July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[>Htech] Infoshop News: Surveillance and Domestication
by Premise Checker 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Surveillance and Domestication http://www.infoshop.org/inews/print.php?story=04/06/21/3538869 posted by [1]Anon on Monday June 21 2004 @ 03:25AM PDT [2]Spying and Spooks SURVEILLANCE AND DOMESTICATION John Connor on the rise of surveillance and our acquiescence in it Surveillance is sold to us on the grounds that 'the innocent have nothing to hide', but the reluctance of the watchers to also become the watched--the police will plead 'operational security' to excuse themselves from disclosing even the most trivial points of detail about themselves, such as canteen menus, etc--shows this as both a transparent excuse to extend surveillance way beyond the point where it should be socially acceptable and a disguising of what is in the interests of the powerful with reference to what is supposedly 'in the interest of all'. THE WORM IN ADAM'S APPLE By way of excusing current levels of surveillance, where there is now one camera / four people in UK alone, it is possible to present the first band societies 'where everyone knew everyone else's business' as the most surveilled societies of all. This totally misses the point, however, as people then felt they were 'everyone else's business'. Although individual's 'right' to 'do their own thing' in negotiation with the band regardless of traditional custom was highly respected,1 there were not the firm boundaries of selfhood that characterise capitalism's atomised individualism, not least because personal and societal survival were so intimately interrelated. Part of your identity was your relationship to the rest of the band and you would not be complete without this, nor think of withholding something from them as you would from yourself. These were free, equal societies where an unevenness of knowledge, where it was hoarded to advantage one over another, was an entirely alien, civilised concept except possibly between genders and then not always. In fact, continuous sharing of news and skills were as much part of the fabric of daily life in hunter-gatherer societies as the sharing of tools (usufruct) and resources. With the rise of class society, where it became in the interests of the labouring majority to conceal resources and information about them, work rates etc ,from the non-labouring minority overseeing them, it equally became in the interests of the latter to try to find out what was being concealed from them. This, in truth, was the birth of the surveillance society, it's limited effectiveness still pretty much restricted to what could be seen directly by overseers and residual 'group think' that led people to disclosure information they really wouldn't in modern, individualistic societies. Alvarez's Centuries of Childhood is very good in pointing this up in the Medieval era, when any idea of an 'internal dialogue' was the privilege of a literate monastic minority. Others would say what they thought, their expression being limited to the presence of others with whom it could be shared - possibly getting back to the ears of feudal law enforcers and tax collectors. The most radical significance of the book in terms of shaping the human psyche was that it allowed private thoughts and expression in 'dialogue' (for surely the relationship is not mutual in the way conversation is) with the page. The first diaries--typically records of spiritual exercises by cloistered divines--are thus Medieval. The self-enclosure facilitated by writing led, of ruling class necessity, to the elaboration of more sophisticated techniques of surveillance - the spy networks engendered by Elizabeth I's courtier Sir Francis Walsingham, for example, still celebrated as original in Establishment spook circles today. They would solicit disloyal comment through infiltration techniques, pretending to be who they were not to suspects, as well as incidentally engaging pretty comprehensively in mail interception and attempting to crack counter-measures such as concealment and cipher. They were still largely dependant on the word, however, often words procured by duress (torture) and misrepresentation (forgery or 'over-reading' of intercepted correspondence). Of course, this was also the era of the witch hunts with their 'spectral evidence' (the testimony of 'victims of witchcraft'), but this dependence reached its apex in the reign of Charles II and the baseless conspiricising of the Protestant fanatic Titus Oates and his 'Popish Plot'. Simply on the basis of tortured 'confession' and guilt by association, an anti-Catholic pogrom was whipped up, though its only true substance was Oate's own paranoid fantasy. THE ALL-SEEING EYE This sort of thing may have been adequate as an instrument of terror befitting the majesty of absolute kings, but increased rationalism and individualism associated with the ascendance of Protestantism, with its claims of the believer's unmediated relationship with the Divine, meant consequent increased demands for physical evidence as a break on the arbitrary power of courts (both kingly and judicial), especially in matters concerning the 'sanctity' of private property. Paradoxically, as well as demanding more explicit legislative regulation, the bourgeoisie's pet religion also demanded greater self-regulation, the self now being bounded by contract- and financial relationships rather than intimate, social relationships. Thus we have the commonplace appearence2 of the divine 'all-seeing eye', as seen miserably decorating Protestant homes and chapels to this day, as well as topping the Masonic pyramid Washington and Jefferson incorporated into the design of every dollar bill. This idea of 'the Lord sees all' meant that even the individualistic Protestant clung on to the vestige of community, of public being,, in the sense of being in a community of two, s/he and the ever-watchful God, even if real community--typically more reciprocal, less judgmental of 'sin' and 'slackness'--was sacrificed to such an unremitting moralistic code in consequence.. As well as insisting that the worshipper be hard-working and thrifty, the Protestant faith self-imposed harsh standards of personal behaviour when it came to the body and bodily interaction with others. As Norbert Elias classic study of the rise of 'good manners', The Civilising Process, graphically documents, food became problematic, no longer to be indulged in gluttonously or passed from mouth to mouth but rather, like sexual or excretory functions, to be seen as a shameful concession to physicality to be controlled and bounded by taboos, best a private thing the better to avoid public shame. Such etiquette was literally domesticating, confined to the home, and homes too became more elaborate, with particular concessions to the body confined to particular rooms - a dining room for eating, a toilet for excretion (the corners of rooms having previously been preferred, even at Louis XIV's Versailles!), and the bedroom for sex behind curtained, canopied beds. The point of all this specialised architecture--of privacy--was that as few people saw it as possible. And so lose respect for someone shamefully indulging their body, as if we all don't It was mainly something between a wo/man and the all-seeing Lord. SEEING BY NUMBERS A combination of capital accumulation secured by resultant fixed, abstract laws and 18th century innovations in food production and transportation made the mega-cities that characterised the Industrial Revolution possible. This, then, was when surveillance came of age. On one level, faced with cities inhabited by millions, many born and raised undocumented or newly immigrated from the countryside and forming tight village / ghetto communities closed to casual investigation by outsiders, it was impossible to surveil them using the old techniques of gossip gathering On the other hand, this redoubled the need for self-surveillance as a curb on the spontaneous, riotous street mob behaviour of previous centuries as the only practical guarantor of social order. On a general level, the inculcation of a self-denying moral code into the poor was the responsibility of charismatic Methodism--as in the ruling class dilemma of the early-1800s, 'Wesleyism or revolution?'--and later 'do-gooders' dispensing unwanted advice about thrift, temperance and other supposedly good domestic practice. For those who wouldn't accept social inequality as a problem to be resolved by behaviour adjustment on their part, there was the hero of bourgeois rational social calculation, Jeremy Bentham, and his panoptican, a prisonhouse designed to do this architecurally.3 It's two key features were (1) individual cells, a rule of silence and the hooding of inmates outside their cells to enforce complete isolation from their community and force them to fall back on the Protestant 'God and I' 'community' instead and (2) a central tower from which guards could watch each cell unobserved, much like the Protestant God. Whether actually watched or not, the prisoner had to assume the worst for fear of harsher punishment, also inculcating a feeling of permanent surveillance and thus self-regulation. Needless to say, in practice this brutal, unnatural treatment amounted to sensory deprivation and whilst it made some suggestible enough to be effectively brainwashed, it broke others entirely, yielding horrifying hallucinations and self-harm. As recidivists could expect many more years in such a system than first offenders, there was naturally an attempt to evade such treatment by increased anonymity and impersonation of identities amongst the urban poor. Of course, Michel Foucalt dealt with this extensively in his Discipline and Punish, but it is often forgotten that the first concern of the new generation of surveillants was not to control crime but rather to contain disease, a much more widespread and deadly threat to the rich living in close geographic proximity to the poor. High walls, sturdy footmen in livery and a mastiff would no way keep cholera from their doors, so we find as early as the 1830s the first epidemiologists descending into the unplumbed depths of 'darkest London' o identify sources of disease and its carriers. This was rightly seen as social control being imposed on areas that typically rioted before admitting even one of Robert Peel's newly-minted 'blue devils' (police). The proletariat typically refused to acknowledge the reality of epidemic crowd diseases such as cholera (uniquely deadly in the early megalopolises and once a key check on their development) and to destroy cholera carts intruding into their space as a conspiracy to confine the poor to 'houses of death' (as they reckoned hospitals, not without justification) for the sadistic amusement of surgeons, during and after life.4 And, of course, the poor only had to look to the panoptican to see with what degree of humanity they would be treated by the new impersonal total institutions we seem so disturbingly accepting of today. A combination of a bureaucracy not sophisticated enough for individual documentation of entire populations before that developed out of regimented military practice during the American Civil War, and widespread illiteracy and resistance by its intended target population meant that the issuing of identification documents to the poor for voluntary presentation was not practical. In fact, it was so impractical that the threat of epidemic disease wasn't resolved by way of identifying and confining individual carriers (typically bourgeois moralistic 'blaming the victim') but rather by anonymous sanitation measures such as the building of London's sewers in reaction to the 'Great Stink' of the 1850s, even though the idea of the state assuming responsibility for such massive, tax-eating public works would have previously been anathema to bourgeois sensibilities. The breakthrough came in Paris as late as 1870 when a Surete clerk Alphonse Bertillon developed biometrics from a 14th century Chinese model. Bertillonage considered of individually identifying anonymous individuals by a 20 minute examination when many key features of their body--their height, the length of their limbs, the spacing of their facial features--were systematically measured and then recorded to card indexes. Potential recidivists were typically uncooperative during these examinations, later (1903) augmented by 'mug shots', so called by the subject 'mugging' (pulling faces) at the camera in an (often amusingly successful) effort to make themselves less identifiable in future. It should be noted that Bertillon was heavily influenced by the imperial anthropology of its day, with its emphasis on the physical classification of 'types'. Like the absurd Italian criminologist Lombroso, he attributed mental and moral characteristics to these physical signs, typically in a classist and racist manner than only served to reinforce such ideologies in future. Bertillonage finally failed and fell out of police use not because it was racist or unwieldy or even because it was felt to be an excessive intrusion on individual privacy ('sir, my statistics are my own') but rather because it couldn't do it's job. In 1903, a man called Will West was confined to Leavenworth jail for murder on the basis of biometric measurements actually appropriate to another man, coincidentally also called William West, despite a supposed 243m-to-one chance against this happening (not counting any slips of the police tape measure!). Besides, by then they had something quicker to collect and easier to file, which didn't require the perp's physical presence to identify him. It is probably no surprise that fingerprinting arose from a colonial context, that other great 'submerged mass' that caused the Victorian elite such worry. A chief magistrate in Jigupoot, Sir William Herschel first noticed in 1856 that Indians either illiterate or otherwise unfamiliar with English script signed themselves with thumb prints instead of writing, an administrative procedure for unique identification he adopted himself. From there, it was a short step to Darwin's pal Sir Francis Galton writing this up in the scientific journal Nature and a former supremo of Bombay's colonial police, Richard Henry introducing fingerprinting to Scotland Yard's repertoire of crime detection procedures in 1896. LEARNING TO LOVE BIG BROTHER Although the state had a technique for distinguishing one anonymous individual from another with unerring accuracy,5 this was fairly useless if that individual could disappear into the anonymous urban mass. As former Resistance fighter Jacques Ellul noted in his Technological Society, an immediate consequence of seeking to surveil particular individuals is that the whole society in which they might conceal themselves has to be surveilled also, the 'innocent' majority as intensively as the 'guilty' few. Perhaps more surprisingly, by the time fingerprinting was initiated, the resolute resistance to classification of the early-19th century was crumbling. There were a number for factors accounting for this, but key was the inducements offered the majority not to remain anonymous. Mass education on a monitor system--much like that adopted by Napoleon's Grand Armee, the basis of Bentham's panoptican--not only provided a more literate, technically sophisticated workshop with a greater chance of individual socio-economic betterment, it also meant the young came to accept such treatment as normal--both classification by name and number and harsh restrictions on personal behaviour in class ('no talking, no fidgeting')--and could be systematically documented, generation by generation. This was augmented by the centralisation of registers of births, deaths and marriages in places like Somerset House instead of scattered through disparate parishes, the taking of censuses to facilitate national planning,, and the creation of employment-based taxation which meant both bosses and workers (unless inclined to fraud) had to declare their identities along with their earnings if they were to make a living at all. Even systematic mapping, such as carried out initially for military reasons by the Ordnance Survey, meant that space in which people could exist anonymously evaporated ('everyone in their place'). This process was only accelerated by the Liberal welfare reforms of the early-1910s and the post-World War 2 creation of the welfare state, both of which had disclosure of identity as prerequisite requirements of receiving their services. It was a citizen's 'right' (the 'carrot') and 'duty (the legislatively-enforced 'stick') to enter into all this, without realising that my surrendering their anonymity to the state, they were also surrounding a key check on its otherwise unlimited power. I could rehearse at great length the elaboration of technological means that now exist to strip us of any possibility of anonymity, but this is done elsewhere this issue and besides, there is always Privacy International to consult. I will note that when a text like The Technology of Political Control was written in the supposedly paranoid 1970s, the suggestion that a comprehensive database could be linked with face recognition programmes and cameras blanketing every public space in the country was regarded as pure science fiction, something out of George Orwell's dystopian 1984. But today this is, of course, a reality and augmented by overgrown police and internal security agencies, parallel services like social workers and market researchers that want to know everything from the value of your home through to your children's eating and TV watching habits the better to predict and manipulate you, easily surveilled e-communications (ECHELON) and card transactions, 'predictive' databases and profiling,, and any other amount of technical intelligence. No - the point of this section is to explore why people have come to accept that quarter of a century ago would've been thought totalitarian ('like Russia') and nightmarish. We've already had the homo Economicus version above - that people gained in terms of access to education, employment and healthcare by bringing themselves to the attention of the state and lost in terms of prosecution if they failed to do so. However, I think there is more to it than this. A phenomenon like mass observation in the inter-War years was popularly and eagerly supported in its detailed documentation of everyday life - and what do you make of the dating rituals in Chile where, after years of state-orchestrated surveillance to the nastiest of ends, courting couples now trail each other round with video cameras, 'romantically' building files on each other? The point is that with all the mass institutions that came out of Bentham's panoptican, the traditional role of the community in providing education, employment and neighbourly care has been replaced by these. Community has been replaced by institutionalised specialisation and so people feel it only natural that such specialists look out for them now there is no meaningful community to. They have been given no reason to get to know other people and so have no reason to trust them. Far from it - as society atomised, anyone can be a criminal under the rubric of surveillance and lacking any social feeling except fear of punishment under the eye of the camera only encourages selfish behaviour. Of course, the cameras are sold on the grounds not that we are the criminals, but that they are there to protect us from everyone else who potentially is. The old Wesleyans were right that give someone a penny in their pocket and the slightest whiff of a chance of advancement and they'll see everyone else around them as a threat to that, either as potential thieves or as temptations to be repudiated with the zeal of the tempted. 'Terrorists' are currently flavour of the month threat. Before that it was 'paedophiles', meaning kids had to be microchipped and cameras installed in every family home while a generation of kids turned into scared, whiny couch potatoes alongside their parents. Not many years ago it was witches, for fucksakes, absurd social workers seeing cracking the local coven of 'satanic abusers' as their next step up the career ladder. If this doesn't convince you what nonsense it all is, it's agreed that now surveillance is so ubiquitous it can't displace crime anywhere else (itself surely an exercise in imposed policing), it's not actually reducing crime rates. Offences of violence people fear most--irrationally, as they're still rare--are committed spontaneously by people too drunk or angry to be deterred by a camera or too cunning to get filmed by one. Why do people still welcome surveillance despite this? Well, the reliance on experts and definition of ourselves that comes through identification with their institutions and their representations of us--qualifications, income, birth and marriage certificates, conformity to consumer trends, and all the rest of that inane kit and caboodle--continually serves to emphasise our insignificance, an eight digit number in their overwhelming megamachine. It is this that leads people to love Big Brother, essentially a show where we pass tabloid-like judgement on intensively surveilled wannabe nonentities undergoing months of sexual frustration in the hope of getting to be childrens' TV presenters at the end, Endemol's even more sinister Shattered where people were subjected to voluntary sleep deprivation in the manner of victims of Stalin's Cheka, and even lower on the totem pole, searching for themselves in crowd shots (be it big sporting events, pseudo-archaic spectacles typically orchestrated by the royals, or futile 'crawl round London' marches) or 5 second slots on clip shows using RL footage the police or whoever have cobbled together as an extra earner. ONE IN THE ELECTRONIC EYE! How do we put an end to the reign of surveillance - assuming you don't want to lead over-controlled lives like shadows until you die of boredom and insignificance, that is? Well, firstly don't take advice from me and start thinking for yourself, but a few suggestions include: * First realising that there is not a quip pro quo between you and those surveilling you, that they are not accountable to you, that they have no right to do to you what they would not tolerate done to themselves, and potentially these voyeuristic parasites have the power to make quite a mess of your life from as little motivation as boredom-induced whim. They are the enemies of a free society, not its guarantors, a further concentration of state power that prevents any injustice being righted. * Unplugging yourself from all the BS images surrounding you--the clowns in the Big Brother house, the endlessly banal biogs of the lives of the rich and famous, the five day fashions, all that irrelevant crap--and learning to laugh at them and (with consequent increased self-confidence) yourself and your past folly * Unplugging others through irreverent satire and sheer indifference to the manufactured dreams they undoubtedly hold so dear. You'll probably start with the people you know best (typically a tiny number now people have careers, not friends) but best try to broaden it out a bit more than that, as a key factor for sustaining a surveillance society is intolerance and fear of anyone at all different. The new / old you will have better things to do and talk about, maybe even the recreation of authentic, trusting human connections without constant manufactured electronic babble and distraction, of baseless paranoia. * Disconnection and direct action of a more 'hands on' kind, a refusal to fill in tax returns and other official or quasi-official requests for information--the census, market research, card applications--.or responding to them in absurd, misleading ways to gradually fill their databases with (even more) useless shit. Believe me - when up against it, you'll find it's really possible to live without that credit card and all the form-filling bureaucratic BS, especially with a few mates on board with you too. Reformists please note: denying paperwotk and opportunities to surveil the public cuts the lifeblood of the dozens of agencies that exist principly for that purpose, so they can start being laid off as irrelevant too. And the campaign against speed cameras is way to go for all intrusive surveillance and related records, the creation of genuine unmonitored space (at risk of sounding bogus: 'liberated zones') and the return of the lawless, deprogrammed 18th century King Mob! In conclusion, I'd like to say that I am not arguing for 'privacy', a thoroughly bourgeois concept based on self-disgust and shame. No, let yourself go and do what comes naturally - fuck in the streets, I say! I am arguing for the revolutionary re-creation of original, genuine community where there are no secrets, no shame and no surveillance of the powerful as a tool to rule over the powerless. NOTES 1 In his Human Cycle (Touchstone, 1983), Colin Turnbull cites a Mbutu (Pygmy) lad taking a nanny goat as his 'wife', something his band members discourage not with the horror of taboos against inter-species sex being violated you might expect in this society (they have none, though the situation was unusual) but because, as a domesticated village animal, the she-goat could not be expected to cope adequately in their beloved forest. The Mbutu typically extend refusal of the distinction between self and other to that between human and other. 2 It had its origins in the early individualism of monasticism, of course. We have not missed the irony that though denouncing 'monkery', Protestants bought monastic practice outside its traditional confines, universalising its body-loathing codes of behaviour. 3 The first such panoptican was HMP Pentonville, London, where I was myself confined in 1988. 3 Ruth Richardson's Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) is excellent on this. See also my forthcoming essay, 'When Doctors Were Hated'. 5 In fact they did not. As with Bertillonage, there is an outside statistical chance of accidental correlation of fingerprints from otherwise dissimilar individuals--and there have been documented miscarriages of 'justice' arising from this--and twins always have identical fingerprints. As de facto clones, even DNA doesn't distinguish twins, only retinal scans as the pattern of blood vessels at the back of the eye develops post-natum. The latest issue of Green Anarchist (UK) #71/72 is out now. Availble for #1 from BCM 1715, London, WC1N 3XX. Or in the US from Black and Green distribution, P.O. Box 835, Greensburg, PA 15601, USA. This issues core focusses on Surveillance and the Big Brother society. References 1. http://www.infoshop.org/inews/profiles.php?Author=Anon&AuthorEmail=vasb@ter… nanepuvfg.bet&AuthorURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.greenanarchist.org 2. http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?topic=18 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/PMYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -----BEGIN TRANSHUMANTECH SIGNATURE----- Post message: transhumantech(a)yahoogroups.com Subscribe: transhumantech-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com List owner: transhumantech-owner(a)yahoogroups.com List home: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/transhumantech/ -----END TRANSHUMANTECH SIGNATURE----- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transhumantech/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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[>Htech] Infoshop News: Surveillance and Domestication
by Premise Checker 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Surveillance and Domestication http://www.infoshop.org/inews/print.php?story=04/06/21/3538869 posted by [1]Anon on Monday June 21 2004 @ 03:25AM PDT [2]Spying and Spooks SURVEILLANCE AND DOMESTICATION John Connor on the rise of surveillance and our acquiescence in it Surveillance is sold to us on the grounds that 'the innocent have nothing to hide', but the reluctance of the watchers to also become the watched--the police will plead 'operational security' to excuse themselves from disclosing even the most trivial points of detail about themselves, such as canteen menus, etc--shows this as both a transparent excuse to extend surveillance way beyond the point where it should be socially acceptable and a disguising of what is in the interests of the powerful with reference to what is supposedly 'in the interest of all'. THE WORM IN ADAM'S APPLE By way of excusing current levels of surveillance, where there is now one camera / four people in UK alone, it is possible to present the first band societies 'where everyone knew everyone else's business' as the most surveilled societies of all. This totally misses the point, however, as people then felt they were 'everyone else's business'. Although individual's 'right' to 'do their own thing' in negotiation with the band regardless of traditional custom was highly respected,1 there were not the firm boundaries of selfhood that characterise capitalism's atomised individualism, not least because personal and societal survival were so intimately interrelated. Part of your identity was your relationship to the rest of the band and you would not be complete without this, nor think of withholding something from them as you would from yourself. These were free, equal societies where an unevenness of knowledge, where it was hoarded to advantage one over another, was an entirely alien, civilised concept except possibly between genders and then not always. In fact, continuous sharing of news and skills were as much part of the fabric of daily life in hunter-gatherer societies as the sharing of tools (usufruct) and resources. With the rise of class society, where it became in the interests of the labouring majority to conceal resources and information about them, work rates etc ,from the non-labouring minority overseeing them, it equally became in the interests of the latter to try to find out what was being concealed from them. This, in truth, was the birth of the surveillance society, it's limited effectiveness still pretty much restricted to what could be seen directly by overseers and residual 'group think' that led people to disclosure information they really wouldn't in modern, individualistic societies. Alvarez's Centuries of Childhood is very good in pointing this up in the Medieval era, when any idea of an 'internal dialogue' was the privilege of a literate monastic minority. Others would say what they thought, their expression being limited to the presence of others with whom it could be shared - possibly getting back to the ears of feudal law enforcers and tax collectors. The most radical significance of the book in terms of shaping the human psyche was that it allowed private thoughts and expression in 'dialogue' (for surely the relationship is not mutual in the way conversation is) with the page. The first diaries--typically records of spiritual exercises by cloistered divines--are thus Medieval. The self-enclosure facilitated by writing led, of ruling class necessity, to the elaboration of more sophisticated techniques of surveillance - the spy networks engendered by Elizabeth I's courtier Sir Francis Walsingham, for example, still celebrated as original in Establishment spook circles today. They would solicit disloyal comment through infiltration techniques, pretending to be who they were not to suspects, as well as incidentally engaging pretty comprehensively in mail interception and attempting to crack counter-measures such as concealment and cipher. They were still largely dependant on the word, however, often words procured by duress (torture) and misrepresentation (forgery or 'over-reading' of intercepted correspondence). Of course, this was also the era of the witch hunts with their 'spectral evidence' (the testimony of 'victims of witchcraft'), but this dependence reached its apex in the reign of Charles II and the baseless conspiricising of the Protestant fanatic Titus Oates and his 'Popish Plot'. Simply on the basis of tortured 'confession' and guilt by association, an anti-Catholic pogrom was whipped up, though its only true substance was Oate's own paranoid fantasy. THE ALL-SEEING EYE This sort of thing may have been adequate as an instrument of terror befitting the majesty of absolute kings, but increased rationalism and individualism associated with the ascendance of Protestantism, with its claims of the believer's unmediated relationship with the Divine, meant consequent increased demands for physical evidence as a break on the arbitrary power of courts (both kingly and judicial), especially in matters concerning the 'sanctity' of private property. Paradoxically, as well as demanding more explicit legislative regulation, the bourgeoisie's pet religion also demanded greater self-regulation, the self now being bounded by contract- and financial relationships rather than intimate, social relationships. Thus we have the commonplace appearence2 of the divine 'all-seeing eye', as seen miserably decorating Protestant homes and chapels to this day, as well as topping the Masonic pyramid Washington and Jefferson incorporated into the design of every dollar bill. This idea of 'the Lord sees all' meant that even the individualistic Protestant clung on to the vestige of community, of public being,, in the sense of being in a community of two, s/he and the ever-watchful God, even if real community--typically more reciprocal, less judgmental of 'sin' and 'slackness'--was sacrificed to such an unremitting moralistic code in consequence.. As well as insisting that the worshipper be hard-working and thrifty, the Protestant faith self-imposed harsh standards of personal behaviour when it came to the body and bodily interaction with others. As Norbert Elias classic study of the rise of 'good manners', The Civilising Process, graphically documents, food became problematic, no longer to be indulged in gluttonously or passed from mouth to mouth but rather, like sexual or excretory functions, to be seen as a shameful concession to physicality to be controlled and bounded by taboos, best a private thing the better to avoid public shame. Such etiquette was literally domesticating, confined to the home, and homes too became more elaborate, with particular concessions to the body confined to particular rooms - a dining room for eating, a toilet for excretion (the corners of rooms having previously been preferred, even at Louis XIV's Versailles!), and the bedroom for sex behind curtained, canopied beds. The point of all this specialised architecture--of privacy--was that as few people saw it as possible. And so lose respect for someone shamefully indulging their body, as if we all don't It was mainly something between a wo/man and the all-seeing Lord. SEEING BY NUMBERS A combination of capital accumulation secured by resultant fixed, abstract laws and 18th century innovations in food production and transportation made the mega-cities that characterised the Industrial Revolution possible. This, then, was when surveillance came of age. On one level, faced with cities inhabited by millions, many born and raised undocumented or newly immigrated from the countryside and forming tight village / ghetto communities closed to casual investigation by outsiders, it was impossible to surveil them using the old techniques of gossip gathering On the other hand, this redoubled the need for self-surveillance as a curb on the spontaneous, riotous street mob behaviour of previous centuries as the only practical guarantor of social order. On a general level, the inculcation of a self-denying moral code into the poor was the responsibility of charismatic Methodism--as in the ruling class dilemma of the early-1800s, 'Wesleyism or revolution?'--and later 'do-gooders' dispensing unwanted advice about thrift, temperance and other supposedly good domestic practice. For those who wouldn't accept social inequality as a problem to be resolved by behaviour adjustment on their part, there was the hero of bourgeois rational social calculation, Jeremy Bentham, and his panoptican, a prisonhouse designed to do this architecurally.3 It's two key features were (1) individual cells, a rule of silence and the hooding of inmates outside their cells to enforce complete isolation from their community and force them to fall back on the Protestant 'God and I' 'community' instead and (2) a central tower from which guards could watch each cell unobserved, much like the Protestant God. Whether actually watched or not, the prisoner had to assume the worst for fear of harsher punishment, also inculcating a feeling of permanent surveillance and thus self-regulation. Needless to say, in practice this brutal, unnatural treatment amounted to sensory deprivation and whilst it made some suggestible enough to be effectively brainwashed, it broke others entirely, yielding horrifying hallucinations and self-harm. As recidivists could expect many more years in such a system than first offenders, there was naturally an attempt to evade such treatment by increased anonymity and impersonation of identities amongst the urban poor. Of course, Michel Foucalt dealt with this extensively in his Discipline and Punish, but it is often forgotten that the first concern of the new generation of surveillants was not to control crime but rather to contain disease, a much more widespread and deadly threat to the rich living in close geographic proximity to the poor. High walls, sturdy footmen in livery and a mastiff would no way keep cholera from their doors, so we find as early as the 1830s the first epidemiologists descending into the unplumbed depths of 'darkest London' o identify sources of disease and its carriers. This was rightly seen as social control being imposed on areas that typically rioted before admitting even one of Robert Peel's newly-minted 'blue devils' (police). The proletariat typically refused to acknowledge the reality of epidemic crowd diseases such as cholera (uniquely deadly in the early megalopolises and once a key check on their development) and to destroy cholera carts intruding into their space as a conspiracy to confine the poor to 'houses of death' (as they reckoned hospitals, not without justification) for the sadistic amusement of surgeons, during and after life.4 And, of course, the poor only had to look to the panoptican to see with what degree of humanity they would be treated by the new impersonal total institutions we seem so disturbingly accepting of today. A combination of a bureaucracy not sophisticated enough for individual documentation of entire populations before that developed out of regimented military practice during the American Civil War, and widespread illiteracy and resistance by its intended target population meant that the issuing of identification documents to the poor for voluntary presentation was not practical. In fact, it was so impractical that the threat of epidemic disease wasn't resolved by way of identifying and confining individual carriers (typically bourgeois moralistic 'blaming the victim') but rather by anonymous sanitation measures such as the building of London's sewers in reaction to the 'Great Stink' of the 1850s, even though the idea of the state assuming responsibility for such massive, tax-eating public works would have previously been anathema to bourgeois sensibilities. The breakthrough came in Paris as late as 1870 when a Surete clerk Alphonse Bertillon developed biometrics from a 14th century Chinese model. Bertillonage considered of individually identifying anonymous individuals by a 20 minute examination when many key features of their body--their height, the length of their limbs, the spacing of their facial features--were systematically measured and then recorded to card indexes. Potential recidivists were typically uncooperative during these examinations, later (1903) augmented by 'mug shots', so called by the subject 'mugging' (pulling faces) at the camera in an (often amusingly successful) effort to make themselves less identifiable in future. It should be noted that Bertillon was heavily influenced by the imperial anthropology of its day, with its emphasis on the physical classification of 'types'. Like the absurd Italian criminologist Lombroso, he attributed mental and moral characteristics to these physical signs, typically in a classist and racist manner than only served to reinforce such ideologies in future. Bertillonage finally failed and fell out of police use not because it was racist or unwieldy or even because it was felt to be an excessive intrusion on individual privacy ('sir, my statistics are my own') but rather because it couldn't do it's job. In 1903, a man called Will West was confined to Leavenworth jail for murder on the basis of biometric measurements actually appropriate to another man, coincidentally also called William West, despite a supposed 243m-to-one chance against this happening (not counting any slips of the police tape measure!). Besides, by then they had something quicker to collect and easier to file, which didn't require the perp's physical presence to identify him. It is probably no surprise that fingerprinting arose from a colonial context, that other great 'submerged mass' that caused the Victorian elite such worry. A chief magistrate in Jigupoot, Sir William Herschel first noticed in 1856 that Indians either illiterate or otherwise unfamiliar with English script signed themselves with thumb prints instead of writing, an administrative procedure for unique identification he adopted himself. From there, it was a short step to Darwin's pal Sir Francis Galton writing this up in the scientific journal Nature and a former supremo of Bombay's colonial police, Richard Henry introducing fingerprinting to Scotland Yard's repertoire of crime detection procedures in 1896. LEARNING TO LOVE BIG BROTHER Although the state had a technique for distinguishing one anonymous individual from another with unerring accuracy,5 this was fairly useless if that individual could disappear into the anonymous urban mass. As former Resistance fighter Jacques Ellul noted in his Technological Society, an immediate consequence of seeking to surveil particular individuals is that the whole society in which they might conceal themselves has to be surveilled also, the 'innocent' majority as intensively as the 'guilty' few. Perhaps more surprisingly, by the time fingerprinting was initiated, the resolute resistance to classification of the early-19th century was crumbling. There were a number for factors accounting for this, but key was the inducements offered the majority not to remain anonymous. Mass education on a monitor system--much like that adopted by Napoleon's Grand Armee, the basis of Bentham's panoptican--not only provided a more literate, technically sophisticated workshop with a greater chance of individual socio-economic betterment, it also meant the young came to accept such treatment as normal--both classification by name and number and harsh restrictions on personal behaviour in class ('no talking, no fidgeting')--and could be systematically documented, generation by generation. This was augmented by the centralisation of registers of births, deaths and marriages in places like Somerset House instead of scattered through disparate parishes, the taking of censuses to facilitate national planning,, and the creation of employment-based taxation which meant both bosses and workers (unless inclined to fraud) had to declare their identities along with their earnings if they were to make a living at all. Even systematic mapping, such as carried out initially for military reasons by the Ordnance Survey, meant that space in which people could exist anonymously evaporated ('everyone in their place'). This process was only accelerated by the Liberal welfare reforms of the early-1910s and the post-World War 2 creation of the welfare state, both of which had disclosure of identity as prerequisite requirements of receiving their services. It was a citizen's 'right' (the 'carrot') and 'duty (the legislatively-enforced 'stick') to enter into all this, without realising that my surrendering their anonymity to the state, they were also surrounding a key check on its otherwise unlimited power. I could rehearse at great length the elaboration of technological means that now exist to strip us of any possibility of anonymity, but this is done elsewhere this issue and besides, there is always Privacy International to consult. I will note that when a text like The Technology of Political Control was written in the supposedly paranoid 1970s, the suggestion that a comprehensive database could be linked with face recognition programmes and cameras blanketing every public space in the country was regarded as pure science fiction, something out of George Orwell's dystopian 1984. But today this is, of course, a reality and augmented by overgrown police and internal security agencies, parallel services like social workers and market researchers that want to know everything from the value of your home through to your children's eating and TV watching habits the better to predict and manipulate you, easily surveilled e-communications (ECHELON) and card transactions, 'predictive' databases and profiling,, and any other amount of technical intelligence. No - the point of this section is to explore why people have come to accept that quarter of a century ago would've been thought totalitarian ('like Russia') and nightmarish. We've already had the homo Economicus version above - that people gained in terms of access to education, employment and healthcare by bringing themselves to the attention of the state and lost in terms of prosecution if they failed to do so. However, I think there is more to it than this. A phenomenon like mass observation in the inter-War years was popularly and eagerly supported in its detailed documentation of everyday life - and what do you make of the dating rituals in Chile where, after years of state-orchestrated surveillance to the nastiest of ends, courting couples now trail each other round with video cameras, 'romantically' building files on each other? The point is that with all the mass institutions that came out of Bentham's panoptican, the traditional role of the community in providing education, employment and neighbourly care has been replaced by these. Community has been replaced by institutionalised specialisation and so people feel it only natural that such specialists look out for them now there is no meaningful community to. They have been given no reason to get to know other people and so have no reason to trust them. Far from it - as society atomised, anyone can be a criminal under the rubric of surveillance and lacking any social feeling except fear of punishment under the eye of the camera only encourages selfish behaviour. Of course, the cameras are sold on the grounds not that we are the criminals, but that they are there to protect us from everyone else who potentially is. The old Wesleyans were right that give someone a penny in their pocket and the slightest whiff of a chance of advancement and they'll see everyone else around them as a threat to that, either as potential thieves or as temptations to be repudiated with the zeal of the tempted. 'Terrorists' are currently flavour of the month threat. Before that it was 'paedophiles', meaning kids had to be microchipped and cameras installed in every family home while a generation of kids turned into scared, whiny couch potatoes alongside their parents. Not many years ago it was witches, for fucksakes, absurd social workers seeing cracking the local coven of 'satanic abusers' as their next step up the career ladder. If this doesn't convince you what nonsense it all is, it's agreed that now surveillance is so ubiquitous it can't displace crime anywhere else (itself surely an exercise in imposed policing), it's not actually reducing crime rates. Offences of violence people fear most--irrationally, as they're still rare--are committed spontaneously by people too drunk or angry to be deterred by a camera or too cunning to get filmed by one. Why do people still welcome surveillance despite this? Well, the reliance on experts and definition of ourselves that comes through identification with their institutions and their representations of us--qualifications, income, birth and marriage certificates, conformity to consumer trends, and all the rest of that inane kit and caboodle--continually serves to emphasise our insignificance, an eight digit number in their overwhelming megamachine. It is this that leads people to love Big Brother, essentially a show where we pass tabloid-like judgement on intensively surveilled wannabe nonentities undergoing months of sexual frustration in the hope of getting to be childrens' TV presenters at the end, Endemol's even more sinister Shattered where people were subjected to voluntary sleep deprivation in the manner of victims of Stalin's Cheka, and even lower on the totem pole, searching for themselves in crowd shots (be it big sporting events, pseudo-archaic spectacles typically orchestrated by the royals, or futile 'crawl round London' marches) or 5 second slots on clip shows using RL footage the police or whoever have cobbled together as an extra earner. ONE IN THE ELECTRONIC EYE! How do we put an end to the reign of surveillance - assuming you don't want to lead over-controlled lives like shadows until you die of boredom and insignificance, that is? Well, firstly don't take advice from me and start thinking for yourself, but a few suggestions include: * First realising that there is not a quip pro quo between you and those surveilling you, that they are not accountable to you, that they have no right to do to you what they would not tolerate done to themselves, and potentially these voyeuristic parasites have the power to make quite a mess of your life from as little motivation as boredom-induced whim. They are the enemies of a free society, not its guarantors, a further concentration of state power that prevents any injustice being righted. * Unplugging yourself from all the BS images surrounding you--the clowns in the Big Brother house, the endlessly banal biogs of the lives of the rich and famous, the five day fashions, all that irrelevant crap--and learning to laugh at them and (with consequent increased self-confidence) yourself and your past folly * Unplugging others through irreverent satire and sheer indifference to the manufactured dreams they undoubtedly hold so dear. You'll probably start with the people you know best (typically a tiny number now people have careers, not friends) but best try to broaden it out a bit more than that, as a key factor for sustaining a surveillance society is intolerance and fear of anyone at all different. The new / old you will have better things to do and talk about, maybe even the recreation of authentic, trusting human connections without constant manufactured electronic babble and distraction, of baseless paranoia. * Disconnection and direct action of a more 'hands on' kind, a refusal to fill in tax returns and other official or quasi-official requests for information--the census, market research, card applications--.or responding to them in absurd, misleading ways to gradually fill their databases with (even more) useless shit. Believe me - when up against it, you'll find it's really possible to live without that credit card and all the form-filling bureaucratic BS, especially with a few mates on board with you too. Reformists please note: denying paperwotk and opportunities to surveil the public cuts the lifeblood of the dozens of agencies that exist principly for that purpose, so they can start being laid off as irrelevant too. And the campaign against speed cameras is way to go for all intrusive surveillance and related records, the creation of genuine unmonitored space (at risk of sounding bogus: 'liberated zones') and the return of the lawless, deprogrammed 18th century King Mob! In conclusion, I'd like to say that I am not arguing for 'privacy', a thoroughly bourgeois concept based on self-disgust and shame. No, let yourself go and do what comes naturally - fuck in the streets, I say! I am arguing for the revolutionary re-creation of original, genuine community where there are no secrets, no shame and no surveillance of the powerful as a tool to rule over the powerless. NOTES 1 In his Human Cycle (Touchstone, 1983), Colin Turnbull cites a Mbutu (Pygmy) lad taking a nanny goat as his 'wife', something his band members discourage not with the horror of taboos against inter-species sex being violated you might expect in this society (they have none, though the situation was unusual) but because, as a domesticated village animal, the she-goat could not be expected to cope adequately in their beloved forest. The Mbutu typically extend refusal of the distinction between self and other to that between human and other. 2 It had its origins in the early individualism of monasticism, of course. We have not missed the irony that though denouncing 'monkery', Protestants bought monastic practice outside its traditional confines, universalising its body-loathing codes of behaviour. 3 The first such panoptican was HMP Pentonville, London, where I was myself confined in 1988. 3 Ruth Richardson's Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) is excellent on this. See also my forthcoming essay, 'When Doctors Were Hated'. 5 In fact they did not. As with Bertillonage, there is an outside statistical chance of accidental correlation of fingerprints from otherwise dissimilar individuals--and there have been documented miscarriages of 'justice' arising from this--and twins always have identical fingerprints. As de facto clones, even DNA doesn't distinguish twins, only retinal scans as the pattern of blood vessels at the back of the eye develops post-natum. The latest issue of Green Anarchist (UK) #71/72 is out now. Availble for #1 from BCM 1715, London, WC1N 3XX. Or in the US from Black and Green distribution, P.O. Box 835, Greensburg, PA 15601, USA. This issues core focusses on Surveillance and the Big Brother society. References 1. http://www.infoshop.org/inews/profiles.php?Author=Anon&AuthorEmail=vasb@ter… nanepuvfg.bet&AuthorURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.greenanarchist.org 2. http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?topic=18 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/PMYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -----BEGIN TRANSHUMANTECH SIGNATURE----- Post message: transhumantech(a)yahoogroups.com Subscribe: transhumantech-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com List owner: transhumantech-owner(a)yahoogroups.com List home: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/transhumantech/ -----END TRANSHUMANTECH SIGNATURE----- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transhumantech/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Re: NYT covers China cyberthreat
by Rich Kulawiec 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 01:34:13AM +0000, Warren Bailey wrote: > I can't help but wonder what would happen if US Corporations simply > blocked all inbound Chinese traffic. Sure it would hurt their business, > but imagine what the Chinese people would do in response. Would it hurt their business? Really? Well, if they're eBay, probably. If they're Joe's Fill Dirt and Croissants in Omaha, then probably not, because nobody, NOBODY in China is ever actually going to purchase a truckload of dirt or a tasty croissant from Joe. So would it actually matter if they couldn't get to Joe's web site or Joe's mail server or especially Joe's VPN server? Probably not. Nobody in Peru, Egypt, or Romania is likely to be buying from Joe any time soon either. This is why I've been using geoblocking at the network and host levels for over a decade, and it works. But it does require that you make an effort to study and understand your own traffic patterns as well as your organizational requirements. [1] I use it on a country-by-country basis (thank you ipdeny.com) and on a service-by-service basis: a particular host might allow http from anywhere, but ssh only from the country it's in. I also deny selected networks access to selected services, e.g., Amazon's cloud doesn't get access to port 25 because of the non-stop spam and Amazon's refusal to do anything about it. Anything on the Spamhaus DROP or EDROP lists (thank you Spamhaus) is not part of my view of the Internet. And so on. Combined, all this achieves lossless compression of abusive traffic. This is not a security fix, per se; any services that are vulnerable are still vulnerable. But it does cut down on the attack surface as measured along one axis, which in turn reduces the scope of some problems and renders them more tractable to other approaches. An even better approach, when appropriate, is to block everything and then only enable access selectively. This is a particularly good idea when defending things like ssh. Do you *really* need to allow incoming ssh from the entire planet? Or could "the US, Canada, the UK and Germany" suffice? If so, then why aren't you enforcing that? Do you really think it's a good idea to give someone with a 15-million member global botnet 3 or 5 or 10 brute-force attempts *per bot* before fail2ban or similar kicks in? I don't. I think 0 attempts per most bots is a much better idea. Let 'em eat packet drops while they try to figure out which subset of bots can even *reach* your ssh server. Which brings me to the NYTimes, and the alleged hacking by the Chinese. Why, given that the NYTimes apparently handed wads of cash over to various consulting firms, did none of those firms get the NYTimes to make a first-order attempt at solving this problem? Why in the world was anything in their corporate infrastructure accessible from the 2410 networks and 143,067,136 IP addresses in China? Who signed off on THAT? (Yes, yes, I *know* that the NYTimes has staff there, some permanently and some transiently. A one-off solution crafted for this use case would suffice. I've done it. It's not hard. And I doubt that it would need to work for more than, what, a few dozen of the NYTimes' 7500 employees? Clone and customize for Rio, Paris, Moscow, and other locations. This isn't hard either. Oh, and lock it out of everything that a field reporter/editor/photographer doesn't need, e.g., there is absolutely no way someone coming in through one of those should be able to reach the subscriber database.) Two more notes: first, blocking inbound traffic is usually not enough. Blocks should almost always be bidirectional. [2] This is especially important for things like the DROP/EDROP lists, because then spam payloads, phishes, malware, etc. won't be able to phone home quite so readily, and while your users will still be able to click on links that lead to bad things...they won't get there. Second, this may sound complex. It's not. I handle my needs with make, rsync, a little shell, a little perl, and other similar tools, but clearly you could do the same thing with any system configuration management setup. And with proper logging, it's not hard to discover the mistakes and edge cases, to apply suitable fixes and temporary point exceptions, and so on. ---rsk [1] 'Now, your typical IT executive, when I discuss this concept with him or her, will stand up and say something like, "That sounds great, but our enterprise network is really complicated. Knowing about all the different apps that we rely on would be impossible! What you're saying sounds reasonable until you think about it and realize how absurd it is!" To which I respond, "How can you call yourself a 'Chief Technology Officer' if you have no idea what your technology is doing?" A CTO isn't going to know detail about every application on the network, but if you haven't got a vague idea what's going on it's impossible to do capacity planning, disaster planning, security planning, or virtually any of the things in a CTO's charter.' --- Marcus Ranum [2] "We were so concerned with getting out that we never stopped to consider what we might be letting in, until it was too late." Let's see who recognizes that one. ;-) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[liberationtech] Online journalist fatalities, deaths in combat both hit record highs
by frank＠journalistsecurity.net 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Speaking of the need, today CPJ released its journalist killed figures for 2012. Two records: A record number of online journalists killed in 2012. And more journalists killed in combat situations in 2012 than in any previous year that CPJ has been keeping records. Syria is the main reason behind both trends, as Syrian citizen journalists filing to online outlets like Shaam News Network dominated this year's fatalities. http://www.cpj.org/security/2012/12/combat-deaths-high-journalist-risk.php Combat deaths at a high, risks shift for journalists By Frank Smyth/Senior Adviser for Journalist Security Ambulances carry the bodies of Marie Colvin and RC)mi Ochlik, who were killed in government shelling in Syria. (Reuters/Khaled al-Hariri) Murder is the leading cause of work-related deaths among journalists worldwide--and this year was no exception. But the death toll in 2012 continued a recent shift in the nature of journalist fatalities worldwide. More journalists were killed in combat situations in 2012 than in any year since 1992, when CPJ began keeping detailed records. CPJ Special Report b" Journalist deaths spike in 2012 The 23 journalists killed in combat-related crossfire make up 34 percent of the worldwide death toll this year, about twice the historical average. And beginning in 2010, the number of journalists killed while covering street protests or similar dangerous assignments has risen well above the rates recorded since 1992. Journalists carrying cameras--still photographers, television cameramen, and videographers--paid an unusually heavy price in recent years. Freelancers and online journalists have also composed an increasing proportion of fatalities during this timeframe. Many of those killed during combat and dangerous assignments were relatively inexperienced, with some of the victims in Syria still in their teens. So what does this say? It's worth keeping in mind that the risks to journalists change with the news, and the conditions of 2012 won't necessarily be replicated in 2013 or in the future. But a few things stand out from the recent death tolls that demand the attention of the profession. Technology has allowed individuals to cover and disseminate news on their own, without having an affiliation with a news organization. The proportion of online journalists in CPJ's annual death tolls has been rising since 2008, but the 25 online journalists killed worldwide in 2012 represent a record. In Syria, the government worked hard to block the international press, prompting numerous Syrians to pick up cameras to document the violence and upload hours of their footage to online collectives such as Shaam News Network. During the political uprisings that swept the Arab world, domestic and international freelancers were similarly called to action. Individuals with cameras were more likely to be in harm's way as they sought to cover the tumult--and they were also more obvious targets for violence. "I think we have to differentiate between local citizen journalists who report on what is happening in their own country and to their own people, and Western freelancers who go to places like Syria to report on the conflict," said Peter N. Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch who leads a Facebook group composed of conflict journalists and others. Citizen journalists "are part of a seismic shift in the media business, and we are just beginning to understand how we can use the materials they collect, and how we can work together to report better," Bouckaert said. "The role of Western freelancers is totally different. In a shrinking, increasingly risk-adverse media environment, it is all too often freelancers who end up going to the places where the big media won't send their reporters." Many inexperienced, young freelancers can be "lulled" into "a sense of false comfort," Bouckaert noted. "The smartest ones who went through Libya took a step back, and went to take a first-aid course and hostile environment training." But many media organizations that rely on stringers for news also need to step up, he added. "If we want to talk seriously about safety, we need to start getting the media organizations to start contributing more toward safety training and safety gear for freelancers." The annual death tolls in Iraq during the peak of that nation's violence still exceed that of Syria: 32 journalists were killed in Iraq in both 2006 and 2007. But the large majority of deaths in Iraq, especially in the later years of the war, were not combat-related. They were murders. Local journalists working for Western news organizations and those working for local news outlets with perceived sectarian viewpoints were targeted for their affiliation, hunted down, and murdered by the dozen in Iraq. Murder has been the leading cause of death in Afghanistan as well. Any conflict, including the war in Syria, could evolve in ways that would make journalists more vulnerable to targeted attacks than crossfire. That is what has happened, in effect, in Somalia. Government and allied troops largely ousted the militant group Al-Shabaab from the capital, Mogadishu, in 2011, but journalist murders have spiked in the aftermath as remnants of the insurgents and political factions jockey, violently, for control. All 12 journalists killed in Somalia in 2012 were murdered. The 2012 death toll in Syria reflects the range of combat dangers. Many died in government artillery or aerial attacks on populated urban areas. Four were killed in crossfire between government and rebel forces. Four more were shot at close range, according to witnesses, during military operations by either government or rebel forces. Three were murdered outright in non-military circumstances. One journalist died in an explosion. Long-range snipers from either government or rebel forces killed three more. (The last time sniper fire claimed so many journalists' lives was in Bosnia, in 1992 and 1993.) Many combat-related deaths are hardly faultless. In many instances, armed forces act recklessly in firing upon civilians such as journalists. In other cases, they appear to have targeted journalists in violation of international law. Lebanese cameraman Ali Shaaban, who was working just over the border in Lebanon, was killed in a hail of 40 bullets fired by plainclothes Syrian security forces. U.S.-born correspondent Marie Colvin and French photographer RC)mi Ochlik were killed in government shelling that struck their makeshift media center in Homs; journalists who survived believe the shelling was precise, indicating government forces had targeted the center. Unfortunately, there is little accountability for attacks on journalists in Syria or elsewhere. "Most of these abuses remain unpunished," the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said in a March 2012 report on journalist security. "States must therefore ensure that the perpetrators of crimes and acts of violence against media professionals and associated personnel are brought to justice, while also taking preventative measures to ensure that such crimes are not committed in the first place." Here is one more statistic from CPJ's year-end analysis of journalist fatalities. The rate of accountability for journalist deaths in 2012? Zero. Frank Smyth is CPJbs senior adviser for journalist security. He has reported on armed conflicts, organized crime, and human rights from nations including El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba, Rwanda, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Jordan, and Iraq. Follow him on Twitter @JournoSecurity. Tags: Al-Shabaab, Ali Shaaban, Blogger, Homs, Internet, Killed, Marie Colvin, RC)mi Ochlik, Shaam News Network December 18, 2012 12:00 AM ET -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[Freedombox-discuss] FBX in BXL :-)
by JOSEFSSON Erik 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hello, We've just talked about FreedomBox in the European Parliament Free Software User Group (http://epfsug.eu/content/free-tools-ep) You find the videos here: http://media.biks.dk/fb/epfsug2/ A special thanks to EPFSUG Patron and MEP Nils Torvalds and DG ITEC Director-General Giancarlo Vilella for opening and closing the meeting, and to Henrik Alexandersson for recording the whole event! Best regards. //Erik _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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the physics arXiv blog
by the physics arXiv blog 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[1]the physics arXiv blog [2]Cellphone records reveal the basic pattern of human mobility Posted: 11 Jun 2008 12:36 AM CDT [3]Mobile phone movement A few months back, we saw what happens when researchers get their paws on anonymixed mobile phone records. Albert-Laszlo Baribasi at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and some buddies used them [4]to discover entirely new patterns of human behaviour. Now Baribasi has dug deeper into the data and discovered a single basic pattern of human mobility. It's nothing special: lots of smallish journeys interspersed with occasional long ones (the length of the journey actually follows a power law). That's more or less what you'd expect but experimental confirmation is important. Human mobility is one of the crucial factors in understanding the spread of epidemics. Until now, the models that predict how disease spreads have had to rely on educated guesses about the way human travel patterns might affect this process. Baribasi's work will take just little of the guesswork out of future efforts and that can't be bad. Ref: [5]arxiv.org/abs/0806.1256: Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns [6][arXivblog?i=z4OL4F] [7][arXivblog?i=y5ryWI] [8][arXivblog?i=fzd18I] [9][arXivblog?i=N8D0Ki] [10][arXivblog?i=kdbiaI] [11][arXivblog?i=QNL54i] [12][arXivblog?i=Eb5OAI] [13][arXivblog?i=upfv3i] [14][arXivblog?i=j3iPUI] You are subscribed to email updates from [15]the physics arXiv blog To stop receiving these emails, you may [16]unsubscribe now. Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner Inbox too full? [17](feed) [18]Subscribe to the feed version of the physics arXiv blog in a feed reader. If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: the physics arXiv blog, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610 References 1. http://arxivblog.com/ 2. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/arXivblog/~3/309373937/ 3. http://arxivblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/mobile-phone-movement.jpg 4. http://arxivblog.com/?p=88 5. http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1256 6. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/arXivblog?a=z4OL4F 7. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=y5ryWI 8. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=fzd18I 9. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=N8D0Ki 10. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=kdbiaI 11. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=QNL54i 12. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=Eb5OAI 13. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=upfv3i 14. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=j3iPUI 15. http://arxivblog.com/ 16. http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailunsub?id=8632699&key=kesJ612ZsV 17. http://feeds.feedburner.com/arXivblog 18. http://feeds.feedburner.com/arXivblog ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Wikipedia project: Crypto
by Ivan Krstic 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

The good people at Wikipedia have started a cryptography subproject, "an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to cryptography in the Wikipedia." The project page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cryptography features a list of open tasks and things that need cleanup or writing about. For anyone who has a few minutes to spare, their contributions would without a doubt be most appreciated. Cheers, Ivan --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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the physics arXiv blog
by the physics arXiv blog 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[1]the physics arXiv blog [2]Cellphone records reveal the basic pattern of human mobility Posted: 11 Jun 2008 12:36 AM CDT [3]Mobile phone movement A few months back, we saw what happens when researchers get their paws on anonymixed mobile phone records. Albert-Laszlo Baribasi at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and some buddies used them [4]to discover entirely new patterns of human behaviour. Now Baribasi has dug deeper into the data and discovered a single basic pattern of human mobility. It's nothing special: lots of smallish journeys interspersed with occasional long ones (the length of the journey actually follows a power law). That's more or less what you'd expect but experimental confirmation is important. Human mobility is one of the crucial factors in understanding the spread of epidemics. Until now, the models that predict how disease spreads have had to rely on educated guesses about the way human travel patterns might affect this process. Baribasi's work will take just little of the guesswork out of future efforts and that can't be bad. Ref: [5]arxiv.org/abs/0806.1256: Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns [6][arXivblog?i=z4OL4F] [7][arXivblog?i=y5ryWI] [8][arXivblog?i=fzd18I] [9][arXivblog?i=N8D0Ki] [10][arXivblog?i=kdbiaI] [11][arXivblog?i=QNL54i] [12][arXivblog?i=Eb5OAI] [13][arXivblog?i=upfv3i] [14][arXivblog?i=j3iPUI] You are subscribed to email updates from [15]the physics arXiv blog To stop receiving these emails, you may [16]unsubscribe now. Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner Inbox too full? [17](feed) [18]Subscribe to the feed version of the physics arXiv blog in a feed reader. If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: the physics arXiv blog, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610 References 1. http://arxivblog.com/ 2. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/arXivblog/~3/309373937/ 3. http://arxivblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/mobile-phone-movement.jpg 4. http://arxivblog.com/?p=88 5. http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1256 6. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/arXivblog?a=z4OL4F 7. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=y5ryWI 8. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=fzd18I 9. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=N8D0Ki 10. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=kdbiaI 11. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=QNL54i 12. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=Eb5OAI 13. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=upfv3i 14. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/arXivblog?a=j3iPUI 15. http://arxivblog.com/ 16. http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailunsub?id=8632699&key=kesJ612ZsV 17. http://feeds.feedburner.com/arXivblog 18. http://feeds.feedburner.com/arXivblog ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Wikipedia project: Crypto
by Ivan Krstic 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

The good people at Wikipedia have started a cryptography subproject, "an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to cryptography in the Wikipedia." The project page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cryptography features a list of open tasks and things that need cleanup or writing about. For anyone who has a few minutes to spare, their contributions would without a doubt be most appreciated. Cheers, Ivan --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: [liberationtech] Mailvelope: OpenPGP Encryption for Webmail
by Ali-Reza Anghaie 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

You just jogged my memory w/ the clipboard bit.. http://safegmail.com/ Another project in the mix. -Ali On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 12:38 AM, Uncle Zzzen <unclezzzen(a)gmail.com> wrote: > The reason why FireGPG no longer ships with tails is that the DOM of a web > app is not a safe place for plaintext > > https://tails.boum.org/doc/encryption_and_privacy/FireGPG_susceptible_to_de… > Any architecture where plaintext is stored inside a web app's DOM is > dangerous. Especially a webmail app that can be expected to save drafts, > but not only. Web apps can be MITMed, XSSed, etc. If it came via the web, > it's a suspect. > > I'd expect a crypto add-on to only accept plaintext (and other sensitive) > information via separate GUI that can only be launched manually (not via > javascript in an app's DOM) and has a hard-to-imitate look-and-feel (to > discourage phishing). The only communication between this add-on and the > rest of the browser should be via the clipboard. Users who can't handle > copy/paste shouldn't be trusted with a key pair :) > > From what I see at the http://www.mailvelope.com/ slide-show, it seems to > provide even more shooting-yourself-in-the-leg firepower than FireGPG. > > > > On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 3:21 AM, Nadim Kobeissi <nadim(a)nadim.cc> wrote: > >> Cryptocat is a local browser plugin served over SSL, installed locally, >> loads/executes no external code, and communicates only via SSL. It does not >> rely on server integrity with regards to these parameters. >> >> Regarding Mailvelope b does its operation depend on the Gmail DOM? What >> happens if the Gmail DOM is modified, can that be used to damage the >> integrity of Mailvelope operations? There's a reason Cryptocat operates in >> its own browser tab separate from other sites. >> >> NK >> >> On 2012-12-11, at 6:54 PM, Andy Isaacson <adi(a)hexapodia.org> wrote: >> >> > On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 10:07:23PM +0000, StealthMonger wrote: >> >> "Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)" <lists(a)infosecurity.ch> writes: >> >>> for whose who has still not see that project, i wanted to send a >> notice >> >>> about MailVelope, OpenPGP encryption for webmail: >> http://www.mailvelope.com >> >> >> >>> It's a client-side, plug-in based (similar to CryptoCat), OpenPGP >> email >> >>> encryption plugin available for Chrome and Firefox. >> >> >> >> To compare it with CryptoCat is unfair to MailVelope. As I understand >> >> things, CryptoCat has an ongoing reliance on server integrity. On the >> >> other hand, MailVelope is self-contained once securely installed, >> > >> > I'm not sure why you claim that. It was true for Cryptocat v1 which was >> > a browser app and could be compromised at any time with new JS from a >> > compromised server. Cryptocat v2 is a downloadable + installable plugin >> > which at least doesn't immediately execute code served to it. >> > >> > In both the JS and plugin versions, Cryptocat (with uncompromised code) >> > does not depend on server integrity for message confidentiality. >> > >> > Now, both CryptoCat and MailVelope probably have an upgrade >> > vulnerability where a compromised server can tell the app "there's a new >> > version available, plese ask the user to install it". And since the >> > compromised server could refuse to provide service to the secure version >> > of the app, there's a powerful functional reason for the user to accept >> > the upgrade. >> > >> > Ah, perhaps you're referring to the fact that MailVelope layers on top >> > of another server (Gmail) for its transport layer, rather than depending >> > on a "MailVelope server" which could selectively deny service to the >> > uncompromised version of the product. In that respect, MailVelope might >> > be more secure-by-design than Cryptocat. >> > >> > -andy >> > -- >> > Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: >> https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech >> >> -- >> Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: >> https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech >> > > > -- > Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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