security

One of my perennial concerns is the growth of surveillance under network culture. I wanted to share two articles with you today, the first from Naomi Klein, who writes about the use of American surveillance technologies in the repression of dissidents in China's All-Seeing Eye, the second a call to action by Bruce Schneier entitled Our Data, Ourselves. Maybe it's that a generation that never experienced 1984 as a date in the future can't conceive of the dangers of surevillance society. Maybe it's that because the current administration has largely confined activities against citizens who aren't "typical Americans." Maybe it's that the Iron Curtain has been gone for so long. Maybe it's that the Myspace generation is already used to constant exposure of their intimate activities.

Whatever the reason, to imagine that surveillance culture is innocent is naïve. For modernists like Hannes Meyer, transparency was something to build into public buildings so that politicians couldn't operate behind closed doors anymore, not a means by which to repress the people. Times have changed, apparently. Nobody sees inside the Oval Office, but we have waned, our bodies transparent to  technology.

Over at We Make Money Not Art, Regine has a great recap of Trevor Paglen's research on the black world of CIA-run torture taxis, secret government installations, and classified government projects. Regine writes "His artistic work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and other more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us." See here.

I brought Trevor to the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design as part of the New Spaces, New Cartographers series I organized when I was Forum president in 2004 and was greatly impressed by the research he did. In an era in which our lives become as transparent as the government becomes opaque, Trevor shows us how we can turn the tables a little.

If you haven't heard by now, University of Florida campus security (rent-a-cops) tasered a student for asking John Kerry a question. Apparently he took too long to ask it.

Incredible.

My friend Mimi sends news of an outage at the 365 Main data center in San Francisco after a drunken employee went on a rampage. Craigslist, Typepad (which includes Mimi's blog!), Livejournal, Yelp!, and Technorati were all affected. More at Valleywag.

At the Washington Post (via Wired), you can read about yet another instance of unreasonable behavior by the post-9/11 national security state, in this case, the unlawful harrassment of a photographer shooting a random installation that turns out to be the DARPA headquarters.

Through actions such as this one—or the calculatingly demeaning but ineffectual "remove your shoes" security measures at the airport—the Bush-Cheney regime builds a regime of fear.

Then again, perhaps their fears are warranted…after all, a bunch of photographers, plane spotters, and the like, could cause a great deal of trouble.

On the positive side, I had zero harrassment while I was taking photographs for the infrastructural city book in Los Angeles, including this one, not far from city hall.

The New York Times reveals that Americans are delighting in putting secret rooms into their houses. These aren't necessarily armored Panic Rooms. Instead, many secret rooms are purely for delight. Our new rental in Montclair, NJ has a secret room, but alas, it's just a crawlspace for my boxes.