Re: nettime NSA-spying-on-Europe outrage somewhat disingenuous
Heiko, great that you pointed out to this legal brief which is a fantastic, albeit a bit heavy legal read. The Dr. Herzog, Dr. Hesse, Dr. Katzenstein, Dr. Niemeyer, Dr. Heußner, Niedermaier, Dr. Henschelbrief, Bamford's early revelations in the form of books and of course Nicky Hager's Secret Power are the first steps of clarity on the long path of discovery that for now ends with Snowden. And hey, Bamford even exposed Prism (without naming it...) in his article in Wired last year, and the reaction of the wider public and politicians everywhere was more or less crickets There were clear signs that this is happening, from Room 641a on Folsom street in San Francisco (whistleblower Mark Klein) to the Pointdexter dissapeared TIA, which we now know what codenames it evolved into And we are talking only about the West here. Russia and China have of course their own methods and technologies and sometimes buy equipment from the very same companies as the NSA...so does the rest of the world with enough cash and spook cache From the mid 90's on we have done extensive work on these topics, including analyzing and implementing the nicely written Australian Communications Interception Act of 1979 and its amendment of 1997, which of course got a new world face in the recent developments that are completely consistent with the UKUSA (AUS/CAN/NZ) strategic alliance. \ See: http://info.publicintelligence.net/AU-NatSecInquiry.pdf. The problem here is that SIGINT and COMINT technology and methods have of course traveled their exponential trajectory, that is being generated in the RD labs of Narus (now Boeing...) (http://www.narus.com/), Verint (http://verint.com/) and similar companies and even university labs (of course) check out the lovely generic websites. And yes, it is rather ironic that there is so much surprise after Spiegel published the facts that Campbell and even the European Parliament have already exposed to the European public long time ago. Network warfare is slowly showing its material contours and everybody is suddenly (again) surprised. I always resort to bard Dylan in such times At midnight all the agents And the superhuman crew Come out and round up everyone That knows more than they do Then they bring them to the factory Where the heart-attack machine Is strapped across their shoulders And then the kerosene Is brought down from the castles By insurance men who go Check to see that nobody is escaping To Desolation Row. And turn on the receivers Mx # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime NSA-spying-on-Europe outrage somewhat disingenuous
Exactly at the tricky juncture of final negotiations for a comprehensive trade agreement between US and EU (remember - it's the economy, stupid!), the US government has probably more to explain than it ever be able to. Sortof comeback of Churchill's quip on the Balkans, whose problem was that they produce far more history than they possibly can consume... There are MANY actors who stand to gain and lose with the EU/US trade agreement one cannot eliminate the possibility of subterfuge arising from this (I suspect that the military-industrial actors are in a complex dance of power in this situation, not to mention many others...). But I think these are merely evidences of more wide-scaled power struggles between a waning superpower and other rising/shifting power centers that are re-aligning themselves to changing conditions. JH -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD beobachten das Tao, anstatt gerade die Dow vom Umfang der Ostsee +49 (0)171 911 4695 (until 04 July) http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime NSA-spying-on-Europe outrage somewhat disingenuous
Yes, line item 82 is somewhat crucial and surprising in its explanation...(if you are no cynical...) But as you pointed out, this happened in the 80's and you could find similar cases all over the legal systems of s.c. democracies up to today. Here in the US, more than half of the public opinion does not care much about the fact that all of our communications and patterns are being gathered and stored...it is an incredible reaction. Half of the public opinion is completely buying into the security argumentation and the necessity of this becoming a fact that we should simply live with or is not even aware of it and thinks, as the President, that Snowden is a hacker. It is an unimaginable prospect that this is the case, but it is. The problem of Europe is that it has allowed this to happen all along, and the surprise is still somewhat bewildering, although more than necessary. And Europe has if i am not mistaken UK as part of the Union. That says it all as far as UKUSA is concerned. It was probably the GCHQ who facilitated the bugging of the Brussels chambers...why wouldn't they, they have a special relationship. Yes, Holy Smokes, it is really happening. What now? Check out the lovely former representative of the people Jane Harman. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/jan-june13/nsadebate_06-10.html I think this is one of the many little insights into the current state of balkanized hyperproduction (thank you Patrice for reminding us of Chruchill) of history. And Heiko, there are alternatives, and more will emerge. They are slower and slower paced, maybe this is what this world needs before it finally sinks into the Anthropocene oblivion. Mx The trade agreement is for sure part of the ecology, but the fact On 7/2/13 9:22 AM, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: Am 02.07.2013 07:28, schrieb Marko Peljhan: Heiko, great that you pointed out to this legal brief which is a fantastic, albeit a bit heavy legal read. Well, it is a decision by the German Federal Constitutional Court and I think the case shows that it is basically all very trivial. We cannot paint the world, we have to take it as it is. And it is completely ridiculous to expect anything in it to change so far. Thats the nature ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Announcement: Society of the Query #2, 7-8 November 2013, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Society of the Query #2 Online Search: about 4.720.000.000 results November 7 ? 8, 2013 Main Building Amsterdam Public Library (OBA) Amsterdam (NL) This fall the Institute of Network Cultures invites you to the second Society of the Query conference on search and search engines, 7 and 8 November in the OBA (public library) in Amsterdam. Together with Ren? K?nig from the ITAS Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we are working on putting together the program with different sessions and discussions, that will hopefully be complemented with exciting workshops, an art program and a hackathon. We aim to give new energy to the discussion on search and search engines by bringing together researchers from different disciplines, with artists, programmers and designers. In early 2014 this will also result in the publication of the Society of the Query Reader. Preliminary program: November 7 (afternoon): 1. Google domination Even though it is the aim of the Society of the Query to broaden the scope of search beyond Google, it is nonetheless inevitable to pay attention to the dominance of Google in the search engine market - especially from the perspective of the Netherlands, where Google has a market share of around 95%. Despite the growing diversification of Google in terms of revenue, search is still its main source of income, while users still see Google as a free service. Lately the battlefield has shifted to search on mobile phones - could this change or even end Google's domination? What are the implications of the low resistance of the Google monopoly against PRISM? Has the time come for alternative, independent search engines? With Siva Vaidhyanathan (US), Astrid Mager (AT), Dirk Lewandowski (GE) 2. Search across the border It is little known in the west that elsewhere in the world Google is not a major player. Can we speak of cultural differences in the architecture of search technology? And in the way users search in for example the rural parts of India? In China there is a separate search engine domain, leading to a different political economy of online search - geopolitical, linguistically and culturally. How can we oppose this to the libertarian, North-American values of Google? With Payal Arora (NL), Min Jiang (US) 3. Reflections on search Is it possible to analyze the search engine as a cultural artifact? Does it have a philosophical agenda and how can we read it? Search is often overlooked as an important part in the fast changing field of knowledge production. It is only dealt with in a mathematical and statistical fashion or with a focus on its economic significance as a tool of corporate power. But search did not commence in the late 90s - it has been around for centuries. It's important to stress the media-archeological approach, since the history of search, digital or analogue, offers many insights into its cultural meaning. With Antoinette Rouvroy (BE), Anton Tantner (AT), Kylie Jarrett (IRE) November 8 4. Search in context There is a long-term cultural shift in trust happening, away from the library, the book store, even the school towards Google's algorithms. What does that mean? How are search engines used in today's classrooms and do teachers have enough critical understanding of what it means to hand over authority? We think we find more and in a faster way, while we might actually find less or useless information. The way we search is related to the way we see the world - how do we learn to operate in this context? With Simon Knight (UK), Thomas Petzold (GE), Sanne Koevoets (NL) 5. The filter bubble show Since Eli Pariser's influential book The Filter Bubble appeared in 2011, a range of researchers have empirically tried to validate or debunk the proposition of the filter bubble. Is it truly so that the person sitting next to you gets a different search result while using in the same keywords? What do you actually see when you type ?9/11? in the Google autocomplete search bar in Baghdad and in New York? What are the long-term effects of personalization and localization and their tendency to a 'relative truth'? We need to find a way to take our Twitter, Facebook and search engine profiles to burst the bubble and understand society. With Martin Feuz (UK), Noortje Marres (NL), Carolin Gerlitz (NL), Ren? K?nig (GE) and others The Society of the Query project started in 2009 with a conference and research blog, in parallel to the Deep Search series of events, organized by the World-Information Institute in Vienna. While these efforts have contributed to a better understanding of the impact of search engines, many open questions remain. Moreover, dynamics in the field have led to new questions: How does the rise of the social web affect search engines and the practices around them? Which consequences do innovations like personalization, localization or autocomplete have? How can we re-think the established search routines? If you
Re: nettime NSA-spying-on-Europe outrage somewhat disingenuous
On 07/02/2013 08:32 PM, Marko Peljhan wrote: Here in the US, more than half of the public opinion does not care much about the fact that all of our communications and patterns are being gathered and stored...it is an incredible reaction. Ah ha, but the beauty is in the other half, no? I mean, don't get me wrong, whenever I hear anyone of any nationality accepting massive surveillance as a fait accompli or worse, a necessity, I not only despise them but also feel dark pessimism deep in my bones. However the mainstream since 2011 is divided, the other half - which percent I am not sure - has an increasingly good basic knowledge of what's happening and is increasingly against it. Traveling around the world, Claire and I used to be impressed how much more just about anybody we would meet in the former East or Latin America knew about the global hierarchy than our fellow Americans. Well, it is still true, but thanks to hacker and other efforts - and thanks to the visible naked power and greed of said hierarchy - things are changing. I just say, let's change them some more. Nobody has to to teach you all how to be disabused, nor how to put out the facts and the perspectives that give facts meaning. Onward, then. best, Brian-the cup-at-least-has-something-in-it,-no?-Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
