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Stefania at the “Tracking Experience” research seminar, University of Copenhagen

DATACTIVE PI Stefania Milan will speak at the Research Seminar “Tracking Experience – Enhancing Lives?”, organized by Stine Lomborg at the Center for Communication and Computing, University of Copenhagen, on April 24-25. She will  deliver a talk on “Questioning and subverting the tracking of experience: Distributed agency and alternative epistemologies from the ground up”, bringing in a critical perspective on self-tracking seen in relation to political agency. Other speakers include Dorthe Brogård Kristensen (University of Southern Denmark), Minna Ruckenstein (University of Helsinki), Katarzyna Wac (University of Copenhagen) and Rob Procter (University of Warwick), Jan Ekstrom (IBM), and the organizer Stine Lomborg. Check out the program of the research seminar here.

Kersti Wissenbach on ‘civic tech as activism’ @Protest Media Ecologies

The 20th and 21st of April, Kersti will attend the Protest Media Ecologies: Communicative Affordances for Social Change in the Digital Era in Florence, Italy. She will give a presentation titled “Civic tech as activism: The role of transnational communities for data-driven governance”:

New modes of engagement with data and technology have emerged over the last half-decade, which go under the label of ‘civic technology’ (or ‘civic tech’). Individuals and groups take advantage of the availability of data and related software to directly engage and intervene in governance processes. An example is the community around the freedom of information request tool Alaveteli, which supports citizens willing to exert power over under-performing institutions in currently twenty-five countries.

At its core stands the potential of technologies and data at civil society’s disposal to better execute their civic role within the democratic realm. However, the civic tech scene spans from activist groups to international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and the business start-up scene. Civic tech activism is characterised by the collective building, utilization, and localization of tools to enable direct and inclusive citizen engagement in the most diverse socio-political contexts. A community expanding through such collective engagement enables context-relevant tactics catering for local communication means and cultures that enable civic-driven calls for government accountability. This is particularly relevant in less democratic countries.

This presentation will discuss how the action repertoires and collective identity dynamics of civic tech activism can create significant different power dynamics for opening up civil society space than other actors utilizing data and technology for governance processes. It will compare the potentials of civic tech activism with INGOs using technology for short-term interventions and tech start-ups selling open data platform software to governments that might or might not use those platforms to share politically relevant information with their citizens.

 

About ‘Protest Media Ecologies’

Our investigation focused on activists media practices in the framework of anti­austerity movements
in three Southern European countries ­ Greece, Italy and Spain. With this workshop we aim at sharing the knowledge produced through our research with other scholars that focus on topics related to the use of media in the context of mobilizations. We want to engage with the research of people working in the same field, to learn about your projects and findings, and together create research synergies that will deepen our understanding and theoretical considerations of protest media ecologies in Europe and beyond.

This two­day workshop is organized in the framework of the research project Protest Media Ecologies: Communicative Affordances for Social Change in the Digital Era at Lakehead University (Canada) and Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant.

Becky @SensorPublics on Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks

 

5-7 April, 2017
Becky has presented at the ‘Sensor Publics: a Workshop on the Politics of Sensing and Data Infrastructures‘ organized by Laurie Waller and Nina Witjes, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich. An abstract of her presentation ‘Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks in an Environment of Ubiquitous Sensors‘ can be read below.

 

SensorPublics

From the geopolitics of remote sensing satellites, to the political-economy of urban sensor networks, the domestic economy of home sensing devices or the democratic promise of participatory citizen-sensing, we are interested in how sensing and data infrastructures become publicly controversial and invested with political and moral capacities. How do sensor publics unsettle relations between political actors and their environments? In what ways do they problematise the governance of big data or the regulation of real-time surveillance? And, can sensor publics provide occasions for democratizing relations between politicians, experts, activists and citizens?

Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks in an Environment of Ubiquitous Sensors.

With the proliferation of digital surveillance, how to act under the presumption of monitoring and tracking has become a central subject of concern to civil society. The responsibility of the ‘surveillance subject’ extends to the ability to anticipate the likelihood of one kind of ‘digital threat’ over another; to apply risk management strategies to determine the appropriate course of action under fearful circumstances; and to own responsibility for the impacts of any ensuing threats. The extent of this responsibility leads civil society actors to call upon the assistance of security experts, who harden the information infrastructures of civil society organisations, develop security-centric software such as encrypted message and email programs, and push for the standardisation of risk management processes such as threat modeling and adversarial analysis. This push for risk standardization presents an interesting moment of translation among different ‘communities of security practice’. It comes at a time in which ubiquitous sensor networks present new risks and threats to civil society actors. Current security resources aimed at civil society actors are only beginning to address, for example, how activists can safely protest when their every move is tracked across devices and physical spaces with technologies such as advanced facial recognition and mobile phone surveillance. What are the frameworks and practices that civil society and technical communities turn to in order to calculate and counter these new risks and threats of surveillance? This conference paper draws upon my doctoral research, which is done through participant observation, document analysis, and extensive semi-structured interviewing, crossing national boundaries in order to trace the interactions of different communities of practice. In order to conceptualize the interactions between non- security focused communities and security experts, the study draws upon Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker’s work on communities of practice in relation to boundary infrastructures and boundary objects. The study bridges science and technology studies approaches to the study of information infrastructures with the work of critical data and critical security scholars such as Louise Amoore and Claudia Aradau, in order to conceptualize how risk epistemologies are produced and circulated throughout different communities of security practice. The paper presentation draws upon one year of desk research and three months of field work.

[blog] A RightsCon2017 Post-Mortem: Hot in the digital rights agenda

On March 29-31, three brave members of the DATACTIVE team—Davide, Guillen and Stefania, respectively—descended on the lively city of Brussels to attend RightsCon 2017. The RightsCon Summit Series, organized by the US-based non-governmental organization Access Now, is a yearly event bringing together digital rights activists and practitioners with the tech industry. Brussels 2017 was RightsCon’s 4th edition—earlier editions took place in Silicon Valley (2014 and 2016) and Manila, the Philippines (2015). The rich program of RightsCon 2017 counted 21 conference tracks (!), touching upon a wide variety of subjects that mirrored the complex ecosystem of actors and agendas striving for an open and free internet.

Throughout three busy days of this 2017 edition, we had the chance to mingle with activists, researchers, journalists, the industry and law enforcement gathered to collectively think about the future of the internet. We organized our own panel on ‘Resisting Content Regulation in the Post-Truth Age’ in collaboration with Vidushi Marda from the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. The panel opened the track ‘The truth is out there’: full house and lively conversation, bringing together the industry, journalism, academia, and multilateral organizations like OSCE. (What this space: a dedicated post will be online soon!). But we also had two other goals in mind. First, we wanted to take advantage of RightsCon’s ability to bring under one roof people from all over the world, with different backgrounds and distinct visions regarding the interplay between the digital and human rights, to make the best of collective learning and look for potential collaboration. Second, we intended to listen to and collect the voices from various projects and organizations currently working towards a free and open internet—in particular, of course, we wanted to swap thoughts with data activists! While we are still re-elaborating the outcome of these conversations, here we provide some reflections on what bubbles in the great minds participating that gathered this year in Brussels. What were the hot topics of RightsCon 2017?

#1 Fake News Fake News Fake News
Although the topic of fake news was dedicated a conference track of its own, the debate was not confined to those panels alone—rather, it permeated several other discussions, too. This is not surprising given the close connection between this fuzzy notion and other topics discussed at RightsCon, such as algorithms, freedom of expression, openness, and transparency. Interestingly, participants seemed to agree on one starting point: what constitutes ‘fake news’ is extremely difficult to determine, and the very same label should probably be abandoned since neither tech corporations nor governments should decide what constitutes ‘truth’ today. In this sense, although the problem of fake news could be tackled both by platforms themselves (for example, by implementing algorithmic curation) or by state institutions (for instance, by creating regulatory legal frameworks), either solution could easily turn into politically motivated censorship. Our own panel, for one, argued that many amongst politicians, experts and the general public are in fact advocating for the wrong fixes to the problem, e.g. content regulation on and by platforms.

However, we did not leave the conference without any suggestions to tackle such a pressing issue. On the contrary, some of the proposals were actually quite far-reaching. For example, it was suggested that although fake news is not entirely a new phenomenon, they have recently turned into a powerful money-making machine due to the fact that economic incentives promote ‘clicks’ and quantity over quality. How can we promote change in the ‘market’ of the Internet, if we are to prevent the spread of information that is specifically meant to deceive? A second productive approach aims at empowering the user and the citizen: ultimately the problem of false or manipulative information spreading on social media is one of digital literacy. Hence, long-term education, more than algorithmic fixes or regulation, is the key answer to the problem. In sum, the problem is socio-technical in nature (rather than solely ‘social’ or solely ‘technical’)—and thus requires a socio-technical response.

#2 Internet infrastructure between censoring and sensing technologies
The fundamental layer of the digital world we experience is the technological infrastructure of the internet. Two recurrent, somehow complementary themes, which appeared to be central to RightsCon 2017 are internet shutdowns and ubiquitous surveillance technologies. It is interesting to consider them together for two reasons. First, they both bring to the surface the importance of the lower layers of communication technology, in an era dominated by ‘apps’, ‘clouds’ and other intangible metaphors. Second, they represent complementary strategies of politicization of data flows: stopping the flow on the one hand, and somewhat multiplying the flow on the other.
In order to keep the internet free and open, one must first keep the internet running. This is an increasingly serious concern, given the often political use of internet shutdowns, ad hoc censorship and network manipulation, to prevent people getting their news or mobilizing to protest. As an example, some noticed a clear connection between the growth in internet shutdowns and the general increase of activism particularly in South East Asia. Consequently, some initiatives emerge in order to test, monitor and report internet shutdowns and censorship. The Open Observatory for Network Interference (OONI) is a spinoff of the Tor Project, which set the stage for “a global observation network for detecting censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation on the internet”. Another brilliant project along these lines is TurkeyBlocks, which monitors “wide-scale internet slowdown and shutdown incidents using a combination of digital forensic techniques”, with a focus on the delicate Turkish situation.

Next to censoring, another much-debated theme is that of today’s omnipresence of sensing technologies. Alongside the many promises of simplifying life and empowering people, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is bringing surveillance technology literally in every corner of our daily life. While activists (and sometimes governments and companies, too) advocate for “privacy-by-design”, the IoT is objectively promoting “surveillance-by-design”. Moreover, especially with the advent of smaller companies in the market, these technologies present not only a higher number of vulnerabilities, but also kinds of vulnerabilities that can hardly be patched, thus representing a permanent threat to individual and group privacy. Consequently, one should not only focus on whether or not this technology is currently used by government to spy on citizens; the urgent need to regulate the market of surveillance products comes from their potential uses, as it is impossible to anticipate their trajectory from country to country, from government to government, and from present to future uses.

#3 Digital Rights in the Global South
Nowhere else in the world is the number of internet users growing more than in the Global South. Unfortunately, this positive trend is usually not adequately accompanied by the creation or reinforcement of the necessary legal frameworks to protect digital rights. Many activists at RightsCon 2017 shared the problems they face when defending their privacy, resisting surveillance and generally struggling to exercise their rights in the Global South. On a positive note, however, the creativity abounds. In Brussels, activists shared the strategies they use to make their voices heard by both states and corporations. A cluster of Latin American organizations emerged, where groups and individuals are pushing for a regional strategy for the defense of digital rights since they have identified that not only the challenges they face are similar, but also that the tools available to overcome them can be mobilized at the transnational level. Among the problems highlighted by the attendees to RightsCon was the perception within governments in the Global South that digital rights are a matter for developed countries, which results in a generalized lack of political will to engage with civil society actors to develop adequate policies. In addition to that, there seems to be a strong historical and cultural connection between the exercise of basic rights and personal data collection policies implemented by institutions. Telling examples are Argentina, where a longstanding tradition of identification has produced countless databases with personal information, whose management is unclear and far from transparent, and Venezuela, where citizens need to surrender their biometric information in order to access basic services like food distribution. Among the strategies showcased by activists to address these issues, strategic litigation in national and international courts was presented as one of the most efficient tools to force governments and corporations alike to respect internet users’ rights. Therefore, a few organizations in South America, led by the Fundación Datos Protegidos, are calling for the creation of a regional network for strategic litigation related to digital rights, with the goal of triggering a process of knowledge transfer among peers in different countries.

All in all, RightsCon 2017 was an enriching experience for the DATACTIVE team—and it was mostly due to all the people we got to meet and to the excellent organization (thanks, Access Now!). We would like to acknowledge everyone who dedicated some of his/her precious time to talk to us: you know who you are, See you at RightsCon 2018, in Toronto, Canada!

[blog] Communication and Activism – a research visit to the Center of Social Movement Studies

By Kersti R. Wissenbach, March 2017

This week I returned to the beautiful city of Florence to spend several months with the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) located at the Institute of Humanities and Social Science at Scuola Normale Superiore. It is my second visit to the institute and whilst Tuscany is always worth a visit, I did not (just) return for the great weather. Spending time at COSMOS proved to be a very enriching experience given the stimulating environment of like-minded social scientists and particularly a great group of researchers working on the intersection of social movement studies and media sciences –as I do.

As a communication and political science scholar with a background in critical development studies, I am working on the intersection of social movements, democracy, and communication. I am particularly interested in the role of communication in relation to power. During my stay at COSMOS I will advance a part of my theoretical work and finalize an article aiming to (re)introduce the concept of communication, as distinct from media or technology, to the field of social movement studies. I am a huge communication advocate when it comes to social and political change processes, no matter how much attention is given to the potentials of data and new technologies. I will briefly explain why.

There is much blurriness when it comes to the terminology around communication, media, and technology. In the fields of social movement studies and Development Communication much reference is made to media and oftentimes we do not clearly distinct between the terms or we find authors speaking of the use of communication where in fact referring to media as institution or technological infrastructure. Lumping together everything under the media term, however, risks disproportional techno or data deterministic attention whilst underestimating dynamics between activists that might be crucial for how (seemingly) technological interventions play out.

Why is that problematic? Communication is essentially a social practice, based on human interaction and as such relations between people. Where we have human relations and societal interactions we have power dynamics. Those power dynamics ultimately shape activist as much as governance spaces.

My doctoral research deals with what I call civic tech activism -activist groups making use of the abundance of data and new technologies to open up civil society space for direct engagement in formal governance processes and to directly hold government institutions to account. An example would be the community around the freedom of information request tool Alaveteli, which supports citizens willing to exert power over under-performing institutions in currently twenty-five countries. At its core stands a belief in the potential of ICTs and data to support citizens in the exercise of their democratic agency. There has been much attention on the potential of data and technology for governance in recent years, usually looking at platforms and tools that enable governments to open up information or that enable citizens to claim information from governments. Little attention, however, is usually given to power dynamics that emerge and persist within activist communities and thus ultimately shape who is actively engaged in building and practicing mechanisms to hold governments to account or to voice demands to government institutions. So community dynamics – relations, interactions, hierarchies- ultimately affect whose voices are heard, how accessible and accessible to whom respective tools are built, etc.

In consequence, we could say that social practices and relations within activist communities shape social practices and engagement mechanisms between civil society and government institutions. This is why I will deep-dive into communication approaches, mainly those rooted in non-western scholarship, over the coming months. My intention is to provide a conceptual framework that supports a communication driven analysis to social movement dynamics within the governance activism field.

Stay tuned for more!

Jeroen de Vos at Internet of Things day Rotterdam

Jeroen de Vos will be conducting a workshop at the Internet of Things day in Rotterdam, organized by the university of applied sciences of Rotterdam. In light of the international IoT day. This two-day event is built around the question ‘Wishful world, Wishful thinking?’, and Jeroen will present on day two in the inclusive society block.

Tickets are free but need registration: iotrotterdam.nl/aanmelden

Workshop #3 (ENG) | Exploring Radical Inclusiveness

The theme ‘inclusive society’ may evoke a notion of an ideal and democratized social space. However, following the revelations on large scale data-scraping and sociodemographic profiling used by the police force, political parties and commercial parties alike, I would like to expand the notion to ‘radical inclusiveness’. In a world where we are datafied on both a conscious and subconscious level, to what extent is the act of ‘inclusion’ in data gathering practices voluntary and conscious? This workshop will provide some of the tools to shed some light on your own digital sediments, to help shaping the contours of your data shadow. Through the ‘shadow body’ and the ‘filter bubble’, we draw on a set of specific internet tools to look at ourselves through the eyes of Google, question our own filter bubble, and track those who track us.

Davide Beraldo @ SPUI25

what: ‘The Paradox of Social Movements’

where: Spui 25, Amsterdam

when: april 6th, 17.00 – 18.00

Davide Beraldo will give a talk at SPUI25, April 6 at 5h, as part of the series ‘Cheers to Science’. The lecture, ‘The Paradox of Social Movements’, will cover the topics of his PhD thesis. It will present the empirical findings of a digital exploration of Anonymous, showing its contradictory composition and the role of ‘ontological paradoxes’ in the self-reproduction of this ‘contentious brand’. The talk will be followed by drinks.

For more information and to register: http://www.spui25.nl/programma/item/the-paradox-of-social-movements.html

 

 

Lonneke van der Velden at the DataPublics workshop

 

Under the header ‘governing publics’, Lonneke van der Velden presented her work at the DataPublics conference April 1st. For more detail on the outline and schedule of the event, see their website.

The presentation can be watched online!

 

The materiality of surveillance publics

This presentation discusses the materiality of surveillance publics. Notions of material publics are particularly useful to think about activist interventions into surveillance. Digital surveillance is considered to be a rather intangible phenomenon. However, now and then, surveillance gets ‘exposed’, for example through leaks that disclose surveillance technologies or by using software that can detect online tracking. These interventions (sometimes dubbed ‘countersurveillance’ or ‘sousveillance’) manage to transform digital surveillance practices into public knowledge repositories that can be studied and, in some cases, this results into new online investigative tools. In the presentation I demonstrate how surveillance can become ‘public matter’: in the process of turning surveillance into a matter of concern, surveillance becomes itself ‘datafied’, and this material can be used for public ends. In other words, they give rise to ‘data publics’. Moreover, these interventions assemble very specific data publics: these publics are situated in socio-technical environments in which intelligence, secrecy, and privacy practices codetermine the modes of working, and thus, interestingly, making things private coincides with ways of making things public.

 

DataPublics will investigate the diverse ways in which publics are, and can be, constituted, provoked, threatened, understood, and represented. This includes examining the role played in the formation of publics by new on- and offline infrastructures, data visualisations, social and economic practices, research methods and creative practices, and emerging and future technologies. Specifically, the event will facilitate cross-cutting conversations between designers, social scientists and creative technologists to explore the new challenges and opportunities afforded by thinking and working with “Data Publics”.

DATACTIVE at RightsCon

DATACTIVE co-organizes, jointly with Vidushi Marda of the Centre for Internet & Society (Bangalore, India), a session on fake news and regulation at RightsCon titled “Resisting content regulation in the post-truth world: How to fix fake news and the algorithmic curation of social media?”. RightsCon will take place March 29-31 2017 in Brussels.

In addition, three DATACTIVE team members (Stefania, Becky, Davide and Guillen) will be in attendance for fieldwork purposes.

See the draft program of RightsCon here.

RightsCon is the world’s leading event on the future of the internet. Convening civil society leaders, business visionaries, government representatives, activists, legal experts, technologists, and more from across the globe. This year, RightsCon Brussels will include three full days of programming to tackle some of today’s most challenging issues. With over 200 sessions and more than 1,000 participants anticipated, RightsCon 2017 will provide unparalleled opportunities to engage with community leaders in sessions, private meetings and discussions, satellite events, parties, movie screenings, and social events.

 

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman visits DATACTIVE

We are delighted to have Biella paying DATACTIVE a visit march 28th in the afternoon for an informal meetup.

bio

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship explores the intersection of the cultures of hacking and politics, with a focus on the sociopolitical implications of the free software movement and the digital protest ensemble Anonymous.

She has authored two books, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), which was named to Kirkus Reviews’Best Books of 2014 and was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the American Anthropological Association. Her work has been featured in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes. Committed to public ethnography, she routinely presents her work to diverse audiences, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, and has written for popular media outlets, including the New York Times, Slate, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Huffington Post, and the Atlantic. She sits on the board of Equalitie, The Tor Project, and the Social Science Advisory Board of the National Center for Women and Information Technology.