Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 23

Who Watches The Watchers? On Russia Today

Infopolicy: In Sunday’s “Worlds Apart” show on Russia Today, Oksana Boyko interviewed me about the NSA leaks and the state of civil liberties in the world. I got a lot of positive feedback about that interview, so I’m publishing it here for your convenience.

It’s a bit long – half an hour. The first half is about Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks, and the second half abstracts to civil liberties online in general.

Enjoy.

The post Who Watches The Watchers? On Russia Today appeared first on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Six.

Swarm Management: The swarm must have mechanisms for conflict resolution, for decision making, and for reward culture. There are many ways to accomplish this. A traditional voting democracy is one of the worst.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month

1. Understanding The Swarm

2. Launching Your Swarm

3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats

4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message

5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily

6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God (this chapter)

7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen (Aug 1)

8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential (Sep 1)

9. Managing Oldmedia (Oct 1)

10. Beyond Success (Nov 1)

The actual book is expected to be available by August 1, 2013.

We can easily observe that, in any organization, it happens that one person wants to limit what another person in the organization can do. This creates a conflict. In general, there are four ways to resolve this situation.

You can say that no person in the swarm has the right to limit what another can do. This would be the typical swarmthink, at least as far as nonscarce resources are involved. (When it comes to money, in case the swarm has any, decisions need to be made.)

You could also determine that 51 percent of the swarm has the right to exercise power over 49 percent of the swarm, which would be a meeting-and-voting scenario. This is not only counter to swarmthink, but it also creates a culture of fear of losing rather than a culture of empowerment and action.

You could also go with the principle of somebody having the final decision. Ruling over others by decree is not only completely counter to swarmthink, but it doesn’t work in the first place, as people are volunteers and, quite frankly, do whatever they want.

Finally, you can say that everybody has the power of veto for decisions that concern the entire swarm. While this creates significant border-setting problems with regard to exactly who constitutes “everybody,” it is one of the most inclusive ways to get volunteers on board once that problem has been solved.

Let’s take a look at each of these mechanisms in turn, and in particular examine why voting leads to unforeseen problems.

But first, democracy is often heralded as a praise-be-all because it leads to legitimacy in the elected decision makers. This is true for a country, and paramount on that stage: when citizens don’t perceive their legislators as legitimate, a situation is created which can get quite messy. Democracy has never been the state constitution of choice because of its ability to bring forward the best and wisest managers of a country, but because it has the best ability to stave off disastrous managers, and because the resulting choice of manager has a perceived legitimacy in an environment where all citizens find themselves subjected to the rules of that country.

But legitimacy in a swarm is quite different from legitimacy in a country. People cannot realistically choose to not be in a country, but people do choose to be part of a swarm or not be part of it. Therefore, legitimacy in the decision making of the swarm comes through the fact that people are volunteers in the first place and choose to be part of the swarm, with all the values that come with it.

Therefore, we are free to focus on the conflict resolution mechanisms that produce the best delivery potential for the swarm as a whole. In order for a swarm to function, people need to be happy about being part of it. There is a need to make everybody feel like a winner for pursuing their individual goals through the swarm, rather than choosing to stand outside it.

Here, we arrive at the important key insight:

The process of voting creates losers.

People who become losers are not happy.

Happy people are productive, enthusiastic, and good activists. Therefore, we want happy people.

When it comes to a traditional internal democracy, which is the dangerously easy way out for any conflict resolution, there are important drawbacks and side effects to be aware of. People who anticipate a voting process prepare themselves for the possibility of losing — so they become motivated by fear of losing personally, rather than motivated by the joy of building the swarm that furthers their personal goals.

This distortion of motivation in a voting scenario will cause such activists to behave in a completely different pattern than if they were focused entirely on the end goals of the swarm. It creates a significant shift to defensive stances at the individual level that are harmful to the swarm’s ability to function. We’ll be returning to why.

So, in effect, there are two good ways to resolve conflicts in a swarm.

The first is organizational, and means that we negate the possibility of one person determining what another can do in the first place. Nobody gets to tell anybody else what to do. This is the norm for a swarm. Some people call it a “do-ocracy.”

The second effective method is a consensus-making decision process where everybody can veto the way forward. This method is much more costly, but can (and should) be used in rare and carefully selected scenarios.

Once you have clarified to the swarm that these conflict resolution methods are the ones we use, some people will insist that internal democracy with voting brings legitimacy to decision making. But there is an important underlying assumption at work here: that the collective makes better decisions than the individual activists. As we have seen, the swarm organization relies on the exact opposite.

The values we desire in a swarm are inclusion, diversity, and empowerment. But if we are voting on something, we are limiting the minority — not empowering them. We are letting a 51 percent majority decide what a 49 percent minority cannot do, things that the 49 percent believe would further the swarm’s goals. It is therefore highly demoralizing. Also, we are limiting diversity, as the swarm might need that crazy 5 percent of activists to succeed in a very specialized social context that only they understand, in order to create the perfect storm of different social contexts that cooperate toward succeeding with the swarm’s end goal. Voting as a concept closes and eliminates this route to success. Finally, a swarm is legitimate only because it lets every individual include himself or herself on his or her own terms in order to further the swarm’s goals.

Therefore, “democratic legitimacy” is a contradiction in terms in a swarm organization. The process of voting actively reduces the legitimacy of decision making and involvement, and should be avoided as much as possible.

Instead, let’s look at the other two methods we just highlighted.

MERITOCRACY AND THE LAW OF TWO FEET

People accustomed to voting as a catchall panacea will initially have a hard time adjusting to a swarm meritocracy, as they won’t get to determine what others shall do and not do. But this concept — that no person can have a say over any other — is part of the swarm’s core values.

In a democratic conflict resolution system, individual influence is achieved by the group waiting for a decision point and then voicing individual opinions at that point in time. In a swarm, there is no waiting and there are no such decision points. Rather, influence is achieved by individual leadership and individual appreciation — if you think something needs to be done, you just do it, without asking anybody. If other people think that your initiative is good, they will join in of their own accord. If not, they go elsewhere. Thus, the person taking an appreciated initiative gains immediate influence, which gives the swarm as a whole a tremendous momentum and learning speed.

This has sometimes been expressed as “the law of two feet”: It is every activist’s right and responsibility to go where he or she feels he or she can contribute the most and, at the same time, get the most in return as an individual. If there is no such place within this particular swarm, an activist will leave the swarm and go elsewhere.

(Just for the record, the law applies equally to people in wheelchairs, disabled veterans, and people who otherwise don’t have two actual feet.)

There is no shame for an activist in leaving an activity where he or she cannot contribute and going elsewhere. Quite to the contrary: it is expected and seen as showing respect for the other participants in the activity, who won’t have to keep including somebody who doesn’t feel he or she can contribute.

In this way, the swarm will take initiatives all of its own that further the swarm’s end goal. Activists will gravitate to where they see that they can contribute. And from the founder’s perspective, beautiful things just happen without any need for central control or orders.

EMPOWERING LIKE CRAZY FOR FUN AND PROFIT

The tricky part can be to establish a meritocracy in an environment where people aren’t used to it. Again, this can be established through leadership — using the principle of teaching by example, and allowing others to learn through observation. In a swarm, people will copy the behavior of those with a perceived influence. As the swarm’s founder, you have the highest amount of initial such influence.

I solved this by establishing the already-mentioned three-pirate rule immediately, which was later set in stone as a core organizational principle in the Swedish Pirate Party. As I explained it then, people didn’t need to ask permission, and the concept went beyond that: they were specifically banned from doing so. Their own judgment was the best available in the organization for their own social context, and they were required to use that judgment rather than aspiring to hide behind somebody else’s greenlighting.

Asking permission, after all, is asking somebody else to take responsibility — no, accountability — for your actions. But the person asked is in a worse position to make an informed decision, and so may need to gather data to be comfortable with taking on this accountability. This creates delays and fosters insecurity in the organization.

The key insight here is that even the largest and most rigorous processes can screw up monumentally, to the point where the rest of the world asks out loud what they were thinking. To take a concrete example, one of Sweden’s largest labor unions did a large-scale campaign with the slogan “Work gives you freedom.” This was a multimillion-euro project by one of the largest organizations in the country.

Of course, the billboards came back down again and ads went off the air in the blink of an eye as soon as somebody pointed out the slight…lack of propriety…in the labor union using the same slogan as the Auschwitz extermination camp had used in World War II.

While this may be a humorous episode on the surface, at the expense of somebody else’s facepalming, there’s an important lesson here, too. This was a thoroughly bureaucratic organization with stratospherically high budgets that a swarm can never dream of.

If this kind of rich organization can make that monumental a mistake, then no amount of advance checking can safeguard against making mistakes. Once you realize this, that some percentage of things will go wrong no matter how many safeguards and checkpoints you put in place, and that this percentage is fairly constant beyond the most basic of sanity checks, then you can go into a comfortable zen mode with regard to trusting and empowering others.

For if it doesn’t matter how many safeguards you put in place against PR gaffes, there is no point to bother with such safeguards in the first place. Instead, you can focus on optimizing the swarm for speed, passion, and mobility, and we can communicate to the swarm that mistakes will happen, and when they do, we fix them, learn from them, and move on.

My approach for a very basic sanity check was to have three people agree on an idea as good for the swarm. One person can come up with ludicrous ideas, but I’ve never seen two more people agree on such ideas. This was simple, communicable, and effective, yet enough to retain the full speed and agility of the swarm.

But this attitude has another very positive effect. By communicating clearly that in this swarm, you’re not only allowed to make mistakes, but expected to do so from time to time, you encourage the bold attitude required to change the world. You need not only your own crazy ideas, but the crazy ideas of many others to succeed, and you need to create the climate where they are welcome and rewarded.

MISTAKES ALLOWED HERE

This part is absolutely paramount to communicate to your officers in the scaffolding supporting the swarm — that mistakes are not only allowed, but expected, and when they happen, we learn from them. (It’s a different thing to tolerate somebody making the same mistake over and over, or sabotaging the swarm deliberately, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

When forming a swarm, everybody is venturing into unknown territory. By definition, it’s a trial-and-error venture. Everybody is breaking new ground in changing the world in a way that has not been tried before — both on the individual and the organizational level.

Since this has not been tried before, there is no right answer or concrete experience to fall back on. Everything done has, to some extent, never been tried before. Therefore, by necessity, it becomes obvious that a lot of things tried won’t work out. However, a small portion of the initiatives tried will work out amazingly well, and the swarm will learn from those and build further on them.

The conclusion here is that you must allow things to be tried. The good stuff won’t appear if you don’t allow the bad stuff to be tried, too. You only know which is which once they’ve had a chance to work out.

But it’s not enough to allow things to be tried. We have discussed the importance of optimizing the swarm for speed — as in minimizing the time from somebody’s idea to somebody’s action. But to truly outrun the competition, you need to minimize the iteration cycle — the time from a failure to the next attempt at succeeding. Make it possible to learn and try again, learn again and try again, and so on, and communicate that this is not only allowed, but expected.

Failures are expected, but with every failure comes a learning experience. In almost every organization, a number of failures are a prerequisite for an ultimate success with a particular activity. Make it possible to make those failures in as short a time as possible, minimizing the iteration cycle, and your success will come sooner.

Also, it’s not necessary to speak of failures, as most people won’t see a failure — they will see something that went reasonably OK, but which can be done even better the next time. That’s also the appropriate mind-set for maintaining a positive attitude.

With all this said of a meritocracy or a “do-ocracy,” there are some instances where parts of the swarm really may need to work as a cohesive group, rather than as individuals following the law of two feet. Collective decision making is always hard, and, as previously discussed, democracy creates losers. This begs the question; is there a method for collective decision making that doesn’t create losers? There is not just one, but several. I have a very powerful experience with one such method.

THE MAGIC OF THE CONSENSUS CIRCLE

One good mechanism for arriving at a decision in a (defined) group is called a consensus circle. Rather than focusing on fear of losing through voting, which will cause people who fear losing to just stall what they think is a bad decision, the consensus circle focuses on including everybody and getting people into a constructive mind-set.

I observed this firsthand as we gathered the simulated parliamentary group of the Swedish Pirate Party for a kickoff in the summer of 2010. (We had simulated who might get elected in a sort of best-guess exercise, and, seeing the enormous diversity of the group, we realized that these people needed to learn to work together before getting into parliament, or we might just as well hand out name tags saying “BREAKFAST” on getting elected, as that’s the only name the veteran politicians in other parties would care to learn.) In this kickoff, there was a routine issue the group was in complete disagreement about, and we decided to try to agree on it during the kickoff.

The method as such appears quite simple, but with powerful results: The group gathers in a room. Everybody takes turns speaking about what is important to him or her about the issue, under a time limit of sixty seconds. (It could be forty-five, it could be ninety, but should be thereabouts. Somebody is assigned to use a stopwatch to time the speaking slots.) Everybody can spend his or her sixty seconds however he or she likes: by speaking about the issue at hand, by sitting in silence, by singing an unrelated song, or by dropping to the floor doing push-ups. The idea is that everybody will be discussing the issue, but the point is that each person can spend his or her time slot as he or she likes, and may not be interrupted by anyone during that time slot. Again, empower people. But once the sixty seconds are up, it’s the next person’s turn, going in a circle around the room in one direction of the circle, starting over on coming full circle and giving everybody another time slot, until everybody is in agreement on the issue at hand.

Here’s the important part: everybody has the power of veto over a final decision. One single “no” from any participant is a final “no” for the group as a whole. Therefore, nobody will leave the room as a loser. This creates two very powerful mechanisms: the first is that it forces everybody to find a solution that is acceptable to everybody, and the second is that it slowly releases all fears of leaving the room as a loser, creating a completely different mind-set from the one surfacing when fighting internally.

It is equally important that everybody respects this and doesn’t use any kind of peer pressure whatsoever to make somebody not exercise his or her right of veto. Everybody in the room has the power to block the final decision, and it is everybody’s responsibility to find a solution that isn’t blocked by anyone. Any attempts to belittle somebody’s right to block a decision must be immediately stopped, reinforcing the respect for everybody’s power of veto and the equality in the room.

When we discussed the issue in question in this large group of twenty-five people in the Swedish Pirate Party, it took two full rounds of speaking to see a complete transformation in attitude. Those who had come into the room prepared to stall, fight, and delay a decision out of fear of losing had lost all such sentiments, and displayed inclusion in the decision-making process. This, in turn, made the decision making take considerably less time than if we had used a traditional voting method, even when starting from ridiculously diverse viewpoints and giving everybody the power of veto.

Seeing this transformation of attitude happen in the room — going from a tense, jaw-biting fear of losing and infighting to one of inclusion and a constructive mind-set — was a complete epiphany for me. It was so powerful you could taste it in the air.

“Wow, I never thought this was possible. I was convinced we would be tearing each other’s throats out.” — a participant from the event in question

There’s one more important thing to the consensus circle method: a final decision must not be proposed until it appears absolutely certain that the group will accept it, that nobody will exercise his or her right to veto. If just one person blocks the final decision, the issue may not be discussed any more that day, and the group will not have reached a decision. This is important, as any deviation from this rule would throw the group right back into a factionalizing trench-warfare mind-set.

Now, this method doesn’t solve the problem of how to define the group in question where everybody gets the power of veto. That will be a problem that depends heavily on the very specific situation and context.

ORGANIZATIONAL ASTRONAUTS

Let’s jump to another issue. From the very first day of the swarm, you will have people who claim that the swarm would work much better if it were organized in their favorite manner. More often than not, these people will fall into one of two categories.

The first category is technical people, who see everything as technical building blocks. Everything is logical in their world and can be moved around to achieve different, predictable results. As we have discussed, this way of looking at activists collides completely with swarmthink: activists are first and foremost people, and won’t lend themselves to being moved around in some kind of arbitrary logical structure. They make friends and change the world, and that’s it. The swarm is there to support their making friends and changing the world, not to fit them into a flowchart. The technical people eager to put things into comprehensive boxes will not perceive the swarm as a valid organization at all, as there is a lack of understandable, logical rules, and will seek to fix it by constraining people to roles and duties.

(The lack of understandable, logical rules comes from the simple fact that people are neither understandable nor logical by nature. They are social and passionate.)

The second dangerous type of wannabe “fixers” is the MBA-type people, who can come from large corporations or other bureaucratic institutions (including NGOs with strict internal democracy rules), and who will insist that the swarm must reshape to fit their preconceptions of an organization. The actions of these people roughly fit the saying that “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”; they have seen one way of building an organization that has become the way in their minds. Therefore, this group of people will also regard the swarm as a nonorganization, an invalid organization, something that needs to be fixed, again.

There will be no shortage of people who want to reorganize — or even organize, as they will call it. I call these people “organizational astronauts” derogatorily and intentionally, as they will have missed that any organization at its core is about people, and the more you can use the way people behave naturally to further the swarm’s goals, the faster you move.

The swarm is a disorganization by design. Some would prefer to call it a self-organization. In either case, there’s nobody assigning everybody to boxes, tasks, and activities. That’s why the organization works so well. Organizing it in the manner of organizational astronauts kills the swarm’s ability to function as a swarm.

You need to make absolutely clear to these people that the swarm works by its own consensus, that decisions are made organically by individual activists flowing to and from initiatives of their own accord, and that this swarm is your initiative; if the wannabe fixers and organizational astronauts don’t want to play by the swarm’s rules, they need to use the law of two feet themselves, and go somewhere else.

The swarm’s rules, by the way, are by and large that there are no rules. These people will seek to impose them.

DIVIDING SCARCE RESOURCES

This brings us to the delicate question of scarce resources in the swarm. As it grows, people will start to donate resources to it — servers, money, equipment. If it is a successful swarm, it will have recurring donations and some sort of predictable income.

In accordance with the overall theme of this chapter, some people will insist on “democratic control” over these resources. But again, doing so will turn the swarm into something it is not — there are no formal mechanisms for collective decisions, and there should not be. There are senses of rough consensus created by activists moving between initiatives.

At the end of the day, we have a structure that can handle budgets and money, and that is the supporting scaffolding structure we discussed in chapter 3. It becomes the duty of the officers of the swarm to distribute resources in the most effective way to support the end goals through the initiatives of the activists.

In this particular aspect, the swarm will resemble a traditional top-down organization in terms of allocating its resources in a decentralized manner. You, in control of the swarm’s formal name and resources, allocate budgets to officers, who subdivide their budget in turn.

With this said, once the swarm has any money to speak of, a sizeable chunk of it should be devoted to supporting individual activists’ initiatives where they reclaim expenses after the fact. The swarm lives and dies with the creativity and initiatives of its activists.

REWARDING PEOPLE

The military hands out medals when somebody does something good. This works in an impersonal organization, but a swarm is built on social bonds. So screw medals. Screw shiny trinkets. We can use much more subtle, and effective, ways to reward people in the swarm.

The key thing to rewards from a leadership position is to understand that attention is reward. If you are yelling at somebody who did something bad, you are giving him or her attention, and he or she will adapt his or her behavior to get more attention of the yelling kind. If you are praising somebody who did something good, he or she will adapt his or her behavior to get more attention of the praising kind.

(Now, as we recall from previous chapters, we should not be yelling at people in the first place in a swarm. If we do, people will copy our behavior, and disrespect for others will become an organizational value. A yelling match may be a fun game in the sauna between drunk college students, but it is not a very effective way of running an organization with tens of thousands of volunteers. Rather, I mention it here just to illustrate the point.)

It follows that we reward exemplary activist behavior with our attention, and completely ignore things that we want to see less of. Anything that we focus on in the swarm, for whatever reason, will grow in the swarm. Therefore, if there are behaviors we don’t want to see growing, we should ideally pretend they aren’t even there — block them out from our conscious radar, and spend time rewarding other kinds of behavior.

So what behavior do we want to see growing?

Initiatives. Even initiatives that fail.

Supporting others. Actually, this one is quite important. I frequently emphasize that helping others excel is just as valuable as excelling on your own.

Creativity and sharing ideas.

Helping people get along.

While these are just examples, the criteria for rewards tend to converge on three key factors — helping the energy, the focus, and the passion of the swarm.

TAMPERING WITH THE GOAL OF THE SWARM

At some point, you may want to adjust the goals of the swarm. For a political party, this is almost inevitable. For a single-issue swarm, it is more avoidable. Nevertheless, it creates very difficult problems in the face of the swarm’s disorganization.

In a traditional corporation, this would have happened by executive decree. In a traditional NGO or government, it would have happened by majority vote. How does it happen in a swarm?

Let’s go back to where we discussed motivations of fear. People who invest their time and identity in the swarm do so because they agree with the swarm on a fundamental social level. If the swarm reidentifies itself, that will create a discomfort. Even the aired idea of doing so will create severe discomfort among activists and cause a standstill and a halt to recruiting.

Say, for instance, that you have a swarm focused on going to Mars, and all of a sudden, you air the idea of repurposing the organization to selling mayonnaise instead, and skipping that Mars thing. Arguably, this is a ridiculous example to make a point, but the social and emotional effects will be very similar for the more credible repurposings — even those you think would make perfect sense.

After all, people have joined you in the swarm to accomplish something specific. If the reason they joined no longer exists, what are they doing in the swarm? What are they going to do with all the friendships they have built? What about all the energy and identity vested in the swarm? This creates a fundamental energy crisis with the swarm and an identity crisis with activists who have joined the swarm.

For this reason, if you should ever need to repurpose or regoal the swarm, you need to get a very high level of buy-in for this. You need to be aware that there will be a very high degree of pushback, as your new goal or method isn’t why people have joined. The costs will be high, but sometimes, it will also be the only way through, if the swarm has learned that the initially pictured goals or methods for attaining them weren’t possible.

In such a scenario, voting may be the only way through. In doing so, you will create losers, many of whom will leave the swarm permanently with a bitter aftertaste. But if the alternative is to accept the failure of the swarm as a whole, it is still the preferable option.

MEETINGS REVISITED

So at some extreme scenarios, you may still have to use voting. This, I really want to emphasize, should be a last resort through a conscious choice of options that best care for the energy, focus, and inclusiveness of the swarm, given a difficult circumstance, rather than just the default lazy option which is used “just because.” In almost all cases, other mechanisms of conflict resolutions are superior, far superior.

This brings up a number of problems. How do you determine who has the right to vote in a loose network? Everybody who wants to? Everybody who has left his or her contact details as an activist? Anybody who is a paid-up member of something? The last option will certainly be perceived as offensive to a lot of activists, for example — that influence can and must be bought and paid for, rather than deserved through effort and ideas, which is the swarm way.

In such a process, it is absolutely imperative that everybody is feeling included. This sounds easier than it is.

There are many ways to exclude people in practice from influencing the final outcome. If you call a physical meeting in a specific location, you exclude the people who are unable to get to that location on that time, for whatever reason. If you choose to discuss and vote during several hours on a Saturday, you are excluding parents who prefer to spend time with their kids. If you instead pick evening hours on weekdays, you will exclude people who work late. If the issue to vote on is reasonably complex, you are excluding people who can’t take themselves the time to absorb the details of it.

Every exclusion is a failure. Just because you don’t see any people being formally excluded, that doesn’t mean people don’t feel excluded. Every exclusion is a failure.

One way of getting around this, which the German Pirate Party has used very successfully, is to allow everybody with formal voting rights to select somebody to vote in his or her place. This voting right can be assigned differently for different issues, and also be assigned in turn, creating a chain of trust to make a sensible vote. This taps into the heart of the swarm’s social mechanisms of trusting people and friends, rather than fearing to lose. “Trust over fear.” We like that. That’s swarmthink. The German Pirate Party calls this liquid democracy.

Under this system, somebody could be voting for 1,337 people — herself and 1,336 other people who all have delegated their vote to that person, possibly in several steps. This makes the other 1,336 feel a level of inclusion and influence, even if they can’t attend the discussion or vote — or, frankly, if they would rather be doing activism than administration.

However, the concept of liquid democracy doesn’t solve the problem of determining who should have voting rights in the first place.

DEALING WITH MAVERICKS

In the process of running the organization, you will occasionally discover people who don’t feel they get enough attention from you personally for their ideas on how to run the swarm. (Attention is reward. They feel they’re not rewarded enough.) This is quite likely due to you simply disagreeing with their ideas and not wanting to nurture them.

A particular kind of attention-craving maverick will create a group of followers determined to wreak havoc until they get their way. This can be very disruptive and goes counter to swarmthink, where the best ideas and the best arguments win, rather than the loudest mouths. Still, it is a significant disturbance.

The way to deal with this is not to agree to demands — if you do cave in to get rid of the disturbance, you will teach the entire organization that creating loud disturbances is a very effective way of getting influence in the swarm, and you will start going down a very bumpy road as other people start imitating that behavior. You will never be able to convince the maverick that he or she has bad ideas (and especially so if all he or she wants in the first place is attention for his or her person, rather than recognition for ideas). You will never be able to win that person.

Rather, you need to identify the reward mechanisms within the subgroup that has formed around the maverick. Odds are that they’re forming a group identity around not being recognized as individual activists. You can shatter this identity by recognizing good contributors in the group who are hang-arounds of the maverick; odds are that there are several good contributors in that group who are just temporarily wooed by the maverick’s charisma. If you pick away a couple of key people in this group and recognize them for good earlier work — unrelated to the maverick’s yells — you will isolate the maverick, and the disturbance will lose critical mass.

Always remember that an organization is people, and that attention is reward.

 

This is the sixth chapter of Swarmwise, a book arriving very soon (days, not weeks). Did you like it? It’s going to be free to share (it, like this excerpt, is CC-BY-NC), but you can also buy it hardcover.

 

EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING BOOK

This is a part of the upcoming book Swarmwise, due in the summer of 2013. It is an instruction manual for recruiting and leading tens of thousands of activists on a mission to change the world for the better, without having access to money, resources, or fame. The book is based on Falkvinge’s experiences in leading the Swedish Pirate Party into the European Parliament, starting from nothing, and covers all aspects of leading a swarm of activists into mainstream success.

The post Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Six. appeared first on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

With Journalism Persecuted, The United States Is Now At Event Horizon To A Police State

Repression: Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who published Edward Snowden’s leaks, was recently suggested to be a criminal for shining light on the NSA’s abuse of power. This is a key identifiable step when societies close down; it is a point of no return. It seems the United States is reaching the event horizon to a police state.

To understand the pattern when societies close down, we need to look at other societies that have done so. There is much we can learn from history in terms of what happened in recent times. Let’s take a very well-known sequence of events in modern history as an example here, just to illustrate:

When the famous skyline landmark building in the world’s economic center was attacked in fire and flames on that fateful, horrible day, and our elected leaders decided to go to war against terrorism in a “you’re with us or against us”, there is something to learn from that. When the blame for all evil was unanimously put on people from the Middle East with their foreign religion, and all of them were made suspicious, there is something to learn from that. When patriotic new laws were passed almost immediately in the emotions from the attack, and those laws suspended most civil rights (even if those laws had a sunset provision, one that would never be reached). When the word “Homeland” suddenly started being used again, after having been practically extinct. When the country went to war, one after another, in the wake of that attack. When internment and torture camps for those middle-easterners and other unwanteds were created – outside the country borders, in order to hide what was going on from the public. Indeed, the 1930s were a very dark time, and the Reichstag fire in Berlin set off a chain of events that might – theoretically – repeat itself.

While this may seem a trivial observation, it is critical in this context: people tend to be focused on what affects them in the here and now. While some people can connect the dots and follow the line with their eyes into the future, the vast majority of people don’t bother with something that doesn’t affect them directly, personally, and in the present. In 1932, families were still skating in the park in Berlin on weekends. All that nasty stuff was theoretical, rumored, and somewhere else. People who look ahead and try to sound the alarm bell tend to be regarded as tinfoil hats, eccentric, and nuts.

One of the first things that happens past the point of no return into a police state is the persecution of reporters. As a society is closing down, those persecuted first are those with the audience and an interest in reporting the worrying trends that society seems to be closing. This is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. This is the alarm bell. Once that happens, get out of the mine.

An event horizon is a term from astrophysics. It is the edge of a black hole – so the event horizon appears like a black sphere, if you like. Nothing, not even light, can escape from within the event horizon – hence the term black hole. But if you were traveling through space, in direction of the black hole (which may be as large as an entire galaxy), then you would notice absolutely nothing as you crossed the event horizon. You would pass a point of no return, and register not a single thing while doing so. The analogy is depressingly apt.

I’ve written before that I believe that the U.S. is lost to encroaching totalitarianism, which it will likely endure for a number of years before it collapses under its own weight (as all empires do sooner or later). With Edward Snowden being hunted relentlessly across the globe for leaking evidence of systematic abuse of power, Glenn Greenwald – who published Snowden’s leaks – was recently criticized for aiding and abetting the leak itself. This is a key choice of words, for aiding and abetting a crime is itself a crime – the wording suggested that the reporter who published evidence of abuse of power is himself a criminal.

Can't believe @ggreenwald being cross-examined about being a criminal for reporting news, protecting sources #freedomofthepress

— FOI Central (@FOIcentric) June 24, 2013

It is notable that Julian Assange was hunted and disrespected in the same manner when he published Manning’s leaks in the role of the publishing reporter, by the way.

Now, it should be said that this reporter weren’t formally hunted by law enforcement. That’s actually secondary. It’s not necessary – the fact that the sentiment exists at all in society, that a reporter is criminal for doing his job, has enormous chilling effects and progresses the closing-down. But reporters are being formally persecuted as well.

Take the example of Barrett Brown. He published a lot of material that was inconvenient and embarrassing to the government – which is a reporters’ job – and was put under investigation for it. At that point, he did the crucial mistake of threatening the FBI agents who were harassing him and his family in a YouTube video, which is an act that doesn’t go unpunished in the United States. He was arrested and charged with something serious enough – but over time, the charges grew to the whole Christmas tree. Particularly, Brown was charged with publishing the leaks in the first place. In other words, Brown was charged with the crime of doing his exact job as a reporter. He has currently been in detention without bail for 291 days, and pretty much nothing is seen in oldmedia about it.

That’s crossing the event horizon.

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Maybe The Pirate Bay Should Sink?

Copyright Monopoly – Travis McCrea: As a movement based on forking, remixing, and letting the best products win are we really doing anyone any favours by continuing to use and promote The Pirate Bay? I don’t think we are.

I love sharing culture, I think that torrent websites and similar file sharing developments are what will define our generation in the years to come. Eventually we will be the victors in the copyfight (though, of course, the battles will always wage on), the Pirate Party’s visions will not be dreams but seen as common sense much like many Green policies before us, and liberal policies before that.

The Pirate movement is all about “adapt or die” when it comes to business. We encourage companies to keep innovating, and if they don’t innovate we support the new businesses which do. While the Pirate Bay isn’t asking for bailouts or suing other torrent websites for infringement, I believe that we are keeping it alive through our continued blind support of the website — only because they had a famous court case and their defiance of authority.

“The Pirate Bay has become so big that there are hardly any competitors any more. It is not good for the internet if there is only one search engine with an almost monopoly status,” explains TPB co-founder Peter Sunde in an interview with TheLocal.se.

Peter also made the statement during his AMA on Reddit, “TPB should die (I’ve said this for a few years) so that something good will replace it. Come on, it’s 8 years old website with essentially no updates. There must be something better… !”

The problem, in my opinion, is that many of the readers of this post and the activisty types out there (including my own girlfriend) use TPB instead of it’s many better alternatives, just because it is a symbol of freedom to them. Contrarily, the Pirate movement is all about freedom through development and progress, and we can’t have progress if we keep using the same old outdated website that only exists because people support what it stood for.

If you really love the Pirate Bay, and you want it to live on as a symbol — then let it die. Let it be a memory which captures all the beautiful things about it, rather than actually let people see it’s reality of an outdated sesspool of russian bride ads and questionable torrent files. Ask yourself, don’t you want to support freedom? Don’t you want to be cool like Peter Sunde?

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The Ouya Has Geopolitical Implications (For Your Kids)

Infopolicy – Zacqary Adam Green: The world’s first mass-market open source video game console is not going to turn the video game industry upside down any time soon. But in 20 years, it is going to turn every industry upside down. This cheap little box is going to have a profound effect on every kid that grows up with it, and they’ll go into business and politics wondering why the rest of the world doesn’t work like their good old little Ouya.

The Ouya isn’t the first piece of technology likely to imbue hacker culture into anybody that comes into contact with it. But it’s certainly the first to do it in such a polished, tightly-designed way. The price, the design, and the focus on games is what gives the Ouya the chance to break into the mainstream. It’ll have the biggest effect on kids.

At $99, the Ouya’s certainly more attractive to parents than any of the absurdly expensive behemoths from Microsoft or Sony. In South America, Africa, and Asia, that low price makes it exponentially more accessible. Even if older gamers end up rolling their eyes and dismissing it — just as their parents did to their NES — an entire generation of kids is going to grow up playing free and cheap Ouya games.

Then they’ll start making them. Then they’ll start tinkering with the console. Yesterday’s kids all played Mario. Tomorrow’s kids will all hack Mario.

Every educator knows that video games are a gateway drug to teaching kids how to program. That big word “Make” right on the Ouya’s start screen will draw curious, creative kids in by the droves, even before schools and summer camps inevitably jump on the console as a teaching tool. They’ll grow up writing code, sharing code, and participating in the open source culture already developing around the console. Many of them will go on to publish their games, and sell them at a low price or with a pay-what-you-want model.

None of them will be able to wrap their heads around why anyone would do it differently. Why would anyone refuse to share their code? Why would anyone try to stop people from enjoying their work for free? DRM and proprietary licenses will seem as quaint as a Betamax tape.

Think about that. An entire generation of kids, raised on the values of free games, open source, and the ability to do whatever you want with your own hardware. Not all of them will grow up to be programmers. Many of them will bring these values to manufacturing, to service, to agriculture, to energy, and even to politics.

Oh, and there’s one more thing they’ll bring with them; something especially relevant to a political career. They’ll bring with them the experience of game design.

If the world were an MMO, the levels of social and economic inequality it’s experiencing would be attributed to “poor game balance.” Imagine a whole generation of kids who learned to fix game balance issues when they were five years old. They’re going to grow up seeing the world as one big game, waiting to be patched and balanced so that it’s fun and fair for everyone. That’s what they’ll talk up when they run for office.

Maybe the Ouya will break through with older “core” gamers in the next year or so, maybe not. It’s not the gamers of today who matter; it’s the hackers of tomorrow. If you’ve bought an Ouya and aren’t impressed, consider donating it to a children’s charity instead of selling it on eBay. It could pay off in 20 years.

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The United States Seized Confidential Mail Records Of European Parliament

Privacy – Christian Engström: I can’t say I’m surprised – but we’ve got the United States and its security bureaucrats digging through our e-mail in the European Parliament. Mashable reveals that the United States has demanded information from Google about the communications of two Wikileaks activists. One of them is the Icelander Smári McCarthy (pictured).

These events catch our interest here in Brussels, here at the Pirate Party office in the European Parliament. We know Smári, and we have contacted him as a consultant to produce a report on Iceland as an “information paradise” and a conceivable centre for cloud computing (www.islandsofresilience.eu).

A quick check reveals that we have been in touch with Smári (through Erik Josefsson), via his Gmail account, regarding this report during the time period when the United States was wiretapping his mail.

Now, this is not about keeping secrets. That’s not the point. (And besides, we would never use Gmail for anything sensitive.) But there’s an important issue of principle here.

The United States is breaking into and digging through mail between the European Parliament and people who have been commissioned to produce its political reports. This is completely unacceptable.

The United States is not supposed to spy on political parties. The United States is not supposed to spy on the Members of the European Parliament. The United States is not supposed to break into and dig through the daily routine work of the European legislative body.

For now, I’m mostly pissed off. Later, I will consider how to handle this issue. I will probably raise these events at a formal level with the European Parliament.

[UPDATED: The initial headline of this article was "The United States wiretapped mail of the European Parliament". It was changed after criticism of being misleading.]

Originally published in Swedish.

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Petition To Preemptively Pardon Ed Snowden Reaches Goal Of 100k Signatures

Transparency: The Whitehouse petition to pre-emptively pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for “crimes he may have committed while blowing the whistle” has reached its goal of 100,000 signatures. This means that the U.S. Administration, by its own rules, need to take it seriously enough to craft a response to it. While that response is unlikely to be anything else than “we politely disagree and intend to impolitely hunt this man down”, it is still an important signal of dissent.

The petition reached 100,000 signatures at 12:30 UTC, today June 22. These petitions, as defined and set up by the U.S. administration in the White House, are a way for citizens to call attention to issues they want to be taken seriously. This particular petition is unusually clear in its language, where most are rather poorly worded and ambiguous:

Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs.

Now, regardless of success in terms of signature count, it is important to remember that this is a petition – not a legislation. This is not a binding parliamentary vote that reached its goal of majority. It is a voice of dissent against the administration’s persecuting an important whistleblower, and it is a voice of strong dissent against the administration’s ubiquitous wiretapping. They are going to ignore it completely – on its own. But the persistent drop hollows the stone. This was but one fall of the drop. Snowden’s pardon petition needs to be one of many, many initiatives that voice dissent in the coming weeks and months.

It is also reasonable to ask if one should be speaking in terms of “pardon” in the first place, as though the man was a criminal rather than a responsible citizen with higher morals than most could hope to achieve in a lifetime. In this affair, the surveillance hawks are the criminals who should be seeking pardon, and no one else. We think the key message to get across is the first part of the petition: “Edward Snowden is a hero”.

On its own, this petition stands as much chance of changing an ivory-tower establishment attitude as the massive protests after the raid and verdict against The Pirate Bay did. At that time, the establishment reacted with – at most – a condescending “good for them nerds to get some sunlight”. That holier-than-thou tone of voice changed radically when the Pirate Party kicked officials out of office to take their seats in the following elections. One step at a time, one voicing of dissent at a time. Every step is important. For example, don’t miss the similar Avaaz petition that is currently in excess of one million signatures.

To be honest, it is also fair to say that the administration has little reason to take their petition seriously on its own after a petition to build a Death Star reached the same kind of goal. While obviously tongue-in-cheek, and given exactly that sort of response from the administration, that petition set the bar for the seriousness of other White House petitions.

This was one successful step of dissent against the surveillance state, and for the freedom of the press that counteracts it. Sunlight isn’t just good for nerds, it is necessary for society overall.

How Today’s NSA Is Much, Much Worse Than Stasi Or Orwell’s “1984”

Privacy: There are still people warning us of sleepwalking into a Stasi or “1984” society. They missed the boat by a long shot: we are already far, far past the point of Stasi or “1984”. The apparatus that governments have built to trace, track, and record citizens is the stuff of nightmares.

The scene-setting paragraph in George Orwell’s 1984 is still something that gives you chills, even as the book has so old it has come out of the copyright monopoly in Australia:

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

We’re far, far beyond this point. Replace “Thought Police” above with the more general “Government”, and you could fit this story into the United Stasi’s NSA story, the Swedish FRA story, or any similar one.

The government agencies’ claim of “we’re not watching everybody all the time, we target different people” is exactly what is written above – for “at any rate, they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to”.

Oh yes, the cameras? The government doesn’t have cameras installed in every home, right? Well, no. But we do, and the government has taken itself the right to use them to watch us, breaking into our computers to use our webcams. Germany was famous for this a couple of years back with its so-called Bundestrojaner. The primary difference between this scene from 1984 and today, in terms of the cameras, is that we installed them ourselves.

So far, we’re only at the 1984 or Stasi level. But things have become much worse.

Our movements as we walk about in the city are traced, tracked and recorded – almost down to the footstep level. Every step you take, they’ll be watching you. If you deviate more than 100 meters from your usual path, that can be noted and flagged. The first time you see your own movement maps, and realize that somebody else is gather this information to use it against you, sends shivers down your spine. Where were you on April 17, 2012, at 13:21 European time? You were on the move, but at what speed? Whence and whither? Somebody has an answer to that question, and it’s not you.

This leads us to the key difference between the Stasi horror dystopia and the worse society today. Those of us who have read or seen 1984 recall that if the government didn’t catch what you were saying at the time you said it, you had gotten away. Words disappeared as fast as they were spoken and heard, or not heard.

That’s different today. In those dystopias, anything you said could and would be used against you. In our today, anything you say can and will be used against you, today or decades into the future. Everything is recorded. Everything.

If you’re redflagged for some stupid reason one year from today, what you were saying just five minutes ago will come under scrutiny, and whom you spoke them to. If the laws or social norms change to make the things you do right now suspicious in a decade, you’re going to be seen as a suspicious individual if somebody finds out – for everything is recorded.

Stasi couldn’t record what newspaper articles you were reading. For how long. And in what order. That, along with pretty much every thought you have ever explored while sitting at a computer, is now part of your permanent record – even if you never told a single human being.

So you use encryption, you say? Mumble, Redphone, PGP? How nice for you. But a particular encryption has a shelf life. What’s breakable today wasn’t breakable a decade ago, and the NSA is saving every piece of encrypted communications, too. What’s not breakable today may be so in a decade. If you’re encrypting things with the intent of keeping them safe forever, that’s not what today’s reality looks like. Oh, and when did you last change your key? Wait, you do encrypt in the first place, don’t you?

We tend to think of a lost cryptokey as needing to change that key before we make any future communications, kind of like a lost housekey needs replacement. It’s much worse than that. If we lose the key, we just decrypted everything we had ever sent encrypted – for somebody had saved it on the odd chance that such an event could happen.

A lost housekey doesn’t mean your home immediately gets broken into a year ago, but that’s the case with today’s cryptokeys.

We are far, far beyond the point of Stasi or “1984”. Isn’t it time to at least stop, look and listen to what we’ve created?

Copyright Industry Demands, Gets Levies For Every XBox, Playstation Sold

Copyright Monopoly: The copyright industry has decreed in Sweden that it will now collect levies for every XBox and Playstation sold – about €10 ($12) per unit. This levy is the “blank media” levy, originally used to compensate for private music copying from vinyl records to blank cassettes, that has crept over all boundaries. It is hard, not to say impossible, to justify the fairness in a single mother having to pay a levy to the richest rock stars when she buys a Playstation for her kids.

The demand – which has legal support – hit like a bombshell on Swedish markets yesterday. The copyright industry is demanding levies for four new classes of electronics products: ordinary computers with hard drives, internal hard drives, tablets, and game consoles with hard drives. They have previously enacted levies for external hard drives, USB sticks, blank CDs and DVDs, and much more.

This means that the copyright industry in Sweden specifically gets to enact a tax on every tablet, every computer, and every game console sold, since they contain internal persistent memory which could – in theory – be used to store music, which is under the copyright monopoly.

This legal levy mechanism is a remnant from the compact cassette days, when people were (legally) copying from vinyl to cassette. The copyright industry went berserk at the time, throwing tantrums about how it was unfair that their monopoly didn’t cover this particular copying. There were huge campaigns about how “home taping was killing music”, which exactly nobody took seriously.

(The band The Dead Kennedys famously reprinted the dumb slogan on the back side of their In God We Trust, Inc. cassette as “Home Taping is Killing Record Industry Profits”, and added “We left this side blank, so you can help.”)

However, politicians in the 1970s did the crucial mistake of throwing some money to the copyright industry to get them to shut up. Thus, they enacted a blank media levy where every blank (recordable) cassette tape sold would be taxed with a small amount that would be distributed to already-established artists. In other words, the struggling artists who bought blank tapes to make demos were to pay a tax to the richest successful artists and to the gatekeeper middleman system.

The blank media levy is not a compensation for private copying that violates laws and the copyright monopoly. The levy is an industry compensation for private legal copying that falls outside of the monopoly.

Did you get that? Let’s take it again: the copyright industry is “compensated” insanely well at the expense of single parents and innovative startups for the fact that there are nooks and crannies where the copyright monopoly doesn’t reach.

Now tell me – what other industries do you know of that get extensive legal protection in law for their business model, and then get compensated with a private taxation right for the fact that they didn’t get as far-reaching legal monopolies as possible?

This doesn’t even take into account the abysmally terrible political leadership when enacting these levies in the first place. The message that got home to the copyright industry when the blank media levy was enacted was “throw worse tantrums, and you’ll get more taxpayer money”. This has been a consistent behavior since, and predictably so.

The blank media tax is a cancer in our economy. There is no justice in a single mother paying the richest artists and exorbitantly paid lawyers in the middleman system when she gets a Playstation for her kids. There is no justice in poor artists being forced to pay a system that works to keep them out of the market. There is no justice in innovative tech startups being taxed by a dying industry dinosaur that uses the money to fight the same innovative startups.

The blank media levy is a gross abomination from every angle. It needs to be abolished, and it needs to be abolished 90 seconds ago.

PRISM – The British Dimension

Privacy – Loz Kaye: Loz Kaye, leader of the UK Pirate Party, gives a view from the UK about the NSA PRISM revelations: The cultural sense among ordinary people in the UK actually goes very counter to taking authoritarian steps into people’s privacy, Kaye writes, and the sense that the US is legally ignoring UK liberties is disturbing. It is up to us to keep pressing these questions to make sure we don’t sleepwalk in to a society where all of us are suspicious until proven innocent, he writes.

So many of us who have seen Edward Snowden’s video on his reasons for exposing the PRISM programme have found it moving and disturbing in equal parts. But I think it was this that he said that struck me the most:

“Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently … They can use this system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with… to derive suspicion from an innocent life…”

These are exactly the dangers the Pirate Party has been warning of for some time now.

Of course much of the focus in the PRISM story has been on the United States, the NSA and Obama. But the United Kingdom is right at the heart of this scandal too. Not least because of the Guardian’s role in breaking the leaks, but also because of the allegations of British Intelligence service use of PRISM information. 

I think outside the UK people have the impression that we are all too similar to the US. This has no doubt much to do with our willingness to enter in to wars with the Americans in recent years without asking too many questions. Our biggest two political parties Conservative and Labour seem almost interchangeable in their authoritarian tendencies. With a few, a very few, honourable exceptions. But we are actually a very free minded people. Time and again we have pushed back against state excesses. Plans for national identity cards, not even seen as much of an issue in many European countries, were ditched by the incoming government as too intrusive.

In a country where many still have net curtains to cover windows, the idea that we might be routinely “watched and recorded” goes against the fundamental cultural sense that an Englishman and woman’s home is their castle.

What is staggering is that we have just had a long public debate on this very issue of whether  the blanket collection of UK citizens’ communication records is acceptable. The Communications Data Bill law  – unsurprisingly dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” – had many of the traits of PRISM that are most alarming. This was thrown out in the face of an outcry from civil liberties activists, and it was rejected as it could not be supported by all of the Government. 

But essentially, that entire debate was had on a false basis. It appears the very type of access to email, videos, chat and social media that was supposed to be consulted on was already being used against us since at least the beginning of the current government. If that was the case why bother to consult the public or parliament at all? 

The Foreign Secretary William Hague, the minister responsible for security agency GCHQ, did come to make a statement to parliament on the affair, even if he didn’t actually say much. The minister was directly asked when he knew about PRISM. He declined to answer. But whether the answer is since June 2010 or last Thursday it is still bad for Mr Hague. If the answer is the former then he was happy for us to seem to have a democratic choice when none existed at all. If the answer is the latter then he simply doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s difficult to decide which is worse.

Repeatedly he would not answer questions about the actual important issue which is the manner and scope of the data collection, citing security concerns. No-one was asking him to reveal operational details or compromise anything specific. Data collection was precisely what was being looked at in the Communications Data Bill, but it was never suggested that the principles behind it could not be discussed. Why is PRISM different?

The Foreign Secretary sought to reassure lawmakers that any collaboration between GCHQ and the NSA happens within a strict legal framework which ministers sign off on. Let’s leave aside that we in Pirate Party UK have serious reservations about the framework itself. It still doesn’t answer the fundamental problem that Edward Snowden brings up: what about the people who are doing nothing wrong? Mr Hague bizarrely leaves average citizens without support while those who are of concrete interest to the security services have more safeguards.

Crucially doubt remains about whether UK law applies still if it is material that is offered by the NSA rather than requested. Matthew Ryder QC explained in the Guardian: “Foreigners storing their personal data on US servers have neither the protection that their own domestic laws would give them from their own governments, nor the protection that US citizens have from the US government.” That at least is surely a legitimate point to clear up, and how the offering/requesting distinction is managed in practice.

Perhaps the Foreign Secretary is making the familiar mistake of assuming that the UK and the US are basically the same. What I was astounded by watching our parliament was the inability to realise that US spying is for the benefit of the US. What about the US interest in snooping on UK citizens, and for that matter our businesses and government? We heard much about how vital it was to protect our citizens. In the 21st century I would have thought it was obvious that that should start with our personal information. Where are our 4th amendment rights? And actually US citizens are entitled to ask GCHQ the same thing. All of this cuts both ways.

What will simply not wash is expecting on trust that the Americans will operate under our legal frameworks. This is where as a country we have been too close to the US. We have repeatedly followed along in their wake, just accepting torture, rendition, indefinite detention and summary execution by drone. Mr Hague may dismiss these as “controversies”. I would call them the reasons why the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ doctrine is dangerously complacent.

Despite the considerable danger that he must now be in, Snowden’s biggest fear is that nothing will come of these revelations. It is up to us to keep pressing these questions to make sure we don’t sleepwalk in to a society where all of us are suspicious until proven innocent.