Caterina Fake:

It's an incredible amount of data.

Bruce Schneier:

More is coming.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Decius:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

Cory Doctorow:

I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure.

Ryan Singel:

Google unveiled a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual governments around the world have asked for user information, and how often they've asked Google to remove content from their sites or search index, for reasons other than copyright violation.

The numbers reflect only criminal investigations, and do not include national security investigation powers such as National Security Lettters or FISA warrants, which companies are often not legally allowed to disclose.

Matt Higgins:

The nice thing is, it's not a free for all. We're taking care of the problem responsibly. We're targeting the troublemakers, and we're hoping the troublemakers will be gone someday.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

Maybe You And Your Innocence Shouldn't Be Doing It In The First Place

On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.

Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.

A few from the archive:

Lisa: "Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?"

Bart: Hmm, I suppose, maybe, if, uh ... no. No, sorry, I thought I had it there for a second."

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Defiant, House Heads to Havasu

James T. Walsh was one Republican who questioned the value of the session. “What we heard was marginally classified,” he said. “The really secret stuff, we couldn’t talk about.”

“We saved him,” one said. “He probably would have been disciplined.”

From the headlines:

They discussed his reputation as a "difficult" man who sometimes asked "to do things you might not think were safe."

"I mean, it’s just kind of like ... whatever ... I’m here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is. I am not a ... moron, you know what I mean."

From the archive:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly.

Secret session 'was a total waste of time', says Congressman

Surveillance & Society: the fully peer-reviewed transdisciplinary online surveillance studies journal.

This seems like an interesting publication, but: five years on ... why have I never heard of it? (Perhaps because it's mostly a UK publication, with one US-based editor, Torin Monahan, at Arizona State, where they have a School of Justice & Social Inquiry.) Although the description for his course opens with "How are surveillance technologies altering social life in post-9/11 worlds?", the syllabus spends a lot of time on Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It also spends time on Paul Virilio, Steve Mann, RTMark, "Minority Report" and "Gattaca", but little of this is "post-9/11".

I am curious about how this journal fits into the literature. The editorial board is all academic; this sets it apart from, say, Studies in Intelligence, where authors tend to be practitioners/professionals (though not just of "surveillance").

I only recognize a few authors published here, like Steve Wright (2) and Steve Mann (2, 3).

To see whether this publication is getting cited elsewhere, I asked Google Scholar. Things are being cited (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Surveillance & Society Homepage

Decius wrote:

This is a very interesting window into imperfect human lives.

This is sure to be some fascinating data.

I revised Decius's title because I thought it might be deceptive to people who haven't been following this story. (Google has not released this kind of data and is not involved in this latest data leak.)

The secrets people whisper to AOL