Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

surveillance

By

The way power works

When we vote, we choose which political party we would like to invest the coercive, repressive powers of the state in. —Arundhati Roy

“Ouch.”

That’s what I wrote in the margin of Arundhati Roy’s The End of Imagination today when I read Roy’s critique of the political system in India, the electorate’s party choices, and the pervasive oppression of “counter-terrorism.”

In the post-9/11 world, power works in very consistent ways whether in India or the US: power represses, and repression corrodes relationships.

Roy outlines the Indian “Prevention of Terrorism Act” (POTA, 2002-2004), and its provisions were very similar to the network of policies, laws, and policing regulations that the United States has implemented since 2001: invasions and bombings of the Other abroad, mass surveillance and monitoring of the Other at home, heightened security in transportation, new identification document laws, and restrictions on travel and migration.

And as I read that law’s violent consequences for poor, Muslim, leftist, and marginalized people in India, I can see how these implications applied just as much within the US as beyond its borders. Power is consistent.

The Indian state’s proclivity to harass and terrorize people has been institutionalized, consecrated, by the enactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which has been promulgated in ten states… POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as judicial evidence… police torture tends to replace police investigation.” —Arundhati Roy

Roy argues that the judicial system is compromised when the state uses force to compel minoritized people.

If that’s the case, however, and force is ubiquitous, is there justice anywhere?

By

Remote war and responsibility

On a white-blue background, a white four-armed photo drone hangs in the sky.
Photo credit: Clem Onojeghuo

Contains spoilers for Eye in the Sky.

The United States recently expanded its military activity in the Horn of Africa. Among the regional groups it now openly targets in the name of post-9/11 counter-terrorism is Al-Shabab (The Youth), a decentralized network based in Somalia and operating around the Somali-Kenyan border. The US has in fact been active in the area for months, using “Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies” as its proxies.

The administration has decided to deem the Shabab, the Islamist militant group in Somalia, to be part of the armed conflict that Congress authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to senior American officials. The move is intended to shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.” — New York Times, November 27, 2016

A recent film makes this conflict its context. Directed by Gavin Hood, Eye in the Sky (2015) is a 90-minute study of a modern military drone attack on a house in a Kenyan neighborhood. Unlike US foreign policy, however, the film begins with the perspective of one Kenyan family: a father repairing his daughter’s toys, a mother baking bread for the daughter to sell, and, beyond their gate, traders, soldiers, and Wahhabi Muslims monitoring one another’s dress, families, and morals.

Fascinating for me given my doctoral research are sections of the film that feature government officials in the West, military leaders on the ground, and researchers, advisors, and drone operators in three countries (Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The audience observes these military, political, and legal representatives arguing from the logics of their respective domains: they each have to judge whether the UK should conduct a bombing that will injure or kill noncombatant neighborhood residents as well as people the two governments have named as enemies.

Can we bomb a house in a neighborhood in a country we aren’t explicitly bound to?

Should we?

What if a child will be caught in the blast radius?

What if there will be two children?

What if there are suicide bombers in the house?

What if we can watch the would-be bombers don their vests and get ready to deal death?

What if the bombers’ video gets onto YouTube?

What if Western governments’ secret surveillance footage gets onto YouTube?

What if the chain of decision-making offers more stalling than accountability?

What if the military’s risk estimates are fluffy?

What about the drone operators’ mental health?

What does it do to people to have the workday regularly include killing others remotely, watching them die, and then poking through the rubble to identify their remains?

What is our responsibility when all this and more happens in the name of the British and American public, and persists as governmental policy regardless of which political parties hold the reins?

Just as social media moderators experience trauma from their work, so do military drone operators tasked to surveil and sometimes kill. So, too, do people living out their lives with relatives while people thousands of miles away superimpose brutal geopolitics on their homes, families, and children.

Toward the end of Eye in the Sky, a general says to a disapproving politician, “Never tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war.”

Soldiers know the costs because they live it, and many of us may never know the cost ourselves. We might be able to grasp it remotely or through fiction, and if so, ok: some things no one should experience firsthand.

By

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.

By

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.

By

Intelligence Wars: A Conversation with Dr. Lowell Christy

The People have power and we can tap into that again. —Lowell Christy

Cropped shot of Dr. Lowell Christy. He is standing in front of a rock wall, and smiling.
Lowell Christy, Cultural Strategies Institute

Last July, as the media reported on Edward Snowden, the NSA, and surveillance through phone and internet service companies like Verizon, Google, and Microsoft, I spoke with Dr. Lowell Christy about his research on the American Revolution and the logic of 21st Century intelligence-gathering.

Dr. Christy, founder and director of the Maryland-based Cultural Strategies Institute and a board advisor for George Washington University’s Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning, has spent more than three decades applying cybernetics insights, systems thinking, and collective IQ techniques to social and cultural transformation initiatives all over the world. His five-part series, The Intelligence Wars, will be released later this year.

KM: Who are you writing The Intelligence Wars for?

LC: I’m writing for ordinary Americans, not policy-makers. During the Revolutionary War, British General Howe’s plans were undermined by an American housewife by the name of Lydia Darragh. Howe planned to move his troops into Whitemarsh, PA, but Mrs. Darragh leaked the details to George Washington so that American forces weren’t taken by surprise.

That was the colonial American informal information network in action: ordinary untrained people outwitting a superior British military. The People have power and we can tap into that again.

There have been a lot of surveillance-related news stories recently: Manning, Wikileaks, Snowden, PRISM, whistle-blowing, Xkeyscore, and the government’s intelligence-gathering systems. Why should an ordinary person care about intelligence-gathering or metadata?

A simple way to define intelligence is as “in tell”—telling into a subject. To understand a network, intelligence agencies can now compile every piece of mail sent through the postal service, every phone call, credit card, every email, every internet keystroke. And every license plate too—more than ten thousand new licenses are added to this database every day. Combined with the interstate camera system, the metadata in the database allows the agencies to know who travels where and when, and who is speaking with whom.

The art of assembly is the attack point here; the monitoring of assembly subliminally oppresses the People. These strategies eat away at the root of American genius, which is our ability to share and debate ideas freely in order to thresh out differences, separate the truth from the chaff, and grow our commonwealth together.

When you say the art of assembly is under attack with meta-surveillance, what do you mean? Are there any insights into this from your study of the US Revolution and the Founders’ writings?

In the foreground, the Liberty Bell. In the background, the US flag superimposed on the first page of the US constitution. "We the People" is in large script at the top of the page
“Constitution with Liberty Bell” (c) Framed Legacy

Yes. John Adams wrote that the American Revolution “was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.” He wanted future generations of Americans to codify the Revolutions’ pamphlets, letters, and communications of the Revolution, to archive the war, so that we would build an understanding of not just the war’s surface politics and military strategy, but also the conversations and relationships among ordinary people that the Revolution was based on.

The Revolution was triggered in part by the Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed a duty on pamphlets more than half a page long. Ben Franklin was a printer, so he and other writers and critics were directly impacted by this law, and Jonathan Swift predicted that the Stamp Act would “utterly ruin” pamphleteers and the larger press. In England and the colonies, the monarchy used the Stamp Act to raise revenue from writers and inhibit the criticism they distributed through the print media. So that Act was a choke-and control point that strangled the knowledge-building networks of America, and it became the tripwire for the Revolutionary War.

I write more about this in the second article in the series: the data collection programs that are part of the surveillance state today are very similar to the “intolerable acts” that sparked the Revolution.

What other modern parallels do you see?

Have you heard about the anti-pornography regulations in the United Kingdom?

Yes, the Prime Minister is proposing that all broadband subscribers have to opt in to receive the unfiltered internet at home. The justification is “child safety.”

That’s right. But the ISPs’ proposed restricted content includes “adult content” as well as “extremist related content” and “web forums, esoteric material, and web blocking circumvention tools.” And the government wants that content automatically blocked. The UK has also gathered DNA from every newborn as part of a public health program since 2002, so the concept of “personal privacy” is a losing argument in this climate.

Wow. So you write about threats to the People’s assembly and parallels between what we face today and the Revolution era Stamp Act. What else can Intelligence Wars readers look forward to learning about?

In Part 3, I write about the Founders’ principles and the tenets of commonwealth that motivated them. They wanted to build the new nation on the philosophies of natural ability potentials and distributed networked intelligence, not the monarchical model of centralized power and centralized control. Part 4 looks at the organizational pathologies and institutional complexes that work against this natural ability and strangle the organism that is our nation. Finally in Part 5, I explain how we can move forward now we’re dealing with the same issues of centralized power and restricted assembly that colonial Americans dealt with in the 18th Century.

So much else has changed in 250 years. Why do you think we’re having these conversations again now?

It comes down to power. In the 18th Century, America was fighting against a world power. Now we are that power. In 1913, the United States transitioned from its geographical isolation into “America the powerful” and this was a major shift in the context of our role in the world.

But power is an information ecology toxin: it fixes a point and organizes new information and interpretations around it instead of engaging new information in an ongoing conversation. So we became powerful, and we also developed a truncated, militarized mind.

The sun rises in the background as a US soldier in fatigues walks across a dusty desert foreground. His rifle is pointed downward.
Karbala, Iraq, March 17, 2003 (c) John Moore, AP

A militarized mind truncates the decision-making process: it fixes one’s attention on deciding and acting, but doesn’t allow for the observation and orientation need to learn intelligently. Our wars have given us a lot of technology, but technology reinforces this shortcut because it is based on “assumption in, assumption out.”

So what’s the way out? What are our alternatives?

The US revolution was an experiment based the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment teaches us to understand problems by looking at systems, not just individuals, and to accept the concept of evolution or change. In the Herbert Spencer model, evolution is the capacity to have a different future beyond the condemnation of the past or the present: we have the capacity to leap beyond the limits of our past.

We’re often taught the surface reasons for our revolution—shaking off the monarchy, resentment about taxes—but the Revolution has much deeper roots than that. If we can understand those deeper natural intelligence principles and the tools they give us to break our organizational and institutional pathologies, then we can start navigating our way out of the artificial power-centric hegemony that’s dominant today.

Get future updates on Dr. Christy, the Intelligence Wars series, cybernetics, and the Cultural Strategies Institute by becoming a subscriber of mackenzian.com. Also read about a precursor to the 1765 Stamp Act: the 1643 Licensing Order Act that inspired John Milton’s Areopagitica.

By

Reader Review #02

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.

Kenyan Author Binyavanga Wainaina Tells Us All:
“We Must Free Our Imaginations.”

Africa is a Country: #Watch Binyavanga’s brilliant YouTube documentary calling out the BS behind “African” homophobia (Elliot Ross)

Warm red-toned pop-art style graphic illustration of Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina
Illustration credit: Dragon76 via Arise Live

In a 6-part Youtube series, Wainaina addresses his peers—middle class Kenyans and Africans—and challenges them on their cultural indoctrination. He’s not the first post-colonial writer to reflect on how “civilizing” education can deaden curiosity, creativity, risk tolerance, and the willingness to challenge paths that are safely average. Each video is between 4 and 8 minutes long and well worth watching.

Note: These videos don’t include captions and so are not text-reader accessible. If I find a solid transcript, I’ll update the post.

When Technology’s Used to Control, Not Connect

Motherboard: Maybe the Most Orwellian Text Message A Government’s Ever Sent (Brian Merchant)

In the first Reader Review, I shared a Wall Street Journal article on how consumer companies used cellular location data to track customer interests/purchasing patterns and then segment them for tailored marketing. I wrote:

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

That’s why Motherboard’s report on civic surveillance stood out to me. Ukraine’s government has just passed a law prohibiting public demonstrations. Motherboard reports that citizens whose phones had been located near a demonstration received a text message informing them that they’d been added to a government database. “Chilling” is not the only word that comes to mind.

I’ll be checking for updates on this story.

On Being There When Someone’s Hurt

New York Times: The Art of Presence (David Brooks)

Photo credit: Keisha McKenzie, 2007. Shakera and Jada, New Hope Children's Home, Jamaica
Photo credit: Keisha McKenzie. Shakera and Jada at New Hope Children’s Home, Jamaica (2007)

This is a remarkably humane column from the New York Times‘ David Brooks about how to connect with others as they experience or express trauma. The suggestions: Be there. Don’t compare. Bring soup. Don’t say ‘You’ll get over it’. Build with people. Don’t sermonize, explain away, or dismiss.

Just as Brené Brown’s breaks down empathy, Brooks breaks down presence. Both remind us that humane connection heals.

HT to Trischa Goodwin for the share.

Education Testmaker ETS Shifts to Workplace Readiness…
What’s Really Going On Here?

NPR: Certification test focuses on readying students for work, not college (Gwen Ifill)

As part of our continuing work with a local public school system, my colleagues and I have been monitoring developments in U.S. education. The rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) or STEAM (science, technology, arts, engineering, and mathematics) is one development that’s been ramping up for the last 15 years or so. “Workplace readiness” is another that responds to ancient concerns about a disconnect between the educational system and the employing market. These concerns are especially sharp now that US higher education is so costly and costs fall more on students than ever before.

What each of these trends means seems to ride a lot on analysts’ perspective, and observers even disagree on whether there’s a “STEM crisis” at all. One IEEE writer thinks the crisis is mythical and that the myth is damaging to STEM professionals and society; by contrast the National Academies are absolutely certain there’s a Category 5 storm approaching.

In both cases, though, objections and alarms rise or fall on how many degrees and jobs there are, not how much innovative activity is happening or how scientifically informed the lay population is. We don’t even agree on the measures to use so how can we judge progress or decline or agree on how to move forward?

Enter Educational Testing Service, stage left.

Since being founded during the U.S’ post-WWII public education boom, ETS has entrenched itself in the education services industry, positioned itself as a gatekeeper, and driven an emphasis on regularizing student skills assessment. Almost everyone who has entered college, graduate school, or any higher ed preparatory program has first had to pass through ETS’ battery of tests: SAT, ACT, CLEP, TOEFL, and/or GRE (ETS also influenced but no longer manages the MCAT [medicine]).

I have a lot of questions about ETS’ move into “preparing students for work” but this intro is already too long. Read or watch the NPR segment and let me know some of yours.

IHOP: Dominionist Theology and Delusional Leadership

Rolling Stone: Love and Death In the International House of Prayer: A Cultlike Christian Group’s Darkest Secrets (Jeff Tietz)

One of the hardest things to read this week came via Rolling Stone’s long-form piece on the International House of Prayer, the IHOP that doesn’t serve happiness via fluffy pancakes. Between tight, controlling theology and a leadership culture that required deference to delusion, vulnerable students didn’t stand a chance.

The whole article is unsettling. But about a third of the way through is a passage that disturbed me because it was all too familiar:

“With a community of believers around me, I’m not vulnerable,” [student Micah Moore] told a friend. Moore became as zealous as anyone in the group. He often spoke of the fallen world. “God is so pure and we are so sinful that the only way we can ever go near him is because of Jesus. Without Jesus, God can’t even look at us.”

HT to Boze Herrington, quoted in the piece and now recovering from his experiences.