Jean-François Blanchette

Data Retention and the Panoptic Society: The Social Benefits of Forgetfulness

Modern information systems not only capture a seemingly endless amount of transactional data, but also tend to retain it for indefinite periods of time. We argue that privacy policies must address not only collection and access to transactional information, but also its timely disposal. One unintended side effect of data retention is the disappearance of social forgetfulness, which allows individuals a second chance, the opportunity for a fresh start in life. We examine three domains in which social policy has explicitly recognized the importance of such a principle: bankruptcy law, juvenile crime records, and credit reports. In each case, we frame the issue in terms of the social benefits of forgetfulness, rather than in terms of individual privacy protection. We examine how different policy approaches to privacy might handle the retention of data and propose a comprehensive policy that includes a variety of strategies. The broad conclusion of the article is that data retention and disposal should be addressed as a part of a broader and comprehensive policy approach, rather than in a piecemeal fashion or as an afterthought.

A material history of bits

In both the popular press and scholarly research, digital information is persistently discussed in terms that imply its immateriality. In this characterization, the digital derives its power from its nature as a mere collection of 0s and 1s wholly independent from the particular media on which it is stored—hard drive, network wires, optical disk, etc.—and the particular signal carrier which encodes bits—variations of magnetic field, voltages, or pulses of light. This purported immateriality endows bits with considerable advantages: they are immune from the economics and logistics of analog media, and from the corruption, degradation, and decay that necessarily result from the handling of material carriers of information, resulting in a worldwide shift “from atom to bits” as captured by Negroponte. This is problematic: however immaterial it might appear, information cannot exist outside of given instantiations in material forms. But what might it mean to talk of bits as material objects? In this paper I argue that bits cannot escape the material constraints of the physical devices that manipulate, store, and exchange them. Such an analysis reveals a surprising picture of computing as a material process through and through.

Preserving interactive digital music: a report on the MUSTICA research initiative

The promise of recent technological and legislative developments to facilitate the digital dissemination of music is undermined by the lack of reliable means to preserve accurate copies of digital files: music that can be easily transmitted and played back today may not be retrievable tomorrow. Preserving interactive music compositions is particularly problematic, as their performance typically relies on a variety of specialized components. We describe the planned research activities of MUSTICA, an international team of archivists, information scientists, and musicologists that seeks to develop tools to guide the preservation and presentation of interactive digital musical compositions in accordance with the standards and strategies for electronic records preservation being developed by MUSTICAs parent research initiative, InterPARES 2.

Computing as if infrastructure mattered

Understanding the technical and social fundamentals of the computing infrastructure is essential in the continuously evolving technological realm.

The Noise in the Archive: Oblivion in the Age of Total Recall

The convergence of pervasive forms of data collection, widespread deployment of cheap digital sensors, and economics of infinite storage is apparently leading us into an age of perfect remembering where “everyone is on the record all the time.” This paper investigates the figure of a future bereft of oblivion by confronting two widely discussed statements on the changing condition of memory, Gordon Bell’s Total Recall, and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s Delete. I argue that in spite of their antagonistic conclusions, both authors share an intellectual commitment to the unique historical status of digital information as immaterial, and thus, impervious to the noise, decay, and distortion that analogue carriers have previously brought to the task of preserving memory. I conclude that whatever the future of the past may be, digital information cannot, in fact, escape its material foundations, and will inevitably bring to the table its own particular sets of possibilities and constraints to the business of remembering and oblivion.

The digital signature dilemma

The last ten years have seen an enormous amount of legal, regulatory, and technological activity aimed at designing a proper electronic equivalent to handwritten signatures. One such design, that of cryptology-based (or digital) signatures, has succeeded over other solutions to the point where, in certain legal systems, such as those of the Member States of the European Union, electronic signatures are almost exclusively understood to be based on public-key cryptography. Yet, several archival institutions (including the National Archives of Canada, Australia and the US) have expressed ambivalence at the prospect of preserving digitally signed records. This paper argues that discrepancies between technical, legal and archival responses to the problem of long-term preservation of digitally signed documents are founded on diverging understandings — physical vs. contextual — of electronic authenticity.RésuméDepuis dix ans, d’énormes efforts ont étés déployés sur le plan juridique, technologique et législatif dans le but d’élaborer un équivalent électronique à la signature manuscrite. Un des mécanismes proposé à cet effet est celui de la ‘signature numérique’, fondé sur les technologies de cryptographie à clé publique. Dans certain systèmes juridiques (p.ex., ceux des Etats Membres de l’Union Européenne), l’approche cryptographique a rencontré un tel succès auprès des législateurs que la signature électronique s’y comprend presque exclusivement en termes de cette méthode. Néanmoins, plusieurs institutions archivistiques (entre autres, les Archives Nationales du Canada, de l’Australie et des Etats Unis) ont exprimé une certaine ambivalence à l’idée de préserver des documents d’archives signés numériquement. Cet article propose que les différences entre les propositions techniques, juridiques, et archivistiques face au problème de la préservation de documents numériques signés sont fondées sur des conceptions divergentes de l’authenticité électronique -physique versus contextuelle.

Cryptography, data retention, and the panopticon society (abstract)

As we move our social institutions from paper and ink basedoperations to the electronic medium, we invisibly create a type ofsurveillance society, a panopticon society. It is not thetraditional surveillance society in which government officialsfollow citizens around because they are concerned about threats tothe political order. Instead it is piecemeal surveillance by publicand private organizations. Piecemeal though it is, It creates thepotential for the old kind of surveillance on an even granderscale. The panopticon is the prison environment described byFoucault in which prison cells are arranged in a large circle withthe side facing the inside of the circle open to view. The guardtower is placed in the middle of the circle so that guards can seeeverything that goes on in every cell. When we contemplate all theelectronic data that is now gathered about each of us as we movethrough our everyday lives --- intelligent highway systems,consumer transactions, traffic patterns on the internet, medicalrecords, financial records, and so on --- there seems little doubtthat we are moving into a panopticon. The social issues that arise from this are too numerous todetail here, but data retention is an important part of it. In thepaper-and-ink world, documents are filed, files are boxed, boxesare put away or thrown away. The capacity for data retrieval andmanipulation is, thereby, limited by the sheer difficulty and costof storing, finding, searching, and manipulating large numbers ofpaper files. This inconvenience functions as a mechanism wherebythe system forgets past information, not unlike the way weourselves forget. However, the story is very different in thedigital world; digital information is easy to store, easy to searchand manipulate, and inexpensive to keep over extensive periods oftime. Digitalized information systems tend, therefore, to collectextensive ancillary information and to retain this informationindefinitely. Such lack of forgetfulness is likely to hamper theability of individuals to shed their past, and start over with aclean slate. Concerns about data retention were expressed in the earlyliterature on the social impact of computing (Westin and Baker,1972), but for the most part the issue has dropped from sight.Rarely, has the social good of discarding accumulated personal databeen addressed. In this paper, we want to make the case byexamining diverse cases in which retention of information by eitherbusiness or governmental institutions hinders the ability ofindividuals to start over or to act autonomously. We hope ourargument for the good of forgetfulness will challenge the standardframework in which such issues have traditionally been debated. Theprivacy debate exemplifies the traditional framework insofar as ithas been characterized as involving an inherent tension between, onthe one hand, the needs of organizations and institutions for moreaccurate and efficient information systems so as to further theirgoals (law enforcement, employee efficiency, etc.) and, on theother hand, the desire of individuals to have information aboutthem kept private. Regan (1995) argues against this framing of theprivacy issue in favor of one that recognizes the social importanceof personal privacy. We will examine the non-forgetfulness ofinformation systems as a problem threatening not just individualinterests but social good as well. Cryptography is often cited as the technology that will give usprivacy and mediate against surveillance. One of the uses ofcryptography, encryption, will allow us, some hope, to createconfidentiality and relationships of trust that will facilitatemany of the social arrangements we now have and perhaps make themeven more secure than they are now. Electronic cash, for example,could be created in such a form that it would have the anonymityassociated now with hard cash (and perhaps even more.) Others areless optimistic of the potential for cryptography to re-createrelationships of trust in the new medium. One important point that already seems clear is that even ifencryption technology will protect the confidentiality andintegrity of electronic transactions and data, it will NOT stop theobservation of traffic patterns on networks. This seems animportant distinction to put on the table. Our patterns ofcommunication will continue to be available, no matter what isencrypted, and an amazing amount of information can be gleaned fromthis data. In a sense, it means content integrity but no anonymity.This will indubitably impact how we interact and with whom weinteract.

Bodycam Footage as Document: An Exploratory Analysis

In the United States, bodycameras have been hailed by both civil-rights organizations and police forces as a source of superior evidence than can curtail excessive police force while protecting officers from spurious claims. Polices guiding their deployment have relied on traditional definition of bodycam footage as public record, and correspondingly focused on conditions of access to and control of the record. This paper applies the theoretical framework developed by the RTP-doc collective to analyze bodycam footage along three different dimensions—formal/material, content/semiotic, and medium/social—to provide a broader picture of the footage as document. The resulting analysis provides the groundwork for stakeholders to devise policies and ethical positions that better account for the multi-dimensional nature of the technology.

It's a series of tubes: Exploring net neutrality policy through critical making

As an increasing proportion of social life—from education to medicine, business, and national security— becomes mediated through the single medium of the Internet, what are appropriate policies to manage and fairly prioritize the flow of packet traffic through networks? Our critical making exercise will use a car track set as a way to experiment with network management policies and the value choices they imply.

Authenticity: New personas for digital media

This panel approaches the problem of authenticity as the concept is evolving through technological practices. Most debates surrounding this evolution have proceeded from a naturalized definition of authenticity. This definition is largely founded on the printed word tradition and the principle that faithfulness to the written word is paramount, while stylistic modifications to the form of documents are acceptable. This naturalized definition can be problematized using two different axes: (1) from textual to non-textual (e.g., audio-visual) documents; (2) from paper to electronic media. In the first case, there are no general and stable conventions for distinguishing content from its formal manifestation. In the second case, the only stable measure of authenticity, that of bitwise integrity, (a) is too restrictive to deal with the inevitable logical format migrations that must occur for digital media to remain accessible; and (b) does not measure how the rendering process of the bitstream (e.g., on screen, on paper) conforms to the content of the document. The papers in this panel will explore how new electronic documentary practices challenge the naturalized definition of authenticity, and chart how concepts of authenticity evolve in conjunction with such practices. The papers will suggest how new rules and conventions for defining authenticity may emerge in given areas of documentary practices — digitized medieval manuscripts, electronic contracts, XML-encoded documents — or from multidisciplinary research efforts.