I enjoyed reading Byron Tau's "Means of Control." In it a WSJ
journalist discusses tech, data, and surveillance. He had
a lot of things I was not totally aware of. I would say his
big point is that the US government realized that you do
not need a warrant to buy data from data brokers, which
lead to lots of companies competing to be as invasive as
possible.
Hard to be optimistic, when the Western vendors seem to
be intent on being more Orwellian than the authoritarians.
I also got the impression that the market will sell to anyone.
The idea of China using TikTok to spy on Americans always
seemed kind of irrelevant. Why would they invest money
in an app, when they can buy the data already?
On 4/28/24 22:33, Kate Krauss wrote:
Are we too techno-pessimistic?
I pulled out this message from the introductions thread because it
didn't get a lot of attention when first posted, but it's fascinating
--thanks, Kaiser!
I feel ill-equipped to discuss this but I'll get the ball rolling.
*Folks on this list? I'd love to hear what you think about Kaiser's
post (which is pasted below mine).
*
By 2013 and the Snowden revelations, tech activists were realizing how
much both the US government, and as we already knew, platforms like
Facebook were surveilling our lives. (Snowden also revealed how hard
the NSA and GCHQ were going after Tor. And they didn't get it, ha.)
I had also seen, previously, pervasive, all-encompassing surveillance
in China of my activist friends. (They've stopped monitoring your
phone calls and they're sitting in your kitchen--not good). So for me
it was all of a piece, and I didn't have to imagine what could go
wrong if governments conducted unchecked surveillance. And it
motivated me to work on these issues.
Meanwhile, in the wider US, in late 2015 Trump launched his
presidential campaign by demonizing immigrants, then loudly criticized
and sanctioned China's trade practices, and later he blamed COVID on
China. And by the middle of the pandemic, Asian people in Philly were
afraid to walk down the street. So a lot of racist Americans who
didn't know much about technology, IP, or China, were mad at China.
And there are always China hawks that sincerely or exploitatively go
after China in DC. But those are different groups, obviously, than are
on this list.
The people I know who care about online privacy and digital rights
believe (and feel free to speak for yourselves) that if you want
privacy and human rights, you have to defend them, whether by building
online privacy tools, censorship circumvention tools, or decentralized
communications platforms, or educating people in avoiding
surveillance, or blurring out your house on Google maps. You have to
take action.
I myself also think it's important to change laws and regulations, but
you still need the technology. I remember that Griffin Boyce and
others developed tools <http://I remember reading an essay by an
internet pioneer that talked about the implications of online
surveillance; that was the first time I saw that things could go bad
on the internet.> that made the Stop Online Privacy Act impossible to
enforce. Another lesson from SOPA: Collective action can get the
goods. (Thank you, Aaron Swartz.)
So maybe we are techno-optimists and techno-realists at the same time?
Mainstream Americans are still inured to a lack of privacy, and that
is very dangerous. However, they are now suspicious of Facebook--and
maybe that's a good thing.
This doesn't mean that Chinese companies are always A+ and never
steal IP. I went to a lecture in 2018 or 2019 where a Chinese scholar
presented her research studying Chinese companies--and some of them
lacked research departments because they were "borrowing" IP. Several
things can be true at once.
Other people on the list: What do you think?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: kaiser kuo <[email protected]>
LT <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:20:43 -0400
Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Liberation Tech would like a word.
Thanks, Kate, for stepping up to revive this effort — and for the
low-key shout-out!
I've written and spoken quite a bit on the seemingly sudden swing from
the politically techno-utopian idea still present in this listserv's
name to the techno-pessimism that seems so pervasive in discourse on
the relationship between technology and authoritarian politics. We've
gone, as I've often said, from believing that the spread of digital
technology sounded the death knell for authoritarian governments to
believing instead that tech is the loyal handmaiden of authoritarians,
who've become adept at using them to suppress dissent and other
nefarious ends. To an extent, I get why this has happened — the
failure of the later color revolutions and the Arab Spring, when we
too-eagerly appended the names of various American social media
products to these revolutions (the "Twitter Revolution," the "YouTube
Revolution," the "Facebook Revolution"); the Snowden revelations about
Prism; Russian meddling and Macedonian troll farms; Cambridge
Analytica, etc). I suppose some humility about it was needed, but have
we (i.e. the national or "Western" conversation) overcorrected? I'd be
curious to hear from list members with experience in different
geographies to get their sense of how things have played out in the
last decade. I put the inflection point at roughly 2016: that's when I
started sensing the dramatic narrative shift.
And I'm curious whether people think that's related to, or completely
independent from, another narrative shift that seems to have been
simultaneous when it comes, specifically, to China: At about that same
moment, the narrative went from this disparagement of China's ability
to innovate (blaming, in most cases, the lack of free information
flows and academic freedom, and positing a relationship between
innovation and political freedom) to a pervasive sense that China was
out-innovating the U.S. and was an unstoppable juggernaut ready to eat
our lunch. Obviously this latter narrative continues and has been made
worse in recent years.
Thanks! Once again, Kate, thanks for your efforts!!
- Kaiser
--
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