Transparency trends gather steam

First an announcement...

Edward Snowden and David Brin will among the keynote speakers at the Bard College conference, Why Privacy Matters, held October 15-16. Register online. Should be interesting! (One of the two will be attending by Skype.)

Again with this transparency thing!

Reaction has been mostly favorable to my editorial in the Global Post, wherein I suggested that cameras are becoming a Great Equalizer in urban America, the way the Colt 45 was in the Old West... and that small investments in cam-technology for minorities might fundamentally alter power and safety on our city streets. In addition to "black lives matter" why not also chant for the pragmatic thing that's making the biggest difference? "We want more tech!" Now, let's try to actually implement it.

With this in mind have a look at The ACLU's policy on cop cams.

The latest news is actually a qualitative shift. "Arlington Texas Police Chief Will Johnson on Tuesday said he had fired officer Brad Miller over the shooting of Christian Taylor. Johnson says he's troubled by some of the actions Miller took while responding to a reported burglary at a car dealership early Friday morning."

Notice the differences in this case. There was no video footage, yet a white officer is being held accountable, despite the fact that the fellow he shot was probably in the act of committing a felony, at the time. Read further and you'll see this is exactly along the line of progression that I have forecast... that a time would come when decent cops will gather the guts -- partly in their own interest -- to start cleaning house of their bad-apple colleagues. Stay tuned and see if this spreads.

== Change is Unstoppable ==

Online “security expert” Bruce Schneier’s blog surveys the most recent wave of online ideas and revelations and offers new terminology for a phenomenon that has been monthly, without let-up, since the last century: "Organizational Doxing". Hm... nice. And welcome to the light side of the force, admitting at last that:

(1) the tsunami of revelation is unstoppable, but that

(2) it needn't be the end of the world - or even of some privacy - if we acquire habits of reciprocal accountability, and do it...

(3) ...thorough-militant sousveillance-supervision of elites.

One might have hoped for reference to earlier works on this topic, such as The Transparent Society (1997)... if Schneier finally got around to reading it, and thereupon took note of how diametrically opposite his earlier strawmanning-missives were, to the book's actual content. Well, better late than never.

Along these lines, see this from a review of a forthcoming book: Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in An Age of High Technology, by Gary T. Marx:

"We live in an age saturated with surveillance. Our personal and public lives are increasingly on display for governments, merchants, employers, hackers—and the merely curious—to see. In Windows into the Soul, Gary T. Marx, a central figure in the rapidly expanding field of surveillance studies, argues that surveillance itself is neither good nor bad, but that context and comportment make it so. In this landmark book, Marx sums up a lifetime of work on issues of surveillance and social control by disentangling and parsing the empirical richness of watching and being watched. Using fictional narratives as well as the findings of social science, Marx draws on decades of studies of covert policing, computer profiling, location and work monitoring, drug testing, caller identification, and much more, Marx gives us a conceptual language to understand the new realities and his work clearly emphasizes the paradoxes, trade-offs, and confusion enveloping the field. Windows into the Soul shows how surveillance can penetrate our social and personal lives in profound, and sometimes harrowing, ways. Ultimately, Marx argues, recognizing complexity and asking the right questions is essential to bringing light and accountability to the darker, more iniquitous corners of our emerging surveillance society."

== Miscellaneous Items ==

What level of disclosure is appropriate? How can public accountability be balanced with the privacy essential for scientific inquiry? An editorial exploring this as a zero sum tradeoff… "Transparency versus harassment..." a concept I do not actually accept.

I am not so sure about this next item… Under the new Chrome feature “Dmail,” email panic or regret can be fixed by clicking the "revoke" button after a message has been sent. When sending a message, users can also decide whether they want the message to self-destruct after one hour, one day, one week or never. This is different from an earlier feature: Google’s "undo send" feature unveiled in June giving Gmail users with email panic or regret up to 30 seconds to take back the offending message.

Should someone be able to send you a hateful email and deny you a record of it? Weigh in on this.

The app Jott’s AirChat feature allows users to send data and texts without a connection to the Internet. Jott uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios to create a closed network with other devices that are within 100-feet of each other, needing no smart phone or data plan.

You might check out the novel Darknet, by Matthew Mather, about an AI that develops out of a Wall Street hedge fund's automatic trading system. A scenario I've long held to be the most dangerous of all possible sources of AI.

The future of the internet looks a lot like BitCoin: "the same technology that secures transactions on the Bitcoin network—and thereby renders them transparent, nearly instantaneous, censorship-resistant, and free of the need to trust anybody—can be used to process other, more complex financial negotiations and to securely store any kind of digital information on the Internet." The mighty SF author Karl Schroeder looks into the future of chained trust transactions in a story contributed to our transparency-based sci fi anthology, Chasing Shadows, which will appear next year.

== Hackers and Worrisome Devices ==

The dating website Ashley Madison, whose slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair," purports to have 37 million members as cheating spouses. Now hackers are threatening to release all of the site's personal information — including its members' sexual fantasies and financial information — if the company doesn't take Ashley Madison offline. Of course this was to be expected. Anyone who actually believes promises of confidentiality in this modern era is so foolish that such delusion would normally disqualify a creature in any other species from breeding. On the other hand, do the hackers actually believe they have accomplished anything?

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sent a letter last week to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department asking regulators to look into “always on” technology. The group cited technology from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others as worrisome.

Examples: Google Chrome is reportedly able to remotely install code that allows the software to listen to users without their knowledge. The code was originally designed to support Chrome’s new “OK, Google” hotword detection. The Samsung SmartTV has a built-in microphone that is equipped with voice recognition technology that allows users to give verbal commands to the TV. In order for Samsung to convert your speech to text, the voice commands are sent over the Internet to a third-party for interpretation. However, since the TV is “always on,” the microphone is recording every word you’re saying at all times. Others of concern include NestCam and Canary Connect, Amazon Echo and Microsoft Kinect.

Oh and… “Through a Wi-Fi connection and a built-in microphone, the new Barbie is able to hold (unsupervised) conversations with a child.”

There is only one solution. I have been saying it for decades.