I am catching up on some background reading by (and listening to a podcast interviewing) Elizabeth Renieris, a fellow at Harvard’s BKC and consultant on law and policy engineering. It is rather fiery stuff on privacy as an inalienable right and the scourge of personal data commodification. I think she comes across better in the audio interview, which is also long-form. But, in any case, food for thought on where the bounds for current legal discourse on these topics fall.
Surveillance and anti-surveillance in residential housing
An interesting project (via Slashdot) to track and report the deployment of surveillance technology by property owners. This type of granular, individual surveillance relationship sometimes gets lost in the broader debates about surveillance, where we tend to focus on Nation-States and giant corporations, but it is far more pervasive and potentially insidious (as I discuss in I Labirinti). Unsurprisingly, it is showing up at a social and economic flashpoint in these pandemic times, the residential rental market. The Landlord Tech Watch mapping project is still in its infancy: whether doxxing is an effective counter-strategy to surveillance in this context remains to be seen.
Studies on State-sponsored disinformation
Logic magazine
Just discovered (via the BKC newsletter) a cool publication, Logic. They do three themed issues a year on topics at the intersection of tech and society. Vol. 10: Security (from May this year) looks particularly close to the kind of things I am working on. There’s a long piece by Matt Goerzen and Gabriella Coleman on the intertwined histories of hacking and computer security, and a couple of in-depth interviews with Tawana Petty on facial recognition and with Alison Macrina on Tor. Good stuff: I need to get my hands on a hard copy.
Electoral Integrity Partnership
Yesterday, I attended the webinar for the public launch of the Election Integrity Partnership between Stanford, U Dub, Graphika and the Atlantic Council. Quite serious and professional public-interest work being done, and clearly timely.
The definition of electoral disinformation the Partnership adopted as their operational target seemed quite well-tailored and manageably factual (e.g. information such as voting hours and poll locations, the presence or absence of massive queues, mis-documented instances of fraud…).
What struck me as remarkable, however, is that there would be plausible user cases in which this type of factual information would be sought first and foremost, or with greater assurance and trust, on random posts on social media platforms: this really speaks to a gigantic lack of authoritativeness or communication ability on the part of election officials.