
The Banality of Systemic Evil - Maakuth
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/
======
tokenizer
How about we try to get to the core issues of this systemic risk of
authoritarianism and repression, and look at:

Ageism: Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions?
Some adults don't have valid opinions. This seems to affect our dramatically
in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the
generational differences towards conservatism.

Classism: Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? Bush
Sr., Mr. Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, (Ms. Clinton?). To me, it feels weird even
asking these people to have differing views. They're all apart of the council
on foreign relations
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Fore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations)).
Control+F either Clinton or Bush. This in my opinion, is why we won't change
any neo-con/neo-lib policies anytime soon. Expect less worker rights, more
outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits, and more protection of
institutions deemed too big to fail (impossible in classical capitalism but
not the crony kind).

Apathy: The US has killed many people in Iraq since 2003. If you crunch one
version of account, it works out to 16 people every day, for 20 years. Yet
most Americans are more concerned with their own internal matters. This seems
like it could be extended to anything being committed outside of the US to
other humans, including torture, enslavement, anything. The American people
have already shown that if their bellies are full, then it doesn't matter how
many people their government kills. How can anyone fix this?

Anyway, this to me seems like the major hurdles we all need to get over...

~~~
mseebach
> Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions?

Because society has a long-standing agreement that a phase of life called
"childhood" exists, during which an individual is not fully developed and
can't be trusted to make decisions about his or her future. It may be somewhat
arbitrarily defined at 18, but I don't see why people who need to be protected
against entering into contracts as well as receiving a slew of rights and
protections can be expected to have meaningful input into the management of
their country. Someone who can't even join the military could vote to send
their older fellow countrymen into war. I find the idea that the voting age
can be lower than the age of majority very strange, and I have strong doubts
that the age of majority should be lowered to 16 - on account of protecting
childhood.

> This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our
> older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences
> towards conservatism.

Wait, what. You meant to come out _against_ ageism, then you criticize old
people for voting "wrong"?

All in all, if you take a step back from you criticisms, there's a common
point: Legitimacy. Submitting a ballot every few years is a very weak
foundation for a government as sprawling and powerful as most modern and
western ones. Fiddling the knobs of who can vote does little more than shift
the balance of power inside the political class.

~~~
sophacles
Even if we grant the notion of childhood as valid (one which I agree with, but
am open to other models - the idea that one turns 18 and is suddenly a
different person has weird impacts), we are seeing a systemic erosion of the
notion. One which makes the GP's question valid.

I mean that the very idea of 18 == adulthood is going away. For instance, more
and more people over the age of 13 but under the age of 18 are being
prosecuted as adults in criminal cases. Zero tolerance policies for kids of
all ages are assuming that they are capable of making choices with life
altering consequences, but only in negative ways. So for some actions - adult
understanding of the world is assumed much younger than the age of 18. On the
other hand, we are seeing the infantilization of people older than 18 -
drinking age is 21, car rental 25, college policies are becoming more and more
like those of high-school, college campus law enforcement is becoming less and
less tolerant of "young people behavior" (e.g. parties and festivals). It is a
weird set of standards that sends a strange message. Those that conform well
are placed in a class that can fully enjoy the rewards of membership
eventually, and those that don't or make mistakes are placed in a different
class, one with many restrictions.

Basically I'm saying that while the notions of adulthood and childhood aren't
bad, the implementation brings them into question.

~~~
waqf
Your examples of blurring childhood and adulthood are mostly answerable
(however poorly) by saying "well, these things may be increasingly happening,
but they Shouldn't Happen and we should work on fixing that".

Here's an example that can't be thus answered. Should a minor pay income
taxes, if they have enough income? I think most people would say yes. But then
tell me again why they can't vote?

~~~
snowwrestler
I don't think that minors can get that much income because their employment is
very limited, and they cannot enter into business contracts.

~~~
waqf
Minors can _de facto_ have arbitrarily large incomes from investments,
although typically the investments are structured as trusts and are not
legally the property of the minor.

Besides, child movie stars.

------
tptacek
Manipulative. For instance:

* The article's entire coverage of Manning revolves around a single incident involving the detention of 15 Iraqis. But that's not all Manning did, despite the wording of the article. Manning fell afoul of the law by haphazardly collecting and releasing to a stranger on the Internet far more documents than any person could possibly have reviewed, many of which had no public interest implications.

* The article cites the case of Jeremy Hammond, convicted for hacking and dumping Stratfor. Ludlow famously supports Hammond's actions. But Hammond didn't leak secrets he knew were in the public interest. He picked an organization whose politics he disagreed with, attacked them, and helped circulate the credit card numbers of its subscribers to the Internet. The clear message being sent by Hammond's inclusion in the article is that he is of a kind with Manning, Snowden, and Swartz. The only thing his case has in common with the others is that they they share some of the same political motivations.

* The article does the same thing with John Kiriakou, asserting as axiomatic the idea that Kiriakou was motivated by the public interest. But Kiriakou didn't become a "whistleblower" until that label became convenient to his defense, after it became apparent that his conversations with journalists, which related to a book he was selling, had outed an agent who had been in deep cover for over 20 years.

I'm left with a disquieting conclusions about the way proponents of Ludlow
think: so long as the accused share your politics, it's more important for
society to empathize with their motivations than with their decisions and
actions. That's what people who blow up abortion clinics think.

I'm also a little worried about the phenomenon of generating public support
for any mass leak by working with the media to promote those leaked documents
that are most interesting/entertaining/important, while working to thwart any
effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole. Call it "Greenwaldism",
which feeds a careful drip of calculated outrage and then harnesses it to
attack anyone who points out any accompanying documents that might have caused
harm by their disclosure.

~~~
jgroszko
I'd be curious to hear why you make a distinction between leaking for the
public interest and leaking because of a disagreement with an organization's
politics? Presumably most people hold their political views because they
believe they believe those views are in the best public interest?

~~~
tptacek
Hammond didn't leak information about Stratfor! He attacked them. His actions
were straightforwardly criminal, in a way that few people on HN have any
problem recognizing, and his case is only blurred by articles like this that
attempt to conflate what he did with what he believed.

------
detcader
Skimming the article I see no mention of COINTELPRO, of which these programs
are no doubt a continuation of at least spiritually. This would make sense
given that this is the NY Times, and bringing up COINTELPRO would perhaps
force them to admit racial/xenophobic dimensions and roots to these recent
revelations (e.g. the USG's history of targeting civil rights and anti-war
activism), instead of white guys fighting for other white guys' iPad Privacy..

>Swartz argued that it was sometimes necessary to break the rules that
required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil.

That paragraph would have been a perfect place in which to touch on the Church
Committee and its origins. Does the author even know about it?

Honestly, most people with social power and influence don't seem to care about
the revelations because they don't. They have nothing on the line -- their
rights will never be threatened, nor will government programs like the endless
War on Terror ever affect them (in ways that they will understand; "blowback"
is evidently too intricate of a concept for most). Could that be because
they're white men? Perish the thought

------
ck2
I was reading up on Jeremy Hammond as I knew less about him and this caught my
eye:

The judge's husband has an email address released in the Stratfor disclosure
and works with Stratfor clients, but the judge refuses to recuse herself
(while threatening Hammond that he faces a life sentence).

Unmitigated gall.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Jeremy Hammond has been around for a while:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond)

He created a whole site like Stripe's Capture the Flag back in 2003:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite)

This part of his history is also sad:

 _Hammond attended the University of Illinois at Chicago on a full
scholarship. In the spring of 2004, during his freshman year, he pointed out a
security flaw on the computer science department’s website to department
administrators, offering to fix it. For pointing out the flaw, Hammond was
called before the department chair and ultimately banned from returning for
his sophomore year._

~~~
bqe
I met Jeremy at HOPE Number Six.

He was absolutely convinced that hacking was going to be the way that we
protest in the future. He likened it to doing a sit-in of a restaurant,
protesting outside of a business, or chaining yourself to a tree.

Everything he did was focused on this goal. Helping people learn to hack was
going to be a required part of a functioning society. He led by example and
some people followed.

I can't help but wonder if he is the first of his kind: a political prisoner
of the Internet age.

------
DanielBMarkham
You have to be _very_ careful here about the argument that you're making.

If you're effectively saying that any individual has free reign to do whatever
they desire with trade secrets, sensitive diplomatic information, and whatnot
because of a moral injury they may feel the system is giving them, then you've
effectively destroyed any form of organized human activity that involves trust
or secrets.

Here's why: people get morally offended at all kinds of bullshit. It's totally
dependent on the individual as to what pushes their buttons.

So yes, good people in bad systems do really bad things. Lots of Nazis were
working boring jobs as part of the system that exterminated millions of
people. But as a society we generally do not hold these people accountable for
such actions. After WWII most of those folks kept right on working boring
jobs, this time rebuilding the country instead of operating concentration
camps.

Whether or not those people are supposed to feel guilt or revulsion at their
own actions is a _moral_ question -- a question between each of them and their
own standard of what the universe expects of them. Confusing personal
decisions with public ones is a good way to muddle your thinking.

~~~
mattmanser
He's not even making the argument you're suggesting, he's simply trying to
explain why the media has such a hard time explaining the motivation behind
the whistleblowers and why they end up circumventing chain of command.

~~~
twoodfin
No, he doesn't explain that. There's just some hand waving about "the
bureaucracy" and "the system". I think it does a disservice to the many real
whistleblowers who believe (often correctly) that by working within the
system, or at least by working outside it without breaking the law, they can
effect meaningful change.

He makes no attempt to explain just what "evil" Manning was fighting by
passing along essentially random classified diplomatic traffic, or why Snowden
might have felt morally justified in leaking secrets about U.S. spying on
strategic competitors. This was not the Pentagon Papers.

------
kijin
> _David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak
> information about the Prism surveillance program ... “For society to
> function well,” he wrote, “there have to be basic levels of trust and
> cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures.
> By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has
> betrayed all of these things.” The complaint is eerily parallel to one from
> a case discussed in “Moral Mazes,” where ... the complaint against the
> accountant by the other managers of his company was that “by insisting on
> his own moral purity … he eroded the fundamental trust and understanding
> that makes cooperative managerial work possible.”_

Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian
world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken
for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that
fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when
"institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for
example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they
need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic
moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them.

I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if
Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it.
Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future,
nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably
aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe
absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil".

The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or
your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional
assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with
some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby
boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the
civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and
egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and
enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of
their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the
System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure
with questionable instrumental value at best.

So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are
now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value.
Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System,
people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth
preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that
famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense,
replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it
might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying.

It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for
prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration
before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the
population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only
psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect
that it's gone for good.

And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think
that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout
will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another
superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.

~~~
rayiner
There is nothing new under the sun. Your grand kids will be writing similar
screeds in whatever forum is popular with them about more or less the same
subject, just as the hippie generation did in the 1960's.

Society vacillates between rejecting institutions and embracing them, for a
basic reason: you really don't want to go too far in any direction.

On one hand, you obviously don't want to become slaves to the status quo.
Injustice exists, and it must be fought. On one hand, there is intrinsic value
in having issues be _settled._ At a point, a final disposition is better than
the "right" disposition. It is difficult for society to function productively
without broadly shared values, purposes, and coordinating institutions.

The idea of a "hyper-individualistic" "post-communitarian" world is absolutely
at odds with the direction of social change to date. Our societies become ever
more interdependent, a phenomenon that has accelerated greatly since the
industrial revolution and the resulting trend towards specialization and
division of labor. Which is really the more "hyper-individualistic" world? The
world circa 1750 where everyone was a farmer and grew their own food and sewed
their own clothes and generally did 95% of the activities necessary to sustain
their lives, or the world circa 2013 where everyone does a hyper-specialized
job and depends on the labor of thousands of other people doing hyper-
specialized jobs to maintain their lifestyle? Shared values, shared purpose,
and common institutions are far more important today than they were a couple
of hundred years ago.

~~~
jbooth
Actually, two things are new:

1) The ability to store/process data on the scale to monitor an entire
population.

2) The US government's assertion that it has the right to do this. It's not
new under the sun, but it's new in the US.

~~~
protomyth
Sadly, point 2 is really not new in the US. The amount of data might be but
some pretty ugly examples can be found in every decade of the 1900s (maybe not
so much in the first two but the 30's were fun).

~~~
jbooth
Sure, we've got the j. edgar hoover era and everything going along with that,
but that's a case of individualized, nominally illegal wiretapping. Now we're
talking about broad-based wiretapping with entire buildings dedicated to it,
operating practically in the open compared to the cloak-and-dagger stuff of
yore.

~~~
protomyth
I would say the 1930's under FDR were worse than what Hoover did. Even with
the limited technology they did a pretty good job of oppression.

------
washedup
"Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from
doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols
or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role.
The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil
than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor.
Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty
of vision."

It is natural for ALL systems, whether a political organization, company,
terrorist organization, and even biological entities, to fight change and keep
the system in tact. We are now at a point where we can critically assess our
social organizations from a humanistic perspective and ask if they are really
adding value or not.

It is very, very exciting. Also scary.

------
anandabits
It's nice to see discussion in mainstream media applying Arendt to the
policies and practices of the United States. I've been talking about this for
some time now.

Spreading awareness of how institutional behavior can lead to evil actions is
extremely important. We have learned a lot about power, evil, oppression, etc
since the structure of the modern democratic state was created. We can and
need to do much better.

------
nl
I think this is a very powerful & well reasoned piece.

I have a feeling that many of those who should read it will be unduly
distracted by the gender issues around Manning.

~~~
emhart
I was hoping to send this piece to my Mother, as we've had long, frustrating
conversations about each of the people mentioned in the article, but hesitated
for that very reason. Then, just now reading your comment, realized that my
hesitation is actually a desire on my part not to fight a battle on two
fronts.

But. It's worth the fight. Sending her the article and I might even stop in
for dinner and start the conversation fresh tonight.

------
EGreg
This is why we have checks and balances between three branches of government
-- to make sure no one branch gets too much leeway to get disconnected from
what everyone else thinks is ok.

Similarly, people set up governments for societies but they also have a
culture, and an idea of what is "beyond the pale". An insular culture can
slowly become disconnected from the rest of the people, even in government
which gets feedback through voting and other limited means. Thus, individuals
possessing a "moral sense" who are hired to work in the government may in fact
engage in whistleblowing. Governments recognize this and many offer limited
protections to this activity. Of course, if they are too far gone in how much
they disconnect from the people's preferences, then they might seek to screen
heavily when hiring new people, to make sure they don't have this "liability".
And thus make themselves even more insular.

At the end of the day, SECRECY is the source of many of the problems. Secret
laws and secret courts like FISA which sometimes complain that they are being
lied to by the executive branch -- but only during fortuitous court case does
it even come to light. Or this:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-
secr...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secret-memo-
that-explains-why-obama-can-kill-americans/246004/) ... nothing changed in the
last two years. I am a liberal and I really liked Obama, but I despise his
administration's stance on secrecy, and foreign policy, because it sets a
terrible precedent.

Compare:
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment)

------
coldcode
Plato said "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to
be ruled by evil men."

~~~
gruseom
I doubt that Plato said that.

~~~
tptacek
_Misquoted. According to Respectfully Quoted, this maxim is unverified. In
fact, however, it is drawn from Plato 's Republic. Paul Shorey offers a
literal translation: "But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse
if a man will not himself hold office and rule" (Book 1, Section 347c). Since
Plato specifically addresses those unwilling to govern (), rather than those
who are simply indifferent, the accurate translation unfortunately does not
apply as broadly to think-tank work as the misquotation does._

~~~
gruseom
Thanks! The fact that there's a path back to the original makes that one less
spurious than it sounded.

There was quite a good article recently about how quotes turn into misquotes
and eventually proverbs: [http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said-
That-/14155...](http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said-
That-/141559/)

 _There are basically three kinds of Wrongly Attributed Statements. WAS I is
an adaptation or composite of a statement or statements from someone or
several people, who may or may not be famous. WAS II is a statement that was
uttered, as is, by someone, often not famous, that has come to be widely
attributed to someone else, invariably more famous. WAS III was never uttered
by anyone, at least not that we know of._

So this was a WAS I. :)

Edit: Actually, this article is better than quite good. It's the best one I've
seen on the topic and quite fun and one could even call it definitive.

Edit 2: Ok,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595).

------
jonmrodriguez
I think this otherwise-great article is weakened by its praise of Manning.
Unlike the heroic Snowden, Manning leaked an enormous bulk of documents that
she didn't actually review in detail, which showed little to no wrongdoing
relative to the bulk of the texts leaked. This seems useless, reckless, and
spiteful. [http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-
Manning/Is...](http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-Manning/Is-
PFC-Chelsea-Manning-a-hero-or-is-she-a-villain-Why/answer/Jon-Davis-10)

------
cappsjulian
"a statement about what happens when people play their 'proper' roles within a
system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while
remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at
least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences."

Like Todd in Breaking Bad, who is in fact a neo-nazi.

------
mark212
You'll forgive me if I don't put reading someone's email on the same moral
plane as the premeditated murder of 12 million people during the Holocaust.

------
twoodfin
Notably missing from this piece: An argument that valid responses to perceived
abuses include massive, indiscriminate data dumps, repeatedly bypassing MIT's
network access controls and/or taking laptops full of classified information
to Moscow.

~~~
Ygg2
Oh no, the powerpoint presentation that tells which companies are in bed with
NSA will doom us all.

Moscow probably knows most of it, this isn't information/news for them.

I'd like to see all the men that were killed hurt by WikiLeaks data dumps. I
mean cables were fucking benign, nothing people already didn't know or heavily
suspected.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Also notably missing from current discourse: A valid argument that valid
responses to perceived abuses include using the traditional whistle-blower
channels.

People go to Moscow because there seems to be no other way to blow the whistle
any more, not without ending up like Pfc Manning. Snowden said that right from
the start; missing that part is either ignorance or disinformation.

