Tag Archives: Law enforcement

Political economy entanglements of cryptocurrency

A few interesting news items in the past twenty-four hours illustrate the far-reaching impact of blockchain technology and its growing entanglement with structural political and economic realities. Kosovo has moved to ban cryptocurrency mining within its borders, in the face of a countrywide energy crisis. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that the ongoing political unrest in Kazakhstan has led to a crisis for global bitcoin mining, as the government shuts down the nation’s internet backbone to attempt to thwart protesters’ communications. Finally, Casey Newton’s Platformer blog is running a piece on Signal’s imminent foray into cryptocurrency integration: Newton’s take is that this disruption is needless provocation of US authorities and may result in finally coalescing sufficient political will to outlaw end-to-end encryption outright, a move for which many voices worldwide have long been advocating.

Whatever the outcome of these specific dossiers, the data points are fast accumulating to support the claim that blockchain has broken through to mainstream status: going forward, it will be seen as a key variable shaping our future, alongside such old twentieth century factors as the right to free expression or the price of oil.

The taxman and the 4th Amendment

Interesting article in The Intercept last week about the purchase by the U.S. Treasury Department of app data harvested by private brokers, such as Babel Street, in order to circumvent the necessity of obtaining court warrants for searches of personal data.

Nothing shockingly new, but the article ends with a key quote from Jack Poulson, the founder of Tech Inquiry, a research and advocacy group:

“Babel Street’s support for the IRS increasing its surveillance of small businesses and the self employed — after the IRS has already largely given up on auditing the ultrawealthy — is an example of the U.S. surveillance industry being used to help shift the tax burden to the working class”.

Trust among thieves

An item that recently appeared on NBC News (via /.) graphically illustrates the pervasiveness of the problem of trust across organizations, cultures, and value systems. It also speaks to the routinization of ransomware extortion and other forms of cybercrime as none-too-glamorous career paths, engendering their own disgruntled and underpaid line workers.

A global take on the mistrust moment

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.

Bridle’s vision

Belatedly finished reading James Bridle’s book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso, 2018). As the title suggests, the text is systemically pessimist about the effect of new technologies on the sustainability of human wellbeing. Although the overall structure of the argument is at times clouded over by sudden twists in narrative and the sheer variety of anecdotes, there are many hidden gems. I very much enjoyed the idea, borrowed from Timothy Morton, of a hyperobject:

a thing that surrounds us, envelops and entangles us, but that is literally too big to see in its entirety. Mostly, we perceive hyperobjects through their influence on other things […] Because they are so close and yet so hard to see, they defy our ability to describe them rationally, and to master or overcome them in any traditional sense. Climate change is a hyperobject, but so is nuclear radiation, evolution, and the internet.

One of the main characteristics of hyperobjects is that we only ever perceive their imprints on other things, and thus to model the hyperobject requires vast amounts of computation. It can only be appreciated at the network level, made sensible through vast distributed systems of sensors, exabytes of data and computation, performed in time as well as space. Scientific record keeping thus becomes a form of extrasensory perception: a networked, communal, time-travelling knowledge making. (73)

Bridle has some thought-provoking ideas about possible responses to the dehumanizing forces of automation and algorithmic sorting, as well. Particularly captivating was his description of Gary Kasparov’s reaction to defeat at the hands of AI Deep Blue in 1997: the grandmaster proposed ‘Advanced Chess’ tournaments, pitting pairs of human and computer players, since such a pairing is superior to both human and machine players on their own. This type of ‘centaur strategy’ is not simply a winning one: it may, Bridle suggests, hold ethical insights on patways of human adaptation to an era of ubiquitous computation.