[Plura-list] Race, surveillance and tech; The Mounties lied about social surveillance; Telehealth chickenizes docs; Canada's GDPR

[Cory Doctorow]

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

I'm giving a keynote ("Monopolies, not mind-control") at the Data
Natives conference today:

https://datanatives.io/conference/schedule/

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

Today's links

* Race, surveillance and tech: The third Attack Surface lecture.

* The Mounties lied about social surveillance: They always get their
self-serving rationalisations.

* Telehealth chickenizes docs: And hurts patients (but it's great for
investors!).

* Canada's GDPR: Down with fictional consent!

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🦸🏾‍♀️ Race, surveillance and tech

Today, on the Attack Surface Lectures - a series of 8 panels at 8 indie
bookstores that Tor Books and I ran to launch the third Little Brother
novel in Oct: Race, Surveillance, and Tech with Meredith Whittaker and
Malkia Devich-Cyril, hosted by The Booksmith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdc4qqk3lQ0

You can also watch this without Youtube surveillance on the Internet
Archive:

https://archive.org/details/asl-intersectionality

or listen to the audio as an MP3:

https://archive.org/download/asl-intersectionality/Intersectionality%20with%20Malkia%20Devich-Cyril%20and%20Meredith%20Whittaker%E2%80%8B.mp3

Earlier instalments in the series:

I. Politics and Protest (with Eva Galperin and Ron Deibert, hosted by
The Strand):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/16/the-attack-surface-lectures-politics-and-protest-fixed/

II. Cross-Media Sci-Fi (with Amber Benson and John Rogers, hosted by the
Brookline Booksmith):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/2020/11/17/the-attack-surface-lectures-cross-media-sci-fi/

Here's a master post with all the media as it is goes live:

https://craphound.com/news/2020/11/16/attack-surface-lectures-master-post/

And you can also get this as it's posted on my podcast feed - search for
"Cory Doctorow podcast" in your podcatcher or use the RSS:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🦸🏾‍♀️ The Mounties lied about social surveillance

When you think of the RCMP, you probably imagine the romantic sight of
guys in archaic red brocaded uniforms doing close-order drill on horses
while waving Canadian flags.

The reality is that the RCMP is a police force grounded in racial
violence and genocide, which has not improved noticeably over the
following century, adding dirty tricks, antidemocratic political
oppression and domestic surveillance to its portfolio.

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/the-police-2-the-secret-history-of-the-rcmp/

The RCMP lie about this. It's not just the official lie of good-guy
Mounties patrolling the hinterlands for bandits and American gunrunners
- it's a string of ongoing, highly specific, contemporary lies about the
force's illegal conduct.

In 2019, The Tyee broke the story of "Project Wide Awake," the Mounties'
social media surveillance op. On the record, the Mounties denied it,
saying they were only using off-the-shelf commercial analytics tools,
not spy gear.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2019/03/25/Project-Wide-Awake/

Lies.

18 months later, after an FOI request and a complaint to the Information
Commissioner, The Tyee's got 3,000 pages of internal docs on Project
Wide Awake, revealing lawless mass surveillance, sweetheart contracts,
and state-sponsored hacking.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/11/16/You-Have-Zero-Privacy-RCMP-Web-Spying/

The RCMP isn't using off-the-shelf commercial analytics tools to watch
social media. They're using Babel X, a tool marketed for
law-enforcement, the use of which requires judicial authorisation under
Canadian law.

The contracts for Babel X and other spy tools were issued without
competitive bidding, on the grounds that the existence of these
procurements could compromise the surveillance op.

That may seem anodyne, but consider: the reason the RCMP says it doesn't
need a warrant to spy on all Canadians is that it is doing something
"ordinary" - that Canadians have no expectation of privacy or due
process on social media.

But (as Citizen Lab's Kate Robertson_ points out) its argument for
handing out these fat, no-bid contracts to cybermercenaries in secret is
that Canadians *don't* know this stuff is in use, and if they did, they
wouldn't like it and would change their behaviour.

When it comes to warrants, in other words, this stuff is ordinary. When
it comes to transparency, this stuff is completely extraordinary. You'd
think they'd have to pick one, but this is the Mounties. They always get
their self-serving rationalisation.

Project Wide Awake encompasses both social media and "darknet"
surveillance and casts a wide net; according to the RCMP's docs, they're
looking to scoop up "private communications" including those related to
"political protests."

The docs reveal that the Mounties bought a Facebook-hacking tool that
lets them uncover the identities of private friends' lists. The ability
to enumerate the private friends of FB users puts Canadians in jeopardy.

For example, the women who are private friends of a shelter can be
unmasked by their violent intimate partners. Once the RCMP learned that
a tool exists that puts Canadians' safety at risk, they had a duty to
report it and help FB close the hole.

Instead, they bought a license from the tool's developer and used it to
hack Facebook.

The Mounties knew they were committing crimes. To hide their operations
from social media companies, they used global proxies to disguise the
origin of their hacking activities.

They also created social media accounts under false identities, acting
in secret, without warrants, and against the policies of the social
media platforms.

All of this appears to have been controversial within the RCMP. When it
was first under discussion, the RCMP's CIO Pierre Perron blasted it,
prompting a flurry of memos about his outrage over the program's goals
and methods.

Shortly thereafter, Perron quit and went to Huawei (!), bringing with
all his proprietary national security knowledge; Christopher Parsons
from Citizen Lab speculates that hiring a top Mountie might have been
part of Huawei's charm offensive to win Canadian 5G infrastructure bids.

The controversy didn't end with Perron: in the training docs, Mounties
who may have questions about the legality of all this off-the-books
spying are advised, "You have zero privacy anyways, get over it."

The Mounties have a long history of authoritarian policing of democratic
dissent. During the period of martial law in 1970, the Mounties used the
cover of the October Crisis in Quebec to engage in a nationwide wave of
burglaries of antiwar, labour and racial justice groups.

The goal of these burglaries was to steal membership lists so that
people could be put under surveillance on the basis of their political
beliefs.

With that in mind, it can't be a coincidence that the current
surveillance op is called Project Wide Awake.

The name comes from an X-Men story arc in which a fascistic police force
hunts down mutants and puts them in concentration camps, denying them
the most basic of human and civil rights.

Sometimes, it's hard not to say the quiet part out loud, huh?

The Tyee's story by Bryan Carney is a bombshell. For more context, don't
miss Cynthia Khoo's thread breaking it down.

https://twitter.com/Cyn_K/status/1328546829617782786

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🦸🏾‍♀️ Telehealth chickenizes docs

The "shitty technology adoption curve" describes the arc of oppressive
technology: when you have a manifestly terrible idea, you can't ram it
down the throats of rich, powerful people who get to say no. You have to
find people whose complaints no one will listen to.

So our worst tech ideas start out with prisoners, asylum seekers and
mental patients, spread to children and blue collar workers, and ascend
the privilege gradient to the wealthy and powerful as they are
normalized and have their roughest corners sanded down.

For example: If you ate your dinner under the unblinking gaze of a
networked, remote-monitored video-camera 20 years ago, it was because
you were in a supermax prison. Today, it's because you've been unwise
enough to buy home cameras from Amazon, Google, or Apple.

I'm skeptical of prediction (fortune tellers are charlatans), but I do
believe in leading indicators. If you want a look at your likely
techno-oppressive future, just look at how we treat kids, blue-collar
workers, and prisoners:

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/affordances-cory-doctorow-sf-story-algorithmic-bias-facial-recognition.html

Another important concept: the quantitative fallacy. If you want to do
computer work on a complex issue, the qualitative elements are daunting.
Say you want to do exposure notification - it's easy to use Bluetooth
beacons to tell whether two people are close to each other.

But it's hard to know what's actually going on with the people those
beacons represent: are they in adjacent, sealed cars stuck in traffic,
or are they college kids attending an eyeball-licking party?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#thick-description

Rather than address chewy, irreducible, hard-to-compute qualitative
stuff, quants are prone to just incinerating it, leaving behind a
quantitative residue of dubious value, which is nevertheless easy to do
computation on.

It's not just contact tracing: think of the urge to reduce fair use (a
complex, qualitative doctrine hinging on an artist's intent and the
resulting aesthetic effect) into a set of hard and fast rules: if you
quote two lines of poetry, you're cool. Three lines? Piracy.

This powers Goodhart's Law: "a measurement becomes a target, then ceases
to be a good measurement." Discarding the qualitative leads us to extend
the lives of suffering, terminally ill people even when they beg for
release: they're living longer!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Connected to this: Chickenization, a term from the poultry industry,
describing the misclassification of workers as contractors, allowing
employers to shift all the risk onto workers and all the benefits to
themselves.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

Think of Uber drivers, paying their own insurance, gas, depreciation,
etc, but not being able to set their prices, not being able to decline a
fare, not being able to form a union, having no guaranteed minimum wage,
no disability benefits and no workplace safety guarantees.

Put it all together: the shitty technology curve, the quantitative
fallacy, and chickenization, and what do you get?

Telemedicine.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/why-are-telehealth-companies-treating-healthcare-like-the-gig-economy/

As Oliver Kharraz writes in Techcrunch, telemedicine is here to stay,
and while there are many ways telemedicine could benefit doctors and
patients, that's not the system we're getting.

Instead, we're getting doctors-as-commodities, paid for piecework
(chickenization), with outcomes measured in patients-per-hour not
long-term health (quantitative fallacy).

Doctors are powerful, wealthy white-collar workers, but the pandemic has
replaced their working conditions with those of a Pacific Rim outsource
call-center worker (shitty technology adoption curve).

An exploited call-center worker who can only fill in online forms - not
change policies, make exceptions, or even relay your dissatisfaction -
rarely solves your problem. That's not what the system's for - it's
there to neutralize your ability to negatively impact profits.

If they end up helping you, it's incidental to containing the risk you
present.

Likewise, shareholder-first telehealth isn't designed to make you well,
it's designed to respond to your immediate complaint and get you off the
line.

This medical worst-practice: replacing a personal relationship with a
medical professional that develops over time and treats you as a whole
person with hastily jotted EHR notes. The literature and the practice of
medicine are unequivocal: this doesn't make people well.

Kharraz provides two fixes that are critical to a qualitative,
non-shitty, de-chickenized telehealth system:

* The ability to choose a doc

* The ability to specify a nearby doc

The fact that these modest goals are out of reach of contemporary
telehealth really tells you all you need to know about who it serves.


_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🦸🏾‍♀️ Canada's GDPR

Yesterday, Canadian Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains introduced the
Digital Charter Implementation Act, which proposes a national privacy
standard for Canada akin to Europe's GDPR.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/privacy-bill-bains-fines-1.5804779

The law is complex and will undergo many changes, but its two most
salient features are:

I. The right to refuse to have your data collected and used; and

II. The right to have your data deleted if you change your mind.

With still penalties for companies that don't comply.

The latter is self-explanatory, but the former is really interesting.
Since the early days of packaged software, the tech industry has
operated on the basis of a fictional consent: "By being stupid enough to
be my customer (open this box, click this link, etc), you agree. That
I'm allowed to come over to your house, punch your grandmother, make
long distance calls, wear your underwear, and eat all the food in your
fridge.

"You agreed!"

Once a company decides it can declare that its customers have given
consent to non-negotiated, unconscionable contracts, the product-design
equilibrium shifts dramatically.

Features that benefit shareholders (but harm customers) get greenlit,
with a note to get legal to add more text to the sprawling novella of
garbage legalese that no one reads before the new version is released.

Think of the original Ipod, a stevejobsian curve-cornered slab of
plastic and chrome, stripped of ornamentation in favor of one button,
two ports, and a wheel - whose packaging included the world's shittiest
zine: its unreadable terms and conditions.

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/03/03/terms-and-conditions-the-bloviating-cruft-of-the-itunes-eula-combined-with-extraordinary-comic-book-mashups/

What the GDPR did, and what the new Canadian rule proposes, is that the
fiction of consent must be replaced with true consent. If you want to
get permission to do one million things with my data, then you have to
ask me one million plain-language, separate questions.

There can't be an "Accept All" button. The default has to be "no" and
this can only be changed to "Yes" if I manually toggle it. You can't
deny me access if I don't change to a "Yes," so your product needs a
million contingencies for how it interacts with me.

If you think about this for half a second, you'll realize that its
purpose isn't to allow companies to continue producing the kinds of
products you can only field if you can maintain the sham of consent. It
is to prohibit those products by raising the bar on consent.

It's the state saying, "You tell us that all the shady stuff is
undertaken with consent. OK, let's see if anyone actually consents to
this. If not, you gotta cut it out."

The idea is to shift the product-design equilibrium: "If we do this
terrible thing, we're going to have to add 15 more consent questions to
the onboarding process. We predict that 25% of potential users will bail
if we do this.

"What's more, we predict that 85% of the customers who do finish
onboarding will say no to five or more of these questions, which means
an extra year of development time to ensure compliance with their
preferences."

That's the real purpose of these explicit consent rules: the annihilate
the fiction of consent and expose the underlying reality - no one has
ever agreed to these terms and no rational person ever would.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🦸🏾‍♀️ This day in history

#15yrsago Brit backpackers take Indian call-centre jobs
https://web.archive.org/web/20051210103452/http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1284171

#10yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister inadvertently damns his own
copyright bill
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/11/moore-on-treating-consumers-unfairly/

#5yrsago CEOs are lucky, tall men
https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky

#1yrago Podcast: Jeannette Ng Was Right, John W. Campbell Was a Fascist
https://ia803108.us.archive.org/19/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_315/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_315_-_Jeannette_Ng_Was_Right_John_W_Campbell_Was_a_Fascist%20.mp3

#1yrago Beyond antitrust: the anti-monopoly movement and what it stands
for
https://onezero.medium.com/the-utah-statement-reviving-antimonopoly-traditions-for-the-era-of-big-tech-e6be198012d7

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🦸🏾‍♀️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Evan Kirstel (https://twitter.com/EvanKirstel),
Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/)

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 502 words (85254
total).

Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 23)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/11/16/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-23/

Upcoming appearances:

* Shaping the Digital Future Summit/Kaspersky, Nov 17,
https://transparency.kaspersky.com/home

* Misinformation and Disinformation in Science Fiction and Fantasy/LITA,
Nov 17, details TBD

* Keynote, Data Natives, Nov 18, https://datanatives.io/tickets/

* Keynote, Cybersummit 2020, Nov 26 https://www.cybera.ca/cyber-summit-2020/

* Keynote, Cologne Futures, Nov 27, details TBD

* Beaverbrook Lecture: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, Nov 30,
https://www.mcgill.ca/maxbellschool/channels/event/2020-beaverbrook-annual-lecture-part-ii-cory-doctorow-325538

* Teach-In Against Surveillance, Dec 1,
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/teach-in-against-surveillance-tickets-128926228821

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Fully Charged: The future of energy over the next 300 years
https://fullycharged.show/podcasts/podcast-84-the-future-of-energy-over-the-next-300-years-cory-doctorow/

* Allen School Distinguished Lecture "Early Onset Oppenheimers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep78A-jtcrE

* Author Stories Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxSPZn8EGTE

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "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

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. 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.

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20201118/815d702a/attachment.sig>