John Menick Blog | Archive for ‘Surveillance’

Much to the relief of many New Yorkers, the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting decided to scrap its proposal to revise the city’s photography and permit laws. Inundated with stories from artists, journalists, amateur shutterbugs, concerned citizens, bloggers, libertarians, bird watchers, filmmakers, and regular folks, someone made a decent call downtown and backed off one of the most absurd proposals concerning public space in recent memory.

However, I have to say that I’m not confident that this will blip off our radar any time soon. The city is only proposing to redraft a new law, not back away from it entirely. It may be typical politics: test the waters with something outrageous, and scale back until people get tired of fighting or the city gets what it wanted in the first place. My feeling is that the NYPD just wants another excuse to search citizens, and there are plenty of ways to help facilitate that project. A watered-down version of the proposed legislation might do just fine.

Also of note: the above Times article mentions bird watcher D. Bruce Yolton and his website Urban Hawks. As I learned a couple of weeks ago from one of my commenters, in recent years birders all over the city have been unfairly targeted by police. Perhaps not unhappily, it’s been an unintended benefit of the legislation that so many people are learning about the rich and extremely vital NYC bird-watching community.

And then there’s also that awesome video.

As a commenter on the Gothamist points out: “Imagine what would happen if this space-age surveillance and hardline police resources were put to use against actual terrorists, rather than bike-riding college kids.”

Or so sez the FBI. I usually don’t like re-blogging Boing Boing posts, but heck, it’s too good a story to pass up. Happy holidays.

Blogger and architect Raed Jarrar was flying to California through JFK wearing an Artists Against the War t-shirt that said “We will not be silent” in both Arabic and English. JetBlue’ response?

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver’s license. He said “people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt”. I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English “we will not be silent”. You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said “I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive”. He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him “why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said “people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”. So I answered him “I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt”.

More from Raed Jarrar and Democracy Now.

Kevin Kelly’s article in the Times spends a refreshingly long time considering the epistemological consequences of Google Book Search before skidding headlong into the inevitable brick wall of US copyright laws. Yes, as Brewster Kahle exclaims, “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” But, as Kahle would be the first to admit, the Greeks didn’t have our copyright laws, and they definitely didn’t have our multinational corporations.

Google isn’t the library of Alexandria either. It’s a massive, publicly-trade corporation, and, depending on how one looks at it, Google is at heart a tech workshop, but at pocket an advertising company. Despite the mountains of money, Google’s business philosophy continues to be confused with that of a non-profit corporation. For some reason, journalists have taken its unofficial-official slogan, “Don’t be evil,” seriously, and projects like Google Book Search are gauged by their ethical, not economical, merits. Whether it was intended or not by Google execs, this pared-down ethical mantra is perhaps the greatest marketing move of the last decade. Journalists of all backgrounds genuinely seem to believe that the simplistic ethical intentions of a few highly educated executives will drive a company away from, say, censoring its search engine in China, or blackballing the journalists at CNET. Google? Evil? But they said they wouldn’t be…

Everything makes sense though when one accepts the basic fact that Google is a for-profit, publicly traded corporation. Google is not mission driven. It’s profit driven. Avoiding profit for the sake of the tastes of a few individuals would most likely be illegal, just as in the case of a non-profit making a profit from a means outside its mission statement would threaten its existence. That’s not to say that Google has adopted the rapacious practices of its predecessor Microsoft. But it sure looks poised to do so. And although the intentions of publishers who have taken Google to court can also be questioned, even the most extreme fair use advocates can’t help but see their point. If one understands that Google is out to make money, why should it then have a right to scan another corporation’s books, even if those books are ‘orphaned?’ Similarly, the relation becomes troublesome even if one takes into account the proposal by Google to only use a ‘snippet’ of a text. The entire book still sits scanned, indexed and ready to use on hard drives in some vast server farmer, and could potential be used or misused at any time in the future, regardless of what this year’s contract says.

A similar argument can be made concerning the information Google stores on each of its millions of users. No mission statement will prevent the Google privacy statement from being changed (all can be), or the data from being stolen, sold, or secretly slipped to the authorities. Many commentators believed that Google’s denying of their search stats to Congress had more to do with protecting the secret formula than their user’s privacy. And that’s if you trust Google. If they are anything like the airline companies, they could be telling their customers one thing, and the authorities something very different.