Radars & Fences

Selected audio excerpts from David Lyon's lecture "Stretched Screens: Ubiquity, Interoperability and Identification Protocols," Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 04/07/2008.

National Identification Systems
"National Identification Systems are the biggest single identification systems being developed in the twenty-first century. They are historically completely unprecedented and they are huge. When you think that China and India are thinking of biometric-based, RFID-enabled smart cards for identification on a national level, you can imagine the technological and commercial opportunities that this raises..."

Oligolipolization and interoperability
"The oligopolization of the means of identification is the turning point, the pivot, of the work that I am doing… Protocols and standards help to determine and direct the ways in which these card systems appear, especially in their interoperable characteristics, that is to say, the ways that make them operable across different departments and especially, and interestingly, across national borders..."

Stretched Screens
“I am also interested in the ways in which particular artifacts symbolize the systems that I am discussing. Screens in particular… The person who is authorizing or not authorizing entry looks at a screen when you show your document. And that screen, a mere two-dimensional surface in fact conceals a huge depth behind it…”

Governing by Identity
“The new identifiers are rooted in databases, they tend to use some kind of biometrics, some sort of measure that originates from or relates to the body… By these means there is a kind of ‘governing by identity.’ That term was first used by Louise Amoore… She looks particularly at the ways in which that challenge to identity or request for identity can come from anyone…”

Selected audio excerpts from Ron Deibert's* lecture "The New Geopolitics of the Internet," Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 07/04/2008.

The Citizen Lab
"On the research side the main project we have been engaged [at the Citizen Lab] is a collaborative project with Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities called the OpenNet Initiative. The purpose of that project is to document patterns of internet censorship and surveillance worldwide. The second project is a development project. There is a piece of software that we created called psiphon that was released last year, and it helps people get around internet censorship..."

The OpenNet Initiative
"The OpenNet Initiative started in 2002 when a group of us got together who shared the same concerns that there was a lot going on beneath the surface of the internet that wasn't being analyzed by researchers. States especially were intervening in the internet environment, this was shrouded in secrecy... [The ONI] is a unique collaboration, a partnership among four universities [Toronto, Oxford, Harvard, and Cambridge]. When we started out each filled a different functional role..."

Civil Society Counter-Intelligence
"We have 80 researchers running tests in 71 countries on each of the main ISPs in those countries... This all model is deliberately borrowed from national intelligence methods. First of all the combination of technical intelligence and human intelligence, the compartimentalization of knowledge. For example, standing at the apex of this operation I don't know personally many of the testers who would research for us in some of the risky countries, and that's deliberate in order to protect them and vice versa... We are in essence a global civil society counter-intelligence operation..."

Psiphon
[With psiphon] we wanted to create a circumvention system that was easy to use, hard to find... difficult to block. The way we did this was by capitalizing on social networks of trust. We realized that there are these tremendous ethnic diaspora communities that span across censored and uncensored countries, that are already communicating with each other through electronic means... We released psiphon last year as a free and open source tool and there have at least 150,000 nodes that have been downloaded since last year..."

"There is an arms race in cyberspace going on. States are developing very effective and offensive means to take down sources of information that they find strategically threatening, and this is opening up a very dangerous frontier in my opinion... The notion of arms race is very important because it makes us think on how to have arms control in cyberspace..."

* Ron Deibert is the Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership among the universities of Toronto, Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge.

Selected audio excerpts from Trevor Paglen's* lecture "Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere," Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 06/04/2008.

The Black World
"What is the Black World? A good place to start looking at that question is the Defense budget... [The Defense budget] contains blank spots, classified programs, special programs. You have entire agencies whose budget is a giant blank spot... One of the axioms of the kind of geography that I do is that money does not disappear into a vacuum but congeal in the surface of the Earth in a way it produces space."

Visuality of Secrecy
"The question I want to ask for the rest of the talk is one about visuality, and how do we see this world which we know exists but which is secret, as it were. I want to propose that in order to try to see this world, to develop a visual grammar of this black world, of this secret world, we have to become astronomers..."

Amateur Anthropology
"A lot of people that work in this secret world are regular people. They cannot talk to any outsider about what they are doing, including their families. There is a kind of intense cameraderie that tends to develop among this people. When they retire from these programs or they get out of this secret world, they start doing weird stuff, having alumni associations. They are having these conferences in hotels in which they don't even say why they are having then... And there is this incredible crisis of language that happens..."

Astrophotography
"The last contradiction I want to talk about is... about the fact that matter reflects light. I've been trying to photograph black sites for a long long time now. And a lot of them, particularly the ones in the U.S., have huge restricted areas around them, so you can't get anywhere near them. So I have quite literally used the tools of astronomy to try to take photographs that are many many miles away, that are essentially invisible to the naked eye..."