Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Yeah, what Cory said, about the power imbalances.  "Surveiilance"
isn't the same thing as "awareness."   The mechanisms of the
recording media may be technically and objectively identical, but
things get "seen" within different political contexts.  

 If  I'm snooping through people's bedroom windows with my
telescope, it's not because I'm an anthropologist, or a designer
doing user observation studies.  I'm seeking an illicit thrill
because I've violating social norms and it gives me a feeling of
voyeuristic power over the observed.

Last year, during the SOTW, I wrote an essay about the  basic
weakness of real surveillance societies, of totalitarian police
states.  Even though they spy on stuff incessantly, they don't *see*
stuff.  People aren't allowed to notice what's actually going on
lived experience.  It's very hard to get anything useful and
constructive accomplished under those conditions; the society
doesn't prosper, it's poor.   The "surveillance" doesn't get
important people up to speed with what's happening; it's not
journalism or statistics.   Totalitarian spying is destructive
tittle-tattle, abused for purposes of  palace intrigue.  

It's like trying to hire spies to paint your house.  The spies are
very sharp-eyed, but it's all about:  "I found a dirty corner! 
Look, there's a scary spiderweb on the ceiling!"  Where is the fresh
paint?  Every house in Stalin's Moscow looks morbid and gray.  And
does Stalin even notice the greatest real threat to his power: that
Hitler's about to kick his ass?  No: he's got plenty of clues, but
he doesn't notice them.
  

    
On the subject of creepy assholes, here's an excellent work of
satirical design fiction on the subject of, well, creepy assholes. 
This video is about Silicon Valley's habits of glibly chipping,
chipping, chipping away at social norms of privacy in order to line
their own pockets.   Hey look: the sewer is a network, too! Why not
monitor the network?  It's modern, it's helpful, privacy is dead,
get over it!

http://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ
  

    
Question by Halleluja:

"What might be desirable about everyone having access to
everyone's data everywhere? "Privacy" seems like water in a sieve
now; could universal sunlight mitigate the corrosive effects of
unequal access to data? How weird might it be to have such intimate
knowledge of one another in real time? What stabilizing effects
might evolve from such a situation?

*Well, this is a David Brin issue; he's a sci-fi writer, so he's
quite keen on this neat, paradoxical, sci-fi table-turning plot
twist approach in which we're just as powerful as the NSA if we've
somehow all got the NSA's cameras.

*I don't doubt that Silicon Valley would love to have the NSA's
hardware and software.  They'd cheerfully throw a hundred Snowdens
to the dogs for the chance to privatize and commercialize that vast
secret taxpayer-finances apparatus.  They'd "democratize" the
"access" in their rather rough and ready Stack fashion, much like
"you" have all the "access" to everything in iTunes.  Because, wow,
iTunes is all about pleasing you, the almighty consumer.  The
problem is that the idea is fraudulent; you're not a citizen of
iTunes. You have no structure of rights within iTunes.

*The David Brin solution to the existent state of the Stone Age
Sentinelese is to equip them all with telephoto cameras.  Okay, what
about the interests of the Sentinelese?  They're not participants. 
If we use the "everybody's data everywhere" argument, it sidelines
anyone anywhere who doesn't want to participate in the
data-crunching.  The spooks and geeks have napalmed the public
sphere in their own power-struggle.

Who's the "Us" in the democratic "Us" versus "Them" here?  There's a
lot of non-"us" in that "us," people who are neatly amputated
because the whole issue becomes a squabble over the almighty
keyboard.   Civility is't just about how you treat political
competitors.  It's also about how you treat the entities who must
necessarily exist in your civilization but aren't grabbing the
steering wheel:  children, the elderly, foreigners, the sick, the
mentally retarded… even domestic animals and crop plants. How are
they supposed to exist under conditions of radical surveillance
ubiquity?  They're just as surveilled as the geek/spook
power-players, but they will never get any look-in.  They are sub
humanized.
  

    

*This happens to be a major issue in my Turinese smart house
project.  What's a home without a two-year-old?  Kids live in homes.
But everybody who's had a two-year-old around knows that her primary
response to technology is "why can't Mr Fork and Miss Wall Socket be
friends?" Kids are not deft power users.  Kids are naive,
exploratory, rambunctious.

*But how are the welfare, the interests, of two-year-olds reflected
in that system's design?  

*You can look at the commercials for existent smart-house systems
and you can see that it's all about relentless, remote-control,
helicopter-cop parental suppression of the kids.  Every aspect of
that system is designed to coax money from potential buyers, by
intensifying Mom's kid-safety anxieties and playing to Dad's
early-adopter geek control fetish.   

*I have never yet seen a smart-home design that would make a
two-year-old happier and healthier.   They're not about "smartness,"
they are frozen digital reifications of the power relationships that
are already there.
  

    
*Check out this promotional video, for one instance among a great
many.  Look at who gets to "see" whose face here, with the aid of
computer-vision system.  It's allegedly all about the warm and cozy
home life, but who gets recognized and who doesn't get recognized? 
This system is a face-filter hooked to nagware.  

*Where's the Brin solution for the household here, where family life
has been (as Adam Greenfield once deftly put it) "reified with a
clunky intensity?"  The warmth and ease of existent family life is
harmed because the geek-spook power has been clustered exclusively
around the purchaser.

*Do the kids get a message whenever Mom might arrive?  Can the kids
sneak their own friends into the house?  The kids used to have that
informal privilege, but in the new regime, that's been pruned off as
neatly as iTunes prunes tape-swapping.

https://www.netatmo.com/en-US/product/camera#view3
  

    
"Civility is't just about how you treat political competitors. It's also
about how you treat the entities who must necessarily exist in your
civilization but aren't grabbing the steering wheel"

This is why the term "taxpayer" is such a poor substitute for "people" (as
in, "we must respect the taxpayers' right to have an accountable education
system"). It implies that your relationship to the state is as a customer,
and that the "better" a customer you are (the more you spend) the more
legitimacy should be imparted to your priorities and views on the state.

Some of the people with the most intense relationship to the state pay no
tax at all: the elderly, children, prisoners... If we link your right to
steer the state to the extent to which you pay into the state, then none of
these people have *any* rights, and these are the people who have the most
need to have affirmative rights in relationship to the government.

This is why it's obnoxious to tell a cop (or other employee) that "I pay
your salary, you know." Not because that means that you aren't getting value
for money, but because it implies that the police's primary duty is to
supply a competitive service in a marketplace of coercive force -- not to
uphold the rule of law as laid down by a legitimate, democratic state. "I
have inalienable rights because I'm a human being" may be more of a
mouthful, but it is far more true than any nonsense about who is paying
whose salary.

Here's an example of how the state *should* work to affirm the rights of
people on the grounds that they're humans, not as a customer-loyalty
program:

http://boingboing.net/2013/12/10/uk-kids-have-the-right-to-opt.html
  

    
I'd rather have video of an assault than not have it.

I'd rather have my own video camera than need to rely on
police or municipal ones.

Yes it's necessary but not sufficient. It's also inevitable,
because the cameras will get smaller and cheaper until it's
considered weird to not have one, just like it's now weird
to not have a cellphone.

Discussing whether or not people *should* wear lapel cams is
not interesting - they will. More interesting would be discussing
what's public space and what's private space, and how do we
enforce the distinction.

iOn SnapCam: <http://www.cnet.com/pictures/action-cam-maker-ion-gets-into-wearables-with-the
-tiny-snapcam-pictures/>
1.5" square, tap once for a still pic, twice for video, three times
to stream. Should sell for $150. Next year, $50. Year after that, one
will come with your new phone, no separate charge.
  

    
"Discussing whether or not people *should* wear lapel cams is
 not interesting - they will."

Lots of people own telescopes. Most of us don't point them through our
neighbors' windows.

The technology's adoption may be foregone conclusion, but its use is not.
  

    
I suspect that the widespread use of dash cameras in Russia is a good
example of mass civilian surveilance.  WIRED did a short article on
them last year after the meteor strike in Russia:
<http://www.wired.com/2013/02/russian-dash-cams/>

The cameras aren't coordinated in any way except for time and
location, after an event it's easy for people to volunteer (or hide)
their recording of the event.
  

    
My concern about surveillance isn’t about cameras or wiretaps or
“celltaps,” it’s about algorithms. Consider that there are 327
million or more cellphones in the U.S., more than one per person.
It’s theoretically possible to gather and retain data on cellular
communications, most practically metadata about location and
connection. Storage restrictions probably limit the amount of data
it’s reasonable to persist, but data’s being collected, stored, and
made accessible to various law enforcement agencies. They may be
searching for specific numbers and zeroing in on proximities and
movements - doing some granular tracking. But you could also make
broader use of the data if you had sophisticated algorithms for
pattern analysis. 

Law enforcement reps may tell you that they would only use the
cellular data they collect to catch crooks. But considering
Watergate, what might Nixon have done with a lot of data and some
smart algorithms? 

And where cameras are concerned, I’m sure the algorithms for
analyzing visual data are smart and getting smarter. 

Smarter analysis isn’t fail-safe, we’ll almost certainly have some
number of Archibald Buttle incidents. (Buttle was the cobbler,
because of a literal bug in the bureaucratic process,  accidentally
jailed, tortured, and killed in the film "Brazil"). 

But surveillance analysis can also be a thumb on the scale of our
supposedly democratic system of justice.
  

    
> analyzing visual data are smart and getting smarter. 

I think it will always get smarter, the bit we're not ready for is how
much cheaper it is.  License plate tracking in the US is something the
average person probably doesn't know much about and it's gone from an
expensive project I worked on in the mid 90s to something every local
law enforcement agency can deploy.

ALCU has a good summary of how the use of plate readers in the US:
<https://www.aclu.org/alpr>.  However, they don't address what happens
when an officer can go from a license plate to the Internet while
they're driving down the street.

Last month a friend of mine was visiting a relative in another state
and they had some car problems that put them on the side of the road.
Officer stopped to help sort things out and while that was happening
my friend noticed that their personal web site was on display in the
police car's laptop.
  

    
Got this via email from my friend Joseph Rowe, who is (among other
things) a musician living in France and performing with his wife,
Catherine Braslavsky. Quoted with permission. He had attached some
of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but the WELL doesn't have image
support per se, so I can't add them here.

Joseph's letter:

        Please forgive the group mail, but since many of you who live in
the Anglophone world have asked me about the horror of January 7th,
2015, and its bloody aftermath (as I began to write this, I learned
that the murderers were finally caught and killed by police), and
since I often meet the public in my work, I thought you (even those
who haven't heard from me for awhile) might like to hear my take on
how it feels to be living in Paris at this traumatic time.
 
        _Charlie Hebdo_ (hebdo is slang for weekly) isn't some tiny,
offbeat humor mag --- it has long been a part of the lives of all
Parisians with dissident and progressive worldviews, and many other
readers as well. It was always pushing the limits, managing to
offend, at one time or another, every imaginable worldview and taste
(it even succeeded in disgusting me on a few occasions, which isn't
easy to do ...) Charlie wasn't exactly a source of deep wisdom, but
it was absolutely brilliant and hilarious, and I cherished its
existence, and often bought it.  One cowardly, barbaric act of
organized insanity not only murdered its whole staff, it thereby
decimated the elite community of France's most talented cartoonists.
The artists ranged in age from 40 (Charb, editor of the magazine) to
80 (Wolinski, who is one of my all-time favorite cartoonists
anywhere). 

        Catherine and I happen to be in the middle of a run of nightly
performances of _De Jérusalem à Cordoue (From Jerusalem to
Cordoba)_, returning this season after a 10-year long absence in
Paris. After over 450 performances in 6 countries (though mostly in
France) it has acquired a small reputation as a kind of message of
peace, religious tolerance, and unity --- perhaps especially because
it had its première in the aftermath of 9-11, and emphasizes the
peace-loving, mystical, Sufic side of Islam (which of course is
Islam's true meaning). Because of this, some people (not many!) went
so far as to wonder if we might do better to cancel or suspend
performances until things calm down, due to the strong emotions
currently running in the French psychosphere. But we didn't even
consider such a thing. To do so would be to concede to forces of
darkness, reaction, and fear. And as it turned out, we've had good
audiences and very moving feedback. Above all, we're happy to report
that the general French reaction to this horror has been one of
unprecedented solidarity, courage, and intelligence.  (The Imam of
France not only condemned the act in the strongest terms, but
characterized the victims as "martyrs for freedom".) I've rarely
seen this country (with its multiple ethnic communities and its own
well-known anarchic tendencies) so united, including the Muslim
community. In other words, the reaction is exactly the opposite of
what the assassins and their equally insane puppet-masters hoped
for. When I learned yesterday (hearing a gigantic peal of church
bells coming from the direction of Notre-Dame) that the Diocese of
Paris was holding a major mass for the victims, I was both deeply
touched and amused --- many Catholics had been outraged by Charlie's
caricatures of Christianity (the Pope was one of their favorite
targets.)

        Before our performances, I made this announcement:

        _Nous voudrions dédier cette représentation aux martyrs de la
liberté d'expression. Dans les textes du spectacle de ce soir, on
retrouve des mots comme "Dieu" ou "Allah." Pour nous, le sens de ces
mots n'a absolument aucun rapport avec les mêmes sons dans la bouche
d'un extrêmiste._

        Trans: We wish to dedicate this performance to the martyrs for
freedom of speech. In the texts of tonight's performance, one may
hear words such as "God" or "Allah." For us, the meaning of these
words has absolutely no relation to the same sounds in the mouths of
extremists.
  

    

yeah, I have to disagree that cost of storage is a
factor limiting the analysis of 327 million pocket
sized input streams.

Any takers on the idea that surveillance as it exists
today is an early step in assessing global rates
of demand for resources, and will be used to award
resources to those deemed most productive/deserving by 
the algorithm of the week?  

The middle class isn't dying, it's exploding.  
We'll need to manage consumption or we're toast.

<bruces>, very happy to hear about your civilized life
in Torino.  You deserve it. 
  

    
Facial recognition used to be exclusive to national security orgs. Now
Facebook offers it to everyone, within their walled garden. Not too much
longer until it escapes from the garden. All sorts of new apps become
possible when your phone can not just record but realtime-identify
everyone around you.
  

    
Apple offers it to OS X customers as part of their photo apps. 
  

    <scribbled by debunix Sat 10 Jan 15 19:58>
  

    
More via email from Hallelujah:

"Democratization of ubiquitous surveillance" is something of an
oxymoron then. The feeling of omniscience I get when using Google
masks the power imbalance that I'm actually exacerbating by using
Google (or not). But that genie's out of the bottle, right? People
who are able will deploy some privacy enhancement techniques, but
the continuing trend will be what McLuhan called "psychic surgery
without anesthetic" on the whole human race.

The street has its own uses for the spooky tools as they trickle
down and become more pervasive and automated. Like Cory says, the
reasons most of us don't literally look through people's
walls--yet--are normative, not technological. Employers, parents and
potential dating partners routinely check people out already though,
to the extent they can do so surreptitiously. What I want to ask is
how will society evolve in response to widespread use of, for
example, some advanced and invisible version of Google Glass that
provides hyperaugmentation of the user's physical and intellectual
perceptions. Do persons and objects become numinous to the viewer
when he can fine-tune his expert system of second sight, when his
machines can predict with high precision other people's emotions and
thoughts and proximate actions in real time? Does a child's backyard
become Encyclopedia Brittanica? Is the floor of the cage widened? Or
is totalitarianism so enabled that it comes, inevitably and
inexorably?
  

    
"I have to disagree that cost of storage is a factor limiting the
analysis of 327 million pocket sized input streams."

That's not exactly what I said. I was talking about a potential
practical limit on the persistence of data, not the analysis. That
might be more of an indirect limit, in that the scope of analysis
could have  temporal limitation.

Re-reading what I posted, I did get something ~wrong: I said it was
theoretically possible, but the metadata, at least, is being
gathered, stored, and provided to law enforcement agencies. There
are so many law enforcement requests for cellular metadata that
providers have created whole divisions to service those requests. In
many states and at the Federal level, there's movement to require
judicial oversight, in the form of a warrant, to obtain the data.
Currently agencies can get the data via subpoena.
  

    
Spending the day going through entries for the Turinese electronic
art fair.  Normally they are screamingly leftwing political,
everything critically abrasive and subversive.  Scarcely a whisper
of that in the entries this year.  There seems to be a weird vogue
for electronic things done with potted plants.  I wonder what
happened to the European tech-art community.
  

    
*A top fed, Edith Ramirez, weighs in on the "significant risks" of
the Internet of Things.  A speech from the floor of the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is where the feds have to go on
pilgrimage nowadays just like everybody else.

http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/617191/150106cessp
eech.pdf
  

    
I'm fascinated by human diversity.

Real people:
http://www.humansofnewyork.com/
"...  daily glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City."

http://www.juxtapoz.com/photography/taxi-by-mike-harvey
"I wanted to document the lottery of people that occupied the taxi
space, and the experiences that taxi driving gave me. Whether it be
rushing a pregnant woman to hospital or being regaled stories of
World War II by an elderly passenger, the taxi provided a space to
meet, converse with, and learn from people."
  

    
I posted this in another conference, but thought you might want to
weigh in on this article from the Chicago Tribune this Sunday
Morning...

Why does Marriott want to jam your Wi-Fi?
Phil Rosenthal
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
philrosenthal​@chicagotribune.com
1/10/15
Marriott and the hotel industry's American Hospitality & Lodging
Association are asking that the Federal Communications Commission —
and by extension, all of us — trust them when it comes to what they
want to do with Wi-Fi access on their premises.

If you have reservations, they'd like you to cancel them.

But as this is the travel business, be forewarned this change may
cost you.
The hotels say they want to be allowed to monitor and control how
customers connect to the Internet with their laptops and other
portable devices. They say they would never render all but their own
Wi-Fi services inoperative unless it was absolutely necessary to
thwart cybersecurity threats.
--snip--
The argument lodging people make is they want to be able to monitor
and, if necessary, jam Wi-Fi hot spots used in their meeting and
conference spaces that aren't authorized and can be used or co-opted
to hack a computer or device.
"Hotels need to be able to protect the personal data and information
of their guests," Maryam Cope, the industry lobbying group's vice
president of government affairs, said in a statement.

"Our petition asks the FCC to provide clear rules so that hotels can
take all reasonable steps necessary to manage and protect their
guest's data without fear of legal penalty."

Through this prism, it's all in the name of security, like an
in-room safe, an amenity some may find of dubious value for which
some hotels charge guests regardless of whether they're ever used.


"The question at hand is what measures a network operator can take
to detect and contain rogue and impostor Wi-Fi hot spots," Marriott
said. "The entire hotel industry is seeking clarity from the FCC
regarding what lawful measures a network operator can take to
prevent such attacks from occurring."
--snip-
Giants are lined up on either side because of the stakes.

Cisco is with the hotels.

Google and Microsoft are opposed.
--snip--

<http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/ct-rosenthal-wifi-0111-biz-2
0150110-column.html?dssReturn&z=60613>

or
<https://tinyurl.com/mnds7zn>

registration may be required.
  

    
http://www.petnet.io

*A great example of pets in the "connected home" being shifted from
the status of household family members to automatons.  

*Gizmos like this should be a positive boon to crazy cat-ladies. 
With a phalanx of those devices and a budget, you could adopt and
feed four or five hundred semi-feral stray cats and scarcely have to
leave your walker.
  

    
*The ever-surprising Pope is getting mothers to breastfeed inside
the Sistine Chapel.

http://news.yahoo.com/pope-francis-breastfeed-sistine-chapel-164950638.html
  

    

howdy, folks, i'm just catching up here and have a few things to throw into
the conversation. 

jonl, Stefan Jones, evy, and others were discussing aspects of smart homes.
for a while, i blogged for Syfy.com, a column loosely associated with their
show Eureka. one of my first pieces was about Frances Gabe of Newberg,
Oregon. i hasten to point out that no, the self-cleaning house she came up
with was not designed by the inventor husband that Stefan thought he
remembered from a newspaper article: Frances grew up in the construction
industry and is entirely responsible for her invention. 

Syfy kept my blog around after Eureka went off the air, but alas, looks
like the archives aren't around any more, or i'd direct you there. i can
direct you to this link: http://www.csmonitor.com/1982/0512/051235.html 
and quote from it: 

"The inventor says she has been a builder for as long as she can remember,
visiting her contractor-father at work sites at the age of three. As a
result she has worked as a builder for most of her adult life. She also has
found time for such artistic things as sculpture and painting.....Mrs. Gabe
lives alone in her studio - with her two dogs, Megan and Saxon - doing
nearly all the construction work herself. She attributes her inventiveness
to what she calls ''round vision,'' explaining: ''When I look at your face,
I see the back of your head.''