Ed Snowden’s Rewards Points

At first it appeared to be a paper work snafu that enabled Ed Snowden to avoid being extradited from Hong Kong for espionage. However, soon other troublesome issues started to emerge concerning  the Snowden affair. Ed Snowden has ostensibly been doing a lot of economy class traveling. The Times had a nice little chart on the front page of Monday’s print edition, showing how Snowden went from Honolulu to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Moscow, and then showing hypothetical routes to Havana and Caracas and Quito (“U.S. Traces Path as N.S.A. Leaker Flees Hong Kong,” 6/24/13), but one of the unanswered questions relates to his rewards points situation. The Times reported that despite disclaimers on the part of the Hong Kong authorities, it was the Chinese government who was apparently responsible for enabling Snowden (“China Said to Have Made Call to Let Leader Depart,” NYT, 6/23/13). In addition, The Times also reported that Julian Assange “met last week with Ecuador’s foreign minister to support Mr. Snowden’s asylum request,” (“Offering Snowden Aid, WikiLeaks Get Back in the Game,” NYT, 6/23/13). In the same article, The Times described how Sarah Harrison, “a British WikiLeaks activist” was with Mr. Snowden “on the Aeroflot airliner that carried him on Sunday from Hong Kong to Moscow.” What's most significant however is that neither WikiLeaks, nor any of the countries involved in Snowden’s odyssey including the U.S. has dealt with the irksome matter of the rewards points. If you commit espionage in one country, can you receive rewards points on the airline of the country which is offering asylum? Aeroflot does have a bonus program and the question of rewards points for fugitives is a matter that will ultimately have to be dealt with by the ICC at The Hague. 

A Kopimist Archbishop for Quito?

Photograph: Espen Moe

Back in July the Times reported on a new religion which appears to be gaining a growing number of adherents in Sweden (“In Sweden, Taking File Sharing to Heart. And to Church,” NYT, 7/25/12). Kopimism, as the religion is called, derives according to the Times article “from a Swedish spelling of he words ‘copy me.’” The Times quotes Isak Gerson, “a philosophy student at Uppsala University who helped found the church in 2010” as saying “We have something similar to regular priests. We call them ops or operators and their task is to help people with things like meetings.” The Times piece goes on to describe Mr. Gerson as claiming to have "a permanent link to the divine through a Nokia smartphone.” The reaction to Kopimism by the powers that be might be equated with that of the Roman Empire towards Christianity (when martyrs used to be tossed into the lion’s den), though it’s nothing compared to the reaction to Sweden’s Pirate Party, which represents a more secular approach to the file sharing idea. The Times quotes one Gustav Nipe, a Kopimist, as calling the attempts by the Dutch and British to ban the Pirate Bay website “as a kind of inquisition—like burning people.” The advent of Kopimism makes one think back on some of the reasons for the founding of religion in general. For instance Judaism, which introduced monotheism, was a reaction to the worshipping of idols. Protestantism came about as a rebellion against the corrupt practice of pardon selling and so forth. Kopimists are in love with information which they feel should be shared freely. Julian Assange has been granted political asylum by the Ecuadorians. If he is ever allowed to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London, it seems that he would be a good candidate to be the first Kopimist Archbishop of Quito.

Taking a Leak

Fifty years ago, if you said, “I want to be gay,” it would have meant that you aspired to a state of happiness. Today, if someone tells you they want to be gay, it means that they are coming out of the closet. Now, the expression “I want to take a leak” is being threatened by the exigencies of modern electronic warfare carried out by digital-age mercenaries. If someone tells you they want to take a leak or informs you that something is leaking, it has nothing to do with fluids emanating from the bladder or from a pipe, it has to do with classified information being uncovered and released to an older generation of news outlets. Everyone has been wondering about the fate of objective reportage, and whether the gathering of new information will become the province of amateur bloggers who have no real experience in employing reliable sources to report stories. Though there may be some reason for consternation about the latest evolution of reporting (particularly with regard to privacy issues), the fears of amateurism may be put to rest. Where you had Woodward and Bernstein covering the Watergate scandal, now you have sophisticated hackers capable of making their way into highly classified governmental systems that an older generation of journalists didn’t even dare speculate about. As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” First came the reporting about a US Army helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, and now comes the WikiLeak about what is really occurring in Afghanistan. “The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year,” the Times reported (“View is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan,” NYT, 7/25/10). The information, while not surprising, is striking in its detail, but more important, this is one of the clear-cut times when history is transformative in terms of information-gathering. Everyone has been wondering what is going to happen to newspapers, and which ones will start to charge for their online editions. Balderdash—for good or bad WikiLeaks is the new journalism, with transparency (a word that has also been bandied about by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) as the lingua franca and moral high ground of both political and journalistic life. Here is how the unfolding of the current front-page story is described in the print edition of the Times piece:  “The documents—some 92,000 individual reports in all—were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds…”