Feeling Constrained By Your Digital `Liberation’? Speaking Personally, I Am

Here is a personal dispatch from New York City– Weren’t computers and all the delights of digital supposed to liberate and set us free?  I know that was once propounded as the concept, but computers are great. . .  Until they are not.               

Not very long ago I had yet more conversations with Verizon about our Verizon land line, which has been out of service since mid-May.  Verizon gave us a revised estimated restoration of service date extending another six weeks into the future.  That makes it more than an entire half year now in all, with us having to suspect that, as before, the date could be pushed back even further before everything concludes.

Verizon offered to give us a device that would use a cellular signal to supply service to the line.  In that case, they would start charging us again for the full price of a land line, notwithstanding the lower voice quality we would get, and that, on our own, we could install the equivalent connection via cell signal for a fraction of that price. We declined Verizon’s seemingly kind offer.

It is almost as if Verizon is trying to convince us that we don’t want to have a land line. . For one thing land lines are now so much more expensive than digital signal options.

Once upon a time, (and it was up until very recently) it was the land lines that never went out, that worked faithfully and dependably when electricity went out, whenever cell phones didn't, when there were internet or cable outages.  Land line problems, which pretty much never occurred, were always resolved within mere hours if they did occur, as if people's lives depended on it, as they often did. . . Now, it’s as if Verizon wants to convince us that land lines are the least dependable and desirable options.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but if you want to call Verizon about repairing your land line its very hard to find the number to do so: It’s like they hide the number. We also now get a separate bill for the land line from your cell phone.  If you call the easy-to-find number to call about cell phones, they will tell you have the wrong number to call about land lines.  However, on the other hand, if you call about your land line on the correct number using your cell phone (it’s about the only way to call if your land line isn’t working), a robot will ask if you are calling about fixing the cell number you are calling from.

About the only way it doesn’t feel that the phone company is pushing cell phones over land lines is that they haven’t devoted the resources– band-width etc.–  or used the technology (and it is available) to make the voice quality better.  Guess they just don’t want to give up that little bit of profit.

Just the other day, I was reading about good old-fashioned land lines in Tim Shorrock’s book “Spies for Hire,” so I was remembering that at page 199 Mr. Shorrock was saying that in the 1990's the NSA’s historical dominance in surveillance technology was beginning to fade and that it was having difficulty keeping up “with the millions of calls it was monitoring every day.”

He wrote:

And in the course of a few years, the world switched from using telephone lines and calls beamed by radar to using fiber-optic lines, cell phones, and wireless technology. The NSA's eavesdropping skills, in contrast, were in the old telephony infrastructure and electronic signals; the fiber-optic lines increasingly used around the world were almost impossible to monitor from above the ground.

"Wiretapping was physically relatively easy" prior to the 1990s, says Peter Swire, the Ohio State law professor. “If I touch my copper wires to your copper wire, I can listen in. That's the old-fashioned wire-tap.”  But that doesn't work with fiber optics. “If I touch my glass to your piece of glass, it doesn't do anything to conduct.” As fiber optics increasingly became the system of choice for communications, intelligence analysts began to say the NSA was “going deaf.” 

But as we all know now from the Snowden revelations, things pretty much flipped around after that: The NSA got the technology it needs to collect vast quantities of information and data electronically transmitted over the newer infrastructure and have that automatically transcribed, indexed and searchable.  They can even unleash artificial intelligence on it.  “Total Information Awareness,” it’s an intelligence agency catchphrase, it’s the name of a program and it’s even an acronym: “TIA.”  So these days it’s really become the reverse, the NSA, must by contrast to those nostalgic old days, feel relatively deaf with the old copper wire technologies.

When our Verizon land line went out, our intercom for people coming into the building to visit our apartment went out as well.  In all likelihood, that’s because our intercom used the phone line to for us to hear people at our front door and operate the front door lock to let them in.  That’s the way it's been for a number of years, since we went with a new state-of-the-art system in 1996.  When we moved into our building before that, there was a system with push button squawk boxes that had its own designated speaker lines and power source.  We also discovered during a renovation of our 1883 building, once the tallest in Brooklyn, that once upon a time they did it the real old-fashioned way: The walls were filled with courses of hollow tin tubes, one for each apartment in the building, that went all the way up to the top floors.

Our 1996 system was always supposed to work with or without a telephone company involved, but because the technology is now different (and Verizon is reportedly difficult and obstructionist, if not an outright saboteur) we are going to have to get a new system for the building.  The new systems these days all work through our cell phones.  Whoever comes to your front door to visit winds up, by pressing the front door bell, calling you through your cell phone.  Interesting.

Another way I am feeling constrained by technology right now is that I am having problems with Apple.  Yes, I guess that means what I am telling you is that I am having trouble with my cell phone too.  Actually, what I am having problems with is losing my “memos,” the notes, I store on my phone for information and reference. . . .

. . . To be fair, the problem also involves AOL.  (BTW: Let’s mention, for those of you who don’t know, the AOL email service recently merged with the Yahoo email service, so AOL and Yahoo are no longer competitors or alternatives to each other; they are just two different faces for identically operating services– When AOL changed its terms of service recently, Yahoo made exactly the same changes at exactly the same time, with exactly the same message to users asking us if we `consented’ to their new terms.)

What happened with my Apple cell phone is that an update for the operating system came through.  After my phone loaded it, my AOL email no longer worked properly; I was receiving emails, but I could not any longer send emails from AOL, my main email account.  When I tried I got a message about not being ablet to find the server.  (I know other AOL subscribers, so I know I was not the only one who this happened to.)  I intuited that the solution was to simply delete my AOL account from my phone and reinstall it.  (In fact that is what Apple Support told other users to do as well.)  I even did some preliminary research just to reconfirm that, as should have been the case, I would not lose anything this way: Advisory sites told me I wouldn’t lose anything because the information was all securely on a server that would put it right back on my phone.

I deleted and reinstalled my AOL account on my phone.  My AOL email worked perfectly; I received emails and I could send them again.  Then a few days later, I noted that all my memos were gone from my phone.  Why?: Because my memos were stored as AOL memos and my phone was apparently now pointing to a different server for memos than it had before.

What were these “memos” of mine that were missing?  Oh, just a few things I’d been collecting over the decades: Family anecdotes and reminiscences involving ancestors or histories that had been emailed to me; a list of about a hundred classic films I had compiled by genre for my daughters as suggested viewing as they grew up; things to remember like my eye glass prescription or for filling out medical forms, how many micrograms I am (or my mother is) taking for certain prescriptions; a list of all the mayors of NYC, and another of the president’s of the United States; the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights and other amendments; key facts about global warming/climate change I’d collected over time; a time line I’d put together with major events in the formation and geo-history of the earth and the evolution of different species, including mankind on earth; what everyone in my family wants if I am picking up dinner at Chipolte .  . . .  I could go on, but you get the idea: a collection of the things you want to collect and have on hand for easy reference.

In the very distant past, I would have kept a lot of these things in my pocket in a small notebook, perhaps a few inserted pages therein, or in my pocket calendars.  Remember pocket calendars?; Remember when everybody had one? . .

. . . At a later time, I was carrying these notes in my Palm Pilot, the last one of these I owned being a Palm V.  That’s what replaced my calendar too.  The Palm was nice because it not only kept all these notes available to me in my pocket, it also “synced” to make them available on my computers and, vice versa, moved what I wanted from my computer to put in my pocket in the Palm.  My computers were safely under my control.

There were nice things about those days: My Palm also played music and when I wanted it to be able to hold more information or music I could insert tiny memory cards that could be upgraded and were always getting cheaper, going from inexpensive to costing still less, at the same time they were becoming exponentially more capacious.  My iPhone now has tons of memory, but only because I was careful to pay extra for a lot of it upfront: I can now never upgrade.

When I started carrying a phone with me (and the Palm Pilots came in phone versions too in the fashion of what everyone was referring to back then as “convergence”), I never ran out of battery, because I carried two extra batteries in my pocket (they were cheap and small) to swap out whenever needed.  You can’t do that with an iPhone.

When I gave up my Palm Pilot to start using an iPhone as my new phone (and for my calendar and address book), I would have lost my collection of memos, except that, obviously, I was not the only one who didn’t want to lose data like that: There was an iPhone app that would efficiently transfer the notes with all these things I wanted to remember, and it would keep them where I could open and, by hitting the app’s little button, I could search through them.  It was a fine solution for a while. . .

There came a day when my iPhone 4s operating system needed to be `upgraded.’   I didn’t want to upgrade: I had been holding back from doing so and skipped quite a few iterations of 'upgrade'.  But Twitter and some other things on my iPhone that had been working fine, suddenly weren’t working any longer.  At the Apple Genius desk they told me I had to upgrade the operating system to make Twitter work again.  I ‘upgraded’ and doing so caused my handy memo app to stop working.  That’s when I “moved” my memos, this time to the iPhone `notes’ app (in the AOL category) by laboriously copying them there.  To do so, I had to restore my 4s iPhone to its previous state to temporarily get back the previously handy app that wouldn’t work with the upgrade.

In the end, upgrading my 4s iPhone to the new operating system (IOS) to use Twitter was not such a good idea in certain other ways.  It turns out that the new IOS had a buggy relationship with 4s iPhones.  It caused the phone to think the internal antenna was overheating and shut it down, thus turning off the phone’s wifi access to the internet, while it also wrecked the phone’s battery life.  (The same thing had happened to my wife's phone when upgraded.)  On the internet (particularly YouTube videos) I found lots of advice and videos telling me that there was strange fix to the problem: Heating the phone up to a high heat with a hair dryer and then freezing it to reset its calibrations.  At the Apple Genius Bar they told me this was very ill-advised; that it would break the phone and that I needed to buy a new one, advice to which I succumbed.  Nevertheless, trying the hair dryer fix on the device that was then no longer my phone, it did indeed, absolutely fix it (and it has stayed fixed), so the device is now a very nice music player.

Was Apple just trying to sell me, like other 4s owners, a new phone?
 
Apple Support hasn’t been able to fix my most recent lost memo problem yet.  They tell me they are still trying.  Let me explain that I haven’t exactly lost my memos completely.  My memos are still on my iPad, and because I did not upgrade my iPad to the new operating system like I did my phone they are not lost to me there.  But I can’t upgrade my iPad to the new operating system although my iPad persists in electronic notifications telling me that I should want to.  Apple Support tells me if I upgrade I will lose my memos from that device too.

There is a workaround: I could “move” all the memos still on my iPad from the AOL category (thus the AOL server) to the iCloud memo category (which get saved by Apple on the iCloud server).  Do you remember when Apple was working to convince you to store all your music on their iCloud server?  This is sort of the same thing, except that it means that Apple gets all your memos as well any of your music that you might have entrusted to their cloud.  It wasn’t exactly consoling to learn that, as I was considering this, the iCloud server went down for a while.  People I knew couldn't use their iCloud accounts to send emails. It’s interesting to speculate whether the system was overtaxed with people moving data onto their cloud for the same reason that I was considering doing so just at that moment.

I could also go to look at some of my older notes and memos in the desktop program that went with my old Palm that operates on my faithful old and steady XP operating system computer.  I could do that, but Microsoft has abandoned support for the XP operating system and doesn't want me using it any longer.   Browsers are not working well with it anymore.   The abandonment was a major reason I had to buy and migrate to a new computer.

I must confess that, while it was working on my phone, it was nice to have my memos and notes about things “in the cloud,” since I could make a note or put in an update on my iPad and it would show up on my iPhone or vice versa.  Maybe it’s less private, but having things in the cloud can feel reassuring and easy— until those things disappear.

It has been suggested that the ability to stream all sorts of excellent films from the cloud makes it seem “less important to purchase and own pricey Criterion Blu-rays or to leave the house to see a digital restoration at the American Cinematheque,” when you can conveniently rely on the cloud, but now some cinephiles are declaring that they will “clutch” their “Blu-Rays and DVDs tighter” since Filmstruck, the classic film streaming service from Criterion and Turner Classic movies, announced that it is shutting down after just two years of operation.  It was just announced this October, but the “lights go out” at the company on November 29th.

That shutdown may very well be attributable to the different decisions and views about profit engendered by AT&T’s monopolistic takeover of Time Warner.  There are fewer and fewer companies owning things and delivering such things as news and content. This shifts the thinking of those decision makers about what we may be delivered as consumers as that number dwindles steadily downward.

Would it be better and more secure to buy your streaming rights from Amazon, and if you buy a film from Amazon, do you really own it forever?  Might you then find yourself rooting for Amazon’s continued existence?

I know that I am complaining about some of the technology that we have, but sometimes it amazes me, and I complain about the technology that we don’t get—  Once upon a time, not that long ago it seems, I carried a small pocket radio with me at all times.  It’s the way I quickly knew that radio stations were down on 9/11, because I tuned in for news on it that morning as I was arriving at work.  Since that time, radio technology has been improved.  Something called HD radio, or “High Definition” radio has been invented and deployed.  It’s radio that provides an ultra-clear listening experience, without the static.  It even allows extra stations and programming to be broadcast with extra spectrum needing to be assigned to it.  You could be listening to it now and you could easily be carrying a tiny inexpensive HD radio in you pocket.  In fact, taking up no space, they can be built into MP3 music players.  That’s what Microsoft did in 2009 when it designed its new Zune music player. 

Palm Pilots and Microsoft's Internet capable 2009 HD radio and MP3 Music player, mysteriously withdrawn from the market- Try finding pocket HD radios now: It's hard!

Then Microsoft mysteriously withdrew its Zune players from the market, abandoning everything to Apple.  Mini-portable pocket HD radios have been designed and built since, proving that they need cost virtually nothing, but try finding one: They are inexplicably almost totally absent from the marketplace now.

I remember periodically going in and asking the salesmen at J&R (remember the J&R, the now vanished cornucopia electronics store?) why they didn’t have other combination music players/HD radios.  I remember the shrug of the salesmen as they responded that people were supposed to be listening to their music and radio stations over the internet now.  But sometimes you are not close to the internet or a cell phone signal that could connect you.  And there is a difference: When you listen to terrestrial broadcast radio no one can monitor you and collect your data.

Is it just that almost everyone automatically carries a phone now so they don’t think about what else could be available?  It would be a cinch for our slim little phones with built in cell antenna and built in wifi antennae to also have HD radio capacity that way the 2009 Zunes (which also accessed the internet) did.  It would be a cinch also for them to load apps that would (like Tivos or DVRs for radio) and record programs time shifting them for later listening.  Maybe that’s solving a problem that podcasting also readily solves, but it would give the user more control and there might not be the same kind of monitoring and data collection.

Getting back to my disappearing memos— People warn that what is in the digital realm can’t be expected to be forgotten, that your college antics in Facebook posts could follow you around for life.  All right, fair enough, but the potential evanescence of the digital can also be frightening.  HBO recently aired a new film version of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s very famous novel about a future where the government has banned books and burns them.  I found the remake quite inferior to François Truffaut’s 1966 poetic film with its brooding Bernard Herrmann score.  Nevertheless the film briefly introduced a brilliant notion that it hardly explained and didn’t elaborate upon at all: That the book-loving enemies of the government were subject to being punished by having their identities digitally `erased.’

That seems potentially terrifying.  And maybe it was more and more terrifying because the film didn't make clear what was being erased.  As more and more of our identities and the record of who we are is entrusted to a few big companies that may or may not keep what we give them, it seems there is a huge proportion of who we are documented to be and how we might remember about our selves, friends and families, that might disappear when those companies vanish or if we fail to migrate to their next idea for the digital playgrounds they want us to be playing in.

I am convinced that many families have stopped keeping scrap books, expecting Facebook and/or other web and social media platforms to make it all available for them in perpetuity.  Want an example of the way things can disappear?: An entire major social media connection service set up by Google to compete with Facebook, Google’s Google+, is going to be shut down.  (I don't whether that means that all my Google+ posts will vanish.  Yoko Ono's?)  Fairly widely used, Google+ is pretty closely modeled on Facebook; it's more or less the same thing.  It presently hasn’t gotten to nearly the same scale as Facebook, which is probably why the shutting down of such a similar site doesn’t cause us to image that Facebook, which didn’t exist in 2003, might one day not exist again.
    
The timing of the shutting down of Google+ as well as the reasons given for it are suspicious, something I’ll have to get into in a later article.  Facebook isn’t down, but just recently in a huge censorship binge (right in time for the midterm elections) Facebook expanding upon previous censorship endeavors is taking down hundreds of pages (apparently coordinating its censorship with Twitter in doing so).  Many trying to do good work (although it may have been considered dangerous or irksome to government officials or the corptocracy) have lost year's worth of work they expected to keep along with connections to online communities they had been building, all of which will have to be subject another later National Notice article.

Mainly, I just wanted to ask in this article: Are you feeling constrained by your digital “liberation”?  Because I am.

Meta-Irony Of Trying To Mount A Social Network Campaign To Get People To See Oliver Stone’s Movie “Snowden” and To Pardon Snowden- How Efforts To Help Snowden Could Be Impeded

"Pardon Snowden": You are entreated to "follow the campaign."  Have You?  Can you?  Have you thought about. . . .

Concurrent with the September opening of Oliver Stone’s excellent new movie “Snowden” about the illegal surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden, a campaign heavily supported by social media was launched to have Snowden pardoned.  The campaign has a website, and is using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

There is a meta-irony in this in that, given the tools at the disposal of the National Security Agency, the agency that feels thwarted by Mr. Snowden concerning multiple issues about which they are at loggerheads, social media, may not be a dependable, or entirely serviceable tool.  That’s if you suspect that the NSA may be engaged in more than “passive” surveillance.

In the earlier Academy Ward winning documentary “Citizen Four” about Snowden, Jacob Appelbaum, an encryption and security software developer and journalist, testified at a September 2013 European Parliament hearing investigating NSA searches of EU citizens and companies, told the assembly:

There is this myth of the passive surveillance machine, but actually what is surveillance except control? This notion that the NSA are passive this is nonsense.  What we see is that they actively attack European citizens, American citizens and, in fact, anyone that they can if they perceive an advantage.

Do we need to worry that the NSA puts its finger on the scale to control outcomes?  If so, in which situations and how would we know?  Would the NSA or other U.S. security agencies only do so abroad, and, if so, in a world without borders, where communications, interactions and influence bounce back and forth across the world, does that matter? . . .

. . .  When it comes social media, don’t nearly all of us have foreign Facebook friends or follow people on Twitter who are not U.S. Citizens?

Here is why, when it comes to political dissent or anything that the NSA thinks threatens it, social media may not be a dependable level playing field.  (What might government and the NSA feel threatened by?: Perhaps anything that is not sufficiently normative in their opinion, like believing that Edward Snowden deserves a pardon for his self-sacrificing heroism.)

Laura K. Donohue is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, Director of Georgetown's Center on National Security and the Law, and Director of the Center on Privacy and Technology. She writes on constitutional law, legal history, emerging technologies, and national security law.

Ms. Donohue was a panelist at a New York County Lawyers Association conference, "Government Surveillance and Privacy Have We Reached a Tipping Point," held June 11, 2015.

Those attending learned some frightening things from Ms. Donohue about how readily social networks monitored by the government can also be manipulated by the government:

If you look at the fields of social network analytics, for instance, it has just rapidly expanded. So, in the academic literature there are hundreds of new books, in physics and mathematics and new technologies in computer science about how to do these social network analytics.

. . .  you can look at . . . a person in society, right, any of us, and see what our relationships are with other people, how strong those relationships are by what is called bandwidth, how powerful that individual is, and how to pressure that person by those power relationships. So if, for instance, you are the Democratic administration and you had the Republican-- the RNC mapped out-- their Social networks, you could see who the important nodes were in that network and look at different ways to neutralize them. So you could bring charges, for instance, against them, you could find pressure points and get other individuals to pressure them, you could find ways to isolate them. And that would interrupt the communication network. So you could also use their power to accomplish things in the network.

Does this actually happen?  Donohue continued:

Now this isn't science fiction: The USAID [US Agency for International Development] tried [secretly] to do this in Cuba, I'm not sure how many of you are up on ZunZuneo [slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet]. This was a Cuban Twitter website that the USAID set up in order to build a social network to overthrow the Cuban government. And the idea was that they would start out with innocuous content like weather reports, soccer, music; they would build a social network, figure out where the powerful nodes were in that network and then pressure those nodes to basically bring on a Cuban spring.

Donahue qualified this tale by offering her estimation that, “in the end” USAID’s ultimately failed scheme “was up there with exploding cigars and the Bay of Pigs . . . for good ideas in Cuba,” but stressed that “the idea was” this agency of the US Government was “trying to use the social networks to bring about political change.”

And, she said, these tools are very powerful for bringing about such change over time:

And this is an insight from the literature, which is the reason why social network analytics are so powerful is because networks aren't static: they change over time, people’s actions change over time and their perceptions and beliefs are influenced by others in that network. And so that's one of the reasons why the social network analytics are so concerning.

Notwithstanding that power, Donahue said, “there is a certain irony” that researchers have found these tools are not particularly effective to do what has been set up as the justification for the government’s collection of massive troves of information (“metadata” about people and their relationships): preventing terrorist organizations that have organized along cell systems.

She explained what she referred to as “the snowballing effect”:

If you are looking at a social network, the denser that network is the more you can tell about it, but in a cell structure where they are communicating very rarely and you are dealing with peripheries it's very hard to tell where those important nodes are in a sparsely populated communication network.

So, ironically, it turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool to head off potential social, economic, political opposition and not as an effective way to head off concerted terrorist cell structure activity.

Donahue emphasized that exactly what social network manipulation is effective at, targeting “social, political and economic opposition,” is a major concern.  She further pointed out how worries about such governmental abuse by the founding fathers were also certainly a concern behind the fourth amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure at the time of the amendment’s adoption. She cited the attention that had been given back then to a customs officer who had used information obtained through his position “to go after political rivals in Boston.”  . .  Ms. Donohue has a new book coming out where it is to be hoped we can learn a lot more.

A less than perfectly informed United States citizenry is struggling with what it thinks about Snowden.  What it thinks is already quite subtle, complex and perhaps incongruous.  The intricacies involved in informing oneself and understanding the issues are formidable.

There are polls showing that a majority of Americans think that what Snowden did was beneficial for the country while at the same time a majority feel he should be prosecuted:  See: Time Magazine- Support for Snowden-and His Prosecution- 54% of respondents said the leaker, Edward Snowden, did a "good thing" in releasing information about the government programs, by Zeke J Miller, June 13, 2013 and USA Today- Poll: Snowden should be prosecuted for NSA leaks, by Susan Page, June 18, 2013 ("In a USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll, most Americans say the NSA leaker should be prosecuted, but two-thirds don't like the idea the U.S. government is collecting their own communication records.")

With such a delicate balance, what if the NSA castigating Snowden publicly with the help of Obama and Hillary Clinton and much of the major corporate media, also, behind the scenes, puts its thumb secretly on the social media scales?

In theory we have a system of voter elections so that the American populace controls the government and not vice versa. . .

 . . .  There is, on the other hand, a long list of ways in which one may say that elections have been "rigged."  They run the gamut, some more obvious and hard ball than others . . .  the Supreme Court, with a partisan split, saying that Bush should be president without Florida's votes being counted in the 2000 election where, when the votes were after-the-fact counted, Gore was apparently the actual victor . . . discriminatory purges of the voter rolls as happened in that same Florida election, and as apparently went uninvestigated in the New York Democratic primary this year . . . there's the age-old practice of gerrymandering voting districts which when newer technology like the program "Maptitude" is stirred into the brew becomes exponentially more pernicious . . . . voter suppression and disenfranchisement . . there is the problem of hacking and unreliable voting machines, like with Florida voting machines running backward in 2000 . . . deploying polling place resources inequitably so that some polling sites will get extra speeding-up assistance (like special election laptops in Florida 2000) and others will frustrate potential voters with very long lines. . .  money in politics buying elections and, if that fails, the elected officials afterwards. .  there are the efforts by our two major parties to ensure that the rules of election process skew towards perpetuation of a duopoly. . . then there is the imbalance of a corporately owned press.

Suffice it to say that history shows a longstanding interest in, and efforts at, the manipulation of elections by the powerful and, nearly just as frequently, by those in government wielding government's extra powers.  Some of those efforts because they seem harsh and heavy-handed generate resistance as their reward, but now add to that traditional arsenal the potential soft power of behind-the-scenes social media manipulation that you might not even sense is there.  If effective enough, harsher methods need never be taken out of the cupboard unless they are known to be needed.

With these new technologies it is not just social media that can unobtrusively, subtly manipulate your vote: One of the top under-reported stories of this year is about experiments showing that, using biased search engine rankings, a search engine like Google could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more. . .
 
. . . It is one thing for Google to target you and send you health related advertisements even before you, yourself, suspect you have issues.  It is another for Google to know how you are to vote before you ever get to consider that matter and make the decision on your own.

Finally, what about Snowden?  Are you curious about whether he will actually get his pardon, whether the social media campaign mobilized toward that result could be impeded?  One thing you can do is experiment: You could share this article and the recommendations being made for pardon via the social media platforms you use . .  and then see if you think what you've shared gets as much traction as you would expect.

Snowden Revelations Considered: Is Your Library, Once Intended To Be A Protected Haven of Privacy, Spying on You?

Edward Snowden in "Citizenfour"

I was watching the Academy Award-winning documentary “Citizenfour”about Edward Snowden. . . .

. . . I realize as I write that sentence there must, of course, be a lot of people be authoring essentially the same sentence, or its equivalent on computers these days, in emails or in phone texts or via other electronic devices. .

Having watched the film, I realize that the writing of such a sentence will, one must assume, attract attention, in all probability sooner, rather than later, something to take into account even though I eventually do plan to publish the sentence, at which time that publication, and any reaction to it, must be presumed to attract some greater level of additional attention.

This is my first National Notice article about libraries.  I’ve written a great deal about what is happening to libraries in the city of New York where library real estate is being stalked by acquisitive developers, but I am writing here about this issue in National Notice because what I am about to address here it is an issue of national importance.

During the McCarthy era agents of the FBI showed up at the New York Public Library and said that wanted to know what books people were reading.  The librarians were said to be aghast and briefly at a loss about what to do because they recognized the invasion of privacy that this represented.  The solution to their plight, however, was apparently very simple: They took the FBI agents into a room where they showed the agents stacks of call slips for the books.  The agents had no idea what to do with such an overwhelming amount of data, exited and never returned.  This story was told to me by a long-term librarian.

During the McCarthy era there was also concern about what books were available in the libraries, how readily available certain books were and concern about the political leanings of librarians working in the libraries.

Times change and societies transform, often abruptly.  Who would have thought that there would have been a time in the United States when freedom of thought was so perilously threatened? The Nazi era in Germany and the countries Germany occupied also provide examples of how completely countries could change faster than residents could recognize the dire threat they faced in time to flee and save their lives.

Much of the vastly expanded surveillance in the United States documented by Snowden came about abruptly after 9/11.  There had been pendulum swings in both directions before.  The paranoid abuses of government and Nixon’s enemies list during the Watergate era led to new check and balance protections that were gutted after 9/11.

And libraries?  That’s what this article is about: Changes occurring at libraries mean that what you read there probably won’t be private anymore.

Author David Baldacci recently commented to the New York Times:   

Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas.

Indeed, the elimination of books is closely associated with dictatorships and totalitarianism and totalitarian governments are likely interested in controlling thought will be interested choosing what is available to the public to read.  Most recently, ISIS reportedly ransacked Mosul's central library, destroying and burning 100,000 books and manuscripts, many of them reportedly rare and ancient, that did not conform to their notion of what should serve their conception of Islam.

But the surveillance state is interested in something else: The surveillance state wants to know what you think and for that reason the surveillance state believes that libraries should tell the government what you read.

Librarians in Connecticut were the first to successfully challenge the PATRIOT Act when the FBI, along with an accompanying perpetual gag order to keep its actions secret, demanded broadly that the Connecticut librarians turn over to the bureau library records concerning what their patrons were reading and their computer use.

Secrecy was the name of the game.  According to a report of the trial in Mother Jones:

Among the evidence the government had tried to keep secret were quotes from previous Supreme Court cases; copies of New York Times articles; and the text of the Connecticut law that guarantees the confidentiality of library records.

Previously, librarians of the American Librarian Association had, relatively soon after the passage of the PATRIOT Act, fired a shot across the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) bow, with passage of a January 29, 2003 resolution by the ALA Council, criticizing aspects of the PATRIOT Act and urging librarians to be protective of the patrons' privacy.  Librarians were recommended to adopt:

patron privacy and record retention policies that affirm that the collection of personally identifiable information should only be a matter of routine or policy when necessary for the fulfillment of the mission of the library"

Among other strong measures it was urged:

librarians everywhere to defend and support user privacy and free and open access to knowledge and information

The resolution cited among its premises that:

 . . . Libraries are a critical force for promoting the free flow and unimpeded distribution of knowledge and information . . .  that suppression of ideas undermines a democratic society, . . Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association; and, in a library, the subject of users' interests should not be examined or scrutinized by others. .  Certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act . .  threaten civil rights and liberties guaranteed under the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights

And very important to the discussion here it cited:

the likelihood that the activities of library users, including their use of computers to browse the Web or access e-mail, may be under government surveillance without their knowledge.

End of story?  Did the NSA, just pack up its bags and leave, tail between its legs?  Back in the days of the swaggering Bush administration?

What do you think the NSA would do, especially after familiarizing yourself with Snowden’s disclosures concerning the NSA’s secret back doors into all things electronic?

One might suspect that the NSA’s opponents might become even much more of a target.  That was probably likely, but remember that what the NSA does, it does not do out in the open.

Now consider this: Changes are being implemented at libraries, and the changes are particularly apparent in New York City, that would make the heroism of these librarians wanting to protect their patrons’ privacy virtually meaningless except for its symbolism. .  As a practical matter the NSA is probably going to know what you read, just as it always wanted to.

The changes being implemented are twofold:

    1.    An elimination or significant curtailment of the availability of physical books at the libraries that is being pushed even though the public still craves its physical books.

    2.    To the extent that physical books can still be read at the library they must increasingly be requested by computer, often online, and this is more and more often being necessitated by keeping books off-site of the library premises.

Given its multitudinous back doors to technology the NSA will certainly be able to find out what you are reading from the library.  It’s not just libraries: If you buy your books online from Amazon or Barnes and Noble the NSA is probably going to know that too.

When it comes to ebooks it is quite astounding what someone else at a remote location can easily know about your reading.  The publishers of ebooks are not only able to know when you began reading your ebook and whether you ever finished it, they can also determine how long you lingered on each page, what you may have skipped over or chosen to read first. In other words, “just what kind of reader you are.”  See BuzzFeedNews: Publishers Know You Didn't Finish "The Goldfinch" - Here's What That Means For The Future Of Books- The publishing industry's uneasy embrace of Netflix-style analytics, by Joseph Bernstein, January. 21, 2015.

As The Guardian in “Big e-reader is watching you” (by Alison Flood, July 4, 2012) puts things

. . . Would Orwell have been amused or disturbed by the development that Big Brother now knows exactly how long it takes readers to finish his novel, which parts they might have highlighted, and what they went on to pick up next?

Because your ebook, as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal put it, is now reading you right back.

        * * * *

Back to Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four, says Amazon, is the 608th most-highlighted book it sells. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'" has been marked by 349 Kindle users, while "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever" has been highlighted by 195. What would George have said?

There is nothing an e-reader publisher is able to know that the NSA isn’t able to find out too.

Also, with digital reading, if the publisher decides retroactively that it doesn’t want you to be reading what it gave you to read, it can make it disappear.  Amazon did exactly that in 2009 when it eliminated George Orwell's "1984" from its patrons' Kindles.  Wrote the New York Times:   

In George Orwell's "1984," government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the "memory hole."

On Friday, it was "1984" and another Orwell book, "Animal Farm," that were dropped down the memory hole - by Amazon.com.

(See: New York Times: Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle, by Brad Stone, July 17, 2009.)

Amazon removed the books and others such as digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand as the most convenient to itself way of dealing with some licensing disputes.  The precedent, however, is truly frightening.  What’s worse is that there is no reason to believe that disappearance or deletions would always occur only in discrete book-size chunks.  It might be just a paragraph or particular phrasing that disappears or is altered, just as it was the job of the Ministry of Information to do in "1984."

The possibilities play out interestingly in a situation like the following.  In 2010, Anthony Shaffer, a former military intelligence officer who was a military spy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, released a book, “Operation Dark Heart,” after getting CIA clearance of its content.  The book was already out and public when the CIA decided to rescind various aspects of its previously granted clearance.  Unsold versions of the book (10,000 copies) were destroyed at government expense.  This led to comically absurd outcomes.  With two versions of the book ultimately in release (review copies were out), exactly what the CIA had wanted redacted was highlighted by the contrast (including, for some reason, a reference to the actor Ned Beatty).  Also, the CIA would not release to Shaffer, a copy of the book that he, himself had authored and submitted to the CIA for review because it was classified.

Of course, we all know how this very same situation turns out in the digital, ebook world: The CIA instructs the publisher to make deletions whenever it decides on retroactive reclassification of previously cleared and public materials, and the readers, if they notice at all, get a feeling of vague disquiet that what they went back to read again is not what they read originally.  If they linger over the particular passage trying to figure out their unease, somebody in a remote location can be taking note of it.

The idea of fluidly changing books is a reality.  The industry is already releasing ebooks that are being re-edited based on reader feedback.  It is a very small shift from this to books that perpetually and fluidly change for other less laudable reasons.

In the end, there is nothing to prevent ebooks from becoming the equivalent of an ever-changing web page.  The old axiom that you can never step into the same river twice would similarly apply.  Ever-changing web pages* may be beneficial in the context of Wikipedia, but where does this lead when it come to books?

(* When it comes to changing web pages there is actually some monitoring that currently occurs.  Would that happen in the case of an e-publisher’s books?)

Government could be the culprit that ultimately makes our ready access to reliable information extremely tenuous, but the undermining of the availability can also come from the private sector.

Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) has testified at New York City Council hearings about the relationship of the privatizing sell-offs of library real estate to the threat of another form of privatization (excerpts below):

 . .  we must be wary that there are many who see the digitized future in terms of an increasingly privatized future where corporations pushing for various plans expect to make a lot of money by controlling digitized information, in many cases, by charging the public for what's already owned by the public in public collections that are being put out of reach.

    * * *

Digital activist Aaron Swartz warned about this disturbing trend:

The world's entire scientific ... heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations....The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

In the future we may expect that after the libraries have contracted out to privatize content we will be charged exorbitantly high fees for what was once publicly owned.  The further irony in all of this is that much of the transcription and other work to create digitally available content may have been crowd sourced so that the public will be charged for what it once freely owned and for the result of its own freely contributed work product and intensive labor creating privatized content.

Whether our slipping hold on the knowledge we are entitled to will come from the private sector or from government does not have to be an either/or proposition.  Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor who is credited with coining the term “internet neutrality,” has written in his book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” about how the government often colludes with private corporations.  It’s particularly likely when those corporations are monopolies, the very companies the government is supposed to be regulating.

A section of Wu’s book describes how at the same time that AT&T was assisting President Bush to violate federal law pursuant to a secret executive order by assisting the National Security Administration in the warrantless monitoring of telephone and Internet communications on a vast scale, the phone company's pending plans to reintegrate its monopoly were under review by the Bush administration. Congress then, in July of 2008, passed a law granting AT&T and Verizon full retroactive immunity for any violation of the laws against spying on Americans so the full extent of exactly happened has not been investigated and may never get adequate attention.

To put if frankly, it looks like there was a quid pro quo, a trade of rights, in this case, rights to competitive advantage, in exchange for aiding the surveillance state.

There are societal safeguards whenever monopolies are avoided to maintain a pluralistic society.  Surveillance assistance was routinely provided with no objection raised to its illegality by any of the big telecom companies or other large companies, that provided by far the largest bulk of such surveillance.  The first challenge to such surveillance came instead from Nick Merrill, a CEO who ran a small Web-hosting company in New York named Calyx.

Had a few more mergers wiped out the smaller companies, we might never have heard that challenge.

Now let's leave the subject of electronic books to discuss what is happening with respect to physical books.

What is becoming knowable about the individual physical books that library patrons are reading is not quite as granular, but a great deal more is now knowable than ever before.  Books are being checked out electronically.  If you renew your book, you will renew it electronically.  When you want your books you may even specify electronically what library you consider it most convenient at which to pick up that book.  There will be an electronic, again web-based, record of exactly how long you kept your book.  Everything you do electronically can be tracked.

You might go to the library to select and read your book privately, personally removing a copy from the shelves, but more and more under new management practices the number of books kept on the shelves of New York City’s public libraries is dwindling.  Fewer physical books overall and the escalating practice of keeping books off-site of the library premises diminish the chances that you can simply go to any library, or even a central library and expect to find the book on its shelves.   If the book you want is the least bit esoteric or unusual its likely not to be on the shelf. . . in the Brooklyn Public Library you should not expect to find the books of Jane Jacobs without a a preparatory hunt, some not at all.

One thing you can do to adjust for this is to check library records before setting out for a particular library, but if you do, you will probably do so electronically on the internet.  At the library, you might want to figure out what particular section of book could be in. . .  You might succumb and ask your phone (referred to these days as 'personal tracking devices'*) as the quickest possible shortcut.

(* These days they also include built-in fingerprint submission features.)

The NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library- Famously guarded by the lions, Patience and Fortitude, and behind the statues of Truth and Beauty- Behind those symbols physical books are disappearing from the shelves.

At the NYPL’s 42nd Street Central Reference Library, (recently renamed after Stephen A Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, among other things, the world’s largest real estate investment firm, who, without seeming to be that particularly an impressive fellow, just set a record collecting “the highest annual payout ever notched by a founder of a publicly traded private-equity firm”) any of its millions of reference books will now probably be requested electronically, because those books must be if they are off-site as the majority now are.  Those are the books that used to be requested by the physical paper call slip system that once baffled the FBI.

Those research library books will probably be requested electronically whether they are amongst the minority of books still kept at the research library, or amongst the millions more that have been exiled to sites like Princeton, New Jersey.   Only if you are already at the library and want to request a book that is actually there will you have the chance to circumvent a computer request with a paper call slip.

Reverend Billy in Princeton New Jersey where the NYPL sent its books.  From his video.

In August of 2014 the Reverend Billy led a small band of fellow activists out to discover and visit the ReCAP facility site in New Jersey where the NYPL’s books are now entombed.  His plan was to lead a ceremonial “Stonehenge Circle” protest about the books’ removal.  The protest was interrupted, its completion effectively prohibited, because it turned out that ReCAP shares an area of Princeton University with the nearby Forrestal Campus, a complex which has stringent federal security requirements as a laboratory devoted to nuclear fusion and plasma physics research.

Maybe it is unlikely that these books could become inaccessible to the public as the result of an accident or political change expanding federal controls over the area, but what is more frightening is considering the fate of the books that some library administration officials are now intent on bringing about by conscious design.  That can be seen in this report on the ReCAP website: ReCAP-Discovery to Delivery Project- April 1, 2012 through July 31, 2013, Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, October 2013.

When I first heard that million’s of the NYPL’s research books were being moved to, of all places, far away Princeton, New Jersey, I had an initial reaction of, Oh My God, is there some sort of plan where, in the end, the university is going to wind up owning all these books, a reaction I tamped down as paranoia on my part. . . Little did I think I’d eventually learn that this suspicion was not nearly so far off the mark as I’d thought.

From the report, speaking as of 2012, before the NYPL's transfer of even more of its research books

This “Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation” speaks of the NYPL, Columbia University, and Princeton University as being partner institutions with ReCAP.  It envisions that to `manage’ the books `efficiently’ the collection, effectively its ownership, would be “shared.”  The sharing would extend to eliminating many books that were independently owned and identifiable as such in what is euphemistically phrased as a “deduplication” of stock, “deduping” for short.  At the same time, books, now many of them made so much rarer through “deduping,” would be put at risk by allowing them to be borrowed and circulated to “authorized borrowers of any ReCAP partner.”  That would typically be anyone from the universities, students or professors, as NYPL research collection books never circulated to NYPL patrons.  They were considered too valuable.

Also from the report envisioning "deduping"of the shared books

At the same time, the report also speaks of discouraging the reading of the physical books by encouraging that “digital surrogates” of the books be electronically searched before any actual retrievals of books for use.  That’s the  “discovery” of the report’s title.  It would be done (are you listening, NSA?) through a “cloud-based middleware system.”  That system is spoken of as providing “visibility” in “real time status.”  That’s visibility to the users of the library. .  Theoretically.  The report envisions expansion of this “cloud-based middleware system” system to all the libraries’ books.

From the report- "Search and Discover" has been slightly increased in size by National Notice to help emphasize its importance in the structure

This scheme of locating the entire “shared” collection books in New Jersey makes the books sound rather like the family portrait owned on a “shared” basis by a group of siblings except that it is one sibling who keeps it hanging in her own home.  It’s hard to ignore the fact that “shared” books kept on the Princeton campus are most accessible there, especially when the NYPL concedes that transporting books to people who want them in New York is interfered with by things like the Super Bowl.

The NYPL is contributing far more of the books to the “shared” collection than the two universities.  Princeton is contributing the fewest.  According to the report the NYPL had the most books there already, 3.5 million in November of 2012, and noted that “a significant number of additional materials” would come “as part of the NYPL’s Central Library Plan.”  In 2013 the NYPL emptied the research stacks under the Rose Reading Room with more transportations.  Those stacks were historically understood to house another 3 million books, but NYPL president Anthony Marx recently asserted that the NYPL (presumably before any deduping) had determined that 3 million number to be somewhat overstated.

“Deduping” mankind’s knowledge into one central repository where it is intended to be shared may sound efficient, even altruistic, but it reflects a hubristic indifference to how knowledge survives the ages.  Among other things it forgets that one of the benefits of a pluralistic society is the check and balance safeguards that inherently result.  The conservative pro-tar-sands Harper government in Canada is apparently antagonistic to having evidentiary records in its libraries that document and further the understanding of climate science and climate change.  Accordingly it’s engaged in a wholesale destruction of the contents of its national libraries, including:

An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger's 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age.

In that particular case, however little the consolation, a copy of the logs was later found overseas.  That is all we have that mitigates such tragedies when the occur.

The Great Library of Alexandria famously failed.  The myth is that it met is demise in a single catastrophic fire.  Actual fires may have seeded the myth, but the more encompassing explanation is that the library slowly degraded and fell apart in serial destructions over a prolonged period, lack of funding being one of its problems.

Image from Wikipedia: The Library of Alexandria- by O. Von Corven - Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, Alfred Hessel and Reuben Peiss. The Memory of Mankind.

The Alexandrian library was intended to be a central repository of all of mankind’s knowledge, something it  probably largely achieved.  It built up its stock of books in a commandeering fashion.  Whenever a ship came into the port of Alexandria all of its books had to be presented to the library for copying by the library’s scribes.  But when the copies were made, books were returned to the ships.  Reputedly some copies were so good that the ships may not have known whether they got back an original or a copy.

Although ultimately the Great Library of Alexandria wasted and then vanished, the copying that created duplicates meant that, at least as much of mankind’s knowledge survived as if the library had never been created, had never commandeered the knowledge into its collection. . . .

. . . It is the job of lawyers to envision the worst when drafting agreements (I am a lawyer), and the lawyers who drafted the book-sharing partnership agreement to which the NYPL was to become a party envisions that it is ultimately possible the consortium will unwind.  At that time there will be a legal hell of ensuing complications and extra expenses.  Even without a total unwinding, minor reversals or retrenchment of some of the decisions carried out could encounter bureaucratic obstacles such as if the NYPL wanted to, for the sake of increased convenience, return books contributed to the shared collection to stacks on its own premises because certain books (referred to sometimes in the report as the “artifactual” original physical copies) were in frequent demand for retrieval.

The collapse of the NYPL's Central Library Plan was big news

In May of 2014 the NYPL’s Central Library Plan dramatically unraveled. In part because it was going to cost an astronomical amount for what was essentially a drastic shrinkage of library space and services, more than one half billion dollars.  That half billion was at least $200 million dollars more than the NYPL had previously publicized.   As envisioned in the report, in 2013, before the plan fell apart, a significantly important part of the NYPL’s collection, an additional three million or so of what were probably the library’s most accessed books, had been transported off premises out of the stacks under the Rose Reading Room. . . .

. . .  Notwithstanding the rather abject and embarrassing failure of the Central Library Plan the NYPL announced that it did not intend to return these books to the stacks from which they had been taken.  The NYPL maintained that the 110+ year-old stacks that had always been the collection’s home were no longer suitable for their original purpose despite appropriate upgrades over the years.  The cost of any further upgrade of the stacks to make them suitable for return to service was dismissed by the NYPL, ostensibly as prohibitive.  While that was the reason given, there are many who think the NYPL simply wanted to continue to keep the books off premieres, and one must wonder to what extent the grip of these “sharing” arrangements presented a force that countervailed against the collection’s return.

Legalities pull both ways, creating a sort of tug-of-war.  The report, speaking before this additional major shift of the NYPL’s collection materials, noted that, “The controversy over NYPL's Central Library Plan may affect planned transfers to ReCAP.”  That escalating controversy ultimately became, among other things, three lawsuits that delayed and helped derail the plan, two of which I was involved in as a co-founder Citizens Defending Libraries, one of the plaintiff parties.  Similarly the report noted, “a strict NYPL deaccession policy may complicate deduping.”   Expressed more forthrightly, that second statement translates to an admission that getting rid of books that a library owns is likely to legally violate the duty of care impressed when possession of those books was entrusted to the library. . .entrusted to the library and its Board of Trustees.

Although there are also the issues we have just just reviewed above of whether knowledge will be preserved and readily accessible with the NYPL sending its books off-site to ReCAP, the overarching concern of this article is the issue of privacy of reading and thought when library collections become accessible only through computers.  That concern increases exponentially when books are kept off-site.

The intermediation of computers to access books at the library is intruding into the libraries in another way.  In the old days you could, and were likely to, speak to a reference librarian when you hunted for books that would serve your research and mental explorations.  You were likely to speak to that reference librarian in person and that reference librarian was likely to have beliefs, per the 2003 ALA resolution quoted from near the beginning of this article, that your privacy using the library should be defended.  Now there is a move afoot amongst library administration officials to substitute off-site computer-based services for these formerly in-person services.  These electronically managed services may be supported by running requests through analytical algorithms, possibly supplied by the likes of Amazon and may even, in the future, simply be handled largely by computer robots. . .

. . . Robots?  (And Senator Joe McCarthy and his minions once worried about the political leanings of librarians?)

In New York City, the best analysis and explanation for why libraries, more used and in demand and than ever, have been targeted for sale and shrinkage with the concomitant elimination of the books and the librarians used to occupy their space is that this serves the interests of developers looking to grab their real estate.  It should be understood that plans respecting those library real estate ambitions began to emerge around 2005.  Groundwork relating thereto may date back a tad earlier, perhaps a year or two.  Although there is a decided convergence of interest between those who would like to grab library real estate and those who want the use of libraries to be less private, that does not mean that there has been any effort by those with these interests to work together or cross-support each other.

In considering aligned interests one should also think about the increasingly monopolistic corporations providing content electronically with whom the NSA regularly gets entwined.

The sale and shrinkage of New York City libraries was initiated and handled largely by the NYPL's Chief Operating Officer, David Offensend, who came from Evercore, a spin-off from Schwarzman's Blackstone Group, until he was replaced by Iris Weinshall, Senator Charles Schumer's wife.*  More or less contemporaneously with Offensend's efforts at the NYPL, Offensend's wife, Janet Offensend was involved in implementing similar plans at the Brooklyn Public Library.

(*  Weinshall came to the NYPL from CUNY, the City University of New York, where she had handled some somewhat similar and related matters.  The NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library was designed to function on an integrated basis with CUNY's in the same building on 34th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues.)

If one were to guess when the NSA might have wanted to mobilize to decrease the privacy of library use one might have guessed that it would have viewed the January 2003 American Library Association resolution calling for a defense of libraries as havens of privacy as a call to, instead, target these declared sanctuaries.  2006 was the year that the U.S. government backed off in its litigation with the Connecticut librarians, finally settling and allowing the librarians to speak about the FBI’s previous pursuit of library usage records under the PATRIOT Act.

There are those who feel secure, because they see no evidence to the contrary, that surveillance is benign so long as it is only used to prevent clearly illegal, bad acts such as terrorist attacks.  “Citizenfour,” the Snowden documentary, however, presents challenge to the notion that the NSA always acts in in such a restrained and circumscribe fashion.  There a number of references to private companies collaborating with the NSA.  For advantage? To avoid disadvantage? Or just because they feel legally compelled?

From "Citzenfour": Glenn Greenwald speaking to the Senate in Brazil

In one scene of the documentary, Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story, subsequently addresses a Brazilian Senate hearing on NSA spying held in Brasília, Brazil. Speaking in Portugese, he says (the film’s translation below):

First of all, Americans’ justification for everything since the September 11 attacks is terrorism.  Everything is in the name of the national security, to protect our population. In reality, it's the opposite.  A lot of the documents have nothing to do with terrorism or national security, but with competition between countries, and with companies' industrial, financial, or economic issues.

    * * * *

The US government has the ability to get not only metadata, but the actual content of your email, or what you say on the phone, the words you type into Google searches, the websites you visit, the documents your send to colleagues.

This system can track nearly everything that every individual is doing on line.  So if you are a journalist investigating the American government, if you work for a company with American competitors, or if you work in human rights involving the American government or any other field, they can easily intercept your communication.

From "Citzenfour": Appelbaum before the European Parliament

A little later in the film, Jacob Appelbaum, an encryption and security software developer, and journalist testifies at a September 2013 European Parliament hearing investigating NSA searches of of EU citizens and companies, telling the assembly:

There is this myth of the passive surveillance machine, but actually what is surveillance except control? This notion that the NSA are passive this is nonsense.  What we see is that they actively attack European citizens, American citizens and, in fact, anyone that they can if they perceive an advantage.

Do we need to worry that the NSA puts its finger on the scale to control outcomes?  If so, in which situations and how would we know?

Oscar night: Oscar to Laura Poitras, standing with Glenn Greenwald on the left for "Citizenfour" and Oscar to Graham Moore for "The Imitation Game" on right.

Another film that took home an Oscar the same night as “Citzenfour,” also about espionage, could provide some insight into the way NSA may be behaving.   That was “The Imitation Game,” that took home the Oscar for best adaptive screenplay.

From left to right:  Alan Turig, Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turig and Julian Assange, and Julian Assange appearing in "Citizenfour."

Spoiler Alert!: Several significant reveals in that film’s plot are key in giving that film a provocative depth and they apply to the questions we probably, if past is prologue, need to take into account when guessing what the NSA might being doing.  “The Imitation Game” is based on actual historical events concerning the breaking of Enigma, the Nazis’ encoded communications during World War II.  It is a mostly, if not perfectly, accurate.  (Humankind does exhibit a partiality for simplifying historical narratives.  How that makes our race vulnerable to unfortunate manipulations will have to be saved for discussion another time.)

The first plot reveal of “The Imitation Game,” not much of a reveal at all if you know the tales of the time, is how the Nazi code was broken.

After that, you learn in the film’s ensuing reveals:   

    1.    After the Nazi codes were broken, the intelligence community (MI-6, the British Secret Intelligence Service) modulated their interventions into the war, intervening only selectively, sometimes intentionally not using available intelligence and allowing battles and military assets to be lost so that the Nazis wouldn’t perceive by any change in the pattern of outcomes, and would remain unable to detect the surveillance or any tell-tale interventions based thereon.

    2.    A main theme of the film was highlighted by the Oscar acceptance speech of screenwriter Graham Moore, who spoke of wanting to commit suicide as a 16-year-old: Those who are different, and out of the conventional mainstream who may seem weird or like misfits, even societal pariahs, often have very important gifts to offer.  The unfortunate reveal is that even after such individuals may have proved in exemplary fashion how valuable the gifts they offer are, society’s prejudices and demands for conformity may ultimately destroy them nonetheless.  The code-breaking protagonist of the film, Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the modern computer, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is portrayed as socially awkward, somewhat along the Asperger’s spectrum, but more importantly, as a misfit, he is in the end tragically persecuted for his homosexuality. The British intelligence agency he helped stands by, not coming to his aid.  Worse, even before that persecution, the intelligence agency manipulatively blackmailed Turig.  (Interestingly, Benedict Cumberbatch played Julian Assange in 2013's “The Fifth Estate.”- Assange makes an appearance in “Citzenfour” working to assist Snowden get to a country of political asylum.)

    3.    The last reveal is that the intelligence community, able to operate in secret, is unaccountable.  Those running the intelligence community decide that they know better than Churchill how to manage the sharing of information with the Soviets (allies during the war).  Therefore they cut the British Prime Minster out of the picture in order to share more information.

Since World War II the Unite States and British intelligence agencies have been largely cooperative and coordinated.  These days that means the NSA and GCHQ.

Here would be as good a place as any to sum up with some questions.  When you use your library these days, is your library use private, as was once intended?  Or is your library yet one more place that you are being watched?  It probably is.  Also pertinent to ask: When you go to the library are the changes you may encounter changes that are being made because they are good for you, or because those changes are good for those wanting to watch you?  In New York that means, for instance, you’ll probably ask about all those books that are getting increasingly hard to find.  Asking these questions should get you around to asking another set: Is what is good for the NSA always good for the rest of us?. . .

. . .  If it isn’t, what do we need to know about how and why it isn’t?

If you think these are questions well worth asking you might want to email or phone your friends that: “There is an interesting article in National Notice asking interesting questions about the NSA and privacy in our libraries,” but, given the Snowden revelations, you’ll have to assume communicating such a sentence will attract attention.