Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Useful Idiots

Episode Date: December 12, 2016

Your host discovers you can’t beat the Russians at the fake game and ToE’s Chris reviews Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden. Plus: Vladislav Surkov and the Potemkin Panopticon.  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Useful Idiots. So, one of the things that I've been really wondering about since the election is what is going to happen to Edward Snowden now that Trump is president. Did you see Snowden? The Oliver Stone movie? Yeah, I saw it on the plane, actually. You know, you don't have to be embarrassed. I saw it, too.

Oliver Stone is, you know, as American as apple pie. I'm serious. I saw it on the plane. Well, if you really paid attention to the movie on the plane, then you would know what's going to happen to Snowden now that Trump's president. How? Do you remember the scene where the guy playing Glenn Greenwald? You mean Spock? Clearly, he upsets and unsettles Snowden when they're in the hotel room in Hong Kong

and he's yelling at his editor on Skype, right? So you see Snowden at that point look at one of the memory cards in his hand, but it's not the one he ends up giving to Glenn Greenwald and the other journalists, right? He changes his mind. Like he thought Greenwald was just too crazy. Yeah.

He kept some of the information. It's sort of like an insurance policy. And I don't think even Trump's going to mess with him. So you're talking stuff worse than PRISM? It's definitely stuff we don't want out there. And this is yet another reason why it was

such a big win for the intelligence community when Snowden went public. Thanks to Snowden, the American people have been focused on data collection and cameras instead of, well,

the really bad stuff. Hold on, though, because the way you're putting it, it's like Snowden's a stooge. Well, do you know the term useful idiot? No. Well, Snowden is a useful idiot. In fact, he's probably one of the most successful useful idiots the American IC has ever activated. What's the difference, though, between a useful idiot and a regular intelligence asset? Okay, good question.

There's a scene in the movie that takes place when Snowden is working for the CIA in Geneva. Right? working for the CIA in Geneva. We see Snowden's CIA contact. He was the Timothy Oliphant character. He sets up this poor slob of a banker in order to turn him into an intelligence asset. Because it's inferred that the bank he works at does a lot of business with the Saudis. So we see Snowden and the CIA dude

set the banker up for a drunk driving arrest. And then the CIA agent tells Snowden that in the morning, they're going to pressure Mr. Banker to sign up and become an informant, a CIA asset. So a useful idiot is an asset you don't need to pressure. You don't even have to sign them up. They'll do your bidding because, well, they usually have a strong religious or ideological conviction like Snowden did. Or they work in the press. Journalists.

Oh, yeah. You lift the rock on any disinformation or misinformation operation, and you will find a useful idiot journalist scurrying around. Explain how this works, then. Like, compare to that scene in

Geneva. Okay, for example, a lot of folks who wanted to get Trump elected knew that it was crucial to keep the majority of the American people from taking him seriously. So you're saying that all of the fake news we saw over the past year was fed to journalists? Well, yes and no. The objective was news suppression, not fake news. It's just like I said, journalists make for great, useful idiots. So they ran around chasing these stories and weren't paying attention to other things that

were more important. Oh, that reminds me. One of the things you told me last summer was Trump's plan to deal with ISIS, which involved cage matches and reality television in Dabiq. Is that actually going to happen now? Are you serious? No. Of course not.

Why not? Well, let's just say folks are pivoting right now. You can't tell me anything? Hmm. A guy I shared an Uber with last week in Vegas told me the project's code name. Okay.

Droning for dollars. Okay. okay back to snowden how is he a useful idiot well here is where the movie is super helpful because oliver stone does his oliver stone thing and really breaks it down in the movie snowden is a true believer. He's super smart and super patriotic. Okay, the dude just loves America, and like many American-loving patriots, he feels a sense of duty post-9-11. He's not really an everyman character, but he's definitely an everybro character.

Okay, but how does that make him a useful idiot? Why does Snowden reveal the NSA's surveillance operations to the world? In the movie? In the movie and in real life. Because it goes against what he believes in. It goes against the Constitution. The government should not be spying on innocent Americans 24-7. Yes.

For Snowden, our stand-up every bro, the NSA is breaking the law and betraying the Constitution. Because... Spying. and betraying the Constitution because it's fine. But what if Snowden was groomed to reveal the NSA's surveillance programs to the world?

Why the hell would the NSA want that? So many reasons. On a simple technical level it's really hard to monitor all these digital information platforms it's a lot easier to just focus resources on encrypted communication instead of everything that's out there that's unencrypted. And if you believe the government has the capability to spy on everything you put into

Gmail or Facebook messages, if you believe you really do have something to hide, then you will change your habits. You'll sign up for something like Tor, which is a program the NSA actually had a hand in developing. And I don't know if you caught this, but the TOR sticker on Snowden's

laptop in the movie was like five times bigger than the one he had on his laptop in real life. But to be honest, all that technical mumbo-jumbo only complicates things further. What's going on here is really simple. It's behavioral modification. I'm really confused. When people believe that they're being watched, they act differently. This is why, at the heart of every authoritarian regime, you find the spooks. So, I know you like The Handmaid's Tale, right? Your favorite book.

The bad guys are called the eyes. But if the citizens aren't aware of the eyes, or the cameras, then you get no behavioral modification. Thanks to Snowden, everyone is aware of the cameras. So you're saying the NSA wanted this story to get out there in the world. Yeah. Even Oliver Stone makes this clear. All those folks cheering him on, the stupid Nicolas Cage character, the guy he works with that helps Snowden hide his memory card when it falls on the floor.

Even his boss, who tells him that he doesn't have to worry whether his girlfriend is sleeping with the photographer, but that lets him know that even he is being spied on in his own home. All of these folks were part of the mission. All of these folks were there to help Snowden stand up for his beliefs and convictions. Because we had our protests in Moscow in 2011 and 2012, and everybody knew that Facebook as a platform helped a big deal to protest us, to mobilize and to spread information about what was going on.

Well, we all understood that actually, Snowden's revelations might be used by the Kremlin to justify his big offensive on global platforms. Andrei Soldatov is a Russian journalist who covers Internet and security issues. So he understood right away that Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's surveillance programs

would lead to serious consequences for his country. Because American platforms like Facebook and Twitter provided anti-Putin groups communication and networking tools that were safe from the prying eyes of Russian security services, the FSB. And actually that was what happened. Immediately top level officials started proposing new ideas of legislation. We need to force these global platforms to move their service in Russia, but he was going to be living in your town, Moscow?

Well, I had some confusing feelings, mostly because of the way he dealt with the press. I mean, when he had his so-called press conference, that was one of the most craziest press conferences in the world, maybe, because there was no press actually invited. Yeah, for a Russian journalist based in Moscow, it was absolutely, absolutely crazy. As I said, Andrei Soldatov is a journalist who covers internet technology in Russia. So he knows how hard it is to find someone on the inside,

someone who will talk about secret government programs. Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, total hero for Andrei. In practical terms, if you write about the secret services, of course, whistleblower is a gift. for Andre? In practical terms, if you write about the secret services, of course, well, wisdom law is a gift. It's a formidable thing because you can get a guy from inside

who is willing to talk to you for some idealistic reasons, which is a great thing. And you can finally get somewhere through and you can understand what's going on. Obviously, Andrei Solotov tried to get an interview with Edward Snowden. But Snowden said no. He won't meet with Andrei or any Russian journalist who writes about internet surveillance. So Andrei has had to stand by and watch as Snowden, his hero,

has met with one international journalist after another. It's brutal. I never expected him to say to fight for our internet freedoms in the country. But the problem was that Snowden decided quite deliberately

not to comment on how his revelations are used by the Kremlin. He never said, look, when I leaked all this information about NSA, I didn't want this information to be used by authoritarian countries to justify their repressive legislation. And it's, well, we expected him and we wanted him to say something like that. And he never never he never did it it makes me crazy when you talk to european journalists or some people from the left in the united states they seem to be ready to accept this idea look andre you need to understand he's

in difficult situation of course he needs to cooperate with local authorities because otherwise he might be expelled. What do you ask him to do? It's absolutely... Well, so it seems like this theory is kind of a very accepted thing. And I do not understand why. Andrei Soldatov recently co-authored a book about the Internet in Russia with another journalist, Irina Borogon. It's called The Red Web. You can get an English translation from Public Affairs.

We'll be right back after this short break. Edward Snowden is an American hero, and I happen to follow him on Twitter. So when I saw on November 2, 2015, that he was tweeting about Signal, I knew I had to follow him on Twitter. So when I saw on November 2nd, 2015, that he was tweeting about Signal, I knew I had to get in on that. He said that he uses Signal every day. And now, I do too. The Theory of Everything would like to thank Whisper Technologies. Now that Trump is president, it's time to take your internet privacy seriously. One of the easiest tools you can use is Signal, an encrypted chat app that has some real firepower behind it.

In fact, the U.S. government funded Signal to help activists fight for freedom in countries like Ukraine and Egypt, countries that lack basic internet protections. I know that sounds counterintuitive. How can you use a tool made by the very government you want to keep from spying on you? But trust me, according to all of my friends, Signal is the app you need. I don't have anything to hide, but I still use Signal. It doesn't protect you from metadata association, but that shouldn't stop people because as I learned from Edward Snowden, who uses it too, Signal will still protect your content. that I was investigating the Russia connection for my series on surveillance, he told me that

there's one guy who sits at the center of the entire web, a guy named Vladislav Surkov. So Vladislav Surkov is Putin's master of political dark arts and subterfuge. He is the great, great puppet master of modern Russia. If you want to understand what's happening in Russia, if you want to know about Putin, and you want to understand how Kremlin propaganda works, then you have to know about Surkov. I mean, his job for most of the past 15 years has been to sell Putin to the Russian public, and in a way, Putinism to the world. So to give you a little background on this guy, Benjamin, Surkov is the Kremlin aide that came up with the idea of what's called sovereign or managed democracy. So, you know, what is that,

right? It's this kind of imitation of all the aspects of democracy without any of the real meaning behind it. It's all artifice. So for example, you might have free elections, but only a certain candidate or certain parties are allowed to win. You might have, say, courts that are nominally independent, but in fact, the verdicts are never in question. Or you might have a press that's nominally free, but it basically publishes what the state tells them to. And even those who don't, who really are independent, their influence and audience is constantly kept in check. They're managed from above. So you have all the trappings of democratic institutions, but you have none of the intent of them. Thanks to Surkov, you're saying everything in Russia is fake, not just the news. Well,

it is in a way. But Surkov's way of doing this was really ingenious. He creates the impression of competition and choice and struggle while stage managing the end results. And he does this basically by running Russia like it's one big theatrical performance or play, you know? So he creates plot lines for drama, but as the author, he basically knows the way the story ends. And he does this by being omnipresent. He might, for example, back a pro-Kremlin party and an anti-Kremlin party at the same time. He might spin out narratives in the press, some of them true, some of them false. He might pick up the phone and tell lawmakers to simulate debate in the Duma, for example, or, for example, sponsor some exhibit by some anti-Kremlin, controversial artists. So all of this was just to kind of create this hive of activity that was distracting and would give you the sense of a free and open society, when in fact, it's nothing of the sort, because the end result was always predetermined.

As you're, you know, obviously aware, a lot of folks here in America are having a hard time parsing what exactly Russia is up to with all the hacking and online disinformation. Is it fair to say that whatever is going on, though, that Surkov is the guy in charge? Well, you know, it's debated. I mean, in a way, you could say that he lost a bit of influence. He was an untouchable. He was definitely a member of the inner circle, and he was someone operating in the shadows. He was considered kind of the gray cardinal under Putin, and even under Medvedev, if you remember that whole story where Putin steps aside for four years. He has this guy who's even shorter take over the presidency. But there's a-

He was the Twitter president. Yeah, that's right. That's the sort of the tech president of Russia for four years. And so Medvedev was up for reelection, and it was a question of whether he was going to stay or whether he was going to go. And so Kov made the argument, and this was a rare thing where he kind of overstepped his bounds or he made sort of the wrong choice. But he pushed for Medvedev to stay. And really, Medvedev was always a puppet for Putin. So Putin comes back. Putin overrules. He says, I want to come back to the presidency. And Surkov, this kind of punishment, is cast out. And he was given a new job, which was he was in charge of Russia's policies in Ukraine.

No one really gets sent to Siberia anymore. Well, some of them do, Benjamin, but not Surkov. But it was a big demotion, I have to say. This guy, you know, he starts at this new job really with the goal of redeeming himself because he was cast out. And I think a lot of what's happened since is him working his way back to the center of power. Think about what's happened in Ukraine over the past few years. You've had the annexation of Crimea. You've had the war in eastern Ukraine and the Donbass. And essentially, Sirkov played

kind of a role behind the scenes here, where he was applying all the same tactics he used to manage democracy, all this kind of subterfuge. And he was using it on behalf of the Kremlin to essentially thwart Ukraine's drift towards Europe and away from Moscow's orbit. So he's already funding different parties. He's already working with different forces. And he's definitely more out of the shadows now, it has to be said, because this is a guy who's been personally sanctioned now by the US and the EU over what he did in Ukraine. Yeah, I've always wondered what it means when you get personally sanctioned. Well, it means he can't travel. That's one. He's been blacklisted from going to the US. He's been blacklisted from going to Europe. But here's the thing. His response to this sanctioning was it was

kind of a badge of honor. He said it was like getting an Oscar for best supporting actor. And in a way, this is so Sarkov. He says he's always borrowed from all these different cultural influences. He's a little bit rock and roll. He's a little bit art. He's a little bit politics. And so this guy says, the only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, which he knows fluently and can speak, and he apparently can quote fluently his poems, and Jackson Pollock.

He says, I don't need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing from these sanctions. But, you know, here's where it gets weird, because I know a reporter who says he knows a guy who was there when Sirkov made this statement. And Sirkov also mentioned another American icon he didn't need a visa to access. who says he knows a guy who was there when Surkov made this statement. And Surkov also mentioned another American icon he didn't need a visa to access, Donald Trump. Ah, so Trump's biggest fan in Russia is not Putin, it's Surkov. There is some evidence.

Surkov wrote this novel, Okonulya, Gangsta Fiction. Almost zero, Gangsta Fiction is the translation. And what people say he wrote it. He used a pen name. So the credited author of this book is Natan Dubavitsky. But Sirkov's wife is Natalia Dubavitskaya. And so a lot of people think this is Sirkov. And it's also clear that the person who wrote Okula Nulla is a serious fan of Donald Trump's.

How so? Well, the whole plot of Almost Zero is this PR guy's rise to fame and fortune. The main hero of the novel is this guy, Yegor Samokhodov, a book publisher who sidelines as a political operative. He falls in with the criminal gang. And then he's constantly working behind the scenes in the world of politics, media, police, business, and basically bribing everybody. You know, essentially, he's this genius master manipulator. He can see everything that nobody else can. But, you know, there are all these kind of Trumpian moments in it and these Trumpian phrases that are just so clear to me anyway. One of the things this PR guy is constantly running off about

is the idea of or truthful hyperbole. This is straight out of Art of the Deal. Yeah, even I know that one. Yeah, yeah, the Trump line is I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.

That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. So does this guy get all of his ideas from, you know, like the art world, like the guy in the novel? Oh, yeah. So the world of literature, art, music is where Surkov grabs all of his ideas. In fact, some speculate his political career really started with a musical discovery he found at a local black market in Russia.

What was that? with a musical discovery he found at a local black market in Russia. What was that? A VHS cassette of Pink Floyd live at Pompeii. The one where they play the Roman Ampla Theater? Yeah, yeah, from 1974, right? So Pink Floyd was huge in the Soviet underground, and Surkov was like a lot of kids from the former Soviet Union. You know, he was a huge fan. And I mention this because the theory is

that Surkov starts this lifelong fascination with three things. Architecture, for one. You know, there's something about the amphitheater, this circle as the kind of the ideal construction for performance. And there's something about the way that the camera pans around Gilmore and Waters

and the rest of the Floyd, that, you know, it's clear that they can see everything. And the other thing that he notices from this is the Floyd obsession with optical illusions, the laser light shows and everything like that. So that becomes another really huge influence on Surkov. But you said there were three things. Well, yeah, there's a third one, which is that people will pay a lot to see a good fucking jam.

Charles, what does this have to do with anything? Well, so this Floyd tape gets him into the idea of performance and theater and spectacle. And this is why then Yangsirkov enrolls in this drama school. Like a lot of institutes in Russia, it's got a really long name. And it's Moskovsky Institute Kultury, which means the Moscow Cultural Institute, на факультете режиссуры массовых театральных представлений, which means the Faculty of Mass Theatrical Performances. And so it's here where he's introduced all these great Russian theater traditions.

And some people know like Meyer he's introduced all these great, you know, Russian theater traditions. And, you know, some people know like Meyerhold and Stanislavski, and that's kind of the basis of things. But then young Sirkov gets into this little-known strand of old believer puppetry, which, you know, not a lot of people know about, but it has to do with how many fingers you hold when you pull the strings. And then he gets into all this esoteric stuff that goes way back. I mean, he's looking deeper into the well of traditional avant-garde in the 20s, so you've got like Totlin, you've got Vilimir Khlebnikov, you've got Daniel Harms. But at this moment, when young Sirkov is at this Moscow Institute of Culture and the Faculty of Mass Theatrical Performance,

it was oddly a hotbed for the study of a bunch of ideas about art, about technology, about power. And those ideas went back even further to the 18th century, to the time of one guy, a prince named Georgi Potemkin. The villages guy. Yeah, well, it's interesting you bring that up because history is actually unclear whether Georgi Potemkin was actually this guy who built these fake villages for Catherine the Great. That's always been the legend, right?

The Potemkin village. But what is clear is that something was built. And whatever was built was built by a guy that you've talked about recently, Benjamin. And that's Samuel Bentham. No. Yeah. In 1783, Samuel Bentham came to Russia and ended up working for Georgi Potemkin's estate. And this is where he comes up with a real idea for the Panopticon. So when Jeremy Bentham talks about his brother Samuel's ideas for the surveillance building, you're saying that he's specifically talking about the work he did in Russia? Yeah. Yeah. And there's something really uniquely Russian that's embedded in

Samuel's early ideas that many scholars believe his brother, Jeremy, kind of missed. What do you mean? Well, so most people believe the Panopticon was designed to oversee the Russian peasant workers. But the thing is, they already had overseers. They had Englishmen who were there to do that. But there were lots of problems with these overseers. They were drunk. They were lazy. They weren't working hard.

So there were all these... Oh, my God. He designed it to oversee the overseers. Exactly. The Panopticon was Samuel Bentham's proposed solution to Georgi Potemkin's real problem, which is who will guard the guards? Now, like I said, we don't know exactly what Potemkin showed Catherine the Great when she came down into southern Russia and eventually to Crimea in 1787.

Most historians don't buy this fake villages thing. But he definitely showed her something. And perhaps it was one of Bentham's panopticons. As you just mentioned, you know, I did just do an episode on the Bentham's and the panopticon. So, you know, I did do some research and, you know, I'm pretty sure that a panopticon wasn't built in Russia until 1806. Well, that's right, because Bentham's designs were officially put to use for an art school that was built in St. Petersburg in 1806. But the plans were based on what he and Potemkin had presented to Catherine the Great in 1787. And this art school was built after Potemkin died, some say under mysterious

circumstances. Well, I don't know about that, but I do know that from his diaries, he'd hoped to set up an institute for the study of all these things that he'd been interested in, that surveillance, watching the watchers, optical illusions, performance. So in a way, Potemkin is one of the unsung heroes and maybe even the father of Russian political technology. And did he ever set up his institute? Well, so a few historians believe that the Panopticon that Bentham built housed not an art school, but rather the first secret institute for the study of Potemkin's School of Political Technology.

Oh my God, and that burnt down almost immediately. There was a lot of political intrigue, of course, going on in Russia at that moment. But no, there was never anything like an official institute for Potemkin's ideas. Until this moment in the late 80s, early 90s, when out of nowhere, this Potemkin School pops up in Moscow. And it pops up at this place that might sound familiar, the Moscow Institute of Culture in the Faculty of Mass Theatrical Performances. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Useful Idiots.

This episode was produced by me, and it featured Charles Maines, André Soldetave, and TOE's Maines, Andrei Soldatov, and TOE special correspondent Chris. Thanks to Andrew Calloway, Kara Oler, and Mathilde Biot. Extra special thanks to Charles for helping me record Andrei in Russia when I realized that the recording I did with him and his co-author Irina in New York last year had somehow disappeared from my hard drive. Which seriously, dear listener, in all of the years I've been doing this, this has never happened.

The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's greatest podcasts. Thanks to Julie Shapiro and all of the folks at HQ. And of course, to the one and only Roman Mars who made this whole thing real. And to Radiotopia's launch sponsors, the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, and listeners like you. Radiotopia from PRX