From 50 Years of Teaching and Training Torturers,  Counterpunch, Nov. 3, 2004 an analysis of the Kubark Manual on torture techniques.

Some excerpts from the article:

Item

“It notes that psychological rather than physical debility will break a suspect sooner: “The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.”

Item

“Caballero said the CIA taught that psychological coercion was more effective than physical torture.”

Item

“Fay’s Abu Ghraib report makes the same point about dehumanizing interrogations degenerating: “What started as nakedness and humiliation, stress and physical training, carried over into sexual and physical assaults.”

Item

This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort and humiliation
has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning and near asphyxiation.”

Item

“The Fay report noted that nudity likely “contributed to an escalating ‘de-humanization’ of the detainees and set the stage for additional and more severe abuses to occur.”

Lila: Physical torture was actually seen by interrogators as less effective than psychological torture, but an inevitable development from it.

Note how psychological stressors were the means to break down the subject – isolation, dehumanization, humiliation, and sensory deprivation.

Dehumanization, isolation, and humiliation are all inextricable parts  of cyberharassment.

All of these are considered torture in its most sophisticated form, according to the CIA itself.

Item

“Many psychologists consider the threat of inducing debility to be more effective than debility itself.”

“Bullying,” like “hazing” and “ragging” (in India), are part of the inculcation of the brutality that undergirds imperial culture.

They are practices specifically introduced into British public schools for developing the character required to man the empire. From that has developed the attitude of indifference to what is nothing more than training in psychological cruelty.

Being stripped publicly on the net is no different psychologically from being stripped physically.

The fact that it happened in the “good old days” doesn’t turn it into a good thing.

Cyberstalking as defined by law in Florida

Florida cyberstalking law does not require a direct threat of death. It is sufficient that the target fears for his or her safety or family member’s safety:

784.048 Stalking; definitions; penalties.—

If Americans Knew.org has a critique of the Loftus-Aarons theory that the attack on the Liberty was in self-defense:

“Where do they get this stuff?” several of my USS Liberty shipmates asked after reviewing the Loftus-Aarons chapter on the Liberty. “Do they make it up?”

It would seem so. Many of these fables started with Anthony Pearson in his book Conspiracy of Silence, published in England in the late 1970s. Pearson asked me to join him in that effort. I refused. Then I learned that he was lying about alliances with a prominent writer, a senator, and a dozen Arab countries. Still later I learned that most of his book was a lie.

Pearson created the “Major Blue” fable and a host of other fairy tales related to the Liberty. Many of the stories lived on, only to be repeated and embellished by others. Pearson is also the creator of the weird story that has an ICBM submarine lying 90 miles off the Israeli coast during the Six-Day War, ready to nuke Tel Aviv if necessary to keep the Israelis from using nuclear weapons against the Arabs.

Pearson, sadly, was dying from a brain tumor when he wrote his book. It rendered him paranoid. He died on the run from the Mossad, which he believed was trying to silence him. He spent his days slipping in and out of London subways to evade his pursuers; he rarely slept in the same bed twice.

His book reflects his paranoia. Sadly, Pearson’s ramblings are constantly picked up and further embellished by other writers who fail to understand just how sick he really was. Then those writers cite one another as sources for their ravings, never bothering with any serious research or verification. Now, Loftus and Aarons bring 25 years of misinformed embellishments together and give them credence with long lists of “confidential sources” whose identities are known only to themselves.

In a very real sense, this is dangerous, because some of what they say will be believed. Suggestible people will be frightened for no reason, and that should not happen.

In the end, the only thing Loftus and Aarons seem to have gotten right is the fact that the attack was no accident. Even that, they justify as being “necessary.” It was not.”

From the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics:

“Some may have thought that Loftus extremely pro-Israel and anti-Arab bias is a bit suspect. They are right. Loftus has been an organizer and president of “the Intelligence Summit”, a club filled with hard-right intelligence, special forces, and psychological warfare veterans from the United States, Britain and Israel.
http://www.intelligencesummit.org/speakers/JohnLoftus.php: “John J. Loftus President, The Intelligence Summit” .
This is an extremely weird bunch of people. Among the members of the executive and advisory board are:
* Lt. General Tom McInerney – retired high U.S. Air Force officer. Senior military analyst for Fox News. In 2004 wrote ‘Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror’ with co-Intelligence Summit officer Paul Vallely and an introduction from Oliver North.
* Dame Pauline Neville-Jones – former chair Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), a coordinating body for MI5, MI6 and the GCHQ [British NSA], and a controversial BBC governor.
* Major General Paul Vallely – veteran in special operations, psychological and civil-military operations. Co-authored a 1980 paper with then PSYOP analyst Michael Aquino (a Satanist accused of massive child abuse) entitled From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory.
* Richard Marcinko – Former Navy Seal turned author.
* Lt.Col. Gordon Cucullu – special forces veteran who sits on the board of the neoconservative Benador Associates.
* Lt. Col. Bill Cown – special forces veteran with “extensive experience with the CIA”
* Clare Lopez – former Field Operations Officer for the CIA.
* Wayne Simmons – special forces veteran recruited by the CIA in 1973. Terrorism Analyst for the Fox News Channel since 2002. Part of the Pentagon Outreach Program for Military and Intelligence Analysts under Rumsfeld. One of the first outside Intelligence officers to visit Guantanamo Bay.
* Yoram Hessel – former Senior Mossad Officer, now in the high technology business.
* Robert Spencer – director Jihad Watch.”

I

An Amazon review of  “Invading the Sacred” (by reviewer Sutapas Bhattacharya).

My Note:

The book describes how inadequately trained and maliciously motivated American scholars in the field of religion use the general ignorance about Hinduism to misinterpret, distort, and outright demonize Hindu thought and history.

What is significant for geo-political strategy is that Tantric Saivism, which the author mentions as the most accurate Indic portrait of consciousness, is preserved in its best form in the South of India, the locus of Western interference in Indian politics, under the guise of a war on terror or in the course of Afro-Dravidic consciousness-raising.

Western incursions into South India have been bent on dispossessing Hindu temples via state interference mediated by so-called secular Marxists, who turn out to be proxies for the power-elite.

Through eco-feminism centered around the Shekinah (the Kabbalistic correlate or derivative, of the divine feminine of Tantric Saivism), the goal is to appropriate the thought of  Hinduism, divorce it from its spiritual heritage, and reinsert it into a materialistic-hedonistic philosophy consonant with the vision of the elites.

Hence the continuing psychic war on India I’ve blogged about:

Here is the review:

“Indians who criticize Western scholars in regard to their dubious interpretations of Hinduism and Indian history are generally denounced as Hindu fundamentalists, fascists and right wingers in order to detract from issue of Western racism. I am in fact a left-leaning Indian and no Hindu fundamentalist, see my 1999 book on the synthesis of Science and Mysticism, in which I attack the BJP. On seeing this book I was amazed that long-discredited Freudian superstitions (see below) are allowed to pass as scholarship in academia – this book does not challenge the basis of Psychoanalysis, rather an Appendix essay by an American psychoanalyst is given which questions the validity of such Eurocentric Freudian reductionism to the Indian context and mysticism. I will give scientific arguments undermining Freud below. See the website […] the sacred.com for more info. Note also that Jeff Kripal who mistranslated Bengali words like ‘lap, head and touching softly’ as ‘genitals, phallus and sodomy’ in his attempt to portray Ramakrishna as a homosexual pedophile is now linked to the New Age Esalen Institute!
Adam Curtis showed in his BBC Series Century of the Self that Freud’s dubious ideas caught on in the USA through the influence of his nephew Edward Bernays due to Freud’s titillating emphasis on SEX. Similarly we find that Wendy Doniger’s works sell because she focuses on sex, sex and nothing but the sex, writing racy books with the sex element hyped up in spite of their inauthenticity and her struggling with first year Sanskrit! I was amused by de Nicolas’ example of how she used a Hebrew translation for a Vedic word making ‘the world of possibilities’ into ‘the one-footed goat’!

[Lila: Shades of Naomi Wolf….]
I had noticed in 1991 that the 6th East-West Philosophy Congress book “Culture and Modernity” edited by Advaita scholar Eliot Deutsch gave pride of first place to Eliminative Materialist Richard Rorty who believes that Consciousness does not really exist!

Rorty asserted that “ascetic priests” like Heidegger and Brahmins sublimate their sex drives and pretend to ‘penetrate the veil of appearances’ so as to claim to be more manly than the warriors!

Thus first position in a East-West philosophy book was given to an American who not only denies the reality of Consciousness (the (primary reality of Advaita Vedanta and much Buddhism) but uses the thoroughly discredited Freudian sex-mythology to supposedly undermine the claims of mystics to transcend mundane reality!

Were Hildegard, Mechthilde and Teresa trying to be more manly!

I also noticed in 2002 that Thomas Blom Hansen in his “The Saffron Wave” chastised Hindu Nationalists for reworking German Romanticist ideas (with no mention of the heavy Indian philosophical influence behind Romanticism founded by the Sanskritist Schlegels) whilst himself referring to the likes of Freud and Lacan (whose pretensions to Einstein-like genius were exposed in “Fashionable Nonsense”) as if these European thinkers were ‘scientific’.

Coming from a Science background and having identified the physical correlate of the Divine Light (cit, Atman, Buddha Nature, Godhead)with overwhelming empirical evidence for this and showing how Science and the core Indian transcendental mystical picture are integrated, I basically treated such ludicrous Freudian myths with the contempt they deserve.

Indeed, I am currently writing a comprehensive section entitled “The Failings of Western Philosophies, Psychologies and Science in regard to Mysticism and Consciousness” including a subsection “Sigmund Freud’s Sexual Superstitions and the Regression to the Womb Myth”. In fact my overall analyses show by undermining every possible form of western ontology that the only viable ontology is one based on distinctionless Pure Consciousness as the Ground from which physical phenomena manifest as in Tantric Kashmir Saivism – i.e. a logical argument by elimination of alternatives rather than “experience it in mystical union”.

I was just reading this week Thompson and Madigan (2005) Memory (a survey of recent research)which asserted that there is no scientific evidence supporting Freud’s key notion of unconscious Repression of memories.

David Bakan’s 1958 “Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition” showed that Freud secularised Kabbala omitting supernatural elements in his “psychoanalysis”. In 1973 Morton Schatzman in his ‘Soul Murder’ showed that Schreber’s father had disciplinary devices and real child abuse had been misinterpreted by Freud as unconscious fantasy based on the nonsensical Oedipus Complex idea! In the 1980s Masson’s “Assault on the Truth” and Peck’s “The People of the Lie” continued to undermine the Freud Cult.

Freud urged Jung never to abandon the sexual theory and even “we must make a dogma” of it. Jung stated that F’s obsession with the primal incest archetype led to dogmatic rigidity. Medical doctor and psychiatrist Anthony Stevens rubbishes Freudian interpretations of dreams of predatory animals as ‘fear of castration’ when REM dream research shows that such instinctual dreams of being chased prepare all young mammals for life’s dangers. F was also wrong to locate all mental problem origins in infancy as Stevens shows adolescence and attaining ‘manhood’ etc. are more critical than early childhood. Schwarz and Begley point out that Foot Fetishism is explained by the brain maps of feet being adjacent to maps of genitals with some overlap, contrary to F’s ideas about sexual deviations. Griffin and Tyrrell whose work is followed by the UK NHS rubbish Freudian talk therapy as it usurps normal healing processes based on sleep etc.

Finally, in regard to F’s primary notion of the Libido, such a notion of a “sexual energy” is just nonsense scientifically as opposed to Jung’s notion of Libido as a generalized psychical energy. Indeed, Jordens essay on Libido and the Prana/Atman identity in Harold Coward’s “Jung and Eastern Thought” provides one of the many pieces of evidence supporting my identification of the Atman/Prana with the underlying activating energy of the brainwaves of the brainstem Reticular Activating System. This ties in with Jung’s ideas of generalised energy as the RAS is simply that, the energy underlying all gross brain activity and the brainstem Reticular Formation is the only structure essential for consciousness. Thus whilst undermining more serious philosophical ideas, my RAS brainwave/Light of Pure Consciousness correlation also undermines the nonsensical Freudian myth of an underlying Sexual libido!”

–
Sutapas Bhattacharya

Update:

Check out this Guardian article from 2012, by a so-called Christian priest, Paul Oestreicher, suggesting that Jesus was gay, based on misreading the word for love in the text of St. John (which is agape, or spiritual love, not eros, or erotic love).

Please note, I’m not demonizing gays here. My point is that these sorts of readings seemed to be based on obvious misinterpretation of the original text, and point to a consistent agenda.

Just as Doniger claims to be “HIndu,” Oestreicher claims to be “Christian,” yet both are inserting extraordinarily idiosyncratic and unsupported readings to impose a view that the objects of Christian and Hindu veneration are homosexual (and in the case of Hinduism, pedophilic).

Make sure to read through the comments at the bottom of this idiotic Guardian article to see that the majority of readers see through this kind of nonsense.

Aditi Banerjee, Oh You Do Get It Wrong, Outlook India,  October 28, 2009

[Note: Outlook India is a left-liberal outlet and the author of this trenchant critique of Wendy Doniger is not a Hindu fundamentalist but a Yale-trained lawyer.]

Note that while professing to be extremely sympathetic to Hinduism, Doniger, the most influential scholar in the field in the West, lacks first-rate facility in the languages she needs – Sanskrit and Tamil – for original interpretation and instead relies on her command of Latin and Greek to read secondary sources, and that too in a misleading way. ]

Wendy Doniger (Mircea Eliade Distinguished Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School and in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago) was recently interviewed in Outlook with reference to her new book, The Hindus: An Alternative History.  In the interview, she (1) falsely and unfairly brands all of her critics as right-wing Hindutva fundamentalists, and (2) grossly mischaracterizes (and misquotes) the text of the Valmiki Ramayana, calling into question her “alternative” version not just of the Ramayana, but also of Hinduism and Hindu history as a whole……..

Defamation of Critics

The introduction to the interview begins with a misleading quote:

“[Doniger] has continued to infuriate the Hindutva brigade with her unorthodox views on Hinduism and its sacred texts, earning for herself the epithet: “crude, lewd and very rude in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit academics.””

The quote implicitly attributed to the “Hindutva brigade” is actually from the BBC web site:

Professor Wendy Doniger is known for being rude, crude and very lewd in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit Academics. All her special works have revolved around the subject of sex in Sanskrit texts ranging from Siva: The Erotic Ascetic to Tales of Sex and Violence…Never one to shy away from sex, she threw herself into the job of translating the [Kama Sutra] … She was particularly interested by the parts that justify adultery and the list of ways to get rid of a man … When she was translating it (over a period of a few years and numerous Sanskrit classes), she frequently found herself having to take cold showers. [1]

The misleading use of this quote sets the tone for the rest of the interview —heaping blame on a nebulous, undefined, straw man “Hindutva Internet Brigade” for the whole continuum of criticism of Doniger’s work—criticism that has come mostly from moderate and liberal Hindus, secularists, non-Hindu scholars and even one prominent Harvard Indologist who is not known for being friendly towards Hindus.  Rather than confront the actual criticisms, Doniger pretends that her only critics are Hindu extremists, and by rebuking this “enemy” she tries to deflect any criticism of her work.

Just as some politicians resort to picking on their weakest critic to discredit all of their critics, Doniger picks one stray comment on the Amazon web site to characterize all of her critics—when asked to describe the Hindu-American response to her book, Doniger exclaims, “My favourite one on Amazon accuses me of being a Christian fundamentalist and my book a defenxe of Christianity against Hinduism. And of course, I’m not a Christian, I’m a Jew!”

It is totally irresponsible for such a prominent professor, whose career is built on writing about Hinduism, to stereotype and vilify the entire Hindu-American community on the basis of the actions of a few.

Doniger’s refusal to address her critics only worsens as the interview proceeds.  When asked why Hindus object to her writings, she flippantly replies:

You’ll have to ask them why. It doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with the book. They don’t say, “Look here, you said this on page 200, and that’s a terrible thing to say.” Instead, they say things not related to the book: you hate Hindus, you are sex-obsessed, you don’t know anything about the Hindus, you got it all wrong.

This is a bald lie. The first Part of the book, Invading the Sacred, documents and refutes dozens of statements by Doniger, as illustrated by the following:

• “Holi, the spring carnival, when members of all castes mingle and let down their hair, sprinkling one another with cascades of red powder and liquid, symbolic of the blood that was probably used in past centuries.”  (from Doniger’s article about Hinduism in the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia—Microsoft Encarta subsequently removed her entry in 2004; while we do not know this for a fact, one can reasonably conclude that Microsoft Encarta came to an internal conclusion about Doniger’s lack of scholarship and objectivity).

• From a newspaper article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, dated November 19, 2000, entitled “Big-screen caddy is Hindu hero in disguise” written by David O’Reilly, Inquirer Staff Writer:

“Myth scholar Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago was on hand earlier this month to lecture on the Gita.  “The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think,” she said, in a lecture titled “The Complicity of God in the Destruction of the Human Race.” “Throughout the Mahabharata, the enormous Hindu epic of which the Gita is a small part, Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war in order to relieve “mother Earth” of its burdensome human population and the many demons disguised as humans … The Gita is a dishonest book; it justifies war,” Doniger told the audience of about 150” (emphasis added).


Doniger may now claim that she was misquoted, but she has failed to obtain a retraction from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

• Prof. Michael Witzel, Wales Professor of Sanskrit in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University posted the following remarks about Doniger’s translations to a mailing list and called her translations “UNREALIABLE” [sic] and “idiosyncratic:”

• Doniger’s “rendering of even the first two paadas [of the Rg Veda] is more of a paraphrase than a translation;”
• “In this hymn (of 18 stanzas) alone I have counted 43 instances which are wrong or where others would easily disagree.”
• “Note that all 3 translations are Re-translations. Mistakes of the type mentioned above could easily have been avoided if the work of our 19th century predecessors (and contemporaries!) had been consulted more carefully … Last point: Looking at the various new translations that have appeared in the past decade or so: Why always to Re-translate something done ‘several’ times over already — and why not to take up one of the zillion Un-translated Skt. texts?” [2]

Is that specific enough?

Nor can Doniger claim ignorance of these examples, having been made aware of them through emails, various conferences, journals and mailing lists by many people, including university professors, fellow scholars, and students.

As a scapegoat tactic to discredit her critics, Doniger plays both the sex card and the race card, without offering any evidence for being discriminated against on the grounds of her gender or her race:

I think I have a double disadvantage among the Hindutva types.  One is that I’m not a Hindu and the other is that I am not a male.  I suppose the third is that I’m not a Brahmin, but I don’t even get there because I’m not a Hindu.   I think it’s considered unseemly in the conservative Hindu view for a woman to talk about sex—that’s something men talk about among themselves (emphasis added).

But her critics have been concerned not with her gender or race but only with the content of her scholarship.  Race and sex bias are the “cards” Doniger uses to distract readers who are unfamiliar with the details of the substance of the critiques against her.

Hindu society acknowledges and celebrates any genuine scholars of Hinduism, irrespective of their gender, race or caste.  For example, the late Sir John Woodroffe / Arthur Avalon is regarded by even the most traditional and orthodox of Hindu acharyas, including the late Shankaracharya of Sringeri, as one of the great Tantric scholars of modern times—despite his being neither Hindu nor Brahmin-born.  In addition, Dr. Klaus Klostermaier, University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba (Canada), is highly respected in Hindu circles. Linda Johnsen, neither male, Hindu, nor Brahmin-born, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hinduism (2002) among several other books, is also highly regarded for her knowledge about Hinduism.

This respect is not just academic—non-Indian spiritual gurus have been revered by Hindus as well.  Daya Mata (Faye Wright), another female, non-Hindu, non-Brahmin (by birth) of the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) was highly regarded by the most traditional and orthodox of Hindu leaders, including (I have been told) the late Shankaracharya of Sringeri, a great scholar and authority on Hinduism. Similarly, Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble), female, non-Hindu, non Brahmin-born, perhaps the most prominent of Swami Vivekananda’s disciples, has been revered as a true Hindu saint by many orthodox Hindus, including Brahmins; so also has Mother (Mira Alfassa), the Frenchwoman closely associated with (and successor to) Sri Aurobindo.  I could go on with a list of lesser known women of foreign birth who are equally acknowledged as true representatives of Hinduism.  I have not even touched upon the scores of Indian women who have been revered by Hindus from the Vedic times to the modern day—e.g., Gargi, whose open debate with the great sage Yajnavalkya is prominently featured in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad.

Moreover, the idea that “it’s considered unseemly in the conservative Hindu view for a woman to talk about sex–that’s something men talk about among themselves” is another blatantly false stereotype by Doniger……...

There is also the celebrated account given in the Yoga Vasistha of Queen Chudalai, an advanced yogini, who initiates her husband, King Sikhidvaja, as her disciple; she tests his renunciation repeatedly and instructs him on the proper attitude towards sexual union and sensual pleasure…..

As these examples show, not only were women allowed to discuss sex, they had the authority and scriptural and social standing to challenge and teach the greatest of sages and the most royal of men with respect to all subject matters, including sex and eroticism……..

“In a personal context, I can say unequivocally that despite my birth and upbringing as an American and my liberal schooling in Boston and at Yale Law School, my most honest and open discussions of sex have been with the most orthodox and “traditional” of Hindu swamis and acharyas.  They helped me unlearn the associative guilt and sexual repression of Western mores.  They also taught me that sexual desire is, in the appropriate context, an integral part of life and that there is nothing sinful  or shameful about it, and that heightened sexual energies are not antithetical to, but can be an integral part of, spiritual development for people qualified (adhikaris) for those types of sadhana or spiritual practice.

In short, playing this race and sex card may be an attempt by Doniger to elicit sympathy—but this cannot substitute for sound scholarship.  In the traditions of true academic scholarship, Doniger should let her work stand or fall on its own merits and not hide behind false victimhood. ”

Update:

Since posting this, I checked up on Loftus, one of whose books, “The Betrayal of the Jews,” is linked in the post below.

It seems there is major disagreement about him.

While conceding his expertise and successful professional work, some who were on board the USS Liberty claim that his book on the subject is misleading and based on unnamed sources and false accounts. Right-wing propaganda?

Charles Burris at LRC:

As he was dying from lung cancer, the legendary Machiavellian CIA head of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angelton, provided author Joseph J. Trento this startling candid confession:

You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends . . . They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all . . .

Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it . . . Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offiie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.

Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, pages 478-479.

_________________________________

NOTE (Some previous blog posts relevant to the material linked above)

Blog posts related to  Angleton, Colby, Agora, and the rest.

“Doug Valentine on the Empire of the Lie,” December 29, 2009

World Gold Council, Rothschild-backed Fund, Buys Stakes in Bullion Vault,” June 23, 2010

Soros ad Shock Therapy In Poland,” April 20, 2012

“The Ronald Reagan of Columbia,” September 28, 2012

“Was Pegasus Behind the Murder of Bill Colby?,” August 29, 2012

“Paul-Lehrman Connection Meaningless, Says Daily Bell,” August 24, 2012

“Lila at the Daily Reckoning,”

“More Agora,” 2009, updated many times.

“Turning Beach Sand in Gold, the Goldcor Swindle, April 10, 2009

“Systematics threatened Agora over Danny Casolaro’s Death,” Sept. 27, 2012

Started in 2009, I believe, and then updated. I’ve put in dozens of links to material but they disappear mysteriously. Webpages to which I’ve linked are taken down or disappear. I’ve put the links back and they disappear again.  There is software that enables blogs to be hacked without leaving a physical trace. The multiple updates are to keep track of the lies of a certain net troll, who takes my pieces and then deliberately misrepresents them.  Possibly, has financial mafia connections.

Welcome to virtual reality.

COMMENT

The  post by Charles Burris at LRC started an immediate train of thought about the wider effects of revenge porn laws.

Would laws proscribing nude/sexual material put a crimp on outing anyone in public office?

The Weiner case has been cited, but not convincingly.

In the first place, I’m not sure that Weiner’s antics even rose to the level of a public issue….unless he really was stalking his constituents on Twitter.

Secondly, it’s perfectly possible for someone to reveal what Weiner was upto, without putting photos of his private parts on the net.

His targets could show chat sessions to journalists/investigators, who would affirm publicly that they had seen them.

If a president has prostate cancer, is there any need to publish a public photo of his body to “inform” the public?

Obviously not.

But what about my contention that publication of private email correspondence, private conversations, and candid camera shots, without consent, should also be clearly signaled as a violation of rights?

Wouldn’t that get in the way of outing criminals in government or their accomplices?

Not at all. There is, first of all, a distinction between matters of public concern (the behavior of government or police or intelligence personnel) and the behavior of private citizens.

In their public capacity, no business or political dealing of an official should be off-limits to public scrutiny.

What about private business transactions of public figures (that is, how they made money before coming to office)?

That is tougher to address in a principled fashion, because I think it’s still fair to leave public officials some room for privacy, because, contrary to net rumors, they are human beings.

However, I think their right to privacy should be limited to personal matters, not to business affairs, which inherently involve the public (that is, people outside their family and friends).

That means journalists would be free to access tax papers, business records etc., as needed, as far back as needed, as long as they did it legally.

If nothing, that would stop a lot of people from going into public office, in the first place.

My worry about conversations being recorded and used to threaten or coerce journalists stems from my own experience involving telephone conversations with a certain libertarian blogger, in which we discussed a number of other activists and issues.

I suspect very strongly that those conversations were recorded.

The very fact that journalists can be recorded  puts a crimp on their ability to blog.

How is THAT not chilling?

Far more chilling than any law that automatically criminalized non-consensual personal material on the net.

[Note my reasoning on this again:

The individual might have consented to having photos taken in a private context. Such consent doesn’t automatically extend to public display of the photos. If you give permission to someone to enter your home once to fix a sink, does that mean that they’re allowed to come in later to steal your furniture? Even if you gave them a key,  you still retain your right not to be robbed. ]

Obviously, there are invasion of privacy laws already on the books.

Equally obviously, it’s hard to charge someone with invasion of privacy if the person who did it might have been a proxy, rather than a principal.

In other words, the guilty party used someone else to do his dirty work.

Furthermore, invasion of privacy laws are pointless, if pursuing them damages ones privacy even further.

Finally, if malicious intent is used as a test, the law can easily be circumvented, since any anonymous blog can redistribute private material without a problem, as they can claim to be motivated by money or curiosity, not malice.

That’s why a simple, uncomplicated law against the public posting of private photos or conversations or emails that do not show explicit consent would restrain third-party dissemination, off the bat.

No malice would need to be proved.

There is nothing libertarian about hacking private conversations or recording them, even if some theorists have so argued.

On the other hand, laws attempting to circumvent anonymous commenting on blogs are on the face of it a violation of legitimate free speech protection.

Portable real-time eavesdropping on the brain is now working technology, according to a report at the Volokh Conspiracy:

“Consider this – one of my favorite neuroscientists, Jack Gallant, is building a brain-mind map. In one of his extraordinary studies, he showed subjects YouTube videos while monitoring their brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He then built a computer algorithm “dictionary” of the brain (this brain activity corresponds to this image in the YouTube video, and so forth). Using his brain/mind/dictionary, he showed the subject new YouTube video clips that the computer didn’t get to “see” and the computer had to “guess” what the subjects were seeing. The results are really striking. Of course, an fMRI machine is enormous, so law enforcement isn’t going to use it in the field anytime soon (or ever). By contrast, portable brain monitoring has serious potential. (Full disclosure – I already own two Neurosky portable electroencephalograph (EEG) devices, which I use to hack into my own brain activity to improve my concentration, to meditate, and more.) The Parvizi study used electrocorticography. Since we already have really simple EEG devices (they don’t measure much just yet), you can bet it’s just a matter of time before we get high-quality portable brain monitoring. In fact, DARPA has been gearing up for just that (check out its “Portable Brain Recording Device & App” Project, SB131-002). Is this the future of law enforcement and surveillance?”

Eugene Volokh:

“Of course, I can imagine a few situations in which such depictions might contribute to public debates. But those situations are likely to be so rare that the law’s coverage of them wouldn’t make it “substantially” overbroad (even if the “no legitimate purpose” proviso is seen as too vague to exclude those valuable non-consensual depictions of nudity). Any challenges to the law based on such unusual cases would therefore have to be to the law as applied in a particular case. A facial challenge asking that the law be invalidated in its entirety, based on just these few unconstitutional applications, would not succeed.

I recognize that United States v. Stevens (2010) held that “The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits,” and that First Amendment exceptions be limited to “historic and traditional categories long familiar to the bar,” such as obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and the like, which are “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942).

But even under this sort of historical approach, I think non-consensual depictions of nudity could be prohibited. Historically and traditionally, such depictions would likely have been seen as unprotected obscenity (likely alongside many consensual depictions of nudity). And while the Court has narrowed the obscenity exception — in cases that have not had occasion to deal with non-consensual depictions — in a way that generally excludes mere nudity (as opposed to sexual conduct or “lewd exhibition of the genitals”), the fact remains that historically such depictions would not have been seen as constitutionally protected.”

Comment:

Volokh’s credentials, both as a libertarian and a scholar, are impeccable.

Even so, even if constitutional,  it doesn’t mean that the new law might not be poorly drawn up.

As a matter of fact, what I saw of the California law, with its reliance on proof of malicious intent, seemed quite toothless.

But it is at least a starting point.

Contra Volokh, an across-the-board  law against the posting of nude/sexual pictures, without the subject’s explicit consent, would be better.  Naturally, entertainment or pornography involving consenting adults would be excluded.  So the charges of “anti-porn” would be defanged.  Porn addicts can still download triple XXX stuff to their heart’s content. They just can’t download material with non-consenting subjects.

I think that kind of simple clear law is less likely to be gamed, actually, than one that is hemmed in by too many ifs and buts.