2,971 research outputs found
Understanding Complexity
{Excerpt} In development agencies, paradigms of linear causality condition much thinking and practice. They encourage command-and-control hierarchies, centralize decision making, and dampen creativity and innovation. Globalization demands that organizations see our turbulent world as a collection of evolving ecosystems. To survive and flourish they must then be adaptable and fleet footed. Notions of complexity offer a wealth of insights and guidance to 21st century organizations that strive to do so
The Self, the Stasi, the NSA: Privacy, Knowledge, and Complicity in the Surveillance State
We focus on privacy in public. The notion dates back over a century, at least to the work of the German sociologist, Georg Simmel. Simmel observed that people voluntarily limit their knowledge of each other as they interact in a wide variety of social and commercial roles, thereby making certain information private relative to the interaction even if it is otherwise publicly available. Current governmental surveillance in the US (and elsewhere) reduces privacy in public. But to what extent?
The question matters because adequate self-realization requires adequate privacy in public. That in turn depends on informational norms, social norms that govern the collection, use, and distribution of information. Adherence to such norms is constitutive of a variety of relationships in which parties coordinate their use of information. Examples include student/teacher, and journalist/confidential source. Current surveillance undermines privacy in public by undermining norm-enabled coordination. The 1950 to 1990 East German Stasi illustrates the threat to self-realization. The âhidden, but for every citizen tangible omnipresence of the Stasi, damaged the very basic conditions for individual and societal creativity and development: Sense of oneâs self, Trust, Spontaneity.â The United States is not East Germany, but it is on the road that leads there. And that raises the question of how far down that road it has traveled.
To support the âon the roadâ claim and answer the âhow farâ question, we turn to game-theoretic studies of the Assurance Game (more popularly known as the Stag Hunt). We combine our analysis of that game with a characterization of current governmental surveillance that in terms of five concepts: knowledge, use, merely knowing, complicity, and uncertainty. All five combine to undermine norm-enabled coordination. The Assurance Game shows how useâboth legitimate and not legitimateâleads to discoordination. Enough discoordination would lead to a Stasi-like world. But will that happen? A comparison with the Stasi shows cause for concern. The United States possess a degree of knowledge about its citizens that the Stasi could only dream of. Moreoverâperhapsâit arguably surpasses the Stasi in complicity, even though Stasi informants âspied on friends, workmates, neighbours and family members. Husbands spied on wives.â The Stasi only clearly exceeded the United States in repressive use. While it is difficult to predict the future of surveillance, we conclude with three probable scenarios. In only one is there an adequate degree of privacy in public
The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak Investigations and Surveillance in Post-9/11 America
U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists
Trust and transparency in an age of surveillance
Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices.
Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, provide greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, sociohistorical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific sociopolitical contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust - rather than trust - can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the interrelationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society
Trust and Transparency in an Age of Surveillance
Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, provide greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, sociohistorical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific sociopolitical contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrustârather than trustâcan sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the interrelationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society
Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty
Data Epistemologies studies the changing ways in which âknowledgeâ is defined, promised, problematised, legitimated vis-ĂĄ-vis the advent of digital, âbigâ data surveillance technologies in early twenty-first century America. As part of the periodâs fascination with ânewâ media and âbigâ data, such technologies intersect ambitious claims to better knowledge with a problematisation of uncertainty. This entanglement, I argue, results in contextual reconfigurations of what âcountsâ as knowledge and who (or what) is granted authority to produce it â whether it involves proving that indiscriminate domestic surveillance prevents terrorist attacks, to arguing that machinic sensors can know us better than we can ever know ourselves.
The present work focuses on two empirical cases. The first is the âSnowden Affairâ (2013-Present): the public controversy unleashed through the leakage of vast quantities of secret material on the electronic surveillance practices of the U.S. government. The second is the âQuantified Selfâ (2007-Present), a name which describes both an international community of experimenters and the wider industry built up around the use of data-driven surveillance technology for self-tracking every possible aspect of the individual âselfâ. By triangulating media coverage, connoisseur communities, advertising discourse and leaked material, I examine how surveillance technologies were presented for public debate and speculation.
This dissertation is thus a critical diagnosis of the contemporary faith in ârawâ data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making, and of their public promotion as the next great leap towards objective knowledge. Surveillance is not only a means of totalitarian control or a technology for objective knowledge, but a collective fantasy that seeks to mobilise public support for new epistemic systems. Surveillance, as part of a broader enthusiasm for âdata-drivenâ societies, extends the old modern project whereby the human subject â its habits, its affects, its actions â become the ingredient, the raw material, the object, the target, for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves
National Programmes for Mass Surveillance of Personal Data in EU Member States and their Compatibility with EU Law
In the wake of the disclosures surrounding PRISM and other US surveillance
programmes, this study makes an assessment of the large-scale surveillance
practices by a selection of EU member states: the UK, Sweden, France,
Germany and the Netherlands. Given the large-scale nature of surveillance
practices at stake, which represent a reconfiguration of traditional intelligence
gathering, the study contends that an analysis of European surveillance
programmes cannot be reduced to a question of balance between data
protection versus national security, but has to be framed in terms of collective
freedoms and democracy. It finds that four of the five EU member states
selected for in-depth examination are engaging in some form of large-scale
interception and surveillance of communication data, and identifies parallels and
discrepancies between these programmes and the NSA-run operations. The
study argues that these surveillance programmes do not stand outside the
realm of EU intervention but can be engaged from an EU law perspective via (i)
an understanding of national security in a democratic rule of law framework
where fundamental human rights standards and judicial oversight constitute key
standards; (ii) the risks presented to the internal security of the Union as a
whole as well as the privacy of EU citizens as data owners, and (iii) the potential
spillover into the activities and responsibilities of EU agencies. The study then
presents a set of policy recommendations to the European Parliament
The Legacy, November 5, 2013
Student Newspaper of Lindenwood Universityhttps://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/legacy/1110/thumbnail.jp
eROSITA Science Book: Mapping the Structure of the Energetic Universe
eROSITA is the primary instrument on the Russian SRG mission. In the first
four years of scientific operation after its launch, foreseen for 2014, it will
perform a deep survey of the entire X-ray sky. In the soft X-ray band (0.5-2
keV), this will be about 20 times more sensitive than the ROSAT all sky survey,
while in the hard band (2-10 keV) it will provide the first ever true imaging
survey of the sky at those energies. Such a sensitive all-sky survey will
revolutionize our view of the high-energy sky, and calls for major efforts in
synergic, multi-wavelength wide area surveys in order to fully exploit the
scientific potential of the X-ray data. The design-driving science of eROSITA
is the detection of very large samples (~10^5 objects) of galaxy clusters out
to redshifts z>1, in order to study the large scale structure in the Universe,
test and characterize cosmological models including Dark Energy. eROSITA is
also expected to yield a sample of around 3 millions Active Galactic Nuclei,
including both obscured and un-obscured objects, providing a unique view of the
evolution of supermassive black holes within the emerging cosmic structure. The
survey will also provide new insights into a wide range of astrophysical
phenomena, including accreting binaries, active stars and diffuse emission
within the Galaxy, as well as solar system bodies that emit X-rays via the
charge exchange process. Finally, such a deep imaging survey at high spectral
resolution, with its scanning strategy sensitive to a range of variability
timescales from tens of seconds to years, will undoubtedly open up a vast
discovery space for the study of rare, unpredicted, or unpredictable
high-energy astrophysical phenomena. In this living document we present a
comprehensive description of the main scientific goals of the mission, with
strong emphasis on the early survey phases.Comment: 84 Pages, 52 Figures. Published online as MPE document. Edited by S.
Allen. G. Hasinger and K. Nandra. Few minor corrections (typos) and updated
reference
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