Privacy & Surveillance

Posts under this category name relate to privacy generally, rather than distinguishing between the various ‘kinds’ of discussing or recognizing privacy.

Draft: Code-Bodies and Algorithmic Voyeurism

/ Christopher Parsons

Surveillance_timestampsI’ve recently been reading some of David Lyon’s work, and his idea of developing an ethic of voyeurism has managed to intrigue me. I don’t think that I necessarily agree with his position in its entirety, but I think that it’s an interesting position. This paper, entitled “Code-Bodies and Algorithmic Surveillance: Examining the impacts of encryption, rights of publicity, and code-specters,” is an effort to think through how voyeurism might be understood in the context of Deep Packet Inspection using the theoretical lenses of Kant and Derrida. This paper is certainly more ‘theoretical’ than the working paper that I’ve previously put together on DPI, but builds on that paper’s technical discussion of DPI to think about surveillance, voyeurism, and privacy.

As always, I welcome positive, negative, and ambivalent comments on the draft. Elements of it will be adopted for a paper that I’ll be presenting at a Critical Digital Studies workshop in a month or two – this is your chance to get me to reform positions to align with your own! *grin*

Analysis: ipoque, DPI, and copyright

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

Copyright SymbolI worry that increasingly far-reaching and burdensome copyright laws, when combined with the analysis techniques of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), will lead to pervasive chilling of speech. I see this as having real issues for both the creation and development of contemporary culture, which depends on mixing the past into new creations (with ‘the past’ increasingly copy-written), and for the opportunities to use rich media environments such as the Internet to create and distribute political statements. Copyright isn’t just an issue for musicians and artists; it’s an issue for anyone who is or who wants to engage in digital self-expression in media-creative ways.

Given that my earlier post about this relationship between DPI and freedom of expression may have seemed overly paranoid, I thought that I should substantiate it a bit by turning to a DPI vendor’s white paper on copyright. In one of their most recent white papers, ipoque talks about “Copyright Protection in the Internet“. One of the great things about this white paper is how the author(s) have divided their analysis; they identify different methods of limiting or stopping infringement theoretically (i.e. can a technology do this?) and then provide a ‘reality check’ (i.e. can this practically be implemented without gross rights violations or technical nightmares), and end each analysis with a conclusion that sums up ipoque’s official position on the method in question. I want to focus on detecting infringing files, rather than on preventing such transfers of those file, on the basis that it is the former that really depends on DPI to be effective.

Continue reading →

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Reveals their Deep Packet Inspection Website

/ Christopher Parsons

200903300037.jpgThe Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) has been incredibly interested in Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies, and prominently demonstrated their concerns with the technology in the comment they filed to the CRTC about Internet Service Providers’ traffic management practices. As of today the OPC’s DPI website has gone online – it’s got a great set of mini-essays on various elements of the technology, and lets visitors leave comments and engage with each piece. They’ve done a stellar job – if you’re interesting in DPI and its privacy implications, I highly recommend visiting/bookmarking it.

As a note: if you want to get a grasp on what the Deep Packet Inspection is, and how it works, before jumping into its privacy implications I’ve developed an accessible working paper entitled “Deep Packet Inspection in Perspective: Tracing its lineage and surveillance potentials” for the New Transparency Project.

Analysis: ipoque, DPI, and encryption

/ Christopher Parsons

Package-reportipoque is one of the world’s leading Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliance manufacturers. For the past several years they have been producing detailed reports on the constitution of Internet bandwidth usage; their 2006 report was predominantly based on German data (100,000 German households’ data was incorporated into the study, versus 10,000 European households outside of Germany), whereas their 2008/2009 report takes data from Northern Africa, South Africa, South America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Southwestern Europe, and Germany. In short: the study’s range of participants and associated data points have increased substantially.

While the most recent report isn’t ‘comprehensive’ in the sense that it offers a perfect picture of the Internet’s global bandwidth and protocol usage during the data accumulation period, there are interesting things that we can learn from it. Perhaps most interesting, is that ipoque learned that P2P protocol usage grew far less than during the 2007 data collection period. The 2008/2009 report routinely identifies Direct Download Sites and services such as Usenet as reasons for the decline of P2P usage, as well as increasingly rich multi-media HTTP traffic. (While it is well beyond the scope of the ipoque study, it would be delightful to see if there is a corresponding relationship between content owners providing their media through web accessible portals and decreases in the growth of copyright infringement online.)

Continue reading →

The Role of Digital Surveillance in Stopping the Past’s Rebirth

/ Christopher Parsons

Vader Sings!Most of the music that I listen to clearly borrows from the past, takes technologies of the present, and creates the music of the future again. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the electronic beats that I listen to are going to be what everyone listens to, or that Bossa Nova and Samba are going to be predominant music genre in your home (though they should *grin*). No, what I’m saying is that digital technologies facilitate the appropriation of past cultural artifacts that were produced for consumption, and then subsequently modify and make them the artist’s own. Take a look at the below YouTube video for a demonstration of taking up a past cultural artifact (part of an episode from the West Wing) and modifying it to make a contemporary political statement:

Taking the past and making it one’s own isn’t anything new; artists have been reinterpreting prior songs/artwork/performances and making a buck off their reinterpretation for a long, long time. What is new is:

Continue reading →

Note: EDLs in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia?

/ Christopher Parsons

200903230015.jpgThere is a fairly confusing article on EDLs that was published by the Times & Transcript’s Alan Cochrane. It’s absolutely rife with inaccuracies about the technologies about EDLs, which contributes to the rampant misinformation about these identification pieces. Before I get to that, I want to note pieces of information that look interesting, though their accuracy has to be taken as questionable given the sloppy work done throughout the article.

Of interest:

  1. Apparently the New Brunswick government’s support of EDLs has ‘waned’ after receiving some report or another. While the reporter doesn’t mention the report by name, I have a suspicion that it’s the report commissioned by the Atlantic registrars of motor vehicles that was referenced in the May 9, 2008 press release of the Council of Atlantic Premiers. That report has not been disclosed to the public. (I lack anything that would substantiate or disprove the claim that New Brunswick’s interest has waned; I also don’t know what the report stated and so can’t know if it would influence the government’s position.)
  2. Service Nova Scotia has stated that the province is looking into EDLs, but as of yet does not have a deployment timeline. (I lack information that would substantiate or disprove this claim.)
  3. Manitoba is taking applications for EDLs right now, and will begin shipping them in 2 weeks. (This definitely seems on the money, and we can presume that it is accurate.)
  4. Continue reading →