History, Security

This Day in History 1869: “First-Class Men” Torture and Try to Kill Congressman Who Voted for President Grant

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Source: Library of Congress. “Visit of the Ku-Klux” by Frank Bellew. Illustration in Harper’s weekly, v. 16, no. 791 (1872 Feb. 24), p. 160. Click to enlarge and find all the Klan.

Documented in the 1872 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Abram Colby was an elected member of Congress called to testify on domestic terrorism:

Colby: On the 29th of October 1869, [the Klansmen] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

Question: What is the character of those men who were engaged in whipping you?

Colby: Some are first-class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers. They had their pistols and they took me in my night-clothes and carried me from home. They hit me five thousand blows. I told President Grant the same that I tell you now. They told me to take off my shirt. I said, “I never do that for any man.” My drawers fell down about my feet and they took hold of them and tripped me up. Then they pulled my shirt up over my head. They said I had voted for Grant and had carried the Negroes against them. About two days before they whipped me they offered me $5,000 to go with them and said they would pay me $2,500 in cash if I would let another man go to the legislature in my place. I told them that I would not do it if they would give me all the county was worth.

The worst thing was my mother, wife and daughter were in the room when they came. My little daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.

Question: How long before you recovered from the effects of this treatment?

Colby: I have never got over it yet. They broke something inside of me. I cannot do any work now, though I always made my living before in the barber-shop, hauling wood, etc.

Question: You spoke about being elected to the next legislature?

Colby: Yes, sir, but they run me off during the election. They swore they would kill me if I stayed. The Saturday night before the election I went to church. When I got home they just peppered the house with shot and bullets.

Question: Did you make a general canvas there last fall?

Colby: No, sir. I was not allowed to. No man can make a free speech in my county. I do not believe it can be done anywhere in Georgia.

Question: You say no man can do it?

Colby: I mean no Republican, either white or colored.

There you have it. And it has to be said that a “Republican” of that day was the exact opposite of one today. They literally are the inversion of what it meant in Colby’s time. Read that last line as no man can make a free speech in America if they support Civil Rights: death threats, terrorism, torture and beatings came from “First-Class men” against Americans who had voted for President Grant.

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)

I’ve written before here about the attempted violent coup in America in 1868, when the KKK threatened they would murder anyone caught voting for Grant.

Security

Harms Detailed From Facebook Security Officer’s Inaction

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For a long time now I have sounded warnings about how Facebook security needed to take serious action against data integrity vulnerabilities.

In 2019 I wrote a detailed explanation of how the Chief Security Officer had been shooting messengers since at least 2016, showing an institutional habit of leadership inaction on genocide.

Now the results of those crucial years of inaction are being exposed yet again, which begs a question how quickly can the platform be shut down and the ex-officers held accountable.

…parallels between Facebook’s role in the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. “What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it…”

Not just Myanmar and Ethiopia. Here’s the hate speech and misinformation report from India:

The account was soon inundated with hate speech, misinformation, and posts glorifying violence, according to the New York Times. “Following this test user’s news feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the researcher wrote. Although Facebook has been operating in India since 2006… only added systems to detect incitement and violence in both languages this year.

Philippines has this report on slavery:

…Facebook’s products — its flagship platform, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were all used in the labor trafficking industry, and that the company lacked “robust proactive detection methods … of domestic servitude in English and Tagalog to prevent recruitment.”

Several countries across the Middle East as well as Vietnam reported similarly that Facebook became a clumsy tool of blanket oppression and exploitation:

…suppression of speech in Palestine, as well as in other countries such as Afghanistan and Syria, where the company instituted blanket bans for common words and erased content that did not violate the platform’s guidelines… government trolls weaponized Facebook’s own systems for reporting abuse to deplatform activists, journalists, and members of civil society, some of whom were later arrested.

None of this is really news, for anyone paying attention. What hasn’t made it to the news yet is the analysis I provided in 2019; how these predictable failures stemmed from a particular officer’s inaction that facilitated atrocity crimes.

People may be outraged to hear that Facebook chose to not take “enough” action (their own words) despite knowing its role increasing tensions towards civil war in Ethiopia:

The report, distributed in March, said that armed groups in Ethiopia were using the platform to incite violence against ethnic minorities in the “context of civil war.”

However, this points us back to 2016 when arguably Facebook played an outsized role destabilizing the American elections: “abused by a variety of actors, including politicians, to incite discrimination and violence”.

In 2021 we’re seeing bold calls for civil war circulated in American social media. It’s not new, it’s just reported better now.

History, Security

Future Illiteracy is the Inability to Unlearn

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Alvin Toffler perhaps put it best in his famous 1970 book Futureshock

Source: Toffler, A. (1990). Future shock. United Kingdom: Random House. Page 414.

Toffler said the following, just before he admitted the idea was from Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization (Department of the U.S. Army).

Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn. Early computers consisted of a “memory” or bank of data plus a “program” or set of instructions that told the machine how to manipulate the data. Large late-generation computer systems not only store greater masses of data, but multiple programs, so that the operator can apply a variety of programs to the same data base. Such systems also require a “master program” that, in effect, tells the machine which program to apply and when. The multiplication of programs and addition of a master program vastly increased the power of the computer. A similar strategy can be used to enhance human adaptability. By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

Learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them to be literate.

Learn, unlearn and relearn to be literate.

“Cornerstones of Attachment Research” is a new book that phrases it like this:

…early findings and ideas; these enter into circulation, ricochet and rebound among domains of practice, and get repeated and repeated. Later developments, even important ones, become difficult to access and incorporate…

John Maynard Keynes famously wrote something similar into the introduction to his 1936 “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (paraphrased here):

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

And from a military perspective, I think Daniel Hulter’s USAF essay is my favorite take on the problem yet:

I’ve seen too many times when either those pilots mistook their role for simply keeper of the machine–they just let it do what it was gonna do, not seeing or caring where we fell outside the margins… or they saw that our situation wasn’t protected in policy and felt helpless themselves. They weren’t piloting the machine. They were just operators.

To be literate enough to become a pilot you have to extend beyond “keeper of the machine” and into adaptation, an example I often used to put in my big data security presentations in terms of flying versus fighting.

This was well known in WWII by American pilots over the Pacific Ocean who would come from below and behind to pick off Japanese pilots stuck in “keeper” mode formations.

Security

Meta Slavery: It’s Time to Stop Blaming Surveillance

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If someone continuously shames surveillance (as if pursuit of knowledge is a bad thing inherently) they’re headed down the dangerous and dark path of criminalizing knowledge.

Let’s be honest here. Facebook’s business model is not surveillance, it is slavery (an extreme form of debt capitalism). Here’s how a paper from 2016 laid out the problem:

…virtual world technology not only allows real-time synchronous communication and economic activity between users (who are commonly represented usually by graphical avatars), but also allows for the accurate logging of even the smallest economic activities that occur…

Renaming themselves to Meta is related to their quest to create a slavery world where people entering hand over their entire existence and then are prevented from owning their own bodies (whether work or leisure, public or private, as I warned in 2016 and illustrated again in 2019).

It is wrong to equate slavery to surveillance. This is like someone equating prison to building homes. Not all surveillance is bad. Not all homes are bad.

NO.

Don’t continue this false equivalence. Surveillance can be misused. Surveillance can be wrong. But also it can be very right and necessary. In fact it may be that surveillance is necessary to end slavery (knowledge of crimes against humanity).

Do not criminalize knowledge, do not shame gathering all knowledge just because in some cases it is wrong. That will backfire in a VERY bad way by ushering in even more harms from ignorance.

Parents surveil their children for safety, within an ancient consent model everyone is familiar with.

Doctors surveil their patients for rational reasons, as surely everyone would agree. Healthcare requires such a granular user surveillance model that breakthroughs in safety depend on a battery of monitoring devices. Science depends on surveillance so granular it’s literally microscopic.

Thus we must stop calling surveillance evil, given it’s the slavery built on top of surveillance that is evil. Surveillance capitalism sounds about as bad as intellectual property. Are we really prepared to say people shouldn’t ever be allowed to sell what they know?

And now this:

Facebook is an exemplar of surveillance capitalism, harvesting as much data as possible, pursuing scale at all costs, and coercing users toward clicking on ads and spending more time on the platform. It has no other appreciable values, certainly no moral ones, no matter what narrative Zuckerberg might retcon onto the company’s history. (The original sin of TheFacebook, of course, was Mark Zuckerberg’s libidinous mission to rank Harvard’s coeds by relative hotness.)

Everything distasteful about Facebook, including its unmanageable size, flows from its business model, which is infinitely scalable. Yes, we should break Facebook up, but we also must break its business model of ever more granular user surveillance.

Nobody should try to white wash slave plantations granular user surveillance platforms, since the actual business model is human trafficking. And you can’t just walk away from that fact, as Steven Levy sagely warns:

…hold on, Mark. The Company Formerly Known As Facebook, which I will henceforth refer to as TCFKAF, can’t really move forward on that course until it repairs the vehicle that got it where it is. No matter what Facebook is called now, its crisis is ongoing.

Steven really nails it here:

A metaverse migration raises a ton of thorny issues that Zuckerberg’s keynote skated over, or just didn’t mention. If we have such a big disinformation problem now, what would it be like if everything around us—from clothes to real estate to, well, ourselves—was made of information? How can you justify building a whole new economy based on buying virtual products when so much of the world’s population can’t afford basic real-world products?

TCFKAF has likely calculated that creating a world where their crimes against humanity go without any prosecution will have higher margins than the real world where they have to buy up all the lawyers and politicians to monopolize the courts and deny reality… thus renaming themselves to Meta.

…a “meta” in gaming terminology is a generally agreed upon strategy by the community. Said strategy is considered to be the most optimal way to win / has the best performance at a specific task. Some people have defined meta as an acronym meaning “most effective tactics available”.

Sounds like someone declaring themselves the “meta” as an act of obfuscating things to avoid admitting to that something they’re doing is objectionable. Like when American slaveholders called themselves “planters” to obfuscate their business model of raping women.

Branding yourself community leader when the community hates you isn’t supposed to work… Meta (μετά) in Greek means “above” (or beyond, after), such that TCFKAF is branding themselves above the law, or beyond the reach of the law.

In other words it it will be surveillance of TCFKAF that will bring the kind exposure and interventions that could help end their slavery practices. Leaking internal documents scares them because it is a form of surveillance of their crimes against humanity. I will bet anyone that coming Facebook announcements about “improving privacy” will be little more than thinly veiled attempts by them to destroy evidence of their crimes, only to continue them more secretly.

TCFKAF must have realized they were about to come under surveillance, and lose the game they thought they couldn’t lose; increased granular monitoring of their behavior started to generate public outrage, so they destroyed evidence and renamed themselves to God (as if a clever way to avoid punishment for immorality).

This was ironically raised in a recent heartfelt story by someone who decided not to be a spy:

…I had come round to the idea of watching people for a living, swept up in my escape fantasy I hadn’t given much thought to how it would feel to be watched myself.

So can we stop talking about surveillance already and instead just admit TCFKAF’s business model is slavery?

Meta slavery.

Source: Meta plantation