Re: <nettime> aclu: IoT

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

ACLU is not what it once was. The national office is now almost
exclusively mercenary, corporatized as a fund-raising foundation,
high-salaried leaders deployed to hustle concentrated wealth
holders. Genuine public interest board members departed
some time ago. The branches remain reputable but subject
to funds being yanked if too obstreperous.

The national org is a part of the pattern to deeply fund a few
NGOs to dominate "public interest" issues in a way which affirms
global markets in distressed territories. All the giant foundations
are doing this, have been doing this, will be doing this, in concert
with the corporations gushing funds into well to do NGOs, safely
within comfortable ideologies of WMD supremacy.

Non-profit journalism is the darling at the moment, ProPublica,
First Look, The Marshall Project, Knight, Pew, PBD, NPR.

Snowden Inc. is a pointed reminder of how a hot topic like
American civil liberties violating NSA can be monetized instantly
by use of the Internet so long as it does not actually interfere
with global national security arrangements, assure by sustained
consultation by journalists with governments about what to release.

ACLU has accomplished its mission to be the go to org for
not challenging USG authority, and is providing legal services
to Snowden, Inc. as well as running a fancy ad campaign to
lure donors.

IoT is among a panoply of initiatives overflowing the coffers.


At 10:58 PM 3/25/2014, you wrote:

> http://tinyurl.com/l5vcnp7 and
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175822/
>
> Finally somebody makes a public argument against the breathless Red 
> Herring Utopian hype around IoT and its purported deep and 
> beneficent innocence.
<...>


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org