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.
besos,
david
On Wednesday, January 22, 2014, David Keenan <
dkeenan44@gmail.com> wrote:
This is awesome. Thanks Eddan! I will gratefully read what you've forwarded.
Re: speaking on behalf of groups, I appreciate your caution. I should have been more clear, my effort here is specifically not to speak on behalf of this or that group. Im seeking only to deliver an argument pure and simple about the negatives of the DAC specifically into the hands of people in local govt so they can make use of it themselves, in other words, enable them to articulately represent their own personal interest with regards remediating this issue, and specifically not get caught up in the politics of representation or who all is for or against, which can get sticky to say the least.
Regarding the juridical sphere, review there is of course entirely germane, but what im hoping to produce is not a legal brief but more like a 3-5page policy position against the DAC in layman's terms: A summary of the project, its glossed-over overreach, and its unanswered questions in ways that are moral-political (youll be collecting far more info on everyday folks than youre inferring, and this is wrong) and legal (this abridges our specific constitutional legal right and/or state/local laws in x ways).
I had no doubt that discussions were already under way amongst all manner of groups attuned to the precarious state of civil liberties, and so im excited to be able to join in on the conversation and do what i can to contribute. This being but one way. This is not a collaborationalist posture, simply a pragmatic one in my view, and one of many equally-effective approaches we have at our disposal -
looking forward,
david
On Wednesday, January 22, 2014,
eddan.com <
eddan@sudoroom.tv> wrote:
Additionally, in regards to speaking on behalf of these groups - I would recommend looking into the limitations and reporting requirements for political lobbying for traditional 501(c)(3)s like Sudo Room & BAPS -before proceeding too far, especially with the status pending.
eddan,
thank you for this! i will come to sudo tonight. Is the meeting at 6:30, or what is the time?
What is needed are white papers against the dac, that set out clearly the actual scope of the dac and stake out our position against it in point-by-point terms at the level of moral-political logic. Does anything like that exist?
Showing up at public comment at council meetings is fine, but frankly at the same time the attitudes of some at public comment also has had a tendency to just piss off the various people in govt who are also against the dac and mostly ignore the content. These people, various aides and such, who really are on our side, need be able to articulate arguments against the dac in a noncombative manner, that can be framed in a language that isnt polemical or too emotional but simply sensible.
Im going to start a working group / class out of baps on this also -
best,
david
On Wednesday, January 22, 2014,
eddan.com <
eddan@sudoroom.tv> wrote:
Hi David & Sudo folk -
Just wanted to remind folks that the Oakland Privacy Working Group (meeting tonight at Sudo Room) has been trying to coordinate a robust and effective response to the Oakland DAC funding in this crucial several week window at the City Council.
It is of course important for everyone who's willing to work to try and stop this to do what they can. It might be helpful though to make sure coordination is taking place so that one part of our collective effort isn't seen as legitimizing a process we are trying to shut down by supporting it through fixing it.