The surveillance business model — and did the New York Times mean to say that Snowden ‘plundered’ or ‘got the best of’ the National Security Agency?

. 4th Estate moves . , , , , , ,
Drawing attention to the ‘surveillance business model’ is a little lonely, for writers with any grasp of technology, in the artificially-manufactured Snowden hullabaloo - photograph by MIL22

Pointing to the ‘surveillance business model’ is a little lonely, for writers with any grasp of technology, in the artificially-manufactured Snowden hullabaloo
– photograph by MIL22

A few spectators have begun to see why nonstop commercial spying is easily as threatening as state surveillance and, conceivably, worse. Marzia Faggin — whose talent for witty graphical compression is in her painting, ‘Willy Bonkers,’ gracing our last post — has jokingly raised a Kafka-esque possibility for the ‘surveillance business model’ resembling the grimmest consequences of our monitoring by government spooks. In an email exchange, she said,

I research things for my artwork that I often worry might bring the police to my door. I don’t just feel the unsettling lack of privacy online either! I’ve become mindful about what I buy while grocery shopping, lest I get dropped by insurance for buying too much junk food.

That might seem ludicrous unless you happened to read the suggestion of Bernard Stewart, an editor at the cancer agency of the World Health Organization, a few days ago: ‘Can we – and should we – make laws against cancer?’ He explained:

Some cancers cannot be identified with particular carcinogens, but still involve personal choice, like the multitude of minor everyday decisions we all make around food, exercise and lifestyle that can add up to obesity and poor fitness.

As the hue-and-cry about soaring health and medical costs grows louder, who would absolutely rule out a future collaboration between the health insurance and food-vending businesses?

Though the Stewart piece appeared on The Guardian site, both that newspaper and The New York Times keep harping on about what Edward Snowden did or didn’t do, paying merely token attention to commercial surveillance. The contrast between two headlines in the NYT last Sunday helped to create the most bizarre newspaper story we have read for a very long time. On the front page, directly beneath the masthead, the story was titled ‘Cheap Software Helped Snowden Plunder Secrets’. On page 4, where it continued, the headline read, ‘Snowden Used a Low-Cost Tool to Best the N.S.A.’ .

It was indeed a fascinating account of how Snowden had driven the software equivalent of a gigantic moving van into the centralised data store of the National Security Agency and automated the theft of vital treasures, to save him having to schlep them himself, one at a time. But there is quite a difference between ‘plunder’ – commonly used in combination with ‘pillage’ and ‘rape’, in records of especially brutal wars – and ‘get the best of’, defined by the Free Online Dictionary as ‘overcome, usually through no fault or weakness of the person that is overcome. “Heart disease can get the best of us”.’

There appears to have been an argument between the copy editors (sub-editors in the UK) on the NYT about whether Snowden more closely resembled a lawless marauding barbarian, in the way he went about getting the information he leaked, or was just a bit sly, like plaque building up in arteries. … But no, having mostly written about him as a hero, it was too much to expect the NYT to be objective.

The newspaper’s true sentiments were obvious from asking readers to wait until the twenty-sixth of twenty-nine paragraphs devoted to this story to say:

But that leaves open the question of how Mr. Snowden chose the search terms to obtain his trove of documents, and why, according to James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, they yielded a disproportionately large number of documents detailing American military movements, preparations and abilities around the world.

In his statement, Mr. Snowden denied any deliberate effort to gain access to any military information. “They rely on a baseless premise, which is that I was after military information,” Mr. Snowden said.

The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, told lawmakers last week that Mr. Snowden’s disclosures could tip off adversaries to American military tactics and operations, and force the Pentagon to spend vast sums to safeguard against that.

Snowden’s promoters and defenders keep mentioning the billion-dollar budgets of branches of the military financing the monitoring his leaks outline. But since those billions are sanctioned by American tax-payers for their protection, should that accusation about the theft of military secrets — by Clapper, the country’s highest-ranking official in charge of security, no less – have only been tacked on to the end of the piece, like an afterthought?

For good or bad reasons, the spooks have refused to supply details of why the 58,000 documents Snowden stole from them were ‘mission-critical’. But should that mean that the NYT effectively decides that they were not?

When will the #TeamSnowden newspapers admit to using the same spying tools as the spooks at the NSA and GCHQ?

. 4th Estate moves . , , , , ,
Power – wielded by government spooks or corporate surveillance specialists focused on us -- can be addictive - ‘Willy Bonkers,’ Marzia Faggin, 2011

Power – wielded by technology giants, NSA spooks or media surveillance specialists with sights trained on us — can be addictive
– ‘Willy Bonkers,’ Marzia Faggin, 2013

John Naughton http://memex.naughtons.org/

John Naughton

We offer, in this entry, links that will let readers draw their own conclusions about our belief that the Guardian and New York Times should soon supply full disclosures of their own use of Hadoop, the ‘spying tool’ that the UK and US secret services have been using in so-called ‘mass surveillance’. They must do no less if they wish to hang on to their reputations as great newspapers.

To put the Snowden leaks in proper context, the reporting and editorialising on them should have been shaped by John Naughton – who is not only the technology columnist for the Guardian’s sister-newspaper, The Observer, but an electrical engineer, vice-president of a Cambridge college, and emeritus professor for ‘the public understanding of technology’ at Britain’s Open University. As long ago as last July, he had a small blue fit about media coverage of the Snowden saga – in a column well worth reading, beyond these extracts:

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. […] This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media […] The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower. […] No US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system.

We discovered his six month-old protest in a happy accident in which it came up with search terms we used in searching for our last post-Gutenberg entry. Reader, our eyes popped. How, we wondered, had The Guardian not merely buried what Naughton had to say – full fathom five — but marched on with personalising and puffing up the story to such a degree that …

• the technology giants got left out entirely as inventors, enablers and co-operators in surveillance

• newspapers using the identical surveillance techniques conveniently hid this fact behind the Snowden uproar they manufactured

How did The Guardian justify to its conscience avoiding any mention in editorials or reports on Snowden/NSA/GCHQ that in 2011, it actually gave Hadoop, the most powerful surveillance tool – the subject of last week’s post here – a coveted techie award? Curious readers should look up this record in that newspaper’s archive of technology coverage:

‘Apache Hadoop takes top prize at Media Guardian Innovation Awards’

How was conferring that honour explained by the Guardian reporter, Marie Winckler? She quoted one of the software architects responsible for Hadoop: ‘Apache Hadoop pushes data management forward by empowering enterprises to make sense of their increasingly large and diverse collections of data.’ One of the first commenters on this asked sardonically, ‘So what does it do, translated from corporate-speak?’

Ah! He could have found the answer in a 2009 story in the technology section of The New York Times – also a heavy user of Hadoop, and The Guardian’s publishing partner and co-generator of the Snowden hullabaloo. These sections of the piece explained why newspapers find Hadoop so handy for studying their readers, when we click on their sites:

The core concepts behind the software were nurtured at Google.

[…]

[Hadoop] opened the possibility of asking a question about Google’s data — like what did all the people search for before they searched for BMW — and it began ascertaining more and more about the relationships between groups of Web sites, pictures and documents.

Some readers will be scratching their heads, by this point – thinking, but isn’t uncovering patterns and interconnections like these in our web searches and private behaviour  on the net the reason why Edward Snowden sentenced UK and US government spooks to the naughty corner? Yes indeed. This 2009 article in the computer magazine Infoworld answers a few more questions:

‘What’s the New York Times doing with Hadoop?’: A Times software engineer talks about how Hadoop is driving business innovation at the newspaper and Web site

Just innovating for commerce, then, nothing so disgusting as spying … Well, not exactly. Here is what the incredulous reader must study next – even if the verbing of the noun ‘surveillance’ brings on an attack of hives :

‘How The Guardian is Quietly and Repeatedly Spying on You‘

It was almost shocking when I first installed a browser add-on called Ghostery and began to click on various articles at The Guardian. With each click, I discovered that this news publication, which has been primarily tasked with reporting on Edward Snowden and top secret surveillance operations conducted by the National Security Agency, has been surveilling its own readers.

[T]hese publications, while taking on the pious, sanctimonious role of privacy purists, are using multiple third party resources to collect detailed information about nearly every visitor who reads one of the various posts about how the use of digital technology should be a completely private affair. … [ … continues …]

Spooky yarn-spinning: just how did the Guardian and New York Times get the surveillance story back-to-front?

. 4th Estate moves, Culture after Gutenberg . , , , , , ,
Snowden surveillance saga: leaving the tech giants out will be remembered as clickbait-shaped storytelling with a touch of the surreal -drawing by Martin Disteli (1802-44)

Snowden surveillance saga: leaving the tech giants out will be remembered as clickbait-shaped storytelling with a touch of the fantastic
– drawing by Martin Disteli (1802-44)

… or why most editors and writers specialising in technology see no actual scoop in the Snowden leaks …

Sometimes the person dancing backwards and in high heels – famously, Ginger Rogers, compared with her dance partner Fred Astaire – is a man. In this instance, he is the writer and new media entrepreneur Michael Wolff. With a set of super-sensitive manoeuvres that Ginger would have envied, he wickedly added his voice last week to the revelation that the ‘surveillance business model’, not exactly news, has been mistaken by some newspapers for a creepy invention of government spooks bent on invading our private acts and communications.

His ostensible topic was a book published earlier this month about a 1971 break-in by activists that revealed the spine-crawling extent of FBI surveillance under that agency’s notorious founder, J. Edgar Hoover, who ran it from 1935 to 1972. The inside story of the break-in had already been told in another book, Wolff said, eleven years ago. He was briefly puzzled by the huge attention paid to its forty-year old subject in recent weeks in headlines of the two old print stars of the Snowden saga. ‘Earlier this month, The New York Times, Guardian and other media outlets “revealed” the identities of several people who burgled the FBI in 1971,’ was how Wolff’s s Guardian sub-editor encapsulated his gently sardonic amazement. Wolff himself described how the answer came to him, as follows:

[W]hy, 11 years later, was I reading about this as though, mirabile dictu, the lost secrets of the past were suddenly being revealed and now making headlines everywhere? … In the age of Snowden, revelations about government spying are not just hot stories, but suddenly part of a vast new narrative canvas and moral tale. … [I]t is apparently possible to ignore what is known – even in the age of Google – and, when convenient, reposition it to be new and useful again. … There is not just a new age of political activism, à la Edward Snowden, but also of story telling activism.

Quite, and successful storytelling activism makes irresistible clickbait that works even better when it becomes outrage that goes viral when the audience confuses the story with other – justified – targets for anger. At post-Gutenberg, we have had irritable email from dear readers, including two Americans, in which a complaint about our refusal to be impressed by the Snowden narrative has billowed into a polite rant about U.S. military actions and policy – the use of drones at all, or against poor countries, nuclear testing, Guantanamo, and so on – as if the correspondent had never met the idea of a non sequitur.

Let us be clear: post-Gutenberg is chilled to the viscera by the thought of all military weapons, used by anyone, for any reason – and has the identical reaction to any mention of torturing prisoners.

The real surveillance story’s only connection with all that is the use by the UK and US governments of the same tools invented and deployed by large US companies. As Andrew Leonard wrote in Salon last summer in ‘Netflix, Facebook — and the NSA: They’re all in it together,’ expanding on a genuine Wall Street Journal revelation about free surveillance software available to anyone to use:

By making it economically feasible to extract meaning from the massive streams of data that increasingly define our online existence, Hadoop effectively enabled the surveillance state.

And not just in the narrowest, Big Brother, government-is-watching-everyone-all-the-time sense of that term. Hadoop is equally critical to private sector corporate surveillance. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix — just about every big player that gathers the trillions of data “events” generated by our everyday online actions employs Hadoop as a part of their arsenal of Big Data-crunching tools. Hadoop is everywhere — as one programmer told me, “it’s taken over the world.”

… In the past half-decade Hadoop has emerged as one of the triumphs of the non-proprietary, open-source software programming methodology that previously gave us the Apache Web server, the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser. Hadoop belongs to nobody. Anyone can copy it, modify, extend it as they please.

… They’re all in it together. The spooks and the social media titans and the online commerce goliaths are collaborating to improve data-crunching software tools that enable the tracking of our behavior in fantastically intimate ways that simply weren’t possible as recently as four or five years ago. It’s a new military industrial open source Big Data complex. The gift economy has delivered us the surveillance state.

… Hadoop quickly secured the critical mass of cross-industry support necessary for an open-source software program to become an essential part of Internet infrastructure. Even engineers at Google chipped in, although Hadoop, at its core, was basically an attempt to reverse-engineer proprietary Google technology.

People reading those extracts might wonder why Hadoop and not Snowden was the surveillance sensation of 2013. Two answers — aside from the plain truth, verifiable by five seconds spent typing the appropriate search terms into a Google box, that Hadoop has been snapped up enthusiastically by both The New York Times and The Guardian for spying on their readers:

• In the way traditional media work, writers who understand technology do not get much of a hearing from the editors at the top, who specialise in politics. The technology writers usually work for sections that cover business and, or, science. In other words, they are treated as incomprehensible boffins or wonks.

Why, demanded one irate friend, an American poet, didn’t they and post-Gutenberg – who has also served as one of those gnomes — tell everyone else about government surveillance if we knew all about it long before the Snowden hooha? Erm, well, we did … We distinctly remember confessing to him, years ago, our anxiety about email being read by eyes for which it was not intended, including those of spooks. And, quickly noting his sceptical reaction, we realised what he was only thinking but others, equally oblivious but less tactful, had stated bluntly: ‘You’re being paranoid.’

• Being able to pin information about technology to a face, a personality, an identity, and ideally – drama — humanises it. That can suddenly magnetise people who usually ignore it for good reasons: it is complex, and learning about it and the culture and ambitions of Silicon Valley consumes attention they would rather focus elsewhere. But because they do not really understand it – even though some political editors, like Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian, have a hobbyist’s deep fascination with the ‘mechanics’ of their devices and the net – they are easily misled. Think of the millions who really believe that Steve Jobs invented the computer revolution, or that Al Gore had something to do with the birth of the internet.

To reach Joe and Jane Everyone and work them into a tizzy, news of our subjugation to the ‘surveillance business model’ had to be delivered to them as visions of nightmares about a totalitarian state — fronted by the ghostly and bespectacled clever-boy-next-door visage of Edward Snowden, the high drama of his secret-stealing and travails as a fugitive.

Not so much activism as storytelling activism, just as Wolff says.

But the extent of yarn-spinning always gets out, eventually, and diminishes trust in the media. As we keep repeating on this blog – tiresomely – because that trust should not be sacrificed to clickbait, another way of financing and structuring media has to be found – and soon.

John Updike: the literary seer who predicted too much privacy as the price for living on the net

. Culture after Gutenberg, E-books . , ,
In hindsight, Updike's is one of the strangest sour predictions - photograph by MIL22, 2013

In hindsight, Updike’s is one of the strangest sour predictions
– photograph by MIL22

Loathing and resentment of the e-future can even throw off a mind as sharp and capacious as the late John Updike’s.

Martin Amis, writing in 1991, described the great novelist – one of the most astute observers of American life — as ‘a master of all trades, able to crank himself up to Ph.D. level on any subject he fancies: architecture, typography, cave painting, computers, evolution (“asteroidal or cometary causation” set against “punctuated equilibrium”) and Gospel scholarship …’.

But Updike never waxed more bilious than on e-publishing and the internet. His judgment about their effects was at least as warped as that of a few other worthies, pontificating on the most recent twist in the privacy debate – a subject to which we hope to return in our next post. In the meanwhile, here is the masterly wordsmith’s prognostication, reproduced for the pleasure of quoting someone who was never so elegantly and profoundly mistaken:

Millions find bliss of sorts in losing themselves in the vastness of the Internet, a phantom electronic creation which sublimates the bulky, dust-gathering contents of librarians and supermarkets into something impalpable and instantaneous. The Web is conjured like the genie of legend with a few strokes of the fingers, opening, with a phrase or two, a labyrinth littered with trash and pitted with chat rooms, wherein communication is antiseptically cleansed of all the germs and awkwardness of even the most mannerly transaction with another flesh-and-blood human being.

A mass retreat into richly populated privacy has occurred before: in the acts of reading and going to the movies. Excitement lay in both for my generation … I have yet to be persuaded that the information revolution, so-called, is anything but an exercise in reading and writing wherein evanescent and odorless PC screens take the place of durable, faintly fragrant paper and ink.

John Updike, ‘The Tried and the Treowe’ (2000) in Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, 2007