Chris Soghoian published a great op-ed in the New York Times about the operational security (or lack thereof) in mainstream journalism. The killer line:
odd letters
we feel a little strange and a little bit unreal
#OccupyBoston Police Scanner Recordings
Early on the morning of October 11, the Boston PD arrested over 100 people who were part of the #OccupyBoston camp. Oliver Day has posted a recording of police scanner activity from that night to SoundCloud, where it’s been getting some great annotating attention. Being able to establish a timeline of events for that night is extremely helpful from academic, legal and logistical perspectives.
Something Oliver and I have been talking about is the strange world of the legality of police scanners. Apparently, in New York City, it is illegal to have a police scanner in a car, or to be listening to one as you wander around, unless you have an FCC-issued radio license. I’m sure that the enforcement of this regulation varies depending on what’s going on in the city, and it wouldn’t surprise me if enforcement was up over the past few months. One question this brings up, though, is the legality of the various police scanner apps that are available for iPhone and Android phones. After all, it’s not a scanner, but it is accessing all the same information. Yet another issue of the trans-jurisdictional nature of online marketplaces making a (potentially) interesting mess.
The analysis of the laws that I’ve been able to find (with a small amount of non-exhaustive Googling) seem to mostly refer to the possession of the police scanner itself. Courts have found that it applies even to scanners in a non-working conditions as they are “still capable of receiving signals.” So, a few questions. Does the ability to stream digitally-converted police scanner signals turn a smart phone into a default police scanner, one that, when functioning as such, could be subject to confiscation? Does the People v. Verdino decision mean that any smart phone equipped with police scanner app, even one that is not running at the time, could also be subject to confiscation?
Any comments from the peanut gallery on this one? Especially if you’re from New York or have been to the #OWS camp (or any other #Occupy camp), speak up!
Confusion, Apathy and the Tools at Hand
Last night I attended the Cultivating New Voices memorial for Persephone Miel, held by the Berkman Center. It was a fascinating event, and a very moving memorial that made me sad I had never known Miel (she passed away a month or two after I arrived at Berkman). The event featured talks from journalists Fatima Tlisova of Voice of America and Dele Olojede of the Nigeria’s Next Newspaper, as well as Ethan Zuckerman, Colin Maclay, Ivan Sigal and Jon Sawyer. You will soon be able to access an archived webcast of the event at the Berkman site, and in the meantime, David Weinberger has posted a liveblog of the event here.
A major question that continued to fall out of the discussions being had, on stage and amongst the crowd later, dealt with the problem of apathy, or at least the appearance of apathy, among the population at large in response to news coverage. After the event last night, I had a chance to think more about this question. This is my attempt to talk/write through my thoughts and reactions to the issue.
During his talk, Olojede told an anecdote about what his newspaper experienced when they published an extensive expose about extensive and blatant corruption in the petroleum industry in Nigeria. Significant attempts were made “by everyone I had ever known” to keep Olojede from publishing what was sure to be an explosive story on one of Nigeria’s chief industries. He was offered $20M to spike the story. The story was published anyway. Nothing happened. No reaction, no outcry, no public outrage. In what seems to Olojede to be a “slap in the face,” key officials from the implicated sections of government were reappointed by the Nigerian Senate, “with no questions asked.”
“So,” concluded Olojede. “”What happens when you arm the public with all this infomation, and they do nothing?”
Maybe the problem isn’t apathy. It may not be that Olojede’s audience did not care. Rather, they did not manifest their feelings about the issue at had in a way that Olojede could see or recognize as “caring.” He did not receive the outcome he thought was appropriate, which would have been some sort of public political outcry and subsequent reform. This feeling of rhetorical abandonment, like you and your colleagues are shouting with all your might down a well, is incredibly frustrating and demoralizing, and I sympathize with Olojede’s frustrations.
However, just because his audience didn’t react in a way Olojede wanted doesn’t mean they didn’t care. I’d like to posit that what occurred in this case, and what occurs in many similar cases what not apathy, but confusion: confusion of the next step to take. Reasonable, reactive anger without a constructive outlet can quickly dissipate or malignantly fester, but very rarely spontaneously manifests into useful action. You can feel genuinely outraged by an event, but sitting by yourself at the breakfast table with your newspaper, it’s easy to feel your outrage is isolated, and there is no sure next step to take. However, if you are angry, and you look out the window and your neighbors are marching in the street, suddenly your personal path of action is clearer. An active path needs to be available when the public is angry, perhaps laid out in conjunction with news coverage or even by journalists themselves. Without the clear option to act, and a clear path to follow, anger and confusion can lead to hopelessness, and, indeed, a sort of defensive apathy. I think there are palpable feelings of shame associated with inaction in the face of a wrong, and it may be an action of self-defense to hunker down in the motion of everyday life if you truly feel you can do nothing about it.
An example to consider: the popular participation in Anonymous’s Operation Payback last December. The DDOS tool LOIC had been around for a while, and had been used in Anon actions before, but news versions of the tool, included versions that could run on Android phones and jail-broken iPhones and simplified versions with attractive and easy-to-use GUIs expanded the potential user-base considerably. Add to that the use of public Twitter accounts (rather than IRC, which can be intimidating for neophytes to access) to advertise target IP addresses and coordinate actions, and constant news coverage that either linked directly to or provided search terms for the active Twitter accounts and newsfeeds, and you have a swarm of factors that enable a population that was angry at current events to quickly, easily, and with little perceived risk to themselves participate in significant protests actions online, though they may never have been an active member of such a group before. They reached for the tools at hand. Those tools may not have been perfect (the most commonly used versions of LOIC were later found to have security flaws that exposed their users IP addresses during an attack), and DDOS as a mode of political protest is controversial at best, but they represented the most visible path, the tool closest and most clearly at hand.
Another example to consider, from the other side of the issue: the (lack of) mobilization among the hordes of American unemployed. The unemployed population in previous generations had been ripe for organizing and social action. Why not now? Catherine Rampell published an excellent analysis of the issue in the New York Times, in an article called “Somehow, the Unemployed Become Invisible.” She draws attention to problems of the unemployed experiencing feelings of powerlessness, social shame and depression that make them less likely to take political action. Another issue she brings up is suburbanization of the unemployed population:
“Back in the 1960s or even the 1980s, the unemployed organized around welfare or unemployment offices. It was a fertile environment: people were anxious and tired and waiting for hours in line…The Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, which is based in Pittsburgh, helped organize workers in 26 cities across five states, simply by hanging around outside unemployment offices and harnessing the frustration. Today, though, many unemployment offices have closed. Jobless benefits are often handled by phone or online rather than in person. An unemployment call center near Mr. Oursler, for instance, now sits behind two sets of locked doors and frosted windows.”
The scattering of the target population means that it loses a sense of community. The feelings felt by individuals are allowed to dissipate, rather than reinforce each other in a group and become organized. Even those online resources aimed at the unemployed are more focused on resume composition or other similar services than encouraging, harnessing and directed any sense of outrage at national policy.
Journalists, distributing information to large number of people through whatever media is at their disposal, are in an ideal position to tap into the outrage and desire for change that their work ideally seeks to inspire. If it is truly their intention to cause significant social and political change with their work, then it seems the focus on dispassionate, uninvolved journalism that only informs and refrains from directing the feelings it inspires represents an ocean of missed opportunities. At worst, it actively contributes to a sense of hopelessness and, yes, apathy, by inspiring emotions but offering no way for those emotions to grow into action.
I’m just at the beginning of my analysis of these issues. If you’ve got an opinion or reaction, I’d love to discuss it!
Some Thoughts on Google+
I shared some of my thoughts on Google+ over at Women of Google+, which I’m cross-posting in part here. I’ve only been using the service for a few days, so these reactions are still pretty preliminary.
How did you originally get invited to Google+?
My partner invited me to a Google Hangout, even though we were both in the same apartment, across the hall from each other. Even the cats got into it. It was cute and geeky. ; )
How does Google+ fit into your life or career?
I’m an internet and technology researcher, so having the latest shiny thing is more or less a job requirement! What’s been fantastic so far is that all my close collaborators, research partners and colleagues are also all wired in as well. It’s been fun to test drive Google+ as a collaborative research platform together.
Hangouts have been great so far, not only for long (and short!) -distance outings with friends and family, but also for research meetings with collaborators. It’s great to be able to do a synchronous review of digital materials without significant time lags or delay while people scramble for the same link. Combined with Google Docs or PiratePad and you have a great dynamic synchronous composition environment. Of course, all this was previously available by cobbling together different services and products, but it’s great to have it all available “in the same bucket,” as it were.
A particularly interesting story or thoughts you may want to add regarding Google+
A lot of folks have mentioned Google+ as a new Great Techno Hope for bloggers and activists in repressive countries. Whether or not the privacy policy, practices and user-facing controls are robust enough for that user population, I think, remains to be seen. Google+’s “real names” policy is equally problematic as it is for activists on Facebook. (EDIT: Google+’s name policy is actually an “identified” name policy, which is differently problematic. For a good discussion of what this means in practice, check out Jillian York’s discussion of the issue here.)
Another issue I’ve been thinking about recently is the concentration of digital identity assets within a single family of products. This raises monopoly/customer lock-in concerns, but let’s talk personal nightmare scenario here: what if your Google account is compromised? ::hides under the bed:: It really stresses how much faith we’re putting in corporations like Google to keep our data safe, and how important it is to maintain best security practices on the user side as well.
Anyone else currently messing around on Google+, please comment with your thoughts on the service!
Summer Reading
Books came today! A chunk of my summer reading for Comparative Media Studies in the fall arrived: Alone Together by Sherry Turkle, the only required book, along with The Information and The Wealth of Networks, both of which are recommended. The other recommended books are James Carey’s Communication as Culture, John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture, Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New, Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media, and Internationalizing Media Studies, edited by Daya Kishan Thussu. I don’t plan on finishing everything by September 1, but I’ll get through as much as I can. I’ll be posting thoughts here as I go to keep all the words straight in my brain, so check back if you’re interested in discussing any of the above works.
And while I’m at it, here’s my non-academic/non-work reading for the summer. I’m looking forward to the fiction keeping me sane.
Happy reading, everyone!
Art of Science
Over the past week or so, I’ve been diving into the Ptak Science Books blog entries on anatomical illustrations, a completely amazing, complex, almost frighteningly well researched series. (Benefits of blogging for a bookstore, I suppose.) Today I came across BodyMaps, a 3D, 360 degree, annotated, searchable anatomical model of the human body. Looking at it in the context of Ptak’s curated illustrations, it’s a fascinating next step in the production of laymen-accessible anatomic modeling.
When I was in Pittsburgh, I volunteered at the Carnegie Natural History Museum, as an illustrator. I worked in the Mollusk Section, drawing insect specimens and shells for the scientists and researchers. (You can find some of my illustrations over at my Flickr page.) It was one of my favorite things to do, sitting in the lab after hours with my scope, pens, and specimen tubes label in minute, precise handwriting with the location and date of collection. Scientific illustration is about precision and accuracy (some species of beetle can only be differentiated by the hair pattens on their legs or the microscopic structure of their genitalia), but there’s a good deal of interpretation that falls to the artist as well. Audobon’s birds are clear and accurate enough to be matched to individuals in the wild, but they are each also endowed with a lively personality. In the lab, I spent hours fixated on a dead brown spider pinned to my mat, though I am terrified of the living, skittery things, trying to coax some illusion of life into my drawing.
The drawings highlighted by Ptak are filled with humor, intentional and unintentional, and exquisite detail, the kind that makes my drawing hand hurt. The artists I worked with at the Carnegie were eager to embrace digital visualization tools like the kind used in BodyMaps, and I’m excited to see how the field of scientific illustration adapts to new technological capabilities and scientific demands.
Comment bankruptcy
I’m declaring it. If you left a comment sometime in the last few months and you weren’t trying to sell me cheap pharmaceuticals, creepy erotica, or designer shoes, I’m sorry. Your insightful comments are getting swept out the door with the rest of the 30,000 spammy comments I’ve received over the past couple of months. We’re trying to figure out a solution. In the meantime, I’m turning comments off to anyone who is not a registered user of Transneptune.
This blog needs a spam-hunting tiger beast. A mean one.
Moved.
I like it here.
Wikileaks exploded the internet, quick thoughts
I’ve spent the last few days working on breaking down this Wikileaks explosion currently happening all over the internet. The result is this FAQ JZ and I have put together, which has gotten a lot of play around the internets.
There are a few things about this situation that are troubling me. Primarily, there is the issue where I personally cannot download or read any of the cables. Or, at least, I have been strongly advised not to, because at some point in the future I might want to have security clearance. If you know me, you know I react really badly to people telling me I can’t known things. There’s analysis that I want to do, that I believe is important to do, that involves me accessing the original text of the cables. I’m currently unable to do this analysis, under advice from people I trust. Whether I’m going to continue to abide by their advice remains to be seen.
On the other side of things, I’m working on a paper about hacktivism with a security researcher friend of mine. DDOS attacks have obviously attracted a great deal of attention in recent days. I’ve stated before that a DDOS attack is not the cyber equivalent of a sit-in: a DDOS attack silences opposing speech. It is not productive engagement, it is reactive censorship. The challenge is to push the development of hacktivist tools and practice that don’t merely silence speech and destroy property, but instead promote awareness and public debate. I’ll post more thoughts on this as I have them.
In the mean time, I’ll continue to update the FAQ, and will begin posting a deep-link analysis of the cables, the coverage, and hacktivists actions sometime in the next few days. (I’ve got this thing called the LSAT coming up on Saturday. Very minor. Totally not important at all.)
If you have questions that you want answered about any of this, let me know. I may not be able to answer them right away, but I’ll try.
Vitals
Molly is an academic, writer, designer and illustrator living (at the moment) in Cambridge, Mass.
CONTACT: molly(dot)sauter(at)gmail(dot)com
The words and pictures on this blog, unless otherwise indicated, are licensed under an Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license.
CONTACT: molly(dot)sauter(at)gmail(dot)com
The words and pictures on this blog, unless otherwise indicated, are licensed under an Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license.
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