Data Love

The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies

Roberto Simanowski, Brigitte Pichon, Dorian Rudnytsky, John Cayley

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542425
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Intelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms, the mining of big data has sparked a silent revolution. But algorithmic analysis and data mining are not simply byproducts of media development or the logical consequences of computation. They are the radicalization of the Enlightenment's quest for knowledge and progress. Data Love argues that the "cold civil war" of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us.

Roberto Simanowski elaborates on the changes data love has brought to the human condition while exploring the entanglements of those who—out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism, or passion—contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Writing from a philosophical standpoint, Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development and retrieves the concepts, events, and cultural artifacts of past centuries to help decode the programming of our present.

PART I

BEYOND THE NSA DEBATE

1

INTELLIGENCE AGENCY LOGIC

IN the summer of 2013 the twenty-nine-year-old IT specialist Edward Snowden flew into a foreign country carrying with him secret documents produced by his employer, the National Security Agency of the United States (NSA). From the transit zone of the Moscow airport and with the help of the Guardian and the Washington Post, he informed the world about the extent of the surveillance of telephone and Internet communications undertaken by American intelligence agencies. In doing this, the whistleblower Snowden became much more successful than Thomas Drake, a former department head at the NSA who, with the same motives, had criticized the excessive surveillance practices of the NSA first through official channels and then in 2010 by divulging information to a journalist from the Baltimore Sun, for which he was later accused of espionage. Snowden’s disclosures triggered an international sensation lasting many months, creating what historians at the time characterized as the last great epiphany to be experienced by media society.

This is how a report on the events of the NSA scandal of 2013 might begin in some distant future. The report would evaluate the event from a respectful historical distance and without the excitement or disappointment of earlier historians. From the distant future, this moment of revelation would prove to have been the last outcry before the realization that there were no alternatives to certain unstoppable technological, political, and social developments. The report from the future would reconstruct the case with historical objectivity, beginning by explaining how world leaders reacted.

The United States declares Snowden’s passport invalid and issues a warrant of arrest for the breach of secrecy and theft. The Brazilian president protests at the United Nations over spying on Brazilian citizens (including herself). She cancels her planned meeting with the president of the United States and by creating an investigative committee again proves her capacity to act after the traumatic experience of the “#vemprarua” upheavals in her own country. Ecuador—its embassy in London housing the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange—offers asylum to Snowden, thereby forgoing U.S. customs benefits. Germany denies Snowden’s request for asylum on the technicality that one cannot file an application from a foreign country. Russia grants asylum to Snowden for one year, provoking a further cooling of its relations with the United States and immediately causing the cancellation of a planned summit meeting between Obama and Putin.

Net theoreticians appreciated Snowden’s act because it forced society to debate matters that were long overdue for discussion. But acclaim did not come only from this quarter. Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic Party’s candidate for the chancellorship of Germany, and the European Union’s commissioner of justice, Viviane Reding, thanked Snowden for his civil courage and the debate he initiated.¹ Even a former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, supported Snowden. The state’s invasion of the private sphere, he claimed, had been excessive, and Snowden’s disclosure would in all likelihood prove useful in the long run.² The current president remained inflexible in his thinking, although at a White House press conference on August 11, 2013, he conceded that the work of the NSA had to be more transparent. He announced that a commissioner for data protection would be appointed. But President Obama was vehemently opposed to the idea that Snowden should be treated as a patriot and not as a traitor: “No, I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot. I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks. My preference, and I think the American people’s preference, would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws.” Even if it were the case that Obama was a step ahead of Snowden, there’s no denying that Snowden’s act accorded with the impetus of Obama’s review. Nonetheless, Snowden’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 underlines how different the reactions to Snowden’s “treason” have been, especially when it comes to assessing the effect of his act on the world order.

The disclosures and accusations did not implicate the NSA alone. The British intelligence agency was also involved, and, as was later discovered, the German Federal Intelligence Service was working closely with the NSA, which should not have surprised anyone since, after all, a part of the September 11, 2001, team of assassins had come from Hamburg. It was generally known and widely accepted that this catastrophic event had justified many governmental data breaches and restrictions of civil liberties in the new millennium. The belief that defense against international terrorism inevitably requires limits on data protection was shared by the Obama administration and many other politicians. Even moral philosophers agreed. Peter Singer, for example, valued the gain in security over the loss of privacy in his essay “The Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets” (2011) since he considered privacy a recent, chiefly Western phenomenon in the history of mankind, one whose importance he relativized. It was particularly easy at the time, our future report might conclude, to smooth the way for the transition from a democratic society to a surveillance state by way of fear and “prudence.”

If the future report were written by a German, it might at this point possibly refer to Christian Heller, who, simultaneously with Singer but independently, had published a sort of guide to the inevitable in his 2011 book Post-Privacy. Prima leben ohne Privatsphäre (Post-privacy. How to live well without a private sphere). Heller, the future report may then state, overcame the historical trauma of surveillance that has haunted German collective memory since the Third Reich and then the German Democratic Republic. It is possible that the report would regard Heller’s book as igniting the spark for “the transparent 90 percent,” the late 2010s citizen’s movement that demanded more intensive security controls and attracted more and more followers. With their slogan “we have nothing to hide,” they refused to risk their own lives for a minority’s excessive adherence to privacy. The report would show how the followers of this movement proudly repudiated any kind of encryption in their digital communications, how they voluntarily installed the federal government’s Trojan software on their computers and mobile devices, and how they were rewarded in return with VIP biometric security passes that granted them the use of special airplanes, subways, and buses.

No matter how these reports from the future would conclude, such a civil movement could be counted on to subscribe to statements such as the one from the German secretary of the interior at the time, Hans-Peter Friedrich of the Christian Social Union, who maintained that security is a “superfundamental right,” or like the one by the former secretary of the interior, Otto Schily, the “red sheriff” of the Social Democratic Party, who declared that law and order are social-democratic values and that the biggest danger does not come from the state and its intelligence agencies but from terrorism and organized crime.³

Secretaries of the interior are, by nature, partisans of the work of their intelligence agencies, over and above party-political lines. After all, the government issued the mandates for which these agencies are now being publicly scolded, namely, to ward off threats to the inner security of their countries by way of the undercover investigations of possible risks. As Friedrich said in the context of the NSA affair, nobody should be astonished or upset when intelligence agencies use the latest cutting-edge technologies. Intelligence agencies want to secure and enhance their effectiveness just as much as any other functional social system; whatever is technologically possible will be used. For this reason, ever since 9/11 intelligence agencies had been dreaming of the “full take” of all data from all citizens. What had failed to materialize until then, because of financial and technological shortcomings, became a real option with the increasing digitization of society. The consensus was that those who did not use the new possibilities for data collection and evaluation were refusing to work properly, which in this realm of work might almost be regarded as treason.

It is obvious that the situation after 9/11 cannot be compared with that under the Stasi in former German Democratic Republic. In the Federal Republic of Germany the intelligence agency is constitutionally legitimized and controlled by parliament, even if not all members of parliament see it this way and continue to demand more transparency. The stronger argument is a technical one: Surveillance is no longer done by an intelligence agent who scrutinizes the letters and conversations of an individual but by software that searches for certain key terms. Even though the surveillance is more all-encompassing because of its use of modern technologies, it is also more anonymous and more democratic because it is not aimed at specific individuals but at all of society, including the intelligence agent himself. One could regard this as the perfect solution to an internal contradiction within every democracy: As the work of intelligence agencies becomes more and more effective and cost efficient, the private sphere of citizens is increasingly protected by the machinery of such “distant reading.”

2

DOUBLE INDIFFERENCE

THE snooping around by the NSA and the support it received from other intelligence agencies was not the most scandalous aspect of the NSA affair. The real scandal lay in the helplessness of politics and the disinterest it revealed. The German president, who, as the former head of the Federal Commission on Stasi Affairs, should have been particularly sensitized regarding this subject, did not speak up at all. The chancellor spoke of the Internet as a “new territory for us all” and assured the public that on German soil German law has to prevail, as if the Internet could be bound to national laws by way of an increased insistence from the executive powers. The Social Democrats demanded complete clarification, as if they had nothing to do with setting the course for effective collaboration with the NSA and for a law on data retention during their own time in government. Others urged citizens to secure their own data more responsibly, as if it concerned only data presented voluntarily on Facebook and Twitter, as if all was well again as soon as cookies were blocked, e-mails encrypted, and the browser archive deleted every evening. Hardly any apps are at the disposal of those who are worried about their data since terms of use are not up for negotiation; apps triumphantly appear in the hard core of “take it or leave it.” Protecting one’s own data in this case means forgoing the use of a multitude of helpful, interesting, and simply entertaining programs. Perhaps there are a few everyday heroes who stubbornly refuse to click on “accept” if they feel that the appetite of an app for user and usage data is too great, but those who do this consistently must then ask themselves why they even own a smart phone if they use it only to make phone calls.

Nevertheless, at the time, the ignorance of the bulk of the population was scandalous. Even though a few folks demonstrated against the intelligence agencies’ surveillance, the reaction did not measure up to the seriousness of the incident, which some even labeled a “digital Fukushima.”¹ Most of those who were against surveillance still didn’t do anything against it, saying that they had nothing to hide anyway. This gesture of appeasement is not only naive; it is also immoral, as can be seen from a concurrent newscast reporting on the marriage of two men in a Protestant church. Still forbidden by law and frowned upon several decades ago, this was now accepted by society and even consecrated by the church. In other words, from today’s perspective, many people who had something to hide in the past—including those from the less recent past, such as doctors illegally dissecting corpses—had never been bad to begin with.

Those who advocate transparency across the board risk allying themselves with prevailing moral norms against the claims of minorities—or of new scientific findings, for that matter. In a democratic society that is aware of the partially backward-looking nature of its written and unwritten laws, it should be the duty of all citizens—a “superfundamental duty”—to protect the right to anonymity by practicing it themselves. This is the only way to cancel out the prospect that in the future everyone will be under suspicion if they attempt to evade outside control of their behavior—even if only by turning off their GPS. Considering that the laws of a democracy can never be either state of the art or carved in stone, this deserves serious reflection. Germany’s history presents a frightening example. At a certain time in the past German citizens treated their data openly and did not conceal their Jewish ancestry, having no idea that this would lead to their deaths. How are we to know today which part of our “harmless” data will at some point be turned against us under future power structures?

In the present circumstances the statement “I have nothing to hide” is naive. Even if we don’t care whether our GPS data will divulge with whom and where we have spent the night, we should not assume that others cannot figure us out better than we can ourselves. People are more than the sum of their data. Hidden insights are discovered in the digital summary and in comparisons, in the insights gained from statistics, and in the recognition of behavioral patterns. A famous, often-quoted example is that of the father from Minneapolis who complained to the retailer Target over the ads for baby products being sent to his underage daughter. Target had assumed her to be pregnant because the purchasing behavior of this woman had corresponded to the statistically generated consumption patterns of pregnant women. As it turned out, Target actually did know more about its customer than the father did about his daughter. What seems harmless to the initiator of an informationally implicated transaction—ordering a book from Amazon, commenting on YouTube, searching for certain terms through Google, or just buying certain articles—is a piece in the puzzle of a complex profile for big-data analysts, a profile that can tell them more about us than we know or want to know about ourselves. The algorithm is the psychoanalyst of the twenty-first century, delineating patterns of behavior that had previously remained hidden. The sales pitch for the Nike+ iPod Sport kit with pedometer is formulated precisely along these lines: “See all your activity in rich graphs and charts. Spot trends, get insights and discover things about yourself you never knew before.”² How is it possible to exercise our basic rights to informational self-determination when the analyst brings things to light of which we weren’t ourselves aware, all without asking us whether we permit the use of this information somewhere else or not?

No matter how one might assess or evaluate sensitivity to the breach of privacy in the population, suggestions for averting such breaches not only cited national and European laws against the media colonization of the United States but also made use of European technologies.³ One response was an initiative by the German instant-messenger provider Whistle.im that promised—in contrast and in response to the data-hungry WhatsApp—end-to-end encryption along with an allusion to German workmanship: “Secure Instant Messaging. Made in Germany” was their slogan. National regulation as a selling point for marketing on the Internet—what a change vis-à-vis the former animosity against state institutions! And how self-confidently and unceremoniously Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) stated it at the time: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.” Whereas now we were hoping for help from the good old nation-state against the corporations of Silicon Valley.

Of course the subject was not a new one. For a long time the Internet has been discussed as a form of neocolonialism because by way of the Internet Western technophilia and its forms of communication have come into their own worldwide. And so the tedium of “downtime,” which had hardly existed before and outside of the “carpe diem” dogma, becomes a lifestyle disease everywhere else because of our permanent communication over mobile media. Communities that in traditionalist cultures had the authority to determine the individual’s life are all of a sudden confronted with flexible concepts of friendship in social networks.⁴ In the context of the NSA debate, the media’s neocolonialism is now also internal to the Western world, for example, as structuring conflicts between German cul...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Preface
• Part I: Beyond the NSA Debate
• Part II: Paradigm Change
• Part III: The Joy of Numbers
• Part IV: Resistances
• Epilogue
• Postface
• Notes
• Index