Disappointed that Apple seems to have changed the delivery date for my new Apple Watch last minute with minimal notice. Definitely not how to create delight and joy with their customers.
2021.10.14
I’m liking the incremental update to the Photos application on iOS and iPadOS in the newest release of the operating systems. The ability to easily add titles to my photos and also access the EXIF metadata helps to maintain a (slightly) more organized photo library. Access to this information also makes it easier to share out photos straight from the Photos app, since I can copy the title of an image as part of sharing it.
However, I’m still missing the ability to create Smart Folders. Specifically I want to be able to have folders that are accessible, on iOS devices, and which sort based on the camera that took a given set of images. It’s been in MacOS for a very, very long time and it’s nuts that this kind of feature parity hasn’t been reached between operating systems.
I haven’t seen evidence that the newest version of iOS has fixed the green flare issue (which I first encountered when reviewing my iPhone 11 Pro). I know it was in an earlier beta but haven’t yet seen it implemented in a production release.
Canadian Genocide
The history of Canada is linked to settle colonialism and white supremacy. Only recently have elements of Canada come to truly think through what this means: Canada, and settler Canadians, owe their existence to the forceful removal of indigenous populations from their terrorities.
Toronto is currently hosting an art exhibit, “Built on Genocide.” It’s created by the indigenous artist, Jay Soule | CHIPPERWAR,1 and provides a visual record of the link between the deliberate decimation of the buffalo and its correlation with the genocide of indigenous populations. From the description of the exhibit:
Built on Genocide is a powerful visual record of the 19th-century buffalo genocide that accompanied John A. MacDonald’s colonial expansion west with the railroad. In the mid-19th century, an estimated 30 to 60 million buffalo roamed the prairies, by the late 1880s, fewer than 300 remained. As the buffalo were slaughtered and the prairie ecosystem decimated, Indigenous peoples were robbed of their foods, lands, and cultures. The buffalo genocide became a genocide of the people.
Working from archival records, Soule combines installation and paintings to connect the past with the present, demanding the uncomfortable acknowledgement that Canada is a nation built on genocide.
What follows are a series of photographs that I made while visiting the exhibit on October 13, 2021. All images were made using an iPhone 12 Pro using the ‘Noir’ filter in Apple Photos, and subsequently edited using a Darkroom App filter.
Canada is, and needs to be, going through a reckoning concerning its past. This process is challenging for settlers, both to appreciate their actual histories and to be made to account for how they arrived at their current life situations. There are, obviously, settlers who are in challenging life situations—som experience poverty and are otherwise disadvantaged in society—but their challenges routinely pale in comparison to what is sadly normal and typical in Canada’s indigenous societies. As just one example, while poverty is a real issue for some white and immigrant Canadians, few lack routine access to safe and clean drinking water. None have lacked access to safe and clean water for over 26 years but this is the lived reality of indigenous populations in Canada.
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Jay creates art under the name CHIPPEWAR, which represents the hostile relationship that Canada’s Indigenous peoples have with the government of the land they have resided in since their creation. CHIPPEWAR is also a reminder of the importance of the traditional warrior role that exists in Indigenous cultures across North America that survives into the present day. ↩︎
Photography and Social Media
Why do we want to share our photos online? What platforms are better or worse to use in sharing images? These are some of the questions I’ve been pondering for the past few weeks.
Backstory
About a month ago a colleague stated that she would be leaving Instagram given the nature of Facebook’s activities and the company’s seeming lack of remorse. Her decision has stuck with me and left me wondering whether I want to follow her lead.
I deleted my Facebook accounts some time ago, and have almost entirely migrated my community away from WhatsApp. But as an amateur photographer I’ve hesitated to leave an app that was, at least initially, designed with photographers in mind. I’ve used the application over the years to develop and improve my photographic abilities and so there’s an element of ‘sunk cost’ that has historically factored into my decision to stay or leave.
But Instagram isn’t really for photographers anymore. The app is increasingly stuffed with either videos or ads, and is meant to create a soft landing point for when/if Facebook truly pivots away from its main Facebook app.1 The company’s pivot makes it a lot easier to justify leaving the application though, at the same time, leaves me wondering what application or platform, if any, I want to move my photos over to.
The Competition(?)
Over the past week or two I’ve tried Flickr.2 While it’s the OG of photo sharing sites its mobile apps are just broken. I can’t create albums unless I use the web app. The sharing straight from the Apple Photos app is janky. I worry (for no good reason, really) about the cost for the professional version (do I even need that as an amateur?) as well as the annoyance of tagging photos in order to ‘find my tribe.’
It’s also not apparent to me how much community truly exists on Flickr: the whole platform seems a bit like a graveyard with only a small handful of active photographers still inhabiting the space.
I’m also trying Glass at the moment. It’s not perfect: search is non-existent, you can’t share your gallery of photos with non-Glass users at the moment, discovery is a bit rough, there’s no Web version, and it’s currently iPhone only. However, I do like that the app (and its creators) is focused on sharing images and that it has a clear monetization schema in the form of a yearly subscription. The company’s formal roadmap also indicates that some of these rough edges may be filed away in the coming months.
I also like that Glass doesn’t require me to develop a tagging system (that’s all done in the app using presets), let’s me share quickly and easily from the Photos app, looks modern, and has a relatively low yearly subscription cost. And, at least so far, most of the comments are better than on the other platforms, which I think is important to developing my own photography.
Finally, there’s my blog here! And while I like to host photo series here this site isn’t really designed as a photo blog first and foremost. Part of the problem is that WordPress continues to suck for posting media in my experience but, more substantively, this blog hosts a lot more text than images. I don’t foresee changing this focus anytime in the near or even distant future.
The Necessity of Photo Sharing?
It’s an entirely fair question to ask why even bother sharing photos with strangers. Why not just keep my images on my devices and engage in my own self-critique?
I do engage in such critique but I’ve personally learned more from putting my images into the public eye than I would just by keeping them on my own devices.3 Some of that is from comments but, also, it’s been based on what people have ‘liked’ or left emoji comments on. These kinds of signals have helped me better understand what is a better or less good photograph.
However, at this point I don’t think that likes and emojis are the source of my future photography development: I want actual feedback, even if it’s limited to just a sentence or so. I’m hoping that Glass might provide that kind of feedback though I guess only time will tell.
- For a good take on Facebook and why its functionally ‘over’ as a positive brand check out M.G. Siegler’s article, “Facebook is Too Big, Fail.” ↩︎
- This is my second time with Flickr, as I closed a very old account several years ago given that I just wasn’t using it. ↩︎
- If I’m entirely honest, I bet I’ve learned as much or more from reading photography teaching/course books, but that’s a different kind of learning entirely. ↩︎
The Lawfare Dimension of Asymetrical Conflict
The past week has seen a logjam begin to clear in Canadian-Chinese-American international relations. After agreeing to the underlying facts associated with her (and Huawei’s) violation of American sanctions that have been placed on Iran, Meng Wanzhou was permitted to return to China after having been detained in Canada for several years. Simultaneously, two Canadian nationals who had been charged with national security crimes were themselves permitted to return to Canada on health-related grounds. The backstory is that these Canadians were seized shortly following the detainment of Huawei’s CFO, with the Chinese government repeatedly making clear that the Canadians were being held hostage and would only be released when the CFO was repatriated to China.
A huge amount of writing has taken place following the swap. But what I’ve found to be particular interesting in terms of offering a novel contribution to the discussions was an article by Julian Ku in Lawfare. In his article, “China’s Successful Foray Into Asymmetric Lawfare,” Ku argues that:
Although Canadians are relieved that their countrymen have returned home, the Chinese government’s use of its own weak legal system to carry out “hostage diplomacy,” combined with Meng’s exploitation of the procedural protections of the strong and independent Canadian and U.S. legal systems, may herald a new “asymmetric lawfare” strategy to counter the U.S. This strategy may prove an effective counter to the U.S. government’s efforts to use its own legal system to enforce economic sanctions, root out Chinese espionage, indict Chinese hackers, or otherwise counter the more assertive and threatening Chinese government.
I remain uncertain that this baseline premise, which undergirds the rest of his argument, holds true. In particular, his angle of analysis seems to set to the side, or not fully engage with, the following:
- China’s hostage taking has further weakened the trust that foreign companies will have in the Chinese government. They must now acknowledge, and build into their risk models, the possibility that their executives or employees could be seized should the Chinese government get into a diplomatic, political, or economic dispute with the country from which they operate.
- China’s blatant hostage taking impairs its world standing and has led to significant parts of the world shifting their attitudes towards the Chinese government. The results of these shifts are yet to be fully seen, but to date there have been doubts about entering into trade agreements with China, an increased solidarity amongst middle powers to resist what is seen as bad behaviour by China, and a push away from China and into the embrace of liberal democratic governments. This last point, in particular, runs counter to China’s long-term efforts to showcase its own style of governance as a genuine alternative to American and European models of democracy.
- Despite what has been written, I think that relying on hostage diplomacy associated with its weak rule of law showcases China’s comparatively weak hand. Relying on low rule of law to undertake lawfare endangers its international strategic interests, which rely on building international markets and being treated as a respectable and reputable partner on the world stage. Resorting to kidnapping impairs the government’s ability to demonstrate compliance with international agreements and fora so as to build out its international policies.
Of course, none of the above discounts the fact that the Chinese government did, in fact, exploit this ‘law asymmetry’ between its laws and those of high rule of law countries. And the Canadian government did act under duress as a result of their nationals having been taken hostage, including becoming a quiet advocate for Chinese interests insofar as Canadian diplomats sought a way for the US government to reach a compromise with Huawei/Meng so that Canada’s nationals could be returned home. And certainly the focus on relying on high rule of law systems can delay investigations into espionage or other illicit foreign activities and operations that are launched by the Chinese government. Nevertheless, neither the Canadian or American legal systems actually buckled under the foreign and domestic pressure to set aside the rule of law in favour of quick political ‘fixes.’
While there will almost certainly be many years of critique in Canada and the United States about how this whole affair was managed the fact will remain that both countries demonstrated that their justice systems would remain independent from the political matters of the day. And they did so despite tremendous pressure: from Trump, during his time as the president, and despite the Canadian government being subjected to considerable pressure campaigns by numerous former government officials who were supportive, for one reason or another, of the Chinese government’s position to return Huawei’s CFO.
While it remains to be written what the actual, ultimate, effect of this swap of Huawei’s CFO for two inappropriately detained Canadians will be, some lasting legacies may include diminished political capital for the Chinese government while, at the same time, a reinforcing of the trust that can be put in the American and Canadian (and, by extension, Western democratic) systems of justice. Should these legacies hold then China’s gambit will almost certainly prove to have backfired.
The So-Called Privacy Problems with WhatsApp
ProPublica, which is typically known for its excellent journalism, published a particularly terrible piece earlier this week that fundamentally miscast how encryption works and how Facebook vis-a-vis WhatsApp works to keep communications secured. The article, “How Facebook Undermines Privacy Protections for Its 2 Billion WhatsApp Users,” focuses on two so-called problems.
The So-Called Privacy Problems with WhatsApp
First, the authors explain that WhatsApp has a system whereby recipients of messages can report content they have received to WhatsApp on the basis that it is abusive or otherwise violates WhatsApp’s Terms of Service. The article frames this reporting process as a way of undermining privacy on the basis that secured messages are not kept solely between the sender(s) and recipient(s) of the communications but can be sent to other parties, such as WhatsApp. In effect, the ability to voluntarily forward messages to WhatsApp that someone has received is cast as breaking the privacy promises that have been made by WhatsApp.
Second, the authors note that WhatsApp collects a large volume of metadata in the course of using the application. Using lawful processes, government agencies have compelled WhatsApp to disclose metadata on some of their users in order to pursue investigations and secure convictions against individuals. The case that is focused on involves a government employee who leaked confidential banking information to Buzzfeed, and which were subsequently reported out.
Assessing the Problems
In the case of forwarding messages for abuse reporting purposes, encryption is not broken and the feature is not new. These kinds of processes offer a mechanism that lets individuals self-identify and report on problematic content. Such content can include child grooming, the communications of illicit or inappropriate messages or audio-visual content, or other abusive information.
What we do learn, however, is that the ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’ methods of detecting abuse need to be fixed. In the case of the former, only about 1,000 people are responsible for intaking and reviewing the reported content after it has first been filtered by an AI:
Seated at computers in pods organized by work assignments, these hourly workers use special Facebook software to sift through streams of private messages, images and videos that have been reported by WhatsApp users as improper and then screened by the company’s artificial intelligence systems. These contractors pass judgment on whatever flashes on their screen — claims of everything from fraud or spam to child porn and potential terrorist plotting — typically in less than a minute.
Further, the employees are often reliant on machine learning-based translations of content which makes it challenging to assess what is, in fact, being communicated in abusive messages. As reported,
… using Facebook’s language-translation tool, which reviewers said could be so inaccurate that it sometimes labeled messages in Arabic as being in Spanish. The tool also offered little guidance on local slang, political context or sexual innuendo. “In the three years I’ve been there,” one moderator said, “it’s always been horrible.”
There are also proactive modes of watching for abusive content using AI-based systems. As noted in the article,
Artificial intelligence initiates a second set of queues — so-called proactive ones — by scanning unencrypted data that WhatsApp collects about its users and comparing it against suspicious account information and messaging patterns (a new account rapidly sending out a high volume of chats is evidence of spam), as well as terms and images that have previously been deemed abusive. The unencrypted data available for scrutiny is extensive. It includes the names and profile images of a user’s WhatsApp groups as well as their phone number, profile photo, status message, phone battery level, language and time zone, unique mobile phone ID and IP address, wireless signal strength and phone operating system, as a list of their electronic devices, any related Facebook and Instagram accounts, the last time they used the app and any previous history of violations.
Unfortunately, the AI often makes mistakes. This led one interviewed content reviewer to state that, “[t]here were a lot of innocent photos on there that were not allowed to be on there … It might have been a photo of a child taking a bath, and there was nothing wrong with it.” Often, “the artificial intelligence is not that intelligent.”
The vast collection of metadata has been a long-reported concern and issue associated with WhatsApp and, in fact, was one of the many reasons why many individuals advocate for the use of Signal instead. The reporting in the ProPublica article helpfully summarizes the vast amount of metadata that is collected but that collection, in and of itself, does not present any evidence that Facebook or WhatsApp have transformed the application into one which inappropriately intrudes into persons’ privacy.
ProPublica Sets Back Reasonable Encryption Policy Debates
The ProPublica article harmfully sets back broader policy discussion around what is, and is not, a reasonable approach for platforms to take in moderating abuse when they have integrated strong end-to-end encryption. Such encryption prevents unauthorized third-parties–inclusive of the platform providers themselves–from reading or analyzing the content of the communications themselves. Enabling a reporting feature means that individuals who receive a communication are empowered to report it to a company, and the company can subsequently analyze what has been sent and take action if the content violates a terms of service or privacy policy clause.
In suggesting that what WhatsApp has implemented is somehow wrong, it becomes more challenging for other companies to deploy similar reporting features without fearing that their decision will be reported on as ‘undermining privacy’. While there may be a valid policy discussion to be had–is a reporting process the correct way of dealing with abusive content and messages?–the authors didn’t go there. Nor did they seriously investigate whether additional resources should be adopted to analyze reported content, or talk with artificial intelligence experts or machine-based translation experts on whether Facebook’s efforts to automate the reporting process are adequate, appropriate, or flawed from the start. All those would be very interesting, valid, and important contributions to the broader discussion about integrating trust and safety features into encrypted messaging applications. But…those are not things that the authors choose to delve into.
The authors could have, also, discussed the broader importance (and challenges) in building out messaging systems that can deliberately conceal metadata, and the benefits and drawbacks of such systems. While the authors do discuss how metadata can be used to crack down on individuals in government who leak data, as well as assist in criminal investigations and prosecutions, there is little said about what kinds of metadata are most important to conceal and the tradeoffs in doing so. Again, there are some who think that all or most metadata should be concealed, and others who hold opposite views: there is room for a reasonable policy debate to be had and reported on.
Unfortunately, instead of actually taking up and reporting on the very valid policy discussions that are at the edges of their article, the authors choose to just be bombastic and asserted that WhatsApp was undermining the privacy protections that individuals thought they have when using the application. It’s bad reporting, insofar as it distorts the facts, and is particularly disappointing given that ProPublica has shown it has the chops to do good investigative work that is well sourced and nuanced in its outputs. This article, however, absolutely failed to make the cut.
Project GUNMAN and the Telling of Intelligence Histories
This story of how the National Security Agency (NSA) was involved in analyzing typewriter bugs that were implanted by agents of the USSR in the 1980s is pretty amazing (.pdf) in terms of the technical and operational details which are have been written about. It’s also revealing in terms of how the parties who are permitted to write about these materials breathlessly describe the agencies’ past exploits. In critically reading these kinds of accounts its possible to learn how the agencies, themselves, regard themselves and their activities. In effect, how history is ‘created’—or propaganda written, depending on how your read the article in question—functions to reveal the nature of the actors involved in that creation and the way that myths and truths are created and replicated.
As a slight aside, whenever I come across material like this I’m reminded of just how poor the Canadian government is in disclosing its own intelligence agencies’ histories. As senior members of the Canadian intelligence community retire or pass away, and as recorded materials waste away or are disposed of, key information that is needed to understand how and why Canada has acted in the world are being lost. This has the effect of impoverishing Canadians’ own understandings of how their governments have operated, with the result that Canadian histories often risk missing essential information that could reveal hidden depths to what Canadians know about their country and its past.
When the Government Decides to Waylay Parliament
Steven Chaplin has a really great explanation of whether the Canadian government can rely on national security and evidentiary laws to lawfully justify refusing to provide documents to the House of Commons, and to House committees. His analysis and explanation arose as a result of the Canadian government doing everything it could to, first, refuse to provide documents to the Parliamentary Committee which was studying Canadian-Chinese relations and, subsequently, refusing to provide the documents when compelled to do so by the House of Commons itself.
Rather than releasing the requested documents the government turned to the courts to adjudicate whether the documents in question–which were asserted to contain sensitive national security information–must, in fact, be released to the House or whether they could instead be sent to an executive committee, filled with Members of Parliament and Senators, to assess the contents instead. As Chaplin notes,
Having the courts intervene, as proposed by the government’s application in the Federal Court, is not an option. The application is clearly precluded by Article 9 of the Bill of Rights, 1689, which provides that a proceeding in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in court. Article 9 not only allows for free speech; it is also a constitutional limit on the jurisdiction of the courts to preclude judicial interference in the business of the House.
The House ordered that the documents be tabled without redaction. Any decision of the court that found to the contrary would impeach or question the proceeding that led to the Order. And any attempt by the courts to balance the interests involved would constitute the courts becoming involved in ascertaining, and thereby questioning, the needs of the House and why the House wants the documents.
Beyond the Court’s involvement impeding into the territory of Parliament, there could be serious and long-term implications of letting the court become a space wherein the government and the House fight to obtain information that has been demanded. Specifically,
It may be that at the end of the day the government will continue to refuse to produce documents. In the same way that the government cannot use the courts to withhold documents, the House cannot go to court to compel the government to produce them, or to order witnesses to attend proceedings. It could also invite disobedience of witnesses, requiring the House to either drop inquiries or involve the courts to compel attendance or evidence. Allowing, or requiring, the government and the House to resolve their differences in the courts would not only be contrary to the constitutional principles of Article 9, but “would inevitably create delays, disruption, uncertainties and costs which would hold up the nation’s business and on that account would be unacceptable even if, in the end, the Speaker’s rulings were vindicated as entirely proper” (Canada (House of Commons) v. Vaid [2005]). In short, the courts have no business intervening one way or the other.
Throughout the discussions that have taken place about this issue in Canada, what has been most striking is that the national security commentators and elites have envisioned that the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) could (and should) be tasked to resolve any and all particularly sensitive national security issues that might be of interest to Parliament. None, however, seems to have contemplated that Parliament, itself, might take issue with the government trying to exclude Parliament from engaging in assessments of the government’s national security decisions nor that issue would be taken when topics of interest to Parliamentarians were punted into an executive body, wherein their fellow Members of Parliament on the body were sworn to the strictest secrecy. Instead, elites have hand waved to the importance of preserving secrecy in order for Canada to receive intelligence from allies, as well as asserted that the government would never mislead Parliament on national security matters (about which, these same experts explain, Members of Parliament are not prepared to receive, process, or understand given the sophistication of the intelligence and the apparent simplicity of most Parliamentarians themselves).
This was the topic of a recent episode of the Intrepid Podcast, where Philippe Lagassé noted that the exclusion of parliamentary experts when creating NSICOP meant that these entirely predictable showdown situations were functionally baked into how the executive body was composed. As someone who raised the issue of adopting an executive, versus a standing House, committee and was rebuffed as being ignorant of the reality of national security it’s with more than a little satisfaction that the very concerns which were raised when NSICOP was being created are, in fact, arising on the political agenda.
With regard to the documents that the House Committee was seeking, I don’t know or particularly care what their contents include. From my own experience I’m all too well aware that ‘national security’ is often stamped on things that either governments want to keep from the public because they can be politically damaging, be kept from the public just generally because of a culture of non-transparency and refusal of accountability, as well as (less often) be kept from the public on the basis that there are bonafide national security interests at stake. I do, however, care that the Government of Canada has (again) acted counter to Parliament’s wishes and has deliberately worked to impede the House from doing its work.
Successive governments seem to genuinely believe that they get to ‘rule’ Canada absolutely and with little accountability. While this is, in function, largely true given how cowed Members of Parliament are to their party leaders it’s incredibly serious and depressing to see the government further erode Parliament’s powers and abilities to fulfil its duties. A healthy democracy is filled with bumps for the government as it is held to account but, sadly, the Government of Canada–regardless of the party in power–is incredibly active in keeping itself, and its behaviours, from the public eye and thus held to account.
If only a committee might be struck to solve this problem…
Strategy is critical because it establishes a common goal that guides agencies in policymaking and provides the framework for collaboration and cohesion of vision. Strategy is difficult to devise, devilish to agree upon, and often painfully reductive when one considers competing demands. But without it, security boils down to ad hoc government responses based on urgent yet contradicting concepts.
Tatyana Bolton, Mary Brooks, and Kathryn Waldron, “Three Key Questions to Define ICT Supply Chain Security”
Ephemerality in Messaging
Signal announced last week that their users could set a default that messages would auto-delete themselves after a period of time from 30 second to four weeks. The default would apply to all conversations, though could be modified on a per-conversation basis. The company wrote,
As the norms for how people connect have changed, much of the communication that once took place through the medium of coffee shops, bars, and parks now takes place through the medium of digital devices. One side effect of this shift from analog to digital is the conjoined shift from the ephemeral to the eternal: words once transiently spoken are now – more often than not – data stored forever.
I tend to think that the retain-forever approach that digital technologies have imposed on contemporary life is deeply unhealthy, and think pretty highly of the early work done by people like Mayer-Schonberger despite some of my critiques. As I noted when I reviewed his book,
… comprehensive digital remembering collapses history and thus impairs our judgement to act in time, while denying humans the chance to evolve, develop, and learn. This leaves us to helplessly oscillate between two equally troubling options: a permanent past and an ignorant present.
Signal’s approach, while appreciated, is also only a first step as they don’t provide an easy way to also extract and permanently retain some communications outside of their environment. Why does this matter? Because there are, in fact, some conversations that need to be retained for some time, be they personal (e.g., last communications with a loved on) or professional (e.g., government employees required to retain substantive decisions and conversations in archives). The company might introduce a flag where–with the consent of both parties–specific parts of conversations could be retained indefinitely outside of the default deletion times. Adding in the friction of retention would serve to replicate how ‘remembering’ often works in non-digital contexts: it takes extra effort to create facsimiles. We should strive to replicate that into more of our digital environments.
Still, Signal’s approach–enabling deletion by default–is arguably an effort to bend communications closer to their historical norms and, as such, likely for the better. They’re obviously not the first company to think this way–Snapchat famously led the way, and numerous social companies’ ‘stories’ posts are designed delete after 24 hours for ‘privacy’ and also (really) engagement reasons–but I think that it’s meaningful that a text-messaging company is introducing this as a way of easily setting defaults for forgetting.
