#hacking the future

In Hacking the Future, I outlined some responses to people who invoke their innocence in an argument against privacy. 

Here are three that certainly apply this week. 

1. The Misinterpretation Problem

Let’s say you download Tor. The next day you buy some fertilizer. The day after that, you post a rant about the Federal Reserve inflating the money supply. Separately, these things don’t mean much, but when pieced together, a bit of liberal inference can paint an alarming picture. These are the sorts of things that a surveilling agency could be looking for if given the ability to glean information from your Facebook status updates, among other channels. Even if we assume that authority figures mean well, mistakes are made. Death row inmates are proven innocent decades into their sentences. Information is misinterpreted. The more data the government has at its disposal, the more likely they are to arrive at terrible conclusions.

When I spoke with him on the phone, Philip Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, seemed to look back at the times when he was only speaking out against government privacy intrusions as if they were the good old days. Now we have “Little Brother” in addition to Big Brother. He argues that 9/11 created a massive policy drive, a sort of “Manhattan Project” for surveillance technology, bringing my attention to powerful cameras that can zoom in on someone’s face in a crowd from the top of a building hundreds of yards away. Facebook could provide the government with a global database of faces that can be linked to security camera footage.

Having such detailed information at our fingertips sounds like it would enable us to better discern truth from fantasy, but human error is all around us, and more data can often just mean more room for mistakes—mistakes that can ruin lives. 

2. The Data Theft Problem

The number of data security breaches in the private sector has increased by 58 percent year-on-year according to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office. When Microsoft talks about developing a driver’s license for the Internet, I think of South Korea, which had a similar system in place until recently, after the most damaging online security breach the country has ever seen. The real-name registration system was introduced in 2007 and required users to authenticate their posts on certain popular Web sites with their birth name and address. Hackers compromised 35 million user accounts in July 2011.

And you don’t have to be a superhacker to gather enough info to make someone’s life miserable. Just ask the innumerable women who are stalked and harassed by ex- and would-be lovers in real life through information the stalkers have gleaned from the Web.

3. The Tyranny Creep Problem

Some privacy advocates are optimistic about our future, given that citizens now have increased powers of surveillance through mobile phones, for instance, and increasingly robust communication channels, like Twitter. This vision of the future was laid down by science fiction author David Brin. In his 1998 book The Transparent Society, he suggests that within high-tech societies with less privacy, authority figures lose the powers of secrecy they use to abuse citizens. In this view, groups like WikiLeaks and Anonymous will rise up to combat tyranny.

The idea is enticing, and it certainly seems like we are living in an era of great power redistribution and decentralization. But as we’ve witnessed during Occupy Wall Street and its related protests, citizens may have cameras, but the cops still have the billy clubs. The ability to countersurveil will only go so far as the rest of the fabric of democracy allows it. It’s only part of the tapestry of freedoms. I submit that we must ensure that citizen surveillance is shored up by the freedom to expose authority figures with anonymity.

Every oppressive regime, all the way back to the Holy Roman Empire’s census, has used data harvesting as a tool to accumulate greater control. You can’t control a populace you can’t see. As the Roman Empire expanded, so did its need to keep tabs on the far-flung peoples they had conquered. We see this continuing in the modern world, in East Berlin, Russia, and China. Information gathering is always the first step. Not all state-sponsored data analysis is malicious, of course. But it is problematic when a populace doesn’t know how its data is being used. According to a recent study by Stanford University’s Computer Security Laboratory, consumers are far less anonymous while browsing than they realize. The study found that registering an account with NBC shared a user’s e-mail with seven other companies, and Home Depot shared user data with thirteen other companies.

13 September 2012 Cole Stryker Hacking the Future w/ danah boyd, Clay Shirky (by NewYorkRawVideos)

HACKING THE FUTURE by Cole Stryker | Kirkus Book Reviews

Spectre + Lukas Zpira @ Borderline Biennale 2011

벙커주의... 우파적 병으로서의 에볼라 바이러스 ; 에볼라 바이러스는 무수히 많은 "타자"로 대치될 수 있다

Ebola Virus

We recently received the following email from New Orleans ;

It's interesting that an Ebola outbreak has become headline news at the same time as it is published in a national bestseller (HOT ZONE), feature film (OUTBREAK) and TV movie-of-the-week (Robin Cook's VIRUS) - Nick Marinello

Interesting all right. Third World viruses for First World profit.

The Ebola virus is the first of all the media-assisted diseases.

Providing just the right metonymic touch of veracity for the “real” outbreak of the Ebola virus in the internal organs of the mediascape, the Ebola outbreak was diffused by a media system in desperate need of a truth-referent to prop up the sagging mass of hysterical (media) reports about body invasion by viral infections. Not only fear of viral infection by alien contaminants in novels, films, and TV movies-of-the-week, but hysterical anxieties about the invasion of the American social body by alien viruses on the network news, Prime Time scoops, Night Line and particularly all the talk shows.

But if the Ebola outbreak could so quickly become a viral star for the day, It was probably because there was no outbreak at all, only a bunker culture that has long ago successfully immunized itself from alien invasion. Not a Hot Zone, we’re actually living in a cold zone, immunized from uncontrollable outbreaks and certainly innoculated against strange viruses. In this case, the Ebola virus is a perfect virtual disease, a right-wing-disease – an ideological support in the form of panic viruses that play subliminally on fear of the breakdown of the immunity system of the social. The media appearance of Outbreak, Hot Zone, Virus, and the Ebola virus are perfect supports, then, for the will to (viral) purity. Less interesting in themselves, the virtualization of the Ebola outbreak says a lot about the political conditions that gave rise to their popularity and acceptance.

The bunker state mentality always requires a dangerous outsider for its sustenance. What could be better than the Ebola virus with its barley hidden traces of a more ancient fear of African immigrants coming to infect the West? Just because the panic fear of the spread of the Ebola virus is so (medically) far-fetched, it’s perfectly (media) reasonable ; it supports, in the end, the will to bunker down and blockade the whole continent, and all this with a strong feeling of moral righteousness.

The media is getting ready for millennial frenzy. It projects the Middle Ages onto the end of the century. The Ebola virus is perfect. Like the “establishing shot” in cinema, the Ebola virus is the “establishing disease.” It anchors down all the media frenzy about our disappearance into an infectious mediascape.