Opinion
Dragnet Nation: Here’s how you may already be getting hacked
The following is an excerpt from Julia Angwin’s Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. Who is watching you? This was once a question asked only by kings, presidents and public figures trying…
Note to Paul Ryan: There’s no dignity in low-wage work
The fast-food workers’ “Fight for 15″ campaign — a series of one-day strikes — was never only about low wages. It was also about dignity at the workplace — not being forced to work in harsh conditions, or being given unpredictable and constantly…
Why digital privacy is only for the rich
OKCupid knows how likely you are to put out on the first date, the NSA knows you eat a lot of quinoa, and all 962 of your Facebook friends have caught a glimpse of you in an ill-advised bikini. In a digital world where oversharing is caring and brands know more about you than your parents do, privacy is fast becoming the defining issue of our time. Despite constant proclamations surrounding the death of privacy, reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. Privacy isn't dead, but it's getting very expensive.
It wasn't long ago that most of us used services like Facebook or Google without questioning the underlying value exchange or realising that, if we weren't paying for it, then we were the product. The summer of Snowden changed that. All of a sudden it wasn't just terrorists, conspiracy theorists and activists who were worried about their data trail; privacy became both a mainstream concern and a lucrative business opportunity.
Worried about the security of your itrackallyourdataPhone? Now you can pre-order a privacy-oriented Blackphone for $629 (£378) or opt for a $189 "Snowden phone" equipped with 128-bit encryption. Want to scrub your information from marketing databases or set up real-time privacy alerts? There's a privacy protection service that is happy to do that – for a fee. The privacy industry is booming: the market for mobile security management products alone was estimated to be worth $560m in 2013 and is expected to nearly double in size to $1bn a year by 2015.
Cryptographers with a conscience are creating some of the emerging privacy-protecting tools and services – Blackphone being one example. However, as companies start to realise that privacy is becoming a market differentiator for which people will pay a premium, we are seeing "Big Privacy" replace "Big Data" as Big Business's favourite catchphrase, along with a whole new approach to the monetisation of our personal information – this time in the guise of securing it rather than selling it. Privacy, it seems, is moving from being a basic human right to a zeitgeisty marketing slogan.
Of course, there are plenty of ways you can protect your privacy for free. You can disable cookies, turn off the Bluetooth on your smartphone, stop using credit cards, etc. But these tactics tend to be impractical, complicated or require a level of tech literacy most people simply don't have. If you are using a virtual private network or seeking out more secure alternatives to Google, it's more than likely that you have a certain level of education and come from a higher socio-economic background. The digital divide is becoming a privacy divide. Take the security-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, for example. While it doesn't retain any information on its customers, external data suggests that, compared with the rest of the US internet population, DuckDuckGo's users are older, richer and consist of a higher proportion of men.
Whether it involves driving a car instead of taking the bus, or living in a secluded house rather than a crowded flat, privacy has long been a preserve of the rich. And while we may talk about the democratising nature of the internet, it seems online privacy is also becoming a domain of privilege. As a recent article in the New York Times put it, privacy is becoming a luxury good.
Although the growing privacy divide is disturbing, it isn't the fact that privacy might be becoming a luxury commodity that is most worrying – it's the fact it is becoming a good at all. At this year's SXSW festival, which is attended by both the tech and marketing industries, Julian Assange asserted (via video link) that "people are products sold to advertisers". He said this in conversation with the founder of the ad agency that had paid him around $10,000 to appear.
The growing privacy industry isn't changing the fact that most people are products sold to advertisers – it's just changing the way they are sold.
Comcast: Throwing money at Congress to approve our merger is OK because Congress represents the people!
Comcast is using a variety of sophisticated lobbying tricks to get the company's proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved, including using minority groups and an endless roster of think tankers to parrot merger support. They're…
The CIA has brought darkness to America by fighting in the shadows
Little more than a week after 9/11, Cofer Black gave instructions to his CIA team before their mission. "I don't want Bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead … I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want Bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to show Bin Laden's head to the president. I promised him I would do that."
A month later, at a meeting sponsored by Schwab Capital markets, CIA executive director "Buzzy" Krongard laid out for investors what such a war would entail. "[It] will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about," he said.
Back then there wasn't a treaty that couldn't be violated, a principle waived or a definition parsed in the defence of American power and pursuit of popular revenge. To invoke the constitution, the Geneva convention or democratic oversight was evidence that you were out of your depth in the new reality. Laws were for the weak; for the powerful there was force. This was not just the mood of a moment; it has been policy for more than a decade.
Obama's arrival offered a shift in focus and style but not in direction or substance. "I don't want [people at the CIA] to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders," he said shortly before his first inauguration. It was never difficult to see what could go wrong with this approach. But it has, nonetheless, been shocking to see how wrong things have gone. As covert operations were shielded from oversight, so human rights violations became not just inevitable but routine.
In a 2004 report military intelligence officers told the International Committee for the Red Cross they believed between 70% and 80% of the detainees in Iraq were innocent. The nods and winks became permanent tics – so reflexive they embedded themselves in the institutional subconscious. "The most serious thing is the abuse of power that that allows you to do," Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state, Colin Powell's chief of staff, told Jeremy Scahill in his book, Dirty Wars. "You find out the intelligence was bad and you killed a bunch of innocent people and you have a bunch of innocent people on your hands, so you stuff 'em in Guantánamo. No one ever knows anything about that. You don't have to prove to anyone that you did right. You did it all in secret, so you just go to the next operation. You say, 'Chalk that one up to experience'… And believe me that happened."
The logic driving this state of affairs is not only self-fulfilling, it's self-perpetuating. The more they act with impunity the more abuses are committed, the more they have to cover up and the more secrecy they need. So long as it happened abroad, the consequences for the American polity were limited. Abu Ghraib and drone attacks cost precious few votes or senior careers. But it was only a matter of time before these ramifications started making themselves felt at home. Foreign policy doesn't take place in a vacuum; it's co-ordinated by and incorporated into the same system that elaborates domestic policy. Once you have told operatives to take their gloves off and fight dirty on the road they don't just start playing by Queensbury rules at home.
Those openly called on to flout international law in the interests of a higher good do not then suddenly submit that goal to domestic law once they've gone through customs. Once the state has deliberately created space for power to be exercised without accountability those who occupy that space will protect it against enemies domestic and foreign. When your war is global and unending it inevitably comes home and keeps going. The monster the US has unleashed on the rest of the world is steadily devouring its own.
This is not new. The origins of the Watergate scandal, in which President Richard Nixon bugged his electoral opponents, lies in Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia; McCarthyism had its roots in the cold war.
But during the war on terror the process has become particularly pronounced. In recent months, it has emerged that the CIA has been spying on investigators from the Senate intelligence committee – the very committee charged with overseeing the CIA. The investigators, who were authorised to examine CIA documents relating to interrogation methods, found a withering internal review which concluded with the finding that torture techniques, like waterboarding, used in "black site" prisons had been ineffective. This was particularly troublesome because the CIA director had argued the opposite before the committee, contradicting the agency's own findings. When the CIA discovered that the investigators had the review, it started going through their computer logs to find out how they had got hold of it.
In short the CIA spirited people away and tortured them, concluded this was useless, suppressed those conclusions, lied about them to elected officials and then spied on the people who had a democratic mandate to discover the truth precisely because they discovered the truth. Those black sites in far away lands have sister cities within the democratic process.
The defence for this duplicity is invariably national security. To be kept safe we must also be kept ignorant; to protect democracy it must be undermined. The unfettered phone surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency revealed the degree to which politicians collude in much of this – asking soft ball questions and apparently happier being fobbed off than taking on the democratic responsibilities.
"You can get caught up in that world. There's a certain glamour to it I think for a lot of elected officials," Senator Martin Heinrich, who is on the intelligence committee, told Politico. The price for that glamour is high and we all pay for it.
But nobody can claim we weren't warned: "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world," former vice-president Dick Cheney said shortly after 9/11. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion … That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal … to achieve our objective."
Those shadows are long. They have concealed unspeakable horrors abroad. Increasingly they are casting darkness at home.
[Image via AFP]
Global military spending is now an integral part of capitalism
China's surge in military spending gains headlines, partly because of the ominous implications regarding its regional contest with Japan, but it's the deeper structures of military spending in general that are far more compelling.
There are few surprises about the distribution of military spending: for all the current focus on China's growing military outlays – and it is significant that they have embarked on a sequence of double-digit increases as a percentage of GDP – the United States still accounts for 40% of such expenditures. However, the distribution is not the only thing that matters; it's the sheer scale of such investment – $1.756tn in 2012. The "peace dividend" from the end of the cold war has long since bitten the dust. Global military spending has returned to pre-1989 levels, undoubtedly a legacy of the war on terror and the returning salience of military competition in its context. In fact, by 2011 global military spending was higher than at any year since the end of the second world war.
So, what is the explanation for such huge investments? Is it simply the case that states are power-maximising entities, and that as soon as they have access to enough taxable income they start dreaming war?
In a very general sense, militarisation could be seen as an integral aspect of capitalism. One of the central ambiguities of capitalism is that it is necessarily a global system, with production and exchange extending beyond national boundaries; yet at the same time, units of capital (corporations etc) tend to be concentrated within national states where they are afforded an infrastructure, a labour force, and a great deal of primary investments. Even the process of globalisation presupposes the investment and guidance of national states. The more deeply companies are intertwined with national states, the more they rely on those states to fight their competitive battles on a global stage. Maintaining a military advantage is arguably an intrinsic part of this.
However, once this rather abstract principle is established, the question still remains unanswered. After all, there is no inherent reason why geo-economic competition should lead to defence spending consuming trillions of dollars of value each year. Part of the answer has to be located in the way that high levels of military spending became such an entrenched part of the global landscape in the aftermath of two world wars.
In the context of the second world war, and then in the subsequent cold war, one thing about military spending that became abundantly clear is that it is never just about conflict. As in the conduct of wars themselves, the institutionalisation of military spending quickly becomes entangled in a series of incentives that are entirely tangential to the ostensive motive.
First of all, states that do embark on large scale military investment quickly assume strategic command of core sectors of the economy, allowing for a degree of planning and co-ordination, a level of state capacity that might otherwise be deplored by business as "socialism". Quite a lot of the major US technological advances made under the rubric of "free enterprise", including particularly Apple's innovations, owe themselves originally to state investments organised under the banner of "defence".
Second, military investment is not just an effect of economic growth, but often a lever in enhancing it. This is a complicated story in itself. Post-war US growth was probably enhanced by arms spending, but the levels of spending required during the Vietnam war sapped too much capital away from other profitable investments. By the same token, it is not clear whether Japan's rise to becoming a major global economic power would have been possible had its military commitments not been constitutionally limited.
Nonetheless, there is some complex evidence of arms spending increasing growth. Barry Rundquist and Thomas Carsey's study of military procurement in the United States demonstrates that this has a distributive aspect. Such spending in the US helps already wealthy, booming locales become even wealthier, but it does not tend to make poor areas wealthier and nor does it reduce unemployment. This is quite significant, because one of the major arguments governments offer for protecting military spending is that it protects jobs – the one situation in which governments almost always feign an interest in employment. There is actually little evidence for this claim.
That brings us to a final point. There is no way to discuss the real dimensions of military competition without looking at how this is represented for particular audiences. One thinks of the way in which struggles over arms spending in the US become inflected with evocations of external threats, which help consolidate domestic power blocs. The Reaganite-era neo-conservative bloc was impossible without an elevated Russian "threat". So, particularly in states with an imperialist role, military spending can become complexly bound up not only with state-building strategies and agendas for regional economic growth, but also with domestic hegemonic strategies in which the legitimacy of governments hinges upon their ability to project violence.
To this extent, to really understand world arms spending it is necessary to penetrate beneath the generalities about sui generis state behaviour, as power-maximisers and so on, and delve into the messy politics of militarism in each society.
Why female techies in the 21st century face a stone age work culture
'You constantly hear the pipeline argument: there are no women here because there are no women over there. VCs [venture capitalists] blame industry, and industry blames universities, and universities blame schools and schools blame the parents."
Anne Marie Imafidon is a 24-year-old tech genius and founder of Stemettes (a charity to get girls into science, technology, engineering and maths). She was talking on Thursday night about the dearth of women in the tech industry, in all these industries, in the lead-up to International Women's Day. Sixty per cent of all graduates are women, but only 17% of computer science grads are, and only 20% of people studying physics. Only 13% of those working in the tech industry are female.
International Women's Day used to be the day we spent arguing about what the most important issues should be for International Women's Day. Is it OK to talk about feminism in rich nations while women are being raped in the Congo? How can you rank the importance of the glass ceiling against the threat of domestic violence? What I never saw coming was this bizarre situation in which the fields that you'd think of as the most modern, the most cutting edge – tech, physics, engineering – were replicating working conditions so sexist they make Mad Men look like Spare Rib. Not only are there no women to start off with in this area, but the ones there are leave.
"Isn't that just because they're having children?" I ask, with my dumb, humanities, 90s sensibilities. Imafidon and Cate Huston, a software engineer at Google, laugh in my face. "No, it is not because they're having children. It's because of the way they're treated. They're not hired, they're not listened to and they're not promoted."
To go back to the beginning: does this start in schools? Charles Wallendahl, a young Teach First ambassador who teaches at a Archbishop Lanfranc, in Croydon, thinks not. "Homophobia is a problem in schools. Sexism is not a problem in schools. Most teachers are women. The number of times I get called "miss" when I do the register … But kids spend most of their time at home, they pick up these things from their parents."
And yet, whatever the source of it, it's definitely at school that the gaps open up. Boys and girls are equally keen on maths at the age of five. By the time they're eight, girls have internalised the message that they can't do it. Nimish Lad, from the Wootton Academy, was at a workshop on Friday about stamping out sexism in schools, and said: "I was just speaking to a girl who's one of our Oxbridge candidates, and she said she didn't want to do physics, because that's not how her mind works."
Dr Anna Zecharia, from Science Grrl (set up to get more girls into science), thinks there's been a change in gender stereotyping; things are moving, fast, in the wrong direction. "If you look at the gender marketing of toys, sexual objectification of all women, boxing people in to very narrow, old-fashioned gender models, everything in my culture values my physicality above all my other attributes."
Paradoxically, science itself – which I think of as smooth and polished like a test tube, impervious to the emotional demands of prejudice – is often the source of this re-domestication drive. Gina Rippon, professor of cognitive neuro-imaging at Aston University (whom I also met at the schools workshop), said: "There's this constant drumbeat of biology as destiny, which doesn't help. People are driven by what they can get published, and what gets published is positive results. So maybe 2% of studies will show differences between men's and women's brains, and those are what will be published."
It's hardly surprising, then, that girls persistently underperform in what they call "self-efficacy tests" (how good you think you are), compared to their performance in, well, everything else.
Universities have a case to answer, too. Huston tells me a story about how the computer science teams had to be allocated handicaps, and were given one AI student and one girl. In Edinburgh university, this century. A geophysicist (who wished to remain anonymous) said: "When you're a female science student, it's a bit like being a professional woman in the Middle East. You're neither male nor female. You're a third sex, to them."
Imafidon (who, just by the by, took her maths and IT GCSEs while she was still at primary school), says: "Look, I don't get hassle. If I can see something's happening, and I look at you, you will shut up. The other thing is, I have a reputation. They expect everything I say to be golden."
Nevertheless, as Huston says: "I still spend all day every day surrounded by dudes." Imafidon laughs. "Yeah, it's a weird situation, being the only person in the room who can understand why their girlfriend got upset."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Angry woman at computer via Mark Aplet / Shutterstock]
The Tea Party just turned five — and it’s not going away
Some date the advent of the tea party to 2007, when then-presidential candidate Ron Paul held a “tax day tea party” fundraiser to fill his campaign coffers. But the broader movement began five years ago last week — shortly after Barack Obama was…
The GOP won’t pass immigration reform – and it could prove disastrous for them
Dog whistle politics have served Republicans well. But with shifting demographics, they may become an albatross around the party’s neck. No issue reflects that dynamic as clearly as immigration reform. Failure to address a broken system has alienated…
Study suggests internet trolls may not be mentally healthy in real life
A new study from the University of Manitoba has shockingly claimed to have found that the Internet trolls we all know or love so well may not be very nice -- or particularly mentally healthy -- individuals in real life. The study tried to explore whether…
Were Romney’s '47 percent' remarks racist?
In this week’s episode of Moyers & Company, Bill asks Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics, whether Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” comment could be construed as racially coded language. “I think it was,” Haney López says…
Spoiler alert: Downton Abbey is a waste of America's precious TV time
In the opinion of one transplanted Brit, it's a soap opera as inept as any other - and it doesn't live up to the new U.S. standard
The other night, rather behind the rest of the known planet and probably some parts still unknown – the deepest Amazon, say, where naked tribesmen agonize weekly over poor old Mary and Matthew – I sat down to catch up on my Downton Abbey.
It's mine by birthright, I suppose, as an Englishman in America, land of the free and home of the binge-watch. Beset with a small child, I had lost much of that free time, and thus fallen far behind – further even than the one-season lag the US must still endure. But perhaps I had enough in me to sync up in time for tonight's season-four finale on PBS.
Indeed, House of Cards may be America's weekend-killing addiction of the moment, but Downton, we are told, is worth it.
The Netflix political drama itself derives from a British series, a suave if aging shocker reanimated with American energy, camp and schlock-horror verve. In Downton, we have a living transplant, a stately if seductive fairytale playing out in the years around the first world war - a time of unchecked elite excess featuring frocks and frock coats that are really rather lovely ... or at least that's as far as I got.
This time around, two episodes was quite enough to remind me that America's love for this rotten show is drawn from the same well as that baseless love so many Americans maintain for the British royal family. You know it's not for you – in fact, it's rather silly. And you know it's not even worth an hour's attention on a Sunday evening, what with True Detective and soon, once again, Mad Men and Game of Thrones. Given the vigor of your own institutions, you know that, ultimately, it's beneath you.
But you watch it anyway.
America, you can do better than Downton Abbey.
You can do better TV, obviously. Where to start? At the beginning of the revolution, perhaps, with The Sopranos. Or with The Wire or Breaking Bad. Even with House of Cards, if you must. And, oh, how you must: at least half a million of you watched all 13 hours' worth of Frank Underwood's maneuvering last weekend.
I understand the need to binge. Oh, how I do. Before I became a parent, my wife was in New York and I was in London, and so I still had hour upon hour for such things. Back then, my entire social life seemed to revolve around Tony, Paulie, Carmela and Artie Bucco. I'd watch two or three episodes of the Sopranos each night and then call transatlantic to express my exhilaration, fear or both.
Surprisingly, I still got married, and once the resulting small child was safely asleep, we pitched into Mad Men, Orange Is the New Black and all the rest.
In such company, Downton Abbey is all show-off and no substance. It is little more than an enormous confidence trick played by writer Julian Fellowes, ITV and PBS on the world – and especially Americans, those suckers for something to talk about around the water cooler. If it looks good and the write-ups say it's good, it must be good. Right, America? Mustn't it even be ... grand?
Grand with what? Its ludicrous melodrama? With its stultifying lack of ambition beyond flogging the hoary old country-house potboiler of upstairs, downstairs and out over the hah-hah and back? Or with its script? With that insulting, inept, dashed-off, corned-beef hash of a script it force-feeds its hugely talented, entirely wasted cast?
It's a grand waste of time, is what it is, enough to leave David Chase, Matthew Weiner and a dozen other talented show-runners weeping into their martinis. Five seasons and Christmas specials – and counting? Big deal with NBC to rehash it all for the Gilded Age? For this?
America, you can do much better than Downton Abbey.
It thinks it's better than you, too. This is a show about class in the way that Britain is about class, which is the way in which America is supposedly not. And Downton is not just about the British class system. (If you want to read or see something about it, read or see The Shooting Party, quickly.) Downton is a product and expression of the British class system. A highly approving expression, a show of and for the 1%. And 99% of America doesn't need any more of that.
Downton's sickly harmony between nobs and proles is a ludicrous facade erected by an avowedly elitist Conservative life peer who is married to the daughter of a real one and once wrote a supposedly satirical novel called Snobs.
Poke this facade, even lightly, and it falls. The Granthams are top dogs. We are constantly told, by every character from Daisy the sweetly dim kitchen maid to the loveable old lord, that "times are changing". Cosmetic codswallop, I tell you. In Fellowes' world, which is the world of Britain's Conservative-led government, the times are not changing – and have not changed. Let the nobles lead, indeed.
Yet still the numberless hordes allow themselves to be cowed and babied, every Sunday night for five seasons and counting. And all while True Detective is on. It's extraordinary.
It's also extraordinary that I even made it through the season and a half that I did. I suppose it was because Downton, despite itself, kept offering consolations. However many times Fellowes allowed Anna the maid to comfort Cora or had Carson the butler offer lonely-hearts advice to Mary, there was always something to lull – or gull – me right back. A nicely delivered line here; a plausibly nasty edge to Thomas there. Or, tellingly enough for an angry but class-bound Brit, an opportunity to tell anyone and everyone I know that, back when I was in London, I used to work with the girl who became Lady Edith.
But this time, in America, re-engaging, I was brought up short. What did it was this: the realization that in the world of Downton Abbey everyone, but everyone, knows their place. The lords, the servants. Branson the chauffeur, who being both Irish and a bit of a lefty should have known his from the start, despite his wholly unlikely success in marrying in. Even, I suspect, everyone behind the camera, down to whatever is the crew equivalent of the girl who lights the fires. Even the audience.
Obviously, this worldwide love for the Granthams, as much as that for the cursed Windsors, springs from all humanity's love of a good soap opera. That I get. In that case, the best that can be said for the soap that is Downton Abbey is, well, at least the sets don't wobble.
But those sets being the unyielding walls of a genuine stately home, Highclere Castle (which could never be in Yorkshire, let me tell you), built with the blood and sweat of others for the continuing profit of a gang of genuine aristocrats, the whole thing should make anyone remotely normal feel distinctly, queasily ill.
America, you can do so much better.
Or if you really think you can't, there's always Sherlock, I suppose.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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