[Plura-list] EFF on EU interoperability policy; BAHA Blues; Bossware; Big Cop's corporate armorers
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Wed Jul 1 15:27:35 EDT 2020
Today's links
* EFF on EU interoperability policy: Securing Europeans' technological
self-determination.
* BAHA Blues: Patrick Costello's harrowing hearing aid implant experience.
* Bossware: The remote work dystopia is here.
* Big Cop's corporate armorers: Corporate "charity" funds police
military and surveillance black budgets.
* Invigilation CEO doxes student: Proctorio's CEO "takes privacy very
seriously."
* Sun Ra's syllabus: Lecture and reading list from "The Black Man in the
Cosmos" (UC Berkeley 1971).
* Snowden on Little Brother: The new Little Brother/Homeland omnibus is
almost upon us!
* This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading
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👶🏿 EFF on EU interoperability policy
My EFF colleagues Svea Windwehr and Christoph Schmon have published a
major new paper on how the #EU should manage interoperability policy to
ensure that Europeans can claim and preserve their rights to
technological self-determination.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/our-eu-policy-principles-interoperability
It's in the context of the Digital Services Act, the first major update
to EU's tech regulation in a generation, intended to amend and supercede
2000's Ecommerce Directive. How DSA comes out will have a profound
impact on Europeans' tech future for a generation to come.
The core principles here are to enable immunity for platforms for their
users' actions and banning both filtering and mass surveillance (AKA
"monitoring") of Europeans' online activities.
Only by preserving these core principles can we ensure that European
tech platforms can compete with US, Russian and Chinese Big Tech, while
safeguarding Europeans' fundamental rights to free expression and privacy.
Specifically, EFF wants the EU to turn away from adventures in
automating mass surveillance and censorship (Avia in France, NetzDG in
Germany, and the Copyright Directive) and turn its focus to smashing
down the walled-garden barriers within which Big Tech holds us hostage.
To that end, EFF proposes a set of interoperability principles that will
create space for alternatives to mass surveillance and the impossible
and absurd idea that one company can hope to set and enforce policy
governing hundreds of millions of peoples' online lives.
1. General Interoperability Obligations
Fix and expand the GDPR's "data portability" rules to close loopholes
and allow Europeans to fetch their data continuously, in realtime from
within the big platforms. Expose the same APIs that platforms use
internally to competitors.
2. Delegatability
Allow users to designate tech providers - companies, nonprofits, coops,
etc - to act on their behalf, pulling in the messages waiting for them
inside Big Tech silos and pushing their replies back, without requiring
them to expose themselves to surveillance.
3. Limit Commercial Use of Data
Commercial use of data made available through interop should be banned,
full stop. It "should only be used for maintaining interoperability,
safeguarding users’ privacy, or ensuring data security."
4. Privacy
Mandate best practices for privacy: "data minimization, privacy by
design, and privacy by default" and augment them with "easy-to-use
interfaces through which users can give their explicit consent regarding
any use of their data (as well as revoke that consent)."
5. Security
Companies have a duty to keep users safe, but regulators musn't allow
this to become a pretense for shutting down interop: "communicate
transparently, resolve the problem, and reinstate interoperability
interfaces within a reasonable, clearly defined timeframe."
6. Documentation and Non-Discrimination
"Interoperability interfaces shouldn't discriminate between competitors
and shouldn't come with strenuous obligations or content restrictions.
Interfaces, such as APIs, must also be easy to find, well-documented,
and transparent."
"We must take a holistic view of digital policy, and take care that
policymakers do not inadvertently give incumbents excuses to block their
competitors from entering a market. "
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👶🏿 BAHA Blues
I've been following Patrick Costello's work for more than a decade: he's
an open-access musician and music teacher who has taught hundreds -
thousands - of people to play banjo through both open courseware and
online/in-person tutorials.
In particular, I've followed his amazing - and now brutal - journey
through hearing loss and hearing implants, a journey that, at first,
restored his hearing to a large degree, and, later, snatched it away
again, largely due to mismanagement, indifference and incompetence.
As Costello describes in a new video, BAHA Blues, Cochlear's defective
products, indifferent customer service, and poor business practices have
brought him to the breaking point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-YRGAw78o
He's abandoned hearing, because he can't afford the financial and
emotional toll of smashing himself against this medtech giant.
But he's not giving up on music. As he describes in his video, banjo
frailing is one form of music that fits well into a life without hearing.
(as he demonstrates in this companion video, a frailing cover of
Madonna's "Like a Prayer")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKLABHqlE1A
Costello wrote to me this morning after reading yesterday's review of
Sean Williams's "Impossible Music," a novel about a musician who
reinvents his conception of music after sudden hearing-loss.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/30/deafhood/#impossible-music
I'm so heartened to see Costello back at music - he's both a skilled
musician and an empathic and talented teacher. His struggles with
Cochlear have been a heartbreak to watch from afar - I can only imagine
what they were like to live through directly.
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👶🏿 Bossware
It's bad enough that your boss has decided that you now must turn part
of your home into an extension of your workplace at no cost to them.
Then they add Bossware to your computer so they can spy on you (and your
family), adding insult to injury.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/inside-invasive-secretive-bossware-tracking-workers
My EFF colleagues Bennett Cyphers and Karen Gullo take a deep dive into
the creepy, invasive world of Bossware, including InterGuard, StaffCop,
TimeDoctor, WorkSmart, Teramind, and many others.
They find that many of these products are advertised as having the
capability to "read workers’ private messages without their knowledge or
consent."
The apps' overt pitch is that they help enforce compliance with privacy
and other rules.
But never far from the surface is a neo-Taylorist pitch: we can monitor
every keystroke, every click, every URL, and tell you whether your
workers are being "productive" while they're in the rental-free office
they've gifted to your corporation.
Some companies suggest that this kind of monitoring can help customers
decide who to lay off or who to give bonuses to, and Interguard goes
further: "conduct covert investigations [of your workers] and
bullet-proof evidence gathering without alarming the suspected wrongdoer."
They also recommend their covert data-gathering to fight wrongful
termination suits. As EFF writes," InterGuard can provide employers with
an astronomical amount of private, secretly-gathered information to try
to quash workers’ legal recourse against unfair treatment."
These companies are masters of saying the quiet part out loud: Work
Examiner advertises that it can capture your employees' passwords for
the personal services they use, and many advertise the ability to slurp
in DMs from social media.
The analysis ends with a call to pass national and state privacy laws,
under these principles:
* Surveillance of workers—even on employer-owned devices—should be
necessary and proportionate.
* Tools should minimize the information they collect, and avoid
vacuuming up personal data like private messages and passwords.
* Workers should have the right to know what exactly their managers are
collecting.
* And workers need a private right of action, so they can sue employers
that violate these statutory privacy protections.
"Finally, workers may not feel comfortable speaking up about being
surveilled out of concern for staying employed in a time with record
unemployment. A choice between invasive and excessive monitoring and
joblessness is not really a choice at all."
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👶🏿 Big Cop's corporate armorers
US cities spend 20-45% of their budgets on policing on but cops run
foundations that solicit millions from large corporations, which then
take tax breaks for their donations.
The money goes into a slushfund used to procure off-the-books military
and surveillance gear.
A pair of illuminating reports from Littlesis detail how these
foundations turn corporations into deep-pocketed secret armorers for the
largest, most violent police forces in the nation.
First, who gives and what is spent:
https://news.littlesis.org/2020/06/18/corporate-backers-of-the-blue-how-corporations-bankroll-u-s-police-foundations/
Houston PD: "SWAT equipment, LRAD sound equipment, and dogs for the K-9
unit"
Philadelphia PD: "long guns, drones, and ballistic helmets"
Atlanta PD: "a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras."
LAPD: "surveillance software from Palantir" ("by having the foundation
purchase it for them, the LAPD was able to bypass...public meetings and
approval from the city council")
Who gives:
BoA: "$200,000 to NYC Police Foundation, $51,250 to Atlanta Police
Foundation, $25,000 to Boston Police Foundation, $10,000 to Los Angeles
Police Foundation; smaller donations to the Yarmouth MA, Sarasota,
Abilene, Duluth, Bellevue, and Sacramento & Glendale CA"
Goldman Sachs: "$250,000 to the Los Angeles Police Foundation in 2018,
as well as $15,000 to the NYC Police Foundation."
Wells Fargo: "'partner' and donor to the Seattle Police Foundation, and
it sits on the Atlanta Police Foundation’s board and sponsored its Blue
Jean Ball"
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock: "co-chaired the NYC Police Foundation’s
annual gala in 2017, 2018, and 2019"
SunTrust Bank: "$3 million to the Atlanta Police Foundation"
Commerce Bank of Washington: "partner and donor to the Seattle Police
Foundation"
Target: "major contributions to police foundations across the country,
including the NYC, Atlanta, and Seattle Police Foundations..$200K from
Target helped the LA Police Foundation purchase sophisticated
surveillance equipment"
Starbucks: "active donor to the Seattle Police Foundation and has a
representative on its board. The company also recently donated $25,000
to the NYC Police Foundation"
Coca Cola: "long time donor to the Atlanta Police Foundation and pledged
to give $2 million"
Walmart: "donates to the Washington D.C. Police Foundation"
Amazon: "sits on the executive committee of the Seattle Police
Foundation’s board and is a partner and donor, but it donates to police
foundations across the U.S. through its charitable program, AmazonSmile"
Motorola: Board seats on police foundations for Seattle, DC, Detroit;
donor to Chicago foundation, and "profits from selling body cams,
radios, and other products to police departments"
Verizon: Donor to Chicago and NYC foundations, "a board member of the
Detroit foundation," "Platinum Partners of the National Sheriff’s
Association, a law enforcement lobbying group"
Facebook, Google, and Microsoft: "partners and donors to the Seattle
Police Foundation"
AT&T;: "a deep-pocketed donor to the NYC Police Foundation"
Chevron: "has a spot on the Houston Police Foundation board"
DTE Energy: "donor to the Detroit Public Safety Foundation board"
Also implicated, sports teams: NFL’s Lions, NBA’s Pistons, MLB’s
Tigers, Seattle Mariners, Seattle Seahawks MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays, NFL’s
Tampa Bay Buccaneers, NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, and NY Mets
This "giving" doesn't just arm cops, it also helps corporations avoid
taxes. Many of these same companies appear on an Institute on Taxation
and Economic Policy list of notorious tax-dodgers, including profitable
firms that nevertheless pay NEGATIVE taxes, getting cash subsidies.
https://itep.org/corporate-tax-avoidance-in-the-first-year-of-the-trump-tax-law/
Littlesis makes the connections between dark-money arms and cyberweapon
purchases and corporate tax avoidance:
https://news.littlesis.org/2020/06/24/from-amazon-to-starbucks-corporations-avoid-billions-in-taxes-while-funding-police-foundations/
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👶🏿 Invigilation CEO doxes student
Lockdown created a spyware gold-rush, from Bossware that monitors
workers coerced into turning their homes into rent-free branch offices
to students forced to use "invigilation" software to monitor
pedagogically bankrupt high-stakes tests.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#proctorio
These tools are extraordinarily invasive - you can't design a monitoring
app that treats users adversaries unless its processes and files are
obfuscated, sinking deep hooks into systems that are often shared with
family members for work and education.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/15/invigilation/#invigilation
It shouldn't surprise you to learn that these companies have extremely
cavalier views of other peoples' privacy - especially the privacy of the
children whom they are paid to spy upon.
Even so, it's ghastly to learn that the CEO of Proctorio personally
dumped a student's private chat logs on Reddit in response to criticism
from the student of his product.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/01/ceo-of-exam-monitoring-software-proctorio-apologises-for-posting-students-chat-logs-on-reddit
Protorio CEO Mike Olsen admitted that he used the pseudonym
"artfulhacker" to dox the child, posting "If you’re gonna lie bro...
don’t do it when the company clearly has an entire transcript of your
conversation. ...shame on you."
The company told Naaman Zhou for the Guardian that they "take privacy
very seriously."
Previously, they promised critics that "footage, keystrokes and other
data can never be accessed by Proctorio staff" and could only be viewed
by a university's “approved administrators."
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👶🏿 Sun Ra's syllabus
In recent years, the idea of afrofuturism went from the fringes to being
so central that it's sparked debates about overuse:
https://www.tor.com/2019/06/19/white-bears-in-sugar-land-juneteenth-cages-and-afrofuturism/
But one thing is beyond dispute: Sun Ra is central to the afrofuturist
canon.
In 1971, Sun Ra designed a course for UC Berkeley called
"African-American Studies 198" - which had a host of subtitles, from
"Sun Ra 171" to "The Black Man in the Universe" to "The Black man in the
Cosmos."
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/full-lecture-and-reading-list-from-sun-ras-1971-uc-berkeley-course.html
As Open Culture's Josh Jones writes, everything about this course is
spectacular, even the reading list.
http://sisterezili.blogspot.com/2010/01/sun-ras-reading-list-for-african.html
But best of all were the lectures, which biographer John Szwed described:
"Sun Ra wrote biblical quotes on the board and then ‘permutated’
them—rewrote and transformed their letters and syntax into new equations
of meaning, while members of the Arkestra passed through the room,
preventing anyone from taping the class. His lecture subjects included
Neoplatonic doctrines; the application of ancient history and religious
texts to racial problems; pollution and war; and a radical
reinterpretation of the Bible in light of Egyptology."
Despite Ra's attempts, at least one student recorded at least one of
these lectures, and it's *amazing*:
https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/ra_sun/Ra-Sun_Berkeley-Lecture_1971.mp3
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👶🏿 Snowden on Little Brother
In just *one week*, Tor Books will publish a new omnibus edition of the
preferred texts of my NYT bestsellers LITTLE BROTHER and HOMELAND, with
a new introduction by Edward Snowden and a new cover from Will Staehle.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583
Alas, I won't be able to visit the festivals and bookstores I'd planned
to travel to for this launch, but there's still Dark Delicacies, my
marvellous neighborhood bookseller, who are taking orders for signed,
personalized copies of the book:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
Note for overseas readers: Dark Delicacies *will* ship to you, but you
need to email them for a quote on shipping: darkdel at darkdel.com.
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👶🏿 This day in history
#15yrsago Bullying restauranteur: People should keep their blogs on
paper https://hietanen.typepad.com/copyfraud/2005/06/another_day_wit.html
#5yrsago McKinney, TX wants $79K to retreive emails of the cop who
tackled bikini-clad teen
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150630/01355331496/city-claims-it-will-take-9000-hours-79000-to-fulfill-gawkers-request-emails-related-to-abusive-police-officer.shtml
#5yrsago Bigoted officials: First Amendment means we don't have to issue
marriage licenses to same-sex couples
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/30/us/same-sex-marriage-supreme-court-ruling-holdouts/index.html
#5yrsago GCHQ spied on Amnesty International, Investigatory Powers
Tribunal lied about it
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/01/major-reversal-british-tribunal-confirms-surveillance-amnesty-international-violated-rights/
#5yrsago Secret court will let NSA do mass surveillance for another six
months
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/secret-us-court-allows-resumption-of-bulk-phone-metadata-spying/
#5yrsago We've evolved to disbelieve evolution
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027715001080
#5yrsago US Customs and Border Protection: America's largest, most
corrupt police force
https://documents.latimes.com/homeland-security-advisory-council-interim-report/
#1yrago "I'm 10-15": the secret CBP Facebook group full of racism,
sexism, and jokes about migrant deaths
https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes
#1yrago "Fake News is an Oracle": how the falsehoods we believe reveal
the truth about our fears and aspirations
https://locusmag.com/2019/07/cory-doctorow-fake-news-is-an-oracle/
#1yrago Why can't we see big companies' tax returns?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/1/19102713/amazon-tax-returns-federal-2020-election-warren-biden-sanders
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👶🏿 Colophon
Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism
(https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Matthew Rimmer
(https://twitter.com/DrRimmer/), Kottke (https://kottke.org/).
Currently writing:
* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 519 words (33441 total).
* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Yesterday's
progress: 477 words (4735 total) -- FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE
Currently reading: Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro
Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 08)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/29/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-08/
Upcoming appearances:
* 'What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can
make tech less big', Jul 1, Oxford Internet Institute
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6015930181073/WN_MnlH5x2XTRqiKKmhU0QPAg
* In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10,
https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157
Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla
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