Category: Quotations

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Quotations

2013.8.7

[Privacy] has to be institutional; it also has to do with social conventions that we adopt. The reason there isn’t a technological solution is that the ability to infer information from partial information is extremely powerful — you can take information which appears to be anonymous and (extrapolate identity). It has to be a set of conventions that we adopt, either a legal framework or social conventions.

Technology is racing ahead so quickly and we are so eager to embrace it with our mobiles and everything else that we don’t fully appreciate the side effects. When we put photos on the web and other people tag them, we create (problems) for people who just happen to be in the image. They get caught… we learned this with Street View.

There are a lot of things that we do everyday that we think are innocent… but there are cascades of things that happen. I don’t think we’ve figured out what the right intuitive set of social conventions should be in order to protect privacy. We’re going to have to learn by making mistakes.

This can’t be just a national issue because the internet is everywhere. The consequence of that is it causes us to confront head-on this problem of global issues, of frameworks, legal frameworks, social conventions and the like.

Vinton Cerf, “Internet inventor Vint Cerf: No technological cure for privacy ills”
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Aside Links Quotations

Don’t Be a (Work) Hero

I often end the work week with the feeling that, although I’ve got a lot done, I’€™d need another whole week just to catch up. And that’s before I deal with the stuff that I’ll be facing the following week! It’€™s easily solved, right? Work late, work the weekend, and just pull more hours. Wrong. You’re probably setting yourself up for a bunch of problems down the line if you tackle it this way.

As I read this, I saw myself described in paragraph after paragraph. I hadn’t realized how damaging my work behaviour was getting until a month or so ago, when every day was laced with stress resulting from ‘no down time, and too much to do.’ Life was seriously out-of-kilter.

Fortunately I got some relief. A major burden was relieved, slightly, and I’ve been able to breath. I also saw the result of my ‘work ethic’ after it was maintained for months and years on end: I didn’t like what I saw, and worried about the long-term effects.

As part of my recently ‘normalized’ work schedule, I’m actively trying to leave work at work and not bring too much home. The result has been that I’ve been a more productive writer in the past month than I had been in the preceding three months. Sure, I was pounding out ‘rote writing’ at a impressive rate, but the insightful or interesting stuff needed when writing the conclusion for my dissertation just wasn’t coming to the surface. Fortunately, it’s coming at a rapid rate these days and I also get to (try and) enjoy myself for a few hours each night with non-work related things!

Source: Don’t Be a (Work) Hero

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Links Quotations

There are two types of laws in the U.S., each designed to constrain a different type of power: constitutional law, which places limitations on government, and regulatory law, which constrains corporations. Historically, these two areas have largely remained separate, but today each group has learned how to use the other’s laws to bypass their own restrictions. The government uses corporations to get around its limits, and corporations use the government to get around their limits.

This partnership manifests itself in various ways. The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.

Here’s an example: It would be reasonable for our government to debate the circumstances under which corporations can collect and use our data, and to provide for protections against misuse. But if the government is using that very data for its own surveillance purposes, it has an incentive to oppose any laws to limit data collection. And because corporations see no need to give consumers any choice in this matter – because it would only reduce their profits – the market isn’t going to protect consumers, either.

Schneier’s article, “The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership,” does a terrific job in striking to the heart of the ‘arrangements’ between our corporate partners and America’s governing bodies.
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Links Quotations

Mr. Cope, I am Canadian. Like virtually every other Canadian I know, I rely on my mobile phone in my personal life and for my livelihood on a daily basis. The “critical situation” I face comes every month, when I open my wireless bill wondering whether I’ll be able to afford to pay it. Your company, along with Canada’s other major wireless providers, have had 30 years to address this situation. But you’ve failed. Posting huge profits and paying dividends year after year might satisfy your shareholders, but individual Canadians and their families are being hung out to dry. It’s time for a change. Faced with a choice between an American company fighting to gain a foothold in a hostile market or a Canadian one who takes my hard earned money for granted, I’ll pick the lesser of two evils. And if you don’t know which that is by now, I’ll happily send you a copy of my monthly phone bill.

Ben’s letter is awesome. You should really go read all of it.
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Quotations

2013.8.2

One reason for the “stamp and leak” culture is the institutional failure of the intelligence community to find an effective way of allowing people uncomfortable with certain secrets to protest them without leaking to the public. Channels that allow for proper and credible adjudication are essential. David Grannis, the staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says he is not aware of a single instance where a whistleblower from within the community successfully navigated the complex rules set up by agencies to handle complaints. And simply put, the people who work with secrets have little faith in the inspectors general, no matter how independent they are, and have every reason to believe, because they can read newspapers, that their whistleblowing will end their careers if done internally.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
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Aside Quotations

2013.8.2

What are Google’s Nexus devices for if not to be purchased by large numbers of consumers? Google’s take on that issue has been consistent: they’re “halo” devices meant to educate the rest of the ecosystem. Burke put it to us this way: “Basically what Nexus allows us to do is set the standard … [we can] demonstrate how Android runs and hopefully influence other device manufacturers to take what we’ve done and do even better.”

That explanation has often been difficult to take at face value. Though the phones have usually been elegant devices, they typically launched with specs that were behind the curve. The Galaxy Nexus had a pretty terrible camera, for example, and the Nexus 4 lacks support for LTE. Now that Google sells top-end “Google Play edition” phones that run stock Android, the Nexus line seems more irrelevant than ever.

That brings us to the other — and more important — reason the Nexus line exists: Google simply needs hardware on which it can develop Android. Burke says “as an engineering team creating a mobile platform — we can’t do that in the abstract. We need to do it on a real device that we’re carrying with us.” When people ask me about the Nexus line, I like to joke that if you need to create a few hundred polished and usable devices for Google engineers, why not make a few hundred thousand more and sell them to hardcore users?

I think that acknowledging Google wants to control some of its own hardware for internal development purposes – as well as to better enable external developers to produce software for Android – continues to strike to the heart of why the ‘Nexus’ line exists. Arguably the recent ‘Play Edition’ of manufacturers’ flagships phones could address consumers’ desire for stock Android experiences, but I don’t think that the Play Editions will fully satisfy developers’ interests in working from a stock, no-nonsense, quickly updated platform.
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Quotations

2013.8.2

… it is obvious that for all the academic critique, ‘privacy’, as a concept, as a regime, as a set of policy instruments, and as a way to frame advocacy and activism, is not going to disappear. On the contrary, it displays a remarkable resilience as a way to regulate the processing of personal information by public and privacy organizations, and as a way for ‘privacy advocates’ to resist the excessive monitoring of human behaviour. Like it or not, privacy frames the ways that most ordinary people see the contemporary surveillance issues. Surveillance scholars have got to live with it.

Colin J. Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The concept and the regime”
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Quotations

2013.8.1

When members of the intelligence community brief Congress on highly classified programs, they’re incentivized to do so in a way that provides the necessary amount of detail to satisfy legal and administrative requirements, and not a shred more. Since most members of the intelligence committees aren’t experts, an imbalance is built into the system. The briefers will use technical language, knowing that members often can’t share with their staffs enough information to develop follow-up questions. Members know this and tend to be the alert for weasel words or any hints or indications that there are depths to the particular program that might not be visible in a briefing. The less trust there is between institutions, the more games are played in the briefings. These games have become endemic, which for oversight is troubling. The less trust we have in government, the more likely it is for freelancers and hobbyists, people who traffic in classified information that is expressly often pulled from its context, to decide whether to publish secrets. Don’t blame this on the lone wolves. Blame it on the gatekeepers for failing to maintain credibility.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
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Quotations

2013.8.1

The role of public reason is not so much to eliminate or even diminish political disagreement, as it is to provide democratic citizens with reasons and arguments that, if valid and sound, they can accept as democratic citizens. Were laws and policies are decided for purely nonpublic reasons, it could not be said that democratic citizens are politically free. Their political power is being used against their will in ways they cannot endorse as citizens. Public reason then is a condition of political autonomy and collective self-rule.

Samuel Freeman, “Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment”
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Quotations

2013.7.31

An important test of the deliberative legitimacy of a political process … is the degree to which groups may not only gain a hearing for their opinions about issues and proposals already under consideration but are able to initiate discussion of problems and proposals.

Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy”