Also, fwiw I do have some familiarity with the state of academic and academic-y work being done on the problem of survelliance and privacy in general. And I have to say, of what ive read anyhow, its a pretty impoverished body of work with respect to the challenges before us.
With the exception of someone like Schneier, who's at least on the right track, most of the (legal) academia for example has not been helpful in framing the issue for the general public, ie politically.
To wit, I remember reading Solove's topology of 12 kinds of privacy or whatever it was, it was just far too complicated to be useful or memorable to anyone and was anyhow imo a bit too far removed from how privacy is actually experienced at the phenomenal level in everyday life.
Then at the level of US case law pertaining to the 4th's penumbra, which i have read extensively, again and again we have an abstraction of an expectation of privacy thats just so incredibly weak that its frankly not worth translating much of its reasoning into any quotidian political arguments that have a hope of being politically effective. In my view, only by the verbal gymnastics of a very few sympathetic, forward-thinking judges in the past has privacy as a legal concept continued to be viable, and by the skin pf its teeth at that. So with regards influencing politicians and public opinion, I'm not sure the legal domain is the well of ideas to be drawing from - more like, one we actually have to fill with new ideas of our own, 'cause its still such a primordial muddy swamp of intangibility even after decades and decades..
Meanwhile most of the efforts in popular nonfiction around privacy are laudable, but ultimately zero-gain attempts to even adequately describe the problem, let alone begin to develop prescriptive arguments against it. One after another i put them on my shelf never to be looked at again, because they contain almost no ideas that can be deployed at the level of political action. And invariably fail to describe the scope of the problem with which we're faced, which actually exceeds the concept of privacy as such -- or of 'safety', or of 'security', or 'secrecy', or even of 'anonymity'. Imo, each one of these terms is impoverished with respect to the totality pf what is happening, and how it affects our life chances.
At that big cryptoparty that baps & sudo co-hosted, Danny (EFF) bemoaned our inability to make the invisibile (survelliance) visible and actually felt at the level of language and moral politics, as did Moxie, in his own words. So to me, and i think to a lot of other people, this represents a paradigmatic challenge, and my impetus for the baps class on the subject. Talking with anti-DAC activists, ive found we are to a person sorely lacking the language to concisely describe whats actually wrong with the DAC. This lack is not coincidental - we lack effective language, or effective semantic frames, to describe the problem of surveillence in general, and this is a real big part of the reason it has continued unabated. We need to start generating a paradigm for the problem that works - not rely on dead metaphors dredged from Orwell or Kafka or Foucault, but come up with a new description of this survellience apparatus as encompassing as the Situationists' idea of the Spectacle, but intuitive and not opaqu or abstruse. I think we can do this because privacy is something every single person on earth already deeply understands at a felt level. Theres just a disconnect that happens when our 'privacy' or rather our sense of being-in-the-world is ever-informationalized and increasingly mediated by tech -- tech thats not 'experienced' or felt as such, but still affects us and our life chances..
I look forward to reading the articles you forwarded in the hopes of finding or concocting a simple working paper on the DAC's evils, a fact sheet of sorts that is dispossessed of personal representation or overtly political affiliation, that isnt couched in a hermaneutic or a specific argot or a mostly technical domain, but is instead simply clarifying in the venn-diagram area of overlap to which all these areas of focus against the DAC / surveillance at some point intersect and depend upon.