WHERE: Senate, Omni Shorham

WHAT: What do the much-critiqued ‘classics’ on democracy, civic engagement, the public sphere, and education (by scholars such as Habermas, Dewey, Putnam and others) have to offer critical urban geographers? The urban spaces, forms of social interaction, and modes of education that these scholars theorized are quite different than those that many urban geographers seek to understand today. Public life increasingly plays out in both material and virtual/digital spaces, with interactions and deliberations mediated through purportedly interactive ‘web 2.0’ media, including social networking technologies and interactive mapping technologies. Past geographical critiques of the public sphere emphasized the exclusionary nature of abstract liberal visions, drawing on empirical and embodied accounts of spatial life. In the disembodied world of the digital age, how do we bring our empirical research to bear on these new/old questions of collaboration, civic engagement and democratic space? What is geography’s contribution to democratic theory in the age of web 2.0?

Discussant – Robert Lake, Rutgers University

******************************

YouTube Nation
Bruce D’Arcus – Miami University of Ohio

Dominant theories on the intersections of democracy and the public sphere were the product of a media environment dominated first by print media, and later by radio and television typically produced by large multinational capital for the largely passive consumption of viewers and listeners. Indeed, Habermas’ historical narrative of the evolution of the public sphere suggests its gradual demise in the face of the pressures of corporate concentration. Even more recent critics of this thesis have often based their arguments on the role that alternative media may play in constituting the dialog that is understood to be at the heart of a vibrant public sphere. In each case, however, the cultural product of this media is largely read-only. Yet, some commentators have argued, new media forms associated with the internet complicate the relation between the production and consumption of mediated meanings.

This paper considers this argument by way of an examination of connections between new media, social networking technologies, and concrete space. I examine how conservative activists in the United States have used new media such as online video website YouTube to present particular representations of a resurgent political movement. On one hand, I argue, these new media do change the content and character of political representation and dialog by complexifying the relation between the production of space, and the production of mediated political representations. On the other hand, I suggest the challenge they present is as much to theory and methodology as it is to our understanding of changing empirical circumstances.

Cyberdominance and the Digital Footprint: Young People as Objects of Domination and Subjects of Power in the Cybercity
Gregory Donovan – CUNY Graduate Center

This paper aims to unpack the material forms and practices of the U.S. war doctrine of “cyberdominance,” and its entailments with urban youth at multiple scales. This paper will argue that through decentralized information flows, the cybercity affords new environments for education, self-expression, and civic engagement as well as new environments for surveillance and control — simultaneously challenging and enabling the realization of cyberdominance. As young people’s urban geographies blend with cyberspatial mediums, specifically the Semantic Web (SW), their digital footprints are increasingly recorded, commodified, and aggregated by state and non-state actors. Enabled by the increasing propertization of cyberspace, the SW in part symbolizes a neoliberal restructuring of cyberspace through its privileging of informational control over informational literacy. Under this restructuring, information is semantically coded and mapped for “automatic” circulation across various proprietary environments. Intertwined with the privatization and segregation of urban environments through “gating” and private governance practices, the SW affords the contradictory prospect of a mass public conducive to cyber-dominance, alongside a cascade of publics organized around situated interests that challenge cyber-dominance. This paper will conclude with a discussion of a PAR project, in progress, that engages NYC youth in producing their own social network site as a means of enhancing informational literacy and cyber-environmental consciousness. Through their participation, young people investigate how cyberdominance shapes, and is shaped by, their experiences with property, privacy, and security in the cybercity — and propose strategies for re-imagining such dominance according to their situated interests.

Situated GeoWeb Participation: A Qualitative Assessment of OpenStreetMap Contributors
Josef (“Joe”) Eckert – University of Washington

OpenSteetMap.org (OSM) is a widely cited example of the burgeoning geoweb 2.0 movement, seeking to spatially crowdsource street-level geographic information for the globe. The recent State of the Map conference for OSM participants held this year in Amsterdam was the first annual meeting that dedicated a day to emergent business interests in relation to the project. Recent literature on volunteered geographic information calls for an understanding of how user participation functions in these practices. While some research has been done on the nature of open-source software projects, the emerging neogeography literature to date has been largely devoid of economic consideration. However, there is a lack of attention to the political economies localized to a single project in neo-geography literature. This paper utilizes participant observation fieldwork from the conference as well as in-depth interviews to understand the resulting subjectivities created by the complex interplay between members of non-profit foundation at the helm of the OSM project, the business interests of for-profit companies utilizing OSM data, and those participants that simply want to “get on with the mapping.” I argue that treating participants as situated within specific economic networks is essential to our understanding of user participation in geoweb based projects. I suggest that while mapping within this project is actualized at the scale of the individual, user participation in practice is shaped by the fiscal networks required to power a transnational geoweb project and that attention to unique networks may provide a more in-depth understanding of differences in participant motivation.

Desperately seeking the public sphere: After school programs and civic life
Sarah Elwood & Katharyne Mitchell – University of Washington

In this paper we rethink notions of the public sphere, in relation to schools and after-school programs in the United States. Habermasian notions of the ideal public sphere as a site where rational individuals can freely deliberate issues of the common good have been strongly critiqued by many scholars. Much of this discussion, however, has focused on existing sites and on adults. Liberal democratic accounts of schools as sites for subject formation have offered a similarly idealistic view of schools as a public sphere, and tended to theorize young people as unformed subjects within these spaces. Drawing from research at a YMCA-sponsored after school program with young teens in South Seattle, we investigate the types of power relations, hegemonic assumptions, inclusions and exclusions that emerge when young people form their own deliberative publics, as part of a collaborative map-making project. We suggest that these deliberative spaces provide an important opportunity for young people to share, examine, and rethink their own knowledge, but that these spaces are also limited in significant ways.

The protection of an individual is fundamental to today’s society and business freedom should never come above that of person’s dignity and that is what this trial has shown.

I agree, entirely, with the first part of that statement — but when the prosecutor argues “… and that is what this trial has shown” I have to ask myself: what trial is he talking about? Whose dignity is being protected here? Certainly not the dignity of a wired society who is likely to face greater surveillance and censorship as a result of this irresponsible ruling. And, certainly not the dignity of that poor boy who can not “delete” his memories of that horrible act of violence. Of all the serious privacy issues associated with the practices of corporations like Google (see here) and Facebook (see here), and governments like the U.S. (see here and here) and China (see here), how does this qualify as a triumph for privacy when it has the potential to further erode individual privacy on the Internet?

Peter Fleischer is quoted in the Telegraph as saying he found it ironic that “as privacy director I have been found guilty of breaching privacy.” With respect to Fleischer, that’s not ironic — it’s to be expected that the person in charge of privacy policies for the most prominent global information company would find himself (fairly or unfairly) held accountable for those policies. What’s ironic is that three Google executives were convicted for violating privacy laws in an instance where they actually didn’t violate anyone’s privacy, and that conviction has the potential to further compromise individual privacy. Now, that’s irony.

Labour MP Tom Watson said it best in the Telegraph:

This is the biggest threat to internet freedom we have seen in Europe. The only people who will support this decision are Silvio Berlusconi and the governments of China and Iran. It effectively breaks the internet in Italy.

However, having substantial influence in each of these areas – from medium to message – starts to look a lot like an informational monopoly. After describing the four horizontal layers of the WWW — transmission > hardware > software > content – Tim Burners-Lee describes his concern with “vertical integration“:

I am more concerned about companies trying to take a vertical slice through the layers than creating a monopoly in any one layer. A monopoly is more straight forward; people can see it and feel it, and consumers and regulators can “just say no.” But vertical integration — for example, between the medium and content — affects the quality of information and can be more insidious.

Apple certainly isn’t alone, Google immediately comes to mind . . . and Microsoft, but to a lesser extent since they’re more of a traditional monopoly.

* h/t Michael Oman-Reagan.

First, from The Hill:

This week, without much fanfare, the House is expected to approve a bill mandating that the Treasury Department create a real-time electronic database of information related to the bailout. And for data warehousing and analysis firms, the bill could lead to a hefty contract. At a September hearing, Stephen Horne, vice president at Dow Jones, testified that it could cost $50 million to create and run a database for the first year . . .

“We can track where any UPS package is at any time of day,” [Rep. Carolyn] Maloney told The Hill this week. “Why in the world can’t we track this information?”. . .

Dow Jones & Co., IBM and SAS Institute have all lobbied on the bill, according to congressional records. Teradata, an Ohio-based data analytics and warehousing firm, has been a prominent supporter of the bill.

Then, from Wired:

The federal court system charged the Department of Justice more than $4 million in 2009 for access to its electronic court filing system, which is composed entirely of documents in the public domain. . .

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts runs the search system known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. PACER charges citizens, journalists, corporate lawyers and even the Attorney General $.08 per page to look at court filings in U.S. District Courts. The system pulled in nearly $50 million in 2006. The contract between the PACER office and the Justice Department began in 2002 with a charge of $800,000, which quickly rose to more than $4.2 million in 2009.

Wired also notes that the Justice Department had to sign a $5 million contract in 2005 with West Publishing to gain online access to court records since the U.S. Court system does not make their records available for bulk download:

West, and its competitor, Lexis Nexis, buy court data in bulk, reformat it and add proprietary citation codes. They then license the database of public documents at high rates to libraries, law firms and government agencies. Even the U.S. Court system pays West’s high license fees to access public court documents that West purchased from it.

[UPDATE 12.08.09: Yahoo's "spy guide" and price list for user information published by Cryptome]

John Young has obtained and published documents on his website that details some of the digital surveillance policies of Yahoo, Verizon, AT$T, SBC, COX, and Sprint — among others. Most interesting, however, is Young’s publication of Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement that describes the kinds of user information available to law enforcement and how much the company will charge the government for such information. While this ‘price list’ more or less confirms what a lot of people have suspected — that the border between big-business and big-government surveillance is a porous one — Yahoo’s reaction to its publication is truly revealing. Yahoo has issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome, demanding the document be removed and arguing that its publication is (somehow) an act of copyright infringement.

Further, as Wired reported back on 12/01/09 before Cryptome published Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement, Yahoo had been trying to prevent a FOIA request seeking information on how much Yahoo (among others) charge the government for user information. Yahoo opposed the FOIA request by claiming it would both “shock” and “confuse” their customers.

The most interesting interview from the segment was with James Andrew Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Towards the end of his interview, Lewis offered an excellent explanation of why the U.S. has come to see cyberspace as a matter of national security and of how U.S. cyberdominance is being rationalized:

. . . if you talk to the Russians or the Chinese they say “how can you complain about us when you do exactly the same thing?” It’s a fair point, with one exception. We have more to steal. We have more to loose. We’re the place that depends on the Internet, we’ve done the most to take advantage of it. We’re the ones who have woven it into our economy, into our national security, in ways that they haven’t. So, we are more vulnerable.

The quote reveals an odd contradiction: “We” are repeatedly told by governments, corporations, and various individuals that weaving the Internet into our environment will bring more security – at the same time “we” are told by those same actors that weaving the Internet into our environment makes us less secure.

In summarizing his diplomatic discussions with “Mr. Hull,” “the Generalissimo,” “Marshal Stalin,” and “Prime Minister Churchill,” FDR defines a new supreme objective for the future:

The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each Nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word: Security.

And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security—in a family of Nations. (emphasis added)

The speech, which you can read in full at TeachingAmericanHistory.org, concludes with a call for a “second Bill of Rights” to ensure such economic, social, and moral security:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
5. The right of every family to a decent home;
6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
8. The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being. (emphasis added)

It’s notable that he links the expansion of our industrial economy with a need for new rights to ensure equality in the pursuit of happiness. I rarely hear “security” discussed in terms of ensuring happiness. I also find his “Necessitous men” quote notable (4th paragraph above). The FDR American Heritage Center includes a footnote for this quote, from The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt Vol XIII, that states:

“Necessitous men,” says the Lord Chancellor, in Vernon v Bethell, 2 Eden 113 (1762), “are not, truly speaking, free men; but, to answer a present emergency, will submit to any terms that the crafty may impose on them.”

Security, to FDR, is thus physical, economic, social, and moral. It is necessary for the equal pursuit of happiness in an industrial economy. And, it affords citizens the freedom to resist terms imposed on them from the “crafty” during emergencies.

Of course, FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights” never materialized in America and his declaration that “we shall not repeat the excesses of the wild twenties when this Nation went for a joy ride on a roller coaster which ended in a tragic crash” was unfortunately proven false. America – Fuck Yeah!

The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site.

The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site’s spare landing page contains no content to speak of — just links, a logo and a search box. By law, DMCA notices are targeted to specific infringing content.

I increasingly hear the students I work with (and a good deal of the faculty) use Google as a synonym for the web, much as how Kleenex is has become another word for tissue. It’s similar with Googling and  surfing (e.g. one might say “I was Googling David Bowie last night” when they were actually surfing Bowie fansites with little or no use of Google). Of course, no such equivalence exists — Google is a gated community. There is a boundary drawn between the regions of the web that Google (and other major search engines) will index, and the regions they won’t. What they don’t index, we likely don’t see.

That there is proprietary decision-making behind what information is — and is not — indexed, and that we — as a society — are increasingly loosing our ability to even recognize this indexing is a cause for great concern. Expecting Google to make their gate keeping an open and transparent process is ludicrous. Google is for profit, and dreaming up a contorted “free-market” rational for how it could be in Google’s best business interest to be transparent is a dead end. Google makes billions by controlling access to information, and they aren’t going to give that up. Why should they?

But what if there were non-profit, or even for profit, search engines that focused on identifying and indexing all the information Google (et al) isn’t? At a minimum, having such options might at least make people conscious of the fact that the web is bigger than Google suggests.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

Essentially, while a copy of your tweets may still “belong to you,” Twitter now claims ownership over a copy too and they are reserving the right to do whatever they want with it. So, how exactly do my tweets still belong to me, if Twitter now owns them?

The new step is not foolproof, the editors acknowledged. It was possible for a reporter to register successfully on several major sites under falsified names and ID and cellphone numbers.

So, this new layer of surveillance doesn’t really give the state much new information, and it’s at least as fallible as existing forms of digital surveillance. While this surveillance practice, and others, will evolve and become more sophisticated – allowing access to more kinds of (formerly) personal information – people will also evolve and become more sophisticated in their efforts to ensure a comfortable level of privacy. Questioning the efficacy of such a policy, in order to rationalize or irrationalize its application, seems limited. It’s a powerful line of inquiry, particularly for short term tactical gain such as getting Verizon Wireless to stop censoring texts from NARAL, or convincing China to scale back its implementation of the Green Dam Youth Escort. In both cases, however, their was no omission of wrong doing and their was no agreement that they won’t do it again. The only admission was that, within a specific context, a specific surveillance practice was considered to be an ineffective means of ensuring security. In short, questions of efficacy challenge whether a specific surveillance practice does what it claims to do, not how a specific surveillance practice restructures our environment and shapes our daily behaviors (for better or worse).

A better question would ask how this “new layer of surveillance” restructures everyday life – how does this layer shape the built environment and our behaviors within it?  What are the costs, benefits, pleasures, and perils associated with this new layer of surveillance?

Whether or not signing into a web site with a “true identity” will compromise public discourse by making individuals more susceptible to retribution, it certainly does introduce a new practice that a person must perform before participting in a public discussion. That sort of embodied practice, even when subverted, shapes our experiences and influences our behavior. Acknowledging upfront that surveillance always works allows us to get to the more important questions of how it works.

I hear (and read) many people reference the fallibility of the latest and greatest corporate/government surveillance practice — by which they mean “surveillance practice X” doesn’t actually do what “group X” claims it’s supposed to do. This often feeds the illusion that because “it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do” it’s somehow benign and ineffectual — that it doesn’t work. Yet every time a new surveillance policy is implemented it works, in a multitude of ways, on our environment and it encourages a broad range of behavior. Attention to how surveillance works in (and on) everyday life gets us away from short-term questions of efficacy and closer to important long-term issues of social (in)justice, equality, and well being.

Cyberspace is real and so are the risks that come with it. It is the great irony of our information age [that] the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy…

It’s encouraging to hear Obama talk about education as a necessary component of cybersecurity. If an actual education initiative does emerge from this, I hope it will focus on both the empowering and threatening aspects of cyberspace.

Obama also noted that national cyber security policy would not entail the surveillance of Internet traffic or private networks, citing privacy concerns and a committment to net neutrality. So far, so good…

Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Union Parliament, swept in Sunday amid outrage over a new copyright law and the convictions of the four founders of The Pirate Bay.

The party, formed to protest copyright law, took 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden and one of that country’s 18 seats in the European Parliament. The party stands for radical reform of copyright legislation, abolition of the patent system and guaranteed online-privacy rights.

Check out wikipedia for background on the Pirate Party or visit the official Pirate Party website.

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.

(emphasis added)

“(ii) DISCONNECTED YOUTH.–The term `disconnected youth’ means any
individual who is certified by the designated local agency–

“(I) as having attained age 16 but not age 25 on the hiring date,

“(II) as not regularly attending any secondary, technical, or
post-secondary school during the 6-month period preceding the hiring
date,

“(III) as not regularly employed during such 6-month period, and

“(IV) as not readily employable by reason of lacking a sufficient
number of basic skills.”.

Like many of you, when I first heard “disconnected youth” I assumed it was a reference to the digital divide and its effects on youth. Not so much. According to this bill, “connecting” youth simply means softening them up for corporate circulation.

After losing an appeals court challenge last July, proponents of 1998’s Child Online Protection Act received a final blow to their cause – this time from the United States Supreme Court, who quietly declined to review the law without comment.

COPA – not to be confused with COPPA – was passed overwhelming by congress under the Clinton administration; it sought to bar for-profit websites from allowing children access to materials deemed harmful for inappropriate to them, as judged by “contemporary community standards.”

As Daily Tech notes, COPA (Child Online Protection Act) is NOT to be confused with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). Unlike COPPA, COPA would have done absolutely nothing to protect children online and certainly would have shattered whatever privacy children have left online. COPA was a shameful attempt to institute broad surveillance and censorship online under the banner of “child safety.” As U.S. District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. noted on March 22, 2007, during the last rejection of COPA by the courts:

perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.

Of course – while this crappy piece of legislation died a long slow death in the courts, defending it provided Bush’s Justice Department with a great opportunity to seize private user information from information companies like Google and Yahoo.

]]> http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2009/01/29/good-riddance-copa/feed/ 0 http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/08/21/army-navy-to-air-force-we-want-in-on-cyber-command/ http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/08/21/army-navy-to-air-force-we-want-in-on-cyber-command/#comments Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:00:40 +0000 gtdonovan http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/?p=136 For just a moment — a moment — I saw the headline Air Force Halts Cyber Command Program and thought: great news! Some of you may have noticed the air force’s recent power grab, declaring that cyberspace is theirs to protect in recent TV and web advertisements. You can see their new logo in a mash-up I’ve made:

Back in November of 2006 the 8th Air Force became the new “Air Force Cyberspace Command.” According to Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne, the aim of the Air Force Cyberspace Command is to:

…develop a major command that stands alongside Air Force Space Command and Air Combat Command as the provider of forces that the President, combatant commanders and the American people can rely on for preserving the freedom of access and commerce, in air, space and now cyberspace.

As I argue in a paper I’m currently writing, the creation of Cyber Command clearly conveys a state desire to control cyberspace, and as cyberspace expeditiously assimilates into everyday life, such desires deserve a critical look regarding their effects on the privacy and autonomy of young people — the most wired segments of our population.

So, I thought: Great news, the Cyber Command has been put on hold! Of course, the only reason the Cyber Command has been put on hold is because the military (and, specifically the navy) feels they should be playing a role in “protecting” cyberspace as well. Not so great…

According to ars technica:

NextGov says that the high visibility of AFCYBER, which was achieved through video advertisements, attracted the attention of high-ranking military brass who want the Navy to take a more prominent role in the effort. The government has repeatedly touted AFCYBER as an important strategic investment in future cyber warfare, so it seems unlikely that they intend to completely walk away from the concept.

Jonathan Zdrianski, author of the book iPhone Open Application Development, discovered a URL hidden in iPhone’s CoreLocation that he believes the iPhone uses to check whether any apps on your phone match with those listed in a database of blacklisted applications. Presumably, that would allow Apple to remotely de-authorize those apps, or perhaps even delete them.

A few days later, Steve Jobs confirmed Zdrianski’s beliefs and presumptions about the remote kill switch:

[Jobs] confirmed that it is indeed possible for Apple to reach into your phone from afar and disable malicious applications. “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he told the WSJ. An example of a malicious application would be one that stole users’ personal information, Jobs explained. [emphasis added]

Malicious applications?? Since “malicious” is a highly subjective classification, exactly who will be deciding what is malicious and how? Something tells me (history) that Apple and AT&T will be privately deciding what applications are harmful to their business interests, and that this blacklist won’t be available for public viewing. I’m sure Apple will utilized the remote kill switch to disable some applications that I would consider malicious, that is, applications that aggregate my personal information without my knowledge. But what about the malicious applications who sign contracts with either Apple or AT&T in order to aggregate my personal information? I would still consider those applications malicious, but I doubt Apple or AT&T would.

Yes, Apple just wants to “protect” us with this remote kill switch, and they have to create a “secure” environment so that people will feel “safe” enough to buy as many apps as their consumerist hearts desire — Yet, I’ve somehow managed just fine over the past 8 years without having Apple install a remote kill switch on my laptop’s OS and I imagine the great majority of you have as well. The fact that Apple is deciding to censor what applications I can and can not install on my iPhone and clearly monitoring what I do with my iPhone makes me feel a lot less safe and a lot less secure. That’s not just bad ethics, it’s bad business, and its making the idea of android much more appealing to me.

As Lawrence Lessig put it — code is law — and Apple and AT&T are taking the long arm of the law into their own, err… hands. Add this to the fact that the recently passed FISA Amendments Act of 2008 effectively creates an infrastructure for a police-state by allowing the government to wiretap and aggregate all telecommunications, and its easy to see how that infrastructure will extend into our mobile communication technologies.

In their pursuit of both national and homeland security as well as the creation of new markets, the state and corporations are engaging the free-flowing horizontal communication which takes place in cyberspace, with the aim of reworking its architecture into a Semantic Web. The Semantic Web has been primarily conceptualized and developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. The Semantic Web can be understood as a sustained indexing of cyberspace, whereby information is semantically coded in order to be processed and interpreted, across various platforms and programs, through “automated” analysis. To semantically code and then circulate this data, Web ontologies are developed and adopted which rationalize and categorically conform information in order to establish relationships. Most prominent of these ontologies is the Web Ontology Language (OWL). As cyberspace is semantically codified, both the state and corporations have moved to develop methodologies to utilize the Semantic Web for more efficient surveillance – often framed as “data mining” or “market research.” Particularly notable has been the Department of Homeland Security’s “Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement” (ADVISE) program, defined as, “a data mining tool under development intended to help the Department of Homeland Security analyze large amounts of information. It is designed to allow an analyst to search for patterns in data—such as relationships among people, organizations, and events—and to produce visual representations of these patterns” (United States Government Accountability Office 2007). In reformatting cyberspace, the Semantic Web makes information more locative, circulatory and integrable. In doing so, this reformatting enhances cyberspatial navigation but also erodes the qualities of cyberspace that have functioned to protect the privacy and anonymity of cyber-surfers.

NOTE This “outtake” and its relation to the larger paper, from which it was eventually cut, were inspired by two earlier posts: “what they want is an automatic feed” and (young) person of interest.

]]> http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/08/14/outtake-governing-the-semantic-web/feed/ 0 http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/08/08/outtake-public-wi-fi-nola/ http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/08/08/outtake-public-wi-fi-nola/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:12:29 +0000 gtdonovan http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/?p=133 The following is an outtake from an article Cindi Katz and I have been writing on the relationship between U.S. children and young people and their technological environments in the post-9/11 security state. Once/if the final article is published, I’ll post a link to it here. In the meantime, consider this a “teaser.”

These shifts, and the struggles over them, remind us of Seymour Papert’s (1993, p5) caution that, “there is a world of difference between what computers can do and what society will choose to do with them.” In the post-9/11 security state, we can look to that other contemporary site of homeland (in)security, New Orleans, for an example of how state and corporate security concerns shape the difference between what a particular technology can do and the purposes to which it is put. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city’s communicative infrastructure was badly damaged except for a wireless mesh-network, similar to one the FOSS XO can generate.  The network covered the downtown business district and the French Quarter. This network, originally implemented to support surveillance cameras in the area, was “hacked” by emergency personnel in the wake of the hurricane and later converted by the city into a free public Wi-Fi service. Although Louisiana state laws ban the free distribution of broadband services with municipal monies, New Orleans was able to circumvent this ban because of its declared state of emergency. Now that the state of emergency has been lifted, BellSouth has challenged the legality of the public Wi-Fi. While the use of publicly funded Wi-Fi is sanctioned for state surveillance, free public access Wi-Fi is seen as a threat to corporate profit and thus curbed.  Clearly choices are being made—choices that go against the democratic possibilities that Papert and his colleagues envisioned when the Internet and personal computing were in their infancy.

NOTE This “outtake” and its relation to the larger paper, from which it was eventually cut, were inspired by two earlier posts: Connectile Dysfunction (CD) and mesh-networking.

]]> http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/08/08/outtake-public-wi-fi-nola/feed/ 0 http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/04/08/what-they-want-is-an-automatic-feed/ http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/04/08/what-they-want-is-an-automatic-feed/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:29:55 +0000 gtdonovan http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/?p=77 Another sign of growing state interest in the semantic web… According to a recent article in the washington post, “the FBI has created a network of links between the nation’s largest telephone and Internet firms and about 40 FBI offices and Quantico” as part of their Digital Collection System (also called “The Digital Collection System Network” or “DCSNet”). DCSNet not only represents a blurring between state and corporate interests — Sprint facilitates communication between FBI wiretapping rooms on the government’s behalf and companies like VeriSign are often used to carry out the actual wiretapping — but it also sheds light on how state/corporate-run surveillance is being embedded in everyday life.

The DCSNet, which was made possible under the Clinton Administration with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), allows FBI agents to instantly wiretap just about any communication device associated with a particular person of interest — with “point-and-click ease.” While “content” surveillance must be authorized by a court, the washington post explains how the FBI’s “transactional” surveillance does not need court authorization:

Wiretaps to obtain the content of a phone call or an e-mail must be authorized by a court upon a showing of probable cause. But “transactional data” about a communication — from whom, to whom, how long it lasted — can be obtained by simply showing that it is relevant to an official probe, including through an administrative subpoena known as a national security letter (NSL). According to the Justice Department‘s inspector general, the number of NSLs issued by the FBI soared from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005. [emphasis added]

That’s a 453% increase in just 5 years, and the Bush Administration is currently petitioning the FCC to expand CALEA to make it easier for the FBI to access more types of data. The ultimate goal is to achieve real-time tracking of everyday life. In order to accomplish such a task, not only must our laws and telecommunications infrastructure be “updated” but the human actors associated with surveillance practices must be removed… which brings us back to the emerging semantic web, with its desire to find, organize and distribute information between machines without the need for human intervention. As a telecom industry lawyer, who was interviewed by the washington post, put it:

…government officials now “have to rely on a human being at a telecom calling up every 15 minutes to send law enforcement the data… What they want is an automatic feed, continuously. So you’re checking the weather on your mobile device or making a call,” and the device would transmit location data automatically. “It’s full tracking capability. It’s a scary proposition.” [emphasis added]

Scary indeed. They want an RSS feed of everyday life.

The Government Accountability Office maintains an office at the National Security Agency but it remains unused since no one in Congress has asked GAO to perform any oversight of the Agency, the head of GAO disclosed last week.

Despite multi-billion dollar acquisition failures at NSA and the Agency’s controversial, possibly illegal surveillance practices, Congress has declined to summon all of its oversight resources such as GAO to address such issues…

… “We still actually do have space at the NSA. We just don’t use it and the reason we don’t use it is we’re not getting any requests, you know. So I don’t want to have people sitting out there twiddling their thumbs,” Mr. Walker said.