web 2.0 – ubisurv

Where Will the Big Red Balloons Be Next?

The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a $40,000 competition ostensibly to see examine the way communication works in Web2.0. The competition will see whether disributed teams working together online can uncover the location of large red weather balloons moored across the USA.

The ‘DARPA Network Challenge’ “will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems”.

All the headlines for this story have been verging on the amused (even The Guardian). Words like ‘whimsical’ and ‘wacky’ have been common. But it seems to me that this project has many underlying aims apart from those outlined in these superficial write-ups, not least of which are: how easily people in a culture of immediate gratification can be mobilised to state aims and in particular to do mundane intelligence and surveillance tasks (following the failure of simple old style rewards to work in the tracking down of Osama Bin Laden and other such problems), and 2, the prospects for manipulating ‘open-source intelligence’ in a more convenient manner, i.e. distributing military work and leveraging (a word the military loves) a new set of assets – the online public, which is paradoxially characterised by both an often extreme scepticism and paranoia, but at the same time, a general superficiality and biddability.

DARPA, of course, was one of the originators of the Internet in the first place (as it continues to remind us), but the increasingly ‘open’ nature of emergent online cultures has meant that the US military now has a chronic anxiety about the security threats posed not so much by overt enemies as by the general loss of control – in fact, there’s been talk for a while of an ‘open-source insurgency’, a strategic notion that in one discursive twist elides terrorism and the open-source / open-access movement, and the CIA has recently bought into firms that specialize in Web 2.0 monitoring.

It seems rather reminiscent of both the post-WW2 remobilisation of US citizens in things like the 1950s ‘Skywatch’ programs (which Matt Farish from the University of Toronto has been studying) or more specifically, some of the brilliant novels of manipulation that emerged from that same climate, in particular Phillip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, in which unwitting dupe, Raggle Gumm, plots missile strikes for an oppressive government whilst thinking he’s winning a newspaper competition, ‘Where will the Little Green Man be Next?’

So, who’s going to be playing ‘Where Will the Big Red Balloons Be Next?’ then… ?

Balloon4 — DARPA's Big Red Balloons (DARPA website)

CIA buys into Web 2.0 monitoring firm

Wired online has a report that the US Central Intelligence Agency has bought a significant stake in a market research firm called Visible Technologies that specializes in monitoring new social media such as blogs, mirco-blogs, forums, customer feedback sites and social networking sites (although not closed sites like Facebook – or at least that’s what they claim). This is interesting but it isn’t surprising – most of what intelligence agencies has always been sifting through the masses of openly available information out there – what is now called open-source intelligence – but the fact is that people are putting more of themselves out their than ever before, and material that you would never have expected to be of interest to either commercial or state organisations is now there to be mined for useful data.

(thanks, once again to Aaron Martin for this).

Google: ‘give us data or you could die!’

I’ve been keeping a bit of an eye on the way that online systems are being used to map disease spread, including by Google. What I didn’t anticipate is that Google would use this as a kind of emotional blackmail to persuade governments to allow them as much data as they like for as long as possible.

Arguing against the European Commission’s proposal that Google should have to delete personal data after 6 months, Larry Page claims that to do so would be “in direct conflict with being able to map pandemics” and that without this the “more likely we all are to die.”

Google talk a lot of sense sometimes – I was very impressed with their Privacy counsel, Richard Fleischer, at a meeting I was at the other week – and in many ways they are now an intimate part of the daily lives of millions of people, but this kind of overwrought emotionalism does them no favours and belies their moto, ‘don’t be evil’.

(again, thanks to Seda Gurses for finding this)

Google and Wikipedia

A nice rant in The Register from Encyclopedia Britannica president, Jorge Cauz, who claims that Google deliberately prioritizes Wikipedia entries. The article by Cade Metz goes on to produce a pretty convincing back up argument that this is true, and the excuse that Google offers that its search algorithms just do their job is clearly bogus. As Metz reminds us ¨those mindless Google algorithms aren’t controlled by mindless Google algorithms. They’re controlled by Google.¨ This truism is something many people tend to forget when they think about automated systems… And this is the company that of course we all use, but is now taking this trust to try to persuade us to give them all of our files with it´s new ´Gdrive´, part of its cloud-computing initiative that is supposed to see personal computing become simply software.

typing_monkey And it´s not as if Wikipedia is a sound source of information. Take a look at the entry on surveillance – it´s a disjointed mess that shows evidence of all sorts of axe-grinding, self-promotion and personal pathologies, along with some increasingly burried attempts at co-ordination and making sense of it all. I generally tell my students to avoid it. The myth of Web 2.0 is that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters might be able to produce the complete works of Shakespeare but, in practice, a small number of apes with computers can´t even produce a coherent definition of surveillance. This doesn´t mean I am in favour of the proposals to flag revisions to Wikipedia for approval by editors. Wikis are what they are. All that people, including those who run Wikipedia, need to do is be aware of that and not think that Wikipedia is anything more than it is. Especially Google´s programmers.