Something to help me make sense of things

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What if...

What if everyone had some sensor implanted in them and all recording devices gave off something that set those sensors off, so you could know when you're being recorded and trace the where the image has been put if it is publicly available?

It's not just about surveillance. It's self-surveillance.

I just read this in Sherry Turkle's "Life on Screen" (p 247):

Michel Foucault's work, for example, elaborates a perspective on information, communication, and power that undermines any easy links between electronic communication and freedom. He argues that power in modern society is imposed not by the personal presence and brute forece of an elite caste, but by the way each individual elarns the art of self-surveillance. Modern society must control the bodies and behaviors of large numbers of people. Force could never be sufficiently distributed. Discourse substitutes and does a more effective job.

I think we've lost sight of this in the last few weeks as we've talked more about the consequences of incorrect data, of having decontextualized data read, etc. But in health insurance data provenance, could one argue that by encouraging centralized health data, people might feel forced to live lives that are more in keeping with what they think is the norm or regulatory ideal. Smokers might quit for fear of getting the insurance company crackdown. Sinister, isn't it?

In some ways, this makes me realize that there is some strategic value for governing bodies to sporadically and unpredictably surveill, breach privacy, and let recorded data slip. Many people prefer to just modify their behavior to be more acceptable rather than go through the difficulty and stigma of wearing tin foil hats.

Which makes me also realize that it is also in the interest of governing bodies to paint those who do resist surveillance as tin-foil hat wearers, and to encourage and give life to the stigma that goes along with it. How many movies do we have like Hackers, Antitrust, and The Net, depicting security experts and people who resist surveillance as hackers so different from the everyday person? How many films are there that depict issues of surveillance in the dramatic everyday? I can't think of any.

But can I not think of any because surveillance and self-surveillance don't reveal themselves visually in the everyday, and thus might be difficult to film? Or because, again, the power of that stigma of caring and thus "having something to hide," being a "geek" detached from reality, or being "uptight?"

Culture conspiracy? :-o

Surveillance, gender, and public health

From a review of Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body:

In Balsamo's strongest chapter, "Public Pregnancies," she confidently relates how new medical technologies of surveillance--laparoscopy, ultrasounds, and advanced drug testing--permit and even demand novel invasions of the female body. Using an example much in the news recently--criminal penalties against pregnant women on crack--Balsamo argues that such technologies assist the development of a cultural logic of surveillance, where the relationship of women's pregnant bodies to overall public health comes under new scrutiny. Such heightened examination turns pregnancy from an individual to a public experience, allowing doctors and even strangers on the street into the reproductive process. Using Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Balsamo reveals how this logic of surveillance could easily expand beyond society's have-nots, who represent an ideological testing ground of sorts, to general prescriptions defining all female bodies as "potentially maternal bodies and all pregnant bodies as inherently duplicitous and possible threatening to public health" (14).

The questions this raises:

• How do the very things we ascribe as benefits of surveillance come to be in the interest of "the public"? should it be so? how is that debate wrapped up in our cultural ideas of individualism vs communitarianism? (This is the tension between Etzioni and, say, the EFF.)
  
• How are certain people assigned the blame or responsibility for these matters of "public interest" and thus jusitified as subjects of surveillance? For example, why do we surveill suspected political activists to try to prevent terrorism rather than interrogate our public policies that might be the underlying cause of at least some terrorist activities?
• How does surveillance as a informational form appeal to our culture more than other modes of intervening in situations? How has a culture of spectacle, and especially a digital or quantifiable spectacle of manageable information, developed?
  

Software and the mundane management of air travel

Software and the mundane management of air travel in First Monday

Abstract: Over the past thirty years, the practices of everyday life have become increasingly infused with and mediated by software and captured in code. Software is increasingly embedded into objects and systems as a means to enhance and manage usage and to link together disparate and distanciated parts of an infrastructure, enabling new and refined processes. In some cases, such as air transportation, this embedding has become so pervasive and vital that if the software crashes one part of the system grinds to a halt, subsequently disrupting other aspects of air travel. In this article, we examine one part of this system, the profiling and screening of passengers, to argue that the use of software has engendered a new form of governmentality — mundane management — that is having a profound effect on the operation and regulation of air travel. The development of distributed information systems has enabled governments and air travel businesses to capture, cross–reference and regulate the ongoing status of individuals in ways that were previously difficult, if not impossible. By linking these capta together, a dense rhizomic assemblage of power/knowledge is being created; what is at best oligoptic (partial and selective) in nature is becoming more panoptic (all–seeing ). This is especially the case given the trend towards increased granularity (resolution) and uniqueness (unique identification based on biometrics) of capta, and the fact that capta stored are unlikely ever to be deleted. These systems are not without their problems, particularly with regard to civil liberties. However, new procedures and technologies have largely been greeted by the public with ambivalence or welcomed, rather than resisted.

Britain leads in surveillance among democratic states

Guardian writer calls for bounding hands of surveillance, rather than post-hoc oversight

Surveillance for safety?

Is sousveillance in which I strategically reveal my self-recordings an adequate counterprotection against spurious charges from out-of-context quotes that may be brought against me by a surveillance state?

Part of me wonders if decrying surveillance is missing the root of the problem which is that a government no longer trusts its citizens, which also misses the point that the government is supposed to work for it's citizens, at least in the US. Or that the things we surveill to protect ourselves are caused by certain policies that make some people want to aggress against us.

So if surveillance is merely mechanism employed in other causal circumstances, what are the dimensions of properties of that mechanism?

1. transparency - do people know they are being surveilled? do they know when they are being surveilled? can they find out after the fact?
2. permanence - how long will records be kept?
3. accountability - who controls the surveillance apparatus? how do they attain that position? what legal recourse is their against them?
4. context of repression - how clearly understood and enforced are laws? are laws irregularly enforced and ever changing, which means that surveillance effective acts as a mechanism for enforcing on whim?

What am I missing?

Spock seriously creeps me out

Spock.com has surmised my existence by aggregating my internet fragments

Now, juxtaposed, are my Linked In, Friendster, Livejournal, Flickr, and a bunch of other digital fragments that I rather like having just far enough apart that it requires work to get from one to another. Now, rather than having Linked In be the presumed-appropriate canonical place to find my professional info and Facebook the presumed-appropriate canonical place to find my personal info (both are services which mostly give me control over what shows up), Spock goes and mashes them all up.

Particularly irritating is that it performs what the company surely believes is a valuable service without me asking and without asking me to opt in. Instead, I discovered it one day when a contact invited me to their "spock trust" network. I felt like I'd been let in on the secret that there was a dossier out there on me that I didn't know about. From the company's strategic point of view, they feel like they have to do this because they're building social software that derives value from the completeness of the social network, so making those nodes and edges wait until the referent user opts in slows down their great plans.

The other weird thing about Spock is that other people can add information about you and vote on info that others have added. So at some level, it's almost as people were to be invited to write wikipedia articles on you. This idea of others adding information about me into the public sphere seems like both thoughtlessness and the presumption of exhibitionism.

So instead, I've taken to misinforming it. I've told it that I'm male. I don't really add information to it. I wonder what it would take to confuse it.