[Plura-list] DC's security theater panned; Weaponing and monetizing apophenia; Awful voting-machine demands silence; Someone Comes to Town Part 27

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* DC's security theater panned: The curtain-call's gonna be BRUTAL.

* Weaponing and monetizing apophenia: 5G conspiracies have a business-model.

* Awful voting-machine demands silence: ES&S; piggybacks censorship on
Dominion's grievances.

* Someone Comes to Town Part 27: My latest podcast installment.

* This day in history: 2006, 2016, 2020

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

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🤢 DC's security theater panned

After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry
of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or
requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a
driver's license.

Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear"  called these measures:
"Security Theater."

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent,
and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not
security itself.

https://memex.craphound.com/2003/08/21/beyond-fear-required-reading-for-ashcrofts-america/

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people
the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually
things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to
mitigate or avoid it.

But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you
might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car
along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their
flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

Despite the harms of security theater, it became a bipartisan consensus.
Every attack begat more theater - taking off shoes, surrendering
liquids, subjecting ourselves to facial recognition at the gate.

Not just airports, of course. Public buildings were increasingly turned
into a kind of state-run Broadway, with every employee a performer in a
longrunning, terrible epic play called "Security Theater."

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Washington DC, where you can't go
out for a pint of milk without passing a dozen high-security government
buildings, each under the directorship of a different auteur hoping to
score a security theater Tony Award.

As Brian McEntee writes in Slate, Washingtonians have been the
involuntary audience at ground zero for security theater's participatory
drama show, living in "the most overtly armored public spaces in the world."

https://slate.com/business/2021/01/capitol-riot-fortress-dc.html

20 years of shouting at bike-commuters, threatening to arrest people for
sledding down Capitol Hill and barking orders at lost tourists did not,
in fact, make the nation's capitol secure from an actual terror threat.

If history is any guide, the response will be *more* security theater,
from "unscalable fences" (cheered on by the same people who told
trumpists, "show me a 20-foot wall and I'll show you a 21 foot-ladder"),
more forever-closed streets, more ID checks and facial recognition.


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🤢 Weaponing and monetizing apophenia

In 2003's Pattern Recognition, William Gibson discusses the role of
"apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking.
We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and
hearing speech in static.

http://www.mindjack.com/books/gibsonpr.html

Apophenia is omnipresent and weird. It's why 5G conspiracy theorists
started circulating a guitar-pedal circuit diagram as a leaked 5G
cancer-microchip design (the diagram has a segment labeled "5G frequency").

https://www.guitarworld.com/news/conspiracy-theorists-share-schematic-for-5g-chip-they-claim-is-implanted-in-covid-19-vaccines-only-its-actually-for-the-boss-metal-zone

But this kind of hilarious idiocy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It's got a
business model. Companies like Devon's Energydots prey on people who've
been sucked in by their own apophenic misfirings to sell them
"Smartdots" - stickers to protect them from "radiation."

It will not surprise you to learn that Smartdots don't work. Indeed,
they don't do anything, except, perhaps, produce a hard-to-remove gummy
residue.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55613452

Energydots claims that their stickers are programmed with "scalar
energy" - a study by the University of Surrey's 6th Generation
Innovation Centre, commissioned by the BBC, was unable to detect "scalar
energy".

Energydots is a good case-study in how predators exploit apophenia. Its
victims' brains have misfired, and it seizes on the opportunity to part
them with their money, first, by making outlandish claims, and then by
lying about outside validation for those claims.

In Nov 2020, Energydots announced a partnership with the NHS to install
"brand new engagement units" in two London hospitals. They quickly
walked the claim back, saying it was just one hospital. Then they
deleted the press release. They say it was a "misunderstanding."

We are literally beset by unhinged people who believe fantastical things
that cause them to engage in irrational, dangerous and sometimes
murderous behavior. They bear some responsibility for that conduct.

But as we rush to blame the spread of that conduct on the "user
engagement" business-model of Big Tech, which is said to blindly
encourage these beliefs as click-generating activity, we pay short
shrift to the fraudsters who set out to exploit these beliefs.

If we're concerned that the tech platforms' business model incidentally
encourages conspiracies as an emergent property of algorithmic
amplification, let us also spare a thought for people who manufacture
and sell fraudulent goods at fantastic markups.

People whose sales rely on repeating and amplifying conspiratorial
nonsense and falsifying confirmation of their lies from respected public
health authorities.

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🤢 Awful voting-machine demands silence

One of the great ironies of the "stop the steal" conspiratorial fraud
and its focus on Dominion's voting machines is that voting machines are,
in fact, flaming garbage.

For decades - since Bush v Gore and before - security researchers have
been ringing the alarm about voting machine security and the terrible,
bullying, incompetent, indifferent companies that make them.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/bmd-insecure.pdf

Every year, the Defcon Voting Village folks demonstrate the myriad ways
in which voting machines are untrustworthy and not fit for purpose.
Their landmark 2019 report is required reading.

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-report-defcon27.pdf

But not all voting machines are equally terrible. Dominion's machines
share all the information security problems common to electronic voting,
but they use human-readable paper ballots that can be hand counted to
verify their tallies.

There are other machines that do not have this safeguard: many
all-in-one and ballot-marking devices do *not* produce these paper
trails that can be audited during contested elections.

One of the leading manufacturers of these extraordinarily bad machines
is Election Systems and Software (ESS), America's vote-tech monopolist.

ESS is a garbage company, notorious for making bad systems and
stonewalling when asked about them.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/14/with-nnedi-today-4pm/#ess

ESS sucks at making voting machines, but it excels at selling them to
local officials, and part of that grift is a keen nose for opportunities
to silence its critics.

Dominion is suing a parade of trumpy conspiracists for knowingly making
provably false statements about its machines. Progressives and other
members of the reality-based community have been popcorn-eating-gif
about it, all schadenfraudey to see these rotten people get theirs.

Most people cheering on Dominion don't know much about voting machines,
because most people don't know much about voting machines period. ESS is
exploiting that gap by suing ITS critics, implying that anyone who
criticizes voting machines is a trumpist insurrectionist.

They've gone after the leaders of SMART Elections, a nonprofit that has
been warning New York State about its insecure, unauditable ESS voting
machines.

ESS calls SMART's critiques "false, defamatory, and disparaging."

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/01/11/ess-voting-machine-company-sends-threats/

Among the sentiments they wish to prohibit people from uttering: "ESS's
ExpressVote XL is a bad machine."

Remember when Trump trolls created fake news sites and we publicized the
link between trumpism and fake news, only to have Trump start calling
his critics "fake news?"

It's happening again, but in reverse. The outrage at Trump's baseless
conspiracy claims about Dominion is being hijacked to discredit real
election security advocates by a powerful, corrupt monopolist.

Don't be taken in.

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🤢 Someone Comes to Town Part 27

This week on my podcast: part 27 of my serialized reading of "Someone
Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," my 2006 novel that Gene Wolfe
called "a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read." It's my last
podcast of 2020!

https://craphound.com/news/2021/01/11/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-27/

You can catch up on the other installments here:

https://craphound.com/podcast/?s=%22someone%20comes%22

and subscribe to my podcast feed here:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet
Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever, too!):

https://ia601503.us.archive.org/19/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_373/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_373_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_027.mp3

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🤢 This day in history

#15yrsago Hollywood’s MP denounces “users,” “EFF members” — video
https://web.archive.org/web/20060323035434/accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/12/1659162.html

#15yrsago #15yrsago Correcting the Record: Wikipedia vs The Register
https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/11/correcting-the-record-wikipedia-vs-the-register/

#5yrsago HOWTO make a motorcycle out of cigarette lighters
https://web.archive.org/web/20161008082647/https://imgur.com/user/joedusk

#5yrsago Chelsea Manning reviews book of Aaron Swartz’s writing Chelsea
Manning reviews book of Aaron Swartz’s writing

#5yrsago NSA says it will take four years to answer questions about its
kids’ coloring book
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vv7e74/the-nsa-told-me-it-needs-4-years-to-answer-a-foia-about-a-coloring-book

#1yrago William Gibson talks about scrapping and rewriting a novel after
the 2016 Trump election
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was

#1yrago Wireheading: when machine learning systems jolt their reward
centers by cheating
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vXzM5L6njDZSf4Ftk/defining-ai-wireheading

#1yrago America’s most popular governor: the lavishly corrupt Larry
Hogan [R-MD] https://newrepublic.com/article/156183/popular-crook-america

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🤢 Colophon

Today's top sources: Hackaday (https://hackaday.com/), Utopian
Encyclopedia (https://rollership.tumblr.com/), Boing Boing
(https://boingboing.net).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 539 words (97342 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 26)
https://craphound.com/news/2020/12/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-26/

Upcoming appearances:

* What if the future of our public lives online looked like _____?
(panel at New_ Public), Jan 13,
https://newpublic.org/festival/event/783/all-star-world-cafe-what-if-the-future-of-our-public-lives-online-looked-like

* Keynote for linux.conf.au, Jan 22 (US) 23 (Australia)
https://linux.conf.au/schedule/

* Evening with William Gibson, Jan 25,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/william-gibson-cory-doctorow-agency-tickets-132831910821

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

Recent appearances:

* Hedging Bets on the Future (Motherboard Cyber):
https://play.acast.com/s/cyber/hedgingbetsonthefuturewithauthorcorydoctorow

* Applying the Pandemic Mindset to Climate Change:
https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/12/applying-the-pandemic-mindset-to-climate-change-with-cory-doctorow

* 2020 Beaverbrook Lectures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66r57bGG5w

* Bibliotherapy/Shelf Healing:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1509671/6580831

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
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "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.

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

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