ttip: digital respect and resistance

[Kristoffer Gansing]

Dear old nettimers,

I am not a particularly regular contributor here, but as long time
lurker, occasional event announcer and artistic director of transmediale
in Berlin, I would like to share with you a short statement that I
prepared for my presentation at the Werkleitz Festival 2015 ".move ON"
in Halle on October 10.

As this day coincides with a big anti-TTIP demo in Berlin, I choose not
to prepare the usual festival presentation but to offer some reflections
on the troubling relation between the digital art and culture field to
this and other free trade agreements currently in negotiation.

My apologies for the somewhat raw, underresearched, possibly naive and
spoken word like form of this text - I am just curious to see what kind
of response it will evoke! Especially I am curious if the nettime
community has anything to say about the supposed fear of dealing with
TTIP within digital art and culture, well knowing of course that there
is an assumed "field" here that might already be declared obsolete or
for which there are many names and definitions.

best,
Kristoffer Gansing


First of all I would like to say that I am extremely happy to be here
among many respected colleagues and to enjoy the impressive programme of
this year's move.on werkleitz festival.

I and transmediale are very happy to have occasionally taken part in the
different cross-border exchanges that Peter Zorn and his team have so
impressively set up over the years. And I am very happy to have hosted
the work of the artist Robyn Moody at the transmediale festival earlier
this year and to see its finished iteration later here today.

This said, I am painfully aware of the fact that while we are gathering
here we are missing out on a manifestation going on in Berlin that deals
critically with a completely different kind of cross-border exchange.

I am talking about today's big demonstration against the TTIP ??? The
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.  And I am saying that I
am painfully aware since I was really planning to join this demo and if
not possible physically then at least by publishing a critical article
that asks why it is that the digital art and culture scene has so far
shown so little engagement in the debate of TTIP. This is paradoxical
since it seems as if the area of digital culture is highly implicated in
the scarce info we have on the ongoing secret negotiations. The little I
have been able to read up on TTIP and similar current trade deals has
led me to assume that digital art and culture has what one in German
calls a ???ber??hrungsangst??? that is a kind of fearful respect towards
critically engaging with this topic precisely because it is steeped in
rhetorics and strategies of border-crossing, access, digital freedom and
innovation. It would not be a new critique of our field that it exploits
hype waves of technological development that are intimately connected to
neoliberal agendas. But I think we are also all in agreement that we are
trying to change such schemes from within and provide the space for
artists, activists and other critical thinkers to formulate
alternatives. The recent drive of media art to capitalise on the EU's
interest in promoting innovation through funding collaboration between
the technology sector and artists is a case in point ??? and it is yet to
be seen if projects formulated in this framework will really be able to
break out of the bubble of quantification and profit oriented conditions
of production that are now being established.  

So where do actors in digital art and culture stand in relation TTIP? A
cynical interpretation could be that in this field, we are already so
accustomed to simultaneously adapt and bending the rules of changing
economic and political agendas that there is a kind laissez-fair
attitude ??? come whatever come and we will use it to our gain somehow.
And especially regarding transnational trade agreements there seems to
be a language at play that comes close to the border-crossing ideals of
digital art and culture ??? BUT, I would argue that the actual practice
associated with these ideals in the end are among the ones that could be
most endangered by TTIP and that there is now an urgent need within
digital culture to drop the ???ber??hrungsangst??? and formulate a critique
of these free trade agreements and their post-digital brand of
neoliberalism.

But as I hinted at in the beginning, part of the problem is that we are
always busy somewhere else. This might be both the biggest asset and
curse of media art and digital culture : that it is always moving on.
The next place, the next site, the next discourse, the next big trend.
When is digital art and culture going to really grow up and deal with
the here and now? How can you formulate a real alternative in the
present when you are always too busy being tele-present?

These questions haunts me on a daily basis as I try to balance my
intensive working life of being the artistic director of a big 

Barton Gellman: Scholarship, Security and 'Spillage' on Campus

[nettime's_dependent_insecurity_researcher]

Scholarship, Security and 'Spillage' on Campus

By Barton Gellman

This article first appeared on The Century Foundation's website.


[http://www.tcf.org/blog/detail/scholarship-security-and-spillage-on-campus]


This is an adventure in classified speech at an academic
conference. If you know a story like it on another campus, please
get in touch. Send an email[*] or use my secure contacts[*] for
greater privacy.

[http://www.tcf.org/experts/detail/barton-gellman]
[https://www.bartongellman.com/pgp]

On September 24 I gave a keynote presentation[*] at Purdue
University about the NSA, Edward Snowden, and national security
journalism in the age of surveillance. It was part of the
excellent Dawn or Doom colloquium, which I greatly enjoyed. The
organizers live-streamed my talk and promised to provide me with
a permalink to share.

[http://eventmobi.com/dawnordoom/agenda/90674/605774]

After unexplained delays, I received a terse email from the
university last week. Upon advice of counsel, it said, Purdue
"will not be able to publish your particular video" and will not
be sending me a copy. The conference hosts, once warm and
hospitable, stopped replying to my emails and telephone calls. I
don't hold it against them. Very likely they are under lockdown
by spokesmen and lawyers.

Naturally, all this piqued my curiosity. With the help of my
colleague Sam Adler-Bell,[*] I think I have pieced together most
of the story.

[http://www.tcf.org/experts/detail/sam-adler-bell]

It turns out that Purdue has wiped all copies of my video and
slides from university servers, on grounds that I displayed
classified documents briefly on screen. A breach report was filed
with the university's Research Information Assurance Officer,
also known as the Site Security Officer, under the terms of
Defense Department Operating Manual 5220.22-M.[*] I am told that
Purdue briefly considered, among other things, whether to destroy
the projector I borrowed, lest contaminants remain.

[http://www.dss.mil/documents/odaa/nispom2006-5220.pdf]

UPDATE: Just after posting this item I received an email from
Julie Rosa, who heads strategic communications for Purdue. She
confirmed that Purdue wiped my video after consulting the Defense
Security Service, but the university now believes it went too far.

"In an overreaction while attempting to comply with regulations,
the video was ordered to be deleted instead of just blocking the
piece of information in question. Just FYI: The conference
organizers were not even aware that any of this had happened
until well after the video was already gone."

"I'm told we are attempting to recover the video, but I have not
heard yet whether that is going to be possible. When I find out,
I will let you know and we will, of course, provide a copy to
you."

Let's rewind. Information Assurance? Site Security?

These are familiar terms elsewhere, but new to me in a university
context. I learned that Purdue, like a number of its peers, has a
"facility security clearance" to perform classified U.S.
government research. The manual of regulations runs to 141 pages.
(Its terms[*] forbid uncleared trustees to ask about the work
underway on their campus, but that's a subject for another day.)
The pertinent provision here, spelled out at length in a manual
called Classified Information Spillage,[*] requires
"sanitization, physical removal, or destruction" of classified
information discovered on unauthorized media.

[http://www.purdue.edu/bot/meeting-documents/2014/july/stated/sr.managerial%20group.pdf]
[https://www.fas.org/sgp/library/cnssp-18.pdf]

If I had the spider sense that we journalists like to claim, I
might have seen trouble coming. One of the first questions in the
Q & A that followed my talk was:

"In the presentation you just gave, you were showing documents
that were TS/SCI [top secret, sensitive compartmented
information] and things like that. Since documents started to
become published, has the NSA issued a declass order for that?"

I took the opportunity to explain the government's dilemmas when
classified information becomes available to anyone with an
internet connection. I replied:

"These documents, by and large, are still classified. And in many
cases, if you work for the government and you have clearance,
you're not allowed to go look at them???"

"Now, it's perfectly rational for them to say, we're not going to
declassify everything that gets leaked because otherwise we're
letting someone else decide what's classified and what's not. But
it gets them wound up in pretty bad knots."

By way of example, I mentioned that the NSA, CIA, and Office of
the Director of National Intelligence "have steadfastly refused
to give me a secure channel to communicate with them" about the
Snowden leaks. 

Barton Gellman: Classified material in the public domain: what's a university to do?

[nettime's_purdue_chicken]

Classified material in the public domain: what's a university to do?

 OCTOBER 8, 2015 
 BARTON GELLMAN 

Yesterday I posted some thoughts about Purdue University's
decision to destroy a video recording of my keynote address at
its Dawn or Doom colloquium. The organizers had gone dark, and a
promised public link was not forthcoming. After a couple of weeks
of hoping to resolve the matter quietly, I did some digging and
decided to write up what I learned. I posted on the web site of
the Century Foundation, my main professional home:

It turns out that Purdue has wiped all copies of my video and
slides from university servers, on grounds that I displayed
classified documents briefly on screen. A breach report was filed
with the university's Research Information Assurance Officer,
also known as the Site Security Officer, under the terms of
Defense Department Operating Manual 5220.22-M. I am told that
Purdue briefly considered, among other things, whether to destroy
the projector I borrowed, lest contaminants remain.

I was, perhaps, naive, but pretty much all of that came as a real
surprise.

Let's rewind. Information Assurance? Site Security?

These are familiar terms elsewhere, but new to me in a university
context. I learned that Purdue, like a number of its peers, has a
"facility security clearance" to perform classified U.S.
government research. The manual of regulations runs to 141 pages.
(Its terms forbid uncleared trustees to ask about the work
underway on their campus, but that's a subject for another day.)
The pertinent provision here, spelled out at length in a manual
called Classified Information Spillage, requires "sanitization,
physical removal, or destruction" of classified information
discovered on unauthorized media.

Two things happened in rapid sequence around the time I told
Purdue about my post.

First, the university broke a week-long silence and expressed a
measure of regret:

UPDATE: Just after posting this item I received an email from
Julie Rosa, who heads strategic communications for Purdue. She
confirmed that Purdue wiped my video after consulting the Defense
Security Service, but the university now believes it went too
far.

"In an overreaction while attempting to comply with regulations,
the video was ordered to be deleted instead of just blocking the
piece of information in question. Just FYI: The conference
organizers were not even aware that any of this had happened
until well after the video was already gone."

"I'm told we are attempting to recover the video, but I have not
heard yet whether that is going to be possible. When I find out,
I will let you know and we will, of course, provide a copy to
you."

Then Edward Snowden tweeted the link, and the Century
Foundation's web site melted down. It now redirects to Medium,
where you can find the full story.

I have not heard back from Purdue today about recovery of the
video. It is not clear to me how recovery is even possible, if
Purdue followed Pentagon guidelines for secure destruction.
Moreover, although the university seems to suggest it could have
posted most of the video, it does not promise to do so now. Most
importantly, the best that I can hope for here is that my remarks
and slides will be made available in redacted form -- with
classified images removed, and some of my central points
therefore missing. There would be one version of the talk for the
few hundred people who were in the room on Sept. 24, and for
however many watched the live stream, and another version left as
the only record.

For our purposes here, the most notable questions have to do with
academic freedom in the context of national security. How did a
university come to "sanitize" a public lecture it had solicited,
on the subject of NSA surveillance, from an author known to
possess the Snowden documents? How could it profess to be shocked
to find that spillage is going on at such a talk? The beginning
of an answer came, I now see, in the question and answer period
after my Purdue remarks. A post-doctoral research engineer stood
up to ask whether the documents I had put on display were
unclassified. "No," I replied. "They're classified still." Eugene
Spafford, a professor of computer science there, later attributed
that concern to "junior security rangers" on the faculty and
staff. But the display of Top Secret material, he said, "once
noted,... is something that cannot be unnoted."

Someone reported my answer to Purdue's Research Information
Assurance Officer, who reported in turn to