Kevin Smith On Batman At 75: The Enduring Heartbreak & Why We Still Worship Him

(By Kevin Smith, Hollywood Reporter, 02 May 2014)

As Bruce Wayne's alter ego continues to pervade pop culture, TV and film, a famous fanboy expounds on the primal fear at the heart of his appeal.

Since he was created 75 years ago by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Batman has captured more fancies than he has colorful characters from Gotham's Rogues Gallery en route to the revolving door of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The appeal of the Batman has become so undeniable that at the conclusion of his latest multi-billion dollar franchise, the Caped Crusader wasn't gifted with the eight-year vacation his character was afforded by Christopher Nolan between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.  Instead, Warner Bros. lit the Bat-Signal and put his Bat-ass right back to work: on TV in Fox's Gotham, in video games like Batman: Arkham Origins, in animation like the short-lived Beware the Batman on Cartoon Network and on the big screen again, in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel sequel, the tentatively titled Batman vs. Superman, and the director's just-announced Justice League.

But why does Batman endure? In the age of the Marvel movie, a mild-mannered doctor can lose his temper and become a giant green monster, or a rich guy can put on a flying suit of armor and blow away bad guys with repulsor technology.  In The Avengers, a whole slew of super souls battled side by side, giving us so much ass-kickin' eye candy, the worldwide audience collectively screamed, "JUST TAKE ALL MY MONEY NOW!" The Marvel heroes were unwittingly designed for today's modern movie, where digital artists can finally depict not only what it looks like but also how it feels to be Spider-Man swinging through the canyons of Manhattan.

By comparison, however, on paper Batman comes across as kinda dull. He pulls on a mask and a cape and fights street-level bad guys. He has no superpowers. He has cool tech like Iron Man, but he likes to rely on his brains and brawn more than anything else. In a world of super- heroes, he's pretty uncinematically normal. When you take away the Batmobile and the Batcave, Batman is just a guy fighting mad men in makeup. He's not invulnerable: He's a human being.  And therein lies the appeal of the Batman: He is one of us. We can't identify with Superman because, in the real world, he'd be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. We can't identify with Wonder Woman because, in the real world, we don't know any Amazonian women made from clay. We can't identify with Green Lantern because, in the real world, there are no aliens giving out power rings.

But in the real world, parents die. Sometimes it's a car crash that does it, and sometimes it's a natural disaster. Sometimes it's merely something mundane and medical. And sometimes, it's a grisly crime at the hands of the desperate or demented. The thought of losing both parents is a primal fear that preoccupies our childhood imagination: There never has been a child who hasn't fretted, at one point in their lives, "What if Mom and Dad disappear and I'm left all alone?" It's a terrifying thought for a kid: "What would happen to me if the only two people in the world who love me the most were suddenly dead?"  See, it's the Passion Play aspect that keeps us coming back to Batman. In 1966, Batman went mainstream in a campy television show that only once mentioned the heartbreaking origin of the Dark Knight. This was a fun Batman, Biff-ing and Bam-ing bad guys -- in Dutch tilt shots -- simply because it was the right thing to do. But after Watergate and Vietnam, the bubbly Batman was returned to his onerous origins as the boy whose life would be forever altered in Crime Alley. And to a country and world that had lost its innocence with the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, the more somber Dark Knight Batman had a deeper impact than the Bright Knight that was the Adam West iteration of the character.

Ask someone in 1966 why Bruce Wayne became Batman and they couldn't tell you. Ask anyone now? Even the least geeky of us can tell you a young Bruce Wayne watched a mugger murder his parents in the midst of a back-alley robbery. We take this aspect of the story to heart because it's what appeals to us about Batman the most: his humanity. Before he was punching the Riddler in his turkey neck, Batman was a boy who survived the worst thing that can happen to a child.  Yes, we love the look of a man in uniform -- particularly when that uniform includes a cape and cowl. But while Batman is visually arresting, it's what lies at the heart of the character beneath the bat emblazoned across his chest that we respond to. We root for him with a mix of pity and power, the way we silently cheer on any kid we read about in the news who has to deal with issues and complications some full-grown adults couldn't be expected to weather.

And in this less innocent age, where greed and corruption are so commonplace it makes our world more like Gotham and less like shiny-happy Metropolis, we trust the establishment less and less. When even priests and politicians are pederasts, what authority figure can you believe in anymore without including caveats or excuses? Although he's a fictional character, Batman presents an adult any child (and most adults for that matter) can feel safe with, knowing that this masked man with his hidden identity will ironically never betray your trust. He will lay down his life to save yours. But because he spent his formative years honing his body and mind for a lifelong war on crime, we know he won't have to die for us: Unlike most messiahs, you can't stop the Batman.

At the core of the character is an arrested development of sorts: Only a child makes a vow as untenable as “I will spend my life avenging my parents.”  And even though he's a lethal fighting machine who refuses to kill, at the heart of the heroic adult is just a broken boy -- so broken, in fact, that the man adheres to the juvenile promise he made as a child.  But without parents to tell him he's mounting an impossible task, the shattered kid becomes the driven adult, and his dark days make him a Dark Knight.  Bruce Wayne is the original "boy who lived," but his Voldemort isn't the Joker -- it's injustice. The injustice of loving parents taken too young. The injustice of a ruined childhood. The injustice of those superstitious and cowardly criminals taking not only things that don't belong to them, but also the innocence, joy, safety and security of the wonder years.

It wasn't fair what happened to Bruce Wayne, so instantly, we're on Bruce Wayne's side. But he wins our loyalty not because he's the victim we never want to be, but because he's the survivor and champion every one of us dreams we are, with or without childhood trauma and tragedy. Bruce the Boy vows to avenge his parents' murders, and Bruce the Adult makes good on the promise, taking it all one step further: On his watch, no child will ever have to know the pain of losing Mom and Dad. So even though this billionaire playboy has mountains of money with which to dry his eyes or can boo-hoo into the bosoms of any woman (or man) he desires, Bruce Wayne spends every waking hour as a soldier in the service of strangers. And because of this, we feel more connected to Bruce Wayne and Batman than Tony Stark and Iron Man, or Clark Kent and Superman.  Or the pope.  Or the president.  Even the good ones.

We won't let Batman go because, for such a ridiculous notion, he's so easy to believe in. He's a spiritual icon of survival for so many that it doesn't matter if he's a fictional character. He endures because of that young boy who made it through the worst thing that can ever happen to a child and came out stronger for it. And since every one of us has either faced or will face their own personal Crime Alley, where we lose someone precious to us, it's good to know there's someone out there who can show us how to survive heartbreak -- even if he does it by overdressing and socking bad guys in the mush.

Kevin Smith is the writer-director of Clerks, Dogma and the upcoming Tusk, starring Justin Long and Michael Parks.   For DC, he has written Green Arrow: Quiver and Batman: The Widening Gyre. He also is the executive producer of Comic Book Men on AMC.

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The Secret Web: Where Drugs, Porn And Murder Live Online

(By Lev Grossman; Jay Newton-Small, Time Magazine, Monday, Nov. 11, 2013)

 

On the afternoon of Oct. 1, 2013, a tall, slender, shaggy-haired man left his house on 15th Avenue in San Francisco. He paid $1,000 a month cash to share it with two housemates who knew him only as a quiet currency trader named Josh Terrey. His real name was Ross Ulbricht. He was 29 and had no police record. Dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, Ulbricht headed to the Glen Park branch of the public library, where he made his way to the science-fiction section and logged on to his laptop--he was using the free wi-fi. Several FBI agents dressed in plainclothes converged on him, pushed him up against a window, then escorted him from the building.  The FBI believes Ulbricht is a criminal known online as the Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to the book and movie The Princess Bride. The Dread Pirate Roberts was the owner and administrator of Silk Road, a wildly successful online bazaar where people bought and sold illegal goods--primarily drugs but also fake IDs, fireworks and hacking software. They could do this without getting caught because Silk Road was located in a little-known region of the Internet called the Deep Web.

Technically the Deep Web refers to the collection of all the websites and databases that search engines like Google don't or can't index, which in terms of the sheer volume of information is many times larger than the Web as we know it. But more loosely, the Deep Web is a specific branch of the Internet that's distinguished by that increasingly rare commodity: complete anonymity. Nothing you do on the Deep Web can be associated with your real-world identity, unless you choose it to be. Most people never see it, though the software you need to access it is free and takes less than three minutes to download and install. If there's a part of the grid that can be considered off the grid, it's the Deep Web.

The Deep Web has plenty of valid reasons for existing. It's a vital tool for intelligence agents, law enforcement, political dissidents and anybody who needs or wants to conduct their online affairs in private--which is, increasingly, everybody. According to a survey published in September by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 86% of Internet users have attempted to delete or conceal their digital history, and 55% have tried to avoid being observed online by specific parties like their employers or the government.

But the Deep Web is also an ideal venue for doing things that are unlawful, especially when it's combined, as in the case of Silk Road, with the anonymous, virtually untraceable electronic currency Bitcoin. "It allows all sorts of criminals who, in bygone eras, had to find open-air drug markets or an alley somewhere to engage in bad activity to do it openly," argues Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office is bringing a case against Ulbricht and who spoke exclusively to TIME. For 2½ years Silk Road acted as an Amazon-like clearinghouse for illegal goods, providing almost a million customers worldwide with $1.2 billion worth of contraband, according to the 39-page federal complaint against Ulbricht. The Dread Pirate Roberts, the Deep Web's Jeff Bezos, allegedly collected some $80 million in fees.

Most people who use the Deep Web aren't criminals. But some prosecutors and government agencies think that Silk Road was just the thin edge of the wedge and that the Deep Web is a potential nightmare, an electronic haven for thieves, child pornographers, human traffickers, forgers, assassins and peddlers of state secrets and loose nukes. The FBI, the DEA, the ATF and the NSA, to name a few, are spending tens of millions of dollars trying to figure out how to crack it. Which is ironic, since it's the U.S. military that built the Deep Web in the first place.

The story of the Deep Web is a fable of technology and its unintended consequences. In May 1996, three scientists with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory presented a paper titled "Hiding Routing Information" at a workshop in Cambridge, England. It laid out the technical features of a system whereby users could access the Internet without divulging their identities to any Web servers or routers they might interact with along the way. They called their idea "onion routing" because of the layers of encryption that surround and obscure the data being passed back and forth. By October 2003, the idea was ready to be released onto the Net as an open-source project called Tor (which originally stood for The Onion Router, though the acronym has since been abandoned). If the Deep Web is a masked ball, Tor provides the costumes. It was a highly elegant and effective creation, so much so that even the people who built it didn't know how to break it.

In many ways Tor was less a step forward than a return to an earlier era. For much of the Internet's history, a user's online persona was linked only loosely, if at all, to his or her real-world identity. The Internet was a place where people could create new, more fluid selves, beginning with a handle or pseudonym. Through much of the 1990s, the Web promised people a second life. But over time--and in particular with the arrival of Facebook--our lives online have been tightly tethered to our off-line selves, including our real names. Now everywhere we go, we radiate information about ourselves--our browsing history, our purchases, our taste in videos, our social connections, often even our physical location. Everywhere but the Deep Web.

Why would the U.S. government fund the creation of such a system? Lots of reasons. The police could use it to solicit anonymous tips online, set up sting operations and explore illegal websites without tipping off their owners. Military and intelligence agencies could use it for covert communications. The State Department could train foreign dissidents to use it. Tor is currently administered by a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, Mass., and sponsored by a diverse array of organizations including Google and the Knight Foundation. But as recently as 2011, 60% of its funding still came from the U.S. government.

The corruption of the Deep Web began not long after it was built. As early as 2006, a website that came to be known as The Farmer's Market was selling everything from marijuana to ketamine. It built up a clientele in 50 states and 34 countries before a DEA-led team brought it down in April 2012. The Deep Web isn't just a source for drugs: there is evidence that jihadists communicate through it and that botnets--massive networks of virus-infected computers employed by spammers--use it to hide from investigators. Even now, it's the work of a minute or two to find weapons or child pornography on the Deep Web. In August, the FBI took down Freedom Hosting, a company specializing in Deep Web sites, alleging that it was "the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet." Its owner, a 28-year-old named Eric Marques, is facing extradition from Ireland.

But Silk Road was different. For one thing, it was more discriminating: its terms of service forbade child pornography, stolen goods and counterfeit currency. For another, it didn't use dollars; it used bitcoins.  When Bitcoin appeared in 2009 it was a radically new kind of currency. It was introduced as a kind of fiscal thought experiment by someone known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, whose true identity is still a mystery. Bitcoin is both a payment system and a currency that is purely digital--it has no physical form. A bitcoin's worth is determined by supply and demand and is valuable only insofar as individuals and companies have agreed to trade it.  Bitcoins belong to an era in which trust in banks and government has been compromised. Users can transfer them from one digital wallet to another without banks brokering the transaction or imposing fees. The currency is completely decentralized--its architecture owes a lot to Napster's successor, BitTorrent--and is based on sophisticated cryptography. Bitcoin is essentially cash for the Internet, virtually anonymous and extremely difficult to counterfeit. The Farmer's Market was vulnerable because it left financial tracks in the real world. Silk Road didn't.

Like Tor, Bitcoin has entirely legitimate reasons for existing. As far as anyone can tell, it's primarily used for legal purposes--scores of businesses accept bitcoins now, including Howard Johnson, the dating website OKCupid and at least one New York City bar. But Bitcoin's digital slipperiness, when force-multiplied by the anonymity of the Deep Web, creates a potential platform for criminal transactions unlike anything the real or virtual world has ever seen. That potential was realized by the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Ross Ulbricht grew up in Texas, an Eagle Scout who went on to study physics at the University of Texas in Dallas. He was a fan of fellow Texan and libertarian Ron Paul; both studied the Austrian school of economics and the work of its father, Ludwig von Mises, who believed in unrestricted markets. Ulbricht earned a master's in materials science and engineering at Pennsylvania State University. Acquaintances describe him as bright and straitlaced. "He wasn't the center of conversation or the center of anything," says a friend who claims to have briefly dated him last year. "He kind of set himself in the background."  By the time he graduated, Ulbricht had become interested in the idea of the Internet as a venue for perfecting free markets. His greatest enemy--according to his LinkedIn profile--was the government. "The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort," he wrote. "The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a firsthand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

After graduating from Penn State in 2009, Ulbricht went to Sydney, Australia, to visit his sister. It was there, allegedly, that he began working on what would become Silk Road and transforming himself into the Dread Pirate Roberts. By then, drug dealers were already active on the Deep Web, but their businesses tended to fail for two reasons: the money changing hands was traceable, and it was difficult to build trust with clients. Roberts would solve both of those problems. The double layer of anonymity created by Tor and Bitcoin made the money virtually untraceable. To establish trust, Roberts looked to two temples of legitimate commerce for his ideas: Amazon and eBay.  He was a quick study. Users of Silk Road describe a sophisticated, full-featured experience complete with buyer and seller reviews and customer forums. "When deciding whether or not to go with a vendor, I read the feedback on their page and also ratings from a few months ago," says one Silk Road client, who declined to be identified. "I also go to the forums and read the seller's review thread, and depending on the substance, I'll go to an 'avenger's' thread, where people from the Silk Road community post lab results for individual products." When transactions did go south, there was a dispute-resolution system. "Honestly it was like a candy store," says the user.

Products simply arrived by regular mail. "It generally looks like junk mail or information about moving here, or traveling there, or consultation stuff," the user explains. "Usually, when opening the package, you still won't know there are drugs in it unless you're looking for them." Silk Road's community had its own subculture, which skewed toward political outliers. "One memorable thread asked whether we were there for the drugs or the 'revolution,'" recalls the same user. "A lot of people answered 'came for the drugs, stayed for the revolution.'" Dread Pirate Roberts, or simply DPR, was hailed by Silk Road customers as an antiestablishment hero.  Silk Road launched in January 2011. Its existence was hardly kept a secret--with Tor making it possible to get in and out anonymously, why bother? Hiding would just have been bad for business. "It was basically an open thumbing of noses at law enforcement," Bharara says.

The FBI got its first glimpse of Ross Ulbricht that October. Someone named "altoid" had been promoting Silk Road in various chat rooms; then, in a Bitcoin forum, altoid posted an ad seeking an "IT pro in the bitcoin community" for "a venture-backed bitcoin-startup company," according to the complaint against Ulbricht. Ulbricht listed his real e-mail address as the contact for the position.  Ulbricht had left more clues for the feds. His Google+ account linked to some of the same sites and videos--including some from the Ludwig von Mises Institute--that the Dread Pirate Roberts mentioned. The FBI obtained records from Google that showed Ulbricht was accessing his Gmail account from San Francisco; the server through which Roberts accessed Silk Road showed an IP address corresponding to a San Francisco café. Ulbricht also posted a request for help with some computer code on a website for programmers, again under his own name. He hastily changed his user ID (to "frosty"), but the damage was done: that same code later turned up as part of the Silk Road site.

From there the thread becomes darker and more tangled. In January 2013, a Silk Road employee apparently stole bitcoins from users, then managed to get arrested on another charge. Roberts, displaying a side investigators hadn't seen before, allegedly contracted with a Silk Road customer to have the employee tortured until he or she returned the bitcoins, then killed. This was the work not of a libertarian idealist but of a sociopath. Roberts was unaware that the hit man he was dealing with was an undercover FBI agent who had bought drugs on Silk Road as part of a sting operation. The agent sent Roberts faked photographic proof of the murder. Satisfied, Roberts wired $80,000 from an Australian money-transfer exchange.

According to the testimony of FBI agent Christopher Tarbell, who led the investigation, a Silk Road user in Canada began to blackmail Roberts, threatening to leak information about the site's clientele. Roberts responded by paying someone known online as "redandwhite" the sum of $150,000 in bitcoins to kill the blackmailer. (Roberts received photos of that killing too, but the Canadian police can't match it to any murder they're aware of.) In June 2013, Roberts ordered a set of fake IDs from redandwhite. Later that month, U.S. Customs opened a package from Canada containing nine fake IDs bearing Ulbricht's photo and birth date. The package also gave them Ulbricht's address.

The net was closing fast. By July, FBI hackers had tracked down one of Silk Road's servers, in a foreign country whose name has not yet been revealed, which gave them copies of all Roberts' e-mail plus transaction records dating to the site's launch. On July 26, agents from Homeland Security knocked on Ulbricht's door. He admitted that he'd been living under a false name.  The authorities got another break on July 31, when they raided the condo of a Seattle-area dealer who sold meth, coke and heroin through Silk Road under the handle Nod; they quickly flipped him as an informant. On Oct. 1, two years after they first spotted him, federal agents followed Ulbricht to the Glen Park library and arrested him. The FBI says it caught him red-handed with evidence on his laptop screen.

Many in Washington are troubled by the fact that it took so much time and effort just to close one illegal website run by a would-be Walter White.  The FBI is policing an ever evolving Internet using static, often outdated laws. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which governs law enforcement's warrant process and is known as CALEA, was passed in 1994. "We're coming up next year on its 20th anniversary," says Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI's technology division, who now advises Subsentio, a firm that helps companies comply with CALEA. "It's in serious need of being updated to keep pace with the current environment."  Even leaving aside specialized tools like Tor, there are plenty of mainstream technologies that criminals can use to hide their activities: satellite phones, PIN messaging on BlackBerrys and even Apple iMessage, the instant-messaging service on iPhones and iPads. "The DEA got burned in April when it came out that we weren't able to capture iMessage on a wiretap," says Diana Summers Dolliver, a professor at the University of Alabama's department of criminal justice who previously worked at the Drug Enforcement Administration. "So of course all the bad guys went out and got iPhones and encrypted iMessage."

The FBI isn't trying to listen in on everything the way the NSA allegedly does; it's just looking to obtain legal search warrants under CALEA. But even that isn't as simple as it sounds. "First of all, even if you have an idea that they're using their computer to ill ends, you can't seize the computer for evidence," Dolliver says. "You have to have probable cause. So that's roadblock No. 1. Then, once you get ahold of their computer, it takes a lot of forensic work to figure out who the perps are." There are also many companies that have built their businesses specifically on providing their users with privacy and anonymity. Interest groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology argue that making new technologies CALEA-compliant stifles innovation and that building in back doors for law enforcement can make otherwise secure systems vulnerable to hackers.

For years the FBI has been working with other agencies on a proposal to update CALEA, which they finally submitted to the White House in April. The FBI won't comment on details, but generally speaking, the idea is not to force companies to divulge information, potentially compromising them technologically, but to increase fines on those that choose not to comply. If the arguments are reasonable, the timing is terrible: the Edward Snowden leaks began on June 5 and, almost at once, the idea of making electronic surveillance by the government easier became politically radioactive.

In 2012 the FBI established--jointly with the DEA, the ATF and the U.S. Marshals Service--the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center (NDCAC) in Quantico, Va. The center exists because--to quote from the appropriations bill that funds it--"changes in the volume and complexity of today's communications services and technologies present new and emerging challenges to law enforcement's ability to access, intercept, collect, and process wire or electronic communications to which they are lawfully authorized." In essence, the NDCAC is a tech startup with at least $54 million in funding for the 2013 fiscal year that's focused on helping law enforcement penetrate areas of the Web that are currently unsearchable.

The FBI isn't the only agency that's worried about the Deep Web. The Senate Finance Committee is looking at beefing up the IRS' funding for dealing with virtual currencies and investigating potential tax shelters, Senate sources say. Bitcoin presents Washington with a whole set of regulatory challenges all on its own. Is Bitcoin a currency? (Under certain definitions, no, because it isn't legal tender issued by a country.) Is it a commodity? Should bitcoin traders be regulated as banks or wire services?

The incarceration of Ross Ulbricht started a spreading wave of arrests of suspected Deep Web dealers. On Oct. 8, police in Sweden arrested two men on charges of selling pot through Silk Road, and four more men were picked up in the U.K. the same day on drug charges. "These arrests send a clear message to criminals," said Keith Bristow, head of Britain's National Crime Agency. "The hidden Internet isn't hidden, and your anonymous activity isn't anonymous. We know where you are, what you are doing, and we will catch you."  It's not completely clear that that's true. One of the documents leaked by Snowden was an NSA presentation dated June 2012 titled "Tor Stinks." It described the difficulties the NSA has been having cracking Tor, and it said definitively, "we will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." The Deep Web template that Ulbricht created remains technically sound. As one former Silk Road user puts it, "The dust has settled and everyone is kind of like 'Oh, well, time to order some more drugs.' We all knew it was coming." There are forum posts discussing the possibility of a reconstituted Silk Road, based on a backed-up version of the old site but with added security, that could launch on Nov. 5. "This will be where the action is once it's up and running," says the user.

Tor itself is left in the curious position of being funded by some parts of the federal government (including the State Department and the Department of Defense) while others (the FBI and the NSA) are trying to crack it. But even law-enforcement officials directly involved with the case hasten to clarify that they don't blame the technology itself for Silk Road. "There's nothing inherently wrong with anonymity on the Internet," U.S. Attorney Bharara says. "There's nothing inherently wrong with certain kinds of currency, like bitcoins. Just like there's nothing inherently wrong with cash. But it happens to be the case that ... it's also the thing that allows the drug trade to flourish. It allows money laundering to happen. It allows murder for hire to happen."

What's certain is that the need for Tor--or something like it--isn't going away. The Internet is becoming an increasingly unprivate place, where multibillion-dollar business plans are being built on companies' ability to observe and rapaciously harvest every last iota and fillip of consumer behavior. More and more, it falls to consumers themselves to say where the line is and to take control of their personal information.  What makes the Internet, and particularly the Deep Web, so hard to pin down is that it cuts across so many spheres that used to be strictly separate. It's private and public, personal and professional and political, all at the same time; it has a peculiar way of compressing all the formerly disparate threads of our lives into one single pipeline leading directly into our studies and bedrooms. It's virtually impossible for the law to tease those strands apart again. Right now we're trapped unpleasantly between two ideals, the blissful anonymity of the Net as it was first conceived and the well-regulated panopticon it is becoming. It's the worst of both worlds: the Deep Web provides too much privacy and the rest of the Web not enough.

Ulbricht himself currently has plenty of privacy. He's spending 20 hours a day alone in a cell in an Alameda County jail near Oakland, Calif. On Oct. 16 he hired a New York lawyer named Joshua Dratel, who has some experience with controversial cases. His past clients include several alleged terrorists. "He'll be pleading not guilty whenever he's arraigned on charges," Dratel told TIME. "He denies the charges right now, and he'll continue to deny [them]," he said. Perhaps inevitably, 20th Century Fox has already optioned the story of Silk Road from Wired magazine for a feature film.

Meanwhile, Ulbricht fills his days writing letters to friends and family and reading Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. He has no Internet access. He may, however, still have some of his pirate's treasure. On Oct. 25, Bharara announced that, after a prolonged hacking campaign, investigators had gained access to a cache of 122,000 of the Dread Pirate Roberts' bitcoins, worth over $24.9 million. But there may be many more millions out there. People may always be fallible and venal, but technology, at least for the time being, can still keep some of our secrets.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2156271,00.html

Osama Bin Laden Buried At Sea After Being Killed By U.S. Forces In Pakistan

(By Philip Rucker, Scott Wilson and Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post, Monday, May 2, 2011)

Osama bin Laden, the long-hunted al-Qaeda leader and chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, was killed by U.S. forces Sunday in what officials described as a surgical raid on his luxury hideout in Pakistan. In a rare Sunday night address from the East Room of the White House, President Obama said a small team of U.S. personnel attacked a compound Sunday in Pakistan’s Abbottabad Valley, where bin Laden had been hiding since at least last summer. During a firefight, U.S. team killed bin Laden, 54, and took custody of his body in what Obama called “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.” The killing of the terrorism mastermind who had eluded U.S. forces for nearly a decade drew a spontaneous, cheering crowd outside the White House gates and at New York’s Ground Zero, the site of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. “We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies,” a somber Obama said in his nine-minute statement that aired live on television worldwide. “We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to families who have lost loved ones to al-Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.”

Bin Laden’s killing will provide a clear moment of victory for Obama at a time of deep political turmoil overseas that is upending long-standing U.S. policy in much of the Muslim world, particularly the Middle East. It also comes nearly 10 years after bin Laden orchestrated the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked three passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed a fourth jet in rural Shanksville, Pa. “Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people,” Obama said. “The cause of securing our country is not complete, but tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever it is we set our mind to. That is the story of our history.” The discovery that bin Laden had been hiding in a well-populated part of Pakistan, rather than a remote location, raised new questions about the extent to which Pakistan is cooperating with the United States in combatting terrorism.

U.S. forces flew to bin Laden’s hideout in helicopters about 1 a.m. Monday (late Sunday afternoon in Washington). Bin Laden was shot in the head after he and his guards resisted the U.S. attackers, the Associated Press reported. U.S. personnel identified him by facial recognition. A U.S. official said bin Laden’s body was quickly transported away from Pakistan and “buried at sea,” in part because the U.S. government did not want an accessible gravesite that could become a shrine to bin Laden’s followers. The official declined to identify which body of water the corpse was taken to, or provide further details on how it was transported or handled. The official said the body was buried “in accordance with Islamic tradition,” meaning within 24 hours of bin Laden’s death. No information was available as to whether Muslim prayers were recited or the body was ritually washed, as is usually required by Islamic law. In general, burial at sea means tipping the body overboard -- wrapped, likely, in a shroud -- after a brief service.

Obama said neither Americans nor civilians were harmed in the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Three other adult males were killed— two were bin Laden’s couriers and a third was his adult son — according to a senior administration official. One woman was killed when she was “used as a shield by a male combatant” and two others were injured, the official said. There were also children at the compound. During the raid, which lasted less than 40 minutes, one U.S. helicopter broke down. The crew destroyed the helicopter with explosives, so as not to leave the technology behind, and U.S. forces exited on the remaining aircraft. “All non-combatants were moved safely away from the compound before the detonation” of the helicopter, a U.S. official said. U.S. government facilities around the world were placed on heightened alert after the raid, while the State Department issued a worldwide travel alert warning of “enhanced potential for anti-American violence given recent counter-terrorism activity in Pakistan.” CIA director Leon E. Panetta told his agency that terror groups around the world “almost certainly will attempt to avenge” bin Laden’s death. “We must—and will—remain vigilant and resolute,” Panetta wrote in a congratulatory memo. “But we have struck a heavy blow against the enemy. The only leader they have ever known, whose hateful vision gave rise to their atrocities, is no more. The supposedly uncatchable one has been caught and killed.”

The secret operation that culminated with bin Laden’s death was years in the making. For most of the past decade, bin Laden was thought to be hiding in Pakistan, but American intelligence had lost his trail until picking up fresh intelligence of his possible whereabouts last August. After months of studying intelligence and reviewing operational plans, Obama gave the order on Friday morning for the action that ended in bin Laden’s death. The operation took place in Abbottabad, a city of about 100,000 in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, about 65 miles north of Islamabad. Named for a British military officer who founded it as a military cantonment and summer retreat, it is the headquarters of a brigade of the Pakistan army’s 2nd Division. A Special Operations team conducted the mission based on CIA intelligence, some of which was obtained from detainees in U.S. custody, according to senior U.S. officials who detailed the operation under the condition of anonymity. “We’ve been staring at the compound for months trying to figure out for sure whether we had enough to go with,” one official said. Operatives have “been working this target for years, years, years. They finally found the guy who led to the guy who led to the guy who led to the guy, and this is it.”

Beginning in September, the CIA began to work with Obama on a set of intelligence assessments, which led him to believe that it was possible that bin Laden might be located at the compound. By mid-February, Obama determined that there was a sound intelligence basis for pursuing this theory and developing courses of action in case it proved correct. He held five National Security meetings in the second half of March to discuss potential action. On Friday, shortly before flying to Alabama to visit tornado-ravaged communities, Obama gathered senior officials in the Diplomatic Room. At 8:20 a.m., he made the decision to undertake the operation. National security adviser Thomas E. Donilon prepared the formal orders and convened senior national security officials that afternoon to plan for the operation. The United States did not share any intelligence with foreign governments, including Pakistan’s, and only a “very small number” of people within the U.S. government knew about it, one official said. Throughout the afternoon Sunday, Obama met with senior officials in the Situation Room for briefings on the operation. At 3:50 p.m., Obama learned that bin Laden was tentatively identified, and the president remained “actively involved in all facets of the operation,” a senior administration official said.

The operation hinged almost entirely on the hunt for a single man: a courier working out of Pakistan who had been trusted by bin Laden for years. U.S. analysts and operatives spent years figuring out the courier’s identity, senior administration officials said, concluding that he was a former protege of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The courier “had our constant attention,” one official said. Detainees “identified this man as one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden, [and] indicated he might be living with or protecting bin Laden,” the official said. But until four years ago, the United States was unable to track the courier down or uncover his real name. In 2009, U.S. officials narrowed down the region in Pakistan where the courier was working, senior administration officials said. Then, in August, U.S. officials found the compound that turned out to be bin Laden’s hiding spot. It was described as an extraordinary place, with 12- to 18-foot security walls, multiple interior walls dividing the property and massive privacy walls blocking even a third-story balcony. “When we saw the compound . . . we were shocked by what we saw,” the official told reporters, describing it as “an extraordinarily unique compound,” built perhaps in 2005 and expressly for bin Laden. “Everything we saw . . . was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like.” A senior official said the property, valued at $1 million, had no Internet or phone service. But photos of the property appeared to show a satellite dish at the property — a discrepancy that was not immediately explained.

Bin Laden’s capture offered a sense of closure for families of those lost in the 2001 attacks. Basmattie Bishundat, whose son, Kris Romeo Bishundat, died at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, was glued to her television in the Maryland suburb Waldorf in the early hours of Monday, wishing she could join the revelers at the White House. “I cannot believe it, finally,” Bishundat murmured as she watched the pictures from the White House on CNN. “All kinds of emotions. Finally, a sense of closure. Finally, they’ve got the person who started all of this mess.” With the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaching this year, bin Laden’s assassination could benefit Obama domestically even more than the capture of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein helped propel then-President George W. Bush to reelection in 2004. Obama called Bush and former president Bill Clinton, as well as senior congressional leaders, before announcing bin Laden’s death to the nation.

Although Bush and former officials were quick to declare bin Laden’s killing a victory that transcended party lines, it represented the culmination of the former president’s promise, never fulfilled during his time in office, to capture the al-Qaeda leader “dead or alive.” In a statement, Bush congratulated Obama and the military and intelligence personnel who “devoted their lives to this mission.” “They have our everlasting gratitude,” Bush said. “This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.” Obama announced bin Laden’s death eight years to the day after Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, a war spawned in large part by the Sept. 11 attacks, in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, said in her own statement: “Nothing can bring back bin Laden’s innocent victims, but perhaps this can help salve the wounds of their loved ones.”

Bin Laden, the son of a billionaire Saudi Arabian contractor, was wanted by the United States not only for the Sept. 11 hijackings but also for al-Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, which killed 224 civilians and wounded more than 5,000 people. The U.S. government had offered a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture or death. He was one of a handful of Islamist radicals who in 1988 founded al-Qaeda — which means “the base” in Arabic — to coordinate the efforts of various groups fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda eventually shifted its effort to target another superpower: the United States. A senior administration official said the loss of bin Laden puts al-Qaeda “on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse. As the only al-Qaeda leader whose authority was universally respected, he also maintained his cohesion, and his likely successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is far less charismatic and not as well respected within the organization, according to comments from several captured al-Qaeda leaders,” the official said. “He probably will have difficulty maintaining the loyalty of bin Laden’s largely Gulf Arab followers.” That bin Laden was killed- rather than captured- was a victory itself for U.S. officials, who had dreaded the prospect of a long and complicated legal battle if he was taken into U.S. custody. With the military brig at Guantanamo Bay no longer being used to house new detainees, and with the country paralyzed by the politics of where and how to try other alleged perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, the logistics of trying bin Laden could have turned the capture into a spectacle. Now, although he may become a martyr to his supporters, it will be as an invisible hero. “Every day he was alive was a symbolic victory,” said Dan Byman, director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and professional staff member on the 9/11 Commission. “This is a man we have hunted with different degrees of intensity for more than 10 years. His successful defiance was damaging to the United States.”

Obama’s announcement on Sunday seemed to electrify Washington and indeed the country. Hundreds of people streamed toward the White House with flags, some chanting “USA! USA!” In New York, many more were celebrating at ground zero and in Times Square. Before Obama announced the killing, top administration officials divided up the most senior members of Congress and began making calls in the evening, according to congressional aides in both parties. Vice President Biden contacted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.); Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senior congressional leaders issued statements commending the military for the killing. “Today, the American people have seen justice,” House Homeland Security Chairman Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), whose Long Island district lost many in the 2001 attacks, said in a statement. “In 2001, President Bush said, ‘We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.’ President Bush deserves great credit for putting action behind those words. President Obama deserves equal credit for his resolve in this long war against al-Qaeda.” Kerry urged vigilance, saying: “A single death does not end the threat from al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups. The killing of Osama bin Laden closes an important chapter in our war against extremists who kill innocent people around the world.” Kerry added, “We are a nation of peace and laws, and people everywhere should understand that our 10-year manhunt was in search of justice not revenge. Terrorists everywhere must never doubt that the United States will hunt them down no matter where they are, no matter how long it takes.” Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) told CNN: “We’ve cut the head off of the worm, but they may grow another head.”

Minutes after the news broke on Sunday night, hundreds of people rushed to the White House to celebrate. Many were George Washington University students who were cramming for finals when someone alerted an entire dormitory building after seeing a bulletin on television. “I feel like relief,” said freshman Molly Nostrand, 19, who was a fourth-grader in 2001. “After 10 years, it’s a sense of closure in a way.” Those who arrived early to the impromptu street celebration sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in roars and chanted “USA!” Many brought American flags and some put together signs. “Ding, Dong, Bin Laden is Dead,” one read. One group of waved a “Bush-Cheney 2000” election poster. “I think it’s an accomplishment for the U S of A,” Richard Indoe, 73, a farmer from Ohio said, shortly after filming a few seconds of the revelry using a flip cell phone. “Too bad this didn’t happen during George W. Bush’s time.”



http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/osama-bin-laden-is-killed-by-us-forces-in-pakistan/2011/05/01/AFXMZyVF_story.html

Supreme Court Rules Police May Take DNA From Arrestees

I actually don’t have a problem with the court’s ruling on this.  This is akin to taking fingerprints and photos of people who get arrested.  The only difference is that it creates an easier way to match criminals to a crime scene.  How is that a bad thing?  Plus the DNA samples are only going to be taken if you are arrested for a crime so how many people have to worry about this?  On top of that, the database will only be used to match you to a crime other than the one you were arrested for.  So now how many people will be affected?  Correct- repeat criminal offenders.  I have no interest in letting them go free if I have a way to prevent it.  I really don’t want to be an actual victim because someone objected to DNA collection on theoretical grounds.  Look at the guy who brought this lawsuit to the Supreme Court.  He was a rapist who got away with it and then later committed an assault on someone else.  He tried to get the DNA excluded because he knew it would tie him to the previously unsolved rape.  You want that guy released because of a theoretical argument?  Why not wait until DNA collection and database practices cross the line of reasonability and then bring an appeal in front of the Supreme Court.

  

Supreme Court Upholds Maryland Law; Police May Take DNA Samples From Arrestees

(By Robert Barnes, Washington Post, June 3, 2013)

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that police may take DNA samples as part of a routine arrest booking for serious crimes, narrowly upholding a Maryland law and saying the samples can be considered similar to fingerprints.  “DNA identification represents an important advance in the techniques used by law enforcement to serve legitimate police concerns for as long as there have been arrests,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the 5 to 4 ruling.  The decision overturned a ruling by Maryland’s highest court that the law allows unlawful searches of those arrested to see whether they can be connected to unsolved crimes. The federal government and 28 states, including Maryland, allow taking DNA samples.

The court split in an unusual fashion. The dissenters were three of the court’s liberals, and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who amplified his displeasure by reading a summary of his dissent from the bench.  “The court has cast aside a bedrock rule of our Fourth Amendment law: that the government may not search its citizens for evidence of crime unless there is a reasonable cause to believe that such evidence will be found,” Scalia said from the bench.  He added: “Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”  Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Kennedy wrote that the decision was more limited than that: DNA can be taken from those suspected of “serious” crimes. He said that police have a legitimate interest in identifying the person taken into custody and that the DNA samples could make sure that a dangerous criminal is not released on bail.  “By comparison to this substantial government interest and the unique effectiveness of DNA identification, the intrusion of a cheek swab to obtain a DNA sample is a minimal one,” Kennedy wrote. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. 

The challenge to the Maryland law was brought by Alonzo Jay King Jr., whose DNA was taken after a 2009 arrest for assault and used to connect him to an unsolved rape.  Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) said in a statement: “Today’s Supreme Court ruling is important because it confirms an important weapon in our arsenal to fight violent crime in our state.  DNA collection has been a very effective new tool in our efforts to save lives by reducing violent crime and resolving open investigations.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-upholds-maryland-law-says-police-may-take-dna-samples-from-arrestees/2013/06/03/0b619ade-cc5a-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html?wpisrc=nl_buzz

 

Police Can Collect DNA From Arrestees, Court Says

(By Jesse J. Holland, Associated Press, June 3, 2013)

A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for police to take a DNA swab from anyone they arrest for a serious crime, endorsing a practice now followed by more than half the states as well as the federal government.  The justices differed strikingly on how big a step that was.  ‘‘Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,’’ Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority. The ruling backed a Maryland law allowing DNA swabbing of people arrested for serious crimes.

But the four dissenting justices said the court was allowing a major change in police powers, with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia predicting the limitation to ‘‘serious’’ crimes would not last.  ‘‘Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,’’ Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom. ‘‘This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But so would taking your DNA when you fly on an airplane — surely the TSA must know the ‘identity’ of the flying public. For that matter, so would taking your children’s DNA when they start public school.’’

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler agreed that there’s nothing stopping his state from expanding DNA collection from those arrested for serious crimes to those arrested for lesser ones like shoplifting.  ‘‘I don’t advocate expanding the crimes for which you take DNA, but the legal analysis would be the same,’’ Gansler said. ‘‘The reason why Maryland chooses to only take DNA of violent criminals is that you’re more likely to get a hit on a previous case. Shoplifters don’t leave DNA behind, rapists do, and so you’re much more likely to get the hit in a rape case.’’  Twenty-eight states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests. But a Maryland court said it was illegal for that state to take Alonzo King’s DNA without approval from a judge, ruling that King had ‘‘a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches’’ under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The high court’s decision reverses that ruling and reinstates King’s rape conviction, which came after police took his DNA during an unrelated arrest.  Kennedy, who is often considered the court’s swing vote, wrote the decision along with conservative-leaning Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. They were joined by liberal-leaning Justice Stephen Breyer, while the dissenters were the conservative-leaning Scalia and liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.  Kennedy called collecting DNA useful for police in identifying individuals.  ‘‘The use of DNA for identification is no different than matching an arrestee’s face to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect, or matching tattoos to known gang symbols to reveal a criminal affiliation, or matching the arrestee’s fingerprints to those recovered from a crime scene,’’ Kennedy said. ‘‘DNA is another metric of identification used to connect the arrestee with his or her public persona, as reflected in records of his or her actions that are available to police.’’

But the American Civil Liberties Union said the court’s ruling created ‘‘a gaping new exception to the Fourth Amendment.’’  ‘‘The Fourth Amendment has long been understood to mean that the police cannot search for evidence of a crime — and all nine justices agreed that DNA testing is a search — without individualized suspicion,’’ said Steven R. Shapiro, the group’s legal director. ‘‘Today’s decision eliminates that crucial safeguard. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that other state laws on DNA testing are even broader than Maryland’s and may present issues that were not resolved by today’s ruling.’’  Maryland’s DNA collection law only allows police to take DNA from those arrested for serious offenses such as murder, rape, assault, burglary and other crimes of violence. In his ruling, Kennedy did not say whether the court’s decision was limited to those crimes, but he did note that other states’ DNA collection laws differ from Maryland's.

Scalia saw that as a crucial flaw. ‘‘If you believe that a DNA search will identify someone arrested for bank robbery, you must believe that it will identify someone arrested for running a red light,’’ he said.  Scott Berkowitz, president and founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, cheered the decision and called DNA collection ‘‘a detective’s most valuable tool in solving rape cases.’’  ‘‘We’re very pleased that the court recognized the importance of DNA and decided that, like fingerprints, it can be collected from arrestees without violating any privacy rights,’’ he said. ‘‘Out of every 100 rapes in this country, only three rapists will spend a day behind bars. To make matters worse, rapists tend to be serial criminals, so every one left on the streets is likely to commit still more attacks. DNA is a tool we could not afford to lose.’’

Getting DNA swabs from criminals is common. All 50 states and the federal government take cheek swabs from convicted criminals to check against federal and state databanks, with the court’s blessing. The fight at the Supreme Court was over whether that DNA collection could come before conviction and without a judge issuing a warrant.  According to court documents, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System or CODIS — a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles — already contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested. According to the FBI, the DNA samples from people whose charges have been dismissed, who have been acquitted or against whom no charges have been brought are to be expunged from the federal system. But states and other municipalities that collect DNA make their own rules about what happens to their collections.

In the case before the court, a 53-year-old woman was raped and robbed but no one was arrested. Almost six years later, Alonzo King was arrested and charged with felony second-degree assault in a separate case. Relying on the Maryland law that allows warrantless DNA tests following some felony arrests, police took a cheek swab of King’s DNA, which matched a sample from the 2003 Salisbury rape. King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.  King eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault from his arrest, a crime for which Maryland cannot take warrantless DNA samples. The state court said King’s rights therefore had been violated when the state took his DNA based on that arrest alone.  Maryland stopped collecting DNA after that decision, but Roberts allowed police to keep collecting DNA samples pending the high court’s review.  (The case is Maryland v. King, 12-207.)
___

On The Net:

The FBI’s frequently asked questions about its DNA databases: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/biometric-analysis/codis/codis-and-ndis-fact-sheet

 

 

 

Letter To Emily White At NPR All Songs Considered

(The Trichordist- Artists For An Ethical Internet, David Lowery [of the band Cracker], June 18, 2012)

 Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog (Richard’s note- It’s also included at the end of this post) in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Our intention is not to embarrass or shame her. We believe young people like Emily White who are fully engaged in the music scene are the artist’s biggest allies. We also believe–for reasons we’ll get into–that she has been been badly misinformed by the Free Culture movement. We only ask the opportunity to present a countervailing viewpoint.

Emily:

My intention here is not to shame you or embarrass you. I believe you are already on the side of musicians and artists and you are just grappling with how to do the right thing. I applaud your courage in admitting you do not pay for music, and that you do not want to but you are grappling with the moral implications. I just think that you have been presented with some false choices by what sounds a lot like what we hear from the “Free Culture” adherents.

I must disagree with the underlying premise of what you have written. Fairly compensating musicians is not a problem that is up to governments and large corporations to solve. It is not up to them to make it “convenient” so you don’t behave unethically. (Besides–is it really that inconvenient to download a song from iTunes into your iPhone? Is it that hard to type in your password? I think millions would disagree.)

Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.

I’ve been teaching college students about the economics of the music business at the University of Georgia for the last two years. Unfortunately for artists, most of them share your attitude about purchasing music. There is a disconnect between their personal behavior and a greater social injustice that is occurring. You seem to have internalized that ripping 11,000 tracks in your iPod compared to your purchase of 15 CDs in your lifetime feels pretty disproportionate. You also seem to recognize that you are not just ripping off the record labels but you are directly ripping off the artist and songwriters whose music you “don’t buy”. It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t take these tracks from a file-sharing site. That may seem like a neat dodge, but I’d suggest to you that from the artist’s point of view, it’s kind of irrelevant.

Now, my students typically justify their own disproportionate choices in one of two ways. I’m not trying to set up a “strawman”, but I do have a lot of anecdotal experience with this.  “It’s OK not to pay for music because record companies rip off artists and do not pay artists anything.” In the vast majority of cases, this is not true. There have been some highly publicized abuses by record labels. But most record contracts specify royalties and advances to artists. Advances are important to understand–a prepayment of unearned royalties. Not a debt, more like a bet. The artist only has to “repay” (or “recoup”) the advance from record sales. If there are no or insufficient record sales, the advance is written off by the record company. So it’s false to say that record companies don’t pay artists. Most of the time they not only pay artists, but they make bets on artists. And it should go without saying that the bets will get smaller and fewer the more unrecouped advances are paid by labels.

Secondly, by law the record label must pay songwriters (who may also be artists) something called a “mechanical royalty” for sales of CDs or downloads of the song. This is paid regardless of whether a record is recouped or not. The rate is predetermined, and the license is compulsory. Meaning that the file sharing sites could get the same license if they wanted to, at least for the songs. They don’t. They don’t wanna pay artists.

Also, you must consider the fact that the vast majority of artists are releasing albums independently and there is not a “real” record company. Usually just an imprint owned by the artist. In the vast majority of cases you are taking money directly from the artist. How does one know which labels are artist owned? It’s not always clear. But even in the case of corporate record labels, shouldn’t they be rewarded for the bets they make that provides you with recordings you enjoy? It’s not like the money goes into a giant bonfire in the middle of the woods while satanic priests conduct black masses and animal sacrifices. Usually some of that money flows back to artists, engineers and people like you who graduate from college and get jobs in the industry. And record labels also give your college radio stations all those CDs you play.

Artists can make money on the road (or its variant “Artists are rich”). The average income of a musician that files taxes is something like 35k a year w/o benefits. The vast majority of artists do not make significant money on the road. Until recently, most touring activity was a money losing operation. The idea was the artists would make up the loss through recorded music sales. This has been reversed by the financial logic of file-sharing and streaming. You now tour to support making albums if you are very, very lucky. Otherwise, you pay for making albums out of your own pocket. Only the very top tier of musicians make ANY money on the road. And only the 1% of the 1% makes significant money on the road. (For now.)

Over the last 12 years I’ve watched revenue flowing to artists collapse.

Recorded music revenue is down 64% since 1999.

Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!

The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.

Of the 75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies. Without going into details, 10,000 albums is about the point where independent artists begin to go into the black on professional album production, marketing and promotion.

On a personal level, I have witnessed the impoverishment of many critically acclaimed but marginally commercial artists. In particular, two dear friends: Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) and Vic Chestnutt. Both of these artists, despite growing global popularity, saw their incomes collapse in the last decade. There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists.

Shortly before Christmas 2009, Vic took his life. He was my neighbor, and I was there as they put him in the ambulance. On March 6th, 2010, Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart. Anybody who knew either of these musicians will tell you that the pair suffered from addiction and depression. They will also tell you their situation was worsened by their financial situation. Vic was deeply in debt to hospitals and, at the time, was publicly complaining about losing his home. Mark was living in abject squalor in his remote studio in the Smokey Mountains without adequate access to the mental health care he so desperately needed.

I present these two stories to you not because I’m pointing fingers or want to shame you. I just want to illustrate that “small” personal decisions have very real consequences, particularly when millions of people make the decision not to compensate artists they supposedly “love”. And it is up to us individually to examine the consequences of our actions. It is not up to governments or corporations to make us choose to behave ethically. We have to do that ourselves.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now, having said all that, I also deeply empathize with your generation. You have grown up in a time when technological and commercial interests are attempting to change our principles and morality. Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. Although it is the premise of every “machines gone wild” story since Jules Verne or Fritz Lang, this is exactly backwards. Sadly, I see the effects of this thinking with many of my students.

These technological and commercial interests have largely exerted this pressure through the Free Culture movement, which is funded by a handful of large tech corporations and their foundations in the US, Canada, Europe and other countries.* Your letter clearly shows that you sense that something is deeply wrong, but you don’t put your finger on it. I want to commend you for doing this. I also want to enlist you in the fight to correct this outrage. Let me try to show you exactly what is wrong. What it is you can’t put your finger on.

The fundamental shift in principals and morality is about who gets to control and exploit the work of an artist. The accepted norm for hundreds of years of western civilization is the artist exclusively has the right to exploit and control his/her work for a period of time. (Since the works that are almost invariably the subject of these discussions are popular culture of one type or another, the duration of the copyright term is pretty much irrelevant for an ethical discussion.) By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work. This system has worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally. We are being asked to continue to let these companies violate the law without being punished or prosecuted. We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.

Who are these companies? They are sites like The Pirate Bay, or Kim Dotcom and Megaupload. They are “legitimate” companies like Google that serve ads to these sites through AdChoices and Doubleclick. They are companies like Grooveshark that operate streaming sites without permission from artists and over the objections of the artist, much less payment of royalties lawfully set by the artist. They are the venture capitalists that raise money for these sites. They are the hardware makers that sell racks of servers to these companies. And so on and so on.

What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting. Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it. And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?

But it’s worse than that. It turns out that Verizon, AT&T, Charter etc etc are charging a toll to get into this neighborhood to get the free stuff. Further, companies like Google are selling maps (search results) that tell you where the stuff is that you want to loot. Companies like Megavideo are charging for a high speed looting service (premium accounts for faster downloads). Google is also selling ads in this neighborhood and sharing the revenue with everyone except the people who make the stuff being looted. Further, in order to loot you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400 Samsumg tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music. (Like most claimed “disruptive innovations”it turns out expensive subsidies exist elsewhere.) Companies are actually making money from this looting activity. These companies only make money if you change your principles and morality! And none of that money goes to the artists!

And believe it or not this is where the problem with Spotify starts. The internet is full of stories from artists detailing just how little they receive from Spotify. I shan’t repeat them here. They are epic. Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. The reason they can get away with paying so little to artists is because the alternative is The ‘Net where people have already purchased all the gear they need to loot those songs for free. Now while something like Spotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now. As long as the consumer makes the unethical choice to support the looters, Spotify will not have to compensate artists fairly. There is simply no market pressure. Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.

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So let’s go back and look at what it would have cost you to ethically and legally support the artists.

And I’m gonna give you a break. I’m not gonna even factor in the record company share. Let’s just pretend for your sake the record company isn’t simply the artist’s imprint and all record labels are evil and don’t deserve any money. Let’s just make the calculation based on exactly what the artist should make. First, the mechanical royalty to the songwriters. This is generally the artist. The royalty that is supposed to be paid by law is 9.1 cents a song for every download or copy. So that is $1,001 for all 11,000 of your songs. Now let’s suppose the artist has an average 15% royalty rate. This is calculated at wholesale value. Trust me, but this comes to 10.35 cents a song or $1,138.50. So to ethically and morally “get right” with the artists you would need to pay $2,139.50.

As a college student I’m sure this seems like a staggering sum of money. And in a way, it is. At least until you consider that you probably accumulated all these songs over a period of 10 years (5th grade). Sot that’s $17.82 dollars a month. Considering you are in your prime music buying years, you admit your life is “music centric” and you are a DJ, that $18 dollars a month sounds like a bargain. Certainly much much less than what I spent each month on music during the 4 years I was a college radio DJ.

Let’s look at other things you (or your parents) might pay for each month and compare.

Smart phone with data plan: $40-100 a month.

High speed internet access: $30-60 dollars a month. Wait, but you use the university network? Well, buried in your student fees or tuition you are being charged a fee on the upper end of that scale.

Tuition at American University, Washington DC (excluding fees, room and board and books): $2,086 a month.

Car insurance or Metro card? $100 a month?

Or simply look at the value of the web appliances you use to enjoy music:

$2,139.50 = 1 smart phone + 1 full size ipod + 1 macbook.

Why do you pay real money for this other stuff but not music?

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The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?
This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:

Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! Have some money!

Hardware: Giant mega corporations. Cool! Have some money!

Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class. Screw you, you greedy bastards!

Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!

I am genuinely stunned by this. Since you appear to love first generation Indie Rock, and as a founding member of a first generation Indie Rock band I am now legally obligated to issue this order: kids, lawn, vacate.

You are doing it wrong.

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Emily, I know you are not exactly saying what I’ve illustrated above. You’ve unfortunately stumbled into the middle of a giant philosophical fight between artists and powerful commercial interests. To your benefit, it is clear you are trying to answer those existential questions posed to your generation. And in your heart, you grasp the contradiction. But I have to take issue with the following statement:

As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and t-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.

I’m sorry, but what is inconvenient about iTunes and, say, iTunes match (that lets you stream all your music to all your devices) aside from having to pay? Same with Pandora premium, MOG and a host of other legitimate services. I can’t imagine that any other legal music service that is gonna be simpler than these to use. Isn’t convenience already here!

Ultimately there are three “inconvenient” things that MUST happen for any legal service:

1.create an account and provide a payment method (once)

2.enter your password.

3. Pay for music.

So what you are really saying is that you won’t do these three things. This is too inconvenient. And I would guess that the most inconvenient part is….step 3.

That’s fine. But then you must live with the moral and ethical choice that you are making to not pay artists. And artists won’t be paid. And it won’t be the fault of some far away evil corporation. You “and your peers” ultimately bear this responsibility.

You may also find that this ultimately hinders your hopes of finding a job in the music industry. Unless you’re planning on working for free. Or unless you think Google is in the music industry–which it is not.

I also find all this sort of sad. Many in your generation are willing to pay a little extra to buy “fair trade” coffee that insures the workers that harvested the coffee were paid fairly. Many in your generation will pay a little more to buy clothing and shoes from manufacturers that certify they don’t use sweatshops. Many in your generation pressured Apple to examine working conditions at Foxconn in China. Your generation is largely responsible for the recent cultural changes that has given more equality to same sex couples. On nearly every count your generation is much more ethical and fair than my generation. Except for one thing. Artist rights.

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At the start of this I did say that I hoped to convert you to actively helping musicians and artists. That ultimately someone like you, someone so passionately involved in music is the best ally that musicians could have. Let me humbly suggest a few things:

First, you could legally buy music from artists. The best way to insure the money goes to artists? Buy it directly from their website or at their live shows. But if you can’t do that, there is a wide range of services and sites that will allow you to do this conveniently. Encourage your “peers” to also do this.

Second, actively “call out” those that profit by exploiting artists without compensation. File sharing sites are supported by corporate web advertising. Call corporations out by giving specific examples. For instance, say your favorite artist is Yo La Tengo. If you search at Google “free mp3 download Yo La Tengo” you will come up with various sites that offer illegal downloads of Yo La Tengo songs. I clicked on a link to the site www.beemp3.com where I found You La Tengo’s entire masterpiece album I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

I also found an ad for Geico Insurance which appeared to have been serviced to the site by “Ads by Google”. You won’t get any response by writing a file sharing site. They already know what they are doing is wrong. However Geico might be interested in this. And technically, Google’s policy is to not support piracy sites, however it seems to be rarely enforced. The best way to write any large corporation is to search for the “investor’s relations” page. For some reason there is always a human being on the other end of that contact form. You could also write your Congressman and Senator and suggest they come up with some way to divert the flow of advertising money back to the artists.

And on that matter of the $2,139.50 you owe to artists? Why not donate something to a charity that helps artists. Consider this your penance. In fact I’ll make a deal with you. For every dollar you personally donate I’ll match it up to $500. Here are some suggestions.

Sweet Relief. This organization helps musicians with medical costs. Vic Chestnutt, who I mentioned earlier, was helped by this organization. I contributed a track to the Album Sweet Relief II:Gravity of the situation. www.sweetrelief.org

Music Cares. You can also donate to this charity run by the NARAS (the Grammys). http://www.grammy.org/musicares/donate

American Heart Association Memorial Donation. Or since you loved Big Star and Alex Chilton, why not make a donation to The American Heart Association in Alex Chilton’s name? (Alex died of a heart attack) https://donate.americanheart.org/ecommerce/donation/acknowledgement_info.jsp?campaignId=&site=Heart&itemId=prod20007

I’m open to suggestions on this.  I sincerely wish you luck in your career in the music business and hope this has been enlightening in some small way.

David Lowery

Article: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

  

I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With

(By Emily White, NPR- All Things Considered blog, June 16, 2012)

A few days before my internship at All Songs Considered started, Bob Boilen posted an article titled "I Just Deleted All My Music" on this blog. The post is about entrusting his huge personal music library to the cloud. Though this seemed like a bold step to many people who responded to the article, to me, it didn't seem so bold at all.  I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I'm almost 21 and since I first began to love music I've been spoiled by the Internet.  I am an avid music-listener, concert-goer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I've only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.  I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, I've never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I've never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and t-shirts.

But I didn't illegally download (most) of my songs. A few are, admittedly, from a stint in the 5th grade with the file-sharing program Kazaa. Some are from my family. I've swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo (I owe him one).  During my first semester at college, my music library more then tripled. I spent hours sitting on the floor of my college radio station, ripping music onto my laptop. The walls were lined with hundreds of albums sent by promo companies and labels to our station over the years.

All of those CDs are gone. My station's library is completely digital now and so is my listening experience.  If my laptop died and my hard-drive disappeared tomorrow, I would certainly mourn the loss of my 100+ playlists, particularly the archives of all my college radio shows. But I'd also be able to re-build my "library" fairly easily. If I wanted to listen to something I didn't already have in my patchwork collection, I could stream it on Spotify.  As I've grown up, I've come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can't support them with concert tickets and t-shirts alone. But I honestly don't think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience. 

What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?

Emily White is this summer's All Songs Considered intern. She is a senior at American University in Washington D.C. and the General Manager of WVAU.