Does the fallout from Panama blow toward ... Helvetia?
It's like a nuke, going off in the world of secret wealth. And downwind effects will stretch to the Alps and far beyond.
Meanwhile...
== Transparency as a tool ==
Right now I am dealing with press over the Panama Leaks, which eerily resembles a scenario from my novel EARTH (1990). The question of whether this could lead to an unraveling of secret wealth is interesting. Already being called “the Wikileaks of the mega-rich,” the Panama Papers show how many powerful people around the world have used offshore and secret accounts to dodge taxes and sanctions, or to launder money.
Does this sound increasingly like the prelude to the “Helvetian War,” from EARTH? Oh, rest assured, I’ll have more to say about this, soon.
How Technology will expose corporate secrets: A fascinating article on the Fast Company site reveals how much information from legally open sources now flows through new data-handling groups who empower savvy investors to judge whether companies are worthwhile. This goes far beyond what a corporation must reveal in its financial and stockholder statements. For example “startups like Planet Labs and BlackSky Global have launched hundreds of shoebox-sized, orbital satellites that regularly photograph store parking lots, mining sites, plant smokestacks, storage depots, and distribution warehouses. This raw data captures a big chunk of companies' external operations footprints. …"
Spaceknow analyzes traffic of all of the world’s trucks and ships among mines, depots, and warehouses to deliver what they term "radical economic transparency." Hedge fund traders can subscribe to companies like RS Metrics, which uses imaging to monitor retail traffic and predict sales at chain stores in advance of earnings reports.”
Again, if your reflex is to only see all this in Big Brother terms, then you have the wrong reflexes. These info-flows only become Orwellian when they are clutched unequally by cheating elites. But when they empower an eco-NGO to catch and record every illegally harvested hardwood tree or illegally dumped toxin, exactly what will be your complaint then?
Soon, algorithms will sift and track this data. If we have open access and honest regulations and regulators, then the outcome should be better capitalism and better activism, with less waste and more efficiency.
Another area where transparency can help: Many federal and state lands agencies are critically underfunded, often unintentionally so... sometimes unable to report things like changes in flowering time due to climate change, or to inventory plant species. There is an increasing movement to get big groups of amateurs to descend on areas of public land and document everything they can over a day or a weekend - they call these activities bioblitze.
It's part of the movement toward Citizen Science that goes back a century, that I forecast burgeoning in EARTH, and talked about here. And here. iNaturalist.org in particular has burgeoned - as of right now there are 1,791,935 observations with locations marked on the map. Check it -- and possibly have fun while doing good for your planet.
It's part of the movement toward Citizen Science that goes back a century, that I forecast burgeoning in EARTH, and talked about here. And here. iNaturalist.org in particular has burgeoned - as of right now there are 1,791,935 observations with locations marked on the map. Check it -- and possibly have fun while doing good for your planet.
Ike tried to persuade Moscow to accept “open skies” so that we each would be able to see each others’ capabilities and calm down. This wan’t going to happen, given Russian paranoid tendencies exacerbated by the recent second world war, plus Cold War tensions. Indeed, the Politburo doubled down on secrecy and went into a tizzy when Eisenhower tried sending U2 Spy planes, to find out what they were doing. (The Soviets never had that problem with us. They had only to subscribe to Aviation Week.)
We were saved, the whole world was saved, ultimately, by spy satellites – they are why you are alive right now, boyz-n-girlz – which stabilized the world. Diametrically opposite to the lesson preached by Howard Hughes’s favorite flick, “Ice Station Zebra.”
When the Cold War thawed a bit, a series of treaties were signed to reduce nukes and back away from the brink… and finally Ike’s Open Skies treaty was signed, giving NATO and Russian planes the right – under careful conditions – to overfly each others’ territory with cameras. Now Russia seems intent on acting on that right. "One of the advantages of the Open Skies Treaty is that information — imagery — that is taken is shared openly among all the treaty parties," a spokesman said at a joint hearing of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees in December. "So one of the advantages with the Open Skies Treaty is that we know exactly what the Russians are imaging, because they must share the imagery with us." Still, military and intelligence officials have expressed serious concern. And Russian restrictions have limited our own views.
== Surveillance - Sousveillance ==
Could the Third Amendment be used to fight the surveillance state? Yes, the one you've scarcely heard of, because it has not been invoked in a century. I am skeptical. But then, my favorite is the Sixth. The one that truly prevents tyranny.
An interesting site suggests that Jeremy Bentham’’s Panopticon concept for top-down surveillance can fairly smoothly be transformed into laterally accountable sousveillance. Since these words are both French, it is interesting to see a French thinker’s approach to all this. Although the English translation is a bit awkward and rough, M. Ganascia makes several interesting points with his examples…
… while failing to address the key question of why these are the two only choices that we have – either (1) submitting to one-way watching by elites – and thus Big Brother forever… or else (2) taking on the citizen duty for all of us to watch – and thus ensuring Big Brother Never. Instead, M. Ganascia offers a series of interesting, brief anecdotes and examples of how we seem to be heading for #2, whether we like it or not.
One example: “Since he has been elected, President Obama has promoted the 'Government 2.0' (Gov 2.0) or the Open Government by making all the public data transparent and easily accessible to everybody. Through the Gov 2.0, President Obama has wanted to reconnect “we, the people of the United State” and the government. For instance, since February 2009, all the informations about the way public founds are used, about the frauds and the abuses and about public policy are given in the recovery.gov web site that is intended to “Track the Money” and to show, on maps, “where the Money is Going”. In a similar spirit the website data.gov provide access to all the data bases that are used by public services. For instance, data about toxics release inventory or clinical trials of drugs are now accessible to all citizens who can exploit them by themselves or with machines. The promoted Gov 2.0 is a typical case or sousveillance, that has been generalized to the administration of the overall state of the biggest and more influential nation in the world.”
== More on Transparency ==
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million scientific articles from journals - a good fraction of the peer-reviewed paper ever published - freely available online on SciHub, and refuses to shut it down, despite a court injunction.
One idea to beat the surveillance state: radical transparency: Hasan Elahi bares his life for all to see... a uniquely modern and with-it approach, if you have the guts. (He cites The Transparent Society .)
Much discussed lately is “tyranny of algorithms.” The tendency of even a well-meaning political and civil service system to rely upon coded procedures and weighting systems to decide budgetary allocations, or social security payments, or when a prisoner comes up for parole. Do we need better systems to vet these algorithms and make sure they aren’t in grievous error?
Samsung has confirmed that its "smart TV" sets, with voice activation are listening to customers' every word, and the company warns customers not to speak about personal information near the TV sets, as the sets can share information, including sensitive data, with Samsung as well as third-party services.
== Announcements ==
Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center proclaims: “We're excited to announce that edited footage from our eighth annual fall conference "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?" is now available on our Vimeo account. You can watch all of the panels, including Edward Snowden's keynote on "Why Privacy Matters" and David Brin's talk on The Transparent Society, by accessing the Bard conference's video collection here.
The PBS broadcast The Human Face of Big Data nationwide in February (now available on Amazon), focusing on both the promises and perils of the Big Data revolution.
Interview on Hearsay Culture: here I speak on transparency and cyber-utopianism with David S. Levine.
And yes, I'll soon be going to Panama! Well, thematically. Yipe. How right does a guy have to be, before CNN calls?
And yes, I'll soon be going to Panama! Well, thematically. Yipe. How right does a guy have to be, before CNN calls?
