A Culturally Antipodal Relation
"Why have internet enthusiasts, so many of them geeks and hackers, been drawn to denounce Scientology, so vehemently and for over a decade? (Anonymous is just the most current incarnation.) Or to put it more bluntly it strikes us as a little bit odd, and does a need of explanation, that one of the oldest and recurring battles on the internet is between this two kinds of people. Today I hope to make this oddity a little more sensible by examining both the historical reasons behind these battles as well as especially the cultural reasons... What I think we need to look at is how these two groups stand in culturally antipodal relation to one another, and if there is such a thing as a cultural inversion machine..."

Welcome to Mortal Combat between Two Alien Cultures
"I want to tell you about the initial battle between Scientology and the internet that happened in the mid-1990s... Anyone who knows about the history of Usenet might know that in the late 1980s it was a political hothouse... The Usenet battles over free speech in the late 1980s were in fact child's play in comparison with what happened with the Scientology newsgroup..."

Who is Anonymous?
"Who is Anonymous? What is the relationship to their earlier protests and what do we make of the vigor of that? They really are into this and they are using all sorts of tactics and means by which to attack Scientology and their first attacks were classicly hackers' - they were denials of service attacks. They claim that they are not just geeks and hackers... And although not all of them are in fact geeks and hackers, there is enough compelling evidence to say that they emerge from a particularly geeky internet bunker... which differentiates them, although not completely, from some of the earlier folks and battles..."

Meeting at the End
"For geeks and hackers a line has been crossed by Scientology because of their actions... because they are trying to enter the realm of science and technology which is not where religion is supposed to go. And I think that as a society we make a very stark line between these worlds, and geeks and hackers make it even deeper and starker... There is a way in which geek culture and Scientology meet at the end. They go to very different places, they are inverted, but I think if there is a way in which geeks and hackers imagine that much of their world is open and transparent, they are also mired in forms of secrecy and esotericism..."

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..."

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.

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…”

Radars and fences, satellites and walls, networks and bunkers. Two
different sets of technologies confront us: the former epitomize the
selective and flexible character of what Gilles Deleuze termed the
“societies of control”; the latter embody the “old” disciplinary
paradigm based on separation, physical mass containment, and restriction
of the freedom of movement. Most of the times control and discipline
coexist ad reinforce each other; sometimes they seem to collide. This is
due to a variety of far-reaching factors and transformations occurring
in the productive sphere.

As a matter of fact, it is the very structure of the network society,
with its decentralization of tasks and constant multiplication of
electronic eyes that threatens the opacity of physical and immaterial
bunkers. By looking at the grey areas where control and discipline,
transparency and secrecy, democracy and the state of exception overlap
and collide, Radars and Fences provide a cross-disciplinary platform
whereby researchers, artists, journalists, filmmakers, and activists can
negotiate new and critical positions.

(Extended rationale in the next post)

Conference Schedule

Thursday, March 6, 5:00-8:30pm
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South
Vanderbilt Hall
Room 206

5:00 – 5:15 pm Welcome

* Ted Magder, NYU Council for Media & Culture; Chair, Department of
Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU Steinhardt

5:15 – 5:30 pm Conference Overview

* Marco Deseriis, doctoral candidate, Department of Media, Culture, and
Communication, NYU Steinhardt

5:30 - 8:00 pm Panel: The Military between Transparency and Secrecy

Speakers:

James DerDerian, Director of the Global Security Program, Watson Institute, Brown University
The Desert of the Real, the Simulacrum of War, and the
Weaponization of Culture


Trevor Paglen, Artist and experimental geographer, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley
Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere


John Sifton, Human rights attorney, Executive Director of One World Research
Why the CIA Secret Prisons Were not Really Secret


This panel is moderated by prof. Stephen Duncombe, NYU Council for Media & Culture; Gallatin School, NYU

8:00 - 8:30 pm Reception

Friday, March 7, 10:00-2:00 pm
NYU Kimmel Center for University Life
60 Washington Square South
Room 808

10:00 am – 1:00 pm Panel: Identification Protocols, Net Wars and the Struggle over the Securitization of the Internet

Speakers:

David Lyon, Director of the Surveillance Project, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
Stretched Screens: Ubiquity, Interoperability and Identification Protocols


Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU.
Old and New Net Wars over Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$


Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab and the OpenNet Initiative, University of Toronto.
The New Geopolitics of the Internet




This panel is moderated by Becky Lentz, Visiting Scholar, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU.

1:30 – 2:00 pm Closing Remarks & Reception

This conference is being coordinated by doctoral candidate Marco Deseriis as
part of a grant awarded by the NYU Council for Media and Culture with
assistance provided by the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and the Information Law Institute.

***

Please RSVP on the Council for Media & Culture web site

If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of ICT seemed to
foretell, if only for a while, the decline of disciplinary apparatuses,
the new millennium presents us with an extremely functional “return” of
dividing and enclosing technologies – from the U.S.-Mexico fence and
Israel-Palestine wall to the steady growth of the U.S. prison-industrial
system. In other words, besides that such a "return" may be in fact a
process of constant strengthening, the Foucaultian disciplinary paradigm
and the Deleuzian control societies are coming to form a mesh, where
individualized immaterial control and physical mass containment of the
workforce seem perfectly integrated and complementary.

However, if in authoritarian states such as China and Iran such
integration of discipline and control needs little justification in
ideological terms (at least on the inside), in the West such a
co-existence is not frictionless. During the Cold War, the emerging
rhetoric of transparency and accountability associated with control
societies had primarily a propagandistic function against the opacity
and closeness of real socialism. But with the rise of the network
society, transparency has increasingly become a necessary and material
component of open workflows, management methods, and governance. At the
same time though, an excess of openness puts at risk industrial secrets,
military R&D, intellectual property assets, state secrets, and political
careers.

To be sure, in the control societies access to information is restricted
and modulated by codes and passwords. However, a number of notable
examples – from the Abu Ghraib scandal to the leaking of the Windows
source code, from the unveiling of the NSA eavesdropping program to the
CIA extraordinary renditions – show how hard it is for governments and
corporations to obfuscate and seclude information from public scrutiny.
And yet, there are areas of public life that formidably resist the
rhetoric of transparency: around the 10 per cent of the DoD budget is
allocated to the so-called “black programs,” top-secret military
programs whose very existence and name is unacknowledged by the
government; immigrants’ detention facilities are situated in the
remotest regions; and biotech research is highly protected in spite of
its far-reaching consequences on the ecosystem and human life.

On the other hand, it is the very structure of the network society, with its
decentralization of tasks and constant multiplication of electronic eyes
that threatens the opacity of physical and immaterial bunkers. By
looking at the grey areas where control and discipline, transparency and
secrecy, democracy and the state of exception overlap and collide,
Radars and Fences provide a cross-disciplinary and experimental platform
whereby researchers, artists, journalists, and activists can negotiate
new and critical positions.