“The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience … “.
Aldous Huxley, writing to George Orwell in 1949.
Never forget — surveillance is big business. And not just for Internet companies
Terrific column by Cory Doctorow. Excerpt:
Spying is a business, after all: BT and Vodaphone collect huge fees for giving GCHQ illegal access to their fibre optic trunks. The NSA’s massive data-centre in Bluffdale, Utah cost $1.5bn, built by the private sector at public expense.
Remember that Edward Snowden didn’t work for the NSA: he was a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, a company that turned over $5.48bn in 2014. Every new expansion of NSA mass surveillance means potential new contracts for Booz Allen Hamilton.
In other words: spying on everyone may not catch terrorists, but it does make military contractors and telcos a lot of money. Mass surveillance is policy with a business model.
We live in a post-evidence-based-policy world.
If we ever lived in such a world, that is. I feel about evidence-based policy much as Gandhi did when asked, on his arrival at Tilbury, what he thought of Western civilisation. “Ah”, he replied, reflectively. “Western civilisation — now that would be a good idea.”
As far as evidence-based policy is concerned, there are some areas — surveillance, regulation of illegal drugs, alcohol abuse, prison reform, immigration, to name just a few — where British governments of every stripe are entirely immune to evidence.
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
That line from Alexander Pope came to mind time and time again last night as I watched a marvellous Storyville film about the short life and tragic death of Aaron Schwartz. At the end, I was left with the same mixture of anger and despair that I felt when news broke of his suicide, hounded to his death by a vindictive and disproportionate prosecution by the Feds for organising a massive download of scholarly articles from JSTOR.
I never met him, but I followed him through his writing and his work from the first time he surfaced on the Net. I vividly remember his blog posts about his reactions to Stanford, especially the way he tried to figure out why the world (and specifically that particular corner of it) was so weird and dysfunctional. And every day I use Markdown and RSS, two of the tools he helped to create. So like legions of others, I am in his debt.
I knew most of the story of his life. He and I shared a mutual friend (who was truly heartbroken by his death). What I hadn’t known — and the film revealed — was what he was like as a very young child. And the truth turns out to be that he was remarkable from the very beginning, one of the brightest, most engaging toddlers I’ve ever seen.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the film was the way it managed to be deeply moving without being sentimental: that’s a hard balance to strike, but the film-makers pulled it off. In the end, as I said, it left one with a burning sense of injustice and anger. Two things stand out. The first is the hypocrisy of an administration (Obama’s) which vindictively pursues this idealistic young genius while failing to prosecute the criminals who wrecked the banking system. And secondly there is the thought that the real significance of Aaron’s treatment is that it heralds a future in which the established order will do whatever it takes to suppress uses of the Internet that challenge it. Aaron was, after all, well on his way to becoming a powerful political activist.
Due warning
“FOR PUBLIC SAFETY REASONS, THIS EMAIL HAS BEEN INTERCEPTED BY YOUR
GOVERNMENT AND WILL BE RETAINED FOR FUTURE ANALYSIS.”
Signature line on a friend’s email messages.
Oh — and it’s an Android world out there…
Keen still has his edge
My Observer review of Andrew Keen’s new book, The Internet is Not the Answer:
Andrew Keen – like many who were involved in the net in the early days – started out as an internet evangelist. In the 1990s he founded a startup in the Bay Area and drank the Kool-Aid that fuelled the first internet bubble. But he saw the light before many of us, and rapidly established himself as one of the net’s early contrarians. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content which characterised the early days of web 2.0, and whenever conference organisers wanted to ensure a bloody good row, Andrew Keen was the man they invited to give the keynote address.
If his new book is anything to go by, Keen has lost none of his edge, but he’s expanded the scope and depth of his critique. He wants to persuade us to transcend our childlike fascination with the baubles of cyberspace so that we can take a long hard look at the weird, dysfunctional, inegalitarian, comprehensively surveilled world that we have been building with digital tools. In that sense, The Internet Is Not the Answer joins a number of recent books by critics such as Jaron Lanier, Doc Searls, Astra Taylor, Ethan Zuckerman and Nicholas Carr, who are also trying to wake us from the nightmare into which we have been sleepwalking.
Workstation, circa 1942
A code-breaker’s desk in Hut Six at Bletchley Park, restored to its original state. Pic snapped on a private visit last Autumn.
YouTube ad revenue: creeping up on US commercial networks
Levelling the playing field
This morning’s Observer column:
Whenever regulators gather to discuss market failures, the cliche “level playing field” eventually surfaces. When regulators finally get around to thinking about what happens in the online world, especially in the area of personal data, then they will have to come to terms with the fact that the playing field is not just tilted in favour of the online giants, but is as vertical as that rockface in Yosemite that two Americans have finally managed to free climb.
The mechanism for rotating the playing field is our old friend, the terms and conditions agreement, usually called the “end user licence agreement” (EULA) in cyberspace. This invariably consists of three coats of prime legal verbiage distributed over 32 pages, which basically comes down to this: “If you want to do business with us, then you will do it entirely on our terms; click here to agree, otherwise go screw yourself. Oh, and by the way, all of your personal data revealed in your interactions with us belongs to us.”
The strange thing is that this formula applies regardless of whether you are actually trying to purchase something from the author of the EULA or merely trying to avail yourself of its “free” services.
When the history of this period comes to be written, our great-grandchildren will marvel at the fact that billions of apparently sane individuals passively accepted this grotesquely asymmetrical deal. (They may also wonder why our governments have shown so little interest in the matter.)…
Make my day
Lovely! But, sadly, probably not an accurate summary of the position.