Redaction Tactics
surveillance for us, designed by them
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about anonymity – who gets it, how it functions, if it’s even possible in a world in which we willingly proffer data to our techno-fascist overlords and are told it’s bringing us together whilst we are played like marionettes in a culture war of their engineering. Been thinking of that stupid hacker collective called “Anonymous.” Been thinking about how the release of the Epstein files seems deliberately sloppy, with heavy redactions of the names and messages of those involved but identifiable information about the victims everywhere, easily found. Even well-meaning online investigators, in their quest to hold the richest men in the world “accountable” (I’m sorry but if they have evaded prison and failed upward into the Presidency, I am uncertain how a Reddit post will appease such unfortunate contradictions) end up doxxing, smearing, and inventing their own stories about victims, posting gleefully when they find a picture that is not redacted, an uncanny and frankly horrifying feeling of excitement about it all, the perversion of what it seen and not seen, needing more, looking for more, as if the verifiable knowledge that all this happened, that the systematic trafficking and abuse of young women and/or children was covered up by elites for decades, wasn’t enough.
In the fervor to put things right, to address such obvious wrongs, there has been flailing in every direction, wild misinformation, and a tendency for the most unbelievable stories (the tip line information, for instance) to get traction. That they are unbelievable does not mean they didn’t happen, but why must the stories be the worst to make an already unforgivable crime and elaborate coverup that implicates many elected officials somehow more real? In Inventing Reality Michael Parenti writes,
“It is often said that lies spread like wildfire, while the truth supposedly plods along, never catching up because it is not as sensational, nor as timely, hence, not as newsworthy…but actually there is no objective reason the refutation cannot be given equal exposure and treated with the same urgency and importance as the original falsehood. The truth is often much more sensational and revealing than the propaganda lie…truth wins a smaller audience not because it is less interesting, but because it is treated in a less interesting and less important way.”
I read a theory that “don’t” seems to be censored abundantly in the released documents, perhaps a formatting error in trying to redact every “Don T” that appears. I believe it, at this point I’ll believe almost anything, but I don’t think that is a helpful impulse in sorting out reality.
We squabble about food on an app owned by the richest man in the world, who bought the app because he wanted to feel popular, and seeing he was not, seeded it with bots and unleashed GROK, a somehow sympathetic-in-its-ineptitude AI that lives on the site, calling for white genocide, generating child porn, and hallucinating in replies. If you make a mean tweet about Charlie Kirk or Trump on the rebranded website the sycophantic billionaire man-baby bought, you might have the FBI arrive on your doorstep. If you refrain from tweeting but still take a stand against present day injustice by, say, going to a protest, you’ll almost certainly have your face scanned through apps and be added to a watchlist through technology the government purchased from Epstein’s friends, like Peter Thiel.
Observers are told that if they see ICE abducting someone, best practice is to ask for their name. If we know their name, at least, we can try to track them down and tell their family and loved ones where they are, where they’ve been taken, if they haven’t already disappeared into the ever-growing labyrinth of for-profit-prisons being built to house them. Meanwhile the anonymity of ICE agents is apparently paramount and important to national security. ICE agents are being photographed IDF-style with their backs towards the camera, the faces of those arrested looking hauntingly straight at us. Such visual language tells us, over and over again, that “criminals” must be witnessed (in a way carefully staged to suggest violence, etc) while the perpetrators are above the indignity of being identified. They alone are afforded anonymity. But it also shows that they are scared, and that they are cowards.
Meanwhile the White House official website posts mugshots of supposed criminals, and uses technology like AI to doctor these and make people look “scarier,” i.e. dogwhistle—megaphone, maybe—racism and xenophobia as the undergirding force of such actions and play to their base. That Trump + co continue to rake in more money from this shows how clearly his entire presidency has been about consolidating personal wealth for him and his cronies, mafia-style. It is not about dignity, democracy, anything to these people. It is a get-rich scheme, a rug-pull. And what do we have to oppose that? The same shit, but said nicely. Democrats, baby! Earlier the NYT reported:
Other attempts by Democrats to “reform ICE” (they agree with the practice, just not the optics) include body cameras, which have a dubious record of minimizing harms, in many cases just providing another means of surveillance. “With body cameras, law enforcement agencies could expand their surveillance capacity, mitigate police brutality lawsuits, create “highly controllable evidence” against the largely poor, largely Black citizens of whom police often seek to capture footage, and quell social unrest by creating “comprehensive digital archives” of attendees at protests for social change. In his paper, Karakatsanis cites a 2016 George Mason University study of prosecutors’ offices across the U.S. in jurisdictions with body cameras that found that just 8.3% had used the footage to prosecute a police officer, while 92.6% had used it to prosecute private individuals,” a Prism Report outlines. This only updates the existing methods used to criminalize certain populations, see the book Digitize and Punish for more.
The masks work like redactions, too: despite the fact that wearing a mask remains one of the best ways to avoid infection from Covid and other airborne illnesses, protestors are punished for wearing masks while ICE agents continue to mask–not to protect themselves from infection, god no that would be too smart, but to hide their identities, for they know if we knew who they were, their way of life could not go on in the same way. As it shouldn’t. They have to hide. Anonymity for thee, not for me. ICE agents will go masked, protestors will be photographed by said agents, their images fed into a sprawling Palantir database to track us more completely.
And what about the Free Press? Not the Bari Weiss kind, the supposedly free press we have here in our beloved democracy.
Well. Can it ever really, truly be free, given that it is owned by the same class of people who hung around with Epstein? See this cartoon above I made a few years ago, when Bezos bought the Post (and fired a good chunk of the staff, this week). Why do we see the news we see, and what is redacted? What’s shown to us proudly and with authority, and what might such declarations be obscuring in actuality? Parenti again: “Along with owning the media, the corporate business class controls much of the rest of America too, including its financial, legal, educational, medical, cultural, and recreational institutions. Thus corporate interests not only structure the way media report reality, they structure much of reality itself.”
Links:
US Military Helping Trump to Build Massive Network of ‘Concentration Camps,’ Navy Contract Reveals
‘Ignore It.’ How the Elite Consoled Jeffrey Epstein Over His Crimes.
The Handyman: In the parking lot that defines America, Donald Trump’s darkest agenda is still unfolding, one hour at a time.
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another great piece 🫡❣️