Data Culture – Page 12 – DIG 210 (Spring 2015)

Observations of 2/10 and 2/12

I was not really sure what I was going to observe at first, so I put a list together of some of the observations that I made during class. A lot of it ended up having to do with what the class was wearing on Tuesday and Thursday and whether or not the weather becoming colder than it had been would make any difference in what people were wearing. Overall I noticed that the numbers were pretty close to each other over the two days.

February 10, 2015

People in class: 28
Drinks: 9
Sweat shirts/Jackets on in class: 10
Collared shirts: 8
Long Sleeves: 27
Short Sleeves: 2
Glasses: 5
Hats: 0
Nike shoes: 7
Laptops: 14
Things Written on board: 1
Khakis: 7
Sweatpants: 5
Shorts: 1
Jeans: 12
Leggings: 3
Davidson Apparel: 5

February 12, 2015

People in class: 28
Drinks: 11
Sweat shirts/Jackets on in class: 13
Collared shirts: 8
Long Sleeves: 28
Short Sleeves: 0
Glasses: 6
Hats: 4
Nike shoes: 6
Laptops: 15
Things Written on board: 0
Khakis: 9
Sweatpants: 8
Shorts: 0
Jeans: 8
Leggings: 3
Davidson Apparel: 3

Prevalence of Sickness in Class

On Tuesday and Thursday of this week, I decided to observe some of the patterns of sickness that seem to be sweeping the campus this time of year. Over the length of each class (and the few minutes I was in the room before and after class), I recorded how many times I heard someone in the class:

Cough
Sneeze
Sniffle
Clear his/her throat
Say the word “flu”
Say the word “cold”
Say the word “sick”

From the data below, we can see a few trends. One obvious trend is that the all “sickness-related actions” seem to decrease on Thursday. However, some of this data could be skewed, because of the fishbowl discussion. I did spend some time in the fishbowl, and I was not able to track these behaviors as closely as I hoped during that time. Even so, it seemed to me that the prevalence of “sickness-related actions” did indeed decrease during Thursday’s class.

Tuesday, Feb. 10th		Thursday, Feb. 12th
Action	Occurrences	Action	Occurrences
Cough	26	Cough	14
Sneeze	2	Sneeze	2
Sniffle	23	Sniffle	12
Clear throat	24	Clear throat	11
“Flu”	1	“Flu”	0
“Sick”	2	“Sick”	1
“Cold”	1	“Cold”	1

Observing Our Attention Spans Throughout Class

On Tuesday and Thursday, I observed the tendencies of our classmates. I wanted to see how our posture and attention shifted throughout class. There were three observable categories: number of hands on faces, number of phones on tables, and number of students looking at laptops. The frequency of each of the categories was calculated in 15 minute intervals both Tuesday (2/11) and Thursday (2/13).

I predicted that people would get more tired (more hands touching faces) and people would lose attention (stare at their computers and phones) as class ensued. Those trends can be seen in some sections, but the trend is not perfectly linear.

Also, I would like to note that some of the statistics might have been skewed because of our “fishbowl” session on Tuesday.

Looking for a trade off

I’ve always understood our democratic system of governance as a trade off. For example, we pay taxes to the government but in exchange we expect protection from external threats. This perspective is how I attempt to validate the NSA’s snooping habits. Tuesday’s in-class questions/fishbowl exercise had me wondering what such a trade off would look like in this current situation. Maybe its because my emails, facebook posts and tweets are so mundane and boring that I really don’t care if the government sees them, but if I choose to accept that I’m possibly being surveilled then I absolutely expect something in return. I expect to feel completely safe wherever I go, be it through airports or Times Square, and anything less than a guarantee of my safety is unacceptable. I think this would possibly be the only thing worth an invasion of my privacy because its hard to object to the goal of national security.

Even following this logic, sometimes I’m still trying to convince myself that I could live with this deal. In class on Tuesday, Richard raised the point about third party contractors having access to people’s data and using that privilege to creep on their exes. This bothers me more than the NSA simply collecting a database of my phone calls or texts or tweets or whatever, and makes me reconsider my logic. I would like to assume that I could trust the government to prevent this, but I’m not sure that I can make that assumption. This abuse of privilege worries me more than the actual collection of my data.

As a final point, after reading The Guardian article and watching so many talking heads passionately discuss this issue, all I could think about was how lucky I am to be a citizen of a country where this discussion is possible. So many people have completely different opinions about the extent of the government’s reach, but others aren’t lucky enough to have even that option. I spent my semester abroad in Shanghai, and had a similar situation happened in China nobody would be talking about reining in the government’s snooping programs or establishing new oversight because they don’t have power to affect change in their government. Consent of the governed is not a reality in China. If the PLA was conducting the same kinds of data collection and analysis, which they likely are, the Chinese would have no way of protesting it. In my opinion, not being able to act on the knowledge of governmental spying would be a worse scenario than the one we find ourselves in today.

Why Does Privacy Matter?

In “Developing an Opinion on Edward Snowden’s Leaks”, the author describes some of the negative consequences of privacy violations. I think he hits three important points, but I want to highlight some of my thoughts on the posted Ted Talk by Glenn Greenwald.

Throughout the presentation, Greenwald attempts to legitimize the importance of privacy in our lives. He says that humans will inherently act differently when they know they are being watched and that people everywhere will refuse to give up private information even when they have nothing to hide. I completely agree with this statement, but I think a problem arises when humans are under undetected surveillance. Does their behavior actually change without them knowing? And does surveillance make human nature inherently bad or unnatural and which is worse?

Greenwald also makes reference to the social characteristics of humans. People interact with others everyday and peoples’ actions are often influenced by others around them. Does the fact that our behavior is molded by our environment in some way similar to the change in behavior brought about by a privacy breach?

Lastly, people do have the option to fight back against privacy breaches by limiting their internet use or using private search engines (see link below), but many people do not. Does this mean that they are not worried about their privacy or just too lazy to do something about it?

Overall, I think we are in an ever-changing battle with technology. In order to gain the benefits of today’s connected world, people must display their “private” information for others to see. Snowden’s file breach has made people realize the consequences of surveillance, but whether people will actually change their actions is a different question entirely.

Time Magazine Article “11 Simple Ways to Protect Your Privacy”

http://techland.time.com/2013/07/24/11-simple-ways-to-protect-your-privacy/

EU’s Response to NSA Surveillance Practices

Edward Snowden’s revelation has not only affected American’s, but it also caused concern and debate among European Union countries whether NSA surveillance programs should be tolerated. After the NSA scandal, EU executives announced that US will have to alter their surveillance projects in order to meet the EU laws, as well as allow legal redress in the US courts for those EU citizens whose rights may have been undermined by the NSA.

One of the biggest issues, however, is that EU can’t do much to control NSA activities in regards to their actions concerning Europe, because one of the main NSA’s collaborators in mass surveillance programs is Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters. The problem is that secret services in the European Union are strict remit of national governments, and even though EU commission has demanded to view the information that may concern or negatively affect citizens of the EU, its demand was failed to meet. One of the commissioners said, “I have direct competence in law enforcement but not in secret services. That remains with the member states. In general, secret services are national.”

NSA’s policies have been causing serious tensions between EU and US. Cecilia Malmström, the commissioner for home affairs explained that EU’s co-operations with the US in regards of surveillance is based off terrorism threats, and the revelations revealed by Snowden has put NSA’s activities in question. If US wants to overcome the current tensions, NSA must address these accusations and work with the EU in order to be able to collaborate in such way that does not harm EU citizens, yet still allow to prevent possible terrorism threats.

For more information: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/26/nsa-surveillance-europe-threatens-freeze-us-data-sharing

Datacide

DATACIDE: The Total Annihilation of Life as We Know It

An excellent article I recently read talks about how data, algorithms, and connectedness have changed our world and made us aware of heretofore hidden aspects of our collective selves..

I’ve seen the best minds of my generation sucked dry by the economics of the infinite scroll. Amidst the innovation fatigue inherent to a world with more phones than people, we’ve experienced a spectacular failure of the imagination and turned the internet, likely the only thing between us and a very dark future, into little more than a glorified counting machine.

Am I data, or am I human? The truth is somewhere in between. Next time you click I AGREE on some purposefully confusing terms and conditions form, pause for a moment to interrogate the power that lies behind the code. The dream of the internet may have proven difficult to maintain, but the solution is not to dream less, but to dream harder.

Invisible Observations: Week of February 2nd

Tasked with making observations and gathering data for two DIG 210 classes, February 3rd and 5th, I sought to try something unconventional. Rather than focus on visible characteristic(s), I thought I might gather data about the auditory aspect of our class. Given that we exchange knowledge in our class primary over the medium of sound, through our voices, I thought it might be interesting to transpose the sound waves that reverberated through Studio D of the Davidson library from 1:40pm to 2:55pm on those two days into a static 2D image that we can view and make observations about.

There are several limitations to this method of observation. One is the fact that my computer’s microphone was the sole conduit for generating data; being in one place and not designed with high-fidelity audio capture in mind, the data that my computer generates are limited in accuracy. Sounds that I or others at my table made register more prominently than equally loud sounds made by others. These data paint a picture from the vantage point of my computer, which on both occasions I tried to position as close to the center of the room as possible. Finally, my skills in audio analysis are extremely limited; with more expertise and better software, I would be able to provide many more statistics that might allow us to glean more information from these data.

The blue lines vertically indicate amplitude of the sound waves over the horizontal axis of time. We notice by comparing the two that the February 5th class was, on average, louder than the February 3rd class – given that a guest speaker spoke to the class through many speakers on the 5th, whereas Dr. Sample primarily lectured using only his vocal cords on the 3rd, this makes sense. We notice in both graphs more peaks toward the end of the class as opposed to the beginning, which could be the result of many factors – perhaps the conversation becomes more heated and interesting when the class is more involved in the material?

Note: I have chosen to not make the actual sound files available for a variety of reasons.

Developing an Opinion on Edward Snowden’s Leaks

When I first started reading the article, my knowledge of the Snowden leak was very limited. I knew he had taken classified documents and made them available to the public so that the public would be aware of privacy violations; however, anything beyond that I had not given a great deal of thought. After reading and listening through the article, I was still left with a sense of “Does it really matter?” All the article did was present to the reader that their privacy was being violated and that it was not a good thing; I never got any insight as to why violating a person’s data privacy was a bad thing, instead, the idea that it was bad was forced repetitively down my throat. So I spent some time in introspection and browsing through different articles online and I developed a very basic and short list of reasons why it was a bad thing (beyond the idea of it violating the Constitution).

I found a TED Talk that was given by the journalist, Glenn Greenwald, with whom Snowden confided his story. In it, he gives his argument to the people who argue “We don’t actually need privacy if we are not acting like criminals.” His response is to give them one of his email addresses and asks them to send him the addresses and passwords for all of their email accounts. He has never received one.
It leads the American public to believe that America is not as Democratic (yes I do know that we are more of a Republic than a democracy) as was once thought.
Snowden only took some of the classified documents…there are many other secrets that are undoubtedly as bad if not worse than the documents he lifted.

My opinion on the matter is much more complex than this blog post (and my list of reasons) allows, but hopefully by pointing out that the article only tells us that the leaks are bad, and not the potential implications of the leaks, you develop an opinion that goes beyond the surface.

Greenwald’s TED Talk:

Edward Snowden: Domestic Enemy or International Hero?

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US government had never been so exposed in failing to protect the country. The NSA, namely, admitted that they had failed in their intelligence gathering abilities and it was evident that surveillance needed to change in order to prevent another terrorist event from happen again. In the article published by “The Guardian,” the authors claim that the strong increase in surveillance can be credited to the 9/11 attacks and the major increase in cell phone and internet usage the past 10 years.

Enter Edward Snowden in 2013, who exposed the “unethical” actions of the NSA by releasing classified government information to the public. Amongst the documents that Snowden released, the US government was exposed for spying on its citizens using unethical methods, such as partnering with large communication companies and hacking online encryption codes meant to protect US citizens. Snowden rationale was that, “harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

So where does the finger pointing begin? As a government employee, Snowden was certainly exposed to classified information that, like much government information, was not meant to be seen by the public. So by releasing said information, he violated the obligation to his government and his nation. However, Snowden also exposed the NSA for, what he believed to be, questionable surveillance activity and gave attention to the questions: How much does the NSA know about our lives and have they taken domestic surveillance too far since 9/11?

The reason why I would favor the latter part of the previous argument is because of what the government could “hold over our heads” based on information they have collected. In the interview with Ladar Levison, Levison states that “a lot of people have nothing to hide” but “by collecting all of this information and making it only accessible to a small group of people, we are creating a world that is that close to becoming a totalitarian state.”

Nonetheless, Edward Snowden has created a near revolution that merge together elements of civil liberties, national security, and government surveillance power. Perhaps Snowden’s wrongdoing has sparked a change in the way we think about government surveillance that otherwise may have not come about for another couple of years.