I assume you have joined or organized a local group to mobilize mass
protest? Nothing anyone _says_ outside such a context indicates concern.

Carrol

----------

I am not being coy when I say you could put it that way. However that is the 
wrong question. It betrays an organization centered view. One of the great 
strong points of Berkeley was, there was very marginal need for 
organizations per se. Everybody understood, you could just show up, 
participate to the level you were willing and to the commitment you were 
ready to engage. In that sense it was remarkably similar to the amorphous 
Occupy.

This informality had the great strength of being impossible to control from 
the authorities point of view. As the depth of resistance increased, the 
organization did too, but in a much reduced form. It still remained what I 
would call a network phenomenon, publically known with limited association 
ties and very marginal centrality. It was similar to all social networks. 
These seem to be basic social forms. And, they evolved with conditions and 
events to service the needs of people within, associated with, or casual 
visitors to these networks.

This alternate social system could service everything from abortion to 
desertion, bullet wounds to getting out of the country. With these informal 
networks legal and medical cohorts coevolved servicing the needs of these 
nascent communities....etc. You could see these same forms develop in Egypt 
in 2011.

These political-social-economic activity networks are precisely what 
Boundless Informant is good for profiling, monitoring, and subverting 
through information gathering sent to the law and order enforcement 
divisions of the corporate-state at any level that requests it.

In the past it was difficult to get this informational view of an informal 
social network. Now it is not any more difficult than using google to find 
relevant information and material on request. NSA can paint you a diagram 
with names, locations, profiling actions and possible plans, and legally 
cogent content through the metadata picture.

In concrete terms this means that in yore when I helped military deserters, 
it would show up through phone numbers called from my place. The same thing 
applied to the abortion underground. Since everbody uses ATMs, credit cards, 
debit cards and cell phones these all appear in a metadata set now.

The metadata set is the graphic for an informal social network. It's as good 
as a list of membership names, addresses, phone numbers, and profiles. On 
permutation of such sets, is another such graphic. You can pretty much 
determine the true political profile for a local community.

These technological developments created the `picture' of Iraq, Afghanistan, 
Pakistan, etc.

CG


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