Power and Ethics
From our readings, it is clear that we have many different ideas about how power and ethics manifest themselves in our environment. Let’s take a closer look into some situations that we deal with implicitly or explicitly every day.
COINTELPRO was J. Edgar Hoover’s pet program to collect information (usually illegally) about counterculture movements and fellow politicians in order to cement his power.
The following two videos give an introduction and a glimpse into the ramifications that COINTELPRO affected for the United States in the 50's and 60's.
Intro to COINTELPRO and the motivation for Hoover: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhRak4GRLzo#t=808 (13:28-15:08)
Noam Chomsky about COINTELPRO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMIKjM7shJA#t=2643 (44:05 to about 48:45)—people in power don’t go after others in power.
From just these videos, can you extrapolate how Michel de Certeau’s ideas of power, strategy, and tactics apply to COINTELPRO and its opposition?
Why would J. Edgar Hoover want to maintain power?
Have the strategies of similar agencies changed today?
Anonymous is a network of hacktivists that act as watchdogs over government, religious, and corporate institutions. They are known for their digital espionage and have released sensitive documents in the past.
How does Anonymous use tactics?
How does it cause the strategy of the institutions it targets to change?
What are the problems associated with a group such as Anonymous?
How does anonymity serve their tactics? How does it give them an advantage?
Advertising? How must one navigate the land of all the advertising we see on a day to day basis?
Online, people are bombarded with ads. Entire websites are funded by advertisements (e.g. Facebook). People have ad-blockers that block advertisements. Are these ad-blockers tactics? Does ad-blocking entail a negative connotation against these ad-funded websites?
Seattle has banned conspicuous outdoor advertising, and is missing out on a revenue stream as a result. Is this a good strategy by the city? A tactic?
How does Floodwatch function as a tactic?
Would you use this service? Do you consider ad targeting tactics invasive or would you prefer to have ads targeted towards you?
Apple automatically downloaded U2's new album Songs of Innocence onto all Apple devices with the release of iPhone 6 — without users knowledge or permission. This sparked a surprising level of public outrage.
Was this decision unethical?
Why do you think users were so outraged by this decision?
Had it been a company with less power than Apple would it have been as big of a deal?
Racial & Power Dynamics — Divisions that occur in real life, including those of race and class, reemerge online
How are different spaces on the internet dominated by different races?
Who governs these systems? How does power come into play here?
What are other ways in which real-world social and power dyanamics play out online?
Encryption is long been a tactic of computing machinery, but it is finally coming into the mainstream with Apple announcing that all data on their new iPhone 6s is encrypted until the passcode is entered.
Bruce Schneier has an essay (with tons of links) discussing the ramifications of iPhone encryption, and the fallacies of the counter-argument against encryption by the government and law-enforcement agencies.
Is encryption a strategy or a tactic? How has the definition changed over time, knowing what we learned about Turing and Shannon’s role in WWII?
What role does encryption play in your everyday life? Who are you protected from? Do you care?
Is it ethical to hand off the benefits of encryption to private individuals? Do individuals have the same rights as before? How has company and government strategy changed in relation to encryption?
We talked a little about the general internet protocol (TCP/IP), and how messages are sent over the internet. Imagine the layers wrapped around the data like an onion; at the source and the client (your phone!), the data is totally unwrapped to package and then read the data.
At routers in the middle of the internet, only the link layer is peeled off, and the router uses the information in the Internet Layer to discover where the packet is going. This layer contains information from where the data packet originated and its final destination. This is one place where a rogue router could collect metadata, or ‘data about data.’
Though it might not identify what content is being transmitted, enough metadata can be enough to identify the interests and involvements of a particular person, and even their present location.
Is the internet designed for anonymity? Why not?
Encrypting our conversations on the internet only encrypts the transport and application layer. Should we protect our metadata (internet and link layer)?
Who controls the power over this system? How do entities try to flex power over the internet?
The preceding was joint work between Marcella Bianchi and Alper Sarikaya.
