Joris van Hoboken

Crypto and empire: the contradictions of counter-surveillance advocacy:

Since Edward Snowden’s revelations of US and UK surveillance programs, privacy advocates, progressive security engineers, and policy makers have been seeking to win majority support for countering surveillance. The problem is framed as the replacement of targeted surveillance with mass surveillance programs, and the solutions put forward are predominantly technical and involve the use of encryption – or ‘crypto’ – as a defense mechanism. The counter-surveillance movement is timely and deserves widespread support. However, as this article will argue and illustrate, raising the specter of an Orwellian system of mass surveillance, shifting the discussion to the technical domain, and couching that shift in economic terms undermine a political reading that would attend to the racial, gendered, classed, and colonial aspects of the surveillance programs. Our question is as follows: how can this specific discursive framing of counter-surveillance be re-politicized and broadened to enable a wider societal debate informed by the experiences of those subjected to targeted surveillance and associated state violence?

Obscured by Clouds or How to Address Governmental Access to Cloud Data from Abroad

Transnational surveillance is obscured by the cloud. U.S. foreign intelligence law provides a wide and relatively unchecked possibility of access to data from Europeans and other foreigners. The amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 50 USC 1881a (section 702) are of particular concern. Recent leaks around the PRISM surveillance program of the National Security Agency seem to support that these legal possibilities are used in practice on a large scale. These developments will affect market conditions and competition, notably for U.S.-based cloud services. In addition, the possibility of foreign governmental access impacts the privacy of cloud end-users and can cause chilling effects with regard to cloud computing use. Calls for regulatory action and termination of cloud contracts are starting to emerge – such as in cases of medical data storage in electronic patient record systems and biometric data processing in relation to passports in The Netherlands. This Article analyses regulatory solutions to the current status quo on four levels: i) the possibility of limiting surveillance in the U.S. itself; ii) international law as a framework to impose some limitations; iii) the EU General Data Protection Regulation proposals and the EU Cloud Strategy, and iv) improved oversight on transnational intelligence gathering. If transnational intelligence remains obscured by the cloud, the various promises of the cloud, and electronic communications in general, might stall. It will be hard, but considering all the interests involved in the transition to the cloud, it must be possible to come to some agreement about restrictions on transnational intelligence gathering and stronger protections for non-U.S. persons in U.S. clouds.

Democratizing algorithmic news recommenders: how to materialize voice in a technologically saturated media ecosystem

The deployment of various forms of AI, most notably of machine learning algorithms, radically transforms many domains of social life. In this paper we focus on the news industry, where different algorithms are used to customize news offerings to increasingly specific audience preferences. While this personalization of news enables media organizations to be more receptive to their audience, it can be questioned whether current deployments of algorithmic news recommenders (ANR) live up to their emancipatory promise. Like in various other domains, people have little knowledge of what personal data is used and how such algorithmic curation comes about, let alone that they have any concrete ways to influence these data-driven processes. Instead of going down the intricate avenue of trying to make ANR more transparent, we explore in this article ways to give people more influence over the information news recommendation algorithms provide by thinking about and enabling possibilities to express voice. After differentiating four ideal typical modalities of expressing voice (alternation, awareness, adjustment and obfuscation) which are illustrated with currently existing empirical examples, we present and argue for algorithmic recommender personae as a way for people to take more control over the algorithms that curate peoples news provision. This article is part of a theme issue ‘Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal, and technical opportunities and challenges’.