On 5 Apr 2016, at 9:17, Patrice Riemens wrote:
7. Leaks have become unquestionable.
With earlier disclosures, the authenticity of documents leaked could
always be credibly disputed. Nowadays the authenticity of materials
obtained thru electronic leaks, due to its sheer magnitude and the one
to one nature of a digital reproduction, is much more difficult to
question.
For now, maybe, but that won't last long. On the contrary, I think
they'll quickly become *precisely* questionable, plagued with questions
about agendas within agendas, the provenance and 'curation' of
documents, and so on. It may sound strange to use language associated
with connoisseurship in this context, but it isn't; on the contrary,
this increasingly leaky world will be defined more and more deeply in
aesthetic ways -- because leaks involve *media*.
I'll start with one example, an argument I first heard Florian Schneider
make, although aspects of it connect to a wider range of work -- for
example, Eyal Weizman's forensis initiative and Rabih Mroue's
meditations on visuality of confrontation. The basic idea involves a
drastic change in the aesthetics of 'authority.' High resolution,
precision, stability, and controlled framing used to be the dominant
meta qualities of visual 'truths,' but they've given way to a
counter-aesthetic: pixelated, chaotic, fragmentary, indeterminate. The
more fucked-up a video, the more authentic it seems; and, conversely,
the more 'produced' a video, the more artificial it seems. This isn't
entirely new (but nothing ever is entirely new): we can find
prehistories in the enigmatic blurring in photos of disappeared
kommissars, the umpteenth-generation photocopies that of cultural arcana
that circulated with punk and experimental music, older films like
Coppola's _The Conversation_ and Antonioni's _Blow-up_, and newer ones
like _The Blair Witch Project_. But some of it is new: the way that
blocky pixelation and portrait framing suggest a phone camera and
precious video uploaded against al odds, buffers of audio without video,
the sounds of hardware being jostled and scraped. But those very
qualities are easy -- maybe the easiest -- to forge.
The other extreme is a very different aesthetic, but one that will be
much harder to identify as such because it'll be scattered across
seemingly disparate artifacts in many media -- 'declassified' documents
with their distinctive blackouts, phone-size screenshots of text
messages and supposed deleted social-media profiles and posts, and soon
enough voice and video recordings. Again, these techniques have lots of
precedents, real and imaginary -- in books (say, novels by people like
Le Carre but going back to volume 2 of _Don Quixote_), in film (F for
Fake, The Prisoner, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Truman
Show). But these won't just be forged documents or even dossiers,
they'll be 'distributed' in ways that are really boggling. Many of the
constituent technics needed t generate and drive projects like this are
already commodified: botnets and troll armies planting Markov-generated
noise, hardware and networks subverted to perform ever-more subtle
man-in-the-middle and replay attacks, and digital signal processing
technologies (the most recent that I've seen involves real-time facial
motion capture mapped onto archival video -- i.e., using a live actor to
control 'old' footage). The pieces of this puzzle have been coming
together for decades: transmedia 419 scams, social engineering >
phishing > catfishing and spearphishing, 'overidentification' activist
projects like the Yes Men. Call it 'just-in-time conspiratorialism.'
But beneath all that detail, my point is simple: leaks will be precisely
questionable -- and much of the questioning will shift from away from
the supposed substance (who? what? when? where? etc) and toward a sort
of forensic appreciation. and the scale of material won't be a bug,
it'll be a feature.
On 5 Apr 2016, at 14:42, Florian Cramer forwarded:
Panama Papers â not the Scoop but the Flop of the CenturyÂ
Florian, I'm pretty confident that Jens Berger's eruption won't age hold
up very well, and I really wonder why you bothered to forward such a
load of bollocks. And to follow that up with intimations that most of
the major foundations are behind the fact that no US citizens have been
named in the first 36 hours? I'm under no illusions about the many roles
that the upper echelons of US civil society have played in shaping (some
would say distorting) the world for decades, but Berger's tantrum and
your follow-up would be very much at home on Fox News.
And...
On 5 Apr 2016, at 19:11, [email protected] wrote:
Maybe I'm missing something, but the mere notion that something that
3-400 people have access to (more likely thousands, with associates,
managers, etc.) is a tight secret is ... mind boggling. And then when
the logistics of distributing all these terabytes to hundreds of
recipients, months ago, without a single accident, is considered, this
becomes a virtually impossible proposition.
Yes, there's more to this than meets the eye. We're starting to see much
more collaboration and co-sponsorship between media outlets, but it's
still very new and tricky terrain: deep and in some cases irreconcilable
cultural divides separate the cultures of 'magazines,' 'newspapers,' and
'books.' Just one example: James Risen's conflicts with the NYT over his
work on warrantless wiretapping and what became his (excellent) book
_Pay Any Price_. But if we add to that even greater differences -- say,
different national norms in whether or how newspapers cooperate with the
state -- it's inconceivable that there wasn't a growing buzz about this
yearlong development. Oh, and the investigative journalist Ken
Silverstein published a piece about Mossack Fonseca in late 2014, which
I'd guess he'd been working on for several months:
https://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12
Maybe it's just a coincidence that he was nosing around the same law
firm in the months before this leak sprang, or maybe his works suggests
a bit of backstory, I don't know. But the way the _Sueddeutsche Zeitung_
tells the story is a bit too beep-beep Matrix-y for my taste:
"Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data?"
"We're very interested."
"There are a couple of conditions. My life is in danger..."
I suppose that conversation must have really taken place because
falsifying something so basic for no good reason would (or at least
should) violate the most basic tenets of journalism. But, that said, if
this is how it works, we're in for a golden age of trolling.
On top of this, it appears that each entity got a custom subset - a
major editing task.
And none of these thousands - not a single one - sent a copy to
Wikileaks? Give me a break.
What we have here is a totally unrealistic interpretation of the
reality. But then it was only a matter of time when the 'anonymous
leaks' strategy will get weaponized and incorporated into media
business model.
See above.
Cheers,
Ted
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