My forthcoming piece on Ethan Zuckerman’s Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them for the Italian Political Science Review.
Tag Archives: Borders
Barlow as Rorschach test
An op-ed by Joshua Benton on the first quarter-century of John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace on the Nieman Lab website.
Unpacking the different facets of Barlow’s personality and worldview goes a long way toward mapping out early internet ideology: most everyone finds parts to admire as well as intimations of disasters to come. The protean nature of the author of the Declaration helps in the process. Was Barlow Dick Cheney’s friend or Ed Snowden’s? Was he a scion of Wyoming cattle ranching royalty or a Grateful Dead lyricist? Was he part of the Davos digerati or a defender of civil rights and founder of the EFF? All of these, of course, and much besides. Undeniably, Barlow had a striking way with words, matched only by a consistent ability to show up “where it’s at” in the prevailing cultural winds of the time (including a penchant for association with the rich and famous).
Benton does a good job highlighting how far removed the techno-utopian promises of the Declaration sound from the current zeitgeist regarding the social effects of information technology. But ultimately we see in Barlow a reflection of our own hopes and fears about digital societies: as I previously argued, there is no rigid and inescapable cause-effect relationship between the ideas of the ’90s and the oligopolies of today. Similarly, a course for future action and engagement can be set without espousing or denouncing the Declaration in its entirety.
Data security and surveillance legitimacy
To no-one’s surprise, the Department of Homeland Security and the Customs and Border Patrol have become victims of successful hacks of the biometric data they mass-collect at the border. The usual neoliberal dance of private subcontracting of public functions further exacerbated the problem. According to the DHS Office of the Inspector General,
[t]his incident may damage the public’s trust in the Government’s ability to safeguard biometric data and may result in travelers’ reluctance to permit DHS to capture and use their biometrics at U.S. ports of entry.
No kidding. Considering the oft-documented invasiveness of data harvesting practices by the immigration-control complex and the serious real-world repercussions in terms of policies and ordinary people’s lives, the problem of data security should be front-and-center in public policy debates. The trade-off between the expected value to be gained from surveillance and the risk of unauthorized access to the accumulated information (which also implies the potential for the corruption of the database) must be considered explicitly: as it is, these leaks and hacks are externalities the public is obliged to absorb because the agencies have scant incentive to monitor their data troves properly.