Interesting, as such articles often
are, but (I think) unworkable.
The Dangers of Surveillance, Neil M.
Richards, Washington University in Saint Louis – School of Law,
March 25, 2013, Harvard
Law Review, 2013
Abstract:
From the Fourth
Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, our law and
literature are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives.
These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific.
Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we
don’t really know why surveillance is bad, and why we should be
wary of it. To the extent the answer has something to do with
“privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means
in this context, and why it matters. Developments in government and
corporate practices, however, have made this problem more urgent.
Although we have laws that protect us against government
surveillance, secret government programs cannot be challenged until
they are discovered. And even when they are, courts frequently
dismiss challenges to such programs for lack of standing, under the
theory that mere surveillance creates no tangible harms, as the
Supreme Court did recently in the case of Clapper v. Amnesty
International. We need a better account of the dangers of
surveillance.
This article
offers such an account. Drawing on law, history, literature, and the
work of scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of
“surveillance studies,” I explain what those harms are and
why they matter. At the level of theory, I explain when surveillance
is particularly dangerous, and when it is not. Surveillance is
harmful because it can chill the exercise of our civil liberties,
especially our intellectual privacy. It is also gives the watcher
power over the watched, creating the the risk of a variety of other
harms, such as discrimination, coercion, and the threat of selective
enforcement, where critics of the government can be prosecuted or
blackmailed for wrongdoing unrelated to the purpose of the
surveillance.
At a practical
level, I propose a set of four principles that should guide the
future development of surveillance law, allowing for a more
appropriate balance between the costs and benefits of government
surveillance. First, we must recognize that surveillance
transcends the public-private divide. Even if we are ultimately more
concerned with government surveillance, any solution must grapple
with the complex relationships between government and corporate
watchers. Second, we must recognize that secret surveillance
is illegitimate, and prohibit the creation of any domestic
surveillance programs whose existence is secret. Third, we
should recognize that total surveillance is illegitimate and reject
the idea that it is acceptable for the government to record all
Internet activity without authorization. Fourth, we must
recognize that surveillance is harmful. Surveillance menaces
intellectual privacy and increases the risk of blackmail, coercion,
and discrimination; accordingly, we must recognize surveillance as a
harm in constitutional standing doctrine.
You can download the full paper from
SSRN.
How to stand out in a totalitarian
state...
Email is a fairly insecure
way of sending a message – it sits in both inboxes and send mail
folders until the sender or receiver decide to delete it. Cloakmy is
different in that it allows you to send messages to email addresses,
with an added layer of security.
… the recipient gets a link to the
Cloakmy service where they can view the message (which can be
password protected, too). The sender can choose auto self-destruct,
which destroys the message after it has been read, timed-deletion and
no deletion at all.
Similar tools: Burn
Note, Wickr,
Snapchat,
BurnNote,
OneTimeMessage,
SelfDestruct,
Norbt,
and Send.
We've got this army of little robots,
see? Some of them vacuum your carpet while you're not home. Some
can mow your lawn. We even have an air force to deliver your morning
paper...
Newspapers,
Delivered by Drone
Add one more to the list of career
paths that are being obviated by robots: news delivery.
In Auvergne, a province in central
France, residents get their daily news the old-fashioned way: through
newspapers. But the delivery of said newspapers, apparently, will
soon be executed with the help of high tech -- because it'll be done
with the help of drones.
Auvergne's local postal service, La
Poste Group, announced
on its blog that it is partnering with the drone-maker Parrot
to explore the wacky world of high-flying news delivery. The service
will be called "Parrot Air Drone Postal," and it will make
use of Parrot's quadricopter
drones. To test its general feasibility, the delivery service is
already being, er, piloted in Auvergne, Silicon
Alley Insider reports, with a team of 20 postal workers and 20
drones. (The postal workers control the drones by a specialized app
-- which they can use on iOS or Android devices.)
Sometimes, just making the attempt has
value...
Babak Siavoshy writes:
The most vexing
failure of privacy scholarship, in my opinion, is that “privacy
advocates” have failed to articulate in simple terms (to the public
or any other audience) the value of privacy and the harm from
undermining it.
I’m not
suggesting I can solve this problem, but I have some thoughts about
its sources. I think there are several reasons privacy harms and
benefits are difficult to articulate, including the following:
(1) in addition to
being an individual right, privacy is (in the most important ways) a
collective or system-based right, and the harm from violating privacy
rights and the benefits from protecting them are only apparent in the
aggregate. That makes these harms and benefits more difficult to
articulate and conceive in simple terms. In this sense, privacy
is like voting — it may be a relatively small societal harm to
prevent one person from voting, but restricting the right to vote
will, in the aggregate, fundamentally harm the system we live in
by undermining values like democratic accountability.
Read more on a
law and tech blog.
I'm teaching Statistics again this
Spring, so I need some raw data. Probably not this much, but you
never know...
March 31, 2013
New
on LLRX - Statistics Resources and Big Data on the Internet 2013
Via LLRX.com
- Statistics
Resources and Big Data on the Internet 2013: Marcus
P. Zillman has updated his best practices bibliography of sites
and reliable sources focused on the hot topic of statistics and big
data. These sources are representative of multiple publishers,
national and global - government, academia, NGOs, and industry, many
of which leverage open source and collaborative applications.
For my Intro to IT students...
More Sites Like ... allows you to find
all kinds of sites based on any other website.
To use the site, you simply type in a
search term or the URL of a website you want compared. It will show
you a list of websites based on the search term or URL, ranked by
popularity and similarity,
(Related) I like to keep my Intro
students grounded. We can't all be Billionaires...
He
Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He’ll Be 18.
… Nick D’Aloisio, a programming
whiz who wasn’t even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994, sold his
news-reading app, Summly, to the company on Monday for a sum said to
be in the tens of millions of dollars. Yahoo said it would
incorporate his algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories
and shortens them for readers using smartphones
Global Warming! Global Warming! I
admit I don't quite get it, but if too much CO2 is the cause, won't
trapping carbon in new plants be a solution?
The
green, green grass of the Arctic: Researchers predict dramatic boost
in trees and shrubs due to global warming
Experts
say the wooded areas in the region could increase by 50% over the
coming decades - and accelerate global warming in the process.
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