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

[David Keenan]

awesome. talk more in a bit - see all y'all soon!

david

On Wednesday, January 22, 2014, eddan.com <eddan at sudoroom.tv> wrote:

> OK. Let's do this then. Make it so. Let me know how I can help.
> When does your class meet?
> I think you're right on about our memetic state of affairs regarding
> privacy/data protection/surveillance.
>
> That is exactly what I think Balkin nails in the National Surveillance
> State essay, at least for me.
> I also agree that we need the 3-5 page version of that as applied to the
> Oakland DAC in particular. Do you want to start a sudo wiki page draft so
> we can all have a better sense of what you have in mind? I'd be happy to
> contribute.
>
> The most comprehensive repository of information to build from though is
> of course the Oakland Wiki DAC page at
> http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center. Thanks and congrats to
> all who continue to make that such a valuable resource. And the East Bay
> Express journalists have been so impressively focused at getting so deep
> into the story. And most importantly, I think, the Oakland Privacy Working
> Group's freedom of information request for emails regarding the DAC (before
> I got involved) let out a perfect storm at just the right time.
>
> As far as I see it, there's a two-week window in which to flip this thing.
> This is winnable. And it's the right thing to do. How's that for
> moral/political?
>
>
> sent from eddan.com
>
> On Jan 22, 2014, at 4:40 PM, David Keenan <dkeenan44 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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> wrote:
>
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