Source Authenticity from Cold War to Surveillance State

(±) False Tallies - the Prisoner's Dilemma? from Cryptome on Vimeo.

by dnCRYPTOME

(±) False Tallies: The Prisoner's Dilemma? Source Authenticity from Cold War to Surveillance State

Fugitive defectors and whistleblowers evade sovereignty, territory, citizenship and the inchoate metrics of global political space...

Premiere: Thursday 4 February 2016, 21:00 hrs
Tacit Futures: Building Snowden Archives Transmediale - Anxious to Secure
Auditorium, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, BERLIN

2016.transmediale.de/content/deborah-natsios-john-young

Vauban's masterful engineering of militarized borders in defense of the emerging 17th century nation-state provokes our genealogical tracking of Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov (b.1922, USSR) and Edward Joseph Snowden (b.1983, USA).

These two mobile, highly aliased agents of modern state militaries are insurgent territorial engineers in their own right. Deploying in shifting geopolitical and technological contexts 60 years apart, each eventually ruptures from his boundary maintenance agency, fracturing within post-Vaubanian archipelagoes of Berlin in the case of Khokhlov, and Hawaii in the case of Snowden.

Khokhlov and Snowden play the sovereignty game to exhaustion along the 60 year continuum of an inexorably debordering world order. Eventually, their state-imposed aliases, legends and false citizenships collapse into the contingent identities and private fictions of diasporic personhood and the Prisoner's Dilemma.

In 1954, Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov renounces NKVD/KGB scripts that cast him as a border-crossing state assassin.

So too, NSA efforts to re-territorialize sovereignty in response to the 21st century crisis of the national border could not have fallen to a less compliant subject than a placeless, fugitive, dilemmic identity: a.k.a. TheTrueHOOHAH, Verax, Cincinnatus and Citizenfour -- who re-brands himself in May 2013 as Edward Joseph Snowden.

Thus unmoored from the engineering of its militarized border, the state archive disclosed by Snowden eschews the sovereignty demanded by all proprietary regimes and seeks full reconstitution within a borderless public domain.

dnCryptome