Surveillance

Why Mash-up Matters

/ Christopher Parsons

livemashupdj[Note: this is an early draft of the first section of a paper I’m working on, presently loosely titled “Mash-up Meets Deep Packet Inspection: Culture, solutions, and the demand for transparency”. Other sections will follow as I draft them. I’ve adopted this format based on positive reactions to my similar drafting process last year on ‘Who Gives a Tweet About Privacy?‘ Comments welcome. I’ve excluded full bibliographic information, but retained enough that you can find my sources. Text has been copied and pasted from a word processing document; this may result in some links being broken *cough* footnotes links *cough*]

I’m composing the beginning of this article to the sounds of Girl Talk’s ‘Like This’ from his Feed the Animals album. His artistic technique is to take very short samples from a variety of artists – twenty-nine samples are taken in the three minutes and twenty-one seconds of ‘Like This’ – and remix the work to create entirely new songs.[i] He isn’t a DJ but a self-described musician of the digital era, and when his work was presented to Marybeth Peters of the US Registrar of Copyrights she recognized that his music was amazing. She also recognized it was likely illegal, and the fact that his own creativity clearly imbued his creations offered no defense against copyright infringement: “You can’t argue your creativity when it’s based on other people’s stuff.”[ii] This position is mirrored by Barry Slotnick, head of the intellectual property litigation group at Loeb & Loeb, who has stated that “[w]hat you can’t do is substitute someone else’s creativity for your own.”[iii] Girl Talk’s work is recognized as amazing and creative, even by defenders and advocates of the present copyright regime, but is still questionably legal (at best). Feed the Animals is a popular album that pulls together anthems of pop culture, and its artist has been used as a defender of copyright reform movements,[iv] but it is only one item in a rapidly developing and emerging ‘mash-up’ culture that draws together existing cultural artifacts to in the creation of a recombinant digital culture.

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IPv6 and the Future of Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons / 5 Comments

There is an increasing urgency to transition to a new infrastructure for addressing space on the Internet, and in this space all individuals and their devices could be uniquely identifiable by their Internet Protocol (IP) address(es). It is in light of this surveillant future that France’s recent ruling that IP addresses are not personally identifiable information is so serious. Further, it is with this longer temporal viewpoint (i.e. not just the here and now) that has more generally worried technologists about governmental rulings concerning binary ‘yes/no IP addresses are private information’.

Before I go any further, let me break down what an IP address is, the distinctions between versions 4 (IPv4) and 6 (IPv6), and then get to the heart of the privacy-related issues concerning the transition to IPv6. The technical infrastructure of the ‘net tends to be seen as dreadfully boring but, as is evidenced by the (possible) computer failures of Toyota vehicles, what goes on ‘under the hood’ of the ‘net is of critical importance to understand and think about. It’s my hope that you’ll browse away with concerns and thoughts about the future of privacy in an increasingly connected biodigital world.

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Digital Crises and Internet Identity Cards

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

Something that you learn if you (a) read agenda-setting and policy laundering books; (b) have ever worked in a bureacratic environment, is that it’s practically criminal to waste a good crisis. When a crisis comes along various policy windows tend to open up unexpectedly, and if you have the right policies waiting in the wings you can ram through proposals that would otherwise be rejected out of hand. An example: the Patriot Act wasn’t written in just a few days; it was presumably resting in someone’s desk, just waiting to be dusted off and implemented. 9/11 was the crisis that opened the policy windows required to ram that particular policy through the American legislative system. Moreover, the ‘iPatriot’ Act, it’s digital equivalent, is already written and just waiting in a drawer for a similar crisis. With the rhetoric ramping up about Google’s recent proclamations that they were hacked by the Chinese government (or agents of that government), we’re seeing bad old ideas surfacing once again: advocates of ‘Internet Identity Cards’ (IICs) are checking if these cards’ requisite policy window is opening.

The concept of IICs is not new: in 2001 (!) the Institute of Public Policy Research suggested that children should take ‘proficiency tests’ at age 11 to let them ‘ride freer’ on the ‘net. Prior to passing this ‘test’ children would have restrictions on their browsing abilities, based (presumably) on some sort of identification system. The IIC, obviously, didn’t take off – children aren’t required to ‘license up’ – but the recession of the IIC into the background of the Western cyberenvironment hasn’t meant that either research and design or infrastructure deployment for these cards has gone away. Who might we identify as a national leader of the IIC movement, and why are such surveillance mechanisms likely incapable of meeting stated national policy objectives but nevertheless inevitable?

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Data Privacy Day and Anonymity

/ Christopher Parsons / 3 Comments

While I haven’t posted much this month, it isn’t because I’m not writing: it’s because what I’m writing just doesn’t seem to pull together very well and so I have 4 or 5 items held in ‘draft’. See, I’ve been trying to integrate thoughts on accessible versus technically correct understandings of technology as it relates to privacy, and to issues on public relations and the use of FUD by privacy activists, and what I think of the idea of ‘anonymity’ in digital environments that are increasingly geared to map, track, and trace people’s action. Given that it’s the data privacy day, I thought that I should try to pull some of thoughts together, and so today I’m going to draw on some of those aforementioned ideas and, in particular, start thinking about anonymity in our present digitally networked world.

To take the ‘effort’ to try and remain anonymous requires some kind of motivation, and in North America that motivation is sorely lacking. North America isn’t Iran or China or North Korea; Canadians, in particular, have a somewhat envious position where even with the government prorogued – a situation that, were it to happen in Afghanistan would have pundits and politicians worrying about possibilities of tyranny and violence – there isn’t a perception that Canadians ought to be fearful that proroguement heralds the beginning of a Canadian authoritarian state, or the stripping of Charter rights and freedoms. This said, I think that people in the West are realizing that, as their worlds are increasingly digitized, their ‘analogue’ expectations of privacy are not, and have not for some time, been precisely mirrored in the digital realm. This awareness is causing worry and consternation, but is not yet (and may never be) sufficient for wide-scale adoption of anonymization technologies. Instead, we have worry without (much) action.

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Some Blogroll Love

/ Christopher Parsons

Closeconnections

I tend to (almost exclusively) access key websites related to my research and personal interests through RSS feeds. As a result of using Google Reader to collate new content, I rarely actually see the blogrolls and suggested links that are provided by those key websites that I grab content from on a daily basis. Given that I’m sure many people read this site almost exclusively through RSS, I wanted to prepare a short piece that highlights just some of the key blogs and websites that I turn to on a regular basis in the hopes that readers might find some cool and interesting new sources of information they’d otherwise never come across. As a hat tip, this post is largely inspired by Rebecca Bollwitt‘s “The Missing Link” that considers (as of 2008) the changing characters of link lists and blogrolls.

AR.m-ato.me

Aya Walraven is a digital media and internet enthusiast who primarily works in video, web, and emerging technologies. A self-appointed internet-culture historian and archivist, she studies and documents mobile technologies and online behavior, particularly in Japanese youth and anonymous communities.

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Update to Virgin Media and Copyright DPI

/ Christopher Parsons / 3 Comments

virginmedialogoRecently, I’ve heard back from Detica about CView and wanted to share the information that Detica has been provided. CView is the copyright detection Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliance that Virgin Media will be trialling, and is intended to measure the amount of copyright infringing files that cross Virgin’s network. This index will let Virgin determine whether the content deals they sign with content producers have a noticeable impact on the amount of infringing P2P traffic on their network. Where such deals reduce infringements, then we might expect Virgin to invest resources in agreements with content producers, and if such agreements have no impact then Virgin’s monies will likely be spent on alternate capital investments. I’ll note up front that I’ve sent some followup questions to seek additional clarity where the answers I received were somewhat hazy; such haziness appears to have been from a miscommunication, and is likely attributable to a particular question that was poorly phrased. Up front, I will state that I’m not willing to release the name of who I’m speaking with at Detica, as I don’t think that their name is needed for public consumption and would be an inappropriate disclosure of personal information.

The key question that is lurking in my own mind – if not that of others interested in the CView product – is whether or not the appliance can associate inspected data flows with individuals. In essence, I’m curious about whether or not CView has the ability to collect ‘personally identifiable information’ as outlined by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in her recent findings on Bell’s use of DPI. In her findings, the Commissioner argues that because Bell customers’ subscriber ID and IP address are temporarily collated that personal information is being collected that Bell does collect personal information.

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