Few law enforcement institutions have been so thoroughly discredited  as the FBI’s forensic lab. In 1997 the Bureau’s inspector general of the time issued a devastating report, stigmatizing one instance after another of mishandled and contaminated evidence, inept technicians, and outright fabrication. The IG concluded that there were “serious and credible allegations of incompetence” and perjured courtroom testimony.

Our view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. For example, for years many people went to prison on the basis of the claims of a North Carolina anthropologist, Louise Robbins. She helped send people to prison or to Death Row with her self-proclaimed power to identify criminals through shoe prints. As an excellent recent Chicago Tribune series on forensic humbug recalled, on occasion she even said she could use the method to determine a person’s height, sex and race. Robbins died in 1987, her legacy compromised by the conclusion of many Appeals Courts that her methodology was bosh. There have been similarly hollow claims for lip prints and ear prints, all of  them invoked by their supporters as “100 per cent reliable” and believed by juries too easily impressed by passionate invocations to 100 percent reliable scientific data.

Of course the apex forensic hero of prosecutors, long promoted as the bottom line in reliability–at least until the arrival of DNA matching–has been the fingerprint.

Fingerprints entered the arsenal of police and prosecutors in the late nineteenth century, touted as “scientific” in the manner of other fashionable methods of that time in the identification of supposed criminals, such as phrenology. A prime salesman was Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin and a founding huckster for the bogus “science” of eugenics. Actually fingerprints, at least in modern times, found their original use in the efforts of a British colonial administrator to intimidate his Indian laborers (whose faces he could not distinguish) from turning up more than once to get paid. He’d make a great show of scrutinizing the fingerprints he insisted they daub on his ledger book.

Then, as now, the use of the so-called “unique fingerprint” has been histrionic, not exactly scientific. In 1995, so the Chicago Tribune series discovered, “one of the only independent proficiency tests of fingerprint examiners in U.S. crime labs found that nearly a quarter reported false positives, meaning they declared prints identical even though they were not–the sort of mistakes that can lead to wrongful convictions or arrests.”

Decade after decade people have been sent to prison for years or dispatched to the death cell, solely on the basis of a single, even a partial print. So great is the resonance of the phrase “a perfect match” that defense lawyers throw in the towel, as judge and jury listen to the assured conclusions of the FBI’s analysts who virtually monopolize the fingerprint industry in the U.S.A. Overseas, in London’s Scotland Yard for example, the same mesmerizing “certainty” held sway, and still does.

In the U.S.A., part of the mystique stems from the “one discrepancy rule” which has supposedly governed the FBI’s fingerprint analysis. The rule says that identifications are subject to a standard of “100 per cent certainty” where a single difference in appearance is supposed to preclude identification.

The 1997 lab scandals threw a shadow over the FBI’s forensic procedures as a whole and the criminal defense bar began to raise protests against prosecutorial use of latent fingerprint identification evidence, as produced by FBI procedures. In 2002 Judge Louis Pollak, presiding over in a case in Pennsylvania, initially ruled that the FBI’s fingerprint matching criteria fell below new standards of forensic reliability (the Daubert Standards) stipulated by the   Supreme Court. Ultimately the judge was persuaded that the FBI’s fingerprint lab had never made a mistake. In 2004, in U.S. v. Mitchell, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld these same questionable procedures.

But in 2006, the FBI’s new inspector general, Glenn Fine, grudgingly administered what should properly be regarded as the deathblow to fingerprint evidence as used by the FBI and indeed by law enforcement generally.

The case reviewed by Inspector General Fine, at the request of U.S. Rep John Conyers and U.S. Senator Russell Feingold, concerns the false arrest by the FBI of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer from Beaverton, Oregon.

On March 11, 2004, several bombs exploded in Madrid’s subway system with 191 killed and 1,460 injured. Shortly thereafter the Spanish police discovered a blue plastic bag filled with detonators in a van parked near the Acala de Heres train station in Madrid, whence all of the trains involved in the bombing had originated on the fatal day.

The Spanish police were able to lift a number of latent prints off the bag. On March 17 they transmitted digital images of these fingerprints to the FBI’s crime lab in Virginia. The lab ran the images through its prized IAFIS, otherwise known as the Integrated, Automated, Fingerprint Identification System, containing a database of some 20 million fingerprints.

The IAFIS computer spat out twenty “candidate prints”, with the warning that these 20 candidates were “close non-match”.  Then the FBI examiners went to work with their magnifying glasses, assessing ridges and forks between the sample of 20 and the images from Spain. In a trice, the doubts of the IAFIS computer were thrust aside, and senior fingerprint examiner Terry Green determined that he had found “a 100 per cent match” with one of the Spanish prints of the fourth-ranked print in the IAFIS batch of 20 close non-matches. Green said this fourth ranked print came from the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield. Mayfield’s prints were in the FBI’s master file, not because he had been arrested or charged with any crime, but because he was a former U.S. Army lieutenant.

Green submitted his conclusions to two other FBI examiners who duly confirmed his conclusions. But as the Inspector General later noted, these examiners were not directed to inspect a set of prints without knowing that a match had already asserted by one of their colleagues. They were simply given the pair of supposedly matched prints and asked to confirm the finding. (These two examiners later refused to talk to the FBI’s inspector general.)

The FBI lost no time in alerting the Federal Prosecutor’s office in Portland, which initiated surveillance of Mayfield with a request to the secret FISA court, which issued a warrant for Mayfield’s phone to be tapped on the grounds, laid out in the Patriot Act, that he was a terrorist, and therefore by definition a foreign agent.

Surreptitious tapping and surveillance of Mayfield began. On April 2, 2004, the FBI sent a letter to the Spanish police informing them that they had developed a big break in the case, with a positive identification of a print on the bag of detonators.

Ten days later the forensic science division of the Spanish national police sent the FBI its own analysis. It held that the purported match of Mayfield’s print was “conclusively negative”. (The inspector general refered to this as the “Negativo Report”.)

The next day, April 14, the Federal Prosecutor in Portland became aware of the fact that the Spanish authorities were vigorously disputing the match with Mayfield’s left forefinger. But by now the Prosecutor and his team were scenting blood. Through covert surveillance they had learned that Mayfield was married to an Egyptian woman, had recently converted to Islam, was a regular attendee at the Bailal mosque in Portland, and had as one of his clients in a child custody dispute an American Muslim called Jeffrey Battle. Battle, a black man, had just been convicted of trying to go to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban.

Armed, so they thought, with this arsenal of compromising detail, the Federal Prosecutor and the FBI had no patience with the pettifogging negativism of the Spanish police. So confident were the Americans of the guilt of their prey that they never went back to take another look at the supposedly matching prints. Instead, on April 21, they flew a member of the FBI’s latent print unit to Spain for on-the-spot refutation of the impertinent Madrid constabulary.

The Inspector General’s report makes it clear that the FBI man returned from Spain with a false account of his reception, alleging that the Spanish fingerprint team had bowed to his superior analytic skills. The head of the Spanish team, Pedro Luis Melida-Weda, insists that his team remained entirely unconvinced. “At no time did we give our approval. We refused to validate the FBI’s conclusions. We kept working on the identification.”

By now either the U.S. Attorney’s office or, more likely, the FBI was leaking to the press news of the pursuit of a U.S. suspect in the Madrid bombing. But they knew that the actual evidence they had on Mayfield was virtually non-existent, aside from the fingerprint. On May 6, the Federal Prosecutor in Portland told U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones that the Spanish police had ultimately accepted the FBI’s match, that Mayfield, alerted by the stories in the press about an unnamed suspect, might start destroying evidence, and that, therefore, they wanted to seize Mayfield, using the now favored charge du jour of the war on terror, claiming him to be a “material witness”. Judge Jones approved an arrest warrant.

Mayfield had no idea that the FBI had been tapping his phones and secretly rummaging through his office. The first time he became aware that he was a citizen under suspicion was on the afternoon of May 6. On that day eight FBI agents showed up at his law office, seized him, cuffed his hands behind his back, ridiculed his protestations. As they approached the door, Mayfield implored them to take the handcuffs off, saying he didn’t want his clients or staff to see him in this condition. The FBI agents said derisively, “Don’t worry about it. The media is right behind us.”

Mayfield ended up with two federal public defenders, Steven Wax and Christopher Schatz. Like many such, these two were dedicated to their interest of their client, tireless and resourceful. Their first concern was to get Mayfield out of the Multnomah Federal Detention Center in downtown Portland. Though jailed under an alias chosen for him by the Federal Prosecutor, the feds had immediately leaked this alias–Randy Barker–to The Oregonian newspaper, and a guard at the jail had promptly roughed up Mayfield.

The two public defenders went before Judge Jones and asked that as a material witness he be kept under house arrest, there being scant apparent evidence against him. Judge Jones finally compelled the U.S. Prosecutor to say what evidence he had against Mayfield. A fingerprint, said the Federal Prosecutor, withholding from the court the fact that this fingerprint was highly controversial and had been explicitly disqualified by the Spanish police.

The federal defenders questioned the imprisonment of their client, faced penalties of the utmost gravity, on the basis of a fingerprint. Judge Jones allowed as how he had sent people to prison for life on the basis of a single fingerprint. Mayfield’s attorneys asked to see a copy of the allegedly matched fingerprints and have them evaluated by their own expert witness. Knowing he was on thin ice the Federal Prosecutor refused, claiming it was an issue of national security. Under pressure from Judge Jones, himself pressured by the assiduous federal defenders, the U.S. Prosecutor finally agreed he would give the prints to an independent evaluator selected by Judge Jones.

The prints were given to Kenneth R. Moses of San Francisco, an SFPD veteran who runs a company called Forensic Identification Services, which, among other things, proclaims its skills in “computer enhancement of fingerprints”. It was “quite difficult”, Moses said, because of “blurring and some blotting out”, but yes, the FBI had it right, and there was “100 per cent certainty” that one of the prints on the blue bag in Madrid derived from the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield.

Moses transmitted this confident opinion by phone to Judge Jones on the morning of May 19. Immediately following Moses’ assertion, the U.S. attorney stepped forward to confide to Judge Jones dismaying news from Madrid from the Spanish police that very morning. The news “cast some doubt on the identification”. This information, he added, “was classified or potentially classified”.

The prosecutors then huddled with the judge in his chambers. After 20 minutes, Judge Jones stormed back out and announced that the prosecutors needed to tell the defense lawyers what they had just told him. The prosecutor duly informed the courtroom that the Spanish police had identified the fingerprint as belonging to the right middle finger of Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian national living in Spain. Daoud was under arrest as a suspect in the bombing. Judge Jones ordered Mayfield to be freed. The U.S. prosecutor said he should be placed under electronic monitoring, a request which the judge turned down.

Four days later, on May 24, the warrant for his detention was dismissed.

The FBI sent two of their senor fingerprint analysts to Spain on a mission to salvage the Bureau from humiliation. The two analysts did their best, returning with the claim that the fingerprint sent to the FBI by the Spanish police was of “no value for identification purposes”, a claim which the inspector general later shot down by pointing that only a few weeks thereafter the FBI’s latent fingerprint unit concurred with the Spanish national police lab’s determination that the print on the bag matched the right middle finger of Ouhnane Daoud.

The FBI lab fought an increasingly desperate rearguard battle, eventually claiming that it had been the victim of an excessive reliance on technology. The inspector general points out that the only investigator in the FBI’s lab to emerge with any credit is in fact the IAFIS computer that had stated clearly, “close, no match”.

The Inspector General wrote the bottom line on the “science” of fingerprint matching. He got the FBI’s top examiner to admit that if Mayfield had “been like the Maytag repair man” and not a Muslim convert married to an Egyptian, “the laboratory might have revisited the identification with more skepticism.”

And Daoud’s fingerprint match? We don’t know, but if he was convicted on the basis of fingerprints alone, we would say there is grounds for an appeal.

This essay is adapted from End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estateby Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

Alexander Cockburn’s memoir A Colossal Wreck (Verso) is now available from CounterPunch.

Do I single out the New York Times?  No, it is a microcosm of the thinking, planning, and assumptions of US Imperialism, itself having invariably a Janus-faced position, looking and acting simultaneously outward and inward, mounting a global framework of political-economic-ideological hegemony abroad, unimpeded capitalism and widening class-differentials at home.  One cannot, and this includes The Times, compartment the two, being “progressive” in one sphere of government activity, reactionary in the other—and the same goes for those who write about or otherwise analyze it. US policy making is an integrated whole, possessing a capitalist core and militaristic tentacles.

What has this to do with current events in Egypt, the massacre of the unarmed carried out by those with arms supplied by the United States?  I have answered my own question, the enormous military subvention of dictators carried on over many years, for reasons as complex as geopolitical strategy in the advancement of American capitalist commercial and financial penetration of global markets, to those quite simple: love of militarism for its own sake, and seeking out militaries both as ideal companions and those willing to do US bidding.  Think School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., as consummating a marriage of the like-minded, trained to kill in cold blood.  (Obama missed that education, yet seems perfectly capable of vaporizing civilian populations through armed drones for targeted assassination.)  So, it hardly surprises that with news of the ongoing massacre in Egypt, America dawdles, “threatening” (deserving quote marks because a slap on the knuckles, accompanied by the usual wink) suspension of a program which directly ensured democratic life would find inhospitable ground.

Will American foreign military aid ever be scrutinized, let alone stopped?  We sit on our hands as a nation, while the slaughter continues—yet unctuously proclaim to the world our adherence to democratic principles, obviously coded to stand for market fundamentalism and global counterrevolution—a bipartisan consensus, whatever the differences bruited about (largely to conceal that consensus) by the major parties.

Let’s look more closely, Egypt in the last 48 hours (Aug. 14-15), as of this writing.  The assault begins.  We owe much to the reporting of David Kirkpatrick, light-years away from the response of the Editorial Board (my point, such frontline accounts of Times investigative reporters makes the more inexcusable the gap that exists between the editorials and the news-gathering, especially that coming from its own people).  Kirkpatrick writes, in this early account: “Egyptian security officers stormed two encampments packed with supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, on Wednesday in a scorched-earth assault that killed hundreds, set off a violent backlash across Egypt and underscored the new government’s determination to crush the Islamists who dominated two years of free elections. (Italics, mine)  He reminds us this was “the third mass killing of Islamist demonstrators” since Morsi’s ouster by the military.  “But the scale—lasting more than 12 hours, with armored vehicles, bulldozers, tear gas, birdshot, live ammunition and snipers—and the ferocity far exceeded the Interior Ministry’s promises of gradual and measured dispersal.”  One does not have to elaborate on his writing.  What stands out is the sustained nature of the heavy assault.  “At least one protester was incinerated in his tent.  Many others were shot in the head and chest [location of wounds is always telling, here no intention to disperse, but to kill, reminding me of accounts of our own Great Railway Strikes of 1877], including some who appeared to be in their teens, including the 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Islamist leader, Mohamed el-Beltagy.”  The assault on peaceful sits-ins was undertaken in the full knowledge that whole families would be encamped.

Still, Aug. 14, we read from another vantage point, Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh’s account in The Times, where again it was clear that this was disciplined, methodical mass murder, now seen through the eyes of a young mother: “Hayam Hussein had gone to sleep, with her infant daughter by her side, after early-morning prayers.  One moment, silence.  Then, the sound of war.”  The writers continue: “Tear gas canisters fell from the sky. Sirens announced the arrival of armored cars.  There were screams of panic and pain, and frantic warnings of snipers roaming on rooftops and bullets raining down on the encampment in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square.  She ran for cover with her daughter, toward a mosque in the center of the protest camp.”  She and the other Morsi supporters expected an attack, and “they built barricades of bricks, sandbags and steel,” and “gathered sticks and rocks.”  Yet, when the attack came, “shortly after sunrise on Wednesday, they appeared stunned by its fury.”  The army and police, with “heavy armor and deadly weapons,” swept into their encampment, “the third mass killing of civilians since the military took power on July 3.”  The initial warnings included safe passage for women and children, to which the reporters write: “This was nothing like that.”  Like the earlier killings, “the government gunmen appeared to strike their victims with terrible accuracy, the head and chest.”  Snipers attacked the few yards of open space before hospitals—more deaths, more heart-wrenching scenes at the makeshift morgues.

At home, still the 14^th, we find Mark Landler and Michael Gordon’s coverage of the President’s vacation, under the heading, “U.S. Condemns Crackdown but Announces No Policy Shift,” the latter speaking volumes about Obama’s cold-hearted cynicism and cunning, and Washington’s general commitment to favorable militaristic solutions.  Edgartown is far removed from Cairo and Egypt generally (as repression continues to spread throughout the country).  This is before suspension is announced, although certainly the massacre already evident should have warranted the cut-off at the very least (one cannot expect this or any administration to order a full-scale critical review of foreign military spending with a view to termination—for otherwise America would not be America, given its historical-structural-ideological policy framework of hegemonic demiurgic monopoly-capital).  The reporters: “The Obama administration on Wednesday condemned the Egyptian military’s bloody crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood protesters, but showed no signs of taking any tough steps, like suspending American aid, in response.”  That they did, finally, after the article was published, suggests their hand was forced or, as usual, damage control when the rest of the world was outraged.  Kerry was point man, while Obama, “vacationing here on Martha’s Vineyard, had no public reaction.  As his chief diplomat was speaking of a ‘pivotal moment for Egypt,’ the president was playing golf at a private club.”  It seems like his Martha Vineyard vacations “put Mr. Obama in an awkward but familiar place”—last time, in 2011, it was Libya.  This time, on Wednesday morning, he was briefed by Susan Rice, “[b]ut he appeared determined not to allow events in Egypt to interrupt a day that, besides golf, included cocktails at the home of a major political donor, Brian Roberts.”  We were assured, however, that POTUS was keeping tabs of the situation.  (As of this writing, even the joint military exercise with Egypt, Bright Star, scheduled for next month, has not been cancelled.)

With this background, The Times Editorial Board, fully mindful of the preceding day’s dispatches from the front (and the Vineyard), we see its editorial, “Military Madness in Cairo,” appreciating the military violence yet unwilling to condemn future military support—suspension, not termination.  Nor does The Times question foreign military aid as such.  The editorial begins on a somewhat promising note: “With yet another blood bath in the streets of Cairo Wednesday, Egypt’s ruling generals have demonstrated beyond any lingering doubt that they have no aptitude for, and apparently little interest in, guiding their country back to democracy.  I say “somewhat” because, despite conducting a “blood bath,” the generals far from being butchers are instead tone deaf, lacking aptitude and interest.  The result, it warns, could be “a murderous civil war,” and itself “a foreign policy disaster for the United States,” because “Egypt is the most populous and influential country in the Arab world,” and also, “Israel’s most strategically important neighbor.”  Although The Times doesn’t say so, it has put its finger on why the US must go slow in criticizing the generals–no matter how bloody the situation gets.  As usual, the paper lectures Obama on what he should do (making demands, of course, is bad form, coming out in opposition, worse still): He “must make clear his unequivocal opposition to the Egyptian military’s conduct,” via suspension of military aid and canceling the military exercises.  Sounds good, except that it adds, “these steps can be reversed if the generals change their ways,” at best, an irresolute gesture, which generals the world over, in response, may or may not make cosmetic changes to fundamental repression whenever caught in the act.  (Egypt, by The Times’s admission, has been receiving such aid, implementing military rule, “for decades,” although with hardly a murmur on its part, or more generally, wherever generals govern, as in several fascist settings, silence remains golden.)  In one breath, the editorial acknowledges that “[h]undreds of peaceful demonstrators were killed Wednesday when military and police units used helicopters, snipers, bulldozers and tear gas to evict” them, and “a monthlong nationwide state of emergency” was proclaimed, while in another, Obama is left off the hook, also as usual, on the grounds that “Washington’s influence on Egyptian public opinion generally is limited.”  Essentially, take the money and run.

Then, the same day as the editorial appeared (Aug. 15), we see the article by Kirkpatrick, still in Cairo, and Alan Cowell, from London, entitled “Death Toll in Egypt Clashes Climbs to 525,” repeating the charge of a “scorched-earth assault by security forces to raze two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo” on Wednesday.  Now Thursday, the Brotherhood urged followers “to take to the streets,” the “violent backlash across Egypt,” because of the assault, expected to generate “the new government’s determination to crush the Islamists who dominated the free elections over the past two years.”  What was added to the earlier account was a scene of devastation and anguish: “At one landmark mosque, relatives stood over the bodies of up to 240 dead, shrouded in white and laid out in neat rows.  The ice keeping the bodies chilled was melting as household fans played over the makeshift morgue.  Many of the bodies seemed to be badly burned.  One man slumped against a pillar, his face contorted in grief.  By Muslim tradition, the deceased are usually buried within 24 hours of dying.”  In addition, we see the wider response: “The violence was almost universally criticized by Western governments.  Obama, not among the critical voices, merely, his spokesperson saying, the violence contradicts pledges made by the interim government, and the US “would continue to remind Egypt’s leaders of their promises and urge them ‘to get back on track.’”  Prime Minister Erdogan, of Turkey, wanted an early Security Council meeting “to discuss what he labeled a ‘massacre.’”  President Hollande, of France, called in the Egyptian ambassador to condemn the violence and “demand an end to the repression,” language neither Obama nor The Times would use.  General Sisi—scorched earth assaults; Obama—targeted assassinations, to which can be added,  the scorched earth assaults on privacy, dissent, truth-in-government, due process of law, through a maniacal policy of surveillance.

Late footnote:  Mark Handler, “In Rebuke to Egypt, Obama Cancels Joint Military Exercises,” (NYT, Aug. 15), the self-evident happens, a skillful display of disapproval at the murderous binge of the Egyptian military, largely financed by the US, while, on close reading, Obama does everything to minimize the import and effect of the decision.  Obama: “While we want to sustain our relationship with Egypt, our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual while civilians are being killed in the streets.”  No, indeed—as he takes a-pox-on-both-your-houses attitude, in order to exonerate the military, saying, “the cycle of violence and escalation needs to stop,” presumably implicating the Muslim Brotherhood as equally culpable.  He did not cancel the usual military aid.  Landler shrewdly observes: “But while Mr. Obama condemned the violence, which has left more than 500 demonstrators dead and thousands wounded, he emphasized that the United States did not intend to abandon its broader partnership with the Egyptian military, which has spanned three decades.” (Italics, mine)  His Defense Secretary, Hagel, also seems adept at  mouthing the right words, as in speaking to Sisi that the Egyptian government (aka, military) “must refrain from violence, respect freedom of assembly, and move toward an inclusive political transition”—failure to do any of which is hardly likely to rupture the military friendship and collaboration between the two countries.  And Obama, for his part, refused to say whether or not Morsi’s ouster by the military was a coup, which by the terms of the legislation would terminate military aid.  Four little letters, c-o-u-p, would be an excellent test of Obama’s integrity and US intentions.  Have no fear, Bright Star, an ambitious plan to integrate the Egyptian military into the so-called coalition forces, is not in a state of eclipse.

My New York Times Comment (Aug. 15) on the editorial about military repression follows:

“Suspending assistance to Egypt’s antidemocratic military”: Why suspension? Why not unconditional termination? Why military aid in the first place? NYT cannot make a clean break with dictatorship. Period. If this were Tienamen Square, we’d never hear the end of it. But brutality and repression receive a “temporary suspension” only, when the military works with us, and frankly, Israel. This ugly bloodshed is tolerated because of the fundamental animus toward all things Islamic–Morsi was not the authoritarian monster portrayed. Yet democratically-elected leadership, no matter how self-serving the theme in US foreign policy when it is the good guys who get elected, is tossed in the garbage can when we don’t agree with the results AND when we have a military to work with. Call it the militarization of American consciousness, or whatever; for aid will be resumed the moment a face-saving device is found.

Meanwhile, Egypt is bleeding, thanks to US dollars to the thugs.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch/AK Press in the fall of 2013.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s volcanic revelations of ubiquitous US surveillance are in their third month. The aftershocks felt around the world continue. As Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum, the White House fell into anger and dismay.

Computer scientist Nadia Heninger argued that leaking information is now becoming the “civil disobedience of our age”. The late historian and activist Howard Zinn described the act of civil disobedience as “the deliberate, discriminate, violation of law for a vital social purpose”. He advocated it saying that such an act “becomes not only justifiable but necessary when a fundamental human right is at stake and when legal channels are inadequate for securing that right”.

Snowden’s act was clearly one of civil disobedience. John Lewis, US Representative and veteran civil rights leader recently noted that Snowden was “continuing the tradition of civil disobedience by revealing details of classified US surveillance programs”.

Snowden is not alone. In recent years, there have been waves of dissent that revealed the depth of corruption and abuse of power endemic in this global corporate system. Before Snowden, there was Bradley Manning and Jeremy Hammond who shook up the trend of criminal overreach within the US government and its transnational corporate and government allies. Private Bradley Manning blew the whistle on US war crimes and activist Jeremy Hammond exposed the inner workings of the pervasive surveillance state. They took risks to alert the world about the systemic failure of representative government and the trend toward a dangerous corporate authoritarianism.

After Snowden was charged with espionage, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called for global support to stand with him:

“Edward Snowden is one of us. Bradley Manning is one of us. They are young, technically minded people from the generation that Barack Obama betrayed. They are the generation that grew up on the Internet and were shaped by it….”

Snowden, Manning and Assange are all part of an Internet generation that holds that transparency of governments and corporations is a form of check and balance on power. They believe in the power of information and in the public’s right to know. In an interview with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, Snowden described how his motive was “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” He advocated for participation of ordinary people in decision-making processes as a vital part of democratic society indicating that the policies of national security agencies that he exposed should be up to the public to decide. This belief is shared by his forerunners.

Manning, who inspired Snowden, wrote in his infamous chat log with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo: “I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” He confirmed this conviction once again when he testified at the providence inquiry for his formal plea. After admitting that he was the source of the largest leak of classified information in history, he spoke again about the motivation behind his actions:

“I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.”

In pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy for hacking into the computers of the private intelligence firm Stratfor, computer whiz Jeremy Hammond stated that he believed, “People have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors”.

Barrett Brown, journalist and director of a website called Project PM, which crowd-sourced information exposing the activities of the cyber-intelligence industry, also held a similar conviction. Brown now sits behind bars with a possible maximum sentence of 105 years for his daring investigation of the growing private intelligence contractor industry. In an interview with NBC’s Michael Isikoff, Brown described“information freedom” as “the value of this age”. He spoke of how this belief motivates many cyber-activists to engage in civil disobedience against those in positions of power who act unethically.

The motto of these activists is: privacy for the public, transparency for government officials and corporate executives. It was this care for privacy and protection of personal information that motivated Snowden to risk his freedom and also caused Andrew ‘Weev’ Auernheimer to expose a security flaw inside AT&T servers. “Auernheimer’s crime was not a hack” Natasha Lenard of the Salon clarified his position. She explainedhow “he did not illegally access a private server. Rather, his conviction hinged on what data gets to be authorized or unauthorized and who gets to decide this”. Though his actions didn’t harm anyone, Auernheimer was sent to prison for pointing out the company failure to protect user’s data.

It is this common theme of information freedom that motivates this new generation of activists. Their fight against a corrupt system required great personal sacrifice; they have been incarcerated, stripped naked, put on show trials, stuck in an airport transit space and immobilized in an Ecuadorian embassy.

A Vision of a New World

These digital dissenters speak truth to power. By way of the new digital medium, they revealed the deep fraud of an arrogant system that enables governments and corporations to look into the private lives of others while concealing their own immoral actions from the public. But, this was not all; these young activists also saw a vision of a new world and of a more open and just society.

With the release of the classified NSA files, Snowden stated that he was acting in defense of what he cherishes:

“I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

In the chat log, Manning pointed to the idea of open diplomacy, elaborated in a New York Times article as “the opposite of secret diplomacy, which consists in the underhand negotiation of treaties whose very existence is kept from the world”. Discretely referring to the release of Cablegate, he described the material as the “non-PR-versions of world events and crisis” and called it “open diplomacy”. Later he noted that “information should be free” as it “belongs in the public domain” and shared his view stating “if information is out in the open”, no one can take advantage of it and “it should do a public good”. Here he showed his longing for an honest society where there is some form of transparency for what leaders are doing in the dark.

This vision of the world is tied to certain values that are encouraged by the open structures of the internet. Unlike the age of the printing press when information tended to be centralized, the era of the internet fosters an interactive and direct peer-to-peer form of communication. Anthropologist Paul Jorion noted that the inherently democratic nature of the internet means “there’s no hierarchy and everyone can express themselves”.

The life of late activist Aaron Swartz exemplified these new values born in tandem within this digital communication medium. Swartz stood up for the people’s right to free information. The 2008 manifesto he co-authored stated that sharing information was a “moral imperative” against “privatization of knowledge”. “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive”; Swartz urged us to “fight for Guerrilla Open Access.” It is his belief in the freedom to connect that led Swartz into a battle to defeat the Hollywood-based Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that was camouflaged as a solution to copyright infringement, but that actually threatened the ability to communicate and share freely over the Internet.

Hammond, who believed in creating “an army so powerful we won’t need weapons” fought for the same vision as Swartz. Upon Swartz’s death Hammond wrote in his memory:

“What is needed is not reform but total transformation -not amendments but abolition. Aaron is a hero to me because he did not wait for those in power to realize his vision and change their game, he sought to change the game himself, and he did so without fear of being labeled a criminal and imprisoned by a backwards system of justice”.

Before Snowden’s whistleblowing, Julian Assange saw the increasing force that was subverting the internet and alerted people to the spying networks created by transnational corporate allies. In the book Cypherpunks: Freedom and Future of the Internet, co-written with Andy Müller-Maguhn, Jérémie Zimmermann and Jacob Appelbaum, Assange showed how the internet can be used as an instrument for both freedom or oppression.

“Once upon a time in a place that was neither here nor there, we, the constructors and citizens of the young internet discussed the future of our new world,” Assange wrote in the introduction. Pioneers of this net culture seemed to have recognized a democratizing force inherent in the technology of the internet and how its power, when truly freed, could transform the existing structures of control and ownership. The founder of WikiLeaks articulated the vision of Cypherpunks, a group of activists who woke up to the potential of cryptography in bringing societal and political change:

“We say that the relationships between all people would be mediated by our new world, and that the nature of states, which are defined by how people exchange information, economic value, and force, would also change. We saw that the merger between existing state structures and the internet created an opening to change the nature of states. … The new world of the internet, abstracted from the old world of brute atoms, longed for independence …”

Assange saw how the internet is moving in a manner contrary to his vision and how it “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen” and indeed has become “a threat to human civilization”. He elaborated in a Guardian article how the control of oil resources has been a major denominator for granting certain countries geopolitical power and “the war for oil pipelines” has been driving the world. He explained how now this battle has shifted over into “the war for information pipelines: control over fibre-optic cable paths that spread undersea and overland”.

Now, the situation is accelerating. In the last couple of years we have seen a tremendous assault on internet freedom. The force to squash the vision of this generation has infiltrated cyberspace. The battle has begun.

The Frontier of Digital Liberation

The trend toward centralized control or restriction of information flow has become an antithesis to the way of life experienced by this generation of digital activists. Richard Stallman who inspired figures like Assange also warned about the surveillance scheme. Stallman, a founder of the Free Software Movement, promotes freedom respecting software, which gives users control over their technology. He pointed to an unfolding battle between corporations and a growing body of people who believe software and communication venues should be free of insidious covert control. He described how this control is exercised by a form of propriety where, for example corporations and governments subjugate users with insidious features such as converting cell phones into spying and tracking devices and creating software backdoors to make changes to programs or install intentionally malicious software without user’s consent.

In the name of copyright and intellectual property, the act of sharing has in many cases become a crime, yet some have found creative ways to circumvent the systemic clampdown. One of those on the frontier of digital liberation is Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, alias anakata, a Swedish computer specialist who co-founded the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, which facilitates peer-to-peer file sharing. Similar pioneering work was done by Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur who launched the Hong Kong- based company Megaupload, which enables massive file storage and viewing. Such actions were legally attacked by the corporate-government information cartels. Svartholm Warg was charged with illegal downloading of copyrighted material and sent to jail, while the US government overextended its arrogant imperial power byattempting to shut down Megaupload and extradite founder Dotcom.

While the founder of Pirate Bay sits behind bars, Torrent Site continues to combat the censorship. It is releasing a customized Firefox called PirateBrouser that enables users to go around the censorship. After the stories of NSA mass spying became public, Dotcom announced the upcoming release of an encrypted secure message apps and email service. He stated that he might move this privacy service overseas to Iceland, which is known as a strong advocate for protesting citizen’s privacy.

Now, more people are joining together to defend the values of the Internet generation. In the last few years, the online collective Anonymous has become the ubiquitous face of cyber-activism. With V for Vendetta “Guy Fawkes” masks, this loosely tied decentralized network acts whenever and wherever their radar catches classic abuses of power. They fiercely mobilize to take on the powerful, whether it is arrogant government contractors like Aaron Barr, religious organizations like Scientology, child sexual abusers or immoral governments and corporations. “Beneath this mask there is an idea …” They are united with shared sense of justice and conviction that “ideas are bulletproof”. Repeatedly, Anonymous has shown to be a champion of the downtrodden and those that challenge illegitimate power.

Ideals of the Heart

The common struggles in what these young people are fighting against bind them together, but the true mark of this generation is a shared vision of a world with virtues like sharing, love and creativity that have been suppressed in the trend toward extreme capitalism within the transnational corporate-state.

Along with a new found courage, these young people reveal a strong sense of compassion and trust in ordinary people. In the online chat logs, Manning showed his extraordinary empathy for others when he wrote,“I can’t separate myself from others … I feel connected to everybody… like they were distant family.”

At OHM 2013, a five day outdoor international festival for hackers and cyber security workers, retired CIA officer Ray McGovern remarked how both Snowden and Manning acted with empathy when they witnessed human suffering. They trusted the general public over governments and found hope in the actions of ordinary people to change the course of society for the better. Manning said:

“ … its important that it gets out … I feel, for some bizarre reason … it might actually change something … hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms … if not… than we’re doomed as a species.”

The same sentiment was shared by Snowden when he said, “The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change”. It is those human attributes that the empire is trying to punish.

On July 30th, the military judge delivered a verdict in the case of Bradley Manning. Manning was not found guilty for the most ridiculous charge of “aiding the enemy” for leaking state secrets and evidence of war crimes that were published by major news outlets and posted on the internet. Yet, he was found guilty of multiple counts including six Espionage Act offenses. He faces punishment of up to 136 years in prison, which during the sentencing phase, was reduced to maximum of 90 years.

In responding to the verdict, journalist Norman Solomon wrote about how the problem the U.S. government had with Manning was that he acted out of “caring, with empathy propelling solidarity”.

Darker Net called for a miracle in the freeing of Bradley Manning, ringing a similar note:

“The US Government wants to lock him away forever. Why? Because he had compassion. Because he had a profound sense of justice. Because he understood the difference between right and wrong. Because he saw aspects of war that horrified him. Some might say he had an innocence; was naive. But perhaps if we all had that same innocence, the world might be a better place.”

In this sense of naïveté there lies a strength that makes it possible for us to act toward a vision of a world that we imagine. “It takes a little bit of naivety in order to jump in and do something that otherwise looks impossible. Many great advances in science, technology and culture have a touch of naivety at their inception”, WikiLeaks wrote in their about page describing how the organization was first formed.

What at first appears as naïveté is what plants seeds for higher ideals. Sharon Staples, who helped care for Bradley Manning when he was a child, recalled her interaction with him when she visited him in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: “I asked him if he wanted me to send him anything and he said, ‘Everything I want is in here and here.’ …. As he said the word ‘here’, he pointed to his head, then his heart.”

Ideals grow in the minds and hearts of many in this generation and help cultivate a moral sensibility that allows each person to make unique contributions to the world. Janet Reitman, who wrote a defining piece on Hammond, ended the article by highlighting Hammond’s idealism, “He was an idealist who even after being jailed kept fighting at every occasion and he never betrayed himself”.

For those in power, the idealism of this generation and their conscience is an existential threat to their order. The ‘crime’ of aiding the enemy here is really the act of aiding democracy and acting for the public good. In the end, it has shown that we the public have become the enemy of the state.

Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner said of the younger generation:

“The question is not: what knowledge or skills does a person need to have in order to benefit the existing social order. But: what pre-disposition does this person have, and what is capable of development? Then it would be possible to channel new energies from the rising generation into the social order. Then the rising generation will not be fitted into the mould of the existing society, rather society will be what these newly recruited adults make of it.”

What is really happening with the growing trend of crackdowns on dissents and truth-tellers? Our society has failed to listen. Those in power are actively shutting out the voices of those with conscience. Obama’sunprecedented war on whistleblowers and equating these heroic deeds with treason are simply a symptom of this deafening of society. How did we get to this place? How has our society become so degraded?

We Are Winning

This totalitarian surveillance state wasn’t built in a day. There was a warning. Back in 1975 the late Senator Frank Church at the famous Church Committee hearings challenged the burgeoning potential of total surveillance in the US:

“[The National Security Agency’s] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide”.

38 years later, this young courageous whistleblower stepped forward to once again alert the people of the world to the severity of Big Brother moving into a digital dystopia, which he assessed as “turnkey tyranny”. All the US government would need to do would be to give the order and this once-great nation would spiral into overt despotism.

The battle continues in earnest between two forces; freedom and control, transparency and secrecy, sharing and proprietary ownership. It is in this fight that the Internet generation has found itself.

Speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange said, “We are winning … We are a part of a new international body politic that is developing, thanks to the internet”. He predicted to see the inevitable defeat of the national security state, saying that young people of ages between 20 and 30 are the ones who are recruited into the NSA and the CIA and those who are exposed to the Internet are shaped by certain values. He saidthat they will find “the agencies that they work for do not behave in a legal, ethical or moral manner.” This is already happening and this new form of information dissent is spreading.

For instance, at the Black Hat conference, a gathering of computer experts and cybersecurity professionals in Las Vegas, NSA head Keith Alexander was repeatedly interrupted by the audience. As Alexander stated NSA’s mission for freedom, a critical voice emerged to oppose the NSA surveillance.

Despite Obama’s aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers, the climate of fear doesn’t seem to hinder the will of those who act with conscience. Edward Snowden spoke of how he learned from others who came before him and that the power of ones conscience is something that cannot be imprisoned or stopped:

“Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers.”

The recent Snowden asylum victory is just the beginning. Debates over reform are happening. Now privacy has a chance to at least have a front seat debate. Snowden’s revelations led to a major House vote on an amendment that would defund one single NSA program to end their blanket collection of US phone records. Even though the bill was defeated, it was lost by only 12 votes. It brought huge shifts in public opinionabout the security state and government secrecy. A grassroots organization called “Restore the Fourth” quickly formed, which had its first round of protest on July 4th to challenge the unconstitutionality of NSA mass surveillance after it was revealed by Snowden. The group recently launched mass protests, calling for “1984 Day”, named for George Orwell’s classic novel about a Big Brother surveillance state. This movement is gathering momentum. Across the US in major cities, people marched calling to end the government spying.

The founder of a US-based encrypted email service, reportedly used by Edward Snowden, Ladar Levison announced he was shutting down the operation. The decision was made after being given a difficult choicebetween becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people” or walking “away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” He chose the latter instead of submitting to US government’s secret order to give them access to customer content.

While government surveillance brings pressure on internet companies to collude with them, more and more people are coming together to resist this insidious force. Three of Germany’s largest email providersannounced their plans to partner up to strengthen the security of messages sent between them. Mailpile, an Iceland-based free/open source email service is crowd-funding a secure private email client/cloud service that is an alternative to US-tied services such as gmail. After the revelation of the Xkeyscore spying program that is shown to specifically target Wikipedia users, the WikiMedia foundation stepped forward to take extra measures to protect users privacy.

Nothing can stop this generation infused with a new sense of justice and shared vision for humanity. Similar to online connections, where when one link is broken, another emerges; when one person is taken out, several more emerge because courage is contagious. This desperate empire might stop one individual, but it cannot lock them all up.

Call them whistleblowers, dissidents, hackers or geeks, the youth of today’s Internet generation is uncovering for the world the level of deceit and corrupted state power. Our connections, our genuine care for one another is a power in the ether and creates a network that can lead us into a future that is imagined in our collective heart. Whether or not this generation can help move the world beyond the inhumane system of illegitimate governance is up to us, as we too are a part of this rising Internet generation.

Nozomi Hayase is a contributing writer to Culture Unplugged. She brings out deeper dimensions of socio-cultural events at the intersection between politics and psychology to share insight on future social evolution. Her Twitter is @nozomimagine.

Michele Catalano, who was at work and whose husband notified her by telephone of the visit by six plainclothes police officers, described the events in a blog postthe following day. She speculated that the visit was provoked by various Google searches in recent weeks, she looking for a new pressure cooker, her husband for a backpack, and her son for background information on the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings.