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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

privacy

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Radiation and disclosure

Everything radiates its nature. This week my office amplified the story of Pr. Alicia Johnston, who, until very recently, served an Adventist congregation in Arizona. As she studied Christian theology about sexuality, Alicia’s beliefs changed and she came to a deeper understanding of her own orientation and faith.

Alicia also moved beyond simple self-awareness, and chose to disclose her new understanding to her congregation and employers. Wisely, given the climate in Adventism right now, she then resigned.

As Alicia has talked and written about how her disclosure changed her standing among relatives, friends, former colleagues, and the community they all shared, I’ve been thinking about how much power this culture gives to “coming out.”

Part of that power is down to our cultural distinctions between “private” and “public.” Another good measure is how much we conflate “private” and “secret” or “unspoken” and “shameful.”

Someone cut through this concept for me today with the statement “You are disclosing whether you use words or not.” Everything radiates its nature, even in environments where there’s no easy, shared language for that nature. We express who we are, long before we build up the words or friendships and peer groups that empower us to express who we are and express with joy.

I moved out of my subcultural box long before I came to Alicia’s position, rising in a vocation that integrity would require me to withdraw from, but even I had a few people in my network who responded to my disclosures with “We wondered about you a decade and a half ago.”

My stock answer to that quip is still, “Well you could have saved me some time.”

In the end, it’s reassuring to me that the evolving self does seem to radiate outward, trading information with the world of other evolving selves and not being bounded by the limits of language or community consensus.

I love that what we are springs forth in time, much like the season of spring itself. What we are emerges from the soil of silence, denial, and self-rejection.

There are so many cultural disincentives to hold onto what’s real and resilient and trade it for what will keep us primed for praise. But in the season of spring, we acknowledge all that is, all that has been, until now, latent. And we celebrate it: no matter what fear says, life can’t be repressed forever.

I wish Alicia every good thing in this next chapter of her life and ministry.

Please remember her and her family and send them love.

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Intimacy in surveillance culture

Close up of a black typewriter.
Photo credit: Camille Kimberly

I’ve been writing about privacy and surveillance on this site since 2013 when I first read Janna Malamud Smith’s book Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life.

That spring and summer’s news was full of the name “Edward Snowden,” acronyms like “PRISM,” and code names like “XKeyscore.” While the mass media featured psychologists explaining how mass surveillance degraded mental health, Malamud Smith was teaching me about all the ways that modern people reach for moments of privacy and intimacy with others.

We’re in an era of unprecedented state and corporate monitoring: across platforms, in several places, and through many, many devices. At the same time, isolation is a perennial concern: a recent viral article focuses on the consequences of out-group marginalization and in-group isolation for gay American and Northern European men, for example.

But when you know what to look for or which sources to tap, you can find just about anybody or any piece of information. Exploring the Invisible is a digital security project that recently explained step-by-step how an ordinary person might navigate the internet pseudonymously. It’s an awkward, onerous option that a person might yet need to take to preserve their privacy: perhaps someone facing identity-based or political violence or retaliation.

For those who want to share information rather than withhold it, websites and apps like SecureDrop and Signal can make private (encrypted) communication possible. Journalists are now using both apps in their work.

Intimacy is that state in which, as Malamud Smith wrote, “people relax their public front either physically or emotionally or, occasionally, both… [One] comes as close as one is capable of, or as close as one feels permitted, to revealing oneself to another person.”

Intimacy has to be voluntary. It can’t be forced, presumed, or automated, and as such, it runs counter to the logic of conventional surveillance, which enrolls us before and regardless of whether we’re aware or consent.

Surveillance culture, therefore, is fundamentally inhumane: as Dr. Hortense Spillers recently said, losing the ability to choose connection is a paradigmatic sign that one is not free.

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Advent and info security

Advent: Secure your tech. Herod is king.

The Advent story in the Gospel according to Matthew takes a curious turn when foreign “wise men” show up and begin interacting with King Herod the Great.

According to Matthew, these foreign visitors first journey to Herod’s palace to inquire about Jesus. Then, after dreams warn them that Herod has only malevolent interest in Jesus, they avoid giving him any further intelligence, and leave the area in a hot hurry while Jesus’ family flees with him abroad.

Our world has shifted so much that when I retell that story in the shadow of US-VISIT, the NSA, PRISM, and Edward Snowden, a former Booz Hamilton contractor who breached the US Espionage Act and has sought shelter in Russia since 2013, this part of the Advent story doesn’t seem so odd anymore.

I’ve often wondered what an autocrat like Herod would have done if he’d had the power that the contemporary United States has: to compel biometric identification, to monitor mass telecommunications, to hoover up metadata across communication devices and the internet, and to surveil members of the public both above and below the radar.

Today, governments around the world have technological tools and political powers that ancient rulers would have drooled over.

We get to decide how we’ll respond.

Preparing to live under a hostile administration today includes securing oneself and one’s community as much as possible from on- and offline surveillance. We all benefit from good security practices regardless of whether we’d self-identify as activists or as threatening to the mainstream.

The US recently spent a lot of money, energy, and time monitoring peace activists in Seattle; government monitoring of civil rights groups is legendary; and that surveillance has continued with rising Black resistance to state violence.

“If you are privileged and not a minority, your marginalized friends will be safer if you all use privacy tools. The more normalized it is to use them, the harder it is for a system that perpetuates injustice to single out people they don’t like.” —Daniel Oliver (November 10, 2016) [Expletive advisory]

While digital privacy and security activists and developers keep working on the policy context we have to operate in, ordinary internet and phone users can take a few small yet high-value action steps that have a broad impact:

Action steps

  • Block camera hijacking by adding webcam covers to your personal computers, tablets, and cell phones. I use these sticky covers at home and on my tablet, and they’re cheap, low profile, and effective. Also unplug standalone cameras when you’re not using them.
  • Reduce message hacks and metadata leaks by installing the Signal app on your cell phones. Signal is an open-source text and audio messaging service that uses end-to-end encryption by default (unlike Telegram) and does not store user metadata (unlike FB’s recent buy Whatsapp or Telegram). Encrypted messaging services are important tools for anyone doing justice movement work. And Signal is owned by a non-profit consortium of digital privacy advocates and developers.
  • Always assume that conventional email and voice calls on wireless devices or landlines aren’t secure. Communications are only as secure as the network they’re sent over and recipients’ security habits: it doesn’t matter if you have a virtual private network and send messages only in code if you send messages to me and I leave my password on a Post-it note on my desk every day!

Companies and internet service providers often have data and technology use restrictions, but there are additional layers to it because of the federal climate over the last fifteen years. In that same period, justice workers and peacemakers have been subject to federal phone taps and other kinds of technological monitoring and all of the major wireless networks have been complicit.

Resources

Information and digital security are fascinating fields to read about. Check out some recent articles that could be useful to you, no matter what your technological comfort level is.

Be safe out there.

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Automate. Don’t Surveil.

"Don't surveil yourself. Automate. It's a waste of energy to hover over processes that, with planning and patience, you could turn into habit." —@mackenzian

When I write about surveillance, I’m typically writing about states and businesses surveiling citizens and other members of the public or voluntary organizations using the logic of state surveillance to regulate their members.

I’ve also recommended Janna Malamud Smith’s book Private Matters a number of times on this site. In the book, Smith uses psychology, sociology, and history to explain the components of the personal, non-public sphere of life and how Western conceptions of privacy have evolved over the last three centuries.

DAVID GERGEN: Recognizing then how important privacy is to freedom and to dignity, how serious are the threats to privacy today?

JANNA MALAMUD SMITH: I think they’re very serious. And maybe the most serious one is how little we think about some of the changes that we make to protect people against the downside of our culture.

And what I mean by that is that as we get more isolated from each other and we can’t watch each other personally, we’re more and more kind of in an anxiety, turning to means of surveillance as a way of watching each other, whether it’s through cameras at the office place or urine tests, or–one of my favorite examples are teddy bears with video cameras in them so that you can watch the person taking care of your child.

And so, in a way, in an effort to get on top of some of our fears about contemporary life, we are too quickly sacrificing privacy.” —David Gergen and Janna Malamud Smith, July 1997

The most famous symbol of total surveillance is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, imagined as a round watchtower in the center of a prison yard. I think Smith is right when she suggests that the root of surveillance is anxiety. It might be anxiety about terrorism, or about abuse, or about people in a teetotal organization who drink; whatever the specifics, the drive to hover and monitor may elicit compliance yet it also corrodes trust among group members and between group members and group leaders.

Behaviorists who study habit formation suggest that if we do want to sustain a new habit, we shouldn’t hyper-monitor ourselves. For example, Betterment is a passive investment company that strongly discourages new investors from checking on their holdings too frequently. Instead, the team suggests automating deposits so that money flows into the market at a steady pace and users aren’t tempted to watch the markets ups and downs to the point of trying to “time” when they buy or sell.

The old saying about a watched kettle may have been right all along.

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Reader Review #01

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

How Othering and Social Bias Impact Minorities’ Work Advancement

Harvard Business Review: Minority Women Report Downsizing Their Ambitions Because of Bias (Jennifer Thorpe-Moscon)

Credit: A Amando
Credit: A Amando

As Thorpe-Moscon says, “the experience of “otherness” is broader than any one demographic category.” But no, it’s not all about an employee “feeling different” or “feeling valued.” Some issues aren’t about mere perception; they’re about fact.

The facts of difference and the realities of inclusion and value do not depend on how sensitive an individual might be. They are instead directly related to the organizational structure and practiced values of the institution and the policies that flow from each: as an structural issue, they merit structural responses.

Building diversity initiatives around the perception of change rather than actual change is not wise.

Why You Might Want to Check Your Phone’s Location and Wifi Settings (And Who’s Getting Paid Because You Don’t)

MSN Money/Wall Street Journal: Your Phone is Sharing Your Secrets

Last month I finished reading Gurbaksh Chabal’s autobiography, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions. Chabal became a millionaire while in his teens by investing in web advertising that tracked users’ web activity through cookies rather than their demographic categories.

This WSJ article highlights companies doing similar work but through mobile technology. Turnstyle Solutions, Euclid Analytics, Verizon, and Apple all now pull users’ location data from devices’ geo-location feature or from wireless broadcasting. They then aggregate that metadata to build up a view of where people go, how often they gather, and what activities or lifestyles they are involved with.

Salient:

Aj Tin, a university student and customer at Rsquared Café, was surprised to learn that by logging into the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, he was enabling Turnstyle to track his movements and offer other local businesses an aggregated profile of his activities. The disclosure form tells consumers they will be tracked, but not how aggregated personal information will be distributed. “Privacy is cheap,” Tin said.

Individualized, cookie-based advertising makes businesses the most happy and they will and do pay pretty money for the option. “Brute-force” demographics-based advertising still works—just not as consistently.

For the most part, we consumers also prefer the outcomes of individualized advertising. We complain about commercials on regular broadcasting because they’re usually irrelevant to us: they’re based on who advertisers think we are based on what we happen to be watching in a given time slot.. We don’t mind ads as much when they’re based on what we’ve bought in the past, activities we do, or who we’d like to believe we are.

And individualized marketing works: our demographic categories don’t require us to watch a show or go to a certain location, and not everyone in a category has the same interests, concerns, or “pain points.” But we watch and go and do because we choose to; our choices arise out of who we are and the experiences we’ve had. Advertisers want to move away from marketing based on passive category to marketing based on active choice. We will let them do it, and they don’t care how long it takes for us to adjust to the idea without fear.

Socially, we’re still figuring what “privacy” means, and what it’s reasonable to expect from our governments, companies, religions, and clubs.

On Practicing Inclusion—Beyond Words and Accepting Change

BRACE (Building Radically Accessible Communities Everywhere): PSA: When You Actually Welcome Us, Shit’s Gonna Change

An editorial about how ableism impacts disabled people who shouldn’t have to beg for accommodations and enabled people who assume spaces should be centered around them. Plenty to think about.

Have you caught yourself grumbling about having to change how you do things to make others more comfortable? Have you been on the other side of that grumbling? Tell me a story about it in the comments.

Paths to Success: Whose Advice Should You Take?

ActingNaturally_Watts
“You discover who you are by acting naturally.” —Alan Watts

You’ll have noticed a lot of voices in the personal development coach choir, especially those aimed at young professionals,d  from 99U and Switch and Shift. This week Paul C. Brunson offered a list of habits he’d picked up from two billionaires. The list includes some great advice about nurturing your relationships and habits of association.

As you pick up coaches, consider this from Forbes’ Tim Maurer: Two Reasons Why Copying Successful People Won’t Make You Successful:

We wake each day on a quest for personal validation that we apparently believe is found in someone’s definition of success.  We then presume that rote replication of the habits of the supposedly successful will directly correlate to similar degrees of success in our own lives.

While appealing, this logic fails—for two primary reasons:

1)      You’re not them.

2)      They’re not you.

Maurer writes: “When we cultivate our own unique significance through a perpetual cycle of self-examination, education and practice, success becomes a natural byproduct.”

I agree. Onward and upward, but not as an imitation of another. Onward and upward as yourself.

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Privacy and anti-LGBTI Legislation

Throughout history most women have had little privacy. Since autonomy and liberty—as well as certain kinds of creativity and self-expression—are almost impossible without it, establishing its place in a woman’s life is a primary task of any bid for equality. —Janna Malamud Smith, Private Matters

In the last few weeks we’ve been hearing about laws passed in Nigeria and Uganda banning the free assembly, association, and consensual relationships of LGBTI people, and instituting multi-year prison terms or even a death penalty for “offenses.” While the draft Ugandan bill has been circulating for more than 2 years, we don’t have firm information on which versions of which provisions actually passed.

Warren Throckmorton is a psychology researcher who has reported on the Ugandan law alongside local workers like Dr. Frank Mugisha since it was introduced. But when he asked the Ugandan parliament to confirm the passed law, they sent him the 2011 version of the bill. This is discomforting.

Despite the uncertainty, an organization that supports LGBTI current and former Adventists across Africa and around the world released a new statement about these laws this weekend. Yesterday, the US State Department also expressed “deep concern.” Arrests have already been made in northern Nigeria, and human rights organizations are alleging torture and intimidation. These bills in West and East Africa follow a marginalizing pattern similar to those at work in India and Russia: India and Russia passed laws restricting the behavior and speech of LGBTI and LGBTI-supportive people last year.

Nigerians protesting outside their embassy in NY. Pictured: two young adult women holding signs: "We are not ILLEGAL. We are full Citizens of Nigeria." and "STOP THE BILL! Consensual Adult love is not a Crime!
In December 2011, NY-based Nigerians protested the law signed by President Goodluck Jonathan. “Z” (left) had recently founded the site SOGI Naija (Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity in Nigerians). SOGI Naija is no longer accessible.

I’ve seen legal analyses of the new Nigerian law but haven’t yet seen articles focusing on how such anti-LGBTI norms and laws especially impact women, whatever their gender identities or orientations. As Malamud Smith argues, women’s privacy is an essential part of our self-awareness and creativity. But so are the rights to associate freely with peers and communities of choice and to speak openly of and for oneself: these freedoms are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and influence our capacity for individual and social organization, innovation, collaboration, and advancement. Communities that cannot interact or exchange ideas or emotional support without the threats of physical violence, restricted freedom, or social estrangement will suffer.

I take it for granted that the collective suffering of minorities is one motive behind so many versions of these laws around the world. And I include the United Kingdom in that judgment since the UK only repealed its no-“promotion” law in 2003 and it remains ambivalent about making British civil society a space in which non-heterosexuals can share heterosexuals’ ability to live, work, and run their families in peace without having to first lobby for the opportunity.

My hunch is that women suffer under these norms and laws regardless of whether they’re targeted directly, as same-gender loving and cis, or trans- or non gender-conforming people, or more indirectly as the partners, relatives, and allies of those that the legal system harasses. Insofar as anti-LGBTI norms and laws depend on binary, exclusivist, and male-centric views of gender and sexuality, women won’t and can’t be well-served by them. And verbal, legal, social, religious, and physical violence against so-called “offenders” warns everyone else not to breach the rules—that is how terrorism works.

There’s a section toward the end of Privacy Matters where Malamud Smith describes two impacts of legalized terrorism: there is the fear, grief, and violation of the population addressed by violence, but then there’s also a perceptual cloud that covers the rest of a society that fails to connect the dots between individual instances of violence and the social context that makes violence possible or likely. Referring to the case of John Salvi, who murdered receptionists Lee Ann Nichols and Shannon Lowney at clinics in December 1994, Malamud Smith writes:

I was driving to a store when word came over the radio… I parked the car and listened in horror. My grief was visceral, unconsidered, unintended. I felt traumatized. Other women, I learned later, all over the city felt similarly. Terrorism uses violence against one person to inspire fear in all who feel kinship with the victim. The gunman shot particular people, but his gun was aimed at any woman who had ever counted too many days since her last period. It didn’t matter if you had never visited a clinic.

Subsequent stories portrayed the killer as a troubled man acting alone. This assessment was literally true, but emotionally speaking, he was acting on behalf of others… Societies have much in common with a line of wobbly kids playing crack-the-whip. Whenever issues get heated, extremists tend to shoot out wildly, carried by the group’s intention beyond its common range. Bystanders, watching only a lone child speeding along, might think she had propelled herself. So too with John Salvi, the murderer. Until you appreciate the context that propels him, he resembles a man acting alone. —Janna Malamud Smith

But none of the extremists who arise when discrimination and prejudice was worked into law have really “acted alone.” I’m troubled by how easily we disclaim our connection and complicity with the social and legal context of such extremism at times like this. As Nigerian writer Ayo Sogunro has said: “It’s easier to sit down and criticize other bigots in history—but do nothing when faced with a similar situation [in the present]… Your individual silence in the face of such an injustice is a tacit approval of its execution.”

If you’ve seen any recent articles that address how anti-LGBT legislation impacts women, particularly in postcolonial nations, please share them with me in the comments below or via Twitter. I will share a summary of anything that comes in.