Prism

Freedom of Information and the University on Fire

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David Harris Gershon has submitted a concerning report: “NSA Rejecting Every FOIA Request Made by US Citizens.” Specifically regarding PRISM, the letter sent back to Clayton Seymour after his FOIA request is fairly chilling: “we cannot acknowledge the existence or non-existence of such metadata . . . . Therefore, your request is denied because the fact of the existence or nonexistence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter in accordance with Executive Order 13526, as set for in Subparagraph (c) of section 1.4″ (emphasis mine).

Gershon unpacks the meaning of the letter: “the NSA is classifying every single bit of data it receives from ordinary American citizens based on the premise that it has been gathered covertly. Meaning: the NSA’s advertised justification for not granting FOIA requests is to protect our country. However, the real justification is the NSA’s covert violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment right not to be subject to unwarranted searches and seizures (in this case of their personal, digital data).”

And this image seems just too apt regarding my brief post about the decline of the humanities/higher ed the other day.

Eco-Disaster and Surveillance, Some Links

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So some articles of interest.

At Jacobin, Alyssa Battistoni has followed up her piece on disaster in the wake of Hurricane Sandy with “Back to No Future,” a pretty bleak essay on environmental change and the (lack of a) future.

Jeff Goodel has a piece in Rolling Stone,  “Goodbye, Miami,” about what (now inevitably) rising sea-levels will do to Miami.

And here’s a number of links re: the ongoing NSA drama.

Philip Bump has reported at The Atlantic Wire that the US has filed espionage charges against Edward Snowden.

Naomi Wolf raises a number of questions about Snowden, and then raises some more.

Falguina A. Sheth writes for Salon, “Snowden’s Real Crime: Humiliating the State.”

And Michael McCanne has a very interesting essay, “Total Information Awareness,” at The New Inquiry.

And linking ecological disaster and surveillance together, Nafeez Ahmed wrote a piece for The Guardian, “Pentagon Bracing for Public Dissent Over Climate and Energy Shocks.”

Repackaging the Archive (Part X): The Hyperarchivalism of the NSA’s Prism with Links

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In a recently published essay, I have defined the term “hyperarchive” as “an archive whose goal, whether stated or not, can be seen in an attempt to gather together as many documents and texts as it can, regardless of content.”[1] This term clearly applies to the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) data collection. In fact, Prism may well be the best example of a hyperarchive to date (besides the Web). To not at least gesture toward talking about Prism and massive data collection on this blog would constitute gross negligence.

One of the things that this blog consistently tries to demonstrate, draw attention to, and complicate/challenge, is the relationship between technologies of destruction and accumulation, even if only by noting (and sometimes enacting) such relationships with little-to-no commentary. I have refrained from saying much about the recent and developing story about Prism and the NSA,[2] both because it seems too “obvious” and too complex. Prism is an accumulatory technology with clear dangers and evils (which I do not think I have to spell out). Some of these dangers and evils are quite old now, and quite familiar.[3] Others are just emerging, and the potential for misusing the kind of data collected by Prism appears to be limitless. Given the parameters of the hyperarchival impulse of contemporaneity, and the reality of ubiquitous access to massive amounts of information, it is not even vaguely surprising that the NSA has been amassing massive amounts of data. And obviously there is quite a bit wrong with this (part of which is the fact that Edward J. Snowden’s revelation is not surprising).

Glen Greenwald, the writer for TheGuardian who broke this story and has been consistently reporting on it, asked nearly a month ago, “Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the US Government?” Most of us have probably been asking this question for a number of years. The fact that we have been asking this question seriously, for a sustained amount of time,[4] only reinforces the realities of contemporary informatics: that many of us have always tacitly assumed that we were being watched, recorded, etc., pretty much all the time. The fact that we are not much, much more upset about this scandal is probably due to this reality of contemporaneity. Thus Snowden’s whistleblowing is functioning as a confirmation of what everyone always already knew: the emperor is naked, we know, are not pretending otherwise, and don’t seem to mind. This is disturbing, to say the least.[5]

Basically, the issues being raised by the NSA scandal, the implications for thinking about information, surveillance, discipline, and control, issues regarding archives and literature, technology and war, media and communication, contemporaneity and the risk society, immigration, the nation, and the state, are many. I will not dwell on them here, in hopes that thinking about these issues will take the form of an essay (hopefully destined for a more permanent home in a [slightly] different kind of archive). In lieu of more sustained reflection and further remarks, here is a pretty decent smattering of links related to the issue in (more-or-less) chronological order. I imagine I will continue to post links regarding Prism well into the future.

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