Category: Quotations

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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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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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Quotations

2013.7.5

Privacy’s moral weight, its importance as a value, does not shrink or swell in direct proportion to the numbers of people who want or like it, or how much they want to like it. Rather, privacy is worth taking seriously because it is among the rights, duties, or values of any morally legitimate social and political system.

Helen Nissembaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
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Links Quotations

For $1,650 a month, subscribers will soon be able to fly as much as they want between four California cities, NPR’s Wendy Kaufman reports. Members (not “customers”) will be able to board as many times as they want to travel between San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles

Interesting. I can I only imagine how popular such an approach would be on some routes in Canada.

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Aside Quotations

2013.6.7

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited “metadata” is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens’ communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication. Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual’s network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)

Anyone trying to convince people “it’s only metadata” should be discounted as a fool or a government shill. Or perhaps as being both.

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Links Quotations

When the Whole World Has Drones

The proliferation of drone technology has moved well beyond the control of the United States government and its closest allies. The aircraft are too easy to obtain, with barriers to entry on the production side crumbling too quickly to place limits on the spread of a technology that promises to transform warfare on a global scale. Already, more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types. At its last display at a trade show in Beijing, China showed off 25 different unmanned aerial vehicles. Not toys or models, but real flying machines.

When the Whole World Has Drones
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Quotations

2013.5.25

Getting better at something without feedback is very hard. Imagine practising penalty kicks by kicking the ball and then turning around before you saw where it landed; a year or two later someone would visit you at home and tell you where your kicks ended up. This is the kind of feedback loop we contend with when it comes to our privacy disclosures.

Cory Doctorow, “Privacy, public health and the moral hazard of surveillance”