[sudo-discuss] help: anti-DAC resources?

[David Keenan]

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 at gmail.com<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
'dkeenan44 at 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 at 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.
>
>
> sent from eddan.com
>
> On Jan 22, 2014, at 11:53 AM, David Keenan <dkeenan44 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> david
>
> On Wednesday, January 22, 2014, eddan.com <eddan at 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.
>
> Subscription to the listserv is at
> oaklandprivacyworkinggroup-subscribe at lists.riseup.net. It would also be
> great if you could support the petition at
> http://www.change.org/petitions/the-mayor-and-city-council-of-oakland-ca-don-t-sell-out-the-people-of-oakland-to-the-department-of-homeland-security-don-t-vote-to-fund-the-domain-awareness-centerand continue spreading the word.
>
> For those interested, there is also a meeting of the League of Women
> Voters on this topic tonight (http://www.lwvoakland.org/VOTER-January-20<http://www.lwvoakland.org/VOTER-January-2014.html>
>
>
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