brien" was brought with accent issues. Nicolas Cage has an odd cameo-like role trying to restrain his Nicolas-Cage-Acting, and Zachary Quinto too is understated even by his standard of understated-ness.



What's Good About It

The film lays out who the guy was in the context of the US Security apparatus. We've been told by Barrack Obama he was a hacker. The Stone film begs to differ - and even subtracting from the myth-making for which Oliver Stone has a propensity - the man is not some low level hacker that glommed on to state secrets and absconded. No, he was implicitly and explicitly a careerist in the institutions of surveillance and espionage.

The film goes to great lengths to explain just how intrusive the government had gone through the use of its technology, and how enmeshed the military industrial complex has become in being able to prosecute a data wagon every individual on the planet. As an Oliver Stone film, it's relatively short on bombast and discursiveness, but the cerebral nature of the concern is undeniably Stone's work.

What's Bad About It

It's rather unclear about Snowden's own moral conversion to seeing the point of view where this kind of government surveillance was actually a public problem that had to be dealt with in the public sphere and debated. The motivation is weak - as far as cinematic and dramatic depictions are concerned. That being said, he might indeed have just had a eureka moment that made him do the whistle-blowing.

There's also a lot more to Ed Snowden getting to Russia on his way to Ecuador, which is glossed over with a montage towards the end. The film sort of starts telling that story but curtails that venture quickly and finishes off with a scene to do with Ed Snowden presenting his case in a public forum. The film was already long, but it could have done with the escape from Hong Kong.

What's Interesting About It

The rampant growth of the US Security apparatus came about in the wake of 9/11. It is often argued that the intelligence failure in preventing 9/11 led to this rampant growth, but the film argues that the terror threat is small potatoes next to the big issue of fighting a cyberspace war with China and Russia. Neither of those two states have any democratic shackles to put on their surveillance and espionage in cyberspace while American democracy affords itself restrictions, and thus you have agencies who lie to governments about what they do and how.

If this film were made prior to 9/11 describing an imaginary 2013, it would have been a science fiction-tinged action movie directed by the late great Tony Scott - probably starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. Yeah Tony Scott sure had this story down even before 9/11. As things stand, Stone's film is a very sombre film after the fact, about just how much the US surveillance system has grown and how paranoia may indeed be the most appropriate response to the increased surveillance. Essentially it confirms all of the paranoia from 'Enemy the State'. The sombreness is to be expected given that when you find out all the fantastically wild paranoia is legitimate, your world grows that much colder.

It's Not A Conspiracy Theory If They're Really Watching You

Just how invasive is the surveillance? We've been told by Edward Snowden, just how much infiltration and malware distribution and cyberspace intrusion goes on with not only other nations' leaders but also just about any person on the planet with an internet connection. It's a strange feeling to come to the realisation that these organs have been listening in all the time to everything and have everything indexed ("Hey, including this blog! Somebody's reading this site! Hooray!") and the notion that the world is totally transparent to those who watch creeps you out.

This stuff used to be the provenance of conspiracy theorists. If you talked about stuff like this, people would joke and tell you to go get your tin foil hat. Well, let's look at that "tin foil hat" for a moment.

The reason "tin foil hats" is a thing is because the tin foil hat represents an attempt to place a Faraday cage around one's head to stop electromagnetic scanning of the brains and thus block agencies from scanning one's thoughts. This far fetched notion that a government might be interested in one's private thoughts is pretty much the crux of the issue, and there are no tin foil hats to help us from the prying government. The government, it turns out need not scan the inner workings of your brain, they merely need to parse the output of your mind - all of it - in order to figure out what you are thinking.

At this point in history, we had better accept that the surveillance state is fully in motion, fully in operation and minimally supervised with negligible oversight. It goes so deep and wide, a faraday cage won't protect you.

Oliver Stone's Getting Sad

There used to be an animal gusto to Stone's films. Whether it was the bombast of 'Platoon' and the slow motion as Sgt. Elias buys it in a hail of bullets, or Al Pacino's marvellous speech about life being about "a game of inches" in 'Any Given Sunday', which crescendoes like an emotional volcano. The best bits of Oliver Stone's films had a stink, a skunk musk of animal spirits. This film was surprisingly short of that kind of blood-guts-and-glory. It's probably a better film for not going to the emotional bombast but at the same time I just want to note just how conspicuous by its absence of bombast this film is, in the annals of Oliver Stone movies.

Maybe Oliver Stone was feeling very dry about the topic because the film has an emotional dry quality to it, even when it touches upon the passion Snowden has for his girlfriend, and the emotional turmoil that is central to Snowden's decision to go public with the secret. I don't know if a dried up desiccated Oliver Stone is all that fun in the movie house. I kind of missed the swagger and full-throated declarations. Maybe he's getting more circumspect. He may even be getting sad. It was weird because I felt sad for him, and he's a very successful film maker. He shouldn't need my sympathy, but watching it, I felt sympathetic for him.

News That's Fit To Punt - 13/May/2015

We Live In A Peeping Tom Kind Of World

Pleiades had this link for me today. It's about how the NSA surveillance reaches and, to not put too fine a point on it, they reach everywhere for everybody.

Few people, for example, are aware that a NSA program known as TREASUREMAP is being developed to continuously map every Internet connection — cellphones, laptops, tablets — of everyone on the planet, including Americans. 

“Map the entire Internet,” says the top secret NSA slide. “Any device, anywhere, all the time.” It adds that the program will allow “Computer Attack/Exploit Planning” as well as “Network Reconnaissance.” 

One reason for the public’s lukewarm concern is what might be called NSA fatigue. There is now a sort of acceptance of highly intrusive surveillance as the new normal, the result of a bombardment of news stories on the topic. 

I asked Snowden about this. “It does become the problem of one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic,” he replied, “where today we have the violation of one person’s rights is a tragedy and the violation of a million is a statistic. The NSA is violating the rights of every American citizen every day on a comprehensive and ongoing basis. And that can numb us. That can leave us feeling disempowered, disenfranchised.”

In the same way, at the start of a war, the numbers of Americans killed are front-page stories, no matter how small. But two years into the conflict, the numbers, even if far greater, are usually buried deep inside a paper or far down a news site’s home page.

So basically, if a crime is blatant and big enough, we stop caring. I guess there's some democratic insight into that. We all get taxed. We all get perved. If it's a burden of civilisation that falls upon us equally, maybe we just stop seeing it as an issue and just "learn to love the bomb", so to speak.

That being said...

In addition, stories about NSA surveillance face the added burden of being technically complex, involving eye-glazing descriptions of sophisticated interception techniques and analytical capabilities. Though they may affect virtually every American, such as the telephone metadata program, because of the enormous secrecy involved, it is difficult to identify specific victims. 

The way the surveillance story appeared also decreased its potential impact. Those given custody of the documents decided to spread the wealth for a more democratic assessment of the revelations. They distributed them through a wide variety of media — from start-up Web publications to leading foreign newspapers.

One document from the NSA director, for example, indicates that the agency was spying on visits to porn sites by people, making no distinction between foreigners and “U.S. persons,” U.S. citizens or permanent residents. He then recommended using that information to secretly discredit them, whom he labeled as “radicalizers.” But because this was revealed by The Huffington Post, an online publication viewed as progressive, and was never reported by mainstream papers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, the revelation never received the attention it deserved.

That bits a lot more troubling. Even if this blog has nothing to do with porn, the NSA probably has you tagged as a 'radicalized' (sic) entity. Worse still, the powers that allowed the NSA to do this in America are up for renewal. It's been 14years since 9/11 and really, they have very little to show for doing all this perving.

What Next? The Academy Of Degenerate Art?

The picture of a publicly elected official handing out money to artists directly is not a good look. The Arts Council adds a kind of layer of respectability because presumably some committee meets and adds a cushion between the powers of the day and the artists seeking a grant. But why bother with the semblance of respectable distance when you can just control the budget and hand it out to your favourites?

$104.8 million over four years has been ripped out of the Australia Council’s budget to create a new slush fund, apparently to be decided at the discretion of the Arts Minister of the day. 

The funding cuts total $29 million in the coming year, a cut of 16 per cent for the Australia Council on 2014’s appropriation.
'The National Centre for Excellence in the Arts will allow for a truly national approach to arts funding and will deliver on a number of Government priorities including national access to high quality arts and cultural experiences,' Minister Brandis wrote in a media release.

The budget also removes $5.2 million in funding from the Australia Council, and gives it to Creative Partnerships Australia 'to foster private sector support for the arts'.
In the ministerial media release that accompanies the announcement, Minister Brandis launched a veiled attack on the independence and arms-length funding processes of the Australia Council. 

'Funds for these programmes will be transferred to the Ministry for the Arts from the Australia Council, ensuring that government support is available for a broader range of arts and cultural activities,' Brandis states in the media release.

'Arts funding has until now been limited almost exclusively to projects favoured by the Australia Council. The National Programme for Excellence in the Arts will make funding available to a wider range of arts companies and arts practitioners, while at the same time respecting the preferences and tastes of Australia’s audiences.'

What Mr. Brandis means by 'a wider range', God only knows (as in, "God Help Us All, God Help Us All"). The Arts Council already helps props up the vast village of cottage industries that subsist on government largesse, creating the propaganda that there is worthy Australian Arts - that while the average Australian might not opt to partake of it in any meaningful sense, we'd like to wave around at foreigners as something else to look at in-between a Koala and a Kangaroo. It's hard to say one liked Australia Council before but it's equally hard to say that what George Brandis is doing is any kind of improvement.

Oh, and they cut Screen Australia again. I admit I take great sadistic delight in this. It's more proof that your enemy's enemy is not your friend but still of some bloody use.

Speaking Of Western Civilisation

It so happens to turn out that the guy who started 'Jim's Mowing' has a PhD in history.

Who knew that the Jim behind Jim’s Mowing has a PhD in history? It turns out that Jim Penman only became an entrepreneur because couldn’t get a job as an academic.
Founding and running Jim’s Group has kept Penman pretty busy, but he snatched time here and there to continue his research and published various articles in peer-reviewed journals. Now, 32 years after completing his doctorate at Latrobe University, Penman has published a book called Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West. As the name suggests, Penman believes that Western Civilisation is already decades into a decline that could be terminal.  

His book applies the study of epigenetics – a branch of biology that looks at changes in genetic expression as a result of environmental influences rather than changes to the DNA sequence. Penman’s premise with biohistory is that trends in history have roots in biology – and there is more of this in the book and also on the website where there are two videos explaining the theory. 

It's quite an interesting interview. I can't say I agree with the man, his politics sucks, but he does make some interesting points. He thinks Western Civilisation is in rapid decline.

BRW: What is the cause of this civilisation decline? 

JP: “It’s to do with wealth. It’s the same thing that occurred in the Roman Empire and every other civilisation. When you become wealthy and urbanised, it changes temperaments and behaviours in a way that makes people less disciplined, less hard working, in the end less enterprising. It takes a few generations to take place and epigenetics explains why that happens. People think that technology is going to save us but in fact technology makes it worse because it makes us so rich.” 

BRW: Yet you said that Jim’s Group was investing heavily in technology – can it also be a force for good? 

JP: “Technology makes it worse to the extent that it makes everybody rich and that makes us have too much food. But technology that makes us understand the science to fight against those effects would be a good thing. If we could find a way to reverse it so people would not be inclined to eat too much and naturally want to eat less and be more disciplined in their lives, that would be a good thing.

“Technology is very exciting – Jim’s Group right now is investing heavily in new efficiencies and systems and I love it and think it’s fantastic, but we’ve got to use it in good ways not bad ways. Nitrogen-fixing technology is fantastic and helps us feed the world but it also makes it possible to have huge explosions and devastating wars.

I'm not sure I even agree with that last sentence for instance. He seems be a man beset by ideas about civilisation he can't let go, but he's blind to his own ideological bias.