Re: <nettime> Ten Theses on the Panama Papers

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 5 Apr 2016, at 9:17, Patrice Riemens wrote:

> 7. Leaks have become unquestionable.
>
> With earlier disclosures, the authenticity of documents leaked could
> always be credibly disputed. Nowadays the authenticity of materials
> obtained thru electronic leaks, due to its sheer magnitude and the one
> to one nature of a digital reproduction, is much more difficult to
> question.
For now, maybe, but that won't last long. On the contrary, I think 
they'll quickly become *precisely* questionable, plagued with questions 
about agendas within agendas, the provenance and 'curation' of 
documents, and so on. It may sound strange to use language associated 
with connoisseurship in this context, but it isn't; on the contrary, 
this increasingly leaky world will be defined more and more deeply in 
aesthetic ways -- because leaks involve *media*.
I'll start with one example, an argument I first heard Florian Schneider 
make, although aspects of it connect to a wider range of work -- for 
example, Eyal Weizman's forensis initiative and Rabih Mroue's 
meditations on visuality of confrontation. The basic idea involves a 
drastic change in the aesthetics of 'authority.' High resolution, 
precision, stability, and controlled framing used to be the dominant 
meta qualities of visual 'truths,' but they've given way to a 
counter-aesthetic: pixelated, chaotic, fragmentary, indeterminate. The 
more fucked-up a video, the more authentic it seems; and, conversely, 
the more 'produced' a video, the more artificial it seems. This isn't 
entirely new (but nothing ever is entirely new):  we can find 
prehistories in the enigmatic blurring in photos of disappeared 
kommissars, the umpteenth-generation photocopies that of cultural arcana 
that circulated with punk and experimental music, older films like 
Coppola's _The Conversation_ and Antonioni's _Blow-up_, and newer ones 
like _The Blair Witch Project_. But some of it is new: the way that 
blocky pixelation and portrait framing suggest a phone camera and 
precious video uploaded against al odds, buffers of audio without video, 
the sounds of hardware being jostled and scraped. But those very 
qualities are easy -- maybe the easiest -- to forge.
The other extreme is a very different aesthetic, but one that will be 
much harder to identify as such because it'll be scattered across 
seemingly disparate artifacts in many media -- 'declassified' documents 
with their distinctive blackouts, phone-size screenshots of text 
messages and supposed deleted social-media profiles and posts, and soon 
enough voice and video recordings. Again, these techniques have lots of 
precedents, real and imaginary -- in books  (say, novels by people like 
Le Carre but going back to volume 2 of _Don Quixote_), in film (F for 
Fake, The Prisoner, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Truman 
Show). But these won't just be forged documents or even dossiers, 
they'll be 'distributed' in ways that are really boggling. Many of the 
constituent technics needed t generate and drive projects like this are 
already commodified: botnets and troll armies planting Markov-generated 
noise, hardware and networks subverted to perform ever-more subtle 
man-in-the-middle and replay attacks, and digital signal processing 
technologies (the most recent that I've seen involves real-time facial 
motion capture mapped onto archival video -- i.e., using a live actor to 
control 'old' footage). The pieces of this puzzle have been coming 
together for decades: transmedia 419 scams, social engineering > 
phishing > catfishing and spearphishing, 'overidentification' activist 
projects like the Yes Men. Call it 'just-in-time conspiratorialism.'
But beneath all that detail, my point is simple: leaks will be precisely 
questionable -- and much of the questioning will shift from away from 
the supposed substance (who? what? when? where? etc) and toward a sort 
of forensic appreciation.  and the scale of material won't be a bug, 
it'll be a feature.
On 5 Apr 2016, at 14:42, Florian Cramer forwarded:

>    Panama Papers â not the Scoop but the Flop of the CenturyÂ
Florian, I'm pretty confident that Jens Berger's eruption won't age hold 
up very well, and I really wonder why you bothered to forward such a 
load of bollocks. And to follow that up with intimations that most of 
the major foundations are behind the fact that no US citizens have been 
named in the first 36 hours? I'm under no illusions about the many roles 
that the upper echelons of US civil society have played in shaping (some 
would say distorting) the world for decades, but Berger's tantrum and 
your follow-up would be very much at home on Fox News.
And...

On 5 Apr 2016, at 19:11, morlockelloi@yahoo.com wrote:

> Maybe I'm missing something, but the mere notion that something that 
> 3-400 people have access to (more likely thousands, with associates, 
> managers, etc.) is a tight secret is ... mind boggling. And then when 
> the logistics of distributing all these terabytes to hundreds of 
> recipients, months ago, without a single accident, is considered, this 
> becomes a virtually impossible proposition.
Yes, there's more to this than meets the eye. We're starting to see much 
more collaboration and co-sponsorship between media outlets, but it's 
still very new and tricky terrain: deep and in some cases irreconcilable 
cultural divides separate the cultures of 'magazines,' 'newspapers,' and 
'books.' Just one example: James Risen's conflicts with the NYT over his 
work on warrantless wiretapping and what became his (excellent) book 
_Pay Any Price_. But if we add to that even greater differences -- say, 
different national norms in whether or how newspapers cooperate with the 
state -- it's inconceivable that there wasn't a growing buzz about this 
yearlong development. Oh, and the investigative journalist Ken 
Silverstein published a piece about Mossack Fonseca in late 2014, which 
I'd guess he'd been working on for several months:
	https://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12

Maybe it's just a coincidence that he was nosing around the same law 
firm in the months before this leak sprang, or maybe his works suggests 
a bit of backstory, I don't know. But the way the _Sueddeutsche Zeitung_ 
tells the story is a bit too beep-beep Matrix-y for my taste:
	"Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data?"
	"We're very interested."
	"There are a couple of conditions. My life is in danger..."

I suppose that conversation must have really taken place because 
falsifying something so basic for no good reason would (or at least 
should) violate the most basic tenets of journalism. But, that said, if 
this is how it works, we're in for a golden age of trolling.
> On top of this, it appears that each entity got a custom subset - a 
> major editing task.
> And none of these thousands - not a single one - sent a copy to 
> Wikileaks? Give me a break.
> What we have here is a totally unrealistic interpretation of the 
> reality. But then it was only a matter of time when the 'anonymous 
> leaks' strategy will get weaponized and incorporated into media 
> business model.
See above.

Cheers,
Ted

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