randomWalks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew

(Then) Google CEO Eric Schmidt on privacy: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place

Omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance. . . . That seems to me a greater threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs.

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Report tyrannical activity.

Discuss: Are there ways in which government or the private sector intrudes upon the privacy of U.S. citizens? What are some of these ways?

patrickrhone:

“They’re not spying on us to prevent crimes, they’re spying on us to retroactively convict us of crimes once we’ve pissed them off.”

—

Twitter / claytoncubitt

I mused this a few days ago, before I saw the (must watch) Guardian video of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, where he specifically confirms it, at 7:10.

(via claytoncubitt)

Yep. This.

You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.

I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.

You want to know why revolutions happen? Because little by little by little things get worse and worse. But this thing that is happening now is big. This is the key ingredient. This allows them to know everything they need to know to accomplish the above. The fact that they are doing it is proof that they are the sort of people who might use it in the way I described. In the country I live in, they also claimed it was for the safety of the people. Same in Soviet Russia. Same in East Germany. In fact, that is always the excuse that is used to surveil everyone. But it has never ONCE proven to be the reality.

Maybe Obama won’t do it. Maybe the next guy won’t, or the one after him. Maybe this story isn’t about you. Maybe it happens 10 or 20 years from now, when a big war is happening, or after another big attack. Maybe it’s about your daughter or your son. We just don’t know yet. But what we do know is that right now, in this moment we have a choice. Are we okay with this, or not? Do we want this power to exist, or not?

To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.

The retweet allows any user to recontextualize such quips however they please. Anyone, from their computer or Smartphone, can participate in an act of re-framing, of cultural critique or celebrity gossip or found poetry, all dealing with the same 140 characters. The retweet can serve as an implicit comment on the state of our Internet-formulated language, forcing us to consider a barely coherent Martha Stewart rant as a work within itself, rich with Steinian echoes.

In many ways, 1993 did give us our world: globalized and multicultural, libertarian and technocratic at once, target-marketed, relentlessly digital and relentlessly individual, without distinctions between the pursuit of culture and the pursuit of wealth. To put it another way, 1993 might have been the last year of the sellout, when the principle of resistance to the smooth and efficient running of the market began to collapse into our culture of collaboration. It was the year of the first web browser and the forging of both the European Union and NAFTA. Bill Kristol was writing, in Commentary, of how to rebrand conservatism as rebellion in the face of Clinton’s win. MTV’s cultural metabolism was probably at its most rapacious, Tony Kushner brought Angels in America to Broadway, and Toni Morrison won her Nobel. Atlantic Records invested in indie label Matador and Walt Disney bought Miramax. Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Reality Bites were all in production. Marc Jacobs’s grunge collection was for spring ’93. Harmony Korine was writing Kids, and the former insult-comic editor of Spy had taken over Vanity Fair.

When you used a Commodore 64 or one of the first Macintoshes, you were keenly aware of its limits: the paucity of colors, the tiny memory, the long time it took to load files off a disk. You had to learn to work within the machine’s constraints. The history of computing is the history of human creativity and ingenuity—which is why we should hold on to it forever.

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This guy is definitely dancing to George Harrison: Got My Mind Set on You

I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross-examined those memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the civil rights and the women’s movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.

But others could see that their own good experiences were in some ways dependent on unjust social arrangements, or on bad experiences for others. Some white people recognized that their happy memories of childhood included a black housekeeper who was always available to them because she couldn’t be available to her children.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever.

As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.

To hear “Dark Eyes” for the first time — one of the greatest listening experiences one is ever likely to have in life anyway — with Dylan sitting there, averting his glance, shifting his weight nervously, made me aware of just how rare, how painful it is for him to lay his heart bare this way. The tape ended and there was a long silence as we all stared at our feet.

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China’s First Reading of Howl at Studio No. 5

It may have been the entire function of communes to go big, fail and then go home. At the time we thought we were reinventing civilisation but all we discovered is that free love isn’t free at all, that [when] one guy puts up all the money for your commune he is going to feel robbed after a period of six to 12 months, that gardening is actually hard, and that if you treat your women as people who are supposed to wash the dishes, they will leave after six months.

Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.

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louobedlam:

Strong men also cry… strong men also cry.

How can we design the space and signage to be flexible enough to switch between the two modes of service and to make it clear upon a glance what to do when you enter the space at any given time? I constantly have to examine the interface and imagine the experience from the other side. Honing my sense of empathy is an essential part of being a designer and part of why I was attracted to the discipline in the first place.

I’ve heard people say that if someone is brought up in a sexist society and thus becomes sexist, it’s not their fault. That’s a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. On the surface, it’s true – but it sidesteps the question of continuing responsibility. If the same sexist (or racist, or whatever) person is capable of re-evaluating their own position but does not do so, then they’re responsible. Perhaps not for becoming prejudiced, but for remaining so.

And I would NEVER try to obtain information illegally! I’m shocked at the suggestion!! (And will contact you in a more private forum…)