(A request from me that is, not Richard Medhurst, who is merely asking that random police forces could please stop arresting him and nicking his kit.)

It’s like this: I’ve been reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It’s the size of a brick, but not really the kind of brick you’d take with you for light entertainment on the beach.  It tells the story of how the Silicon Valley billionaires, initially the execs of Google and Microsoft, then Facebook, Amazon and others less well known, took the developments that were once the inspiration for ‘The Aware Home’ (which was going to be so-o-o-o groovy – a home full of brilliant, responsive electronic gadgets that would learn and provide for all your wants and needs) and turned them instead into a marketeers’ orgy of information-gathering and direct selling.

This nightmare shift created the situation we have now where both businesses and governments crave your private information as keenly, and seek it as unscrupulously, as the most helpless of drug addicts go after the price of a fix.

For the pathological information addict, the next step on from a compulsive desire to know everything about you is a ferocious aversion to you understanding anything about them.

Hence Richard Medhurst’s predicament, which he explains here…

The anti-terrorism trick

The powers who are persecuting Richard Medhurst and other journalists (most recently Ali Abunimah, arrested for no reason they can explain by the Swiss police) seem to be vexaciously misapplying anti-terrorism laws. What our law in the UK does say is that it’s a crime to support terrorist organizations. Firstly, that becomes rather questionable when our government defines as ‘terrorist’ any group the US says are terrorist but not, for example, politicians who are wanted for war crimes by the International Court (as seen in Keir Starmer’s recent secret meetings with Israeli politicians to whom he still allows the sale of weapons).

Secondly, a look through past court cases shows that the original meaning of ‘supporting terrorist organizations’ was, for example, buying or providing money for weapons for such organizations, that could result in the killing of UK civilians. It could not be much further from the current interpretation by various police forces that writing about organizations the government considers terrorist counts as illegal support.

It would appear that the Austrian police were under the impression Medhurst might be a member of Hamas, because he’d written about them, and like our government (that does not think the Israeli government is terrorist), they think Hamas (who are the former government of Gaza) are terrorists (so do I, but that’s beside the point).

Whose Exceptionalism?

What’s on my mind now is who are those ‘powers’ who pursue journalists from country to country (as they did Julian Assange) — and why their fixation on journalists who are spotted telling you about what businesses and governments are really doing?

According to Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the answer can be found in what happened in the US after 9/11, which the US government presented as the worst act of terrorism ever. Zuboff tells the story of goings on in government and in Silicon Valley in the months that followed those attacks, noting how every semblance of the citizen’s right to privacy was sidelined as an information-hungry government cleared the decks for ‘The War on Terror’. The White House ‘worked closely with’ Google, to hoover up every bit of available information on anything and anyone that might pertain to 9/11.

By the time the ‘exceptionalist’, war-on-terror music stopped, several former Google execs were working in the White House and several former presidential staffers were embedded in Silicon Valley, running a surveillance company. Pigs and people? George Orwell would not have known where to start. Perhaps it no longer makes sense to ask which government is pursuing our journalists, or whether it is government or weapons/surveillance companies calling the shots.

I want to read that book!

Anyway – back to my selfish request. In that video, Richard Medhurst talks about the police stealing his kit (as the UK police did to journalists Asa Winstanley, Sarah Wilkinson and Craig Murray, as the Swiss police did to Ali Abunimah). Medhurst said that amongst the stuff they were poking through were his notes for a book he was writing. Given the topic (cyber security) and given his situation (various police forces’ determination to explore his devices) I think that’s the book I ought to read next, after Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism, because if we don’t get our heads round this government-is-business-is-the-law situation soon, every journalist and blogger with a modicum of curiosity about what’s going on in ‘conflicted’ places like Palestine will be in jail, then none of us will be able to find out anything any more.

But I can’t read that book, because the Austrian police have just nicked Medhurst’s kit, and he hasn’t finished the book yet. And so, I have not put my usual donations request on the end of this article, I’m going to ask you this instead. If you’ve got a few pounds to spare today for donations to bloggers, please could you put your money in Medhurst’s GoFundMe (links in the vid below) ….

….so he can buy some new kit and finish his book, so I can read it? Thank you!