Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Quotations

2013.7.10

… the cultural, political, and privacy concerns raised by the new business alliances of search engines, social networks, and carriers cannot be translated into traditional economic analysis. They raise questions about the type of society we want to live in–a holistic inquiry that cannot be reduced to the methodological individualism of economics.

Frank Pasquale. (2010). “Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries.” Northwestern University Law Review 104(1).
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Quotations

2013.7.9

Canadian carriers detect over 125 million attacks per hour on Canadians, comprising 80,000 new zero-day exploits identified every day. The vast majority of attacks are undetectable by traditional security software/hardware.

From “The Canadian Cyber Security Situation in 2011”
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Quotations

2013.7.9

We can draw a distinction here between Big Data—the stuff of numbers that thrives on correlations—and Big Narrative—a story-driven, anthropological approach that seeks to explain why things are the way they are. Big Data is cheap where Big Narrative is expensive. Big Data is clean where Big Narrative is messy. Big Data is actionable where Big Narrative is paralyzing.

The promise of Big Data is that it allows us to avoid the pitfalls of Big Narrative. But this is also its greatest cost. With an extremely emotional issue such as terrorism, it’s easy to believe that Big Data can do wonders. But once we move to more pedestrian issues, it becomes obvious that the supertool it’s made out to be is a rather feeble instrument that tackles problems quite unimaginatively and unambitiously. Worse, it prevents us from having many important public debates.

As Band-Aids go, Big Data is excellent. But Band-Aids are useless when the patient needs surgery. In that case, trying to use a Band-Aid may result in amputation. This, at least, is the hunch I drew from Big Data.

Evgeny Morozov, “Connecting the Dots, Missing the Story”
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Quotations

2013.7.8

…PETs are a technological fix to a sociological problem … [they] introduce another dimension of social hierarchy into cyberspace, not one that aggravates the divide between the information rich and poor, but between those with technological savvy to assert their personal preferences and those who do not possess such expertise…An over-emphasis on PETs leaves the surveillance imperatives being designed into information infrastructures unscathed, while fostering particularistic struggles over the uses of technologies.

Dwayne Winseck, “Netscapes of power: convergence, network designed, walled gardens, and other strategies of control in the information age”
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Quotations

2013.7.8

This week, court documents filed by the RCMP pertaining to their investigation of Mr. Duffy were disclosed. They show that the Conservative Party of Canada was initially prepared to use taxpayer-subsidized party funds to repay the debt that Mr. Duffy owed because of improperly claimed Senate expenses. It balked, however, when it learned that the amount was $90,000, not $32,000.

The Conservative government of Canada: tough on crime over $32,000; anything above $32,000, you’re on your own – or not, since the documents confirm that Stephen Harper’s then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, did, as reported, step in and give Mr. Duffy a personal cheque for $90,000.

Tabitha Southey, “Duffy the empire slayer: How the PMO created a big, big problem”
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Quotations

2013.7.8

Like a giant python that has consumed a rat, Facebook captures, swallows, and slowly digests its users.

Ron Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
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Quotations

2013.7.7

In this light, the selfie isn’t about empowerment. But it also isn’t not about empowerment. Empowerment, or lack thereof, is not part of the picture. Neither is narcissism, as either a personal or a cultural moral failure. And the selfie isn’t about the male gaze. The selfie, in the end is about the gendered labour of young girls under capitalism. Do we honestly think that by ceasing to take and post selfies, the bodies of young women would cease to be spectacles? Teenage girls are Young-Girls, are spectacles, are narcissists, are consumers because those are the very criterion which must be met to be a young woman and also a part of society. That their bodies are commodities enters them into economies of attention, and that is where the disgust with selfies comes from. In an economy of attention, it is a disaster for men that girls take up physical space and document it, and that this documentation takes up page hits and retweets that could go to ‘more important’ things. And so the Young-Girl must be punished, with a disgust reserved for the purely trivial. To paraphrase that beloved of Young-Girl films, Ever After — itself paraphrasing Thomas More’s Utopia — what are we to make of the selfie but that we first create teenage girls and then punish them?

Sarah Gram, “The Young-Girl and the Selfie”
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Aside

Nature: it can happen to you, too

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Quotations

2013.7.7

An Ipsos Reid survey on federal politics, released on Wednesday, titled At the Midpoint, shows the public’s ambivalence. Among the more curious findings is one that suggests that Canadians believe that there is an inverse proportion between competence and honesty. Of the three major parties, the Conservatives are held to be the most competent and the least honest; with the NDP, it is the other way around. As usual the Liberals are somewhere in-between. On the face of it, greater competence is likely to attract the voters, but if the Conservatives drift on in their current direction, a desire for a change may yet prevail.

Editorial, “The Tory turning-point ahead of the next election”
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Links

A handy guide to the hidden meaning behind all those NSA and government statements

A very helpful resource for deciphering ‘government-speak’ surrounding national security surveillance practices.