Category: Quotations

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Quotations

2013.7.30

Obama’s first director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, wanted the CIA to use its [drone strike] capability more strategically. His reading of the intelligence suggested that the collateral harm of the operation–the anger that the strikes caused among Pakistanis, even though the targeting was precise–was damaging to U.S. security interests. The CIA, in a deft bureaucratic move, simply stopped providing Blair’s office with advance notice of strikes. The dispute went all the way to the Office of the Vice President, which sided with the CIA, although Blair “won” the ability to have a director of national intelligence representative at CIA covert action briefings at the White House.

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

2013.7.30

The idea that there is no problem with surveillance as long as you have nothing to hide simply points to the complacency of the liberal view of freedom by contrast with the republican one. The liberal thinks that you are free so long as you are not coerced. The republican agrees, of course, that if you are coerced then you are not free. But freedom for the republican consists not in being free from coercion in respect of some action, but rather in being free from the possibility of coercion in respect of it.

Quentin Skinner, “Liberty, Liberalism and Surveillance: a historic overview”
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Quotations

2013.7.29

If code doesn’t receive constant love it turns to shit.

Brad Fitzpatrick, Gopher at Google
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Quotations

2013.7.19

Mark Zuckerberg runs a giant spy machine in Palo Alto, California. He wasn’t the first to build one, but his was the best, and every day hundreds of thousands of peopl eupload the most intimate details of their lives to the Internet. The real coup wasn’t hoodwinking the public into revealing their thoughts, closest associates, and exact geographic coordinates at any given time. Rather, it was getting the public to volunteer that information. Then he turned off the privacy settings.

…

If the state had organized such an informationd rive, protestors would have burned down the White House. But the state is the natural beneficary of this new “social norm.” Today, that information is regularly used in court proceedings and law enforcement. There is no need for warrants or subpoenas. Judges need not be consulted. Th Forth Amendment does not come into play. Intelligence agencies don’t have to worry about violating laws protecting the citizenry from wiretapping and information gathering. Sharing information “more openly” and with “more people” is a step backward in civil liberties. And spies, whether foreign and domestic, are “more people,” too.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. (2013). Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. New Jersey: Wiley. Pp. 27.
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Aside Links Quotations

How to Publish A  Story That Explains How to Use Social Media to Juice Your Story’s Popularity

emptyage:

I paid to have my latest Wired story promoted on social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, to try to show that a lot of the metrics* we use to measure a story’s success are bullshit. It worked. When the story went live today, the page appeared with more than 15,500 links on Twitter, and 6,500 likes on Facebook. The story is a part of Wired’s Cheats package for the latest issue of the magazine. It needed to go live online at the same time readers encountered it in print, and it needed to have all those social shares set up in advance. 

…

The entire package was going live at once. I could publish my story a little bit early, but the timing needed to be very close. I wanted all the public-facing stats (like the 15 thousand links and Twitter and 6,000 Facebook shares) to be live by the time the text appeared. Certainly, if someone found it in print or on the tablet, it needed those metrics to already be there. To make that happen, we cheated. 

…

This morning (or last night) at a little after 1 am, I added the story text, set it to the current time, and hit update. Now it showed up in RSS readers and I could openly tweet it form my main account. (I had originally used a secondary Twitter account I have for testing 3rd party stuff to link to it and score retweets.)

So now, the story goes “live” and as if by magic it has tens of thousands of social shares listed on it the instant real people start to encounter it. It worked. 

*As is site traffic, to a very large extent. My original idea was to use a botnet to throw traffic at it, but Wired’s lawyers said “no, no. Don’t do that.“ 

And, of course, people tend to associate lots of shares with an article’s significance or influence. Consequently, by ‘cheating’ ahead of time a content owner can add a false gravitas to the content in question. I’m curious to know how search companies that, in part, use social signals to surface content deal with this kind of ‘hacking the social.’

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Links Quotations

Freelancers are second-class journalists—even if there are only freelancers here, in Syria, because this is a dirty war, a war of the last century; it’s trench warfare between rebels and loyalists who are so close that they scream at each other while they shoot each other. The first time on the frontline, you can’t believe it, with these bayonets you have seen only in history books. Today’s wars are drone wars, but here they fight meter by meter, street by street, and it’s fucking scary. Yet the editors back in Italy treat you like a kid; you get a front-page photo, and they say you were just lucky, in the right place at the right time. You get an exclusive story, like the one I wrote last September on Aleppo’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, burning as the rebels and Syrian army battled for control. I was the first foreign reporter to enter, and the editors say: “How can I justify that my staff writer wasn’t able to enter and you were?” I got this email from an editor about that story: “I’ll buy it, but I will publish it under my staff writer’s name.”

FJP: A fast-paced, fiercely heartfelt essay on the downsides to freelance work abroad and the madness of war.

(via futurejournalismproject)

This speaks volumes about contemporary war reporting: not only are ‘dirty wars’ outsourced to freelancers, but the credibility linked to successfully covering them is either denigrated or obviated to the public.

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Quotations

2013.7.10

Antitrust law is ill prepared to handle a “market” where some percentage of consumers consider a loss of privacy a gain and others consider it a loss. Economic reasoning in general falters in the face of externalities, but usually we can all agree that, say, pollution is a harm (or negative externality) and flowers are a boon (or positive externality). Privacy preferences are much more idiosyncratic.

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

2013.7.10

… 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”