Privacy, Propaganda, and Assimilation in the 21st Century

I'm interrupting our 2013 Pleasures series for this guest post by Kristin King, to boost the signal of news that will likely not be carried by Seattle's primary news outlet. But we'll be resuming the Pleasures series shortly.

Privacy, Propaganda, and Assimilation in the 21st Century
by Kristin King
kristinking.org

Yesterday, KUOW broke the news that the Washington State education department, OSPI, signed a data sharing agreement to hand all kinds of confidential student and teacher information off to eight reporters at the Seattle Times. Parents were never notified, lack the legal right to “opt out” of such disclosures, and have no legal recourse if their students’ data is stolen and misused. Our only protection? The Times and the reporters promised to keep the data private and to return it when their studies were done.

Yes, I did say “studies” rather than “articles” or “investigations.” Since when do reporters conduct studies? Since a nonprofit gave the Seattle Times some grant money for it, that’s when. What nonprofit? Why?

The name of the nonprofit is the Solutions Journalism Network. It’s a new thing. You know how the news is kind of a downer? It presents crises, but no solutions. But never fear! Someone is on hand to do evidence-based research on ideas for fixing the problems.

You might wonder whether the solutions are simply “for the greater good” or whether they benefit anyone in particular. I certainly did. So I did what I always do when I see a nonprofit involved in something that looks sketchy: I checked out their funders. At the top of the list? The Gates Foundation, which has become notorious for using its cash to change public policy to support various types of school privatization and other changes to education, including the Common Core initiative, which requires states to gather large amounts of data on students, teachers, and test scores.

By the way, as long as we’re talking about the Gates Foundation, we had better talk about Bill Gates and his concept of creative capitalism. It’s unfortunate that capitalism is hard on some people, but we’re all smart people, and we can fix it. You just find creative ways “to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.” The inequities still exist, of course.

After I finished peeking at their funders, I checked out the Solutions Journalism Network’s projects and examples. They have grants available for researching climate change, for example. But not stopping climate change. No. The articles are all about climate change resilience, or helping communities cope with the disastrous effects of climate change on local communities. And there are articles on economic equity. But this isn’t economic equity between the rich and the poor, or between whites and people of color. No. It’s only economic equity between men and women. And there are articles on solutions to education problems. But they’re not about addressing fundamental barriers to learning. No. They’re about social/emotional learning.

Do you see a pattern here? The articles are all great articles. We should be working on climate change, economic equity between men and women, and social-emotional learning. However, the grant funders are only looking for articles that are going to make us feel good without threatening their wealth or raising taxes.

Let's dig a little deeper into the kind of content they’re looking for. If you scroll down just a little way on the “examples” page, you see their idea of a Solutions Journalism approach to education on the rez. The article they highlight is “Education in Indian Country: Obstacles and Opportunity,” published in Education Week. The problem? “On most measures of educational success, Native American students trail every other racial and ethnic subgroup of students.” What’s the solution? I’ll give you a hint: it’s got nothing to do with raising the per capita income above $8,000 per year, or putting tax dollars into schools. Actually, it’s about an Indian school. It’s about sending Lakota children off to a private, Jesuit-run high school.

I had to stop here and do the dismayed version of laughter. Did we learn nothing from the past three hundred years? Did we forget about all the abuses heaped on First Nations peoples by Jesuit boarding schools? No, we actually didn’t forget. If you do a Google search for “Jesuit boarding schools Native American,” you’ll see what I mean. Of course, the Jesuits of today are not the same as those olden times Jesuits. We’re in the twenty-first century, and assimilation takes a different form. Students learn the Lakota language and are allowed to practice Lakota spirituality. That’s all good. But they also study the Catholic religion and learn how to function in twenty-first century capitalism. More importantly, an outside entity is getting to decide what the Lakota kids learn. This is still assimilation.

Also problematic is that a private school is set up as a solution to economic inequalities. Not all the Lakota children are allowed to go: school officials choose kids they feel have appropriate parental support. An even smaller number are able to go on to college: since 1999, 50 students have been granted Gates Foundation scholarships to go to college.

This is the creative capitalism solution in a nutshell: leave the underlying social injustices in place, but “ease the world’s inequalities.” Might there be a better solution that includes economic justice and Lakota self-determination? Yes, but Solutions Journalism isn’t going to be funded to look for it.

Instead, I’d be willing to bet that Solutions Journalism will be funded to look at education “solutions” involving privatization, high-stakes testing, fast-track teacher preparation programs, and other corporately-inspired “education reforms.” Why would I think that? Because it’s what its funders want.

And this brings us back to the grant-funded Education Lab at the Seattle Times. The grant funders have no direct control over editorial content, as the Times explains. But of course they have the same kinds of indirect control as advertisers have. If an advertiser doesn’t like what a publication is doing, it can withdraw its advertisements. If the grant funders don’t like the stories put out by the Times, they can stop making grants. Another type of indirect control is that money is available for certain types of projects that might not be possible otherwise, such as the study the reporters are doing using student data.

What might that study be about? We don’t know, but from the KUOW article we do know that the OSPI “has so far promised the Times individual student and staff data dating from 2009 to this year, including individual students’ test scores on numerous state assessments, grades, school schedules, absences and discipline information.” We also know that Deputy Managing Editor Jim Simon wants this -- ahem -- “welter of information” as “a way to hold the system accountable for the performance of schools.”

Ah, accountability. In the world of “education reform,” that means judging schools and teachers by student “achievement” as measured by scores on standardized tests. It doesn’t mean accountability for fully funding schools or working to solve racially based discipline disproportionality or following the law in educating special education students .

A few years back, the Los Angeles Times used this data for “accountability” with tragic results. It posted rankings of teachers based spuriously on student test scores, and a teacher was so upset he committed suicide. Here’s hoping the Times doesn’t do that. But my guess is that the study will in some way, shape, or form, advocate for “education reform.”

Putting it all together? My children’s private data will be used to bring grant money to a for-profit company. It will be used as propaganda for education policy changes that are not in my kids’ best interest. I’m not pleased. What can be done? Well, public protest is always good. Angry parents and civil liberties groups have stopped a bunch of states from sharing data with Gates Foundation-funded nonprofit InBloom.

But to make that public protest happen, people need more information about privacy. Most of the parents I talk to don’t understand the ways the federal privacy law, FERPA, does and does not protect our children’s privacy. They don’t know that even if they sign an opt-out form, schools can share data with third-party organizations. They don’t know that this kind of data sharing agreement is becoming the norm. That’s a lot to explain right there.

We also need a better understanding of the dynamic between nonprofits and the philanthropies that fund them. For that, I’d recommend the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. It’s a big eye-opener. Or if you want something shorter, try my post “Are Nonprofits Our Frenemies?”

Here in Seattle, we are fortunate to have some actual investigative journalism around education issues: the blogs Save Seattle Schools (http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/) and Seattle Education (http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/). Through these blogs, Seattle parents, teachers, and students have been able to work together to learn about privatization and fight for our own visions of education.

And as a bonus? Unlike the Seattle Times, those blogs don’t make back-door deals with the state to get our children’s private data.

A lot of interesting mistakes

Phoebe Connolly's "How Social Media Is Science Fiction" reports on a recent panel discussion, conducted by Annalee Newitz, which included such sf luminaries as Maureen F. McHugh, Bruce Sterling, Charlie Anders. After noting that Matt Thompson posts "a spectrum that starts with collective intelligence, goes through social media and ends with AI," Connolly writes that Maureen McHugh interestingly

reminded the crowd of Robert Heinlein's definition of three levels of science fiction -- at the first level, we're inventors in the basement, at the second level we extrapolate an infrastructure and at the third level, we're positing changes in people's behaviors as a result of this changed world.

McHugh said we're well into the second level of abstraction in how we think about social media, but we're not yet into the third. Consider multitasking -- in general, we're still bad at it, as an MIT study recently demonstrated. "And we're freaked out. But Socrates was freaked out about literacy!" McHugh noted, and the result of literacy was a written record of history. The benefits we're going to gain from offloading part of our social interaction onto the net remain to be seen.

The discussion also talked about the apparently paradoxical shift away from allowing individuals to adopt multiple identities and keeping their Real Life identity private.

It's not just the conversation that we struggle to control online, it's our very avatars. "Part of being social animals is we construct identities," said [Matt] Thompson. Increasingly, our online avatars demand that our identities merge into one--we are asked to log-on to services using an existing Twitter or Facebook account, we're discouraged from interacting anonymously, be it on Craigslist or a discussion forum. This is a change from the fears about ourselves that we expressed in science fiction of say, the 1960s. Doris Lessing, to pick one example, took up this fear in The Golden Notebook. The novel's protagonist, Anna Wulf struggles with possessing multiple social identities.

Connolly's report ends with: "McHugh captured it best: "I think we're making a lot of interesting mistakes." You can read the entire geeky report here.

Living in the Future

A few months back, Gwyneth Jones published
“We have the technology” in the Guardian. She concluded:

Our gadgets are just like our children. They have the potential to be marvellous, to surpass all expectations. But children (and robots) don't grow up intelligent, affectionate, helpful and good-willed all by themselves. They need to be nurtured. The technology, however fantastic, is neutral. It's up to us to decide whether that dazzling new robot brain powers a caring hand, or a speedy fist highly accurate at throwing grenades.

A couple of months after Gwyneth’s article appeared, I read that California State Senator Joe Simitian had introduced a measure in an Assembly committee “that would prohibit an employer from implanting tiny ID chips in workers, block RFID technology from being embedded in driver's licenses, prohibit schools from issuing ID cards to track student attendance, and make it a misdemeanour to skim identification cards.” Despite Simitian’s efforts, likely, the fairly recent technology of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), used to track packages and shipments, will become yet another nail in the coffin of individual privacy in the United States.

A few years ago, Maureen McHugh actually wrote a story, "In the Air," in which a woman, anxious for her loved ones’ safety and with the best intentions, implants tracking chips in her teen-aged daughter as well as her mother (who has Alzheimer’s); the story confronts the personal consequences of the use of such technology.

Living as we do in a society governed by the marketplace without reference to ethical questions or the general welfare, we know all too well that the applications of new technologies will never be limited to the benign and practical. One doesn’t have to be a Luddite to believe that every technology invented will be abused. If a technology can be used to control and exploit people (on both a small and a large scale), businesses will happily pursue the resulting profit and thus Make It So.

Still, until recently, certain uses of surveillance technology were considered impermissible in the US and thus were politically unfeasible. Very few politicians have shown any interest in challenging the NSA’s access to every email sent and phone call made by US citizens, nor to secretly accessing citizens’ computers and tracking their book purchasing an library records at will. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Demian Bulwa writes that the ACLU’s 19-page report “Under the Watchful Eye,”

argues that the cameras have proven ineffective in decreasing violent crime and recommends that cities replace them with less invasive measures. Short of that, the report calls for “intense public scrutiny” of surveillance systems…. The report comes after a week of renewed debate over cameras in San Francisco. Since 2005, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office has spent about $500,000 on 70 cameras placed at 25 high-crime hot spots, and the Housing Authority has spent $200,000 on 178 cameras for its sites.

Police have defended the 70 city cameras, saying they deterred crime, while acknowledging they have contributed to just one arrest in two years. City cameras are not monitored in real time due to privacy concerns. Investigators have ordered copies of footage about once every three weeks, police said.

Although the US Government is unwilling to help the many impoverished people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast rebuild in the wake of Katrina, it is happy to dole out funds for to keep streets and parks under surveillance. In a Boston Globe article last week, “US Doles Out Millions for Street Cameras: Local Efforts Raise Privacy Alarms,” Charlie Savage writes:

The department will not say how much of its taxpayer-funded grants have gone to cameras. But a Globe search of local newspapers and congressional press releases shows that a large number of new surveillance systems, costing at least tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars, are being simultaneously installed around the country as part of homeland security grants.

In the last month, cities that have moved forward on plans for surveillance networks financed by the Homeland Security Department include St. Paul, which got a $1.2 million grant for 60 cameras for downtown; Madison, Wis., which is buying a 32-camera network with a $388,000 grant; and Pittsburgh, which is adding 83 cameras to its downtown with a $2.58 million grant.

Small towns are also getting their share of the federal money for surveillance to thwart crime and terrorism.

Recent examples include Liberty, Kan. (population 95), which accepted a federal grant to install a $5,000 G2 Sentinel camera in its park, and Scottsbluff, Neb. (population 14,000), where police used a $180,000 Homeland Security Department grant to purchase four closed-circuit digital cameras and two monitors, a system originally designed for Times Square in New York City.

Why in the world would a town with a population of 95 would want a camera in its park? Savage notes that

[Pr]ivacy rights advocates say that the technology is putting at risk something that is hard to define but is core to personal autonomy. The proliferation of cameras could mean that Americans will feel less free because legal public behavior — attending a political rally, entering a doctor’s office, or even joking with friends in a park — will leave a permanent record, retrievable by authorities at any time.

Businesses and government buildings have used closed-circuit cameras for decades, so it is nothing new to be videotaped at an ATM machine. But technology specialists say the growing surveillance networks are potentially more powerful than anything the public has experienced.

Until recently, most surveillance cameras produced only grainy analog feeds and had to be stored on bulky videotape cassettes. But the new, cutting-edge cameras produce clearer, more detailed images. Moreover, because these videos are digital, they can be easily transmitted, copied, and stored indefinitely on ever-cheaper hard-drive space.

In addition, police officers cannot be everywhere at once, and in the past someone had to watch a monitor, limiting how large or powerful a surveillance network could be.

But technicians are developing ways to use computers to process real-time and stored digital video, including license-plate readers, face-recognition scanners, and software that detects “anomalous behavior.” Although still primitive, these technologies are improving, some with help from research grants by the Homeland Security Department’s Science and Technology Directorate.

“Being able to collect this much data on people is going to be very powerful, and it opens people up for abuses of power,” said Jennifer King, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies privacy and technology. “The problem with explaining this scenario is that today it’s a little futuristic. [A major loss of privacy] is a low risk today, but five years from now it will present a higher risk.”

As this technological capacity evolves, it will be far easier for individuals to attract police suspicion simply for acting differently and far easier for police to track that person’s movement closely, including retracing their steps backwards in time. It will also create a greater risk that the officials who control the cameras could use them for personal or political gain, specialists said.

Yesterday’s Baltimore Sun has an editorial about the US Government’s plan to use satellites to spy on its citizens:

Once the federal government had rationalized its authority to violate the privacy of Americans by tapping their phones, reading their e-mail, surveying their library selections and poking through their bank records, it was only a matter of time before the Department of Homeland Security would point spy satellite cameras intended for foreign enemies into the private lives of Americans as well.

Indeed, the country is becoming so inured to the Big Brother tactics of the Bush administration, news of this intrusive new eye in domestic skies has provoked little outrage. Congress has apparently given the plan its blessing, totally abdicating its oversight role.

The Bush Administration has repeatedly used the al-Qaeda threat to make the case that a population under surveillance is Safe (though obviously in no way a “Safe Space” for anyone). I’m wondering how much my response of visceral horror is a legacy of growing up during the Cold War. Propaganda in the US took a two-pronged approach: celebrating materialism (availability of consumer goods) on the one hand and fear of police-state culture stripping individuals of the right to privacy and due process on the other. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so inculcated with a horror of the Stasi way of life, I wouldn’t now find the politicians’ foisting a police state on us so intolerable.

On the panel “Thinking About the World” at the Locus Awards weekend last June, Charles Brown, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, and Greg Bear discussed, among other things, changing attitudes about surveillance. Mark Kelly noted on his blog, Views from Medina Road:

The discussion veered into the virtual realm; Brown noted how much people want to be watched these days, in an inversion to 1984; Vinge sensed a sea change about what young people are willing to give away; and Stephenson cited the guy on a government watch-list who's put his entire life on the web, as a defense. Most people don't have anything to lose, he said; for most, it's a net gain to put their personal stories out there for everyone to see.

I took a few notes myself:

CB: Orwell’s 1984 was one of the most important sf books of the 20^th century. Some of his predictions came true. But Orwell never imagined the webcam—the idea of wanting to be watched 24 hours a day. Predictions can never be strange enough.

VV: One of the strengths of sf is that we talk about possiblities—particularly “scenario planning”—think about extreme versions of what could happen and hen play them out. SF is performing a sociological function that dreaming has for human beings. I wonder about people who are 13-23 years old. Maybe young people don’t understand that there will be consequences in the future [for sacrificing their privacy].

CB: We’re heading toward Chinese attitudes toward privacy—what happens on the outside doesn’t matter.

NS: I’m horrified by what people are willing to put up on their blogs. The downtrodden value getting their stories out (unlike people at the top, who value their privacy). [NS cites the case of a guy who uses a 24-hour-a-day webcam to let the world know about his persecution by US authorities; when he’s stopped at airports, he tells TSA to look at his webcam as proof that he hasn’t committed any acts of terrorsm.]

Unidentified Audience Member: Children have been conditioned to be watched all the time—so that they don’t feel safe unless they are always being watched.

Jay Lake: Indirect surveillance is really total—most people are unaware of that [Sprint records, credit card slips, etc]

GB: In the past, we had judicial safeguards.

I’m not sure that the men on that panel are correct about the generational difference. But I’ll give the last word to Gwyneth:

It's hardly surprising if the children of the 21st century find it difficult to distinguish between a scientific discovery, this year's new gadget, and utterly fantastic concepts such as the man with the 50s 'do, who wears his pants over his tights and flies faster than a speeding bullet. After decades of stalling, it seems that science fiction is finally, rapidly, becoming fact - just as the first pulp writers and movie-makers were convinced it would, back in the 1920s.