Researching cybersurveillance, I stumbled upon the Citizen Lab, and subsequently upon Deibert’s book, Black Code. First book to have read on Kindle, and there’s irony in this, as the more I read, the more data I produced to be collected and analyzed.
A few of the main ideas: To start with, code is law. As Marshall McLuhan postulated that the medium is the message and Harold Innis showed the bias of communications, we must understand that instructions encoded in software regulate what we can do. Second, a recent change is the movement away from searching the WWW to a push notifications environment where „information is delivered to us” through apps. Third, while in the beginning the internet seemed like a free place, hard to regulate, right now, many countries use censorship and block Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Internet censorship went from being regulated – like usual things – through law, to being regulated through code and software, and responsibility is put directly on the service providers. For example, China has a particular way of doing this: it sends back to the user an error message, as if the content itself doesn’t exist (Google found a way around this, suggesting users alternate spellings). We must begin to understand and connect the dots, as users and as citizens: the internet is international, but its cables are everywhere, its central nodes are everywhere – but mostly around the US – and the devices we use are from specific nations – bending to specific national laws. From a lawless place, it has became a place of many, many laws. Fourth, the future is at least partly out of the West’s hands. The growing populations of the rest of the world will have access to the net, along with living in increasing inequality due to climate change and capitalism’s mechanism, so the question Deibert asks is, what kind of web will they craft? As the author shows, in some countries governments outsource to extra-legal intervention groups to deal with unrurly citizens. Coming back to corporations, Google has started issuing transparency reports, showing the number of requests it has received from governments to censor or remove content, and highlighting those it complied with or turned down (most requests are „other requests”, not issued through a court order). Most companies don’t tell users if their data is asked for by the government. In 2002 and 2004, Chinese government requested information on two dissidents from Yahoo!, who complied. When being sued by the families in the US, the company testified that it was following local law. Skype, as well, uses content filtering for China, and can be intercepted, although it promises end to end encryption. After 9/11, a key point in the cybersurveillance debate, governments felt entitled to more and more of citizen’s information, creating the false tradeoff: privacy vs security. Human Rights Watch found that the UN passed several resolutions urging member states to pass laws that expand government powers to „investigate, arrest, detain, and prosecute individuals at the expense of due process”. With enough data, a Minority Report future isn’t just dystopian fiction anymore – politically inclined individuals can be monitored before they do anything. Researcher Chris Soghoian pointed out that some companies even charge fees for „lawful access”, with automated process. Cybercrime is real, and just like most crime, its structure is knotted in complicated patterns and networks – many „cyberweapons” (spying software, malware for breaking in, or just hiring a black hat to hack someone) are cheap and easy to buy on the internet, and, as Deibert puts it, how can the West condemn the Syrian Electronic Army when it openly markets computer network attack products at trade shows? Besides, when cyberweapons are perceived as clean, there might be „strong pressures to adopt military over diplomatic solutions”. Technology is multi-puroposed, and the same is used for surveillance of dangerous targets or of peace activists. Hacking used to have a more positive value – „of experimentation and exploration of limits and possibilities”. Technology can be seen not as a thing, but as a craft, inherently political. In the context of our constant connectedness, the increasing restrictions on cyberspace „are alarming”. The closing off of hardware and software and putting on copyright or other laws to diminish access to them are not only barriers to our freedoms, but ultimately to our security as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has found laws (in debate – Article 3 of DAAIS in Europe) that limit the publishing of research on security flaws. The denial of access to knowledge is increasing, together with the tools to dismantle it. One solution could take the form of a distributed model: mixture of multiple actors with governance roles, division of control with cooperation and consent, and restraint. Without humans „cyberspace would not exist”. Deibert pushes for a position of joint custodianship: we either degrade cyberspace, or we extend it. The responsibility is inter-generational.
I also finished Program or be programmed by Rushkoff. It’s a kind of manifesto for the digital age, with ten main “commandments”, which I quite enjoyed - an easy read, fast and recommended for anyone interested in what it means to live online. Rushkoff is a character, writing that “instead of optimizing our machines for humanity ... we are optimizing humans for machinery”. The base for the ten commands are the biases inherent in the technology we use. First, ‘do not always be on’, as machines live beyond time, from decision to decision, while we live in the present, continuously flowing, so, “by becoming “always on”, we surrender time to a technology that knows and needs no such thing”. Second, ‘live in person’, be local, be there, where you are - technology is biased towards distance, non-space, and scaling. Third, ‘you may always choose none of the above’, as technology draws lines that are too simple, categorizing or binary through our lives, we can refuse all options, or label freely, with tags. Fourth, ‘you are never completely right’, because, “thanks to its first three biases, digital technology encourages us to make decisions, make them in a hurry, and make them about things we’ve never seen ourselves up close”. It is “biased towards a reduction of complexity”. Rushkoff stresses that we should opt for a world in which we learn about our technology, not a world in which it learns about us. Fifth, ‘one size does not fit all’, because this hyper-abstracted model of internet business doesn’t work for smaller start-ups. Sixth, ‘be yourself’, because while anonymity can protect you, it can also make people behave irresponsibly, facilitating angry and revengeful mobs. Seventh, ‘do not sell your friends’, exposes the internet’s bias towards connection rather than content, and how businesses are making money off it. Eighth, ‘tell the truth’, “because this will increase our value to others”, and besides, lies don’t last long. Ninth, ‘share, don’t steal’, shows how our belief in open sharing has lead to the current business model based on ads, and how we should support the work we consume directly. Tenth, and most importantly, ‘program or be programmed’, because if you don’t understand the inner workings, or at least the superficial biases of the technology you use, it will bias you towards certain things, and you’ll never know why.
When I find the time, I plunge into Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Men without Women - a gift from my cousin. I re-read the first story, which I hear a few years ago at a “Vocea cititorului” meeting - “Drive my car”. This time, I enjoyed it more. I guess I read the book with a kind of nostalgia, but also detachment. Murakami used to be a favorite of mine in high school, and although I’ve always sensed his novels are far better than his short stories, I have a feeling now I wouldn’t like those as much as I did back then. Men without women is a collection of stories about exactly this - lonely men, left by women in one way or another. I think they’re a bit like writing exercises, in which Murakami tries this and that, typical characters and settings of his, on jazz or Beatles music. None of them contain anything too surreal, maybe just a smokey atmosphere. “Yesterday” is about the narrator’s relationship with his peculiar friend and his girlfriend, “The independent Organ” is about a doctor that is constantly in romantic relationships, for short time and without engagement, with married women, “Sheherezade” contains a woman taking care of a man who can’t go out for some mysterious reason and telling him stories of her youth, “Kino” is about a man whose wife cheats on him so he leaves and opens a bar, “Samsa in love” is, well, a bug turned into a man, and “Men without women” is the narrative of a man who gets a phone call about the death of a love from his youth. I most liked “Kino”, for its emotional, fantastic ending, and “Samsa in love”, because it’s such a nice stretch of the imagination, and kind of lovely all in all.
