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Episode 50: Radio Free TrueAnon (Patreon)

Published:
2020-03-07 22:20:55
Edited:
2021-09-23 21:31:22
Imported:
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Content

We sit down for an epic two-hour episode with the legend Yasha Levine to ramble through American soft power, intelligence technology, Russiagate and more.

**PRODUCER'S NOTE**: The canonical numbering scheme has been corrected to account for inflation and bonus episodes.

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Comments

Jake Rogers
>>33470720

lol I think I’ve learned this from you sometime over the four years since I first wrote this! it really tracks too with a lot of the pretty, milquetoast, toothless literature we get today.

Benphish

"Inflation" Sus

logan

oh yeah, the episode i've been waiting for

David Anderson

srsly - do episodes 47-49 exist?

Feedbag

we need bibliographies for these episodes

Himbo Slice

Rank revisionism

David Anderson
>>33395150

I'm picturing a Black Album type situation where the missing material is eventually released. O(+>

JB
>>33397786

Was curious about the World Anti-Communist League one. The Yockey bio from a few years back touches on it, but I’ve been looking for one without a giant swastika on the cover

David Demmel

The Totalitarianism discussion made me so happy - Arendts framework is so fucking stupid and so much of academia is taking it at facevalue...

Welfare state

Hey Brace, what's the name of the book about stepan banderas? Great Ep this week!

TrueAnonPod (edited)

Comment edits

2021-07-23 01:08:26 Stepan Bandera: The Life & Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist
2020-03-08 16:55:14 Stepan Bandera: The Life & Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist
>>33415460

Stepan Bandera: The Life & Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist

fidgetspinster

Good ep, and while it's not the actual concern of these tech libertarians, the issue with a lot of this surveillance is that a lot of this data collection is used in some pretty fucked up, targeted shit. Like one I heard was that people google searching 'PTSD' and 'depression' and linked to being veterans, will be targeted with those predatory for-profit colleges. And if your location services indicate you're living in a low income area, you'll also get those fake college ads, ads for payday loans, and scam ads that ask for your credit card number for a credit check...I've read about this and experienced a lot of it, like it's disturbing shit Like I think the whole privacy thing is a big class thing, and it's annoyed me that people fixated on it push that idea that its just like a universal value when its like, dude I never got privacy growing up, its not a right that you never be disturbed. But the one-sided data collection isn't a normal lack of privacy, like we don't see eachothers search history and texts and cell phone location data, big companies and state agencies collect that info and they aren't using it for community building. Agree that the vpn or whatever shit isn't a solution, and you have to pay for a lot of that shit, which is just stupid when it's people without money getting hurt by it. Personally, I'm of the thinking that we all give it more, random info because people don't actually know how to process all this information. They'll still collect data from you no matter what you do so go chaos mode with it

Nik

(I sent a version of this message privately, posting a slightly more anonymized version of this publicly) Hello. In general I'm a huge fan and love the podcast, but this episode contains a lot of disinformation and harmful slander against good people doing good work. I've come to know many of the people involved in some of the various technology projects and applications discussed in the episode through workplace organizing in the bay. We have years of history organizing and agitating around things like full benefits (matching software engineers) for contract workers on major tech campuses, forcing large companies to drop contracts with ICE and DHS, supporting and helping people working in Amazon's warehouses to strike and fight back against Amazon's exploitation, supporting local striking workers (e.g. the Lanetix strike where all engineers were fired after trying to form a union), tech worker solidarity and support for local housing and immigration projects, and many, *many* other things (far more than can be listed here). We also have spent a ton of time and effort on outreach and things like worker's learning clubs through which we introduce other tech workers to radical labor history, read history of communist and anarchist union organizing and successes, and facilitate workplace organizer training for the tech world (every part of the tech world, whether its bus drivers or cafeteria workers or security guards or engineers). We're also in the streets, in the bay and elsewhere. Fighting fascists, fighting cops, holding shit down. Ask around if you want to learn about that. I've also done lots of security engineering work with focus on cryptography, and I have personally worked on many of the technological projects and applications brought up in this episode. Some of the critiques brought up in the episode (i.e. the narcissistic savior complex afflicting many tech activist types, trying to solve political problems with technology, etc.) are 100% true and valid. But you all then take it a step further and start throwing accusations of government control and ownership of these projects, conflate the dumb fuck tech libertarian bros with all tech-world activism, and most importantly miss the actual purpose of these projects entirely. This is harmful and damaging, both to the people involved in these projects but most importantly to their actual anti-capitalist goals, which Yasha clearly doesn't understand at all. I think this episode comes from a place of ignorance on your part about this work and its history, and that's fine. Everyone can't be an expert in everything. But it's really disappointing that you're here in SF, surrounded by people who are involved in day-to-day organizing and work on this shit, but you bring in someone like Yasha who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about and intentionally tries to paint committed activists as either government stooges or naive manipulated children just to further their own media career. If you care about the *real* purpose, goals, and history of these projects or want to get an actual understanding of some of the technology involved, let me know. I'm really supportive of the podcast and would love to help unfuck this narrative for you and your listeners. If you don't, fine, but don't talk shit on things you don't know anything about, and you should be a *lot* more careful implying people (real, actual, *LOCAL TO YOU* workers and activists) are cops or working for the government.

Anonymous

Best episode ever. Love Yasha and can’t wait to see you with Ames and the war nerd

Brian Stewart

Yasha has a lot of interest to say, but he’s wrong and dismissive about a lot. His response to Brace’s question “what should people do about being surveilled” is “who the fuck cares let them watch you”. That fucking sucks and doesn’t help our comrades in BLM, socialist gun clubs, union salts who *need* good advice to minimize their exposure to state violence. Signal cannot be thought of as “unbreakable”, especially for the reasons Brace notes—your devices themselves can get compromised. Maybe P*ter Thi*el and the NSA can read your Signals if they target you, but can the local police? Should you use SMS instead, *knowing* that all our SMS’s are flowing through the NSA’s PRISM real-time-monitoring shit? Think about U-lock on your bike. Yeah, it can be cut off! But does that mean you shouldn’t use it to lock your bike? Of course not. Yasha’s commitment to interrogating these technologies is not one with any eye toward why leftists actually want them in the first place—to help us build power together, while making it a little harder for the State to track our every move.

Nik
>>33420771

Agree. This is a big part of what Yasha doesn't understand and oversimplifies. I alluded to the "real" purpose in my long comment above, but projects like Signal and Tor do *not* aim to make surveillance impossible. They aim to make *mass* surveillance impractical, and they have been wildly successful at this. 15 years ago local cops could real all your text messages easily. 10 years ago the NSA could and did read and run machine learning surveillance algorithms on almost all internet traffic *content* (not just metadata) silently and easily. Today, both of those things are not possible at a mass scale. Intelligence agencies and well-funded federal agencies can still conduct digital surveillance on basically anyone they want, but the cost is *many of orders of magnitude higher* than it was 10-15 years ago, and this surveillance has to be targeted to a particular individual and cannot be conducted on a mass, societal scale. This is a massive victory, and it should be recognized as such, not trashed because it's not perfect for every use case.

Eamon

Please record your War Nerd Episode

Benjamin N. Block

LOL at the irony of an INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER feigning unconcern over privacy or secrecy. Truly the stupidest contrarian take I've heard.

lal

yeah the exiled people have not aged well

Michael
>>33420152

Regarding the crypto projects - could you say exactly what Yasha said about tor and the rest that is wrong? I'm someone who witnessed this controversy online and it alarmed me to see the online privacy activists saying that things like tor or signal are infallible because math. It makes people who know how software engineering works very suspicious of anyone saying it. And as far as I'm aware, nobody actually denies the government funding for things like tor, or that it started as a government project. I see blue check marks insisting that anyone who talks about it is crazy, but nobody actually denying it.

Solomon

I remember going to a Ukranian folk village on a field trip during elementary school in Edmonton, Alberta. One of the employees there was so fucking nasty to me. I made some egg painting (pysanka) mistake and she said something aling the lines of? "Of course a Black kid would do this." Makes sense to hear that they're basically neo-Nazis. TrueAnon: putting life into perspective.

Brian Stewart
>>33420152

@Michael—it’s a good faith question the way you pose it, and you’re right that anyone who says “use Signal and Tor and you’re safe because math” is a dope—lots of ways that your data can be compromised, even with those tools. But the open source technical community and privacy advocates have been on the front lines of identifying, analyzing and devising best practices, workarounds and better protocols to avoid them. For example, there’s a type of attack that the FBI was able to use to de-anonymize a bunch of Tor traffic. It involves them operating a sizeable proportion of all the Tor entrance/exit nodes. This is doable, but as the network becomes larger it becomes more expensive. But it’s a known risk. It’s known because Tor, like Signal, is intensely studied and scrutinized in public by an international community of researchers. The reason the government funded these applications is absolutely for use by spies and dissidents. The thing is, the developers know that you can’t have maximum security *and* backdoors in your tools. Nor can you maximize security by developing your code in secret among a small group of developers. The accepted best practice for security in cryptography is to openly publish your algorithms, protocols and implementation, so those with the skill and knowledge have the chance to identify and patch flaws—and, in doing so, to share in the process of building trust in the tool. This buys you the best security possible. The cool thing about it is that the public also gets access to these imperfect but still powerful tools. Neither application is perfectly protective, but they protect you more than any known alternative. Yasha hand-waves at the legitimate need of opposition groups to communicate online, which is super weird and extremely irritating. Like, what cause are you fighting for, bro, if you’re taking that position? You just wanna make a career being an anti-imperialist, nihilist gadfly? You’re the enemy of my enemy, good enough I guess. I’ll stick with Signal and Tor, used with my eyes fully open, until something better is available.

Jake Rogers

what’d i miss about the iowa writers workshop?

philip podolsky

Great ep but as is always the case on the left, the analysis is far superior to the “policy prescriptions.”

Steev Hise
>>33420771

there are also better encrypted messaging apps that aren't connected to the CIA, etc. Like "Wire". People should also be looking into using phones that aren't iOS or Android, there are Linux-based phones that are almost ready for general use which will be much more secure, like the Pine Phone. But yes, nothing is perfect - nevertheless, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good...

calvin!

love yasha! smart and funny guy. i was surprised by his take on surveillance bc it minimizes the level of care that minority groups must take to keep their privacy. he mixes really well with liz and brace i would love to hear him on the show again!

Anonymous

This episode was a really really fun two hours please have Yasha on regularly. Also two hours isn’t too long- war nerd goes to 3 hours all the time and I love it. I spend all day in the kitchen for my job and having stuff to listen to really helps get through it

Jeff Semmerling's Art Side Out Studio & MASK SHOP

I have many friends in Russia I've met through Service Clowning there in 1999 with Patch Adams (he takes 35 clown doctor big heart types every year since 1984). It is so good to hear any truth about that world I grew up in ignorance about. Please have Yasha back!!!!

Jack Lawrence

Great episode and Yasha as a guest gelled really well with Brace and Liz. I was surprised at Yasha's take on privacy. Public discourse is increasingly moving online and our interactions are being mediated through what amount to vast data collection agencies. Never before have people's habits and activities been commodified to such an extent. Privacy from other individuals may be a privileged conceit but privacy in the sense of having ownership over your personhood is something that has never been under threat in this way.

Conrad Kirby
>>33420152

Fucking thank you. God I was rolling my eyes so much during this fucking episode.

Jaron Lenz

Where are episodes 47, 48 and 49.