Martin Wolf is one of my favourite columnists. This is his verdict on the two contenders for power in the forthcoming election.
So is the US really going to rein in the spooks?
Hmmm… Only in so far as they surveill Americans at home. Today’s New York Times reports that
On Thursday, a bill that would overhaul the Patriot Act and curtail the so-called metadata surveillance exposed by Edward J. Snowden was overwhelmingly passed by the House Judiciary Committee and was heading to almost certain passage in that chamber this month.
An identical bill in the Senate — introduced with the support of five Republicans — is gaining support over the objection of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who is facing the prospect of his first policy defeat since ascending this year to majority leader.
Under the bills, the Patriot Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection, and sweeps that had operated under the guise of so-called National Security Letters issued by the F.B.I. would end. The data would instead be stored by the phone companies themselves, and could be accessed by intelligence agencies only after approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.
The legislation would also create a panel of experts to advise the FISA court on privacy, civil liberties, and technology matters, while requiring the declassification of all significant FISA court opinions.
Neither bill will, however, do anything to end the unrestricted surveillance of non-Americans, i.e the rest of the world, whose privacy, and therefore their civil liberties, will continue to be infringed by the US, without let or hindrance.
Networked echo chambers
Lots of people, including Cass Sunstein
Nick Corasaniti thinks that use of the ‘Unfollow’ button on social media may be the way in which people now construct their own echo chambers.
With the presidential race heating up, a torrent of politically charged commentary has flooded Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, with some users deploying their “unfollow” buttons like a television remote to silence distasteful political views. Coupled with the algorithm now powering Facebook’s news feed, the unfollowing is creating a more homogenized political experience of like-minded users, resulting in the kind of polarization more often associated with MSNBC or Fox News. And it may ultimately deflate a central promise of the Internet: Instead of offering people a diverse marketplace of challenging ideas, the web is becoming just another self-perpetuating echo chamber.
The sociology of online cruelty
Interesting NYT piece by Nick Bilton, which starts by outlining the way in which the Net has become a machine for amplifying cruelty but finishes on a more nuanced note, suggesting that maybe we should be researching the social dynamics of this kind of mob behaviour.
In the early days of Twitter, I jumped into the fray a few times myself. But since then, having been on the receiving end of several Internet mobs, I think twice before piling on.
Some people I know who were once attacked by a mob now reach out to whomever is the Internet’s piñata of the week, telling them to hang tough, to look the other way and that this, too, shall pass.
And I’ve come to the realization that most people do not join these online mobs with the intention of being mean.
Whether it’s an online army of one or millions, people often believe they are doing the right thing by joining the mob.
“You show your proof of membership in a community by criticizing the most erratically,” said Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogger who has been on the receiving end of racially charged Twitter mobs. “There’s a social dynamic that says ‘Let me show that I belong.’ And there is a reward structure for being even more inflammatory.”
Mr. Dash noted that online mobs can sometimes serve a public good, as in cases when the powerless are given a voice to hold the ruling class accountable.
But the next time we want to provide justice from behind a keyboard, we should remember that there is a nuanced human being on the other side of that screen.
And while we’re not intending to be mean online, there’s a chance that in our quest for justice, we are performing an even worse injustice.
He ends by quoting Nietzsche: “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.”
Sheer genius
This is lovely. From a compendium of ingenious answers to exam questions. Reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story about Michael Frayn when he was a philosophy student at Cambridge. The story goes that one of the questions in a Part II paper read “Q2. Is this a question. Discuss.” To which he supposedly answered: “If it is, then this is an answer.”
The clueless in pursuit of the impossible
Oscar Wilde famously defined fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the unbeatable”. Something like that always comes to mind at the moment when US and other law-enforcement bosses attack tech companies like Apple and Google for building serious encryption into their mobile products. As The Register puts it‘ “WHY can’t Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption? cry US politicians”.
Where do you begin when faced with such cluelessness? The Reg asked a few cryptographic experts:
There’s just one problem with the government’s idea as it stands: it’s impossible from a technology, business, and international standpoint. Not a single one of the cryptography and security experts El Reg spoke to at the show could see any way such a system would work.
“It’s impossible,” Bruce Schneier – the man who literally wrote the book(s) on modern encryption techniques – told The Reg. “I can’t create mathematics that works differently in the presence of a particular legal piece of paper. Math just doesn’t work that way.” As Schneier has explained many times, strong crypto requires a sound encryption algorithm, correct digital signature handling, a random number generator that can’t be fooled, and a working methodology to house all of these and that doesn’t allow mistakes. Get one thing wrong and the whole system breaks down.
Quite. What was it TH Huxley said about “the slaughter of a beautiful idea by an ugly fact”?
Joke of the Day
“The Secret Service is the only law-enforcement agency that will get into trouble if a black man gets shot.”
American comedienne Cecily Strong at Saturday’s 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
What the election should be about (but isn’t)
The thing about neoliberalism is that it’s a machine for producing and amplifying inequality. In other words, inequality is not a regrettable and inevitable byproduct of an otherwise admirable economic doctrine: it’s what the system is designed to do. Or, as programmers would say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
Hot on the heels of Thomas Piketty
Joe Stiglitz has been writing about inequality for ages too, and his new book
Project Loon: launch day approaches (says project leader)
No matter what you think about Google, it’s an astonishing project. Also I can’t think of another company that could — or would — attempt it.
Quote of the Day
” Facebook is interested in “digital inclusion” in much the same manner as loan sharks are interested in “financial inclusion”: it is in it for the money.”
Evgeny Morozov, writing in the Observer, April 26, 2015.