Colleagues,

Below is the DATA-PSST!  advert for the forthcoming seminar at Kings College London - Visible Mediations of Transparency: Changing Norms & Practices

It includes some of the Position Papers, to whet your appetite (they’ll be put on the blog soon).

If you'd like to attend, please let Dr Clare Birchall ([log in to unmask] ) and myself ([log in to unmask]) know asap. Participants would need to supply a brief Position Statement, outlining their  response to the seminar's topic.

As places are very limited, they'll be allocated on strength of Position Statement. There are also some limited travel bursaries (2nd class rail travel).

Visible Mediations of Transparency: Changing Norms & Practices

Kings College, London, 10 Sep 2015

This is the fourth of six seminars in the ESRC-funded DATA-PSST! seminar series.

 

In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked the mass surveillance activities of liberal democracies’ intelligence agencies, but many other techno-social phenomena contribute to today’s increased visuality. Commercial companies employ a wide range of surveillance tools, from applied data-mining and analytics to facial scanning software at supermarket checkouts (Tesco). Social media have normalized the practice of people watching themselves and each other by mediated means; while wearable media such as smart watches (eg Apple Watch) add a more intimate layer of biometric data into the mix. Power-holders are watched through investigative journalism and whistle-blowing websites. Criminal justice tries to reduce crime through electronic tags and other forms of advanced surveillance and intelligent policing. We are thus dealing with a techno-cultural condition of increased, normalized and forced transparency.

 

As surveillance practices are largely invisible, what cultural resources inform the public’s views on transparency? Media, Journalism, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Security academics who examine issues of transparency, communication and power are joined by activists, artists, companies, politicians and regulators, to debate the following key questions:

-       Through what media, cultural, activist and commercial forms do people learn about transparency issues? What are the dominant messages on transparency?

-       Do people care about liberal transparency (holding power-holders to account)? Do people care about ubiquitous transparency (where their own private lives are open for inspection)?

-       Is there is a disconnect between transparency representations and public opinion, and if so, how it should be addressed?

-       Do we have a healthy public debate on transparency issues? What would improve its quality?

-       Is privacy worth preserving?

 

The seminar will be organized around these key questions and all participants will be able to actively contribute to the debate.

 

However, the event is reliant on all participants engaging so in addition to short keynote talks, the seminar will function by means of position statements, roundtable discussions, and open discussion.

 

 

 

Agenda

 

10-10.15          Registration and coffee

10.15-10.30     Summary of previous seminars (Vian Bakir) followed by introduction to today’s seminar (Clare Birchall)

10.30-11.00:    Josh Cohen, The Private Self

11.00-11.30     Zach Blas, Infomatic Opacity

11.30-12.00:    Coffee

12.00-1.30:      Roundtable 1: Public attitudes towards transparency & privacy

1.30-2.15:        Lunch

2.15-2.45:        Mark Cote / Tom Heath: Big Social Data

2.45-3.15:        Daniel van der Velden, Metahaven: Black Transparency

3.00-3.15:        Coffee

3.15-4.30:        Roundtable 2: Mediating Transparency

4.30-5:             Plenary

 

Participants include:

Simon Rice, Information Commissioner’s Office

Simona Levi, XNet, Spanish Activists

F-Secure

Alexander Hanff, privacy technologist

Tony Bunyan, Statewatch

Daniel Van der Velden, Metahaven

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, International Modern Media Institute

Professor Joshua Cohen, Goldsmiths, author of The Private Life

Dr Mark Cote, KCL

Dr Greame Davies, Leeds

Tom Heath, Open Data Institute

Dr Zach Blas, Goldsmiths

Dr Paul Bradshaw, Birmingham City

Dr Clare Birchall, Kings College London

Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck,

Dr Andrew McStay, Bangor, author of Privacy & Philosophy: New Media & Affective Prrotocol

Dr Evan Light, Mobile Media Lab, Concordia University (Canada)

 

 

 

 

 

Position Statements

 

 

Professor Joshua Cohen, Goldsmiths

I want to argue that the political stakes of the privacy debate are as much imaginative as they are legal. The case for the right to privacy cannot rest solely on the demand for legal control and ownership of one’s data. The various and intersecting intrusions of state, corporations and the media impinge not only on externally verifiable aspects of my privacy – the insides of my home, bank account or computer, say – but on the more elusive and opaque privacy of my inner life. A self coerced into permanent transparency, will come to feel constrained not only in what she can say, but in what she can think and imagine. A surveillance society – not only the persecutory monitoring of the Orwellian state, but the more tacitly imposed, mutual monitoring of social media culture – impinges on the interior space of affect and imagination which ensures I can never be fully transparent to others or to myself.

 

 

 

Dr. Paul Bradshaw, Birmingham City

Data journalism and data visualisation are essential techniques in mediating transparency initiatives. Data visualisation and interactivity has proven to be a particularly successful way to bring previously dry topics to a much wider audience, while data journalism allows journalists to make transparency data intelligible to the wider public in the first place. However, with both there is the danger of data ‘churnalism’ and misrepresentation. Transparency initiatives themselves are a form of power which needs to be held to account: the selection and collection of data is itself an exercise of power. And data visualisation can give information a patina of credibility which the underlying data does not always possess. Journalists not only need to be more able to interpret and communicate data – they need to be more critical in interpreting the same work when done by others.

 

 

Dr. Madeline Carr, Aberystwyth

One of the problems with generating an engaged public debate about data security, privacy and transparency is that the practice of collecting and sharing data is largely invisible and inaccessible to most people. Debate tends to focus therefore, on key events; public ‘leaks’ like Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, large-scale data breaches like the Target credentials theft and the Sony hack, and the everyday experience of search queries generating correlated advertising results in our browsers and social media. These tangible and somewhat more visible examples can facilitate discussion but they fail to engage with some of the significant technological, political and commercial changes that face us in the very near future. Migration to IPv6 and the related development of the ‘Internet of Things’ both raise serious questions about informed consent, about accountability and about the legitimate control of personal data. Ensuring that civil society interests and human rights are protected as we transition to this next phase of the Information Age is essential but it is not being driven by an informed public debate. The focus of this workshop, which seeks to explore the cultural resources that inform public approaches to norms and practices of surveillance is an important contribution to the DATA-PSST project.

 

 

 

Simona Levi, X.net

Xnet [https://xnet-x.net/en/] (ex-EXGAE) is a group of activists who have worked since 2008 in different fields related to online democracy and the creation of mechanisms for organised citizen participation and to control the seats of power and institutions.  We defend a free and neutral Internet; the free circulation of culture, knowledge and information; citizen journalism and the right to know, to report and to be informed; the legal, technical and communications struggle against corruption and technopolitics, understood as the practice of networking and taking action for empowerment, for justice and for social transformation.
Transparency and open access to information is the best strategy against corruption. We are driving the initiatives that are behind the leaks of one of the major corruption cases that are shaking Spanish politics today. These cases have emerged thanks to the fundamental participation of organised citizens.
The 15MpaRato [https://15mparato.wordpress.com/citizens-against-corruption/] project is a citizen device used to file the initial lawsuit and that drives the Bankia Case in the National Courts, uncovering the scams of Bankia's listing on the stock exchange, the preferred shares and the 'Black' Credit Cards.Xnet has built a Mailbox for Citizen Leaks Against Corruption [https://xnet-x.net/en/mailbox-leak-corruption-cases/], responsible for the discovery Blesa's Emails and the Black Credit Cards scandal and has recently launched a news blog [lhttps://xnet-x.net/en/blog/] with selected information that citizens have securely and anonymously provided through the Mailbox. A collaborative space for open source journalism in the struggle for transparency and against corruption.In a context where governments and institutions are accomplices of the abuse imposed, the most important part of Xnet's work is citizen empowerment; so people can be the active actors of change.

 

 

Dr. Evan Light, Mobile Media Lab, Concordia (Canada)

Since the Snowden revelations there has been significant energy put into social conversations around surveillance and transparency with a dash of accountability (oversight) thrown in for good measure. The conversations that have emerged – while interesting – have originated from a select few media outlets and have thus only had a chance to impact a limited audience. While the number of documents that have been made public (504) may seem significant, consider that there are tens of thousands of documents awaiting analysis and release. The fact that the media have taken so long to analyze and release these documents – and to then, through their writing, educate the public about mass surveillance practices reinforces the claims that that surveillance is largely invisible and of an overwhelming scale and complexity. At the same time, we – researchers, journalists, activists who critically engage with the surveillance state – tend to accept that in order for the general public to care about mass surveillance they must understand as experts do. Through my work with the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive, I have come to believe that perhaps this is not the case.

 

The Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive was launched in March 2015 by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression in collaboration with researchers at the University of Toronto. It was the first effort to create an institutional archive of the published Snowden documents, processing them into machine-readable formats thus making them text searchable. They have also been categorized, summarized and linked to the original articles with which they were first published. Shortly after the launch of the archive, I proposed to create a portable stand-alone version so that people could do research on the archive without being surveilled. I then decided to integrate a wifi sniffer - a tiny computer that sucks radio signals out of the air – into it. As people use this stand-alone archive by simply connecting to an open wifi network and going to the GCHQ website, the wifi sniffer plays back on a screen the conversations taking place between their phones/tablets/laptops and the archive. As I'll demonstrate at the Kings College London DATA-PSST! workshop, users experience the unique sensation of reading top secret documents about mass surveillance while witnessing surveillance of their own actions in real-time.

When I first created the Portable Snowden Surveillance Archive, I did not consider it as a public education/surveillance visualization tool. However, as it has made the rounds as an installation and workshop prop, public reaction has been fascinating. The visualization aspect is currently less than fancy. It is, quite literally, a rolling textual representation of computer conversations. People don't seem to care that the data makes no sense to them, though. The fact that they can see “their data” streaming by – that the act of surveillance has been rendered transparent before their eyes - makes people uncomfortable. Film festival-goers in Bologna refused to connect to it for fear it would take over their phones, students have instantly wanted to learn how to use encrypted email, people have looked at it and shuddered.

 

Two questions to bring to the table:

- Is it necessary to explain the inner-workings of massive mass surveillance programs to the public – to render these things transparent at a high level – in order to engage the public?

- Working with a public education project such a the Portable Snowden Surveillance Archive, how do we move beyond simply “creeping people out” to engaging them politically and immediately?

 

 

Dr. Andrew McStay, Bangor

The Case of Empathic Media in Advertising

My take on this seminar topic stems from what I term ‘empathic media’. Developed in my recent book Privacy and Philosophy: New Media and Affective Protocol (2014), this odd sounding expression has less to do with sympathy, but technologies able to interpret people and their environments by means of text, images, facial recognition, speech, behaviour, gesture, skin responses, respiration and bodily movement. Each of these involves mediation of emotional transparency by means of arousal, social-semiotic practices and behaviour.

This is a relatively new dimension to the transparency surveillance question that will become more pronounced as smart cities discourses are increasingly realised. For a tangible example, this year M&C Saatchi has tested advertising billboards this year with hidden Microsoft Kinect cameras that read viewers’ emotions and react according to whether a person’s facial expression is happy, sad or neutral. This is the first example of artificial intelligence (albeit a limited sort) being used in urban environments.

At this stage very little data is being collected but this information will be very useful to the media owners so to chart performance of the media sites across cities. This information will surely be irresistible to authorities.

Bioreactive empathy was also evident at Wimbledon this year. In partnership with Wimbledon, Maido and Lightwave, Mindshare launched a campaign called Feel Wimbledon. This captured moods and emotions of the Wimbledon crowd by means of heart rate variability, localized audio, motion and skin temperature of 20 fans in the crowd, via sensor-equipped wristbands. This allowed Jaguar to create ‘living ads’ by means of visualising fluctuating emotions.

This provides us some foresight into the implications of wearables. Feel Wimbledon received full consent for participants, but if (and I admit it’s a big if) wearables become embedded in everyday life, emotionally sensitive empathic media will grant advertising greater insight into our emotions through how we speak to our mobile devices, more granular facial recognition and emotional insights derived from our heart rates, respiration patterns and how our skin responds to stimuli. A bit weird I know, but we’re already a good part of the way there.

Most notably with the M&C Saatchi campaign, the artificial intelligence part comes in as soft biometric feedback from viewers provides data by which ads improve themselves (for example by using elements that win smiles rather than grimaces). 

As it stands, empathic media do not require personal information. This fact means that data can be more easily collected, processed and shared. Although there are right and proper questions to be asked about re-identification and whether it can truly be separated from personally-identifiable information, the industry is betting big on the fact that it can be bundled as non-spooky because it is legally compliant. This presents privacy people such as myself an interesting conundrum because data protection and privacy concerns are typically based on the principle of identification, not intimacy.

 

 

 Best

Vian