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<title>Abandoning My Silence - A Year of Lisp</title>
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<h1 class="huge"><a href="">A Year of Lisp</a></h1>
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<h1>Abandoning My Silence</h1>
<p>A few weeks ago, at the showing of "This Changes Everything" in Chicago I approached one of the people involved and
told them a brief summary of my story. I wanted at least one person in the activist community to know who I was, to know my name in case something happened to me. That person encouraged me and listened to my testimony. Thank you. Thank you so very, very much.
In a small way you helped to give me the courage to finally publish this, after so long and after so many threats.</p>
<p>My name is Daniel T Peters and this post is meant document, publicly, the experiences of the last 2+ years of my
life, specifically my refusal to shill for the intelligence community within the greater Chicago technology community
in general and the Chicago Python Users group in particular. I will not be revealing the identity of my would-be
liaison as to do so would in all likelihood be a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. I will
however discuss why (I believe) I was selected and some of the things that happened after I refused.</p>
<p>In 2013 someone in my life revealed them self to be an undercover intelligence officer and asked me, point blank,
to work them them. This person had been a part of my life for some time at that point and the shock was so great that at the first opportunity I simply fled and tried to tell someone else what was happening to me. Over night my entire life radically changed. I was threatened, repeatedly, with my own death. My family's life was threatened to me. If I left where I was staying without a cell phone or if I took the battery out
I would immediately acquire fairly obvious physical surveillance. Peoples behavior toward me changed, across many
different communities in my life, not simply in tech circles. Jobs I had been offered evaporated. When I walked into a
room peoples spines would stiffen, their faces contort, sometimes even turning bodily away from my at my approach. If
I engaged them in conversation, where there had previously been friendliness, openness, camaraderie, even the
occasional flirting, I now found stammering, excuses, barely concealed anxiety. I made this possible by simply
taking what was being done to me. My quiet-ism exacerbated it. I guessed roughly what was happening but it wasn't
until several months of this waking nightmare had passed that I was handed some proof. One by one a tiny handful of
people either passed me hand written notes or simply told me in stairwells and corners; there were rumors going
around that I was "paranoid delusional", "schizophrenic", "potentially violent" and an "anarchist". A whisper
campaign to delegitmize me if I <em>did</em> say something.
My appearance, the way I lived, and even aspects of my behavior did absolutely nothing to quell this. At the
time I sported a 4 inch scraggly beard and hair to match. I openly smoked weed and lived a bohemian life. When
excited, and I was usually pretty excited at tech meetups, I would sometimes chatter on in a near manic way, leaping
from idea to idea sometimes mid-sentence.
There is one thing people were told that is slightly true. I am extremely left of center on a number of issues.
I've studied a fair amount of 19th and 20th century anarchism theory and practice. From the early Israeli kibbutzim
to the London East End to the Spanish CGT. Bakunin, Nestor Mahkno, Emma Goldman, Rudolph Rocker, Daniel Guerin,
Friends of Durruti, and, of course, Noam Chomsky. I'm Sicilian and have southern Italian anarchists in my family
going back over a century. And while I tend to identify as more of a European style social democrat I want to be
perfectly clear; I am glad I have engaged these traditions. I am glad that I've struggled with the profound
questions they raise. And I am proud, damn proud, to have come from a family with a history of radicalism. Have
you ever seen this picture?
[<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/Flower_Power_by_Bernie_Boston.jpg">]</p>
<p>This was my uncle. If you have seen it you know exactly what it means. He was
extremely active in the Berkeley Free Speech movement, kicked out of Chicago, the place of his birth, for organizing
during the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention. Several of my other aunts and uncles marched with MLK
Jr, and participated in other ways in the great social and political ferment that was 1960's America.<br />
But other than that what was spread about me was quite simply, total bullshit. I'm
actually extremely boring. When I can, I spend virtually all of my free time in used book stores, libraries and
coffee shops. I often simply walk the city, thinking, enjoying the pulse of life around. I identified very much
with a recent post by Charles Pierce in Esquire, on walking the Esplanade in Boston. I've walked that same Esplanade
many times. Truth be told, I am the flaneur extraordinarie.
After six months or so of this I began to realize that nothing was going to change. There is a quote by Laura Poitras
in the beginning of Nowhere to Hide by Glenn Greenwald where she says, effectively "my silence is only making this
worse". I came to that realization myself around this time. So tentatively, I started talking. First to my family
and then, in bits in pieces to people in Chicago. At Pumping Station One and at Chipy meetings I would mention
"things are pretty difficult right now, for political reasons", "harassment and surveillance don't just happen to
high profile people, its happened to me too", and that "its getting difficult to survive right now, I've been blacklisted". Starting around
the same time I attempted to find legal aid. It turns out however that the only means by which you can initially
confer with a lawyer at the ACLU is over the phone, and that only after you've called, emailed, or snail mailed a
summary of your problem first. This was not something I was prepared to do at the time. Use a phone? To....talk
about this? Not a chance. I did manage to make it up to their office only to be told that the absolute best I could
do was to fill out a form and wait for a call. Sadly after doing just that I never heard from them. I appreciate
the problems organizations like the ACLU suffer from, chief among them a lack of resources, but the unique nature
of my situation made their normal process untenable.
By the end of March 2014, unable to pay rent I left Chicago, returning home to Texas. The first few months back
home were difficult. I realized I was suffering from PTSD. Screaming nightmares, starting at loud noises, a near
complete unwillingness to leave the house alone. The harassment and surveillance dried up almost completely,
almost. Once I was followed around by a man brandishing a knife, occasionally if my parents went into a store
without our cell phones we would suddenly sprout relatively close following browsers. This in <em>Granbury Texas</em>.<br />
Finally this past summer I resolved to emigrate. Despairing of any change I decided to start my life over again in
Europe. But before I leave, I knew I had to write this. I owe it to those who tried to help me. I owe it to my
family. I owe it to the Free Software community, the Python community, and the Chicago technology community.
I've left out large chunks of this. Perhaps most of the details. Thats for a much later time, I think. The rest
of this will be an exposition of why I was I think I chosen, and what particularly someone like me would've been used to do. </p>
<p>In addition to the more radical elements in my family there is also a strong tradition of military service. My
father served in the crypto branch of the army signal corps, operating the American equivalent to the successor to
the enigma machine. My uncles also served, as did one of my grandfathers and several grand uncles. Growing up my
family went to air shows, visited battlefields and old bases and avidly discussed all things military. In college I
was awarded a partial scholarship for ROTC and spent my freshman year splitting my time between the campus where I
studied and the campus where my unit was located. But after that first year I dropped out, partially because though
I had deeply repressed it, I knew I was bisexual and was extremely worried about what that could mean, even with
DADT. Less than 2 years later I had also dropped out of school and slowly came out to my family and select friends.
In the intervening years as gay rights and particularly the right to serve have become enshrined in law I've been
somewhat haunted by a deep ambivalence about my choice to forgo service. On the one hand I have zero regret about
having to occupy Iraq, on the other I've felt a deep regret for missing an opportunity to serve my country and
share in the burden. This even with the decade plus of radical study I spent after dropping out, with my pure
unadulterated hatred of the coup-making and mass slaughter that passes for foreign policy in this country. This
ambivalence would've been fairly obvious to the right conversationalist and absolutely obvious to anyone reading my
browsing logs. Tom Ricks? Andrew Baccevich? Military history? This combined with my radical interests might have been enough to elevate me to attention, but
the things I believe that triggered the attempt to turn me had a great deal more to do with technology. Specifically
the questions I ask at meetups and conferences relating to the political consequences of a given piece of technology.
This is an example, its from PyCon 2012, a conference I was sent to via a "Chipy scholarship". That man is Paul Graham, someone probably well known to technologists and certainly to the technology
startup scene. In this keynote, he outlines ideas for new startup ideas.</p>
<p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=R9ITLdmfdLI#t=2457</p>
<p>You may have to turn up the volume to hear my question.
I have to admit a rather profound embarrassment here. Did you hear me start to ask about "EEG" devices? It was, for
a time, a fascinating subject to me and the question I started to ask was a reflection of that. Despite Paul Graham
and others complimenting me on the actually asked question, I've never quite forgiven myself for choking and asking
what was, to my ears at least, something of "gotcha" question. You see the question I wanted to ask is almost
bizarrely specific, and out of context sounds....well...crazy. And up until a few weeks ago I had yet to see or
read anyone else ask anything like it. To understand the question though you need to understand the tech involved.
In the last 10 years or so EEG devices have slowly begun to be marketed as commodities, primarily for hobbyists and
researchers. Here's the emokit, the actual device I was referring to. It costs around $400 and can talk to windows.
So what exactly does it do? It allows you to develop software that will respond to patterns of brain activity. The
problem for me and the question I started to ask Paul Graham is this:</p>
<p>What happens when the bits shooting across the wire shift from being primarily html, email, etc
and start being representations of our brain activity? More specifically, if we have trouble trusting companies
with our email, why should we trust them with an EEG feed?</p>
<p>These sorts of questions are only now becoming ask-able. This technology is still very much in its infancy. And its important to make sure that these questions aren't blown up into some kind of Alex Jones-style fever-swamp garbage. There is no government program to mandate your own personal headset. No shape shifting lizard jews from the constellation Draco coming for your mind. It can't even
"read your mind", it can only utilize other software to correlate certain patterns with certain somewhat understood brain
states. It is worth noting however, that the Snowden revelations, recast in the light of this question attain an
even higher level of importance. A much, much, much higher level of importance. The heroism of whistle-blowing over
metadata, machine learning, and internet wide network capture is amazing. The heroism of whistleblowing in the face
of the eventual "cyborization of the human species" is another thing altogether. That phrase, "cyborgization" isn't
mine by the way. Its none other Benjamin Wittes, stalwart defender of the NSA, and it was offered only a few
weeks ago at a panel which also included General Michael Hayden. Think about that for a second. Not some bearded hippie
stoner chattering on about the potential social and political implications of non-invasive BCI technology while
downing his fifth cup of coffee and eating roughly half his weight of free Giordanos. Benjamin Wittes. Here's the
video. The whole thing is worth watching though. Seriously. Take some time out of your day. You might be amazed.</p>
<p>Panel Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=R6z6Cke6Zdc#t=876</p>
<p>So all of this is crazy, minds blown and all that, but what does this have to do with me, aside from having asked
these questions almost three years ago? What it has to do with that is that there are very real differences in the
ways a given piece of technology can be implemented, and those very real differences have wildly varying potential
consequences for our social, political, economic, even our physiological life. And the kicker is this: within a
given set choices for implementation one or more may have a higher ethical content to it. A higher civic content.
Put another way; the political, social, ethical values of the technologist class over the course of the next
generation will have an unprecedented effect on the nature of our society. I say this not in a narcissistic way or
supremacist way, technologists have always had an outsized effect on their society, and there are arguably more important
classes in terms of political institutions. The difference now is this; the incredible power computational
technologies have confers on its users (read: creators, programmers, engineers, etc) a corresponding incredible power over
virtually every facet of our life. Now, I don't need to reference non-invasive BCI tech to prove this. The ways in
which digital tech in general and the internet in particular have reshaped our society is one of the most discussed
topics of our current age. Thus those with an interest in, say, maintaining easy access to digital communications
will seek to influence programmers to make design decisions that promote that interest. Witness James Comey and the
Case Of The Golden Key. The security state needs people to make its case for it from within the community,
ostensibly on their own, exactly the way they did during the cold war. An excellent book covering the cultivation
of such relationships, of shills, is by Hugh Wilford The Mighty Wurlitzer. This is no radical scholarship either,
Wilford is not in any way that I know of sympathetic to the USSR. But as a good scholar he compiles the enormous ways
in which the CIA <em>domestically</em> sought to cultivate support through patronage. I imagine that a similar set of
projects is underway or already in place now though for very different reasons. And for what its worth, manipulation of private citizens through ostensibly independent individuals is apparently so blasé a
subject to the political class that none other than Cass Sussstein put out a paper 7 years ago, speculating on how,
and under what conditions to "infiltrate" groups of private citizens. Glenn Greenwald had an excellent piece on
that as well. I do want to be clear though, I have no desire to whip a a wave of finger pointing and witch hunting.
Free communities have been struggling with how to survive state subversion for a long, long time, and if anything its
probably gotten easier for them to overcome such subversion, at least in the free societies. My own guess is that the number of plants and
those who have been turned is probably lower than one would expect in this post-snowden age. I assume when you have
access to the informational vantage point of the contemporary security state you probably don't need as many as you
people as you did in 1960.</p>
<p>A few endnotes. </p>
<p>A new documentary is coming out soon; Spied Upon. Its important and while I (obviously) haven't seen it, I have
seen and read several of the activists interviewed. It seems like there were some similarities with what happened
to me, a deep cover operative building relationships with activists. </p>
<p>Democracy Now has consistently been one of the best news organizations, perhaps <em>the</em> best news organization to cover these things.</p>
<p>The book mentioned above, The Mighty Wurlitzer, has an incredible listing of sources, and can give deep insight
into the mentality that sees citizen organizing as a thing to be either co-opted or destroyed.</p>
<p>The few people I've told in these last few months when I've
simply started talking have told me to filter, to speak more like Edward Snowden. The problem therein is that I am
not Edward Snowden, and have no desire to become like him. He is him, I am me. I have lived a great deal of my
life with my head buried in books, studying politics, journalism, economics. When I was 16 I was selected to go to
Boys State in Texas. I was in debate, extemporaneous speaking, current events, all in high school. For the brief
period I was in college I was a political science major. All of this is to say, I've come to very different
conclusions from my studies then he has and the desire to put me in the same box springs mostly from my (relative)
youth and my passion for technology and politics. I hope that he can come home one day. I'm a
little embarrassed to say this but I was actually quite skeptical of him at first, and only after the interminable
nightmare my life has become did I really understand why he left. If he had stayed here I have no doubt whatsoever
that he would have been killed. Full stop. <br />
I wish this were more polished. I've written it a dozen times and every time it feels wrong, incomplete,
inarticulate. But there comes a time when you simply must take a chance. When you have to get on with your life. As
time goes on perhaps I'll add more in a more focused, polished fashion. There is a distance one must have from
traumatic experiences before you can get your arms around them and I have a feeling this one is far from over yet.
In other words, I'm sorry for the quality of this writing. My entire life I've dreamed of being a published writer,
fiction, satire, essays. The last thing I wanted to write about was something like this. I've had a hellish fucking run of it
these last few years and this the best of I've got.</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre> Hopes
</pre></div>
<p>I hope that Paul Graham and other VC's/founders see this and think about that unasked question I <em>almost</em> asked.
Its still distant, but that makes it all the more important to consider it now, while there's time to attempt to
figure out what the potential physiological effects of all these new technologies will be. I see the who's
hiring threads every month on Hacker News and every month there seem to be more posts for people who have "wetlab"
experience and related biotech skillsets. I'd be lying if I didn't say that makes me profoundly uneasy. I hope the Python community sees this
and knows how much of an effect you have had on my life. It would be difficult to overstate the respect I have for</p>
<p>so many of you. I hope that the technology community in general finds ways to cope with the effects it is having
and will only increasingly continue to have on the entire rest of the world. I hope that those who followed me
through the streets of Chicago, Ft Worth, Granbury, Houston, who spread lies about me, who threatened me to my face,
I hope one day you come to know that you were tasked to do these things not because I was a "terror threat", but
because I refused to join you. In an age of literally daily mass shootings I cannot hate those who were made to fear
me or even hunted me, I certainly looked the part (though I've kept the fucking beard). I hope more people know who
William Binney, Thomas Drake, Russell Tyce, Edward Snowden and the other whistleblowers are. Watching the John
Oliver piece where he interviews people on the street on whether on not they know who Snowden is was profoundly
depressing. An Oscar for Citizenfour is great but it proves meaningless if only those who already know are the ones
to see it. I say that this with the deepest of respect for Laura Poitras, its a statement about the contemporary
media and political climate, not a comment on her incredible work. </p>
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<time datetime="2015-11-03T00:00:00-06:00" pubdate>Tue 03 November 2015</time>
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