Published Date 8/11/11 3:56 PM

The 20th century view of privacy is no longer valid for the 21st century world. The digital transition has ushered in a world of complete surveillance – the questions now are more about who watches who – who is empowered to watch you, not ‘should you be watched’.

Let’s briefly look at where we are at. Who are we hiding from?

Do you carry a mobile phone?

– Your service provider will have a record of your movements to within 500m or better every minute or so that your phone is on.

– All the texts and phone conversations can easily be recorded by a 3rd party.

– If you have a smartphone it will be broadcasting a unique Wi-Fi and blue-tooth signal to all receivers as you carry it around.

– If you “lose” your phone, it will give details of all calls in and out, all texts, all web pages visited by web history and cache. It will give access to all your social networks, both open and secure, by apps and via the ‘save password’ option in the web phone browser. Thus, someone has access to all your friends’ social networks as well as your own, all the documents saved and, of course, your contacts book.

Do you surf the web?

– Every website you visit will have via your IP address a record of your location within a few km’s.

– They can uniquely identify you through the browser configuration collected every time you visit a site.

– If you use a social network, then your life is an open book for both the corporations and any police government agency they provide the data too. They will know you and your social circles better than you do.

Do you go out in public in a city or town?

– Your image will be recorded on CCTV meany time’s on each trip

– Do you use public buildings? All on CCTV

– They can use face recognition to identify you and track you

– Number plate recognition will track your car

– Everyone has a camera in their pockets – you are in the background of some of these millions of shots and many of them are on Facebook and Twitter.

Do you use a store card, credit or debit card?

– Every transaction creates data that tracks your movements and habits.

Do you go to political meeting or demonstrations?

– The police Fit team have many images of you from unflattering angles

– The police spy in your group has video/stills and audio from your meetings

– As does the corporate spy: any group that is worth anything will have one or more of them.

Do you use encrypted communication and secure activist websites?

– The keylogger has already captured your passwords for your encrypted/secure e-mail communication so that it is open to those you don’t want to read it.

– The nice site admin who helpfully builds all your secure activist websites is employed by MI5 or Special Branch, just like the helpful man with a van who drives you to the demonstrations.

– And if you think you can hide by obscuring your online life, the pattern matching algorithms will connect the dots – to reveal who you talk to, who they talk to and what you/they do.

For a comedy look at all this, the Onion is a good source of news: http://www.theonion.com/articles/google-responds-to-privacy-concerns-with-unsettlin,16891/

As you can see, all the “bad people” already watch your every move. When you try to hide in the modern world, you are hiding from your friends, not your enemy. There are some cases where you can have a “semblance of privacy” – such as a teacher hiding their Facebook updates from the children they teach. Such limited privacy is mediated by the whim of the corporate owners – and in Facebook’s and Google’s case this is constantly changing.

I think it is too early to have a solution to this privacy debate, but it is high time to bring it into the wider public view. We hope this post is a vaccine that will make you a little “ill” so you can have the antibodies to fight off the worst social disease that is growing all around you.

Published Date 6/25/11 11:26 PM

This first banner  was made for Greenham Common Womens Peace camp in the 1980s to counter their vilification by main stream media. It was used during the 1984 miners strike and the Poll tax Riots too. Its now in Malta used by their Labour party in a general election. In the 1980s before the Internet got going we had to use banners,  post cards, posters  and word of mouth …

This Second banner was going to be a replica to use  here in UK… but  of course the message needed  to be different . They had the media.We have got the Message.
And the message now uses the internet.

Banners by Thalia Campbell

Published Date 6/2/11 2:16 PM

VisionOntv is a project to move people from being passive consumers to taking more of a role in production/curating and hosting news media. Its a project to empower the producers of media. So from a very broad-brush perspective:

Has to be easy for normal people to browse, with a constant pull towards people being more involved – even if this has a balancing affect on the ease of use. Consuming of content isn’t social change rather conversation leading to community self action is. Our mission is a hard one to use content to catalyse this change and this is a little harder for users, our website won’t run away from this issue.

Has to not be pulled into the Geek ghetto on complexity and obfuscation , even if this on balance affect security and efficiency. The command line and professorial server infrastructure may have advantages but the project will use desktop servers and GUI were ever possible so as not to disempower the producers also taking on the many of the roles of the sysadmins. With out this movement we end of up with a small cartel off Geek gatekeepers rather than a broad empowered community.

So consumers pushed into producers and producers pushed into sysadmins is our core Geek mission. We don’t wont to replace one media class with a another, we instead won’t to democratise and level the media so that it is a much wider and more embed in community’s that it covers.

To do this technology it self and the people who create it have to change.

Published Date 5/31/11 11:42 AM

A look at ideas around Ukuncut, which grew from the winding down of the climatecamp movement.

The ecology of hash-tag organising

A group of driven people get together in a pub and come up with a strategy and a hash-tag – they then build a aggregating website to display the hash-tag and self organise around it. This facilitates exciting, dramatic and dynamic actions, which draw in more dynamic and active crew, the aggregating website allows fast feedback.

Mainstream media pick this up, a group of media savey crew start to feed this media. The mainstream media coverage brings in a flood of more “liberal” activists and normal people, this swells the actions and makes them much more affective. This swerles round for a while.

The targets start to recognise the damage that is being done to them and the threat that they might have to change – and start a two prong strategy

* PR offensive to show how they are changing

* Use of private corpurtae spy’s, the courts and the police to repress the demonstration strategy

The problems of hash-tag organising start here, as the mainstream media outreach has seceded in bring in many more less experienced (and more liberal) people there attitudes start to dominate the hash-tag organising space. And the more experienced activist voices are submerged in this flow. The effects of this are 3 fold:

1) Actions start to follow a narrow predictable pattern which quickly becomes stale

2) The forces of repression create strategy’s for dealing with these static ideas/actions

3) The voices of change are submerged under the voices of flow, and the flow cercals to 1)

This leads to the inflexible liberal elements wilting under the focused repression and the movement stagnating and often turning on it self. It seams to me that hash-tag organising has no way out of this cyclical.

Published Date 5/29/11 4:05 PM