Man, that is hard to beat for hardcore spookpunk. It shows so much contempt for Jobs and his hippie-freedom rubbish that there’s something endearing about it. I wonder how old this NSA technician is, and what he reads on his off hours.
via Bruce Sterling
and what we’ll see more of. https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5
He is probably (hopefully) right that we’re going to see more and more of these kinds of dissidents, and possibly wrong about the fact that activists got it all wrong.
What about the claim that they (which extends to, I guess, ‘we’ as artists) would be
utterly thrilled to have the NSA’s vast technical power at their own command.
Are we, too,
electronic first, and civil as a very distant second
?
Next term @ Surveillant Architectures: The Future
“behold the future of drone countermeasures”
Q: Is it possible to put security in place to protect against state surveillance?
A: “You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.”
He is deeply worried about being spied on. He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.
Though that may sound like paranoia to some, Snowden has good reason for such fears. He worked in the US intelligence world for almost a decade. He knows that the biggest and most secretive surveillance organisation in America, the NSA, along with the most powerful government on the planet, is looking for him.
…, and as a result, “I got hardened.”
“…our inability to describe and understand technological infrastructure reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.”
James Bridle
“Again it comes back to infrastructure and how our inability to describe and understand reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.
Opacity is an important word here too, as is the term ‘black box’. Most of our engineered communications infrastructure is not just extraordinarily abstract for people to come to grips with but is actively kept hidden. There are some valid reasons, of course, for keeping infrastructure hidden but the fact is it out of sight is being increasingly exploited in and out of supposedly democratic contexts, largely by surveillance initiatives we were never told about.
Engendering a healthy paranoia here, along with making work that ruptures the featureless skin of these black boxes – providing points of entry – is important to me currently. Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it. ‘The Cloud’ is a good example of a dangerous simplification at work, akin to a children’s book. Such convenient reductions will be expensive in time as some corporations and governments continue to both engineer – and take advantage of – ignorance.”
The always excellent Bruce Schneier (who coined the term “security theater”) in a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center (video and transcript). About the Internet and Power, and technological advances that set into motion events no could can possibly predict. In his own words:
What I’ve Been Thinking About
I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:
1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes — aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything — resulting in a world without any real privacy.
2. The rise of nationalism on the Internet and a cyberwar arms race, both of which play on our fears and which are resulting in increased military involvement in our information infrastructure.
3. Ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, either to prop up their business models (copyright protections), enable more surveillance (increased police access to data), or control our actions in cyberspace.
4. A feudal model of security that leaves users with little control over their data or computing platforms, forcing them to trust the companies that sell the hardware, software, and systems.
On the one hand, we need new regimes of trust in the information age. (I wrote about the extensively in my most recent book,Liars and Outliers.) On the other hand, the risks associated with increasing technology might mean that the fear of catastrophic attack will make us unable to create those new regimes.
It is clear to me that we as a society are headed down a dangerous path, and that we need to make some hard choices about what sort of world we want to live in. It’s not clear if we have the social or political will to address those choices, or even have the conversations necessary to make them. But I believe we need to try.
Three developments for greater mass surveillance powers, by a government, a corporation and a UN body.
1. Public Buses Across Country Quietly Adding Microphones to Record Passenger Conversations
Not to forget, no one in particular needs to listen to all these recordings. Homeland Security algorithms do that. (Thank you, Moore’s Law!)
2. How to get targeted ads on your TV? Try a camera in your set-top box.
Seriously? A camera watching you watch TV? Baffling stuff.
George O. should have patented the idea in 1948!
3. Leaked: ITU’s secret Internet surveillance standard discussion draft
Authoritarian regimes worldwide teaming up with a UN telecommunications body relic to get the internet under control once and for all. There’s a list of what could be possible by deep packet inspection (referred to as DPI in that article), once installed at the net’s central nodes. Scary stuff. We’d all have to go dark web, which I’d prefer not to. The future? Not if I can help it.
Hilarious: You can tell surveillance cameras are implanted into mannequin heads when they wear… sunglasses!
Frank Rieger about the look of tomorrow’s wars (in German), and an interview with Daniel Suarez, author of „Kill Decision“.
Talking points & new terms learnt today:
Plus: Screenshots from Spiegel Online today:
