communication media in the running of their
busy lives, and on the other you have
governments who want to know our every
move, because there might be a terrorist
in our midst, once a decade, of those they
didn't plant anyway.
the enablers of this "human soap opera"
are the coders and programmers. They
know if a program's code has a sleeper spy code
in it.
As a result, they're rather blase' about surveillance,
just because they know how it works.
Anyway, you'd think that admitting
that you're not surprised would be
coupled with advice on encryption.
But, you would be wrong.
Checkit: Code academy
The
NSA, Code Literacy, and You
rushkoff
June 17, 2013
Whatever
we might think of Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents detailing
the NSA’s snooping on America’s - well, everyone’s - communications, at least
we all now know what’s going on.
Sure,
most of us on the coding side of the
screen already knew the deal. I haven’t found a programmer who was surprised by the news that our emails,
text messages, and phone calls are being logged and stored. If anything, most
of them are surprised that the general public seems so shocked. What were
people thinking? That Google just gives us services like Gmail for free? We pay for this stuff - not with cash, but with our
data.
None
of our data may be so interesting in itself, but when it’s combined with
everyone else’s it reveals a whole lot of information about us. Using factor
analysis and other statistical techniques, big data can identify members of a
population who might be about to purchase a new car, trying to have a baby, or
even about to change political affiliations. No logic is required; the people
and machines analyzing big data sets don’t care about why one set of data
points might indicate some other data point; they only care that it does.
As
long as corporations from Facebook to Twitter are collecting and using this
data, why shouldn’t government get in on the act? Instead of looking for
potential car buyers or new mothers, however, government is looking for potential terrorists. Or at least that’s what
they say. In reality, the sample size of known terrorists is so small that
it’s essentially impossible to draw statistical conclusions about their data.
The only way to know what they’re saying is to listen to what they’re saying. Luckily (or terrifyingly, depending
on your perspective) voice calls can be scanned for keywords as easily as a
text document. The conversation can then be parsed by humans to determine
whether there’s a threat.
The
big news here, if any, is that now this stuff is public knowledge. Most of my
friends and colleagues knew about government surveillance of digital
communications, already. Some former students had even told me about installing
switches at cell phone companies to be used for government snooping. Others helped write the database
architecture for facilities that store voicemail long after it has been
“deleted” by its recipients. Most of them were relieved that the
information they were afraid to leak
themselves is finally out.
But
they aren’t the only ones who had foreknowledge of this recent leak. Pretty
much anybody who knows how code works was prepared for this sort of revelation.
Because becoming code fluent is
about more than simply knowing enough javascript to get a job. It’s a way to
become familiar with the operating
system on which the human drama is playing itself out.
