Writing for the New York Times, Krolik, Mozur, and Satariano have published new details about the state of Russia’s telecommunications surveillance capacity. They include documentary evidence in some cases of what these technologies can do, including the ability to:
identify if mobile phones are proximate to one another to detect meetups
identify whether a person’s phone is proximate to a burner phone, to de-anonymize the latter
use deep packet inspection systems to target particular kinds of communications metadata associated with secure communications applications
These types of systems are appearing in various repressive states and are being used by their governments.
Similar systems have long been developed in advanced Western democratic countries which leads me to wonder whether what we’re seeing from authoritarian countries will ultimately usher in the use of similar technologies in higher rule-of-law states or if, instead, Western companies will merely export the tools without them being adopted in the countries developing them.
In effect, will the long-term result of revealing authoritarian capabilities lead to the gradual legitimization of their use in democratic countries so long as using them is tied to judicial oversight?
Using a foreign country’s military doctrine to reframe fuck-ups as successes — here, that the Russians’ real operations have had the intended effects — boils down to doing a GRU colonel’s work for him; placating Gerasimov about whether or not the O6’s department has contributed to winning the war, among other things.
The Russian government and its various agencies have been incredibly active in attempting to influence or affect the ability of the Ukrainian government to resist the illegal Russian invasion of its territory. But at the same time there has been a back and forth about the successes or failures of Russia in largely academic or public policy circles. In at least some cases, these arguments seem to argue for the successes of the Russian doctrine without sufficient evidence to maintain the position.
Notwithstanding the value of some of those debates it’s nice to see a line of critique that is more attentive to the structure of institutions and what often drives them, with the affect of broadening the rationales and explanations for the (un)successful efforts in the cyber domain by Russian forces.
There have been any number of concerns about Elon Musk’s behaviour, and especially in the recent weeks and months. This has led some commentators to warn that his purchase of Twitter may raise national security risks. Gill and Lehrich try to make this argument in their article, “Elon Musk Owning Twitter is A National Security Threat.” They give three reasons:
First, Musk is allegedly in communication with foreign actors – including senior officials in the Kremlin and Chinese Communist Party – who could use his acquisition of Twitter to undermine American national security.
…
Will Musk’s foreign investors have influence over Twitter’s content moderation policies? Will the Chinese exploit their significant leverage over Musk to demand he censor criticism of the CCP, or turn the dials up for posts that sow distrust in democracy?
…
Finally, it’s not just America’s information ecosystem that’s at stake, it’s also the private data of American citizens.
It’s worth noting that at no point do the authors provide a definition for ‘national security’, which causes the reader to have to guess what they likely mean. More broadly, in journalistic and opinion circle communities there is a curious–and increasingly common–conjoining of national security and information security. The authors themselves make this link in the kicker paragraph of their article, when they write
It is imperative that American leaders fully understand Musk’s motives, financing, and loyalties amidst his bid to acquire Twitter – especially given the high-stakes geopolitical reality we are living in now. The fate of American national security and our information ecosystem hang in the balance.1
Information security, generally, is focused on dangers which are associated with true or false information being disseminated across a population. It is distinguished from cyber security, and which is typically focused on the digital security protocols and practices that are designed to reduce technical computer vulnerabilities. Whereas the former focuses on a public’s mind the latter attends to how their digital and physical systems are hardened from being technically exploited.
Western governments have historically resisted authoritarian governments attempts to link the concepts of information security and cyber security. The reason is that authoritarian governments want to establish international principles and norms, whereby it becomes appropriate for governments to control the information which is made available to their publics under the guise of promoting ‘cyber security’. Democratic countries that emphasise the importance of intellectual freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and other core rights have historically been opposed to promoting information security norms.
At the same time, misinformation and disinformation have become increasingly popular areas of study and commentary, especially following Donald Trump’s election as POTUS. And, in countries like the United States, Trump’s adoption of lies and misinformation was often cast as a national security issue: correct information should be communicated, and efforts to intentionally communicate false information should be blocked, prohibited, or prevented from massively circulating.
Obviously Trump’s language, actions, and behaviours were incredibly destabilising and abominable for an American president. And his presence on the world stage arguably emboldened many authoritarians around the world. But there is a real risk in using terms like ‘national security’ without definition, especially when the application of ‘national security’ starts to stray into the domain of what could be considered information security. Specifically, as everything becomes ‘national security’ it is possible for authoritarian governments to adopt the language of Western governments and intellectuals, and assert that they too are focused on ‘national security’ whereas, in fact, these authoritarian governments are using the term to justify their own censorious activities.
Now, does this mean that if we are more careful in the West about our use of language that authoritarian governments will become less censorious? No. But being more careful and thoughtful in our language, public argumentation, and positioning of our policy statements we may at least prevent those authoritarian governments from using our discourse as a justification for their own activities. We should, then, be careful and precise in what we say to avoid giving a fig leaf of cover to authoritarian activities.
And that will start by parties who use terms like ‘national security’ clearly defining what they mean, such that it is clear how national security is different from informational security. Unless, of course, authors and thinkers are in fact leaning into the conceptual apparatus of repressive governments in an effort to save democratic governance. For any author who thinks such a move is wise, however, I must admit that I harbour strong doubts of the efficacy or utility of such attempts.
For the past decade there has been a steady drumbeat that ‘cyberwar is coming’. Sometimes the parties holding these positions are in militaries and, in other cases, from think tanks or university departments that are trying to link kinetic-adjacent computer operations with ‘war’.
Perhaps the most famous rebuttal to the cyberwar proponents has been Thomas Rid’s Cyber War Will Not Take Place. The title was meant to be provocative and almost has the effect of concealing a core insight of Rid’s argument: cyber operations will continue to be associated with conflicts but cyber operations are unlikely to constitute (or lead to) out-and-out war on their own. Why? Because it is very challenging to prepare and launch cyber operations that have significant kinetic results at the scale we associate with full-on war.
Since the Russian Federation’s war of aggression towards Ukraine there have regularly been shocked assertions that cyberware isn’t taking place. A series of pieces by The Economist, as an example, sought to prepare readers for a cyberwar that just hasn’t happened. Why not? Because The Economist–much like other outlets!–often presumed that the cyber dimensions of the conflict in Ukraine would bear at least some resemblance to the long-maligned concept of a ‘cyber Pearl Harbour’: a critical cyber-enable strike of some sort would have a serious, and potentially devastating, effect on how Ukraine could defend against Russian aggression and thus tilt the balance towards Russian military victory.
As a result of the early mistaken understandings of cyber operations, scholars and experts have once more come out and explained why cyber operations are not the same as an imagined cyber Pearl Harbour situation, while still taking place in the Ukrainian conflict. Simultaneously, security and malware researchers have taken the opportunity to belittle International Relations theorists who have written about cyberwar and argued that these theorists have fundamentally misunderstood how cyber operations take place.
Part of the challenge is ‘cyberwar’ has often been popularly seen as the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their associated military hardware being deployed into a foreign country. As noted by Rid in a recent op-ed, while some cyber operations are meant to be apparent others are much more subtle. The former might be meant to reduce the will to fight or diminish command and control capabilities. The latter, in contrast, will look a lot like other reconnaissance operations: knowing who is commanding which battle group, the logistical challenges facing the opponent, or state of infrastructure in-country. All these latter dimensions provide strategic and tactical advantages to the party who’s launched the surveillance operation. Operations meant to degrade capabilities may occur but will often be more subtle. This subtly can be a particularly severe risk in a conflict, such as if your ammunition convoy is sent to the wrong place or train timetables are thrown off with the effect of stymying civilian evacuation or resupply operations.1
What’s often seemingly lost in the ‘cyberwar’ debates–which tend to take place either between people who don’t understand cyber operations, those who stand to profit from misrepresentations of them, or those who are so theoretical in their approaches as to be ignorant of reality–is that contemporary wars entail blended forces. Different elements of those blends have unique and specific tactical and strategic purposes. Cyber isn’t going to have the same effect as a Grad Missile Launcher or a T-90 Battle Tank, but that missile launcher or tank isn’t going to know that the target it’s pointed towards is strategically valuable without reconnaissance nor is it able to impair logistics flows the same way as a cyber operation targeting train schedules. To expect otherwise is to grossly misunderstand how cyber operations function in a conflict environment.
I’d like to imagine that one result of the Russian war of aggression will be to improve the general population’s understanding of cyber operations and what they entail, and do not entail. It’s possible that this might happen given that major news outlets, such as the AP and Reuters, are changing how they refer to such activities: they will not be called ‘cyberattacks’ outside very nuanced situations now. In simply changing what we call cyber activities–as operations as opposed to attacks–we’ll hopefully see a deflating of the language and, with it, more careful understandings of how cyber operations take place in and out of conflict situations. As such, there’s a chance (hope?) we might see a better appreciation of the significance of cyber operations in the population writ-large in the coming years. This will be increasingly important given the sheer volume of successful (non-conflict) operations that take place each day.
It’s worth recognizing that part of why we aren’t reading about successful Russian operations is, first, due to Ukrainian and allies’ efforts to suppress such successes for fear of reducing Ukrainian/allied morale. Second, however, is that Western signals intelligence agencies such as the NSA, CSE, and GCHQ, are all very active in providing remote defensive and other operational services to Ukrainian forces. There was also a significant effort ahead of the conflict to shore up Ukrainian defences and continues to be a strong effort by Western companies to enhance the security of systems used by Ukrainians. Combined, this means that Ukraine is enjoying additional ‘forces’ while, simultaneously, generally keeping quiet about its own failures to protect its systems or infrastructure. ↩︎
The New York Times recently wrote about Nokia providing telecommunications equipment to Russian ISPs, all while Nokia was intimately aware of how its equipment would be interconnected with System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM) lawful interception equipment. SORM equipment has existed in numerous versions since the 1990s. Per James Lewis:
SORM-1 collects mobile and landline telephone calls. SORM-2 collects internet traffic. SORM-3 collects from all media (including Wi-Fi and social networks) and stores data for three years. Russian law requires all internet service providers to install an FSB monitoring device (called “Punkt Upravlenia”) on their networks that allows the direct collection of traffic without the knowledge or cooperation of the service provider. The providers must pay for the device and the cost of installation.
SORM is part of a broader Internet and telecommunications surveillance and censorship regime that has been established by the Russian government. Moreover, other countries in the region use iterations or variations of the SORM system (e.g., Kazakhstan) as well as countries which were previously invaded by the Soviet Union (e.g., Afghanistan).
The Time’s article somewhat breathlessly states that the documents they obtained, and which span 2008-2017,
show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.
It is not surprising that Nokia, as part of doing business in Russia, was complying with lawful interception laws insofar as its products were compatible with SORM equipment. Frankly it would have been surprising if Nokia had flouted the law given that Nokia’s own policy concerning human rights asserts that (.pdf):
Nokia will provide passive lawful interception capabilities to customers who have a legal obligation to provide such capabilities. This means we will provide products that meet agreed standards for lawful intercept capabilities as defined by recognized standards bodies such as the 3rd Generation Partner Project (3GPP) and the European Telecoms Standards Institute (ETSI). We will not, however, engage in any activity relating to active lawful interception technologies, such as storing, post-processing or analyzing of intercepted data gathered by the network operator.
It was somewhat curious that the Times’ article declined to recognize that Nokia-Siemens has a long history of doing business in repressive countries: it allegedly sold mobile lawful interception equipment to Iran circa 2009 and in 2010-11 its lawful interception equipment was implicated in political repression and torture in Bahrain. Put differently, Nokia’s involvement in low rule-of-law countries is not new and, if anything, their actions in Russia appear to be a mild improvement on their historical approaches to enabling repressive governments to exercise lawful interception functionalities.
The broad question is whether Western companies should be authorized or permitted to do business in repressive countries. To some extent, we might hope that businesses themselves would express restraint. But, in excess of this, companies such as Nokia often require some kind of export license or approval before they can sell certain telecommunications equipment to various repressive governments. This is particularly true when it comes to supplying lawful interception functionality (which was not the case when Nokia sold equipment to Russia).
While the New York Times casts a light on Nokia the article does not:
Assess the export controls that Nokia was(n’t) under–is it the case that the Norwegian government has some liability or responsibility for the sales of Nokia’s telecommunications equipment? Should there be?
Assess the activities of the telecommunications provider Nokia was supplying in Russia, MTS, and whether there is a broader issue of Nokia supplying equipment to MTS since it operates in various repressive countries.
None of this is meant to set aside the fact that Western companies ought to behave better on the international stage. But…this has not been a priority in Russia, at least, until the country’s recent war of aggression. Warning signs were prominently on display before this war and didn’t result in prominent and public recriminations towards Nokia or other Western companies doing business in Russia.
All lawful interception systems, regardless of whether they conform with North America, European, or Russian standards, are surveillance systems. Put another way, they are all about empowering one group to exercise influence or power over others who are unaware they are being watched. In low rule-of-law countries, such as Russia, there is a real question as to whether they should should even be called ‘lawful interception systems’ as opposed to explicitly calling them ‘interception systems’.
There was a real opportunity for the New York Times to both better contextualize Nokia’s involvement in Russia and, then, to explain and problematize the nature of lawful interception capability and standards. The authors could also have spent time discussing the nature of export controls on telecommunications equipment, where the equipment is being sold into repressive states. Sadly this did not occur with the result that the authors and paper declined to more broadly consider and report on the working, and ethics and politics, of enabling telecommunications and lawful interception systems in repressive and non-repressive states alike. While other kicks at this can will arise, it’s evident that there wasn’t even an attempt to do so in this report on Nokia.
Late last month, Global News published a story on how the Canadian government is involved in providing cyber support to the Ukrainian government in the face of Russia’s illegal invasion. While the Canadian military declined to confirm or deny any activities they might be involved in, the same was not true of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). The CSE is Canada’s foreign signals intelligence agency. In addition to collecting intelligence, it is also mandated to defend Canadian federal systems and those designated as of importance to the government of Canada, provide assistance to other federal agencies, and conduct active and defensive cyber operations.1
From the Global News article it is apparent that the CSE is involved in both foreign intelligence operations as well as undertaking cyber defensive activities. Frankly these kinds of activity are generally, and persistently, undertaken with regard to the Russian government and so it’s not a surprise that these activities continue apace.
The CSE spokesperson also noted that the government agency is involved in ‘cyber operations’ though declined to explain whether these are defensive cyber operations or active cyber operations. In the case of the former, the Minister of National Defense must consult with the Minister of Foreign Affairs before authorizing an operation, whereas in the latter both Ministers must consent to an operation prior to it taking place. Defensive and active operations can assume the same form–roughly the same activities or operations might be undertaken–but the rationale for the activity being taken may vary based on whether it is cast as defensive or active (i.e., offensive).2
These kinds of cyber operations are the ones that most worry scholars and practitioners, on the basis that there is a risk that foreign operators or adversaries may misread a signal from a cyber operation or because the operation might have unintended consequences. Thus, the risk is that the operations that the CSE is undertaking run the risk of accidentally (or intentionally, I guess) escalating affairs between Canada and the Russian Federation in the midst of the shooting war between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
While there is, of course, a need for some operational discretion on the part of the Canadian government it is also imperative that the Canadian public be sufficiently aware of the government’s activities to understand the risks (or lack thereof) which are linked to the activities that Canadian agencies are undertaking. To date, the Canadian government has not released its cyber foreign policy doctrine nor has the Canadian Armed Forces released its cyber doctrine.3 The result is that neither Canadians nor Canada’s allies or adversaries know precisely what Canada will do in the cyber domain, how Canada will react when confronted, or the precise nature of Canada’s escalatory ladder. The government’s secrecy runs the risk of putting Canadians in greater jeopardy of a response from the Russian Federation (or other adversaries) without the Canadian public really understanding what strategic or tactical activities might be undertaken on their behalf.
Canadians have a right to know at least enough about what their government is doing to be able to begin assessing the risks linked with conducting operations during an active militant conflict against an adversary with nuclear weapons. Thus far such information has not been provided. The result is that Canadians are ill-prepared to assess the risk that they may be quietly and quickly drawn into the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Such secrecy bodes poorly for being able to hold government to account, to say nothing of preventing Canadians from appreciating the risk that they could become deeply drawn into a very hot conflict scenario.
Not for lack of trying to access them, however, as in both cases I have filed access to information requests to the government for these documents 1 years ago, with delays expected to mean I won’t get the documents before the end of 2022 at best. ↩︎
The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty || “A family member lost work because of the pandemic and was denied unemployment benefits because of an automated system failure. The family then fell behind on rent payments, which led their landlord to sue them for eviction. While the eviction won’t be legal because of the CDC’s moratorium, the lawsuit will still be logged in public records. Those records could then feed into tenant-screening algorithms, which could make it harder for the family to find stable housing in the future. Their failure to pay rent and utilities could also be a ding on their credit score, which once again has repercussions.” // The harms done by automated decision making are deeply under appreciated, and routinely harm those whom society has set aside as ‘appropriate’ test subjects for these inequitable technologies. It’s abhorrent, unethical, and unjust.
How Russia wins the climate crisis || “…agriculture offers the key to one of the greatest resources of the new climate era — food — and in recent years Russia has already shown a new understanding of how to leverage its increasingly strong hand in agricultural exports. In 2010, when wildfires and drought conspired to ruin Russia’s grain harvests, Putin banned the exporting of wheat in order to protect his own people, then watched as global wheat prices tripled. The world reeled in response. From Pakistan to Indonesia, poverty increased. High prices rocked delicate political balances in Syria, Morocco and Egypt, where about 40 percent of daily caloric intake is from bread. The shortages poured fuel on Arab Spring uprisings, which eventually pushed millions of migrants toward Europe, with destabilizing effect — a bonus for Russian interests. And much of this turmoil began with wheat. As Michael Werz, a senior fellow for climate migration and security at the Center for American Progress, says, “There’s a reason people demonstrated with baguettes in Cairo.”” // Bread will, once more, be a functional weapon of war as climate change devastates currently fertile land and enables authoritarian countries to express their will—and encourage chaos—by withholding the nutrients required for life itself. One can only hope that countervailing democracies in the Nordic nations and Canada can acts as sufficient counterbalances to withstand potential Russian malfeasance.
The outbreak that invented intensive care || “Comparisons are being made to the 1918 influenza pandemic — eerily, just over a century ago — which had a mortality that might turn out similar. But that outbreak occurred without a ventilator in sight. Is this new disease, in fact, more deadly? Thanks to what my predecessors learnt in Copenhagen almost 70 years ago, we can, in some parts of the world, offset the havoc of COVID-19 with mechanical ventilation and sophisticated intensive care that was not available in 1918. But it is as COVID-19 continues to spread in areas that do not have ICU beds — or not nearly enough of them — that we will, sadly, learn the true natural course of this new virus.” // It’s incredible that, until 1952, we didn’t have modern ventilators, and worrying that the ‘true’ mortality of the current pandemic may only be apparent after studies are conducted of countries where contemporary medical technologies are often unavailable.
How infectious disease defined the American bathroom || “When architects designed homes in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic and World War I, they typically took one of two approaches to the recent traumas. The first was to start at the ground-up and rethink everything, like Modernists and the Bauhaus did in the 1920s. The second — and far more common — tactic was to try to forget about the trauma and make ourselves comfortable, which bolstered the popularity of Art Deco design, according to Dianne Pierce, adjunct professorial lecturer in decorative arts and design history at the George Washington University.” // The links between human perceptions of health and safety, and the design and configuration of where we live, are fascinating. The extent(s) to which there will be substantial changes in how we build out homes and living areas will similarly be curious: will design change as a result of the current pandemic or, instead, will we see an active effort to not change or to ignore the events of the past (and coming) year?
… in the long term, agriculture presents perhaps the most significant illustration of how a warming world might erode America’s position. Right now the U.S. agricultural industry serves as a significant, if low-key, instrument of leverage in America’s own foreign affairs. The U.S. provides roughly a third of soy traded globally, nearly 40 percent of corn and 13 percent of wheat. By recent count, American staple crops are shipped to 174 countries, and democratic influence and power comes with them, all by design. And yet climate data analyzed for this project suggest that the U.S. farming industry is in danger. Crop yields from Texas north to Nebraska could fall by up to 90 percent by as soon as 2040 as the ideal growing region slips toward the Dakotas and the Canadian border. And unlike in Russia or Canada, that border hinders the U.S.’s ability to shift north along with the optimal conditions.
Now, the advantages faced by Canada might be eroded by a militant America, and those of Russia similarly threatened by a belligerent and desperate China (and desperate Southeast Asia more generally). Regardless, food and arable land are generally likely to determine which countries take the longest to most suffer from climate change. Though, in the end, it’s almost a forgone conclusion that we are all ultimately going to suffer horribly for the errors of our ways.
Last hundred days?. “The last hundred days of the Trump presidency—if that’s the period we’re in—thus gives rise to a number of distinct concerns about the excesses of an involuntarily lame-duck president of, shall we say, an unconventional disposition. These concerns often get blended together, but they are worth separating into four broad categories. The most alarming of the set, but probably the least likely, relate to the possibility of a contested election. A far more likely possibility involves the president’s delegitimization of an election that he cannot fruitfully contest. A third set of concerns involve self-dealing and other abuses of power during the transition. The final category involves simple mishandling of the transition itself.” // Here’s hoping that things don’t turn as badly under that last dregs of the Trump presidency as some fear. But I wouldn’t personally bet a lot on hope right now.
Deep-freeze challenge makes pfizer’s shot a vaccine for the rich. “Even for rich countries that have pre-ordered doses, including Japan, the U.S. and the U.K., delivering Pfizer’s vaccine will involve considerable hurdles as long as trucks break down, electricity cuts out, essential workers get sick and ice melts.” // It’s going to be miserable to keep hearing about possible vaccines and then, after the initial euphoria of media, realize just how incredibly hard it is going to be to distribute them. Hopefully with a competent America returning to the world scene we’ll see the various superpowers of the world work together on this issue to coordinate probably the most significant logistics campaign in humanity’s history.
The brouhaha over google photos. “[Google] has decided that the photos uploaded to its system have trained its visual algorithms enough that it doesn’t have to eat the cost of “free storage.” // Om definitely has one of the best assessments for why Google is no longer offering unlimited (non-premium) photo storage. The company has done the training it needed to do, and now it’s time to monetize what it’s learned from the data which was entrusted to it.
‘Are we getting invaded?’ U.S. Boats faced Russian aggression near Alaska. “As Russia has ramped up its presence in the region, U.S. officials have accelerated their own efforts. The Coast Guard has long complained that its lone pair of aging icebreakers are struggling to stay in service but may now have the opportunity to build six new ones. (Russia has dozens.) The United States is also discussing a northern deepwater port, perhaps around Nome. Currently, the nearest strategic port is 1,300 nautical miles away in Anchorage.” // It’s increasingly becoming evident that the Arctic, long a place where ice kept the different major powers from seriously competing for territory and resources, is going to heat up as a result of a warming climate. It’s truly worrying that Canada and the United States seem to be utterly lacking in preparation for what is coming.
Welcome to this edition of The Roundup! Enjoy the collection of interesting, informative, and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee or grab yourself a drink, find a comfortable place, and relax.
I put together, and self-published, another photobook that is entitled “Pandemic Chronicles: Book I”. Each week that my city has been in (functional) lockdown, I’ve gone out once or twice and made images while just stretching my legs outside.
Over the past four months it’s often been hard to figure out how, exactly, I’ve been processing the life changes that have been imposed as a result of the pandemic. My life has, in many respects, reverted to that of my life during my PhD. So, lots of time inside and rarely leaving leaving my home, and having considerably less social contact than normal.
I think that it’s through my photos that I can best appreciate how I’ve felt, in retrospect, and understand how those images reflect how I see the world. The book that I made isn’t particularly dark: it’s just…lonely. It showcases the city that I live in, without the people that make it the city that I love. It shows people living their lives, often alone or separate from others, or while engaging in ‘safe’ behaviours. And, towards the end, it shows the light returning to Toronto, though in a format that differs from prior summers.
Photography has, and remains, a way for me to engage a creative part of my brain that otherwise would lie fallow. And, also, it’s operated as a meditative process that uncovers how I have been in the world, and how the world has been presented to me. As someone who has struggled with the idea of a ‘narrative’ in image making, I think that this book is a breakthrough because it ‘says’ something in aggregate that is more than just a presentation of visually pleasant images: it speaks to where I live, and how it has endured in the wake of the city’s closure. Is it the height of art? No. But it’s the closest I’ve come in this medium so far!
Inspiring Quotation
“Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something.
(Photos included in ‘Pandemic Chronicles: Book I’ by Christopher Parsons)
Music I’m Digging
This month has been packed with a lot of listening, with some alternative and R&B pretty tightly mixed in with hip hop. The best of what I listened to in June includes tracks from Yung Tory’s Rastar (including Mizu, Water Pt 2, and Netflix & Chill), Kali Uchis’s TO FEEL ALIVE (EP), HONNE’s no song without you (Single), and 6LACK’s 6pc Hot(EP).
Neat Podcast Episodes
I’ve been listening to a pair of new podcast shows over the past month that I’d recommend. From the CBC, there’s This Is Not A Drake Podcast, which uses Drake as a way to talk more about the history of rap and hip hop. So far I’ve really appreciated the episode on mixtapes, as well as the connotations of Nice Guy rappers.
Very differently, I’ve also been listening to the Globe and Mail’s series, Stress Test, which is about money issues facing millennials in the time of Covid. The episodes haven’t been staggering brilliant (a lot of the advice is pretty time tested) but the caution and suggestions are all helpful reminders.
Good Reads
Reflections from an “Accidental” Mentor// Prof. McNamara’s discussion of what it means to be a mentor— first and foremost modelling who we are, as individuals, rather than fitting within a particular narrow category of who we are normatively expected to be—is good advice, and important if we are to expand what is ‘normal’ within academia. She also focuses on celebrating the commonality across scholars; we’re all nerds, at heart, and so should focus on those attributes to create community. I agree, but for myself it’s more than that: it’s also about ensuring that the structures of professional environments are re-articulated to enable more junior persons to experience their jobs and professions in ways that weren’t possible, previously. It’s not just about focusing on commonality but, also, assessing baseline principles and values and ensuring that they conform in theory and practice with welcoming, creative, equitable, and inclusive environments. And, finally, it’s about accepting and making clear that as mentors we are fallible and human, and creating workspaces where others can also betray these inherently human (and humanizing) characteristics.
Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In// Jon Stewart’s comments throughout this interview are worth the read; his assessment of the problems of contemporary political media—centred around the ‘need’ for content to fuel a 24/7 media environment—as well as for the media to engage in structural assessment of practices, are on point. Similarly, his discussion of the nature of racism in American society (but, also, Canada) strikes to the heart of things: even if someone isn’t deliberately malicious in deed or thought, they are conditioned by the structures of society and power in which they live their lives. And those very structures are, themselves, racist in their origin and contemporary design.
Hacking Security// Goerzen and Coleman do a terrific job in unpacking the history of what is secured by computer security experts, and why certain things are within or outside of bounds for securing. Critically, while experts may be involved in protecting ‘assets’ or combatting ‘abuse’, where threats to assets or abuse arise from the underlying profit mechanisms associated with large technology companies, those mechanisms are seen as outside of bounds for security teams to engage with. Similarly, the failure of security teams to consider, or address, ‘political’ issues such as abusive speech, harmful video content, or propagation of racist or white supremacist content all showcase the need to critically interrogate what is, and isn’t, made secure, and to expand security teams by adding social scientists and humanities scholars: technology is political, and we need security teams to have members who are trained and competent to consider those politics.
Once Safer Than Gold, Canadian Real Estate Braces for Reckoning// Canadians have been doubling down on their debt-loads for over a decade to the point, today, that on average Canadians owe north of $1.76 per $1.00 of income, with that number rising in the country’s largest cities. Housing is particularly vulnerable and, if it is destabilized, can be devastating to the Canadian economy more broadly given that it accounts for around %15 of GDP; slowdowns in housing will delay the revival of the Canadian economy, while simultaneously threatening the ability of Canadians to stay in their homes—now—or retain their savings to invest for their retirements—in the future. If anything good comes of this, maybe it will be a reminder that allocating the majority of your savings into a single asset is, indeed, not a good long-term investment solution which could have knock on effects if investors decide they want to move to their next bubble, and let the housing bubble deflate as gracefully as possible.
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument// “I have rape-coloured skin.” Not only is this perhaps the most poignant lede I’ve come across in an opinion piece in years, it also sets the stakes for the Williams’ article; the very skin of many Americans (and Canadians) is a testament to violent and racist actions taken against women who were forced from their homes to live as slaves. That testament continues, today, and not just in the monuments that were established in the Jim Crow era to deliberately attempt to continue subjugating Black persons, but in the very skin inhabited by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of enslaved people.
Vladimir Putin’s war of fog: How the Russian President used deceit, propaganda and violence to reshape global politics// I take issue with some of MacKinnon’s choice of language in the first ¼ of the article—he suggests that truth is substantively confused and that Putin’s tactics are more successful that I think are appropriate to concede—but beyond that he’s done a masterful job in creating an overview of who Putin is, what he’s done, and how he’s come to (and held onto) power. If you’re a long-time Russia watcher you may dispute where MacKinnon puts some of his emphasis, or in his assessment of some events, but I don’t think that you can deny that this is a helpful article that provide the broad contours of Putin’s life and career. And, after having read it, it will hopefully inspire people to learning more of the financial, military, or other scandals that have happened throughout Putin’s leadership of Russia.
Cool Things
iPad OS + Magic Trackpad 2// Lots of people already have figured this out but…the new version of iPad OS + a Magic Trackpad 2 and a keyboard is a really, really compelling combination. I’ve using this as my writing and work system for a little while and it continues to prove to me how robust the iPad actually is, and how many of the pain points have been, or are being, ground away with each version of the operating system. That said, some of the gestures are very, very opaque—in particular those associated with the slide over window—and so you may want to review how, exactly, those gestures really work to get the most out of the process (and not get frustrated when certain windows just won’t go away!)
Excited Pixels 