Anarchism: Necessary But Not Sufficient

Posted by Anna Morgenstern on C4ss.org

Economic Development Without the State

American political debate has recently centered on manufacturers that relocate overseas and “abandon” American workers — and the alleged need for government to stop them from doing it.  But maybe we need to figure out a way to abandon the corporate employers, instead.

Conventional community economic development policy — this is equally true of Chambers of Commerce, state industrial development commissions, and World Bank technocrats — starts from the assumption that the path to economic development is colonization: Get a giant corporation to set up an outpost in your community and provide a lot of jobs (preferably with government seed money to lure them in).

The rationale was simple: For a couple of centuries, the propertied classes’ privileged access to big piles of capital and millions of acres of stolen land made them a chokepoint on economic development.

But technological developments in recent years — the desktop/Internet revolution in the information sphere, and the revolution in cheap digitally controlled machine tools in manufacturing — are freeing us from this dependence.

The main material reason for the factory system and predominance of wage labor was the technological shift a couple hundred years ago from relatively inexpensive, general-purpose artisan tools to expensive machinery.  Only the very rich could afford the machinery required for production, and they then hired wage laborers to operate it.

The computer revolution, and the revolution in cheap garage-scale machine tools, have reversed this shift.  The computer is a cheap, general-purpose artisan tool that destroys the quality gap between what a person can produce at work and what he can produce at home, in a whole range of industries:  Software, recording, and desktop publishing among them.

And now cheap digital machine tools mean the same thing for manufacturing.  Open-source hardware hackers have cooked up homebrew versions of CNC routers, cutting tables, milling machines, lathes, 3-D printers, etc., that cost one or two thousand dollars (or less) to build — compared to tens of thousands for commercial, proprietary digital tools, and millions for a factory equipped with old-style mass production machinery.

A garage “factory” with $10k worth of homebrew machinery can do most of what used to require a million-dollar factory.  And with a network of open-source hardware designers, it can design its own products, and produce “lean” style:  Producing in small batches and switching back and forth between lots of different products as the orders come in, and gearing production to a local/neighborhood market.  That means low overhead, no inventory, drastically reduced shipping costs, and no mass-marketing costs.

In a lot of manufactured products, a major portion of price is either brand-name markup or embedded rents on patent and copyright, rather than labor and material cost (Tom Peters crowed, in The Tom Peters Seminar, that 90% of his new Minolta’s price was “intellect”).  Competition will strip out that part of price (along with the portion of your work hours that go toward earning money to pay tribute to the owners of artificial property rights).

It helps that relocalizing manufacturing to “a hundred thousand garages” essentially makes proprietary designs unenforceable. The costs of industrial patents are such that they only pay for themselves if you produce in large batches, and enforcement costs are minimized by the fact that a handful of oligopoly firms distribute their products through a handful of corporate retail chains.  When thousands of garage factories are producing knockoffs or riffing off of proprietary designs, in small batches at the neighborhood level, the costs of enforcement will destroy the patent regime.

Patents are also the main legal support to planned obsolescence, as well as to the whole model of price-gouging on parts and accessories (e.g. cheap phones and expensive service plans, cheap printers and expensive toners, etc.).  With no patent restrictions on competition, there would be no legal barrier to competitors producing generic modular accessories and spare parts for other companies’ platforms.  So the competitive pressure would be toward developing products that were compatible with other companies’ stuff and easy to repair by simply replacing one modular component — instead of designing products that only work with your own marked-up accessories, and can’t be fixed without throwing the whole thing away.

And all this renders the conventional strategy for community economic development totally obsolete. A low-capital, low-overhead approach to development is an enormous force multiplier for the community’s own resources. When the capital outlay for building a factory to produce everything you need falls a hundredfold, the propertied classes’ longstanding advantage in access to land and capital is completely nullified — communities can bootstrap local economies, starting with almost nothing, without begging a Daddy Warbucks for help.

So maybe this is the beginning of a shift away from the idea of “jobs,” and back to work as something working people do for ourselves and for exchange with each other.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

No War But Class War!

Frédéric Bastiat nailed it when he defined the state as “the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

If that was as far as it went, political government would pretty much be a wash. We’d all get back about what we put into it, less the “friction” of transaction costs and such. Eventually we’d presumably notice that the state is a hamster wheel and get off it.

Unfortunately, that’s not as far as it goes. Any state — even (or perhaps especially!) the most putatively egalitarian or democratic one — eventually metastasizes under the pressures created by the competition of “everyone to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Even if first intended as a mere abstract transactional crossroads across which mutual aid assets or reciprocal rights protections pass on their way to and fro, the state is quickly reified by its more clever admirers. It becomes a concrete entity with its own interests. A new class of keepers, tenders and purpose-evolved parasites — the political class — emerges to make those interests its own.

Eventually the state drowns in the waste generated by its parasitical classes. The French monarchy collapsed beneath the weight of the Bourbon dynasty’s wars and palaces and intrigues. The Soviet Union’s apparatchik class drained its blood until that reddest of red states became a pale, lifeless husk — whiter than Kolchak’s armies! — ready to be blown away by the slightest gust of popular discontent.

It is for this reason that I’m very much encouraged by the American situation. After more than 200 years, the United States seems to be reaching the end of the same rope.

Its politicians have racked up more than $13 trillion in direct debt, at least $100 trillion in “unfunded liabilities” (i.e. promises of future payments), and at present are borrowing and spending $150-$200 billion more per month than they can figure out how to forcibly extract from the populace through taxation.

Where’s all that money going?

“At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn …” (“Federal workers earning double their private counterparts,” by Dennis Cauchon, USA Today, 08/10/10)

“We have already spent close to $1 trillion in Iraq …. When all is said and done, the combined cost of caring for veterans, continued Iraqi operations, replenishing and transporting equipment and paying interest on the debt will bring the final tally to well over $2 trillion. Including the economic costs — both to individuals and to the economy as whole — the bill easily tops $3 trillion.” (“Iraq war winds down, but costs soar,” by Linda J. Bilmes, San Francisco Chronicle, 08/15/10)

“We spend $7 billion a month on the war in Afghanistan and every day it becomes more and more clear that we are pursuing a failed strategy that doesn’t make America any safer …” (US Rep. Chellie Pingree [D-ME], quoted in “Mitchell meets, greets,” by Susan M. Cover and Rebekah Metzler, Kennebec Joural, 08/02/10)

This, my friends, is what we call “not a tenable situation.” But the state keeps doubling down, as with last week’s $26 billion payout to save 300,000 government employees from falling off the teat.

America’s politicians, by habit, frequently call upon the populace to eschew “class warfare,” by which they are generally understood to mean war between the rich and the poor.

Left unsaid, but becoming increasingly clear even to those who generally take little interest in matters political, is the fact that every operation of government is, by definition, an exercise in “class warfare” — a raid by a political class whose very survival depends on its continued ability to loot your wallet, your wealth, your work.

Like everyone else, the political class has to eat.

Unlike everyone else, the political class proposes to eat us.

Now that the pesky mosquitoes have mutated into gnawing rats and threaten to grow into rabid wolves, more and more Americans are finally starting to take notice.

It’s class war, to the death, like it or not — a war for survival, the political class or us. Personally, I’m for us.

C4SS News Analyst Thomas L. Knapp is a long-time libertarian activist and the author of Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed, an e-booklet which shares the methods underlying his more than 100 published op-ed pieces in mainstream print media. Knapp publishes Rational Review News Digest, a daily news and commentary roundup for the freedom movement.

Capitalist Democracy: The Illusion of Choice

Supporters of capitalist democracy generally claim that it is the best—if not the only—way of organising a free society. Capitalist democracy provides the conditions, they claim, under which each of us can determine the course of our own destiny and enjoy all the benefits in terms of creative autonomy and individual self-development that accrue to a truly free people.

They say that freedom is something we enjoy as a result of choosing those political representatives whose policies best reflect the dictates of our own conscience to make laws on our behalf. We achieve the common good, they say, by compelling all to respect the laws, which are applied equally to all without fear or favour.

These claims are myths. The fact that many of us commonly confuse these myths with facts changes nothing, since the truth of an idea is not determined by the number of people who believe it.

While capitalist democracy appears to offer us choice—choice being the cornerstone of our freedom—the fact is that the choices it offers are not meaningful ones. Since capitalist democracy provides us with meaningless choices, it also provides us with the illusion of choice, and thus the illusion of freedom.

Consider the following facts:

1. Capitalist society is class society. Despite the claims made by the most powerful people in our society—who, we might add, have vested interests in doing so—the unity of the nation-state is an illusory one, because capitalist society is divided into economic classes. On the one hand we have those who own and control social resources, and who enjoy the economic and social privileges that accompanies such ownership and control, and on the other those who lack such ownership and control and are obliged by the circumstances of their birth to sell their labour for a wage, which is generally most of us.

2. Exploitation is inherent to class society. The foundation of meaningful freedom is economic independence, and economic independence on a social level derives from the ability of each of us to control the fruits of our labour. This is a basic human right. In capitalist society the propertied classes own and control the tools of production, the places where we work and the things we work with, which means that those of us who don’t own and control the tools of production are forced to work for those who do. Needless to say, this situation deprives us of our economic independence and forces us into a position of submission and subservience.

But it gets worse. The capitalist class generates profits from the wage system by paying workers less in wages than the value of the product of our labour, which they take for themselves. This is exploitation, period, and any sort of exploitation is inconceivable in a free society, because as long as one person can be exploited none of us are free. The only difference between chattel slaves and wage workers is that the former were owned, whereas the latter are rented. Seen in the cold hard light of day, wage labour is really wage-slavery.

Suffice it to say that the economic and social privileges that the propertied classes enjoy in our society depends for their existence on the denial of elementary human rights to the vast majority of society.

3. The exploitation inherent to capitalist society is protected by the state. The denial of the basic human right of economic independence to the working class is protected by the institutionalied violence of the state, by the police, military and judiciary. The primary function of the state is to protect and defend the social and economic privileges of the propertied classes. It is an institution of class domination which lords over the whole of society and imposes economic dependence and servitude on the great mass of humanity in the service of an opulent minority.

(Some will argue in the defense of the state that it 1) maintains order and 2) protects us from violent crime. To this we pose the counter-arguments as follows: 1) what sort of order and in whose interests, and 2) that being ‘protected’ against ‘crime’ by the state is like being ‘protected’ against ‘crime’ by the mafia, and that as the state bequeaths its ‘protection’ to the working classes, facilitating the theft of the wealth it produces, so too does it perpetuate crime in the name of stopping it. Since the system of deterrence has failed to stop violent crime, we suggest alternative strategies such as addressing the causes).

4. The primary function of the state as a defender of privilege and injustice is reflected in capitalist law. The character of the state as an institution of class domination and the nature of its basic function (to protect the privileges of the propertied classes from the rest of us) forms the basis of capitalist law. The golden rule is that those with the gold make the rules. The basic fraud behind the doctrine of equality before the law, the foundation for capitalist democracy, derives then from the fact that the laws are made by and for the rich.

The fact then that, in applying the same law to all, capitalist law has overcome the arbitrariness of kingly despotism is ultimately irrelevant for those of us in a state of economic servitude, since the law itself is unjust; being grounded as it is in the protection of elite privilege and the perpetuation of the master-slave relationship at the core of the wage system, it perpetuates the arbitrary rule—the despotism—of a class.

5. Capitalist democracy operates within the paradigm of capitalist law and underwrites its injustices. When we go to the voting booth at election time we choose between candidates from within an ideological spectrum that takes the legitimacy of class rule and wage-slavery as a given. No discussion may be entered into on the subject—all sides, whether left or right, agree that the propertied class may exploit the working class and that the master-slave relationship that characterises the wage system is proper and just.

Thus we can’t vote out wage-slavery. We can’t vote out the extraordinary extremes of wealth and poverty that the capitalist system produces. We can’t vote out the sacrifice of every ethical, moral, social, environmental and humanitarian consideration to the holy gospel of profit. We can’t vote out the system that fulfills human needs only as long as the human beings involved have enough money to pay. We can’t vote out patriarchy and institutionalised racism. We can’t vote out the imperialist wars that the West is waging in Iraq and Afghanistan to control the flow of oil in the name of fighting the sort of terrorism that it perpetuates. We can’t vote out corporations, private tyrannies with internally autocratic decision-making structures whose global reach renders the governments of individual nation-states obsolete as well as illegitimate. We can only vote for the carrot from the left or the stick from the right—either way, wage-slavery continues.

Considering all of the above facts, it is impossible to make any conclusion other than that in providing us with candidates who are essentially the same insofar as they share a consensus regarding the legitimacy of wage-slavery, capitalist democracy provides us with false choices, and thus the illusion of choice, and thus the illusion of freedom. It is only possible to conclude that the regime of capitalist democracy and its two-party circus act where we vote for Tweedledum’s stick when we get sick of voting for Tweedledee’s carrot and vice versa, signifies the permanent deferral of meaningful freedom for anyone who isn’t a beneficiary of exploited labour.

Capitalist democracy will always disappoint because it is of, by and for the ruling class. We must learn to take responsibility for our own freedom and let go of our childish faith in leaders and in being told how to think and act. We must learn to think and act for ourselves individually as well as socially. We must create the facts of a better future in the here and now through community and workplace organising on a cooperative and non-heirarchical basis, in such a way that connects our goal of meaningful freedom with the means that we use to achieve it. Only in this way do we have any hope of overcoming the injustices of capitalist democracy and creating a brighter future for everyone.

Economic Hitmen Come for Their ‘Pound of Flesh’ in New Jersey

Source: Activist Post

It was reported today that New Jersey’s Governor Christie is proposing privatization of many public services. This is the precise playbook of “Economic Hitmen” aka Banks.  First, they loan ridiculous amounts of money to the public sector, knowing full well these loans can never be repaid and when state bankruptcy looms, the public infrastructure is auctioned to pirates of industry for pennies on the dollar.

According to the article on NorthJersey.com, Christie plans to privatize motor vehicle inspections and other public services:

New Jersey would close its centralized car inspection lanes and motorists would pay for their own emissions tests under a sweeping set of recommendations set to be released by the Christie administration today.

State parks, psychiatric hospitals and even turnpike toll booths could also be run by private operators, according to the 57-page report on privatization obtained by The Star-Ledger. Preschool classrooms would no longer be built at public expense, state employees would pay for parking and private vendors would dish out food, deliver health care and run education programs behind prison walls.

Get ready, as more cash-strapped states will surely follow suit and the fascist takeover of all public services at rock-bottom prices will commence.  Wouldn’t it be terrific to see Chinese companies buying up California’s infrastructure?

Are You a “Perfect Citizen”?

By Tom Burghardt – BLN Contributing Writer

Big Brother Deploys Snooping Sensors on Private Networks

Rather than addressing an impending social catastrophe, Western governments, which serve the interests of the economic elites, have installed a “Big Brother” police state with a mandate to confront and repress all forms of opposition and social dissent. — Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, Preface, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, Montreal: Global Research, 2010, p. xx.

In a sign that illegal surveillance programs launched by the Bush administration are accelerating under President Obama, The Wall Street Journal revealed last week that a National Security Agency (NSA) program, PERFECT CITIZEN, is under development.

With a cover story that this is merely a “research” effort meant to “detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants,” it is also clear that the next phase in pervasive government spying is underway.

With “cybersecurity” morphing into a new “public-private” iteration of the “War On Terror,” WSJ reporter Siobhan Gorman disclosed that giant defense contractor Raytheon “recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that Raytheon had positioned itself, and profited from, a media-driven panic. As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock documented for CorpWatch, “as the primary spying unit of defense industry giant Raytheon,” the firm’s Intelligence and Information Services division (Raytheon IIS) is the premier provider of command and control systems “capable of transforming data into actionable intelligence.”

According to Shorrock, the unit’s “most important clients … are the NSA, NGA, and NRO, for which it provides signals and imaging processing, as well as information security software and tools;” in other words, agencies that are at the heart of America’s electronic warfare complex.

The program, Gorman writes, “would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack.” While Journal sources claim the program “wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system,” a leaked Raytheon email paints a different picture, in line with other NSA intrusions into domestic affairs.

“The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security,” the whistleblower writes. “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

These revelations have triggered concerns that projects like PERFECT CITIZEN, and others that remain classified, signal a new round of secret state surveillance and privacy-killing programs under the catch-all euphemism “cybersecurity.”

The Journal reports that information captured by PERFECT CITIZEN “could also have applications beyond the critical infrastructure sector, officials said, serving as a data bank that would also help companies and agencies who call upon NSA for help with investigations of cyber attacks, as Google did when it sustained a major attack late last year.”

In other words, the program will have major implications “beyond the critical infrastructure sector” and could adversely affect the privacy rights of all Americans. In fact, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to hypothesize that PERFECT CITIZEN may very well be related to other “intrusion detection programs” such as Einstein 3′s deep-packet inspection capabilities that can read, and catalogue, the content of email messages flowing across private telecommunications networks.

One unnamed military source told the Journal, “you’ve got to instrument the network to know what’s going on, so you have situational awareness to take action.”

However, as the UK publication The Register noted, “many of the networks that the NSA would wish to place Perfect Citizen equipment on are privately owned, however, and some could also potentially carry information offering scope for ‘mission creep’ outside an infrastructure-security context.”

The Register’s Lewis Page, a former Royal Navy Commander and frequent critic of the surveillance state, writes that “full access to power company systems might allow the NSA to work out whether anyone was at home at a given address. Transport and telecoms information would also make for a potential bonanza for intrusive monitoring.”

When queried whether the program would be yet another snooping tool deployed against the public, NSA spokesperson Judith Emmel told The Register Friday: “PERFECT CITIZEN is purely a vulnerabilities-assessment and capabilities-development contract.”

According to NSA, “This is a research and engineering effort. There is no monitoring activity involved, and no sensors are employed in this endeavor. Specifically, it does not involve the monitoring of communications or the placement of sensors on utility company systems.”

When specifically asked by Page if NSA is “seeking to spy on US citizens by means of examining their power or phone usage, tracking them through transport systems etc, the NSA would simply never think of such a thing.”

“Any suggestions that there are illegal or invasive domestic activities associated with this contracted effort are simply not true. We strictly adhere to both the spirit and the letter of US laws and regulations,” insisted Emmel.

Which raises an inevitable question: what would lead a Raytheon insider to compare the project to “Big Brother”? This is strong language from an employee of one of America’s largest defense firms, a company in the No. 4 slot on Washington Technology’s 2010 Top 100 list of prime federal contractors with some $6.7 billion in total revenue, 88% of which are derived from defense contracts.

At this point we don’t know, and Siobhan Gorman hasn’t told us since the Journal, as of this writing, hasn’t seen fit to enlighten the public with the full text, if one exists, as to why someone obviously familiar with the program would put their job at risk if PERFECT CITIZEN were simply a “vulnerabilities-assessment and capabilities-development contract” and not something far more sinister.

The Pentagon Rules. Any Questions?

The Journal reported that the project began as “a small-scale effort” under the code name APRIL STRAWBERRY. Over time, the classified program was “expanded with funding from the multibillion-dollar Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, which started at the end of the Bush administration and has been continued by the Obama administration,” Gorman wrote. Now, with billions of dollars available “the NSA is now seeking to map out intrusions into critical infrastructure across the country.”

As Antifascist Calling reported earlier this year (see: “Obama’s National Cybersecurity Initiative Puts NSA in the Driver’s Seat”), although the administration has released portions of the Bush regime’s National Security Presidential Directive 54 (NSPD-54) in a sanitized version called the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), the full scope of the program remains shrouded in secrecy.

Indeed, most of NSPD-54 and CNCI have never been released to the public. This led the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) to write in a 2008 report that “virtually everything about the initiative is classified, and most of the information that is not classified is categorized as ‘For Official Use Only’.”

Due to the opacity of the highly-secretive program and stonewalling by the administration, the SASC joined their colleagues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and called for the initiative to be scaled-back “because policy and legal reviews are not complete, and because the technology is not mature.”

Hardly beacons of transparency themselves when it comes to overseeing depredations wrought by the secret state, nevertheless SASC questioned the wisdom of a program that “preclude public education, awareness and debate about the policy and legal issues, real or imagined, that the initiative poses in the areas of privacy and civil liberties. … The Committee strongly urges the [Bush] Administration to reconsider the necessity and wisdom of the blanket, indiscriminate classification levels established for the initiative.”

In fact, as the investigative journalism web site ProPublica reported last summer, the White House “has erased all mention of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from its Web site. The removal, which was done with no public notice, has underlined questions about the Obama administration’s commitment to the board.” As of this writing, it remains an empty shell.

Despite repeated efforts by civil liberties and privacy groups, the Obama administration has been no more forthcoming than the previous regime in answering these critical concerns, particularly when the “policy and legal issues” are cloaked in secrecy under a cover of “national security.”

Instead, CNCI’s “Initiative #12. Define the Federal role for extending cybersecurity into critical infrastructure domains,” offer little more than linguistic sedatives meant to lull the public as to how and through what means the administration plans to build “on the existing and ongoing partnership between the Federal Government and the public and private sector owners and operators of Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR).”

While the administration claims that the “Department of Homeland Security and its private-sector partners have developed a plan of shared action with an aggressive series of milestones and activities,” as we now know the civilian, though securocratic-minded Homeland Security bureaucracy is being supplanted by the Pentagon’s National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command as the invisible hands guiding the nation’s “cybersecurity” policies.

As I reported last month (see: “Through the Wormhole: The Secret State’s Mad Scheme to Control the Internet”), corporate greed and venality aren’t the only motives behind hyped-up “cyber threats.” Armed with multibillion dollar budgets, most of which are concealed from public view under a black cone of top secret classifications, agencies such as NSA are positioning themselves as gatekeepers over America’s electronic communications infrastructure.

The Media’s Role

With corporate media serving as “message force multipliers” for the flood of alarmist reports emanating from industry-sponsored think tanks such as the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), or lobby shops like the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), it is becoming clear that consensus has been reached amongst Washington power brokers, one that will have a deleterious effect on the free speech and privacy rights of all Americans.

Floated perhaps as a means to test the waters for restricting internet access, The New York Times reported July 4 that “the Internet affords anonymity to its users–a boon to privacy and freedom of speech. But that very anonymity is also behind the explosion of cybercrime that has swept across the Web.”

Reporter John Markoff, a conduit for “cyberwar” scaremongering, informs us that “Howard Schmidt, the nation’s cyberczar, offered the Obama administration’s proposal to make the Web a safer place–a ‘voluntary trusted identity’ system that would be the high-tech equivalent of a physical key, a fingerprint and a photo ID card, all rolled into one.”

“The system” Markoff writes, “might use a smart identity card, or a digital credential linked to a specific computer, and would authenticate users at a range of online services.”

Schmidt has described the Obama administration’s approach (note the warm and fuzzy phrase hiding the steel fist) as a “voluntary ecosystem” in which “individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on.”

Markoff’s reporting would be humorous if we didn’t already know that secret state agencies themselves have already compromised the Secure Socket Layer certification process (SSL, the tiny lock that appears during supposedly “secure” online transactions), as computer security and privacy researchers Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm revealed in their paper, Certified Lies: Detecting and Defeating Government Interception Attacks Against SSL.

In March, Soghoian and Stamm introduced the public to “a new attack, the compelled certificate creation attack, in which government agencies compel a certificate authority to issue false SSL certificates that are then used by intelligence agencies to covertly intercept and hijack individuals’ secure Web-based communications.” They provided “alarming evidence” that suggests “that this attack is in active use,” and that a niche security firm, Packet Forensics, is already marketing “extremely small, covert surveillance devices for networks” to government agencies.

Not everyone is thrilled by Schmidt’s call to create this allegedly “voluntary” system. Lauren Weinstein, the editor of Privacy Journal, told the Times that “such a scheme is a pre-emptive push toward what would eventually be a mandated Internet ‘driver’s license’ mentality.”

The stampede for increased state controls are accelerating. Stewart Baker, the NSA’s chief counsel under Bush, told the Times that the “privacy standards the administration wants to adopt will make the system both unwieldy and less effective and not good for security.” Baker and his ilk argue that all internet users “should be forced to register and identify themselves, in the same way that drivers must be licensed to drive on public roads.”

Considering that police have increasingly turned to license plate readers that are fast becoming “a fixture in local police arsenals,” as the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed last month, and that such devices have been deployed for political surveillance here in the heimat and abroad, as both The Guardian and Seattle Weekly disclosed in reports documenting outrageous secret state spying, a licensing scheme for internet users is an ominous analogy indeed!

The Grim Road Ahead

A confidence game only works when “marks,” in this case American citizens, allow themselves to be defrauded by a person or group who have gained their trust.

And when trust cannot be won through reason, fear tends to take over as a powerful motivator. This is amply on display when it comes to Washington’s ginned-up “cybersecurity” panic.

According to this reading, fraudulent internet schemes, identity theft, even espionage by state- and non-state actors (say corporate spies who benefit from NSA’s ECHELON program) have been transformed into a “war,” one which Bush’s former Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, currently an executive vice president with the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm, claims the U.S. is “losing.”

But as security technology expert Bruce Schneier wrote last week, “There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now.

“It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top.”

Schneier avers that “the entire national debate on cyberwar is plagued with exaggerations and hyperbole.” Googling “cyberwar,” as well as “‘cyber Pearl Harbor,’ ‘cyber Katrina,’ and even ‘cyber Armageddon’–gives some idea how pervasive these memes are. Prefix ‘cyber’ to something scary, and you end up with something really scary.”

Hackers, criminals and sociopaths have been around since the birth of the “information superhighway.” Schneier writes, “we surely need to improve our cybersecurity. But words have meaning, and metaphors matter. There’s a power struggle going on for control of our nation’s cybersecurity strategy, and the NSA and DoD are winning. If we frame the debate in terms of war, if we accept the military’s expansive cyberspace definition of ‘war,’ we feed our fears.”

This is precisely the intent of our political masters. And if the purpose of “cyberwar” hype is to breed fear, mistrust and helplessness in the face of relentless attacks by shadowy actors only a mouse click away then, as Schneier sagely warns: “We reinforce the notion that we’re helpless–what person or organization can defend itself in a war?–and others need to protect us. We invite the military to take over security, and to ignore the limits on power that often get jettisoned during wartime.”

Destroy trust, increase fear: create the “Perfect Citizen.”